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Not everything is a conspiracy. I know the author of this article and he is a straightforward person. The game industry is a big place with many different kind

by jblow 9y ago

Not everything is a conspiracy. I know the author of this article and he is a straightforward person. The game industry is a big place with many different kinds of people in it, all of whom have different motivations. If you build a picture for yourself wherein everyone is That Guy At EA Who Put Loot Boxes Into Battlefront 2, then that picture will probably get in the way of your understanding what everyone is being said by everyone else in the industry who is not that one guy. This article is targeted primarily at developers, not at gamers. It is an "oh crap what do we do" article, because believe me, that is a big problem and in general we do not know what to do. This was not some "cost of games need to go up because blah blah" justification article ... it is a straightforward look at what has been happening and some musings about what we can do about it, with "cost of games will probably rise" thrown in as a 6-word aside near the end (at which time he also points out that nobody wants to do this, which is true). You're reading the article you want to read, not the article that the author wrote.

lacker 9y ago
1. Thanks for making Braid that was great 2. I believe you that the author is a straightforward person and I don't think there's anything malicious here. Still, it's not a good dataset. It's 250 data points collected in an ad hoc way. A single decision like "do we include PUBG or not" can sway every statistic in here. So I don't think it's a good idea to make any conclusions based on this data.
- lj3 9y ago
  If you have a better data set on which to make decisions, feel free to share it. People need to make the best decisions they can with the information available to them.
- wink 9y ago
  I'd say PUBG data is much too new, in the timescale this looks at. I'd be inclined to say "ignore World of Warcraft" in anything like this, because it's the biggest outlier ever (No MMO comes close, even 14 years later) - but at least there's tons of data around it.
falcolas 9y ago
Motivations and character of the author matter little; the article which was written is pushing an agenda: a justification of (and if not a justification, a recommendation for) the use of what could be seen as questionable practices for reducing costs and getting more money out of their audiences. What practices do I consider to be questionable? > "de-emphasize bytes in favor of other types of content" This, and the rest of the suggestions reads as "don't build a hand-tailored experience, instead build more random permutations of generic content." There's even suggestions to find ways to monetize some of those permutations. I'll admit it: I'm a gamer, not a professional developer. But these things matter to me. Good, profitable, games do exist - I am playing many of them. What bothers me as a gamer is that all of the suggestions being offered up here will never re-create one of these good games. The games being advocated for describe yet another vehicle for selling lootboxes or skins or weapons. The whole article closes with the comment "I would love it if these graphs were wrong". Charitably, we can say that the graphs the author displayed are not wrong. However they provide, at a minimum, an incomplete picture. They invite readers to come to a very specific conclusion. That practice is what I'm criticizing with the phrase "lying with numbers" (credit for which goes to "Penn & Teller's Bullshit").
- Raph_Koster 9y ago
  > This, and the rest of the suggestions reads as "don't build a hand-tailored experience, instead build more random permutations of generic content." There's even suggestions to find ways to monetize some of those permutations. Chess, PUBG, CounterStrike, and soccer fall into this category. It is the art of systemic game design. Saying games should tilt more systemic doesn't mean they get worse. It means they are different. In the commercial history of the game industry, we've seen entire genres fall out because they stopped making financial sense. Often, they come back later, when the finances make sense again. I really think you are filtering the entire article through a lens based on your assumption that I am advocating for a world where Uncharted and Edith Finch can't exist, and every game is a lootbox-driven roguelike or something. That world would actually make me very sad.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    "Horizon: Zero Dawn", "Final Fantasy 3", "Nier: Automata", "Opus Magnum", "Bastion", "Transistor", "Tomb Raider", "Redout", "Mass Effect", "Hellblade", "Braid", "Divinity 2" ... these do not fall into that category. Not everyone is driven by competition. The niches which fell into oblivion were driven there by the fact they are niches - their consumers too small a group to justify the investment. Crafted, story-driven games are not niche. They are not running the razors edge of being barely profitable, instead some are becoming profitable well before they're expected like "Hellblade". They are funding future games like "Bastion". They are being held as the pinnacle of a genre considered to be a dead horse like "Horizon: Zero Dawn". Whether you're sad or no, the practices advocated by your article doesn't include these games, these experiences. Your comment here even condemns them as not making financial sense, being doomed to only be revisited at some point in the future. And yet, these games are being released today, are being funded by major and minor publishers and developers alike for tomorrow. That, more than anything else, is a compelling argument for the gameplay you recommend is not the only way forward.

by jblow 9y ago

lacker 9y ago

1. Thanks for making Braid that was great 2. I believe you that the author is a straightforward person and I don't think there's anything malicious here. Still, it's not a good dataset. It's 250 data points collected in an ad hoc way. A single decision like "do we include PUBG or not" can sway every statistic in here. So I don't think it's a good idea to make any conclusions based on this data.

lj3 9y ago
If you have a better data set on which to make decisions, feel free to share it. People need to make the best decisions they can with the information available to them.
wink 9y ago
I'd say PUBG data is much too new, in the timescale this looks at. I'd be inclined to say "ignore World of Warcraft" in anything like this, because it's the biggest outlier ever (No MMO comes close, even 14 years later) - but at least there's tons of data around it.

falcolas 9y ago

Motivations and character of the author matter little; the article which was written is pushing an agenda: a justification of (and if not a justification, a recommendation for) the use of what could be seen as questionable practices for reducing costs and getting more money out of their audiences. What practices do I consider to be questionable? > "de-emphasize bytes in favor of other types of content" This, and the rest of the suggestions reads as "don't build a hand-tailored experience, instead build more random permutations of generic content." There's even suggestions to find ways to monetize some of those permutations. I'll admit it: I'm a gamer, not a professional developer. But these things matter to me. Good, profitable, games do exist - I am playing many of them. What bothers me as a gamer is that all of the suggestions being offered up here will never re-create one of these good games. The games being advocated for describe yet another vehicle for selling lootboxes or skins or weapons. The whole article closes with the comment "I would love it if these graphs were wrong". Charitably, we can say that the graphs the author displayed are not wrong. However they provide, at a minimum, an incomplete picture. They invite readers to come to a very specific conclusion. That practice is what I'm criticizing with the phrase "lying with numbers" (credit for which goes to "Penn & Teller's Bullshit").

Raph_Koster 9y ago
> This, and the rest of the suggestions reads as "don't build a hand-tailored experience, instead build more random permutations of generic content." There's even suggestions to find ways to monetize some of those permutations. Chess, PUBG, CounterStrike, and soccer fall into this category. It is the art of systemic game design. Saying games should tilt more systemic doesn't mean they get worse. It means they are different. In the commercial history of the game industry, we've seen entire genres fall out because they stopped making financial sense. Often, they come back later, when the finances make sense again. I really think you are filtering the entire article through a lens based on your assumption that I am advocating for a world where Uncharted and Edith Finch can't exist, and every game is a lootbox-driven roguelike or something. That world would actually make me very sad.
- falcolas 9y ago
  "Horizon: Zero Dawn", "Final Fantasy 3", "Nier: Automata", "Opus Magnum", "Bastion", "Transistor", "Tomb Raider", "Redout", "Mass Effect", "Hellblade", "Braid", "Divinity 2" ... these do not fall into that category. Not everyone is driven by competition. The niches which fell into oblivion were driven there by the fact they are niches - their consumers too small a group to justify the investment. Crafted, story-driven games are not niche. They are not running the razors edge of being barely profitable, instead some are becoming profitable well before they're expected like "Hellblade". They are funding future games like "Bastion". They are being held as the pinnacle of a genre considered to be a dead horse like "Horizon: Zero Dawn". Whether you're sad or no, the practices advocated by your article doesn't include these games, these experiences. Your comment here even condemns them as not making financial sense, being doomed to only be revisited at some point in the future. And yet, these games are being released today, are being funded by major and minor publishers and developers alike for tomorrow. That, more than anything else, is a compelling argument for the gameplay you recommend is not the only way forward.