The lessons of Bulletstorm and the problem with price-points
gamesindustry.biz
gamesindustry.biz
That's not at all the point here. It's about persistent, clunky notions about hit-making in the game industry.
>'The problem with the AAA world is not the games; the problem is the structure of assumptions and arbitrary targets that surrounds them.'
>'Gotta tick those boxes. Gotta justify that $60 price-point. And here's the rub: in a digital world, whether AAA or indie, those restrictions should be irrelevant.'
I think that's spot on.
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Note: The original article/HN title was 'The Astronauts: "In 2014, $60 for a game is a little insane"'. HN has since been updated to something much more descriptive.
A $60 game to me, commmunicates a rehash of the same ideas we've seen in gaming for decades and/or a sub 10-hour campaign with a bland multiplayer experience.
It has a modding community larger than most actual game communities for indies. That's extremely rare in indies (and even AAA's!) to achieve an Elder Scrolls level of modding. Some of the modlaunchers/modapis that I use have more versions and active development than some indie games I play, and that's before we consider the mods themselves (hundreds, almost thousands, available for every MC point release) which are almost all separate projects being actively maintained.
And two, Minecraft is a procedurally generated emergent game, an rarity among all games.
My point is that it's wrong to use Minecraft as a generalization for "indie" game, when it breaks most of the rules/paradigms that most indies follow.
">A $60 game to me, commmunicates a rehash of the same ideas we've seen in gaming for decades and/or a sub 10-hour campaign with a bland multiplayer experience."
Yeah, like Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas.
Games like torchlight are ARPG's played on rails, with zero emergent gameplay. Same with BoI when I played it, it's a rougelike not an emergent game. It wasn't a world to explore but levels to complete in order. KSP can be emergent but requires you to play very specifically to experience the content. FTL is cool but it's linear by design, no exploration, no freedom, no building, no game world destruction etc, just running from and attacking things on a mostly linear random path. But FTL is a game to play and finish, Minecraft is an emergent experience, a world to work on until you abandon your world.
I would pay $60 upfront and $10 a month to play a RTS like command and conquer or SC2 (not the new new MMO one) that is on a long lived or persistent map w/ set teams (factions).
It has to have no annoying timers, not feel like grinding and cannot charge me incremental dollars to get further in the game "recharge" packs, "advisors" to unlock end game functionality, or premium currency that (in practice) cannot be obtained otherwise.
Hell, I might just quit my job and learn to build this game.
But people making lower budget films can take more risks, because if they do come up with a new type of hit they'll see huge returns.
I used to work on a site that covered the movie industries and one of our views was that fixed ticket prices were hurting the movie industry. A dumb, low-risk summer movie makes the same per viewer as an intelligent but niche film. Things would be a lot more interesting if some films targeted at smaller markets could charge $20 or more per ticket; and you might see declining returns on dumb tentpoles if they had to compete on price with each other (e.g. "How to die in the west" for $5 vs "Godzilla" for $15 ... ?)
$10/month - So how much load does the game put on a server? And what sized server? That's important because if you have a bunch of dedicated AWS instances they can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, if you put them on demand you will have to figure out the latency issues.
The game is going to change quickly, and as you said its multiplayer and 'persistent maps' so lots of memory? Recovery if you lose a machine in the middle of the game? And a staff of Game Masters who can help angry 11 yr olds trying to get their 'Mom's crappy Dell' to play the game with a decent frame rate.
To put it a different way, I would love to play that game too, and I would pay $10 a month, but could I run it at $10 a month in at least a cash flow break-even mode? Turn based games are easier with their arbitrary latency allowance, RTS gets to be less easy. Especially if one player lagging out freezes the map for everyone? So perhaps the game engine isn't the challenging part, perhaps the backend stack is a harder challenge, or the support infrastructure. I don't know but I wonder about that some times.
The reason you probably won't get funded is that it's hard to make a fun game which lasts.
1. Games could have a true end. One faction wins, game over, server reset. 2. Different maps. Could be worked in the "game over" scenario or could be running concurrently. 3. Different "ages": the game code could adequately work with past, present and futuristic units, giving users different experiences when they play.
As for AWS costs, I really have no idea the kind of load you would get from that game, but given a C3.xlarge is about $175 a month (or less for reserved), I'd be shocked to hear that you cannot serve at least 175 concurrent users from that server-- giving about $1500 a month profit per server utilized. IMO dev costs, engineer time etc will far far outstrip the infrastructure costs.
You'd think tablets/mobile would have an amazing plethora of RTS's, but it kind of seems like the simulation/Facebook games took over (Clash of Clans etc).
In the context of the article it makes sense. But out of context it appears to be saying that all games should cost a lot less than $60, which really isn't the point.
In fact to justify a luxury price point you just have to give people something they really want. For example, right now lots of people are paying $150 to get into the beta for Elite: Dangerous, a game that I presume will be substantially cheaper in full release:
If $60 is insane then $150 is totally nutballs, yet that is what a nontrivial slice of people are paying, because this beta is giving them something they want that they can't get any other way.
(Note: In the alpha, people were paying $295!)
Same with the people that threw money at obsidian, Brian Fargo and Tim Schaffer.
It is paying premium price for a product due to supply demand.
//I miss Freelancer so so much.
[disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders of DCL, a junior officer in Rangers, and my wife is the primary developer of D1x-retro.]
I also have friends who actively play and mod Freelancer. Their team is at http://ripteam.com/ [Disclosure: I'm a member of team RIP, though only in their Descent 3 division.]
Plus, for me at least, you get the modern take on Elite that you've been waiting 20 years for.
I don't mind paying a lot for it, I had a lot of fun playing it as a child..
(On PC at least) it's quite common for a AAA game to launch riddled with bugs. Recently it was Watch_Dogs which costs 60€ on Steam, yet it has a lot of performance issues, the publishers client has connectivity problems etc.
$60 is too much for a game.
The only AAA title so far this year that game me good value for money was Reaper of Souls, mostly because devs listened to the public and for a change made the right decisions.
The majority of games have always been crap. Nothing is new. Rose tinted glasses mean we only remember the good games.
I think it's more that when releasing any given game, you aren't just trying to sell people on "Our game is worth $60." you also have to sell "You are better off spending $60 on our game than on all the other games you can currently buy for $60 or less."
Plus, if games these days are crap, I don't even think there are words to describe the relative awfulness of the games I played in my childhood on the NES.
Today, that could be handled with a patch and the lovely multiplayer could be enjoyed online.
I don't doubt that the release of unfinished products is a real issue, but there are trade-offs in most things.
Bugs certainly aren't new
In beta/pre-order now. Steam Greenlight. Small + very dedicated team.
If you apply your logic to the automotive world we should just stick with the single barrel carburetor V8 Chevrolets because, otherwise we just end up with BMW's iDrive issues and Prius throttle problems.
While that is certainly true, all of those amount to nothing if you cannot download the game at all or if the game is constantly stuttering.
So I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to draw here.
In 1990 you had a game that was 1-2 players, 16 bit, no upgrades/updates in content or playability, no versatility in mediums, limited scope of possible actions within the game itself. In 2014 you can play with a number of players greater than 2, a few more colors, constant updates in content and playability, easy played on any number of platforms and a drastically increased set of possible actions within the game.
You are frustratingly trying to explain that a narrow capability system with great stability is greater than a wide capability system with a decrease in stability.
I will be driving a car that breaks down every couple months and you can continue to ride your skateboard everywhere.
The ability to update a game later means that QA can be less thorough, this makes things cheaper.
Versatility in mediums? Having the choice between download and DVD is much cheaper than any cartridge. Or wait you're talking about platforms? There have always been multiplatform games. And being multiplatform means you expand your audience perhaps 50% while using the same art assets and a lot of the same code; that doesn't make a game's price higher at all. The amount of code you can share keeps rising, too.
So while games are prettier and more complicated, with art and animation getting crazily expensive, talking about convenience features like translations and downloads and patches is a red herring.
Games also often came on multiple CDs , scratch one CD and that's the end of the game.
HA!
I have some N64 games that still have the price tag on them from Toys R Us, Sears, or Target. One or two say $89.99 on them. I distinctly remember Street Fighter II: The World Warrior being $75 at Target when it was first released. I had to beg mom like I never begged before to get it.
I'd still pay these prices too, if, and only if, we didn't have the digital DRM, online requirements, bugs, patches, etc. that plague today's games. I realize though that today's games are far more complex probably and that's part of the problem.
After the SNES era, we saw how Playstation games were quite a bit cheaper than N64 games, but it had nothing to do with Nintendo wanting to make more money per copy: It had to do with the fact that pressing CDs was cheap as dirt, so the game developer would get as much money, per copy, despite a cheaper price.
With the switch to downloadable, we can save even more than that: The cut from the retailer, the distributor, the box manufacturing... You could cut at least $20 from a game, easily, and still get the publisher the same cut.
If you want to talk about game pricing without dealing with fixed non-development costs, you are comparing apples and oranges, on purpose.
So a company selling such games will have a higher price floor than games without those costs, and due to that floor may not be able to achieve a profit maximizing profit maximizing point that a game without those costs may be able to achieve (such as selling 100 million games at $1 each). Their entire set of optimal production possibilities would probably be shifted inward.
Not saying a consumer should factor this in, just the game maker has a restriction on the consumers they can target that they would not have without those costs.
> "The saying in the industry right now is, 'If you want to sell a game for $60, to the player it has to feel like $200.'"
> "Bulletstorm was a $60 game for $60. And these days $60 for a game sounds basically crazy, when there are literally hundreds of high quality games out there for a much smaller price - even on console. In 2014, $60 for a game is a little insane."
I believe that, economically speaking (and I now almost nothing about this), customers pay the value they percieve the product has. Chmielarz is actually saying that some games have a bigger value that the price they are sold. That they priced the game right but some other games of equal value were sold cheaper.
Or, in other words, people are paying less for games than they should.
I could rant for hours about this, but I'll refrain from it. I just wanted to add this clarification.
As supply exceeds demand, prices tend towards manufacturing costs rather than utility provided. Suppliers therefore have to either increase demand or reduce supply (big publishers), or segment the market (small publishers) to maximize profit.
I remember back when I was in grade school, me and my brother were so excited that we saved up enough to buy Ninja Gaiden...for the NES, not XBOX...and someone then stole the game, which was our first new game in a loooong time (we were not a wealthy family). $50 had a lot more value in the the 1980s...and that game was very primitive by today's standards...so thinking about that stolen NES cartridge makes me laugh with a bit of a wince
>and that game was very primitive by today's standards
Is the game primitive, or did it look primitive?
I think it's important to make the distinction, because for all the fancy technology that goes into making a AAA shooter look cool, the actual game underneath it all is never terribly sophisticated, and usually even less so than the average FPS from the 90s. Yet people nowadays will claim that something like The Legend of Zelda, where you have a fairly nonlinear adventure through a huge world, is more "primitive" than a modern game where you are basically guided on rails from start to finish.
Usually, games with multiplayer features last significantly longer than single player games, but there are exceptions like the ones you listed which all have high replay values. Also, genres matter, open-world sandbox games lack the intensity but enjoys longevity, the price could hardly reflect that.
Then there's Minecraft, which keeps its charm after months, for some people even years. And it cost a lot less than the typical AAA titles.
I feel the pricing model in gaming industry is so rigid and backwards (although no so much for casual games, eg. in app purchase and mulitplayer games eg. esport games and MMORPGS). Some movement toward more flexible pricing mechanisms to reflect games' contents will undoubted benefit both game makers and players.
Does that include multiplayer? Personally I'd be surprised to find a majority of AAA single-player games to have that much content, barring the Skyrims and Fallouts. For me, playing the same game past around the 20 hour mark starts to feel like a chore.
That said, I actually enjoy good games, so I take my money elsewhere and buy little indie titles for $15-20 intead, and only occasionally buy a AAA theme park.
Also, the amount of content in most games these days is absolutely huge. Per hour, they are an incredibly cheap form of entertainment.
Check out a catalog from 1990 for example: http://www.huguesjohnson.com/features/sears_catalog/sears-ca...
Thus the industry bifurcates into low-cost, quality, smaller-scope games and huge-volume annualized franchise games like CoD and Assassin's Creed, leaving no room for high-quality, mid-scope, "middle-class AAA" games like Bulletstorm.
Aiming at the $60 game price point and experience is aiming for a saturated market where you have to do crazy things to stand out.
Furthermore, what's the alternative? Mobile, as a platform, has been out in force for a few years now, and though there are a few gems, I've been largely disappointed with it. Mobile gaming hasn't really evolved into producing true, quality AAA titles.
It's better for the publisher to make an online game that can't be resold.
Gamestop lucked out this console generation when Microsoft caved. I sincerely believe they won't be so lucky next gen.
Oh wait I paid $7 for it when I decided to port my save files from the 360 to my computer and futz around with mods. Either way. Lots of fun for not very much because I didn't care about playing it when it was the hot new thing.
(At the time I wrote this, it was on the old title.)
Then, even if you make a game witha good multiplayer element, you're still struggling against the tide because you need a big enough player population to keep players engaged. It's the network effect working against you. If all of a given gamer's friends are playing Call of Duty they're less likely to invest in the multiplayer of another game. Or when they do go to another MP game and there aren't many players available for matchmaking, they just give up and move on.
The point was well made in this article that what needs to happen is that the game dev industry needs to set more sane goals and sane budgets. There's not a lot of room for games with $30+ million budgets because of the amount of copies that would have to be sold and the fact that gamers only have so much time to play. The only way to get around that would be to significantly expand the player base, which is not happening.
For a long time I played the Wii and picked up mostly used games.
Recently I got a Playstation 3 and a Vita and joined Playstation Plus where you get a pretty generous set of free games. These are not the latest blockbusters but instead the really great game they are following up.
On the Vita I haven't bought a single physical game, but I do get good sales offers a lot. For instance, I never would have thought of getting Killzone Mercenary for full price but at $20 it is a awesome game and great value. I liked it so much I bought a used copy of the Killzone Trilogy. Later on there was a sale on Persona 4 Golden and that too was excellent value.
My son tried "Need For Speed Most Wanted" on the Vita and we went looking for PS3 NFS games at Gamestop. I hear "Rivals" is a good game but I can buy him two older games that are quite different for a lot less, have a lot of fun, and even have it written up in GameFAQS!
If a game sells poorly , there's more pressure to discount it heavily and quickly. But, if you like a game, you should try to buy it at full price as that incentivizes them to make more games "like" it.
Part of it is that I live in the United States (and not in Austin, TX or Kansas City) so I have to live with either high latency phone company DSL or expensive high latency phone company LTE. This means usually I get fragged as soon as I get in the room and there isn't much I can do with it.
My son, however, likes the multiplayer mode in Need For Speed.
I think it's annoying, and I'm always thinking about what would have made it to the game if they didn't spend time and money tacking multiplayer on top.
Obviously I must have a pretty unpopular opinion since all the new games have multiplayer now :(