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Core casualtiesJanuary 23rd, 2008 |
For whatever reason, my post on core gamers and what sort of landscape they face seems to have resonated with a lot of folks, or least caused a fair amount of controversy — but in like six different ways at once. The issue of what casual is, and whether that market is serviced and whether developers are listening to that type of player, and so on, is a large and complex one; and microtransactions, whoo! — so I am going to answer a different set of comments first. 
One of the threads has been “why should we think of core games as being in jeopardy?”
Matt Peckham at PC World used wargames as a contrarian example:
So while I half get what Koster is arguing here (just like I half got what he was saying when he argued games for introverts are ipso facto doomed) I think he places too much value on gaming’s production metrics and too little value on the tenacity of by-niche-gamer-for-niche-gamer studios or groups of developers who’ll never swallow the notion that mass attraction equals mass satisfaction.
I actually think wargames fit my arguments quite well. Wargames today do not get the AAA budgets, though they once did. The net audience is probably somewhat smaller, but not significantly so — it’s just that where they once represented a large share of the overall computer game market, now they do not. They are never going to go away — there will always be some made, and there will always be a fiercely devoted audience who plays them. Given that they are fiercely passionate, they probably could be monetized more, but they aren’t. The picture for wargamers looks fairly rosy, except that perhaps there are fewer being made than in their heyday.
But wargames are not on the hopelessly steep budget curve that core games are. If wargames cost ten times to make than they used to, we would be seeing a different wargaming market. Wargamers passed through the hump I am describing.
The issue is, in large part, that core games are defined by production values right now, and it’s part of what core gamers expect. Michelle D’israeli in the comments states
We have become locked into this view of being a genre, of meaning seven hours of gameplay priced at £40.
She goes on to say.
The big point here is that films still exist, despite the other forms of visual non-interactive recording. And even with their competition from other mediums, we still have blockbuster films each and every year, and audiences have not seemed to decrease. Production quality of television shows has markedly increased even in just the last decade, yet movies are thriving. Similarly, games will adapt, change, cost less and be more casual, but we will still have blockbusters. The easy money for blockbuster games might dry up, and the industry’s sales methods may change, but the supply of blockbuster and other film-like games certainly will not.
Film is not a good analogy for a number of reasons. For one thing, the subsidiary markets for films are vastly different. A film has an earnings lifespan measured in decades; a game, only a few years. A film invites repeated watching, and a blockbuster games do not to the same degree. The end result is that the lfietime earnings curve for a film is hugely different. This will enter into the calculus of whether it makes sense to make a given blockbuster.
Another point made in the comments, by Leo, makes me think that this basic calculus isn’t understood clearly enough.
There’s going to be more tolerance for niche markets and large budget titles like Halo aren’t going anywhere because the hardcore gamer won’t die out and these things are fun as hell to play. Just because a market is niche doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in it. Case-in-point: EVE online.
Let’s start with some basic premises: only around 1 in 10 games will hit, earn out, result in a significantly worthwhile business venture. It’s a generalization, and not really completely accurate, but worth using as a yardstick.
If you have $100m to spend, you can make $1m “light” games and $25m “core” games. Obviously, doing only core has a high likelihood of not having any “good” ones in the batch. So you do portfolio planning. 2 core games and 50 light games? That means that in a given year, you have low odds a core game will hit, but you will probably have 5 lighter games that do. Oh, when a core game hits, sure, you hit a jackpot, because the earning power of the core game is higher. You plan on one of those every five years, under this simplistic model.
This works fine. Then we double the costs: core is now $50m and light is now $2m. You can make one core game and 25 light ones. Now you have ten years between hit core games, and you have 2 1/2 hit light games… do you make core games, or do you instead chase the 5 hits from light games?
Obviously, this is a highly reductionist model. Costs exist at all points of spectrum, and so do earnings (there’s light games that have made insane amount of money). So sure, an EVE Online can, and will exist. But it may not exist from a major studio, and it won’t get enough money first pass to launch with avatars, and it won’t get the kind of marketing and other bells and whistles that an AAA game would.
Swatjester, arguing the value of the core gamers, says,
Casual gamers are a one time cash influx because they play the game a few times and then quit. They don’t conduct microtransactions. They don’t buy expansions and strategy guides. They don’t attend fan events and cons, and spend hundreds of dollars on limited edition items, or hundreds on a con just so they can get a coupon for a free in game item. Hardcore gamers do that. Hardcore gamers are the ones that will keep a game going for months and months. Hardcore gamers buy everything they can, stretching their cashflow to the limit because games are what they care about. Hardcore gamers are the ones that preorder games. Hardcore gamers are the ones that really drive the industry and no amount of fearmongering is going to change that.
You are absolutely right. The path to the mass market lies through the core. Less committed gamers buy stuff in large part based on the recommendations of their core gamer friends.
The difference, I think, is that we are starting to see the rise of another core, one that doesn’t demand the same production values and high budgets. There’s a new sort of core gamer in town: the core casual gamer. (This is why these terms are so freakin’ useless). One can be “hardcore” in anything — including light games. People who knit Katamari hats are not casual.
Moroagh questions several of my statements — is, or was, PC the most core? Are RPG lengths actually in decline? And what about the growth in other PC segments?
The PC market has traditionally been primarily to “core” gamers. The genres that did the best on that platform were aimed at hobbyists, while consoles were seen as the bastion of “kid games” and “family games.” PC gaming demands high investment in hardware, which limits it to hobbyists, usually. This has changed a lot over the years. Today, the core PC gaming segment has declined to the point where the top ten chart, as I posted a week ago, shows only one non-MMO title on it. That isn’t because the MMOs are doing spectacularly — some aren’t. It’s because the sales of PC titles at retail suck.
Yes, there’s a huge and rising market in PC gaming that isn’t based on that core hobbyist audience. That’s because a lot of that audience moved to consoles.
What’s an RPG that is 8 hours? It’s called Bioshock. It’s a linear RPG with streamlined stats — the modern face of where the genre is going. The rare ones these days are the ones like Witcher and Mass Effect — we currently get two of these a year. This is way down from the peak production of RPGs, and we have in fact seen the AAA studios who specialized in this style of game dwindle until now there’s basically only one: Bioware. There’s a reason why the sleeper RPG hit is Eschalon Book 1, an indie game written in BlitzBasic — the market simply isn’t being serviced.
The bottom line: games will always be made for hobbyists. But they won’t be made to the tune of tens of millions of dollars unless
- hobbyists pony up to cover the costs and supply a profit, or
- they aren’t just for hobbyists
If they’re not made for tens of millions, then the hobbyists need to stop defining the “good game” as the one with highly flashy graphics and huge amounts of content. Because the dev budget simply won’t buy that for them. And currently, that is what the core market is.
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