Lessons from the PC video game industry | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from the PC video game industry

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34 pointsjordigg35 comments

> Legally, it would probably be easy for the games industry to crack down on broadcasting, but instead they have encouraged it, seeing it as a new way to engage users and generate revenue.

Nintendo is a notable outlier in this instance. They are notoriously strict about broadcasting games, to the point where even many reviewers simply won't touch their games. Even though a review is absolutely protected by copyright law, it's just not worth the effort when all of the industry's video hosting services are stacked in favor of games publishers and developers. [0]

SEGA also has a sordid history in this regard, having sent out huge swaths of takedown requests on YouTube, effectively shutting down many content creators and endangering the livelihoods of even more. [1]

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/02/06/nintendo-u...

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/17321021296/sega-...

Nintendo is an outlier in another sense too. They straight-up do not understand the internet and customers. This is evidenced by how very long the 3DS account system had games you bought online tied to the physical machine, instead of the account you used. They're not strict. They're just helplessly ignorant.

I think it's a bit of a culture clash. Nintendo of America seems to do what they can, given the short leash Nintendo of Japan has them on.

There seems to be something about Japanese culture that is fundamentally incompatible with the "share everything" West.

They just don't buy into the subscrption model at all and it is not limited to just games. A lot of major Japanese music labels pulled their titles from Apple Music lately because they worry that it competes with the sales of physical albums, without realsing that the market has been in decline for at least a decade.

The author paints a rosy picture of PC gaming, but in my experience (I work for a AAA game studio) PC sales are by in far the least profitable (10%~) and the most likely to cause piracy (crackers even use the PC version to figure out how to reverse engineer the console versions)

This would tell me that we simply don't know how to make games for the PC platform; but the author also ascribes the freemium model to PC gaming- which I personally see as a blight on gaming and firmly in the realm of the smartphone market..

or at least they do it more tenaciously.

On the other hand games on PC have a much longer tail with much less effort and can often bring in money decades after release (see GOG). There's also a difference in store design that makes it really easy to find things on steam you didn't know before and are relevant to you, even if they're really old; while the stores on consoles are utterly useless if you are not buying the newest games or know which game you're looking for.

As for the freemium comment, you didn't understand him correctly. There's different ways to do freemium. One way is to sell cheats, and design the game so it becomes progressively more unfun to play without cheats. (mobile games) The other is to make the game free to play and offer either cosmetics (tf2) or pieces of the gameplay (warthunder) for cash. The latter is really nice, and seems to happen exclusively on PC.

I'm utterly baffled at how terrible the Playstation 4 store experience is. I can't help but think it's somehow intentional, but for the life of me I can't figure out why.

It's not intentional. Just like Nintendo, Sony is just very helplessly ignorant about many things. Even their webstore has childlishly naive failings. They recently added a wishlist, which has a maximum of 100 entries, and doesn't automatically remove games bought. As well, when they update the webstore, on tuesday, it becomes a literal minefield because they update every single item slowly, over the course of 3-4 hours, in production, and often the storefront will display different prices for items than you see in the cart.

I'd also add the model that's essentially the same as shareware (also popularized on PCs and other home computers). It's not as common as I'd like but on both PC and mobile, I occasionally run across games or other applications that offer the first 10 levels (for example) out of 100 for free and then you can choose to buy the full game after getting a chance to try it out. Or maybe the first chapter of an interactive story game or the first third of a point-and-click adventure.

The point is still the same and some non-game programs do similar things (free version gets the main function, paid version unlocks all of the more specific options of features). I really like this model because I'm not buying a game or application sight unseen but I also don't need to keep feeding it quarters in order to progress.

I have no problem buying software on PC or mobile but it's a lot easier to buy something without reservations if I know it's what I want. Likewise, when I buy something, I generally want to buy it once and not get stuck in a cycle of endless microtransactions or open-ended subscriptions. I'm sure I'm not the target market but when I play a mobile or PC game, I find myself wanting to pay when it's something I enjoy or find useful. But if a game uses microtransactions (pay to win), I basically refuse to ever spend any money on it at all and just play until it gets old and then move on to the next distraction.

It seems that industry-wide, PC revenue is on par with or surpassing consoles, though. [0]

Completely anecdotally, in my experience as a consumer when games do better on consoles than on PC it's because they A) are poorly ported from consoles, often by a third-party developer, B) are poorly suited for PC, such as "party" type games better played with many friends in one room, or C) don't offer enough new or differentiated content to justify the purchase, since the PC platform has (nearly/theoretical) unlimited backwards compatibility. Sometimes the new Assassin's Creed just isn't a different enough experience from all the previous games to justify the purchase when you can just go back and play any of the others on the same platform.

[0] http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/83972-pc-games-sales-e...

> It seems that industry-wide, PC revenue is on par with or surpassing consoles, though.

Revenue is not profitability, and there are much higher costs shipping a PC game.

Sure, you have to do a lot more QA and support than on consoles. And there will be some PC specific development, both for the engine and for amenities that PC players expect like keyboard+mouse support, graphics options, etc. But the biggest costs in AAA gamedev aren't going to be platform specific. The assets (textures, models, animations, sound fx, music, level designs) should just port over. Likewise most marketing will be platform agnostic; you don't have to triple your marketing budget when going from one platform to three. And art + marketing is probably like 70%-80% of the budget.

The marginal profitability of a PC port should thus be extremely high. (Which is why pretty much every AAA game will launch on the PC too, not just on the consoles. If the PC really was a marginal and expensive platform, they wouldn't bother).

Interesting point- care to share any data? I know a PC game requires supporting a variety of hardware, but it also does not entail paying a licensing fee to a console maker... so it would be interesting to see which one is less expensive for a reasonably popular game.

Are you basing this on the fact that the overall profit to cost ratio for console games is really high compared to the same games on PC?

Depends. For indies it can be substantially less expensive. If you go early access you can skimp on QA, you don't need expensive (well, not that expensive) devkits, you might even only have one target platform, which has obvious benefits as well.

Multiplatform games will still today almost always sell more and be considerably more profitable on console than PC. The industry wide figure comes from the fact that there's an order of magnitude more content on PC.

I think it could be argued that the high rates of piracy are forcing devs to look at these alternative models. That he doesn't suggest this hypothesis is kind of a hole in his argument.

> A close cousin to crowdfunding is the trend of pre-releasing games before they are finished.

This has contributed to a disturbing trend of actually releasing games before they are finished. AAA titles have been released in the past couple of years that should have been delayed several months to be fixed and polished first. Batman: Arkham Knight was so terrible on PC that all stores offered no-questions refunds, and even stopped selling the game altogether until it was patched. Fallout 4 committed the cardinal sin of tying physics to framerate, so people with high-end gaming machines are actually experiencing more bugs and issues than most, unless they cap their framerates.

Are you sure those AAA games released early because of the Early Access trend? Keep in mind they did not release as Early Access, but as full release.

A much more fitting theory is simply that such AAA games are absolute monsters in terms of cash expenditure and as all software developments are, very hard to estimate in advance; so they probably ran into cash flow trouble and managers decided to just release it and fix everything else after release, which has a VERY long tradition.

I think it's a little of column A, a little of column B. The consumers are desensitized to the bugginess of early access, and therefore more forgiving of companies releasing games that aren't yet finished. Companies have been releasing buggy games for a long time, but are pushing those limits further every year.

Batman was pretty bad, but you can't use any game from Bethesda to further your argument. It's pretty well known that if you don't want a super buggy Bethesda experience, wait for the game of the year edition.

You're right on Batman and the general theme, so I upvoted you, but you're totally wrong about FO4.

Physics are always tied to framerate. There is not a game physics library in wide use that is independent of update rate. In practice what usually happens is that the physics library has an internal tick rate (say every 1ms or every 2ms) and every frame N physics ticks occur to catch up. Without this, the physics sim would be dangerously unstable (and in practice, it still is).

There are many other places where game code is typically framerate dependent, not just physics. Even games that are 'framerate independent' are often framerate dependent in very subtle ways, such that players with high or low framerates gain an advantage or experience unique bugs. Most parts of a game are not continuous equations that you can perfectly evaluate at any point in time; there are always 'frames'.

So ultimately, this is not some unique cardinal sin FO4 committed. It's just another in a long series of Bethesda titles that ship incredibly buggy and broken and don't get fixed, largely as a result of the way they build software. The incredible scope of their games is a factor, though, as building games that large is EXTREMELY HARD.

Ultimately you should consider people talking about FO4 framerates that way to be in the same bucket as the types who get vigorously upset about a game being locked to 30fps: Uninformed.

> Physics are always tied to framerate

Why does it have to be like this? I would think the more robust approach would be to decouple the simulation from the rendering and display interpolated frames if the renderer framerate is higher than the simulation framerate.

Whilst it's nice to think in separate concepts such as 'physics' and 'rendering', in reality all these things are tightly coupled together in code. For example collisions inform physics which informs collisions which informs animations etc. Also with memory being so scarce in AAA games you have to evaluate the cost of using separate threads for different actions, which leads to problems of resource sharing, deadlocks, syncing of update/render loops etc.

Bungie did a talk on their multi threaded renderer for Destiny. Google it if you want to see how complex the design can get, and how it affects the whole game process.

Thanks. Apparently fallout4 has a bunch of bugs on higher-end PCs because and I was wondering why they would couple things like that. I guess the harsh restrictions of gamedev explain it a bit then...

btw, I think this is the video the parent mentioned, in case anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nTDFLMLX9k

Many engines do exactly that.

http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/

>Physics are always tied to framerate. There is not a game physics library in wide use that is independent of update rate. In practice what usually happens is that the physics library has an internal tick rate (say every 1ms or every 2ms) and every frame N physics ticks occur to catch up. Without this, the physics sim would be dangerously unstable (and in practice, it still is).

This is called a fixed timestep, and is not what people mean when they say "physics is tied to the framerate", referring to the rendering framerate and generally instead meaning that you pass the actual delta time elapsed between rendering frames into the physics simulation, which can cause bugs at extremely high or low framerates. I have no idea if FO4 works this way, but many engines do (even if it is usually a bad idea), so it's not completely outside the realm of possibility.

The reason is that there are tradeoffs. Fixing the timestep guarantees a frame of latency, but most (all?) integration methods used to simulate physics break down with wildly variable timesteps.

Tying simulation to framerate is often the best choice, when you consider that most hardware is average, it minimizes latency for the average user, and results with a more accurate simulation, so long as people keep vsync on (why do you need framerate greater than your monitor's refresh rate anyway...).

>Tying simulation to framerate is often the best choice, when you consider that most hardware is average, it minimizes latency for the average user, and results with a more accurate simulation

It can be, if you either are on a fixed hardware platform or have both modest demands and a framelimiter in place to keep things from going off the rails. But in return you pay with a great source of nondeterminism that can cause maddening bugs, break replays, and hinder synchronization in networked games.

>so long as people keep vsync on (why do you need framerate greater than your monitor's refresh rate anyway...)

Two things going on here. Vsync is theoretically a great idea (that worked perfectly in practice on countless simpler platforms in the past), but due to driver flaws and the realities of preemptive multitasking introduces a noticeable additional frame or two of latency on every PC I've used in the past decade or so, whether playing a game or just using regular desktop applications. My guess is that the OS scheduler isn't precise enough to keep applications from barely missing a present deadline (thus causing unnecessary stuttering), so driver devs force triple buffering when vsync is enabled to compensate, giving you a smooth but unresponsive presentation. It really sucks that I have to toggle desktop composition (and thus, vsync) on and off to fix stuttering in one application or tearing in another, but somewhere in the Lovecraftian horror that is Windows, someone screwed up.

The other is "why do you need framerate greater than your monitor's refresh rate anyway," and the answer is "to provide the lowest latency and smoothest presentation possible within the constraints of a preemptive multitasking OS." In a perfect world, a game would know exactly how long it would take to simulate and render a frame, and would wait as long as possible before doing so, so that the most up-to-date input from the keyboard, mouse, and network could be used to display a frame with the least amount of latency factored into it to the player. This is not a perfect world, but you can get a similar effect (at a greater CPU and GPU cost) by rendering multiple superfluous frames, so that whichever one happens to be presented is much closer to the ideal than the one you'd see if you rendered the frame at the start of the 16ms then yielded for the rest of it.

This is part of why you often see "pro e-sports" types turning the graphics settings down to comical levels, by the way. Not only to lessen the threat of a completely missed frame due to a spike in visual complexity, but also so that they can run their game with the framelimiter off.

I think part of his point was that such a drastic effect on physics/framerate as the Bethesda studio allowed is inexcusable.

Honest question: is such a bug excusable/understandable?

My impression is that this is something that could've easily been caught in testing. My guess would be that it WAS found but allowed to pass into production. That I believe, is inexcusable for a studio that large.

On the contrary, all popular physics engines today (including the one in FO4) do not tie simulation framerate to rendering framerate. That would make the simulation incredibly unstable. Instead, the physics happen in their own thread at a fixed timestep. It's up to the game developer to have enough sense to write non-blocking multi threaded code, but if they do things by the book everything just works. This includes FO4, which contrary to your post does not have a 30 FPS cap (except on consoles).

> Physics are always tied to framerate.

Do you mean "to some framerate"? Obviously physics has to be ticked, but it doesn't have to be ticked at the same rate the game renders. Lots of games and game engines decouple these rates correctly.

Likewise, games where the logic runs faster at high visual framerates are hardly that common. Outside of Bethesda, and retro games played on an emulator, I can't recall the last time I saw one.

> Ultimately you should consider people talking about FO4 framerates that way to be in the same bucket as the types who get vigorously upset about a game being locked to 30fps.

What?

How is being used to higher framerates uninformed?

Fallout 4 does not have a 30fps cap on PC, it has 60fps cap. It's unlocking past 60 that causes the physics to shit the bed.

Unless you are going to suggest that there is no difference between 30fps and 60fps in gameplay, in which case I would say you are the one that is uninformed.

I feel I should point out that the "Games" section of Kickstarter also includes board games, which takes a big chunk of cash.

A good point, and many games are being developed for consoles, or include consoles as "stretch goals".

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