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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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Re: Op Ed |
Jan 12, 2012, 12:25 |
Jerykk |
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And morals have nothing to do with whether it is right or wrong.
Quote of the Day.
As an aside, while I do pirate, I also buy plenty of games. In fact, I find myself buying more often than pirating these days due to sheer laziness and general apathy towards most new releases. It's just more convenient to buy a game on Steam than it is to pirate it, especially when that game has a lot of patches.
As for the F2P article, I think there's an inherent limit to what you can do within that business model. Ultimately, F2P games rely on microtransactions and this reliance has a significant impact on the game's design. Players need to be given a reason to spend money, which means you typically have to restrict access to things that would have otherwise been immediately and freely available. Tribes Ascend is a perfect example of this. The XP system, unlockables, class system, two-weapon limit and numerous variants of the same core weapons are all a result of relying on microtransactions.
This comment was edited on Jan 12, 2012, 12:37. |
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