10 ms·

Lessons from the PC video game industry

34 points by jordigg 11y ago

Zikes 11y ago
> 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-updates-their-bad-youtube-policies-by-making-them-worse/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/02/06/nintendo-u... [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/17321021296/sega-goes-nuclear-youtube-videos-old-shining-force-game.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/17321021296/sega-...
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  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.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    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.
    - Laforet 11y ago
      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.
dijit 11y ago
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.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  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.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    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.
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      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.
Zikes 11y ago
> 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.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  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.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    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.
- oberstein 11y ago
  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.
- kevingadd 11y ago
  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.
Macsenour 11y ago
I feel I should point out that the "Games" section of Kickstarter also includes board games, which takes a big chunk of cash.
- Zikes 11y ago
  A good point, and many games are being developed for consoles, or include consoles as "stretch goals".

34 points by jordigg 11y ago

Zikes 11y ago

> 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-updates-their-bad-youtube-policies-by-making-them-worse/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/02/06/nintendo-u... [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/17321021296/sega-goes-nuclear-youtube-videos-old-shining-force-game.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121206/17321021296/sega-...

Mithaldu 11y ago
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.
- Zikes 11y ago
  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.
  - Laforet 11y ago
    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.

dijit 11y ago

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.

Mithaldu 11y ago
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.
- Zikes 11y ago
  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.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    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.

Zikes 11y ago

> 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.

Mithaldu 11y ago
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.
- Zikes 11y ago
  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.
oberstein 11y ago
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.
kevingadd 11y ago
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.

Macsenour 11y ago

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

Zikes 11y ago
A good point, and many games are being developed for consoles, or include consoles as "stretch goals".