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The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

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Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#71

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

Kapura wrote: post #22
taneq wrote: post #4

> Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops. I don't think that's necessarily true. WoW moved more and more towards this model and all it did was make the game predictable and grindy. You need big chunks of uncertainty (will we kill the boss? will it drop what I'm…

mmm, almost all of the most addicting games I know are some variation of small bars filling up over time to unlock more small bars to fill up. I'll give one specific example: Destiny is a loot shooter (or "looty shooty" if you're in polite company) which has rare drops as part of it's core gameplay. Certain rare guns can only come from high-level activities, and some weapons have randomised rolls that encourage peopl…

What you are describing is the most common model of progression. Guns, weapons, characters, skills. Something needs to be leveled. That's fine and great but it also takes the excitement away because all of the progression is 100% guaranteed( you kill an enemy, you get some exp for whatever you are leveling) vs random scarce drops being the main way to progress.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#72

Post by sago »

john_minsk wrote: post #44

I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end. In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money. There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, exc…

> developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model

This is not a defence of the current state of the industry, but let's not get too rosy with our nostalgia glasses.

As the content increased and fidelity improved, production costs skyrocketed. The majority of games failed commercially. A commercial failure with a big production budget could (and regularly did) easily destroy a studio. Even a pretty big multi-title studio. The churn and carnage was dramatic.

Then with an alternative distribution and the availability of tools, the race-to-the-bottom pricing was on. Further increasing the pressure on production.

There were always games being released on the single pay model, but it was never a good risk profile for investors. That profile is almost suicidal when the investment is $200m vs $10m.

There is still a healthy single pay tranche to the industry: indie games. And not coincidentally, production costs of a 'triple-I' game are not that dissimilar to the production costs of an average publisher-funded game 20 years ago.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#73

Post by sudhirj »

seventhtiger wrote: post #33
sudhirj wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netflix or Apple Music model might work. Fixed price per month for a catalog of games, with revenue shares happening based on play time. This a basically a solved problem for video and audio content, games don’t need to be different.

Video and audio content are not interactive. You never feel active manipulation from static media. Games in that model will be accused of manipulating players into having as much play time as possible even sacrificing quality. The same addictive mechanics can be used for time instead of money.

But won’t people get bored and just stop playing? I wonder if songs have gotten longer since the rise of Spotify and Apple Music.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#74

Post by baud147258 »

baud147258 wrote: post #50
seventhtiger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.

But then it's an incentive to make a good product to get good sales on that game and the next

Regarding the next game from a game developer, I remember an indie making the point that the feedback from the general public (not the loud minorities only) will mostly be felt on the sales of the next game of series and, to a lesser extent, the next game from this developer.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#75

Post by leetcrew »

einr wrote: post #53
seventhtiger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.

There is only uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support if the marketing is actually deceptive and if there is an actual lack of support. People have been burned a few too many times by less reputable developers (EA) selling unfinished, deceptive garbage (SimCity 2013) at full price, so a certain amount of uproar and skepticism when it happens again and again is to be expected, I think. But there are good,…

an upfront price made sense in the old days when a relatively polished product was released at launch, perhaps with a couple patches to fix bugs, and with users running their own multiplayer servers.

for better or for worse, the norm has shifted to longer periods of support and servers hosted by the company. it's hard to commit to supporting a game this way when each user only pays once.

personally I like the approach csgo has taken. you get a full game for free (although it was still a good deal at $20, imo) and you can pay for purely cosmetic items. I think this aligns the incentives well; the devs can only get paid by making game that people care about playing, but there's also an unrestricted stream of new players since it's free. plus if you decide your finally done, you can sell all your skins on the market and get at least some of your money back.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#76

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ehnto wrote: post #57
seventhtiger wrote: post #26

I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility. If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad. If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting t…

I hear you on all points. But I would argue that for your last sentence, mature people at least would be satisfied with an upfront cost and a truthful marketing campaign. I think we can all understand that it costs money to make a game.

Yeah, I don't have any problem paying $60 for a game. I haven't paid that much in a long time though, since the vast majority of games I'm interested in are far less than that even when not on sale.

And if you take inflation into account, we used to pay $60 for NES games, which would be closer to $130 today.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#77

Post by [deleted] »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #67
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, making millions with a literal scam gets you criticized? Please just stop bringing this up in this context. They literally sold a single player game as multiplayer , along with a plethora of features which were said to be in the game at launch day which where never implemented. See yourself at [0]. The only reason this keeps being brought up is because Sean Murray has extraordinary talent at tickling the media…

They did finally implement the multiplayer among other things.

[deleted]

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#78

Post by einr »

leetcrew wrote: post #75
einr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support if the marketing is actually deceptive and if there is an actual lack of support. People have been burned a few too many times by less reputable developers (EA) selling unfinished, deceptive garbage (SimCity 2013) at full price, so a certain amount of uproar and skepticism when it happens again and again is to be expected, I think. But there are good,…

an upfront price made sense in the old days when a relatively polished product was released at launch, perhaps with a couple patches to fix bugs, and with users running their own multiplayer servers. for better or for worse, the norm has shifted to longer periods of support and servers hosted by the company. it's hard to commit to supporting a game this way when each user only pays once. personally I like the approac…

I will fully admit that I have only the faintest idea of how modern multiplayer games work, but I agree from my understanding that the old business model of selling a complete game once seems ill suited to that style of game.

(Although, counterexample: Mojang made a fortune out of selling Minecraft, a complete multiplayer game, where you host your own servers, with no paid DLC or hidden catches, but then later came out with the Realms thing where they had optional paid server infrastructure. That's a thing you can do. Not sure how it panned out.)

That being said, my point was that there are still plenty of companies, such as Nintendo, successfully operating in the traditional way without facing much hostility for daring to sell a complete, polished, mostly bug-free product for money.

Therefore I think it is inaccurate to state that "every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility" like the grandparent did.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#79

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ardani wrote: post #59
torben-friis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony is going in the opposite direction ( single player, story based games with rich content). Their logic is quite flawless: Online games depend on a large userbase to be successful, which forces them (or at least greatly pressures them) to be multiplatform. That's a bad direction to move towards if your business is selling a console and its walled garden - so they are pushing for content that is more compatible wit…

I hope they develop more splitscreen games! That's really the main edge to consoles for me.

In an alternate reality, 3D TV really took off and split screen was replaced by polarized-screen. Wouldn't that have been neat?

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#80

Post by vinceguidry »

One of my favorite Minecraft Mods was equivalent exchange. It foretold the coming of modern idle games. You work hard in the beginning to earn your first magical item, that gives you some sorcery that lets you spend less time gathering resources.

A small amount of time later, you get another magical item that lets you transmute a little more efficiently. A few dozen grinding hours later and you've acquired an array of items that grant you limited control over the environment, and you start grinding towards your first resource generator, which gives you resources which let you make the second one.

Now you're scaling. Build speed becomes the bottleneck for awhile, you're grinding the farm. Eventually you reach the next tier of generators, and this unlocks new mechanics. Finally at the end of the game you get artifacts of immense, game-breaking power.

Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again.

The lure of mastery is perhaps the most addictive one that could ever be dreamed.

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