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| [Jan 11, 2012, 10:16 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments |
GameFront - SOPA Isn’t the Solution, But Can We At Least Agree There’s A Problem?
Game publishers are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to battling piracy. If they do nothing, they are essentially ceding a good portion of their sales to pirates who have no intention of ever paying them a dime. If they institute a simple DRM scheme to try and protect their games, some gamers will get annoyed and others will get to work breaking the protection within days or even hours, making it worthless. If they institute a strong DRM scheme, such as Ubisoft’s recent efforts to require a persistent Internet connection to constantly confirm the validity of a played game, it ends up negatively impacting a good many legitimate customers and also cause the esteemed, self-appointed “Internet Representatives of Gaming” to go into a collective hissy fit so large that it ends up costing more sales than it saves.
Raph Koster - Improving F2P. Thanks Ant via Boing Boing.
The thing to understand about the free-to-play market, and its best developers, is that F2P developers treat everything as science. Everything is subject to analysis, and everything is subject to proof, and the business process is about seeking what works. If what works happens to also be an original, innovative, interesting design that meets a checklist set of criteria for being art, well, all the better. But really, it’s about what works.
We have to be honest with ourselves. There is an awful lot of stuff that we have cherished for a long time in the games business which turns out not to work. Sometimes it takes us years to shed the scales from our eyes about the fact that hoary conventions of yore are just that — conventions, mutable and open to change.
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| 58. |
Re: SOPA Isn’t the Solution, But Can We At Least Agree There’s A Problem |
Jan 12, 2012, 15:44 |
jdreyer |
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Creston wrote on Jan 12, 2012, 13:33:
Lokust wrote on Jan 11, 2012, 22:11:
They already ARE doing this and have been for years. 25 years ago new video games were around $50. Now they are $50-60. Adjust for inflation and that's a steal. Games cost far more to make now, but they make up the difference between higher development costs and lower (relative) prices through volume as the gaming market is larger.
This argument is bunk. I know the industry loves to bleat it over and over again, but they (and you, seemingly) also ignore the fact that ten years ago, I bought games that had 15-20 hours of content on average. And now it's an average of FOUR.
If they want to charge more for games, maybe they should put some more content in. (Games like Skyrim obviously excepted.)
Creston
Creston, There are lots of things you're not taking into account.
1. Which games are you comparing? Does Dragon Age have less content than Baldur's Gate? Starcraft vs. SCII? HL vs. HL2? Fallout vs. Fallout 3? Civ vs. Civ 5? Total Annihilation vs. Supreme Commander? UT vs. UT3? I don't think any of the newer games mentioned here have less content than the older games.
2. The audience is savvier. Doom and Quake have fairly long Single Player content, but the levels are simple, the textures reused again and again (and I don't know if they are that much longer than SP Doom 3 and Quake 4). No one would put up with that today. Gamers demand complex, unique environments, which require vastly more resources. Doom was a few megabytes, Doom 3 a few gigabytes.
3. Longer doesn't mean better. I only played a few hours of the original Call of Duty before quitting. It was boring and repetitive. But I played all the way through both SP campaigns on Modern Warfare 1 & 2. They were enjoyable and action-packed and I had a blast, even though they were probably shorter. |
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