The answer may seem obvious: money, of course! If I obtain a player's money, who cares how much/often they play my game? If I can convince them to drop $10-60 bucks, I win; it doesn't matter afterwards since sales are sales. I can reinvest that money into my team, pump out new products, and stay in business.
The problem with this is that it is a front-loaded system. The money is made up front in huge initial bursts and then all the talk/support/community falls out over time as people play the game, get tired of it, and move on. Most games are, from their core design, meant to be played this way. Most "little black book" ideas that designers have are constructed to be a linear experience that ends at some point. But what if you look at the most (critically and/or financially) successful games in the past 5 years? How many of them actually have an end? According to Metacritic (I know, I know "ugh...Metacritic") these are the best games ever:
I know that chart really speaks to Metacritic's lack of credibility (no Shadow of the Collosus or MGS 1?) But to my point: out of all of those games, how many had or are a sequel? Every single one, with one exception. And most of them were designed to "end". No shit, who cares: good games make money, so we should create more content from successful IPs so we can make more money and buy corvettes and private jets, right? You know how those game developers love their private jets.
Stay with me now. From a design standpoint, what is a sequel? It's an addition to something that originally was planned to end at some point. When initially designing a game, designers have to build the game with the possibility of the game having one or more sequels. It must end, but not end. Through this development method (publishing method?) a game's core narrative and mechanics are limited by how much money it can generate. In a way, games are really only designed to make money; they cannot exist if they do not make money or convince stakeholders that there is money to be made. For example, if Half Life 1 didn't sell we would have never seen Half Life 2. While this isn't an ironclad rule, and it also applies to other industries, it's nice to imagine a world where the creative process isn't affected at ALL by the financial success of the creation.
Books, for example, are mostly free of this constraint. Their development costs are so low that a writer can just write for funsies while the potential for revenue be damned! Imagine what types of games would come about if they were not designed to make money.
Back to my point: what about the games that are not designed to end? Games that hearken back to their more primal roots of competition? With a game designed from the beginning to never end, you remove the sequel problem entirely. This changes how designers approach them, setting these endless games down a completely different design path from their colleagues. Not having to worry about a potential sequel bestows this sense of freedom to the designer, a sense of finality to the mechanics and narrative.
While this concept is associated mainly to F2P/Freemium titles, the concept of trying to attain a player's time rather than have them buy your product extends into ALL games. For example, what would the Call of Duty IP be like without it's Multiplayer component?
The main problem with trying to attain players' time is that their time is much more limited than their wallets. Any competitive title worth it's weight in in-game currency requires many months to years of practice to become "good" or even competent at it. This requires your players to actually want to devote hours upon hours of playtime to develop such proficiency. I have quite a few F2P titles on my desktop that I no longer play, but keep them installed "just in case". I log about 10-20 hours in one, then move on to the next. Sometimes I'm in the mood for Tribes Ascend, other times I want to tear it up in LoL or Awesomenauts. In fact, I only really "play" 1-3 F2P titles from each genre. I doubt I am the only one in the world who does this.
When developers focus on trying to make my time-investment more worthwhile, I am more willing to spend more time (and eventually more money) on their game. I quit playing Smite because I didn't feel that learning the nitty gritty paid off at all compared to perfecting LoL. I quit playing Bloodline Champions (BLC) because despite how I LOVE it, having to play on European servers makes me tear my hair out. I know that, in the long run, I won't be able to "go pro" with BLC because of this reason.
We are seeing a big shift in the industry towards never ending games. I can attest that they're way more fun to design as probably 80% of my black book ideas are designed to be played forever. Gamers are maturing (might not be the right word) into wanting more from the games they spend so much time on, they want to be rewarded for developing insane APM in Starcraft II. They want to go down in history for having the fastest run in Dustforce (which has a great soundtrack by the way).
Time actually translates into money because of this. Let's say I decide to dedicate my time to becoming a beast in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1. What are the chances I will buy the next sequel(s)? I personally only started buying LoL skins when I hit level 30 and really started taking the game seriously. I decided that LoL was relevant to my life, and started investing money into it. People naturally have no qualms investing in things they seem important; relevance = importance.
The bottom line is: players seek to establish relevance for their colossal wastes of time and effort. Give your players relevance and you will win their time (and their money).
SIDENOTE: I recently was laid off from my sweet producer gig, so I will be updating this thing twice monthly from here on out. I decided I am going to stay home for a couple years while my wife finishes school, raise my son, develop my programming skills and collaborate on a few games. I'll add them to the portfolio page as they crop up, so stay tuned!
"Books, for example, are mostly free of this constraint."
ReplyDeleteDan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, JK Rowling, Stephen King, James Patterson, the 50 Shades of Grey guy. Writing in the modern era is as much about finding someone to publish your work as it is about writing it in the first place. That there are institutions that celebrate the writer from a craft perspective, like literary magazines or university presses, is more a result of the critical body than it is of the author.
But then there are indie games and the support for some indie games is enormous. I'm working on a critical retrospective of Space Pirates and Zombies and, if the lengthy and awesome backstory that's been posted is to be believed, indie games will be where the ludic experiments happen. Everybody's read Lord of the Rings; nobody's really read Dubliner's or To the Lighthouse or even a book as 'popular' as Infinite Jest.
If anything, the pedestal for games is a lot higher now than the one for books.
PS Hope the job search is fruitful! Thanks for the posts.
Thanks for reading Wogzi!
DeleteWhat I meant by the statement about books was that the act of writing is not limited by whether or not the book will sell. It is different for the career authors you mentioned though, they have to write things that will sell. Games are so expensive to create so for a specific level of quality you can not have a one-man show as books can. It's more difficult to do "games on the side" like you can with books.
Your second point is very true. Indie devs are my heroes for that reason. And "good" books are lost to hit-driven retail distribution, unfortunately. I picked up SPZ in the last Humble Bundle, but have yet to play it. I'd like to read your retrospective on it after I've played it for a few hours. :)