• Requiring online for single-player

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 44 Comments

    In the wake of what has been happening with SimCity 5, a lot of folks are asking what the future holds for single-player games that require an always-on connection.

    It’s not going to stop.

    The future is that

    • Connectivity keeps getting better, which softens the blow for consumers.
    • Developers find the sweet spot between “always on” and “phone home when you can” that mobile games have already had to solve (because bandwidth and connectivity for mobile are far more erratic).
    • Metrics usage explores in the single-player market, to match what is seen in Facebook and mobile.
      • Yes, this means, with all the good and bad that brings to the table. The fact is that publishers simply won’t be able to resist it. When used right, it makes for better games. And even when used wrong, it generally adds to the bottom line.
    • Single-player games will continue to evolve towards being services.
      • Ongoing updates, because again, as seen on mobile, publishers won’t be able to resist the loyalty factor, the boost in retention, the revenue from re-acquisition… in the presence of things like charts showing popularity of games or top grossing games, there’s huge value in doing this even for games that don’t have ongoing revenue streams.
      • For games that do (be they sub, DLC, or microtransactions), it’s of course a no-brainer.
      • Really, the single-player model did this already, just without connectivity. Always on just makes it cheaper and better.
    • Ongoing erosion of the pure single-player experience, as I stated would happen ages ago.
      • Achievement system metagames.
      • Tweets.
      • Dashboards of friends, leaderboards
      • Getting interrupted with messages that pull you out of the immersion
      • Notifications
      • Asynchronous multiplayer features
      • Sharing your gameplay sessions (Twitch.tv, Everyplay, etc)

    Basically, we will continue the march towards “everything you used to buy, you now rent as a service.” With all the good and bad that entails.

    Penny Arcade, "All of the Jokes", http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/03/08

    Gamers may protest now, but if I may draw an analogy: when they came for your music collections (Pandora! Rhapsody!), you did not complain. When they came for your DVD collections (Netflix! Hulu!), you did not complain. When they came for your office documents (Google Docs! Adobe Creative Cloud!), you did not complain. Now they are coming for your games (Steam! You love Steam, don’t you?), and no one is left to complain on your behalf. 🙂

    Don’t get me wrong, though. I keenly feel the drawbacks. As an example — as someone who cares deeply about the history of our medium, I shudder to think what happens to preservation efforts for games from this time period. We’re not going to be able to emulate things without reverse engineering dead server apps — which will mean reverse engineering every rule and bug.

    Or another — we’re used to platforms obsolescing away the ability to play a given game. But when business realities mean shutting down a server as soon as the opportunity cost makes it not as profitable as doing something else, we’re going to feel like even single-player games have gotten to feel a lot like that TV show we loved that wasn’t allowed to finish out a full season and left us on a cliffhanger.

    But for any business owner, the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages. Even with the issues SimCity has had, I am sure that right now the takeaway within EA is not “don’t do this” but “do it better.” The fact of the matter is that running a service seems to be one of those things that you have to learn by doing, stumbling along the way, and it’s a big adjustment for any organization that has been used to retail-style sales.

    And the fact is that if it works seamlessly, customers will start to say “I like my Games On Demand” and sign up willingly.

    It may be that at some point we see a swing back from the cloud — if the power on our devices exceeds that available in the cloud (if this happens, it likely will be due to bandwidth, not CPU cycles). But I don’t see that changing in the near future.

    Instead, we’ll see disconnected games using their disconnected nature as a selling point, at first in contrast to the rocky services and later on as a premium offering for hardcore folks who want to keep going after the game is sunset.

    Am I crazy about this scenario, all things considered? No. It has many pitfalls, and some old lessons are getting to be more relevant than ever. But at the same time… I design online games. I’ve been part of the problem the whole time. 😉

    Best of luck to the SimCity team with resolving the issues. I’ve been there.

  • The Devil Wears Prada game

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 13 Comments

    The Devil Wears Prada game:

    Easy Mode

    • A game about climbing the ladder at a fashion magazine. Lots of special event parties and lots of character customization

    Normal mode

    • A game about attempting to edit a fashion magazine successfully — including taste-setting and photoshoots and budgets and ambitious editors

    Hard mode

    • A game that teaches you that even the most frivolous-seeming of professions and activities have surprising depths; and people who passionately dive deep into the minutiae; and more, even consider it to be important to human civilization

    Nightmare mode

    • A game that seems to be about the prices we pay to be at the pinnacle of a profession, and about what we sacrifice; but that in the end reverses it all, and becomes about the fact that we all make a commitment to something, even if it is inactivity, or a balanced life, and that in the end, we always still sacrifice everything we chose not to do.

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  • Oscar bait

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    side_oscarHollywood just got done with its annual parade of self-congratulation. And I don’t mean that in a bad way — the Oscars may have originated as a marketing gimmick, but they are more than that. They serve as a way for creatives to honor creatives. And every year, movies are made which get called “Oscar bait” — films clearly made without much expectation of huge profits.

    At a time when big game companies frequently speak in terms of “it it doesn’t make a million a day, or have a million players a day, it’s not worth making,” why do Hollywood studios keep making films that are small, play to small audiences, and aren’t anywhere near as profitable as a summer blockbuster? Wouldn’t it make sense to focus all your resources on the titles that have the highest ROI? While many small films have great profit margins, the absolute numbers are small, and thus there’s a large opportunity cost to doing the small movies.

    Don’t worry, there’s a business reason. The logic goes something like this:

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  • Why do we like a given game?

    Hours Categories Game talk, Mailbag
    Comments 21 Comments

    I was just asked this on Quora, and thought I would crosspost my answer here.

    What makes people like specific genres of gaming (FPS, strategy, sports, racing etc)?

    What can you tell about people who like only a certain genre of gaming like Fps rather than strategy?

    Everyone starts out with different natural predispositions. For example, some people are born with more fast-twitch fibers in their muscles, which gives them the ability to move more explosively than others [Skeletal striated muscle]. Other folks have greater color sensitivity, faster reaction times, better ability to see things that are moving or that are standing still.

    Some of these things are spread across a gradient where a person may fall anywhere on the gradient, but there are biases based on the sex of the individual in question. [Men and Women Really Do See Things Differently] We should be cautious about treating this as “biology is destiny” and instead think in terms of statistical distribution; recent metastudies show that overall, sex differences in cognition are weak correlations [Science Confirms The Obvious:  Men And Women Aren’t That Different] but there are nonetheless some large and obvious differences between sexes and of course between people.

    These predispositions mean that some things are easier or harder for a given individual. Not necessarily hugely so — maybe only marginally, say 1% easier than the norm. But it doesn’t matter, because of how the brain’s reward system works. Read More “Why do we like a given game?”

  • Color Theory of Fun images

    Hours Categories Art, Writing
    Comments 1 Comment

    penguin-06So, I have been working on the process to color all the cartoons in the revised Theory of Fun edition. I thought I might share some samples of the way it is looking so far.

    The original cartoons were done very quickly, which is why they were in such a rough, naif sort of style. They were also done with ink on paper, rather than digitally. I am trying to have the coloring be in keeping with that… I want something that feels fairly organic, even though I am doing all the coloring on the computer.

    So I tried out doing plain flat shading, and gradients, and that sort of thing… but ended up using a custom brush to get a bit more of a painted look with more color variation.

    In the process, I am also replacing the Comic Sans with my own handwriting font, like I used in the 10 Years Later presentation.

    There are well over a hundred of these to do, of course. I am on pace to do multiple a day right now, although the flu has gotten in the way a bit.

    In other news, though, the contract still isn’t finalized, so I am a bit ahead of myself anyway. 🙂 But that’s OK.

    See a before and after comparison:

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