Right now, the talk is rah rah fight the powah EA sucks (yes, they do suck, they killed one of my all time favorite MMOs, Earth and Beyond). I know this will be a downer post, but I will explain why Game Spot is living on borrowed time, how both the publishers and retailers are ripping you off, and what you can do about it. A big raging debate from my personal circles is that gamers have a right to trade in their games and physical media, that they should be able to hand in used games for credit, and that the publishers should stop being blood sucking vampires.
You're being screwed by both retailers and the publishers, you know.
Retailers screw you by making huge markup margin on your used games. Say, you drop $70 on Call of Duty 99 - Guns Against Bunnies. You burn through the game in a week. You head back to your favorite game retailer, who generously offers to give you store credit of $25 on your purchase. You sell back the game, and have a 50-50 chance of using the credit for a recently used title. So, when they put the game into one of their own boxes and place it next to the new title, a week after release, and proudly say, "just as good as new", what do you think a cost conscious gamer will do when presented with a commodity product? They'll buy the cheaper product. In this manner, the game retailer gets to sell the same essentially new title 2,3,4 times before it becomes stale. No wonder game publishers are pissed (but they're no saints either, keep reading.) The margin on this kind of product is insane. That kind of center can't hold.
On their end, the Publishers are pissed that they're game is being sold multiple times without them seeing a red cent. AA games are being produced on bigger and bigger budgets that are ironically going more and more to marketing instead of actual development. How do they respond? By increasing prices to recover that lost margin, or engaging in shenanigans like DLC or requiring 24-7 connects or other customer harming bullshit. Who gets caught in the middle?
You.
So, here are my views on what changes I think are coming down the pike, and how you can prepare for them.
While game consoles aren't going the way of the Dodo (in fact, they're going to be doing just fine right now), portable media is. You've never owned a video game, and never will. As of the 1972 Berne Convention, it was established in both US Copyright law and in international treaties that while the physical objects that we may have used to carry game code and assets may have been your property, you were renting the code that is actually the substance of whatever game you play.
Go to your favorite game. Read the EULA.
I'll wait.
If you bothered to skim the damned thing (I'm assuming you didn't read it all), it should be abundantly clear that the actual code, assets and creative work that goes into that game isn't yours - it's the property of the people who paid for the creation of the game.
So, X-Box and EA requiring 24-7 constant connections to the Internet? Yes, shitty. Inability to loan game CDs to your friends? Yes, that sucks. Games being driven either by free-to-play models that require you to pay for every little peice of crappy content or by DLCs that are $5 and $10 at a time for things that in earlier games would have been included for free? I feel your pain, man. I play MMOs pretty religiously myself (I'm on Star Trek Online and Neverwinter). PC gamers are getting the shaft just as Console gamers are.
I'm not going to get into the hemming and hawing of whether or not the game publishers owe you anything or whether or not the current distro models are right or moral or bother with all that nerd rage. That's amygdala masturbation anyway. So, take a moment, rant, scream, bitch on Reddit, whatever. I'll wait again. Enjoy your 3 minute hate.
The fact is, eventually, video games will be delivered online only with no physical media, either to a console, some form of set top box, a PC or most likely, a tablet. In 10 years there will be tablets and phones that can perform as well as game consoles do now (probably with an iteration of the Unity engine). Gamers will gravitate towards whatever provides them with the best combination of price and ease of use. Services like Steam will be the norm. DRM will no longer be an issue because all games will be administered from the Cloud, and downloaded like apps. We can't stop it. We need to prepare for it.
Yes, yes, obvious. So, how can we prepare? What's the good news?
My guess (note the word guess here) is that as the upward visual quality curve of various gaming platforms level off that it won't make much of a difference what platform a game is on. I can see folks playing games on multiple devices all sharing the same technology platform. We're already taking baby steps towards this, especially for non-action game play - witness the Neverwinter Gateway. Since every moment of engagement with a game is a moment when someone can potentially make a purchase, game designers will want players to be able to engage with the game as often as possible, via phone, tablet or desktop unit. I also forsee that one day you'll get X-Box and PS whatever quality on your tablet and phone.. It might be 10 or 20 years, but that day will come.
As a consequence, I feel we will see a bloom of creativity from small developers, especially as universal tools packages become cheaper and more viable for game startups. An example of this is the F2P Warframe, developed by indy studio Digital Extreme and distro'ed by Sony. Video games now seem to follow a production model reminiscent of film production, with studios often being brought together and disbanded for individual projects.
Also, with these universal tool sets, costs will go down. Right now, console makers have a hammer lock on that distro channel due to the high costs of their SDKs, and the audience that their console brand can deliver. As tablet and phone games reach greater penetration, the exclusivity of the console platform will become less and less relevant, especially as HDTVs become more sophisticated. Will having a PS# or Xbox whatever really matter when your 60 inch TV also acts as a tablet and can natively render polygons just as well? The merger of the game platform, TV, tablet, phone and other data appliances is nearly here. Hopefully, we'll see a world where all TVs use the same OS and developers can write for the native TV platform - Android, IOS, or whatever. Sally in Wichita, Greg in Jacksonville and Bobby in Long Island can all grab their bluetooth Xbox style controllers that talk right to the TV. Jim's sitting at a bus stop, so he has to use an attachment through his tablet, but he'll be able to join his buddies for that raid. I know the stars have to align for this scenario, but I feel it's a when, not an if.
This is what I'd suggest to anyone who is a casual to serious gamer to prepare themselves in these ways -
- Forget about media and DVD boxes. If you want a memento of the game you love, buy the merch. I have a fondness too for things like DVD boxes and art, but that's going away. Stuff that looks just as nice on a shelf are things like art books, action figures and other stuff. Also, any serious game company should have some merchandise to purchase.
- Support small developers. I feel that the creativity in the market is going to come from these guys. Consider these guys like your favorite bands - if they get enough support, they'll be picked up by a major publisher. There's some awesome work coming down the pike from indy devs in the IOS and Android app worlds. I especially like Humble Bundle.
- Get ready for the decline of the PC. I love PC gaming, and I don't game on consoles (although that will change soon.) However, tablets will soon rule the world. PCs will still certainly be around, but game development dollars will flow to the dominant platform, which I estimate will be tablets. I suspect that OS developers will attempt to train users to treat their platforms more like phones than PCs, in order to cut down on piracy. I'm not taking a position on that entirely sticky wicket, except to say that everyone in the industry will do everything in their power to make all forms of piracy structurally harder or irrelevant. Games, like most other media, will be streamed and in the cloud, possibly entirely paid for by microtransaction or subscription. There is a reason why the major platform for fantasy dungeon adventure games is the MMO, and it isn't just the multiplayer aspects.
- Keep a watch out for the unification cascade. I think that whatever becomes the universal code platform will sneak up on us. My money is on Android, but as these things develop in fits and starts, who knows. Whatever happens, I think it will be disruptive, take everyone by surprise, and then a new status quo will be established.
So, that's it. Share your opinions and views.
