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The blown hard arrogance of Parallax Abstraction.

Tag Archives: DRM

The EApocalypse

Leave a Comment Posted by on March 8, 2013

Man, it’s been a shit year for Electronic Arts so far hasn’t it? Rarely in the good graces of gamers at the best of times, the world’s second largest publisher (and once the largest by a country mile) has just been drowning in controversy in 2013. Between the microtransactions in Dead Space 3 to the continuing fustercluck that is the launch of SimCity with its always-on DRM, the company is just swimming in bad PR and furious customers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s reaping what it’s sown and it deserves all the ire that it’s getting. Never before have I seen a company so Hell bent on going to war with its own customers and expecting to come out the other side smelling of roses and money…alright, maybe Zynga.

The thing about this though is that is really doesn’t have to be this way. EA doesn’t have to be this way. What’s going on down in Redwood Shores?

I am generally not a fan of big business and the way it tends to treat its customers and this is the case in the video game industry as well. Big publishers love to push the bounds of unreasonableness to see just how much gamers are willing to take. It drives me nuts, as it does to constantly see the argument trotted out that businesses exist to make money and therefore whatever they do in the interests of that is OK because it’s what they’re supposed to do.  That’s bullshit. You know how businesses make money? By building a loyal base of customers, not driving them away. Without your customers, your business has no money. I mean, duh? If you are a CEO who thinks the needs of your short-sighted shareholders should trump the needs of the customers who actually generate value for those shareholders, you are doing it wrong.

At the same time, I do understand the plight of these companies and even sympathise with it to a degree. Like it or not, big publishers are important to a large segment of gaming. Those big, expensive AAA titles we all like so much? Big publishers need to exist and thrive for those to get made. A couple of bedroom programmers aren’t going to make Battlefield. Kickstarter isn’t going to fund the next Mass Effect. You can’t make a Dead Space experience for a few grand and sell it for 99 cents. Millions of people want these games and big companies are how they get produced. The games industry is a tremendously risky one, regardless of the level you’re trying to compete in and we live in a world where people want everything right now, they want it to be better than last time and they want it either free or as close to free as possible. It’s an almost untenable situation and is at odds with the very core of how some of the best interactive experiences have been created. As a whole, the industry doesn’t know how to handle it yet.

Some companies are handling it much better than others and they’ve done it by being focused on what they’re good at and catering to it while trying to push forward in their chosen space. For all of Ubisoft’s faults, I think they’re a great example of this. While they’ve dabbled into other facets of gaming such as mobile and social, their focus has remained hardcore AAA titles with another segment dedicated to family and casual games, almost all on consoles and PC. They’ve also managed to do this and continue experimenting and iterating on even their biggest money making franchises. They’re not necessarily raking it in but they’re weathering the current storm the game industry is in much better than most. I think THQ may have ended up in a similar position had they been able to hang on longer. I’ll talk more about Ubisoft’s philosophy in a future post but I use it here to demonstrate the stark contrast with EA.

For many years dating back to the 90s, EA was seen as the evil boogeyman of the game industry. They grew their fat wallets by releasing full priced updates to sports titles every year that were little more than roster updates and they were famous for buying studios that ran on creativity and running them, their people and their franchises into the ground. They frequently released games that were overpromised, buggy and often outright broken without supporting them properly. They drew near constant hate from gamers everywhere but always had their stable of sports franchises to tide them over. And time went on and game production costs rose, this formula waned and the EA money train began to slow.

Enter current CEO John Riccitiello. Fresh off of selling the powerhouse studio combo of BioWare/Pandemic to EA for a ginormous pile of money, he took charge of the company as a whole and came in with lofty ambitions to reverse their fortunes. His words were music to the ears of gamers. He said EA’s quality was poor, that there was no originality in their games and that a wave of new creativity and business models to go with it were necessary if EA and indeed the publishing industry as a whole were to survive and grow. He planned to completely reform not only EA but the entire idea of what a video game publisher was about and he was going to do it by trimming the fat and focusing on quality and new ideas. It all sounded great and for the most part, none of it’s come true. I won’t spend another 1,500 words detailing all the Riccitiello ambitions that haven’t come to fruition. I link to Jim Sterling’s Jimquisition series a lot but he often does a great job illustrating points I want to make better than I could. Check out his Why Do People Hate EA? episode to see just how badly EA has flubbed what sounded like a fantastic vision that John Riccitiello entered with.

The company has gone from one that wanted to embrace new ideas to trying to throw its seed into every pot available in the hope that something will take root. In the last few years, they’ve gone on another acquisition bender, buying up several prominent companies in the mobile, social and casual game spaces, all for ludicrously inflated prices. And almost none of them have panned out. They bought the companies when they were hot and just like the EA of the past, they were either left to stagnate or were interfered and meddled with to the point where their uniqueness and creative soul were drained from them and they didn’t bare the results desired. They did initially put a lot of effort into new IP and franchises but after a couple of these didn’t work out because not everything’s a sure bet, they got scared and retreated back to stagnant safety.

The only semi-new things we see from EA any more are their constant, desperate attempts to chase after what’s hot at the time. Not being able to make Battlefield a yearly series, they’ve been desperate to find something to compete with Call of Duty and that’s led to the largely dreadful attempts to reboot Medal of Honor, recently shelved after the piss poor latest title in that series. Hungry for a piece of the World of Warcraft pie, they poured an estimated $200 million into developing Star Wars: The Old Republic, an immensely ambitious effort to make the Star Wars MMO everyone wanted. Except they just made it exactly like WoW with a Star Wars skin and no one cared. The game was a flop and cost the company a fortune. Rather than understand that CoD and WoW are juggernaut outliers and that they should focus on building their own ideas rather than go head-to-head with those, they tried to latch on to their success and failed miserably. EA went from being a company with a bold desire to chart its own course to one wildly flailing its arms around, hoping that it would hit something, anything that would prove to be a cash cow as big as the two Activision tripped over.

When none of those things worked out, EA doubled down on mobile games and core console titles. Except rather than try to make unique and appealing experiences in those arenas, it just made all of its franchises an indistinct sludge with no single amazing thing you could point at them for, all in the interests of “broader appeal”. They took Dead Space, one of the only horror games I liked and turned it into an action series with multiplayer no one asked for in the second game and co-op no one asked for in the third one. They padded the third with a ton of boring side missions, bloating it to a ridiculous, unnecessary size. On top of all that, they stuffed Zynga-esque microtransactions in, shoving the option to artificially buy progress for real money into your face every time you opened a crafting bench. Never mind that the previous two games made money by selling less copies and having no microtransactions. Rather than look inward and figure out why their costs got so bloated and rein them in to keep the game focused and the sales requirements reasonable, they basically threatened fans by saying it had to sell an obscene number of copies to justify its existence. Let’s not also forget how what many consider critical story elements were cut out of Dead Space 3 as well as Mass Effect 3 to be sold later as DLC.

Then we have the new SimCity, a game that with its very name alone would have been a money press. Of course, that wasn’t good enough. They crammed it to the seams with always-on DRM, made the city size laughably small and piled on half-baked social features that were forced on players in order to drive engagement through overexposure (i.e. how most Facebook games work) and sell people DLC. No one asked for any of this, gamers weren’t cramming for smaller cities and forced social integration. We all just wanted a new SimCity but now we have an online-only game that as of this writing, doesn’t work.

To me, the new SimCity embodies a near perfect representation of the modern EA: A company who is desperately trying to be a jack of all gaming trades and is not just a master of none but not even competent at any of them. It treats its paying customer as adversaries and not allies, a relationship that’s poisonous to everyone. The company is acting completely contrary to the incredible vision that John Riccitiello came in with and I think that’s so sad. Reverting back to their old ways hasn’t helped either. They lost hundreds of millions over the last few years and are only just barely clinging to profit right now. Their financial future is far from certain, even with the stable of hits they do have.

Had he been able to execute his ideas the way he expressed them to fans, I think it could have been an amazing thing, a creative and business revolution in an industry that desperately needs both right now. Why has this vision rotted away so badly? Did Riccitiello just lose faith in his own ideas? Were EA’s shareholders just too clueless and short-sighted to give him the time necessary to do it? Given that he hasn’t yet been ousted from his position as CEO (though there have been rumbling of this before), they obviously mustn’t think he’s doing that bad a job. I really don’t want to hate EA. I don’t want to hate any publisher. I think competition is good and the more people that make games, the better we as gamers are. I also love the big AAA franchises and want to see more and better ones get produced but the way EA is doing things right now is not sustainable. They need focus and clarity, they need to pick an area of gaming and put all hands on it. They need to let creators create for a while and be willing to take some risks. And most of all, they need to stop treating customers as cash machines and start rewarding their loyalty and make them feel welcome. This all sounds so basic but it’s apparently too hard for the average shareholder to comprehend.

I don’t know how they’ll do it but EA needs to tell the market to sit down and shut up for a while because only happy customers who want to spend money with you will generate long-term growth. People are only willing to be fleeced for so long before they’ll move on and then you have nothing. SimCity could be the tipping point for a lot of people and the lessons it is giving are ones that should be burned into the minds of not only EA but their competitors who think that their model is the right one to follow. EA needs a revolution and if not that, a major correction. It’s time to let one of those happen.

Business, Predictions, Video Games , , , , , ,

When Popularity Trumps Principles

1 Comment Posted by on March 5, 2013

If you’re a reader of this blog or really just a savvy media consumer, you don’t need me to tell you that DRM sucks, it doesn’t work and it only serves to punish customers for a fight against piracy that is unwinnable. This doesn’t stop companies trying of course and a quick Google search will find you all the examples you need. In the gaming space, the most egregious and obnoxious form of DRM comes in the “always-on” variety, where you have to be constantly checking in with a publisher controlled server to make sure you aren’t stealing anything. Several companies have tried it and the gaming community has rightfully screamed from the rooftops about it pretty much every time. Like other DRM, it also hasn’t worked and it’s caused nightmares for the legit customers. Don’t get me wrong, pirates are thieves by my moral compass but creating headaches for the people who aren’t stealing from you isn’t how you solve the problem. My lifestyle puts me in a position where I do tend to have fast Internet that’s reliable and always available but that’s not the point. If I’m not playing a game online, there’s no need for me to be online and I don’t want a product I paid for being tied to a short term focused company’s infrastructure.

The problem the gaming community (and to a lesser degree the press) have is that when they take up a fight over principle, it only tends to last until it requires them to sacrifice something popular or that they really want. Oh sure, gamers will scream about boycotts and refusing to support the evil publishers trying to strip us of our rights to do with our purchases as we see fit but if it means turning down the new shiny, as a whole we’re frankly pathetic. Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with this. Personally, I hate always-on DRM but I don’t judge you negatively if you choose to not take up arms against it and purchase titles that use it. I think the concept does damage to the gaming medium and I don’t think it should be supported but who am I to tell you how to spend your precious money and free time? If you support it, I think you lose the right to bitch about it for a while but that’s about as far as I take it.

This was perhaps no better demonstrated than with Diablo III. This is a game that can be 100% completed solo without interacting with another living soul. Many including myself prefer to play it this way, at least our first time through. Nonetheless, it requires an always-on Internet connection, even when you want to play by yourself. This was most certainly always-on DRM but it also served the dual purpose of also making sure Blizzard’s horribly balanced and broken Real Money Auction House was always shoved in front of you, tempting you to spend more money for a game you already paid full price for. On top of that, they made such a mess of it that the servers were unreliable for days after launch, rendering paying customers unable to access their games. Even to this day, Diablo III is still subject to lag issues. It didn’t need to require an always-on connection but it did and Blizzard did so with this game because they knew it had a rabid fanbase that would bitch and whine about it but line up to buy anyway. And they were right, it’s sold north of 12 million copies as of this writing.

Fast forward to now and we have a new hyper anticipated title about to launch, the reboot of SimCity. From what I’ve been reading, this looks to be a really neat, fresh take on the idea and people seem to be loving it but like Diablo III, it also requires the Internet to be up at all times to play it, even by yourself. Yes, there are a multitude of social features as well but none of these are required, yet the constant connection still is. Beyond that, these forced social features remove many of the things people previously loved about SimCity (such as being able to revert back to previous saves and have fun with the manually triggered disasters) and from what I’ve read, some of them aren’t even that well implemented and could stand to screw up people’s games due to factors they can’t control. In other words, it’s another game forcing online down people’s throats, even when it doesn’t make sense. Like Diablo III, EA carefully chose this title to try this new initiative because it’s a crazy popular series and they know people will line up for it. And once again, they appear to be right.

I was stupid and bought Diablo III. I shouldn’t have, I compromised my principles as a staunch opponent of always-on DRM but I was suckered in. I regret it to this day because beyond that issue alone, Diablo III is a poor entry in the series with dated visuals, dumbed down game play and frankly, it’s just not a very good game. Diablo I and II were better as are both Torchlight games. I refuse to be suckered into making the same mistake again with SimCity, at least not while it’s at full price. Disregarding that I don’t want social hooks shoved down my throat in every game, I also don’t trust EA to do right by their customers on this. For Blizzard’s faults, one can never accuse them of not supporting their games. The servers for the entire Diablo series (including the first entry released in the 90s) are still online and Diablo II was receiving patches mere months before Diablo III’s release, even though it was more than a decade old. I have no fear of the Diablo III servers going away any time soon.

EA on the other hand is a company that shuts off servers for two year old sports games in order to force people to buy newer versions that are basically just roster updates. They drop support for games at a frightening pace and have no regard for players that might want to keep playing them, not when there’s slight iterations to be sold again at full price. I have no confidence that they will do right by SimCity players in the long term. They have a history of not caring about their customers and treating them as adversaries more than allies. There’s a reason that EA is often considered the “most evil” publisher, even when they have Activision as their chief competitor.

Nonetheless, now that continuing the fight against always-on DRM means once again having to choose between principles and sacrificing the new shiny, many gamers and indeed reporters in the enthusiast press are not only glossing over the concerns but belittling and dismissing those who continue to have them. Once again, if you’re cool with purchasing titles that utilise this method, feel free, even if you were someone who derided the practice at one time before. People’s opinions can change, even if it is just to justify not having to sacrifice something popular. But exactly what gives you the right to wave off those who do have a problem with it and continue to state it?

The people who make snarky comments such as those linked above seem to think that just because the Internet is full of blowhard protests that rarely amount to much, that they never amount to anything and that’s just not true, even on this issue. Ubisoft, who were among the very first adopters of always-on DRM announced a few months back they were scrapping the practice, specifically because of feedback from consumers. People spoke with their mouths, keyboards and wallets and a big company listened. There’s other examples of this working elsewhere too. Yes, there’s a lot of meaningless whining on the Internet that doesn’t have any action backing it up. But that’s not representative of all Internet protests and when enough people speak up, companies do listen. The only way anything we don’t like changes is when people speak up in numbers and keep speaking up until change is realised. If you have a passionate dislike for something and don’t make noise about it, you can’t blame anyone but yourself when nothing changes.

Some of us are able to stick to our principles, even when it means turning away from something we want. I’m turning away from SimCity (at least for now) and I will also turn away from any future game console that requires a constant Internet connection and/or which blocks used games and rentals. I’m fully aware when I say such a thing that I caved on Diablo III. I regret that decision to this day and believe me, as someone who loves SimCity and really likes what I’ve seen of the new one, it pains me to say no to it but I will do so. If you don’t care, that’s your choice to make and I hope you enjoy the game for as long as EA permits you to play it. However, avoiding it is also my choice as well and if you have an issue with me both making it and openly saying why so that others can be better informed, feel free to get on the high horse you rode in on and piss off, be you forum poster or journalist.

Business, Coverage, Video Games , , , , , , , , ,

Steam Does What Nintendon’t

1 Comment Posted by on December 28, 2012

Yep, I totally titled this blog post with a reference to an old, hilariously bad Genesis marketing slogan. I figured that since this post is going to be filled with nothing else but vitriol and rage, that I should at least try to inject some bad humour somewhere. To be honest, I know I’m preaching to the choir here as if you’re someone who is in a position to be affected by this issue, you likely already know what it is and are nodding your head. Nonetheless, this is something I need to rant about because it was actually so bad that it soured my initial impressions of a system I was really excited for.

To my great shock, I got a Wii U Deluxe Set for Christmas because my girlfriend and her parents are amazing. I had planned to get one but couldn’t afford it at launch and had no expectation of getting it for Christmas. I couldn’t wait to get home and try it out. I already knew about the hour long firmware update and while that was dumb and annoying, I’d planned for it so whatever. Then I decided to do the transfer of my sizable amount of purchased content from my Wii, about 90% of which is Virtual Console games. I’d heard that the transfer process was unnecessarily complicated but also doable so I decided to get it over with. What I discovered was that the process is much worse than most people said and that how bad of an experience it can be is directly proportional to how much content you’ve purchased. Let me put that another way: The more money you voluntarily gave Nintendo, the harder the process is. This is absolute bullshit and there is absolutely no reason for it, as I will demonstrate later.

Firstly, you have to download the Wii Transfer Tool onto both systems. It doesn’t come pre-installed on the Wii U, there’s just a link in the menu that takes you to the download page. This would be fine were it not for the fact that the Nintendo store servers were absolutely swamped and constantly errored out on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Guys, this is probably the single biggest activation day the Wii U will ever have, how did you not scale for it?! I gave up doing this on Christmas Day but succeeded at getting the tool on both systems on Boxing Day.

The first thing you’re told is that you need an SD card for the transfer process. Alright, that’s cool. Like most people, I store most of my downloaded Wii content on an SD card because the Wii has virtually no internal space for large stuff. What I’d assumed was that the transfer process would recognise this, merge that data with whatever you have stored on the Wii internal memory and package it all up so you can plug it into the Wii U and you’re away. Nope. It turns out that in fact, the transfer tool will only backup stuff that lives in Wii system memory. That means that everything you have on the SD card must be moved to the system memory one item at a time (there is no way to move them in batches) and if like me, you have way too much stuff to fit in system memory, you have to check all the sizes of the items and exclude enough to make everything fit. Stuff you’ve bought and had to delete can be re-downloaded from the Wii Shop later but I’ll get to that.

This didn’t initially anger me so much as make me tilt my head, not unlike my puppy does when he sees something he’s curious about. I re-read the poorly written transfer tool instructions multiple times, certain I’d missed something. Nope, this is totally how it works. This really pissed me off but I centered myself by remembering that this process only has to be done once. I started the transfer process on my Wii and my anger was quelled somewhat by the absolutely adorable Pikmin progress animation that accompanies it. The transfer off the Wii went fast…way too fast. Confused but hopeful, I removed the SD card and put it in the Wii U to start the second half of the process.

Once things got going, I was greeted by a totally different adorable Pikmin animation (also in the link above) but noticed that the progress was moving significantly slower this time. Then I looked at the top of the screen where it shows a status message on the current item being transferred and saw that all my purchased games were showing as “Downloading” whereas save data was showing as “Transferring.” Even though I’d had to painstakingly move every individual item on my SD card back to the Wii system memory, it wasn’t copying them, it was downloading them all again anyway! That rendered that entire long, frustrating process of moving all my content from the SD card to system memory completely unnecessary! If it has to download all the games again why can’t it just analyse all the content I have on the system, transfer the licenses on Nintendo’s server and just re-download them all again anyway?  There is absolutely no reason this had to work this way! NONE!

At this point, I literally said out loud “Fuck this bullshit!”, put the Wii Remote down and went to do something else and calm down while the process completed. When I came back about half an hour later, I saw an error message displayed with Nintendo’s usual cryptic numeric code that doesn’t actually tell you squat. I Googled that code and was informed it was a network timeout error. This was likely because the store servers were still swamped and since it was downloading everything again even though I had it all on the SD card, it was having issues. I hit Try Again and things continued. Half an hour later, I was greeted with another “An Error Has Occurred” message, this one with no buttons or numeric code and also a frozen Wii U. I’d read somewhere that this happened to a person and he lost the licenses to most of his content in the process. I hard rebooted the Wii U and thankfully, it realised the failure and offered to continue. I had two more “Try Again” error prompts throughout the remaining process but it never froze again. However, the entire process of re-downloading everything (which totaled less than 512MB, the size of the Wii system memory) took well over two hours. According to my router, the transfer speed rarely ever exceeded 250Kbytes/sec or to put it in simpler terms, 1/28th of the maximum speed of my Internet connection.

After all this was done, I had all the content that I’d managed to fit into the Wii’s system memory but now had 18 items to re-download. Should be easy right? Actually it is but it’s also unnecessarily arduous and frustrating, just like everything else. When you go into the Wii Store, there’s a Titles You’ve Downloaded button. The problem is, it’s an alphabetised list of everything that only displays 10 or so titles per page and it doesn’t know or tell you what you’ve already downloaded. You have to select an item, confirm you want to re-download it, tell it where to save it, confirm you want to basically “purchase” it again for no money, wait for it to download (which is slow at the best of times and barely worked at all prior to the 27th) and agree to a health and safety warning. After all that, you’re kicked back to the first screen of the Wii Shop. You can’t download content in a batch, you can’t queue up multiple items and it doesn’t even remember your place in the list of downloaded items. On top of all this, it takes about 5 seconds to switch between each page of the list and there were items on all 7 pages for me. Downloading these 18 remaining items (on the 27th when they had some semblance of available bandwidth) took over an hour.

The primary reason this took so long for me was because of the amount of content I had. I voluntarily gave Nintendo more money to buy more digital content on the Wii and as a direct result, this process took me hours when it probably took most others minutes. I would bet I’m in a very small percentile of people who bought that much digital content on that platform and that irrefutably made the process that much harder for me. People (myself included) lament how DRM only punishes legitimate consumers while doing nothing to stop piracy but this is worse than that. It proportionally causes more harm to the legitimate consumers the more content they bought. It’s completely backwards and it’s insane. Considering the Wii platform has been cracked wide open and has more rampant piracy than either of the other two consoles, this DRM has also proven a complete failure to boot. The worst part is that the longest, most frustrating steps of the process weren’t necessary at all because most of the data that was transferred was just licenses, not the games themselves! Why was this done this way? I can’t figure out a reason.

As you can tell from the title, I’m going to drop an example of exactly how you do DRM and why Nintendo has no excuse: Steam. You know how you get your Steam games on another computer? You install Steam on that computer, double-click the game you want and download it again. And if you don’t want to download it again, you copy the folder with the game from your old PC to the new one and it’s there instantly. Steam has thousands of developers working with them and all the major publishers. They are all fine with Steam’s sensible, completely reasonable way to do DRM. Both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles also do DRM far better than Nintendo. Microsoft’s could be better but it’s not this bad. There is no way that Nintendo of all companies couldn’t implement a similar style system and there is no way they were pressured from their partners to do it the way it is now.

I don’t know what entered their minds to make them think this was necessary but it’s wrong, it can be changed and it must be changed. I was super excited when I got my Wii U and I still can’t wait to crack into some games on it but this experience was so terrible and so frustrating that after it was done, I didn’t want to touch the system for the rest of the day. Combine this nightmare with the fact that Nintendo Network IDs (and eShop purchases made with them) are hard locked to the individual hardware they were created on and it makes me never want to buy a digital product from Nintendo again. It’s certainly enough to make me tell any prospective Wii U owner to stick to discs only. This type of DRM takes everything that’s bad about the concept in general and turns it up to 11.

Nintendo has a lot to prove with the Wii U and in general as a company. Dedicated consoles have a hard road ahead, Wii U perception has been mired by bad messaging and despite strong initial sales, lots of people are questioning what kind of long-term future it has. Combine this with Nintendo milking too many of their franchises too hard (even by Nintendo standards) and the company isn’t the sure bet it has been for decades. How does any company treat their most loyal and enthusiastic customers so badly in the face of competition like they’ve never seen before? I love Nintendo’s stuff and I so want them to continue to succeed but they’re either ignorant or arrogantly apathetic to the future that’s staring them in the face. They should be doing everything in their power to court their core fan base and keep them evangelizing the Wii U and 3DS. Based on my experiences with the Wii U so far, the message they sent to me was that they are either so arrogant or so apathetic towards my concerns that it doesn’t matter that I’ve bought more digital content than probably 90% of all Wii owners. Clearly the fact that I spent so much there means I’m willing to endure the headaches, either out of loyalty or because I’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect the content investments I’ve made. It’s unnecessary, it’s disrespectful and it’s offensive to me as a loyal Nintendo supporter.

I admit that my case is far in the minority and most Wii U buyers will either not be affected by it at all or will have it be much easier than it was for me. But that’s the whole point: This doesn’t affect many people because no one bought digital content on the Wii. We’re entering a new digital age and people who don’t embrace it with both hands will be left behind. Things like this show me that Nintendo either doesn’t get it or is too arrogant to realise that people won’t put up with this anymore, not when systems like Steam and the various app stores (for all their many flaws) do it far better and easier.

Nintendo has more to prove right now than perhaps they ever have in their 100+ years as a company. They need to listen to their customers, particularly their hard core audience and be nimble in their responses to them. They’re doing neither right now and they no longer hold a position where they can afford to do that. Please Nintendo, please fix this and do it quickly. I want you to succeed but things like this will be the beginning of the end for you.

Business, Predictions, Video Games , , , , , , , ,

On Gaming’s Future: AAA Reality Check

1 Comment Posted by on May 7, 2012

So yeah, this post going up by the end of the week of my last post obviously didn’t happen. Turned out to be a crazier month than I predicted (tons of new hires at work and they just announced we’re buying another company), plus I was getting ready to leave for what was an amazing week’s vacation in Iceland (which I’ll post about in the future). But enough excuses.

Last time I talked about the mobile gaming landscape and how despite what the iPress is claiming, the reality is that the mobile industry is not nearly as rosy as many think and is in many ways steaming head first into the challenges the rest of the industry has been struggling with for years. The biggest challenges of all–those impacting AAA development–are what I’m going to talk about this time.

I love big AAA productions with heavy story, characters, worlds and production values with deep, immersive gameplay. I have nothing against smaller indie titles and have enjoyed many of them but bigger scope titles are where my heart is and it’s where I go first with my gaming time and money. Most of what I’ve played in the supposedly revolutionary mobile space has underwhelmed me to say the least. Not to say there isn’t strong potential there but touch controls (which on the iPad at least I find very laggy in most games) limit how complex you can make a game and I’ve yet to see anything on the platform which has strong characters, narrative and storytelling. I’ve looked and not even the best examples I’ve been cited can hold a candle to something like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, unless they’re titles that originally began on a dedicated gaming system. Many are claiming that tablets will render all consoles obsolete in a few years and that they’re already as powerful as the current systems. That argument however is full of holes. Going into the boring technological reasons would be a post unto itself but suffice it to say that tablets are a long way from being able to play even current-gen AAA games in a meaningful technical way, forget what we’ll end up seeing next year when the new Xbox and PlayStation systems are out. Mass Effect, Skyrim, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Forza Motorsport, Gears of War, Uncharted; these simply can’t be done on a tablet right now and will not be possible for many years to come.

The CEO of respected AAA developer Remedy Entertainment recently stated that we’re very close to having AAA experiences on tablets (both technically and in design terms) but then he pulled out Infinity Blade II as what he called the “benchmark” for that argument. Having played Infinity Blade II, I can’t believe he said that seriously. It’s a very good looking game for the iPad (though only because it has super tiny levels and basically no AI, it’s all trickery) but is simply a treadmill of one-on-one timing based battles with a meaningless filler plot, it’s stuffed with immersion-breaking elements like random gold bags you have to tap on quickly during cutscenes and it’s primary hook is making you replay the same 15-20 minute section over and over again as you grind out higher levels, all while nagging you to post positive reviews and buy power through microtransactions. If this game was released for PC or consoles, it would have been ripped apart in reviews as being shallow, boring, criminally short and a sub-standard experience but for some reason, being in the mobile space seems to give many titles a pass for weak design with the depth of a spoon. And this is one of the biggest budget, highest production value titles I’ve seen on iOS. If this is what Remedy thinks AAA gaming is due to become, I guess I better take up knitting or something.

Despite the fact that the AAA industry pulls in more revenue that pretty much every other form of gaming combined, it’s an industry that has been in a profit struggle (many would say a death spiral) for years. Back in “the day”, selling 50,000 units of a title was considered a massive success. Today sales in the millions are often required to recoup development and marketing efforts and aside from a decreasing number of runaway hits, very few even cross a single million. There’s fewer publishers now than there used to be, several are struggling badly and even the big players are relying on a couple of key franchises to drive all their profits. The vast majority of AAA releases lose money and lots of it. No one is launching new AAA publishers today and I can’t remember the last time I heard of a new studio starting up in the sector either. Big publishers are required to bring AAA games to market but almost all of them are making games internally now, rarely relying on external partners and when they do, it’s with contractual terms that ensure the developers barely survive, even if they craft a hit. Many of these people from the industry who are forming mobile and social studios I think are doing so not just because they want to but because that’s the only place they have a chance of success, even if it’s not that much greater.

On top of that, year over year AAA software sales are in a free fall and the current generation of console hardware is also starting to see sales drop as they reach market saturation. Many believe that while the increasingly niche hardcore demographic is still buying stuff, many of the more casual players who would normally only buy a couple of games a year have shifted to mobile and social platforms, taking their money out of the AAA space entirely. For a long time, I said I was fine with the current consoles and was in no hurry to have new ones to worry about. Now I would say that with more and more people touting how tablets are taking over everything (whether they’re correct or not), it’s time for new consoles to grab and refresh people’s attention. However, Microsoft has told us to expect no console announcement from them any time soon and by all accounts, Sony will be focusing on Vita and late PS3 releases only at E3 this year. Even when they do put those systems out, higher technology means even higher costs which means even greater sales are needed to turn a profit. Nintendo has said that they plan to release the WiiU in 2012 but much like its predecessor, it will only sport current generation technology and will not be the step forward that AAA gamers are looking for and it’s unique tablet controller will require that developers devote additional resources to it.

While I don’t believe that iOS is completely destroying the dedicated handheld gaming market the way the iPress says it is, there’s no doubt that those systems are also struggling. Initial sales of the Vita were strong but have fallen off a cliff since and while 3DS sales still seem decent, neither system has a huge slate of software coming out and a lot of what releasing from third parties is not selling well. These systems desperately need top-tier titles from companies that aren’t the hardware vendors and the vendors need to back them in a big way. I think E3 will be the real tell for those platforms. Either there will be a ton of big announcements for them, signalling that third parties are on board or there won’t be which will indicate to me that they’ve basically been abandoned.

All of these factors point to a sector that’s in real danger. Mobile and social is currently in a fashion trend driven bubble of growth that is pulling a lot of funding and interest away from the AAA space. That bubble is going to burst eventually and that growth will normalise as a result but for right now, it’s clear there is less risk in that sector than AAA which is why no one wants to invest in those kind of games. As a result publishers are struggling, the industry is consolidating, new releases are becoming fewer and less original and in spite of it all, almost no one’s making any money. Regardless of how much I and millions of others love big AAA games, if they can’t figure out how to start making money soon, they won’t keep getting made. The AAA space is currently in a tail spin towards another 80s style video game crash and such an event in modern times would result in many more billions lost and many more thousands of creative people being out of work. If AAA doesn’t get its house in order, crappy iOS and Facebook games may be all hardcore gamers have left. I don’t want that and I doubt they do either. I sympathise with this plight but I also think that the way publishers are trying to mitigate it is ridiculous and that in their desperate struggle to compete, they’re actually driving customers away when they should be embracing them.

So what can they do about this? Is the trend reversible? I absolutely think it is but much like in the music, movie and TV industries, it’s going to require a lot of “old guard” people at the top to make major fundamental changes to how AAA games are made, marketed and thought of. These are people who are still very arrogant and think they know what’s best, even as their companies and investor cash evaporate around them. It’s likely that many of them will try to stick to the old ways and fail as a result. I don’t want to see even less competition but at the same time, those who can’t face the realities of change need to go away and clear a path for those who get it. As I’ve said many times before, I’m not a business guy and I don’t work in the industry and never have. However, I’ve been an avid follower of the industry’s content, people and companies for many years now and I’ve learned a lot in that time. I know what’s worked and hasn’t worked both for myself and my gamer friends and I like to think that our group represents a decent cross-section of gamers as a whole today. I definitely have more to say to the AAA industry that I do to the mobile industry. So here are my long-winded suggestions for how they can make mount a return to sustainable success.

Firstly–and this is obvious to literally everyone who isn’t one of the big publishers–all the anti-customer garbage needs to stop, all of it. DRM doesn’t work and every single person who lives in the real world knows it. There may be an infographic somewhere that shows that publishers actually sell more copies of their games by using DRM than it costs them to purchase the technology but that doesn’t take into account the massive amounts of good will they burn with fans for it. Pirates are scumbag thieves but publishers can’t ultimately stop those who are determined to steal their stuff and making life harder for the paying customers is not the answer. Budget projects assuming a certain amount of piracy will occur and at least some of the losses can be mitigated.

Next, they need to stop using online passes. Much like piracy, I can understand how the used games market is parasitic and leeching money out of the industry that it desperately needs while giving more profits to scummy companies like GameStop. Once again though, this isn’t a new problem and it’s been the case for years and it may not even be as bad as they think. Publishers need to learn to work within the constraints they have rather than pushing new ones on legitimate customers. The few times the publishers that use online passes have talked about their results, they’ve openly admitted that they aren’t seeing much additional revenue from them. That means that people are either still buying used games and just not buying the passes or they are skipping those games entirely. It’s cutting off their noses to spite the faces and it’s not working.

Then there’s on-disc DLC. I don’t have a problem with DLC per ce when it’s done tastefully but when you’re charging $60 for what is supposed to be a premium product, locking away content on the disc behind a paywall–content which had to be completed before the game shipped in order to make it on the disc–is money grubbing. I don’t buy the excuses about idle teams or technical compatibility reasons. Those are your issues, not your customer’s. If you can’t do DLC without putting it on the disc, then don’t do it. For a more detailed version of this argument, refer to this Jimquisition episode.

Second is that mainstream AAA gaming has become too complicated. When most people hear this, it’s usually accompanied by a story of someone trying to sit their Grandmother down with a 360 pad and them having no idea what to do. I don’t accept that argument. While it’s important for games to reach a large audience, AAA gaming is an enthusiast hobby and that’s what it should cater to. If someone really finds big AAA games interesting but doesn’t know how to play them, their interest in seeing more will end up with them sticking it out and learning. That’s how all of us who grew up with games learned and there’s nothing wrong with that. This idea that all games need to be fully understandable within 30 seconds to be enjoyable is ridiculous and symptomatic of a society that constantly demands instant gratification for minimal effort. This is the reason I find many mobile games so boring. On this front, I don’t think things should change. So what do I mean then?

Remember back before consoles were online and you could just put a game in, play it and generally have a good experience? Having to patch and use hack workarounds to get your games working as advertised was reserved for crazy PC people but not anymore. In an era where console games can be patched, many ship with numerous bugs and in some cases, completely broken. This requires console players with limited technical knowledge to go into forums and find weird solutions no one should have to use to get their games working properly or sit and wait for weeks for a patch, if one even comes. Between this and the frankly obscene processes many games make you go through just to get started these days, many casual players are getting turned off by the complexity. The worst I’ve seen with any mobile game I’ve started up is a couple of logos, that’s it. The whole point of a console is you put the game in and play. The more layers publishers put between the players and the content, the less fun they have. I don’t care what middleware you used and no one’s going to convince me that EULAs need to be as long-winded as they are.

Third is that there are too many games right now. Yes, you read that right. When AAA games are required to be multi-million sellers to turn a profit, it’s impossible for that to happen when every quarter is filled with more titles than even people like me with a lot of free time and disposable income could ever hope to play. Publishers are spreading themselves too thin among their customer base and the result is a whole pile of games that don’t sell enough rather than a smaller number that do. We need fewer releases but they all need to be high quality and for the love of everything, they need to come out over the course of the whole year, not just in the Christmas quarter. I would take 5 really good games over 15 mediocre ones any day and I think most gamers would too. Publishers no longer have the financial resources to dump out a whole bunch of titles at once and see what sticks, they need to focus on making fewer releases shine.

Fourth is that the AAA pricing model is broken and no one wants to try to fix it. If mobile, social and PC digital platforms have shown us anything, it’s that you can charge very little for a good product and still make a ton of money from it. $60 for a AAA console game is actually cheaper than it used to be when adjusted for inflation but it’s still really expensive, especially in this economy. Publishers have to work very hard at overcoming this ridiculous and outdated public stigma that a retail console game that sells for under this price point is somehow inferior and less worthy of purchase. We’re in an era of $1 mobile games that make millions and free-to-play shooters on PC that are pulling in massive returns by selling meaningless cosmetic items. What better a time is there to put out products on consoles that cost say $30 but are made with a budget of $10 million instead of $50 million? I think a few titles like that with good marketing campaigns behind them can break the misconceptions and usher in a new model where riskier ideas can be attempted without such huge financial stakes. I know that when selling games in brick and mortar stores, a lot of different entities have their hands in the pie and that can eat into profits but there’s no reason why some of these titles couldn’t be released exclusively on the console download services, something Microsoft, Sony and maybe even Nintendo plan to back in a big way in the next generation. Cheaper games can sell, they just have to be quality games as well.

Speaking of free-to-play, this is something the hardware vendors really need to start getting behind. This concept meeting with massive success in the PC space and at least for multiplayer games, I don’t see that changing. There’s no better price to draw people in than free and those who like your game will step up and spend money. I frankly love the model when it’s done properly and some of my favourite games right now are free-to-play. Sony is dabbling their feet in this arena with CCP’s Dust 514 but I think both companies need to make adopting this model a major part of their online strategies for next generation consoles. Aside from giving more of their customers a reason to put their consoles online, it forgoes brick and mortar stores entirely and gives every new title an immediate massive install base. If the hardware vendors take a reasonable cut, this can be a massive new market they can open up which compliments the traditional AAA space while taking little away from it. Allow free-to-play companies in (perhaps with some regulation to make sure they don’t rip players off too badly), give them an infrastructure to work with and watch the money roll in while laughing in GameStop’s face.

Fifth is marketing and the ridiculous excesses it has reached with AAA games. Every major publisher is guilty of this but some are more guilty of it than others. I understand marketing to large audiences is expensive and that there are so many things pulling at people’s time and money that the message often has to be bigger and better to convince them to spend some with you. But if you have a game that costs $50 million to make and it’s often costing two or three times that to market it, you’ve got a major problem somewhere. Does spending $100 million on marketing really bring in enough additional sales over spending $50 million on marketing? Did THQ sell enough additional copies of Homefront from that stupid stunt they pulled in San Francisco to justify its cost and the damage to their image? I have a really hard time believing that. And then there’s all the stuff EA does. The marketing agencies the publishers are working with need to be reigned in, have their budgets strictly controlled and be forced to sell more with less. The publishers need to look to indie games and how they market themselves as while they obviously aren’t reaching audiences in the millions, their techniques work and it’s why a successful indie can make a staggering profit ratio wise against a big publisher. There’s nothing wrong with making a big splash for a big game but the current ways simply cannot be generating enough sales to justify the splendour and when you spent twice as much marketing a game as making it, that’s now three times as many copies you need to sell to make a profit. The quality and uniqueness of a title are what needs to become the centre of AAA marketing, not simply screaming louder than the other guy.

Lastly is that the console manufacturers need to start embracing additional business models and adjust their operating practices to support them. I already talked about free-to-play but I’m also talking about things like small indie games, titles that are great small experiences that also come with a small price. Mobile platforms have this nailed and while there’s far more risk in mobile than many would have you believe, there are a lot of people making money there selling products for $5 or less in many cases. Microsoft and Sony have made experiments with this on both their platforms but they never received any kind of backing or promotion and as a result, both companies dismissed them as failures, driving those developers to mobile. That’s simply ridiculous and it needs to change. It costs so comparatively little to give small indie developers some promotion on both your systems and your web sites and can pay off in droves, particularly now when so much of the general public has learned than a $1 game can still be an amazing experience. Today’s $1 indie developers are the AAA powerhouses of tomorrow but they need to be given a vector into that space.

However, one major sticking point that’s constantly causing developers headaches and needs to change is the manufacturer certification process. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all have these and developers bemoan them endlessly. Before you can release a game (or update it) on any of the current home consoles, it has to be submitted to the hardware manufacturer for certification, a process that can often take weeks or months and can cause huge delays over often ridiculous issues. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo say this process is necessary to ensure the games meet their quality standards but in reality, the process is built to ensure that the game says “Please don’t turn off your console.” when saving or to display the right error message when you pull the controller out by accident. The process has nothing to do with ensuring your game isn’t a buggy mess at launch, something that can be demonstrated by the countless releases that ship with major issues, which of course can take weeks to patch because of the same certification steps. The process is inefficient, wasteful and frankly unnecessary. So what if a game fails to say that the console shouldn’t be turned off when it’s saving? Most people know that and the ones that are dumb enough to do it will do so regardless of the warning. Indie developers can’t afford the hassle and cost of this useless process and by streamlining or removing it entirely, it also takes a big cost sink out of the equation for large releases as well. I simply refuse to believe that the process in its current form is necessary to ensure that our consoles don’t explode when we put games in them, especially since the biggest scandal of this generation was the result of Microsoft’s faulty and poorly tested hardware.

I really think there is still a bright future for AAA games, particularly as the audience continues to grow. Many people who are playing Angry Birds on phones and tablets today won’t go deeper into gaming than that but there is a section that will and a growing audience just means more potential for success. But the AAA publishers have become so blind to costs that they’re outspending the audience growth and that can only result in more consolidations and bankruptcies and as a result, less titles and originality.  At the rate the current publishers are going, there won’t be many left to make AAA games soon and if others can’t fill that void, the main benefit of consoles goes away and suddenly, Microsoft and Sony have no incentive to keep making them. A world of simplistic and shallow mobile and social games is not one I welcome but the current way of doing things can’t continue and both the publishers and the console makers need to wake up and adapt before it’s too late. There’s a trail of industry bodies that’s already showing what happens when content creators refuse to go with the times and being such a young industry, I hope this one can realise that and be more agile. I love AAA games and I don’t want to see them go away and I hope this crazy long manifesto can maybe give someone in the the industry who is smarter than me some ideas on how to turn things around. It’s time for these executives to step up and think outside the box before their companies run out of oxygen within it.

Business, Computers, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Tablets, Technology, Video Games , , , , , , , , ,

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