Category Archives: Business

I recently criticized Bill Mooney’s acceptance speech at GDC for Zynga’s “Best New Social/Online Game” award (for FarmVille), and excerpts from that started a journey across the internets. Subsequently, I’ve been involved in a number of conversations — often spirited debates — about the good and bad of social games, what effects they’re really having on the industry, and whether my attitude toward them is justified.

One point of clarity: while the articles that quoted me are about the intra-industry controversy around Zynga (and social games in general), my criticism in particular was not targeted that broadly. I felt that significant aspects of Bill Mooney’s acceptance speech were inappropriate in the context of the GDC Awards (specifically his taking a shot at the indie game developers and fellow award recipients in the room), but I didn’t offer an opinion directly toward Zynga or FarmVille, or social games as a whole.

With respect to the broader social games space, I’m doing that now.

I look at social games through a few lenses:

Do I want to play social games?
Do I want to work in the social games space?
Are social games exploitative, or even unethical?

Let’s explore, shall we?

Play Them?

As a player, I have yet to see a social game that appeals to me. To be honest, I’m usually turned off by the amount of automated Facebook spam I get from friends who are playing social games, to the point that I’m sick of the game before I’ve even taken a look at it. Although I have made a bit of an informal game out of blocking social games, so I guess there’s a silver lining.

I don’t view social games as particularly engaging; I’m bored by the very concept of them. MMOs, at least, feel like proper games to me, even though there are clear similarities between the two in terms of being deliberately-designed time- and money-sinks. I just don’t see the appeal of manipulating a Facebook account in a controlled way and calling that a game: I have way more interesting things to spend my time on.

The fact that I’m uninterested in playing social games doesn’t mean nobody should play them, however. That there are all new kinds of games showing up that don’t interest me speaks to the expanding diversity of our industry, and that can only be a good thing. The “core gamer” market won’t evaporate, and any perceived shrinkage in that sector owes only to the fact that it’s becoming more and more clear how much of a niche it’s always been: it just hasn’t had competition before. I’m okay with being a niche player, and letting everyone else do their thing.

Develop Them?

As a game designer, I can see some interesting opportunities in the concept of social games, but thus far I have yet to see a single product attempt to explore those opportunities. Social gaming is a business buzzword right now, in my view, and that unrestrained profit motive is stifling creative innovation. As such, I have absolutely no desire to enter this space at this time. Maybe the business end of things will quiet down in a few years — it seems inevitable that this social games bubble will eventually burst — and there’ll be more room to design for the sake of the game. But right now, it looks to me like social game designers are stuck designing business opportunities more often than they are designing games.

And that’s fine too, if that’s the sort of thing you like doing. But I’m not a businessman: I don’t get excited talking about quarterly reports, shareholders, venture capital, ROI, or IPOs. I know what I need to know about those things to be a [hopefully] successful game designer in the commercial game development industry, but business is the part of my job that I have to do, not the part that I want to do. So why would I go into a social games space where, as far as I can tell, it’s currently all about the business?

Condemn Them?

Probably the biggest point of industry contention over social games is the accusation that they are designed to exploit our inherent psychological weaknesses of compulsion and addiction, for profit. (B.F. Skinner has almost become a household name in just a few short months, it seems.)

I do get a bit uncomfortable when I look at the business models of many social games today. I feel more or less the same about the modern MMO, about the free-to-play sector, and about some of the early experiments with DLC (the worst of which seems to be largely phased out now, thankfully). I wouldn’t go so far as to call any of these games “unethical”, as long as they’re up-front with consumers about their business model. But from a pure game design standpoint, I feel like leaning on the psychology of addiction to satisfy a profit motive may be chilling creative exploration into other kinds of interactive experiences.

One can certainly argue that “other kinds of interactive experiences” simply belong somewhere other than the social games space… and that may well be true. Is it valid to want social game designers to create an experience like that of Heavy Rain? Does that even make sense? Perhaps not. Maybe experiences like Heavy Rain necessarily belong to the single-player space, or the home console space, or the long-form space, or whatever other classification you want to assign it.

Ultimately, social games exist because there is an apparent demand for them. Zynga makes eleventy billion dollars off a glorified Facebook app, because there are eleventy billion people who enjoy tinkering with that app enough to shell out some cash for it. If those people are enjoying themselves, then far be it from me to suggest that they are wrong for wanting to play FarmVille, or that Zynga is wrong for developing it. My taste doesn’t dictate the world.

My biggest fear — which is, admittedly, probably irrational — is that the apparent financial success of modern social games will broadly motivate our industry’s business interests toward that sort of design. And since our business interests (i.e. publishers and investors) provide the the means by which we game designers create entertainment (i.e. money and resources), I fear a future in which “game design” gives way to “business design”. That’s a future in which I, as a game designer, would have to either adapt or die… and yes, I’ll admit it: that thought bothers me a lot.

More rationally, demand continues to exist for other kinds of experiences, including experiences more in line with my own taste. Where there’s demand, the American free-market system incentivizes a supply, so I doubt an apocalyptic takeover of the industry by social games will actually come to pass. In reality, we’ll probably spend a few years baby-stepping in that direction before the bubble bursts and the cycle starts anew. I’ll continue to design games, and leave the business design to the business people.

Conclusion

In summary:

As a player, social games bore the hell out of me.
As a designer, I think social games have far more potential than their unrestrained profit motive allows them to explore.
The social games bubble will eventually burst. Real innovation may follow soon thereafter.
They’re not inherently unethical, but they do lean on the psychology of addiction as a financial crutch.
People are free to make and play what they want, regardless of my taste.

I do want to leave you with this sobering thought, from Psychochild’s Blog:

I think this focus on psychological tricks is one reason why people are wary about the “metrics-driven” design of new social games that focus on profitability over fun: it does seem a bit much like the psychological tricks that casinos use. But, while there are resources to warn people about the dangers of gambling and programs to help people with gambling problems, we don’t have the same thing for social games. Again, I’d rather not get to the point where we need to have these types of support networks and education, because strict government regulation comes shortly thereafter.

There are consequences to leaning on the psychology of addiction too much, whether or not it’s profit-motivated. All game designers, whether in the social games space or otherwise, should respect that.

A Connection

In going through some old posts, I stumbled upon an unexpected connection. From nearly two years ago:

I came across a fantastic article (PDF) this morning discussing various considerations of software development team compensation, like how money isn’t an eternal motivator… In fact, using money as a primary motivator can be quite damaging in the long-term:

“…once employees get used to receiving financial rewards for meeting goals, they begin to work for the rewards, not the intrinsic motivation that comes from doing a good job and helping their company be successful. Many studies have shown that extrinsic rewards like grades and pay will, over time, destroy the intrinsic reward that comes from the work itself.”

And from just a few weeks ago, at GDC 2010:

Hecker drew a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from within: a desire to do a thing for the sake of the thing itself (Csikszentmihalyi terms this an “autotelic” task). Extrinsic motivation comes from without: a desire to do a thing for the sake of an expected, associated reward — like an achievement!

Hecker’s thesis was that “the research shows that in most cases, extrinsic motivators are ineffective and actually decrease intrinsic motivation on interesting tasks.”

This is perhaps of trivial interest, but it serves to indicate that this research has been around for a while. And yet we’re all still clinging to the game design crutch of “extrinsic motivation”, not putting much thought, effort, or even attention toward that issue.

Shrink To Success

Shortly after the success of Portal, a movement for shorter games began to form. It hasn’t gained much momentum in the mainstream, but game designers are beginning to recognize the advantages of “short-form” games, and I predict that producers and publishers will join the chorus within the next few years.

When I say “short-form” games, I’m speaking comparatively. A short-form game, for purposes of this discussion, is one which is significantly shorter than a mainstream AAA title; specifically, a game of roughly 2-4 hours in length, regardless of genre. The establishment of specific duration criteria implies that the game is at least somewhat driven by narrative, if not largely so; for example, it would be difficult — if not impossible — to quantify the duration of Tetris, so such non-narrative games are omitted from this discussion.

Short-form games can be uniquely compelling in ways their longer cousins can’t. For starters, their shorter duration necessarily eliminates “filler” gameplay, resulting in a more-or-less uninterrupted state of player education. This is compelling because, at their core, games are learning machines. The process of play is a cycle of learning, then applying:

When new concepts are being learned — whether they’re mechanics, environments, characters, or plot situations — player engagement rises. When known concepts are subsequently applied, or “tested”, engagement may begin high, but quickly falls as the application of the concept becomes repetitive; this is “filler” gameplay. The education of new concepts introduces novelty into the game flow and helps maintain player interest over time, but filler — too-long periods of application without learning — breaks the game flow and ultimately bores players.

Short-form games don’t have room for filler; thus, short-form games need not break the flow of education. New concepts can be educated to the degree necessary to ensure mastery, then applied for just long enough to provide validation of the new skill (and no longer!) The learn-apply cycle is compressed, resulting in greater overall player engagement:

Short-form games also tend to be more focused, in terms of both gameplay and story. Less overall content means room for fewer mechanics and fewer plot points, so short-form designers have to make the most of what they have. Portal, for example, has very few mechanics:

Fire blue portal
Fire orange portal
Pick up (and drop) objects (e.g. Weighted Companion Cube)
Turrets
Crushing pistons
Jump pads
Bouncing energy balls (with matching conduits)

By contrast, Grand Theft Auto IV:

Driving (cars)
Driving (motorcycles)
Helicopter piloting
Melee combat
Gun combat
Cover system
Cell phone
Bowling
Darts
Pool
Drunk-driving (and drunk-walking)
“Wanted” system
Vigilante missions
Internet cafes
Clothing customization
Safehouse customization

That GTA4 has a longer list of mechanics than Portal is neither surprising nor disturbing. But try ticking off, for both lists, the mechanics which were implemented poorly, and a very different picture quickly emerges. A major strength of short-form games’ necessary focus is that while they contain fewer mechanics, those mechanics are generally of a more uniform, and higher, quality.

The same goes for game stories. The stories in Braid, Knytt Stories, and World of Goo are simple, digestible, and most importantly, thematically and ludo-narratively coherent. By contrast, the stories of games like Metal Gear Solid 4 are sprawling, often incomprehensible, and packed with useless information and a low proportion of memorable moments. Not that I support games uncritically aping film, but there’s a useful maxim in screenwriting that applies to writing scenes: “Get in late, get out early.” The idea is that by presenting only the most irreducible core of a scene you increase audience comprehension of that scene, and by extension its impact and memorability. Put another way: distracting the audience with irrelevant or redundant content not only makes that content suck; it also drags down the perception of the “good stuff”.

So far, it all boils down to focus: short-form games are necessarily more focused than long-form ones, and therefore less likely to break the flow of player education or distract the player with meaningless content, leading to an ultimately more engaging experience. But there are several financial benefits to short-form games as well, and these are arguably more likely to make allies of producers and publishers.

First, the average gamer is 35 years old. That means he or she is likely to be employed full-time and to have a family, or at least a spouse. This is not a person with a lot of free time. Films are an enduring entertainment medium because they run about two hours, which isn’t difficult at all to fit into an otherwise busy schedule. 60-hour gaming extravaganzas are a whole different story, but a quality 2-4 hour game can be completed in a sitting or two and not feel like an endless slog. A ubiquity of 2-4 hour games would place games firmly in the same “impulse buy” space as movies and music, for the simple reason that consumers would no longer see games as a significantly greater time investment than those mediums.

However, even if such a ubiquity came to pass, games are still seen as a financial investment, due to the unconscionable $59.99 standard price point. The most common argument given by publishers at the beginning of the 360/PS3 generation for the price increase was that “next-generation” games were more difficult and, critically, more expensive to develop. While it is true that game development budgets increased significantly from the PS2/Xbox generation to the 360/PS3 generation, they are still, with the exception of a very few outliers, far below the average budget of a feature film. The key difference, as I have argued previously, is the difference in audience size. $10 DVDs sell to tens of millions of consumers and make a handy profit on $100 million dollar films. If a game sold to tens of millions of consumers, it wouldn’t need to be priced at $60 to make a profit on its measly (by comparison) $20 million development budget. And if you’re wondering where we find those extra customers, all you have to do is lower your price point.

But for the sake of argument, let’s indulge these publishers’ assertion that higher prices are necessitated specifically by higher development costs. Short-form games have dramatically lower development costs than long-form ones; notable short-form indie titles like Braid and World of Goo were done in their entirety for under $200,000. Such lower development costs should make reduced game pricing a non-issue, and as Valve’s data shows, reduced game pricing is highly likely to result in dramatic increases in net revenue… and that’s before we even factor in the short-form game’s superior focus, consistency, and ludo-narrative coherence, and the subsequent word-of-mouth and goodwill boost it’s all but guaranteed to receive!

It’s no coincidence that games whose duration is nearer that of films are likely to prove more compelling in many respects than 60-hour epics. Short-form games necessarily hold sacred the all-important flow of player education, keeping engagement high by avoiding filler and redundancy. They are more tightly focused, presenting a better-integrated set of mechanics and superior ludo-narrative coherence. They are cheaper to produce, which means they can be sold at a price point that supports impulse purchases, and good data suggests that price-point will actually increase net revenue. They fit sensibly into the average gamer’s schedule, all but eliminating the negative perception that games must be a significant time investment. And perhaps most importantly, they are small enough to be memorable in their entirety, rather than recalled in disparate pieces tainted by a plurality of poor experiences.

Presented with such a win-win package, why would producers and publishers not jump on board?

(This article was originally published at Game Design Aspect of the Month.)

Outsourcing the Boring Bits?

I was just reading this interview on Gamasutra with LOVE creator Eskil Steenberg (yeah, I’m a few days behind the curve right now), and about halfway through the interview he dropped this bomb:

Outsourcing, to me, is very stupid because you don’t get to keep the talent in the building. If what you are doing is so boring that any sweatshop can do it, you should spend time developing tools that do the job for you.

My initial response was along the lines of, “Ooh, sick burn! Devs totally make boring games!”

Then I remembered that I’m a dev, and I’ve worked on projects where we’ve outsourced work, and I’ve been proud of those projects. Ok, so maybe outsourcing isn’t automatically a stupid thing to do.

But now that Eskil said that, I find myself thinking a bit more deeply about outsourcing and its now-prominent role in game development. I’m continually surprised at just how much outsourcing goes on, and increasingly, what gets outsourced. I had always thought those third-party contractors were used as the game development equivalent of in-betweeners in traditional animation, but more and more I hear about key scenes and characters, concept art, even entire chunks of the design being outsourced.

I wonder, how far down this rabbit hole can we go before it becomes unsustainable? I don’t think we’re there yet — great games are still releasing on a fairly regular basis, and the last two years have been so fruitful as to recall the boom of 1998 — but where do we cross that threshold to where we’ve handed off so much of the game that we’re not even in control of our own project any more?

As a bit of a corollary, part of Eskil’s point is that outsourcing can potentially be replaced by in-house procedural creation tools. As I’ve watched the content requirements for games absolutely soar when compared to the PS2/Xbox generation, it occurs to me that we’re trying to solve the problem of not having enough manpower to fill our content needs, by simply moving the responsibility to other people. But come time for the PS4/Xbox 720 or whatever the hell they’re going to be called, are our outsourcing partners going to run out of manpower, too? Is a future of procedural content generation actually inevitable?

I wonder if in 2020 our outsourcing budgets will be paying, not for man-hours, but for time on massive cloud-computing farms that’ll be algorithmically building our content from scratch.

Epic Crunch Is Epic

There have been a lot of games that fed into my desire to be a game designer, but at the top of the heap sits Unreal Tournament 2004. A great many of my opinions about shooter design, level design, and tools design are strongly inspired by that game and its excellent engine and toolset, with which I became intimately familiar during my work on Gem Feeder and various custom maps. I came to hold the opinion that Epic, the game’s developer, was the pinnacle of development studios doing the kinds of games I wanted to work on. Simply put, I made it my career goal to become a game designer for that company.

I applied, and was shot down — probably due to having no industry experience at that time, so it was no big surprise — but I kept that goal alive. Persistence is key, or so they say.

I got into the industry via another studio, planning to work my way up to my goal. A few years passed, and the first tech demos for Unreal Engine 3 started to surface. The new tech got me really excited, reaffirming for me Epic’s supremacy as a developer. Then Gears of War launched, and I loved it. That game showed that Unreal Tournament wasn’t just a fluke, and that the UE3 tech they’d been showing off was the real deal. I thought, “For sure this is the direction I want to go. I need to work on these games.”

Well, I’ve been in the industry for five years now, and I still don’t work for Epic. But now, I’m not so sure I want to. The biggest part of that has to do with me being incredibly happy with the team I’m with now, the project we’re working on, and my role in it all. I really couldn’t want for much better, and I’m surprised and delighted to have stumbled into such a great situation so early in my career. But there’s another side to it, and that’s some of the comments that have come out recently from Epic president Mike Capps and Gears of War 2 producer Rod Fergusson.

First there was this, via Greg Costikyan’s blog Play This Thing:

Mike Capps, head of Epic, and a former member of the board of directors of the International Game Developers Association, during the IGDA Leadership Forum in late 08, spoke at a panel entitled Studio Heads on the Hot Seat, in which, among other things, he claimed that working 60+ hours was expected at Epic, that they purposefully hired people they anticipated would work those kinds of hours, that this had nothing to do with exploitation of talent by management but was instead a part of “corporate culture,” and implied that the idea that people would work a mere 40 hours was kind of absurd.

Capps was backed up by Gears producer Rod Fergusson at last month’s GDC (via GamesIndustry.biz):

“I am a believer that if you’re going to make a great game, and there is that caveat, I believe that crunch is necessary. I believe it’s important because it means your ambition is greater than what you scheduled out. Going in with that idea that crunch is necessary means you can plan for it. It shouldn’t be a surprise. Crunch should be driven by the ambition of the team, and not the inaccuracy of the schedule.”

I do not believe in crunch. It is not a necessary evil, and it’s certainly not required to make a great game. Crunch is the result of a failure of schedule, or a failure of discipline. Period.

The dominance of the 40-hour work-week is not an accident. It’s backed up by reams of empirical evidence dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, evidence that has continued to support the 40-hour work-week despite the massive changes in our society over the course of 100 years. It is well-known and well-proven that productivity drops off dramatically beyond 40 hours, especially when overtime hours are worked for many weeks in succession. The IGDA’s Quality of Life initiative compiles much of this data in their white paper, articles, and presentations.

Productivity aside, 60-hour work-weeks wreak havoc on family and personal lives. Good luck having any hobbies outside of work (unrelated hobbies being a key advantage for game designers, incidentally). Good luck starting, or keeping, any kind of meaningful relationship. Good luck raising your fucking children.

Consistent overtime turns humans into drones, which is the kiss of a death for any creative endeavor. You would think one of the world’s foremost game developers would understand that, would feel some sense of professional and social responsibility to use their considerable influence to encourage sane working hours and healthy work-life balance in an industry that so desperately needs these things.

Epic need only advocate for good quality-of-life, or at the very least not advocate for crunch. But instead, two of Epic’s top people are trying to sell us all on the idea that crunch is good. That’s a tough pill to swallow, especially when Mike Capps made his comments at the Leadership Forum while seated on the IGDA Board of Directors.

I’ve held a lot — a lot — of respect for Epic over the last ten years. I’ve consistently held up their tools as the right way to make games, and pushed the teams I’ve worked with — both amateur and professional — to learn from what we see there. But Epic should hold their work-life balance to the same standards as their technology. It would be good for their employees, good for their image, and good for the industry at-large.

Our responsibility to society increases with success. This applies to individuals and corporations, in the games industry and beyond it. With great success comes great power, and with great power, as they say, comes great responsibility. And I strongly believe that a responsible game studio is one that rejects crunch, embraces work-life balance, and still produces great games.

The Myth About Game Pricing

We have yet more evidence that video games are too expensive for their own good, in the form of Gabe Newell’s 2009 DICE Summit keynote address. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has the story, and some truly damning statistics:

The recent Left 4 Dead sale lead to a 3000% increase over the previous numbers. That is, more than in the weekend it was released. Plus, another 1600% in new customers to Steam.

The holiday sales lead to interesting numbers. A 10% reduction lead to 35% increase in amount of money which came in (i.e. Not just sales). 25% lead to a 245% increase. 50% lead to 320% increase. And 75% lead to 1470%.

(The Left 4 Dead sale dropped the normally-$49.99 game to $29.99 for a week, if my memory serves me correctly.)

Off-the-cuff intuition would seem to suggest that a price drop would result in more units moved, but not necessarily more overall revenue, due to the reduced income-per-unit. However, Valve saw significant revenue increases right out of the gate at 10%, and the jumps kept getting larger the lower they cut prices!

Obviously there’s a point of diminishing returns, hovering somewhere around market saturation. Specifically, there’s a finite number of people who are even potential customers, based solely on their personal interests. That is, even if your game was free, that doesn’t mean every person on the planet is going to want it. So once you’re moving enough units to approach market saturation, further prices drops are going to stop increasing sales volume and start reducing revenue.

But until then, the evidence seems clear: the more affordable the game is, the more likely it is people will buy it. So much so, that the increase in sales volume more than makes up for the decrease in income-per-unit.

I’ve said this before, and I remain an advocate of lowering the price of games. The argument that game pricing has gone up to keep up with the increased cost of development is, in my opinion, arguing for the wrong solution. As Valve’s numbers clearly demonstrate, lowering the price increases the revenue dramatically, making it far easier to offset development costs than the standard price jump from $49.99 to $59.99 back at the start of this console generation.

Game pricing also has implications for piracy, as Cliff Harris noted (and I commented on) last year:

A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating… People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper.

Are there really any arguments left for maintaining the $59.99 price point?

In-Game Advertising Is Perfectly Well Understood

While this is not exclusively a games blog, my primary focus is on video games and game development. My last several posts have been of a markedly non-game nature, so let’s return to our roots, shall we?

Today, GamesIndustry.biz reports on Ed Bartlett, co-founder of in-game advertising agency IGA Worldwide, asserting that advertising is misunderstood by game developers and publishers. He defends the use of in-game ads, suggesting that they actually increase creativity:

“There is so much emphasis on creativity for most brands today that I would argue that in-game advertising will actually promote creativity in games, not reduce it.”

How does this work? Bartlett provides the example of early television advertising, where a particular broadcast would have a single sponsor which might pull its advertising dollars if it didn’t agree with the content of that broadcast. This total reliance on a single sponsor clearly chills creativity. Games, by contrast, do not rely on a single sponsor; in fact, most of their development costs are paid by publisher investment, and many games are fully-funded without advertising sponsorships of any kind.

This explanation has me raising an inquisitive eyebrow. Bartlett seems to argue that in-game advertising increases creativity, but as far as I can tell it only doesn’t chill creativity.

These are not the same concept.

Bartlett is propping up a straw man here: disdain for in-game advertising has never been about chilling creativity, because the industry at large has never had to deal with a single-sponsor model. The opposition to in-game advertising is entirely directed at its effect on the user experience.

Simply put, we play games to escape from real life. Yes, even “realistic” games are played for this purpose. When I’m busy enjoying my escapist fantasy, the last thing I want is McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Ford crashing my party. I did not pay $60 to learn how Axe Body Spray helps me pick up chicks (LOL) or how much money I can save on car insurance by switching to Geico.

If you’ll please excuse me, I just want to blow the shit out of some aliens. You can advertise to me when I return to the real world.

Talking to Pirates

Cliff Harris of Positech Games recently posed an open question to pirates: “Why do people pirate my games?” He got a ton of responses and summed them up on his blog.

The results are somewhat surprising, but not wholly unexpected. I’m drawn in particular to the argument that games are too expensive:

A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating… People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper.

I’ve gone over this before, and I’m not the only one. At $50-$60, games are currently an investment, and too often you’re not provided enough information to make an educated purchasing decision. (Ironically, the market with the best-developed demo program, Xbox Live Arcade, also hosts many of the industry’s lowest-priced titles.)

Read Cliff’s full writeup here.

Third Helix

The professional website of Josh Sutphin, indie game designer and writer.