The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
jeff-vogel.blogspot.com
jeff-vogel.blogspot.com
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.
With a friend I played Minecraft for years. Every time we met I would bring my xbox360 controller and we would dig, build, whatever, for hours and days on end.
One week, we decided to go for the nether dragon, at the time newly added to the game. We spent hours farming items, going to hell and losing stuff there, but we went on, arrived on the nether world, spent ten minutes finding out how to deal with the dragon and we killed it. Then we looked at each other and said "oh, now we have finished Minecraft".
We never played it again.
We spent days and days in game automating away as much resource gathering as we could. Until the server was basically finished - there really were no more farms to build.
So we started a new one :)
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 them for money.
If you sell time, like a subscription, then players think you are trying to force them to grind to pay money
If you sell in-game items, like weapons or maps, the players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
If you sell in-game cosmetics, like skins, which have no impact on gameplay, the players think you are trying to make every look stupid and you have to pay to look cool.
Video games are inherently manipulative in the sense that the game is designed for you to behave in fun ways and do fun things. Once monetization is in the picture it completely poisons the whole dynamic. It doesn't help that the audience skews young.
If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.
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, reputable companies too who are doing honest business by selling quality games for a reasonable up-front price. I don't generally see people having an issue with that.
See if you can find a lot of people who are unhappy with dropping $60 on Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, for instance.
Also, in the old days of early Internet era, we used to buy games not based on some marketing (in my parts of the world, US videogame marketing didn't really exist anyway), but based on reviews in videogame magazines. Those were pretty honest, and if they weren't, we'd blame the magazine. It was entirely expected that games have varying quality and plenty of bugs. People didn't have a problem with that.
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.
(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.
all I'm saying is that there are other "game-as-a-service" models that can align incentives well between players and devs for ongoing projects without necessarily being abusive.
GGP is sort of right though. gamers are a notoriously difficult group of customers to please, and they don't really have a way to understand the business or technical constraints faced by the makers of their favorite games. the worst of them will be uncharitable and hostile, no matter what you do.
Creating something and putting it out there for free or for a one-off payment is the cleanest possible model.
I would say that in almost any business there is always small amount of people who intrepret the pricing and/or the business model of the business with hostility. I think it is quite natural - people would rather not pay for things. However the majority of people are not the ones bitching loudly about it, they pay for services happily and are somewhat content & quiet. The small minority bitches about it and that minority is often quite vocal.
That doesn't change the fact that some business models are more abusive and deserving criticism than others, though.
Well, yes and no. When it comes to movies in general and movie adaptations of books in particular, like recently the Hobbit, number one complaint I heard (and expressed myself at times) is that they're so desperate for money that it's pathetic, stringing a short book for three movies ending in a way that ensures people will have to go to the cinema not just to continue watching, but also to rewatch the old movies upon release of the new one.
From what I can tell, the sentiment for now is that it's pathetic, not abusive.
The biggest example of this was the "rerelease" of Infinity War to add a couple new scenes, and charging full price for people to rewatch a multi-hour movie for 5-10 mins more content.
And if you take inflation into account, we used to pay $60 for NES games, which would be closer to $130 today.
Between Steam's refund policy and review system this is basically a solved problem.
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 medias gamers-are-evil trope. This has nothing to do with payment methods.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...
What I want to figure out is how to monetize a game that removes the assumption of bad faith and detoxifies the community. I came to the conclusion that it has to be free. Every other monetization will lead to the abuse we see developers receiving.
> players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
Players dont just think this, time after time this has proven true. If the buyable item wasnt better why would anyone buy it?
None of the other monetization methods you lists are objectionable if done right.
If enough people are complaining about the value of your $60 game then maybe it's because you got your price point off and should have instead sold it at a lower price. Not every game is a AAA title.
You are literally allowed to do it. It does mean more effort to preserve the desired healthy relationships.
I don't think free games actually tend to result in perfectly healthy relationships either; but monetisation just provides a single point of failure for such dynamics.
Games in that model will be accused of manipulating players into having as much play time as possible even sacrificing quality. The same addictive mechanics can be used for time instead of money.
Full-priced games have tens of millions of sales regularly. Games that do not hide content behind paywalls can sell cosmetic microtransactions all day long (see: League of Legends or Path of Exile).
Its transparent "money grab for the sake of money grabbing" that gets the rightful criticism. Besides, I have literally never seen any complex indie game being attacked for releasing in the 9.99$-19.99$ space. Never.
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 after? will that item go to me?) to really kick the intermittent-reward circuitry into gear.
Constant small incremental progress is just easier to implement.
I used to be an actual heroin addict, many many years ago. Finding the next hit every day/every couple of days was nearly as satisfying as the actual rush of the drug itself.
In fact, this effect was so powerful, that the "come thru" message from my dealer, and driving over to his, would make my withdrawal symptoms subside nearly entirely, well before I'd actually taken the drug.
Brains are crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system#Anatomy
Though I've not read any articles on heroin or these long lengths of time specifically, opitates are known to have these anticipatory responses in the brain like the one you describe.
Brains are indeed totally crazy.
I'm really very deeply glad you kicked that habit and killed the dragon. This internet stranger is rooting for you :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Gambling_%E2%80%...
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 people to re-play those activities to get gear that is marginally better. A lot of the best parts of the gear drop design are lifted from peak WoW. But that alone isn't what makes destiny addictive.
Destiny 1 had "gun leveling" where you would need to get kills on certain rare weapons to unlock the rare features that made them useful, along with individual numbered levels for each gear slot, and that's before you get into the quests and bounties. There was always a reason to hop on, because you always had some new weapon that you could power up to see what it did. Tiny bars filling up.
When Destiny 2 shipped, they dramatically improved the loot system, simplifying the ways people would get drops and making them more consistent overall. But they also tried to remove a lot of the other "grindy" aspects of the game like gun leveling, but the result was the game didn't feel like you had compelling reasons to log in. Fewer bars = fewer hooks.
It's only now that the game has had several significant expansions and added a host of new quests (many of which simply require using certain types of gear in certain activities) that the game is approaching those same levels of addictive.
I could write an essay on this subject but the two I'll mention now are cross-server dungeon/BG finder (which destroyed much of the social aspect to the game) and loot tokens instead of loot drops.
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, except priorities change in the industry. Fast forward 15 years - all the progress and tools, developing practices, experience accumulated in the industry - but no real progress or innovations.
There are still games that push quality mark forward, but mass market is going away from it. Companies like EA have to make a choice: do we fund this game that will sell for 60$ and give 100s of hours of diverse gameplay or do we fund this online game with proven gameplay and sell ingame items for 1$/piece for next 2 years. Both of these games not only differ in terms of money they make, but also in terms of time people spend on them. So EA is better not to fund game 1 at all, to let people spend more limited gaming time on the game that has a potential for more profits.
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.
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 with console exclusives, ie. single player games.
And with modification this technique also works with laptops and colorized glasses!
gaming intensifies
> I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end.
I think this is fundamentally a problem, because the psychological pressures a game applies to get people to pay for microtranactions are intrinsically opposed to fun and satisfying experiences. Games that successfully monetize on microtransactions do so by putting the "fun" just out of reach, and annoy and bore their users into putting money into the slot to get the result they want.
> 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, except priorities change in the industry.
I think the single-pay model might very well have been an accident of history. Before we had home consoles and PC gaming, the business model for video games was based on recurring revenue: in that case in the form of coin-operated games. Before digital distribution, the only way to monetize a game for PC or home console was to sell a game in a box with enough value inside that customers would be willing to pay outright for it. That was the age of the gaming experience as a development priority: the game itself had to be good enough that players would be willing to pay $50 for the next title.
But now that digital distribution is the norm, it's again possible for game developers to extract revenue from users on a recurring basis, and since that is wildly more profitable and less risky than relying on one-time-purchases, that's what developers are going to focus on. That's only accelerated by the cost of content creation: in order to build a AAA game these days, it takes an army of artists many years to deliver a product. That's a far cry from something like the original Diablo which was made by a handful of people. With that level of financial investment, studios are much less likely to take risks on new ideas, and are more likely to seek alternative means to monetize that investment.
One more thought is the idea of the "Forever Game". It seems the longtail development cost of already released games keeps growing. So how do you fund it? Is that a cause or a symptom of the drive toward profit?
It's not that I disagree with you, but some payment models are justified and comprehensible. On the other site, its pretty obvious that especially companies like EA make use of that and try to gate it's users behind those walls on purpose to get big buck for small bang.
For me, personally, I will never buy a game if it has some connection to EA ever. These guys are toxic and just hurt the industry. But people buy and EA delivers. And obviously people don't learn, EA got so much shit from the internet community and people still don't stop buying there games, which, for me, is incomprehensible.
It's a problem they created on purpose, so they shouldn't get to use it as a justification for their practices. It's not that players need "endless online service"[0] that needs "neverending development, bug fixing"[1]. It's that the companies figured out doing it this way gives them access to much more money, so they created the problem and used their marketing budgets to make it a new normal.
> but some payment models are justified and comprehensible
Yeah, but some feel like they're justified by self-serving arguments, in a case of creating a problem to justify getting paid for solving it.
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[0] - Which actually isn't endless, but works just for couple years until the next game in the franchise is made, or the studio gets bored, or bought out, or...
[1] - Tangential, but I still don't buy the whole "bit rot" thing as a natural phenomenon. I'm starting to believe that our industry has accidentally become good at making everything so fragile that it justifies endless work just to keep things running.
I love strategy games. From Carrier Command back in the 80s to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to Stellaris. I've recently picked up Surviving Mars in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does.
Why? It probably can be reduced down to the reward factor. In Stellaris the galaxy is pretty huge, there's a massive combination of races, ideologies and other factors that all go together to create what feels like a novel/new experience.
In Surviving Mars, your playing field is limited to a 10x10 grid, and you quickly become bogged down keeping ahead of your colonists' needs. The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty. The planet just kind of exists as a map outside your little grid, there's no way to visit or expand, you just send expeditions out and get a text box saying they found x, y or z.
Now, if someone could write a game that accurately captures the feel of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars in an exploration/build/research combined with novelty in a truly expansive world, that would be amazing. Setting up your base, digging your habitats, finding volatiles and water and all that good stuff. It would be great, if done well, of course.
But maybe by the time someone writes such a beast, we'd have people on Mars for real.
That sounds like Stellaris, tbh. Eventually it just turns into waiting for things to complete so you can launch the next war. And without the historical immersion (EUIV, VIC II), or personal connection (CKII) of other Paradox games it just feels like a complicated menu simulator.
>I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.mac.games/-ShSyZ8bv...
A key question on the ethics of it all is - I think - whether there is some externality from the behavior that leads to social utility. Reading literature might make you more understanding and empathetic of others' experiences for example. Gambling in a casino, maybe not so much (though certainly it creates jobs, etc).
I'm excited by the idea that neurochemical feedback loops in gaming could create some positive social utility. Certainly the storytelling in a lot of games is artistic and meaningful, but maybe we'll find even better ways to directly channel those brain cycles, along the lines of protein folding games but with more depth. (Neal Stephenson had some interesting ideas for this in Fall or Reamde - can't remember - where an MMORPG had an API similar to mechanical turk where players were rewarded for cognitive tasks in the real world like airport security)
edit: I guess we shouldn't forget that games are fun too, and doesn't necessarily need to be deeper than that to be good.
Yes, and that difference is the whole point of art vs entertainment. After consuming entertainment, you want more entertainment. But after consuming art - after reading The Great Gatsby - your eyes get yanked back to your own life. You start thinking "what doomed dreams do I have?", not "when will they release Great Gatsby 2?"
If it’s a single fixed price, what is incentivizing the developer to make the game more addictive? Purchasing the sequel? Wouldn’t the developer instead be incentivized to make a game with novel and compelling gameplay that isn’t necessarily addictive?
So you need to have more gameplay, and that's either through cleverly addictive game mechanics or a ton of expensive to produce content.
If you present the game honestly, then people can evaluate the price you're asking for vs. what's being offered, and they have no reason to complain that it was too short.
I was ready to write an angry 10,000 word response on the importance of private property and the free market system. But reading this paragraph de-escalated the situation enough for me to realize this article was only a general overview of the industry they work in.
The basis of free markets is that participants act rational and have full knowledge.
Yet here we are researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut their rationality...
Markets perform better than other allocation systems for many things. It's an observed principle rather than something that was directed from above.
Some economic models assume people are rational because on aggregate it works for those models.
Mostly market systems have substantially outperformed centrally controlled systems.
Yes, we've observed that under free market, "people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge", at least on many occasions. We've also observed countless of occasions when they'll make a worse choice. Sometimes idiotically worse choice. We've observed the cases where those choices, aggregated, cause wide-spread suffering.
So many people were asking a question - why does free market work perfectly in some cases, but fails so badly in others? That's where the "rationality" and "full knowledge" things come from. Economists have figured out that these are necessary conditions for the free market model to work the best. When you make people behave irrationally, or refuse to give them full knowledge, the free market model results in suboptimal outcomes.
Free market isn't a silver bullet. It's a process that gives particular outputs for particular inputs, and we've been mapping the relationship between its domain and codomain for a while now. We know that the more rational participants and the more symmetrical information come in, the more ethically positive transactions come out. This can be seen in both theoretical models and in practice.
Now when the game industry is "researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut [players'] rationality", what that means is that they're weaponizing the free market to fuck fellow human beings over.
If you're curious about how this is developing, try Black Desert Online. It's a really remarkably polished game that is truly unique. It's a PvP action fighting game encapsulated by an immersive RPG with a load of different ways to play the game.
It's almost terrifyingly well crafted.
There is a startlingly well designed progression system pivoted around raising your attack and defense rating to fight against other players in the various fields of battle. In every one of the sub routines within this intricate Skinner Box there is an efficiency modifier which can be metered through the use of USD,
All of these sub routines inevitably connect at the central purpose of pumping black stones, or as I'll refer to them, probability stones into your gear with a chance of either raising their rating, lowering their rating, or in certain cases destroying them completely. Sometimes the undesired outcomes can be negated through further remittance of USD, for this and certain other mini-games as well.
There is a tightly controlled exchange of goods through a central system (which collects a tax unless you pay for a buff every month), with only a small number of consumable items being transferable between players.
You are utterly economically isolated in the game.
This is not a new phenomenon, but I think it's clearly evolving.
Casinos were built on it, and so are many of these so-called "Korean MMOs".
Pearl Abyss has enjoyed massive success and, to my dismay, has purchased CCP Games, developer of EVE Online.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_gam...
I hope these system designs are less insidious than my experience has led me to believe.
Edit: I'll add that I've read supposedly regulatory action is being taken, I read somewhere that China was or is imposing a rule for disclosure of probabilities in at least some circumstances. Not confident on veracity.
Curiously, in certain regions there are apparently varying or no limits on purchase of "cash shop" items, while in others (like NA) there are. Also worth noting that within the game, players who've paid the most into the cash shop are called "whales".
Edit2: Last I looked they boast a player base in the 2-3 million range.
Or doesn't care. Or cares and has no idea how to live an ethically sustainable and interdependent life.
Also me: gcp compute model.fit(epochs=20) watches error trend downwards
Have you ever tried?
> In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994.
> This isn't an editorial. I'm not judging anyone. I write computer RPGs for a living. My games are crude and low-budget, but they give you your modest dopamine dose for a far more reasonable price than the free-to-play drug lords over on Android. I even throw in a decent story to put a patina of sophistication on the whole thing.
If there’s any kernel of truth here, it’s nothing new. Likening commercial online games to drugs is as old as “Evercrack”.