Part
II: Innovation
What
is Innovation? Is Innovation fun? Does Innovation lead to greater sales and
profit? What is Innovation? When things are going badly developers will do
anything to stop the hemorrhaging; they’ll throw everything and the kitchen
sink at the problem. They say ‘Necessity is the mother of all invention’, which is why Innovation is often defined as 'it’s when things are worst that you’ll do the
previously unthinkable'.
I
envision innovation with regards to F2P as choice. Someone once wrote that the
true goal of civilization is to give the great amount of choice to its peoples.
While often times F2P is seen as getting something for nothing, with regards to
the business side of F2P, I believe that choice is its greatest innovation.
Before F2P, there was only the subscription; $14.99/month. And it worked for
many years. Often times when something works fine, the school of thought is to
leave it as it is. As costs and expectations rose in the wake of the explosion
of popularity in the MMO market, the subscription market met a saturation
point. It’s entirely possible, likely probable, that the business side of MMO’s
will return to the subscription model, even if it’s just in conjunction to the
F2P model. While, there is a growing surge from the consumer side for F2P,
there is a core minority that wishes things to remain the same.
A recent article at Eurogamer featured the trio of Ragnar Tornquist, the game's creative director, Joel
Bylos - then lead content designer on The Secret World, now game director, and
Funcom's communications director Erling Ellingsen; the de facto public faces of
The Secret World. In it Joel Bylos asked: "Guild Wars 2 is a very high
quality product funded by the largest MMO publisher in the world. Will people
be expecting that quality in all free-to-play going forward? What about smaller
companies like us? We want to try and create that huge experience, but we don't
have five or 15 MMOs that we own that are still making money all over the
world. Do the bigger companies then drive out the smaller companies?"
It’s a question
I’ve been pondering as the anticipation of F2P, by gamers, the media, and
developers alike reaches a fever pitch. It’s not a small question. Unless you
believe that the subscription-less market was small because of publicity and
quality, you must acknowledge the possibility that a sizeable amount of smaller
less well-known games and development houses are going to close as a result of
the industry wide switch from subscription. The argument can be made that this
is a free market and only the strong survive, of course that’s akin to saying
the popular kids in high school were the best and the brightest lights.
Gamers have for
the most part hailed the rise of the F2P; most gamers look at it as getting a
superior or equal product for free. Various people have put the
number at upwards of 60%; of F2P gamers who never pay a dime. Freedom can have
unintended consequences, as one only needs to look at the world’s economy to
see the perils of deregulation done poorly. There is the story of the King who
says to his General ‘I am your King, I decree this war shall be won’. As the
General is walking away his second-in-command whispers to him jokingly ‘You
never told me that I could win wars simply by pronouncing them’. More than
anything it troubles me that gamers have such disregard for reality. Ragnar
Tornquist said: “It might be the right path for MMOs; as a consumer, as a
player, I appreciate it. As a developer I'm with Joel in thinking that it is
unfortunate for a lot of smaller companies or medium-sized companies."
F2P often works
similarly to the big gambling casinos. There are four types of gamers: The
Whale, the Everyman, the Gambler, and the Compulsive. Firstly, the Whale, for
whom spending hundreds or thousands of dollars is just good fun; they are the
holy grail of F2P players. Though just a small percentage they make or break
most F2P games. Secondly, there is the Everyman, this gamer is mostly dipping
their toes into the water. They might spend a few dollars here or there, but
mostly they’re playing for free. Thirdly, there is the Gambler; these types
play the odds and look for the best deals. Lastly, there
is the Compulsive spender who burns through money like water; this is often the
type that you will read stories about, the ones that make good copy for
advocates against gaming. This type tends to spend money on a whim, without
strategy or planning, they see a shiny object and they have to have it. There
is a fifth type, a secretive type that crosses all boundaries, this gamer is
often looking for the exploit, the incorrectly labeled or coded item that is
more than a simple bargain, often times breaking the game until fixed but this
gamer has little to no bearing on the economic side of F2P. They do, however,
bring notoriety to a game and name recognition for a smaller game can pay immense dividends. EVE Online, for example, is famous for individuals
who have swindled others.
Often times F2P
gets criticized for its ambiguity in both form and function. One developer can
mean something entirely different from another. While understandably this can
frustrate gamers who aren’t particularly sold on the business model; it’s not
surprising that there are growing pains. I find that games that seem to have
the most goodwill are the ones that have subscriptions with some free credit
for the cash shop every month alongside of the F2P model. The best games seem
to have subscriptions along with F2P with a ‘limited everything’, as I call it.
The ‘limited everything’ means that no part of the game is unplayable for the
F2P customers, however it is not as fleshed out as the subscription side, it
allows for freedom to see the game without giving away everything for free.
LOTRO, STO, and perhaps the soon to become F2P SWTOR all do the same things.
The obvious exception is Guild Wars 2, whether you believe that it is the
exception that proves the rule or not, I wouldn’t be surprised if Guild Wars 2
comes out with an option for subscription. It would likely be business driven
from a wish to have a steadier income flow, than the highs and lows of the cash
shop model.
In
many ways MMO’s are likely to be the micro proving grounds for economic
theories of the macro in video game business. According to the Washington Post last
month:
“In real life, if you want to know what’s happening with car sales, you
might call up a handful of car dealerships and ask what their sales are like
this month… In a virtual world, you just know everything. There’s no sampling,
there’s no error. It’s perfect information, said Dmitri Williams, a researcher
at the University of Southern California.” It’s not just economic theory
that benefits from using the video game genre to collate data according to a
Wall Street Journal article: ‘In the
largest public study of electronic gaming so far, Mark Blair at Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver, British Columbia, is analyzing the behavior of 150,000
people who play the popular online game called StarCraft II, pulling together
more than 1.5 billion data points of perception, attention, movement and
second-by-second decision-making. By analyzing so much game play, he hopes to
learn how people become experts in an online world. That may shed light on how
new knowledge and experience can become second nature, integrated into the way
we react to the world around us.
One thing to
realize is that innovation often comes from smaller companies, or at least less
well-known games. In Guild Wars 2, the combat its freeform play and its lack of
reliance on the trinity of tank, healer, and damager dealer is a signature.
However, other games have gone that route in one form or another. Vindictus,
Dragon Nest, Tera, TSW, are just a few of the games in recent years to step
away from the trinity and become looser and more freeform combat based. Often
times it is the smaller games and companies which can afford to be risky simply
because they need something to stand out from the crowd. Bungie before Halo,
Epic before Gears of War, Bioware before Baldur’s Gate, Eidos before Tomb
Raider; and the list goes on. Ragnar Tornquist said in the Eurogamer article: "On
the positive side, this brings change to MMOs, and the market needs it. MMOs
had stagnated, and that's something we tried to address as well. Hopefully that
things are stirring up now means that there can be new games, new types of
games, and those will often come from the smaller guys or the medium-sized
guys, and not the big ones, because the big ones are playing it safe."
The
most important idea behind innovation is how it is perceived. The Old Republic
innovated in story, and after the initial buzz it was largely ignored to the
point of switching from a positive to a negative in comments made by writers
and gamers alike. It is not enough to merely innovate; it must be innovation
that is well received by the audience or consumer base. It is akin to the
premiere show of a play. Initially there is a good buzz until word comes down
that a major critic has panned the show. In minutes the formerly packed hall is
empty. Perception is everything, and often much more important that the actual
innovation involved. Consider that the MMO’s likely to be the most innovative
are sandbox MMO’s. Sandbox MMO’s have very few rules and regulations; they are
much more a free world to do as the gamer desires. Consequentially it is much
more work for the dividends to pay off. The innovations of sandbox MMO’s are
perceived to be more akin to work than play and thus a large percentage of
gamers will often times stay away. Perception is everything in regards to innovation.
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