Newell reveals major PC flaw, the future business of games, and fear of Apple

The snarky response to this would be to stop downloading bad games.

There are plenty of good F2P games out there. Planetside 2, League of Legends, Path of Exile, etc. On mobile, there are games like Angry Birds that aren't just a money funnel. But honestly, you're going to have a tough time on the mobile space because IMO there just aren't that many games worth playing out there.

It's a one-way street on most phone apps. The devs write a little phone game, and then put 90% of it behind staged paywalls. Quite a different thing than what Gabe has done, and what he discusses here.

Widespread scammy/spammy feeling greedy money-suckage? Sounds like great news to me! That shouts opportunity.

I think Valve has a formula that could do well in a market like that described above. You keep the size of the company small, so expenses are low, thus minimizing the temptation to money-suck. On top of that, you emphasize user-generated content. This increases the game's value, harnessing resources to compete with content ground-out by larger shops' payrolls, while offloading development risk for content to the users. The game makes money as a marketplace.

Most importantly, build your brand on an emphasis on quality and playability. Steer clear of the mentality that you give people something for free so you can addict them using variable schedule of reward to suck money out of them. Be genuinely focused on delivering fun and build the brand on that.

It's those companies who will eventually stand out over self-deluded hacks who can't see up over their own swollen greed. (I like that!)

tl;dr - Be true to and work with the passions of your userbase, and you'll stand out from the crowd of self-deluded hacks who can't see up over their own swollen greed.

Robotek is an example of a great free-to-play game that does use in-app purchases, but doesn't require them (games that claim not to but basically do if you want to actually get anywhere are horrible).

Anecdotal evidence is crap, I know, and this is only one example (I've played others but can't recall them right now)... but the top earners are obviously always going to be the kind of money-pit BS you're talking about. That's a shame, but putting all free to play games -- with or without IAP/advertising/etc. -- into that category just isn't realistic.

Games for intelligent people who aren't variable-reward-schedule drones will always be around. I would like to invent such games that are touch based. I don't see any reason why this can't be done.

One influence that the keyboard has, with it's very large number of buttons, is a tendency towards bloated, intellectually uninteresting (for most people, excepting the deep end of the Aspberger's spectrum) complexity of a phenomenological nature. Let's have lots of arbitrarily determined entities that interact in arbitrary ways, but dress this up in a sci-fi/military/fantasy context. It's the same reason card games tend to have the same sort of complexity. Lots of cards can fit in a deck. Lots of keys on a keyboard. Gotta use them!

The reason why games like Angry Birds and World of Goo have such wide appeal, is that they combine relatively few principles that have the elegance of math or physics (because they are math & physics) allowing them to generate genuinely emergent complexity of the kind most human brains find fascinating.

I remember playing Sim City a lot on my computer. It was fun. I tried a similar game on my iPad which was free to play but it turned out very Facebook like. No options to speed up, I have to touch the buildings to make them work and all that stuff.

That's kind of the problem. You can do anything, and plenty of people are. But there's no platform 'boss' to lay down standards.

Aside from (fleeting) de-facto standards (particular flight sticks in years past; the 360 gamepad today) input support on the PC is a pain point for devs. Shoddy drivers, shoddy APIs, shoddy manufacturer support -- to say nothing of the state of vision, voice and touch.

There's a reason PC games are treading water with support for little-to-nothing beyond kb/m and dodgy/partial support for the 360 gamepad here and there.

If you're a dev and want to make a game, do you make it so that it can only be used by a few thousand people, or by everybody on the platform?

I think Nintendo learned this lesson (somewhat) the hard way until they released the Wii. Peripherals don't sell.

Input devices like this have been common on PC for a while now, just for specialized games.

http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/products/trackir5/

Power users will surely complain a lot, but I don't think an average customer will do much!

That's kind of the problem, though- the market is too fragmented. Microsoft can release the Kinect as the control device to buy, and everyone does. Meanwhile, the PC has has five competing devices sharing a smaller market.

Now, you can argue about weather that's true, but it's not immediately dismissed as "self serving".

He's nodding to consoles here.

He didn't say input methods on PC were flawed, he said that PC gamers have been slow to accept and/or develop innovative input methods. This is pretty much his one and only criticism of the PC market, and he said this in the context of "PCs are super cool because they've been the best and coolest in everything forever (except new input methods)!"

>The only thing of interest in that speech would be just how much Newell is struggling to hedge his bets, yet completely ignoring the elephants in the room, e.g. his console competitors...

Wat. The whole point of the talk is that he's going to bring a small form-factor "PC box" to the living room. It will look and function like a console to the layman, but it will not require reimplementation of everything, it will automatically work with PC players online, manufacturers will be able to make and sell custom "Steam boxes" a la Android mobiles.

The whole thing says, "We're going to pwn 'consoles' with our new thing, because it's the best of both worlds; the normal person sees it as a console, but it's still a free and open ecosystem, the work is already done, and the communities are already there."