Digital Downloads: Worth It?
Posted on Thursday, January 24 2013 @ 12:28:47 Eastern


The internet’s amazing. Ever since speeds moved into the Mbps range, our interconnectedness has given birth to the digital marketplace. Not everyone has access to the sorts of speeds, bandwidth caps, and storage space for switching to digital, but the amount of people who do is increasing all the time and businesses are eager to make their games available through digital: It’s more convenient for the consumer, more profitable for the developer, and less wasteful for the environment. What’s not to like?!
 
Actually, there’s quite a bit not to like. The most obvious thing is the lack of a physical product which is important to a lot of people. Those who don’t care if they have a game manual can still run into problems stemming from the same root. Personally I love opening a case and seeing a decent game manual. It’s not the playing of the game I want to learn; it’s the background, the characters, and the story. The GTA manuals do a fantastic job of using the style of the game to inform the player, but in the age of digital content the closest we’ll get to that is a .pdf file on the computer next to the TV. Perhaps it’s the new ‘old fashioned’ to harken back for the days where our game manuals were the only analogue factor in an otherwise digital medium but, damn it, I want my paper manuals!
 
I can live without physical mementos of the games I buy, however grudgingly, but there are still elements of the online movement we need to overcome before it can become the dominant way of buying games. A while ago sliverstorm discussed the pre-owned market and highlighted pretty effectively why publishers aren’t, to put it lightly, the biggest fans of consumers trading and buying secondhand items. It’s no surprise that having profits taken away within weeks of launch is going to grind with developers and publishers, but since sliverstorm has already covered their point of view, let’s take a look from the consumer’s perspective.

Games are expensive. Americans can expect to pay around $59.99 and I, as a Brit, usually see games around the £40-45 mark. If the customer doesn’t mind waiting for a while, then they can get almost the same game (thanks to the introduction of the online pass since publishers have cottoned on to the profit-draining potential of the secondhand market) for a hell of a lot less: In the case of many games, a secondhand copy of the title and an online pass is still cheaper than a new game.

When we look at both sides of the pre-owned game market we see that it actually provides two advantages to the gamer and can even help publishers. Because games are pricey, it’s difficult to buy them all at full price so what is an eclectic gamer to do? They’re to buy and play a game to death and then trade it in towards another brand new title, of course! They get a new game at a discounted price, their old game is no longer gathering dust on their shelves and the store gets another pre-owned item to flog at a cheaper rate (but higher profit) later on. On top of all that, most video game retailers survive thanks to secondhand profits and every day they continue to trade is another day new games are sold to the public as well.


 
Which brings us rather tidily back to online markets since pre-owned doesn’t exist in the digital realm, at least not on the scale it does in retail. So we see another reason why online is so appealing to the publisher: They pay fewer distribution costs, don’t need to worry about profits being sapped by second-handers, and don’t need to share profits with retailers; if they self-distribute as with Origin, they don’t even need to share with digital powerhouses like Steam and Microsoft.

While online is a huge plus for the publisher, the lack of a secondhand market is a massive downer for the consumer. We’re still paying high prices, but we’re getting less and we can’t trade it in later so we can pay a little less for the next release. We can’t even take it back for a refund if it was an unwanted gift or whatever other reason. It’s clear that the digital market hopes you will pay for short-sighted convenience and not worry about what happens to the 0s and 1s later on.

Publishers may not like secondhand games, but they’re a fact of the market. They, and console manufacturers, may want to make second hand games impossible to play on future consoles but with the advent of the Ouya, nVidia Shield, and Valve’s Steam Box as well as the constantly strengthening PC market, consumers have more options than ever to get their ‘proper’ gaming fix and have even more choices with internet browsers, smartphones, and tablets for casual games. Now that the next generation of consoles are right around the corner our buying power is at the highest it has been since 2004-5 when the X360 was announced and released.

Rumours recently flew that Microsoft was researching the viability of a download-only next-gen console. As soon as the news broke, X360 fans took to the Microsoft forums in droves and Microsoft quickly backed down. News is now indicating that Sony is filing patents to stop secondhand game use, though competing with these rumours are the ones that say they’re planning nothing of the sort. It’s hard to say which rumour is right since Sony has already dipped their toes into these waters with the Vita which restricts memory cards to one user ID and appears to have gotten away with it. Hopefully they saw the backlash on Microsoft and get why it happened. Either way, these incidents give a worrying insight of how these gaming titans want their business to go—all they have to do is remove the physical product.
 
Let’s backtrack a bit, though. I kind of assumed that games are priced high online, didn’t I? Unfortunately, not really. Prices are always changing but at the time of writing the X360 marketplace is listing FIFA 13 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown at a wallet shrivelling £49.99 while the British Amazon website is selling the boxed products at a much more reasonable £28.99 and £24.99 respectively. But wait! That’s Amazon, home to online bargains. It’s unfair to compare an instant download service with an online mail-order one. In a way it is, fair reader, and that is why I’ve looked into store prices too. Aside from a couple of identically priced games (FIFA 13 at £49.99 and Skyrim at £29.99), even the store price is cheaper than the direct marketplace price.

Two caveats are required before I go on:
The store I used for my prices was going through a sale so games were cheaper than normal. Out of the top 20 list I used, there were only six games available for download on Xbox Live.

And now to continue: The store had a sale, but if a brick and mortar store with all its overheads can afford to sell Resident Evil 6 for £28, why can’t an online store do it for £25 when it only has to worry about the bandwidth charge? Instead digital users find themselves paying £49.99 for a cloud of 1s and 0s—I’m struggling to find the appeal.

The next point, that only six out of twenty games sample were available digitally, says a lot. Typically the games ready for download are the older games. FIFA 13 and Borderlands 2 are the most recent releases but much newer games like CoD Black Ops 2 and Far Cry 3 are nowhere to be seen.

Amazon is the clear leader in terms of prices, but there’s a lot more hassle and time involved with trading, returning, and even receiving goods, so really the price could be better in a store which lets you trade your old games straight away. The average price for the downloadable games sampled is £37.49; at Amazon it’s £25.12; at the store it’s £31.45.
 
The cynic in me says the higher price for downloads is due to the complete lack of competition; if an Xbox gamer wants to download a copy of FIFA 13, then he’s got one choice: £49.99 or bust. If the same gamer wants to buy a physical copy of FIFA 13, then he can choose from several mainstream retail stores, so many more websites including peer-fueled sites like eBay, plus independent retailers which do still exist in some places. And that’s another aspect of downloading that terrifies me: Will next-gen systems be the closed ecosystems they are now or will they open up to introduce the competition which drives innovation while keeping down costs as we see on PC? Tight control may be good for profits, but it’s only ever a bad thing for the consumer and now is the perfect time to make manufactures know what won’t be tolerated. After all, they need us to buy their machines before they can make us buy their games.
 
So is digital worth it? Despite everything I said above, I’d still say that it is. But not for games you’d expect to see in boxes. I’ve had some fantastic experiences thanks to  games that are only available via download: I’ve made sprawling landscapes in Minecraft; puzzled through Braid; fought the shadows in Limbo; nearly broke my controller thanks to Trials HD; and crafted my own story in The Walking Dead. These games are what make digital content what it should be and, for the bargain-basement prices each developer asked for, I’m happy to pay and not be able to trade later. You know my concerns now and none apply in quite the same way to titles like these, I only hope the content creators can see that.

The opinions expressed here does not necessarily reflect the views of Game Revolution, but we believe it's worthy of being featured on our site. This article has been lightly edited for grammar and image inclusion. It has been submitted for our monthly Vox Pop competition. You can find more Vox Pop articles here. ~Ed. Nick

[ 14 Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

Why 'Game Companions' Would Be Totally Bitchin' And Way Better Than Strategy Guides
Posted on Wednesday, December 12 2012 @ 12:57:18 Eastern



A lot of games have strategy guides, usually priced around £10-£20 apiece. These guides are usually A4-sized with a couple of hundred pages detailing advice and step-by-step walkthroughs for the single-player and multiplayer game types. But the chances are you’re gamers so you already know this. Chances are equally high that you know the same information can be found on the internet, often in video form, before the game even launches for the sky-high price of not a penny.
 
I’ve always been interested in the expanded universes of games: Halo, Mass Effect, Hitman, Assassin’s Creed, and Metal Gear Solid are all set in diverse universes which only depict a small portion as a backdrop to the games. This is often evidenced in crossover media like comic books and novels which expand on the worlds created by the developers. When Halo: Reach was released, a nugget of an idea which had always been residing in a dark, but clean, corner of my mind came to the forefront and grew into a slightly larger nugget I’m going to tell literally tens of people about on the internet. 

If one of those tens is a game guide producer who sees a market opening… awesome.
 
Why did Halo: Reach become the waypoint in this journey? The Limited Edition came with this. That’s the journal of the woman who started the whole Spartan project in the Halo series: Dr. Halsey. It outlines completely fictional but interesting points about the procedures performed on the young children, the technology behind the Mjolnir armour, theories on AI construction, personal thoughts from Halsey and a bunch more. If that’s not enough it also gives you separate slips of paper like a map of Reach, sitreps, reviews of the enemy, letters to Halsey, even a login card. To give it all an edge of realism (within the Halo universe) a few pages have coffee rings, or some random musings from Halsey like being pissed that she had to switch to decaf, or the odd ripped page and the whole thing is packaged as if it was an asset recovered from the planet Reach just before it fell to the Covenant.


 
We’ve seen the Limited Edition of Gears of War 3 try to do basically the same thing but it didn’t really have the same depth of content even though the flag and cog tag were pretty cool.

Despite Mass Effect having one of the richest universes in gamerdom none of the special editions have really taken advantage of it in quite the same way as Dr. Halsey’s journal and I’d say that was a crying shame if it weren’t for all the novels, graphic novels, and spin-off games. As it is, it’s just a shame.
 
Why isn’t this sort of thing made available more often? There are lots of special editions out there like the Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Codex Edition and the totally *****ing God of War 3 Special Edition but more often than not these editions are horrifyingly expensive and aren’t really what I’m talking about. I want a report on the game’s hidden story. I want material reflecting the stories of characters the protagonist mentions in passing. I want information about the technology we use to accomplish missions in game. Separate documents relevant to the universe, military doctrine, conversations between important characters, all of this would take work but would find homes in the fans of the franchise. It may not be right for every game; I can’t imagine Need for Speed gaining anything from such a venture, but it makes sense for others and could be of real benefit for the fans.
 
Just imagine a ZombiU Game Companion with John Dee’s astronomical workings concisely reported with a few smatterings of research from the Ravens of Dee society. Or how about an Assassin’s Creed Game Companion with the manic writings of Subject 15, Desmond’s ponderings between journeys in the Animus, historical documents used by Shaun in his research and exploded diagrams of the parts of the Animus itself? What about Hitman with breakdowns of his many weapons and some information on his shrouded origins?
 
Few games boast the expanded universe necessary for this concept but how awesome would this be for those that do?
 
Very.

The opinions expressed here does not necessarily reflect the views of Game Revolution, but we believe it's worthy of being featured on our site. This article has been lightly edited for grammar and image inclusion. It has been submitted for our monthly Vox Pop competition. You can find more Vox Pop articles here. ~Ed. Nick

[ 9 Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

Kickstarter: Revolutionising Game Design?
Posted on Thursday, October 11 2012 @ 12:06:21 Eastern


Kickstarter was launched back in 2009 but has recently hit the spotlight with projects like Ouya—the Android-powered home console—reaching way beyond their requested amount. The idea behind the website is to offer people a way of asking for money for their projects. These projects can be games, music, film, even public art, but as this is a gaming website the obvious thing to focus on is how this innovation-driving website is changing game development.
 
Once upon a time games were made in bedrooms; Worms was famously made by Andy Davidson for a competition and was eventually picked up by Team17 to be published. Worms was programmed in BASIC and it didn’t take long for the games industry to progress past the point where games could be created in such simple languages. Publishers soon became an essential part of the development cycle thanks to the closed nature of home consoles, and the money required to develop and distribute the game. Big players like EA, Ubisoft, and Activision have built empires by bringing business acumen to the games made by the developers under them, and small developers could find it difficult to crack the console market because of these hurdles.
 
Burgeoning game markets like the mobile platforms, Steam, and even XBLA and PSN have put the power of the internet to good use and helped to put control back into the hands of the developers. Studios like Rovio Entertainment (Angry Birds) and Mojang (Minecraft) have grown into major players without the assistance of profit-sapping publishers and the major publishers are now playing catch-up by releasing mobile games of their own to attempt to tap into the potentially huge profits available.
 
Of course pretty much any game needs some capital to put behind it regardless of how it’s being distributed. The exception for a week was the Steam Greenlight service which Valve set up in an attempt to reduce their workload in approving game submissions for their enormously popular Steam service. What could have been a great idea—user submissions are checked out by other users at zero cost to anyone—has been soiled by the pranksters and trolls who take it upon themselves to be the reasons we can’t have nice things. Valve has now updated their Greenlight policy to require a $100 donation to the Child’s Play charity to try and curb the fake Half-Life 3 submissions. Even so, with innovations like this and game development courses popping up faster than Whack-a-Mole it’s easier than ever to learn how to make games and to get them distributed somewhere.
 
Alex Hutchinson, creative director for Assassin’s Creed III, reckons that he and his team are the “last of the dinosaurs [to create a AAA game]”. Even though gamers still want amazing, sprawling games evidenced by Skyrim sales reaching 3.5 million units sold in the first two days and the hype of GTA V reaching astounding levels with very little effort on Rockstar’s part, there are very few studios who can afford to throw $100 million at a project and be confident of that investment being returned on a worthwhile scale. The new markets mentioned above have shown that games can cost $20,000 from the first line of code to landing on the device of the consumer. That is much more manageable but it’s still too steep a price tag for a lot of people and that’s where sites like Kickstarter have come into their own.

 
The major success story of crowd funding is the aforementioned Ouya. The creators of this ambitious project asked for an already immodest $950,000 and received a staggering $8,596,475—that’s 904% of their requested amount. We’ve also seen the Oculus Rift reach 974% of their target by making $2,437,429, and the not-really-game-related-but-still-awesome Pebble E-Paper Watch become the most successful Kickstarter project to date by raising a kind of ridiculous $10,266,845 (that’s 10,266% of the target). There’s a whole raft of games which have been successfully funded and look to bring something fresh and exciting to gaming. Just look at Shadowrun: Online for multi-platform gaming and SteamCraft for a steampunk-inspired tabletop RPG. All of these projects have exceeded their targets even though they haven’t been released yet, but that’s okay because thanks to Kickstarter we’ve been privy to an early stage of development and we need to wait while everything else is worked out behind the scenes and we can reap the rewards for all our investments.
 
Do we reap all the rewards, though? Crowd funding sites fall into one of two categories: There are the Keep it All (KiA) sites which allow the project authors to keep any proceeds made regardless of whether their target is met and there are the All or Nothing (AoN) sites which don’t charge investors a penny until the target is met. If a project gets all but, say, $1000 of their $100,000 target then tough luck, the authors see none of it. We don’t hear about these failed projects much because Kickstarter takes a few measures to hide them; they use meta tags to prevent indexing by search engines, the front page doesn’t show failed projects, nor does the Discover facility.

As Dan Misener (linked a couple of sentences ago) says, this probably isn’t underhanded, they even blog about it and Yancey Strickler (Kickstarter co-founder) later clarified that it also prevents the unsuccessful funding attempt from returning page 1 results when that project is searched for, which would obviously suck for the project creators who may be seeking other investments. It clearly also makes business sense for Kickstarter to not flaunt failures when their 5% commission rests on the successes, but it’s worth taking note that Kickstarter projects are just as likely to become the next Ninja Baseball as they are to become the next Ouya (incidentally, the fact that Ninja Baseball, a failed project, is searchable on Kickstarter at all shows that they’re not being totally disingenuous in hiding failed projects).
 
A lot of people responded to Misener’s article by saying that there’s not much to learn from the failed projects. Misener disagreed saying that there may be interesting information to be gleaned from the aggregate of failures. Jeanne Pi followed Misener’s article with one of her own and then issued her own sequel because her first was, in her own words, wrong (the original is here if you want to read it). She basically states that projects with reasonable targets are more likely to succeed but only by a little and if the project fails to meet its target, then chances are it will fail hard. The overachieving projects are in the minority but are certainly the most heavily publicised.


 
Kickstarter themselves state that 43.89% of all projects reach their funding target with only 33.77% of gaming projects managing theirs, so you may be wondering how useful Kickstarter is for the gaming landscape. The truth is that despite only a third of gaming projects successfully reaching their target, Kickstarter and other crowd funding sites can be essential for small developers. Projects like graFighters might not reach their Kickstarter target but they can still succeed thanks to attention stirred by their presence on the popular website. GraFighters managed to make more than their $20,000 target via a more traditional route; a private investment firm. Who saw them on Kickstarter.

A failed project on Kickstarter doesn’t have to be a truly failed project. It’s important to note that being successfully funded isn’t the same as being successful either, and this is a point Jeanne noted in her second infographic by stating that only 25% of successful projects are delivered on time and after a delay of 8 months the final 25% will still not have been released. Kickstarter has the potential to change the market for better and worse.
 
Is Kickstarter and its ilk the future of project funding? Despite franchises of old like Broken Sword and ambitious projects like Ouya finding new financing homes on the service, perhaps not, at least not exclusively. Crowd funding has its place and it’s one that should be used to full effect because it’s a brilliant concept which can give us innovative, original, and interesting forms of entertainment, but there’s still room for more traditional types of development. That’s not to say that the old publishing model doesn’t need to evolve—it does. The publishing giants have gotten so big they can barely see us, and our wants and needs so if they want to stay big they’ll need to take some drastic action because Kickstarter is primed to pick up their slack if they continue to neglect consumer wishes with their DRM, DLC, and shoehorning multiplayer into every damn thing.

[ 4 Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

Special Editions
Posted on Tuesday, September 11 2012 @ 15:10:15 Eastern


There are some *****in’ special editions floating around. Sure, there are some whose only claim to fame is a tin case or an extra code or two, but there are some developers who love their creations enough to extend them into the ph...   read more...

[ Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

Is Gaming At A Milestone?
Posted on Tuesday, August 21 2012 @ 12:46:43 Eastern


Gaming is the new kid on the block: Films have been around since the 1890s and were based on the long established theatre scene; books are as old as the written word; and music is so ingrained that it is thought that early humans communi...   read more...

[ Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

Patches, DLC and Downloadable Fixing
Posted on Wednesday, June 27 2012 @ 14:44:57 Eastern


Today marks a fairly monumental occasion in the videogame world. Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut has gone live. Ever since consoles were able to go online, patches have been commonplace, and before that, PC gamers have been enjoying bug fixes...   read more...

[ Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

Mass Effect Shall Continue!
Posted on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 14:17:16 Eastern

As I said before, Mass Effect is an incredible universe. ME1, 2 and 3 focused on Shepard’s tale but set the scene for books and graphic novels to complement that story arc and chronicle the stories of other characters such as Anderson, and the ...   read more...

[ Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

ME3: A Simpler Ending
Posted on Friday, April 6 2012 @ 09:33:50 Eastern

Mass Effect is an incredible universe. From the asari to the batarians each species has a compelling backstory: the hanar have a close relationship with the drell; the turians and volus are dependent on each other’s expertise. The complexity of...   read more...

[ Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

The Scourge of Multiplayer
Posted on Friday, November 18 2011 @ 15:29:55 Eastern

The biggest game of the year has just been released. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has been available to purchase over retail counters for a few days and now seems as good a time as ever to discuss how multiplayer has progressed from humble beginnin...   read more...

[ Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]

Kingdom of Violence
Posted on Tuesday, August 2 2011 @ 14:33:41 Eastern

Once upon a time the citizens of a fair and prosperous kingdom enjoyed a pastime. Their hobby was a combination of story-telling, make-believe, music, and action. Practitioners would don costumes and play out specially created stories with each other...   read more...

[ Comments ]        [ Post a Comment ]