Labeling consumers in the games market *spawn*

[Shifty Geezer]

I know many people who do not have the time to play traditional pay once games fully to their end. And those people are extremely grateful that there are games they can play where they can just spend more money to shorten the game experience such that they can experience all of most of a game fully.

That option seems very wonky to me. Why pay to have a different experience? Why not provide shortcuts gratis? Provide 'quick game' in the menu? I know the whole principle of capitalism and that nothing has intrinsic worth and all worth is assigned by the consumer, so charge whatever people are willing to pay, but I've always been unable to accept the core inequalities of that. Person A and person B, enjoy this game. Oh, person B hasn't as much free time. No worries, just pay more.

Before microtransactions, games were designed to accommodate different levels of player. Microtransaction shortcuts may have been introduced to 'help' people, but they've become a new pricing model where you never know what you'll spend and games are designed to frustrate people into spending, although the masses seem to have acclimatised. Case in point, Godus. Populous was an amazing game, fabulously balanced. Godus was impossibly imposing in its 'time requirements' which had nothing to do with offering busy people shortcuts to a busy game and everything to do with milking the mobile audience. So the audience has basically 'ruined' gaming. Mobile could have been a platform of awesome portable gaming and would have if the users were all gamers, but the presence of 'casuals' meant it's become something else, with gamers justifiably miffed at the results.

 

[milk]

Cosidering Gaming was born at the arcades, Micro-transactions was THE original business model for games, along with frustration-based design.
Old is new again it seems.

 

[bunge]

Old is new again it seems.

 

[Exophase]

The way I see it, the real distinction between "core" and "casual" gamers isn't so much about how much time they spend gaming, how dedicated they are or even what genres they play (although this correlates heavily), but how they spend money on games.

Someone who plays Candy Crush for a thousand hours has anything but a casual relationship with the game. But if that's the only game they're playing then most games will have next to zero opportunity to get their purchase. They may also not actually be spending much money on Candy Crush. Or they could be spending thousands of dollars. But for the majority of game developers this audience is completely irrelevant. And it's not really reasonable to expect these developers to cater to this audience.

 

[tuna]

And that's the whole point fun is all in the eye of the beholder.

For them, it's either that or just don't play games period. They value other things far more than games (family, outdoor activities, home renovation, car renovation, tinkering, model building, sewing, crocheting, fishing, hunting, sports, tabletop gaming, the list goes on and on), but do enjoy gaming when they get a chance, even if it's abbreviated compared to what "core" gamers think is fun.

I also have other interests than gaming and arguing on the internet, but I fail to see how that would make me paying money not to play a game, or shorten the game experience. If the game is not fun I would do something else instead.

 

[tuna]

IMO, it's both elitist and snobbish to think that the games X demographic prefers are the only games worth playing. And that the pay model that X demographic prefers is better than another other pay model. And it's downright offensive when X demographic looks down on another demographic just because they get their enjoyment from something they themselves don't find enjoyable. And that extends to the games that another demographic decides provides them the best enjoyment possible within the budget (time or money) they can afford.

People do that all the time with all art forms. When and where I was young* saying you liked certain types of music would likely result in you getting physically beaten up. Hopefully people grow out of that mind set.

*That hurt to write....

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I also have other interests than gaming and arguing on the internet, but I fail to see how that would make me paying money not to play a game, or shorten the game experience. If the game is not fun I would do something else instead.

Of course, and that would be expected. No-one is going to pay for something that isn't fun or rewarding. No-one is going to spend their free time on something that they don't find fun or rewarding. That's not in question.

What I take offense to is when people look down on how other people choose to spend their time or money on games.

I get that at a personal level, everyone places a value on games to determine what they find enjoyable. That's no big deal. When that extends to deriding other people for enjoying something they themselves don't enjoy, that's offensive, IMO. Not the act of disagreeing which is fine, but active derision, which, IMO isn't fine.

Regards,
SB

 

[Silent_Buddha]

That option seems very wonky to me. Why pay to have a different experience? Why not provide shortcuts gratis? Provide 'quick game' in the menu? I know the whole principle of capitalism and that nothing has intrinsic worth and all worth is assigned by the consumer, so charge whatever people are willing to pay, but I've always been unable to accept the core inequalities of that. Person A and person B, enjoy this game. Oh, person B hasn't as much free time. No worries, just pay more.

Before microtransactions, games were designed to accommodate different levels of player. Microtransaction shortcuts may have been introduced to 'help' people, but they've become a new pricing model where you never know what you'll spend and games are designed to frustrate people into spending, although the masses seem to have acclimatised. Case in point, Godus. Populous was an amazing game, fabulously balanced. Godus was impossibly imposing in its 'time requirements' which had nothing to do with offering busy people shortcuts to a busy game and everything to do with milking the mobile audience. So the audience has basically 'ruined' gaming. Mobile could have been a platform of awesome portable gaming and would have if the users were all gamers, but the presence of 'casuals' meant it's become something else, with gamers justifiably miffed at the results.

I can see your point here, but I addressed it somewhat beforehand.

The past model (minus the very good arcade analogy that milk brought up), was you buy once for X game. And yes some games actually provided in game methods to greatly shorten the game. Doom, for instance with its myriad in game cheat codes. Granted you had to do research to find those cheat codes or even to know if a game had cheat codes. So it was technically available to everyone but not everyone knew about them.

That model still exists, although I don't see cheat codes in games all that often anymore.

However, a new model has arisen. The F2P model. The closest analogy in gaming is the shareware model for PC gaming in the old days.

For example, you could in many ways think of Doom as a predecessor to some F2P game models. It offered a free but abbreviated gaming experience. The entire first 3rd of the game was free and included a satisfying boss battle at the end. If you wanted more, you would have to pay money to unlock the rest of the gaming experience. That's a bit beyond the scope of what many today would consider a game "demo" but a bit short of what many today would consider a F2P game. But it does in many ways form the basis of todays F2P model.

Basically, the pay once for X game limits the amount of people that could be playing games. F2P or C2P (cheap to play mobile) makes the barrier of entry for gaming extremely low and leaves it up to the user to determine their level of investment in the game, whether it be time or money. Of course, since developer's can't make a living (food, rent, all those niggling things) by offering a purely free game, there must be some incentive for people to willing trade time invested for money invested.

The good games strike a good balance and are successful. The ones that don't strike a good balance are either quickly abandoned by users (too greedy) or go out of business (not enough incentive to get enough people to trade time for money).

In other words. By making these sorts of games available, suddenly you have millions upon millions more people that can enjoy gaming in its electronic form than you could with the prior model of buy once for X package.

Of course, there's the inevitable bleed of some gamers from the prior established gaming that found the new variable rate (money or time) gaming more enjoyable. Either because it was cheaper or because they could get as much enjoyment out of it in less time, but at a greater cost.

MMOs are a great example of this. There's a lot of people that like playing MMOs. There's a lot of people that loved MMOs but had to stop playing MMOs when they graduated HS or graduated college because they no longer had the time to fully enjoy MMOs. They didn't stop playing because they stopped liking MMOs. Given a chance they'd keep playing if they felt they were progressing. In come the F2P model and they can suddenly enjoy MMOs again by spending more money instead of spending more time.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Basically, the pay once for X game limits the amount of people that could be playing games. F2P or C2P (cheap to play mobile) makes the barrier of entry for gaming extremely low and leaves it up to the user to determine their level of investment in the game, whether it be time or money.

The good games strike a good balance and are successful.

In other words. By making these sorts of games available, suddenly you have millions upon millions more people that can enjoy gaming in its electronic form than you could with the prior model of buy once for X package.

I disagree. The new wave of casual mobile gamers don't exist because of what happened with microtransactions. If the microtransaction model hadn't have existed, these people would have gone with a try-and-buy model. Download a game, like it, pay the 'unlock' price, job done. Games would have been balanced for time and playability as there'd have been no incentive for devs to balance for ongoing income. Godus would have been a God game in the same vein as Populous. And/or sell DLC, so games are sold piecemeal with people buying more content based on what they want to do. That's a better solution than to old monolithic price.

What has actually happened is microtransaction and ecommerce has enabled 'throw-away' amounts of money to be spent, and developers have found that people are just as willing to spend $5 on in game consumables as they are real consumables like a cup of coffee or toothpaste. So they treat in-game virtual items as real as Joe Mobile pays for it in a way that makes zero sense to us who understand it's just a bit in memory and there's nothing 'consumable' about it! This in turn has resulted in a change in game design and a different style of game altogether.

Derision is always wrong - it's unconstructive. However, one can't help but feel all these mobile gamers are the victims of a massive con job. There are psychologists employed to make these games addictive and make people want to spend money and feel obligated to play (eg. resource sharing with friends). They'd all be better off without in game consumables. Games would be cheaper for these people, play far better, and be fairer on the devs.

I guess a definition of Casual here is 'fine with the in game consumable model'

 

[milk]

What do you mean Derizon is wrong? The best lessons I learned in life were by being called names and humiliation. That's the engine of self-critique and evolution!

-just to add fuel to the fire

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I guess a definition of Casual here is 'fine with the in game consumable model'

I still maintain that a game isn't defined by how much money one spends on it or how much time one spends on it. It's more about the scope of a game, how easy it is to pick up (learn), how easy it is to put down (conducive to short or long play sessions), how complex are the controls (complex is a huge turn off for more casual gamers), etc.

I guess another way to think of it is, how much are you willing to learn and/or "put up with" in order to play and potentially enjoy a game.

Thinking of it that way you can sort of picture a spectrum in ascending order of "coreness" (love made up words ) like:

Mobile games (match 3, for example) -> PC analogs of those mobile games -> handheld games -> console games -> PC games.

You can see that not only does that increase in general game complexity but also in how much effort one has to put in just to play their games. PC analogs would be things like browser based games or downloadable Flash versions of those games in many cases. IE - requires no setup, can be run on anything that has a browser, and are generally rather simplistic albeit potentially quite addictive to some people. While at the end of the spectrum is the PC analog of console games, albeit potentially far more complex.

Regards,
SB