Outside Opinions: The readers speak

Over the course of this blog, I've gotten quite a few reader opinions, and for this post, I think it's a great idea to let the reader opinions make up the post. First in two interviews, one audio and the other text, and lastly, in a guest post expressing opinions on developer salaries.

Interview 1

First, the audio interview with reader and game enthusiast "chiefvsmario":
Interview with chiefvsmario (Click to listen!)

Interview 2

Secondly, a text interview with another gaming enthusiast, "Fenril":

Forte: Tell us a bit about your history involving video games.

Fenril: As a very young child, I often played my older cousins' video games, under the hawk-like watch of my mother. When I was six years old I recieved my first console; an N64 for my birthday, along with Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I remember my mother telling me I wasn't allowed to play Zelda at first because of something she'd read about it having blood in it, but (luckily) there was a video game room for the "big" kids at my day-care, and without motherly supervision I was able to experience absolutely delightful games, such as Mischief Makers, Star Fox64, Super Mario RPG, Bomberman 64, Pokemon Snap, Kirby 64, Yoshi's Story, Mystical Ninja, and so on. Later, my mother actually started to like video games herself, and we purchased most of the afore mentioned games to play together at home. And by together, I mean she watched and told me to watchout for NPCs and things in the background of the stage...

Forte: Do you think video games have gotten better, worse, or stayed the same over time?

Fenril: I don't think games have gotten worse or that there are more bad games as much as bad games now-a-days have better marketing teams. Except for Megaman. Those games got worse.

Forte: Looking at the infographic on the Costly Creation blog, does the empty space on games surprise you?

Fenril: Yes it does! Although, it makes me feel sort of dissatisfied, like every time I ran into one of those "why can't I do this?" or "why can't I ever go there?" or "why was what that NPC said just flavor text and not a little easter-egg?" it could have actually been something they added into the game. Not like they didn't have space, right? On the other hand, I feel excited to know that there's ample space to work with when making games. It feels like the possibilities are so much more grand than before, and they were already amazing to begin with!

Forte: How do you feel about microtransactions, and do you think those are a good business model in comparison with traditional DLC?

Fenril: Well, since I'm a fan of certain MMOs, I really don't mind microtransactions, as long as they don't unbalance or break the fairness of the game. As for DLC... on-disk DLC is absolutely unacceptable. It's just rude for any amount of the production time going towards a game's launch to include working on DLC. That pretty much means a consumer is going to have to wait longer for their game, and then have to pay again to unlock content already on the disk of the game they just bought.

Forte: What do you think the industry should do to increase sales and decrease loss?

Fenril: I don't know what the industry in general can do, but Nintendo already did what they could. Allowing 3rd-party companies to port to Nintendo's consoles stole a vast majority of the reason to buy either Sony or Microsoft's consoles. All Nintendo needs to do now is start making house-hold appliances.

Ian Owen's Guest Blog: Development Salaries

In the past year the video game industry has had it’s ups and downs, a slight decline in overall value of the industry occurred due to the over-saturation of mobile gaming and new innovations in mobile devices. But, it is expected to resume it’s upwards trend in the following year with the rumored release of the Xbox 720 around the holiday season of 2013, as stated on bloomberg^[1]. Now, I know there has been talk about all the profits and how much the game industry has been making, so lets turn the page and look at what the actual employees are making.

References:
[1] Dina Bass & Ian King, November 30, 2012: Microsoft Said to Plan Next Xbox for 2013 Holiday Season

Wasted Space: A neccessary evil?

The infographic in the previous post illustrates quite a bit of waste from the developer's part, but honestly, is there a way to avoid that? If they worked to make a game to responsibly fill (by which I mean, put useful information instead of something like animated cutscenes^[1]) a 10gb game disc, it would probably take years to complete. Not only that, but the resulting game would also probably literally take years to play from start to finish (barring any game breaking glitches that allow the player to skip huge portions of the game). For those of us who have experience with not playing a game for maybe a month or two, then going back to it and feeling confused about the story, imagine having to play a game constantly for that long just to remember what you were doing. I'm a fan of long games and feeling like I got what I paid for, but that would be more of a chore than a game.

A chore?

Having unrealistically long games doesn't only turn gaming into a chore for gamers, but it would probably end up making consumers buy less games. I know a lot of people who grew up where their parents wouldn't buy them a new game until they were finished with the one they already had (for some children who ended up with brutally difficult games like Battletoads or Treasure Master, that was a tough order to fill!), so any frugal parents of today following that logic wouldn't see a need to buy their children another game until the next year. From another perspective, looking at video games as an art form like I mentioned in the blog's first post, would you want to read a book that took so long to complete? For most people I know, War and Peace is an intimidating work of literature simply due to its size. Even in terms of long movies, it's hard to sit in one place and watch something for so long. The same holds for video games: they need to be long enough to make us feel like we spent our money wisely, and either short or modular enough to let us play them quickly.

Modularity?

I could never call myself a proponent of short games, but I understand that average gamer of today (which is older than you may think^[2]) leads a busy life, and most probably don't have time for the lengthy quests of their childhood. However, instead of short games, I believe that games should be modular, which is to say, they should be relatively long and can even continue to have deep, well drawn out stories and characters, but be able to be put down for extended periods of time without confusing the player upon picking them up again. How that's done is completely up to the designer, of course, but I feel it's probably the best way to bring the classic feeling of video games into the modern world.

Next post, we'll be looking at what a few consumers think about the industry in the form of interviews, and a special guest blog talking about the salaries in the industry.


References:
[1] blue, March 4, 2006: DVD capacity: Team Ninja filled entire disc and had to make adjustments
[2] Jay Jackson, June 14, 2011: Today's Living: Target audience for video games getting younger

A Visual: How Much We've Been Getting Per Game

Mp3 Size information courtesy of:
Tempus, June 2, 2005: MP3 file size: how many MB/minute @ 320kbps?

NES, SNES, and N64 Cartridge Average/Maximum Capacities courtesy of:
Sebastian Mihai, June 24, 2011:
A comparison of videogame cartridge sizes across generations

Average PS1 Game Size courtesy of:
reactionsok, October 15, 2007:
The average size of a downloadable PS1 game

Average Xbox 360 Game Size courtesy of:
Gorilla1dad, October 10, 2008: Average 360 Game Size...1-2 GB's?

What are you really paying for? - A look at the content of games Part 2

In the last post, the topic of DLC has sparked a large amount of comments (3 is quite the feat for this blog!), and they bring up great topics for discussion.

Smartphone Games

Love them or hate them, smartphone are permeating society, one study shows that 50.4% of United States consumers own a smartphone^[1]. Of course, video game developers, mostly independent studios, have taken interest in developing games for this now prevalent platform. Typically the games are cheap, and in some cases free, and in my opinion, the quality of the games really reflects the saying "you get what you pay for". Needless to say, these games seem to please people, and in some cases like Angry Birds, the games have spawned merchandise, so there's no way that I could ever ignore that these games are clear exceptions to the topic of this blog - they're produced relatively cheaply, costing anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 USD to produce ^[2], and just to take the success of Angry Birds into consideration: from a development cost of $140,000 USD, it grossed $70 Million USD as of March 2011 ^[3]. A figure like that is the dream of the professional industry.

Smartphones for the professional industry

Of course, independent game developers can't have all the fun, right? Professional development studios have started to produce games for smartphones, as well. Of particular note here is Capcom, whose most notable (read: notorious) foray into the world of smartphone games is a remake of RockMan X (originally for the Super Nintendo), and most recently, RockMan XOver. Unfortunately, finding the cost of either of these games' production is relatively impossible, so I cannot speak for how much Capcom has made off of it. However, pertaining to one of the comments in the previous post, the remake of RockMan X allows players to buy the armor upgrades and weapons as DLC without having to get them in-game. To answer the question of how I feel about this form of DLC: it's a bit of a cash grab. When the game was released on the Super Nintendo, a password system was implemented to make it easier on beginner players. From a non-business standpoint, there is no reason to implement a system of asking your users to pay to unlock a feature in a video game, especially when it's something you could just wait to find or unlock later.

Digital Distribution

One of the comments in the previous post asked how I feel about Digital Distribution, which is the concept of selling a product purely as its software and not as a physical copy. From a business standpoint, this is an excellent model. Nowhere in this model does a company have to pay for packaging, shipping, reseller costs, and if they're selling their products through their own service (such as Nintendo's eShop), the company doesn't really even need to spend money on advertising. In the case of services like Steam, it's extremely useful for independent developers to get their game out in the public eye at a relatively low cost to the developer (although, the share of the revenue that Steam gets from sales is kept secret). However, from the standpoint of a collector such as myself, services like this bother me, since not only does it strip you of the ability to own a potentially collectable item, I worry that eventually physical software will leave the market for good. Hopefully, enough consumers will want to get physical goods in exchange for their money to perpetuate the distribution of physical copies of games.

Next time, we'll go back to the past to continue the theme of exactly how much you're getting on your games in comparison to the games of the past, and exactly how it's affecting the industry.

[1] Nielson, May 7, 2012: America’s New Mobile Majority: a Look at Smartphone Owners in the U.S.
[2] Carter Thomas: How Much Does it Cost to Develop an App? (Accessed November 27, 2012)
[3] James Brightman, March 9, 2011: Angry Birds 'One of the Most Profitable Games in History'

What are you really paying for? - A look at the content of games Part 1

Like I went over in the previous post, Microsoft has made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of their Xbox live membership fees, and even though they charge for their service, they still place ads on the Xbox Dashboard (for those unfamiliar with this, that's the home screen when you turn your Xbox Console on). Whether it's in your games or simply on your consoles, the question arises: what are gamers paying for? Compared to other forms of entertainment media, I believe the answer is very little.

Years in the past...

Let's shoot back to the days of the NES. Games were simple, but just as much a form of art as they are today. Don't let uninformed people try to tell you that games were cheaper back then though, since games had just as high prices in the late 80s and early 90s as they have today, sometimes even higher: Street Fighter 2 sold for $74.99 USD, and Final Fantasy V was an impressive $88.00 USD!^[1] What you could rely on back then, though, was that your money went into a full game.

The era of Downloadable Content (DLC) Begins

In today's world, the concept of a "full game" has changed and taken on a slightly different meaning. As the internet became more popular, game developers quickly tried to find a way to use it to enhance the experience of playing games - Enter DLC. It's hard to really pinpoint where DLC started, but from my own experience, early DLC ranged anywhere from simple things such as maps, characters, or extra weapons, to entirely new single player scenarios. Typically, these small additions to the game were free, and even today, some companies like Valve provide free DLC for their popular titles such as Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Portal 2.

Paid DLC: A blessing or a curse?

It's sort of a given that when a concept is introduced, someone is going to try and monetize that concept, and DLC is definitely no exception to that. Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with asking consumers to pay for DLC - it's only logical that if you put work into a professional product, consumers should expect to pay for it. On the positive side, it's a great way for developers to make extra money without having to release a full game, but on the other side of the spectrum, recently the industry has been plagued by developers releasing DLC for games while the DLC is already on the disc. Notable examples of this are Street Fighter X Tekken^[2] and most recently, Resident Evil 6^[3]. This insistence on forcing consumers to pay twice for their game is something that I have likened to if you bought a toy, and then you had to pay money to open the box and play with it.

Next post, we'll go further into the realm of DLC and its implications on the industry. For my readers in the United States, have a happy Thanksgiving!


References:
[1] Jeremy Parish, March 30, 2012: The 90s Game Comparison Charticle
[2] William Usher, July 6, 2012: Street Fighter X Tekken Disc Locked Content Unlocks July 31st for $19.99
[3] Jason, October 8, 2012: Capcom Responds to on-disc DLC found in Resident Evil 6

The Industry of Today: Part 4

As we've seen from Nintendo and Sony's standpoint, the fall in stocks can be from outright failure to make sales, or from what I perceive as forgetting your target audience. But what about Microsoft, where do their stocks fit in with all of this?

First, we need to remember that Microsoft is a huge corporation, and they are extremely popular all over the world. But what about Microsoft Games Studios, the branch of their company that actually produces the games for their popular Xbox 360 console, and for PC?

Let's look at this purely from a popularity standpoint - Microsoft's Xbox 360 has outsold both the PS3 and Wii in the United States for the past 18 months, as of August 16, 2012^[1]. To still be pulling in such strong sales figures after almost 7 years on the market is a feat indeed. What is it that makes the Xbox 360 so much more buyable than its competitors?

Probably the most influential selling point of the Xbox 360 is its use as a social gaming media, allowing you to connect with your friends in almost every game on the console. Microsoft brings in a steady profit from their "Xbox Live" service, which charges, on average, $5 USD per month, and an estimate from Forbes in June 2010 put the total amount that Microsoft is making off of their Xbox Live Gold service at $625 million USD per year, and that's from subscription fees alone.^[2]

On top of the subscription income, Microsoft makes even more money by selling advertisement space on the Xbox Dashboard. Microsoft seems to have stumbled upon a diamond mine, charging consumers to give them ads, and in effect winning twice. Next post, we'll look at the implications this has on games, and in the future, why I believe treating gaming as a "social media" has negative implications on the future of the industry.

References:

[1] Don Reisinger, August 16, 2012: Microsoft versus Sony versus Nintendo. Who wins?
[2] Oliver Chiang, June 17, 2012: Microsoft's Xbox Live Is Making Boatloads Of Money On Virtual Goods

The Industry of Today: Part 3

As I've mentioned before, Nintendo is the only company in the industry today that makes nothing but video games. Heralded as the savior of video games, the Nintendo Entertainment System's (NES) release in 1985 revived the video game industry from the slump it was in due to the crash in 1983. Although historically, Nintendo has been one of the strongest game producing companies in the industry, and even with the success of the Wii, which launched in 2006, recently Nintendo has been suffering from the same sort of problem as Sony - losing money.

The factors in Nintendo's money loss are basically the same as Sony's, their hardware is costing them to sell, and sales aren't doing too great. The Nintendo 3DS, while outselling Sony's Vita, sold nowhere near as well as expected at launch, prompting Nintendo to drop its price soon after its initial launch. Fortunately for Nintendo's finances, as of July 25 of 2012, they stopped reporting losses on 3DS sales, meaning that the cost of production of the hardware has gone down enough to allow for the lowered price^[1], but that hasn't undone the losses they suffered from it.

To me, Nintendo's problems stem from their consoles having less than desirable launch games since the launch of the Wii, typically being carried by one high-name title, and supplemented (barely, might I add) by lesser titles and the promise of better titles in the future. If we look back to the release of the Wii, the big named launch title was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. At E3 2006 when Nintendo revealed the Wii, they also promised that it would have Super Smash Bros. Brawl as a launch title, which was then delayed to be a "soon after launch" title, and further delayed until it finally released in the United States in 2008. In my opinion, the promise of Brawl was something that Nintendo used to sell Wii consoles to their core audience, but the 3DS didn't have this kind of push behind it, and neither does the Wii U, which releases later this month.

The Wii U is in an especially odd position, since it is being carried more by third party games than Nintendo's own first party material. In the days of the Nintendo 64, which launched with a diverse selection of games from different publishers, this third party support was instrumental in the 64's success, but only because the consumers could not get those games on a rival console. When you look at titles like Batman: Arkham City or Assassin's Creed III on the Wii U, you realize that not only can you get these games on other consoles, but you could have purchased them months ago.

Of course, for owners of the consoles that already have these games, purchasing a Wii U based on these titles is pointless, so I'm predicting the Wii U's sales being lower than anticipated by Nintendo, to follow suit with the 3DS.

Next up, we'll look at Microsoft, whose stock chart seems to make them out to be the strongest in the market right now. Are the stocks really an indicator of this when the majority of Microsoft's income comes from their computer software?


References:

[1] Keza MacDonald, July 25, 2012: Nintendo Still Losing Money, But 3DS Sales Improving