"Keep It Simple, Stupid" – David Braben on Added Value Services

[tramazi]

I dont nthink they're rubbish myself, Gaming became a bit run of the mill in the last few years (imo) but at last we're starting to see really innovative things such as phsycological gaming effects being brought in, character design or storylines worthy of a movie.

What I am finding though is that games nowadays (such as Far Cry and Skyrim - which are both very good games to play) are made easy to play. I think this is for a number of reasons, IE the player gets a sense of achievemnt from the game (Even though he is helped all the way through it), all of the content gets seen by the person who bought it (And why not, you buy a game so you're entitled to see all of the special effects and storyline etc) also the company wants to make profits, so making a game that cant be completed isnt good. Because of this though I think we're seeing the dumbing down of some games to get as much sales as possible.

The above is something I dont want to happen to Elite, I want Elite to be difficult, I want Elite to be like actually exploring the universe, I want the feeling that there may be things I may never find or that at any point my player could die and the auto save wont put me back at the place I was just before I died. I want to feel that the next planet I visit or the next ship I pirate might offer something that isnt part of the instruction book. Most of all though I want to have to work hard to complete my game and not be hand-held through it.

Far Cry - 30
Skyrim - 30
Silent Hunter 4 - £30 (I played the previous titles but then the devs noticed it was a good game so they replaced gameplay with graphical bling to get more buyers)
Civ 5 - Gameplay sacrificed for graphics (£35)
Hearts of Iron - Top game but then gameplay sacrificed for gameplay with later versions (£25)


I try before I buy nowadays I have paid an awful lot of money to find out the game looks good but doesnt play better, graphics have no need to get beyond the graphics on RRT1 on the atari-ST asfaic, gameplay is most important.

Ok that killed an hour of work time

 

[Rafe Zetter]

Yeah I agree with this. As long as I can still stick the disk in another system and play it without being told "This disk is already registered to "Xbox A", please insert into "Xbox A" if you wish to play" (We have two Xboxes in our household).

And would prices really come down if the pre-owed market went. Activision hiked the price up on MW2, for no real justification, so I can't see prices ever coming down.

Without the pre-owned market, the game publishers would know that you have no other option, so prices won't go down but will probably go up, and stay up for longer. Games are now pushing £50 for a new game, often for little more than a couple of dozen hours playthru, with the option to redo the same game at a harder level; a scam (to my eyes) that consumers keep falling for rather than insisting on more content.

I'm not against a good price for good content; I played World of Warcraft for over seven years @ £8.99 a month plus expansion costs, so I'm no stranger to forking out for a game; BUT from the last few modern warfare type games I've played, they seem to be little more than a thinly veiled counterstrike whereby the main core of the game is the multiuser online battles rather than the single player game.

Game publishers are greedy, and price their goods as high as they think they can get away with; and because there will always be people who have that kind of spare cash and queue all night for the latest release, they will ALWAYS treat you like sheep...

to be shorn as soon as you are ripe.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

This is why digital distribution is such a welcoming thing for publishers/developers as it cuts out a lot of the middle men, allowing the publisher to sell directly to the consumer without the need to pay for physical goods - which in return, allows for the price point to come down. However this isn't yet widely accessible on console's, so for now we need to find ways to entice people to purchase new games at retail - and serialised discs is a way of building upon and making more widely accessible what publishers such as EA are already doing.

I'm sorry I don't wish to be rude, but if you think the above will remain a constant you are naive.

Publishers reduce digital distribution prices not because it's cheaper for them, but to play "the long game". Once it becomes the normal way to get games, prices will rise to the same prices we have now. It's only cheaper now (marginally) to increase sales and to condition people to do it that way. Drug dealers use this dirty tactic all the time (which is pretty much how I view most publishers).

As far as entice people to buy new, other people have said it here - they are TOO EXPENSIVE - price it @ £20 and i'll buy it new, no problem, no qualms, because that's about the price point I buy them now; either new: reduced or pre-owned depending on where I'm at in my "lets buy another game" cycle.

I'm really hoping the crowdfunding concept takes off in a big way and we get back to the old days of games being made by gamers FOR gamers, people who view their creation as sacrosanct and won't release it until it's actually ready, without the publishers getting their claws into it; because anything less and the backers will howl for blood.

I gladly backed ED for £100 (and Star Citizen for a similar amount) partly for this reason, if basement coders see that it does pay to go independent and that a good portion of the gaming community will back you; even with a 2 year wait for the right title, you don't have to go to bed with the devil and face compromise and a smaller profit too.

I'm supremely glad David B went this route as we will get his game with his vision, when he says it's ready.

Take your time David, us gamers have got your back

 

[Malicar]

The only game I think I've bought a retail copy of for PC in the last 24 months was Diablo 3. I buy everything from STEAM now. I do however have console retail games. I don't ever buy used games myself. I just wait for them to drop in price. If they end up repacked and sold for higher prices like Mass Effect 3 I just avoid them period.

Prices on STEAM can't be beat. I spent over $150 on the Xmas deal alone. Even games I didn't really need to buy. EB games doesn't even stock retail PC games around here anymore. No real reason either with direct and or 3rd party etailers. Only reason I bought any console retail products is because XBOX doesn't have a day 1 digital distribution setup. Nearest store to me is a 1 hour drive both ways. I would have to drive even further to find more niche titles.

STEAM won't magically get more expensive in the long run either. Daily, Weekly, Weekend, and holiday specials have become the norm. As a Canadian I look forward to the US thanksgiving now. Hell even October has halloween specials. Even if Microsoft gets rid of used sales of retail discs on 720 I would still buy it. Again I don't buy used games as I don't like bringing something home that doesn't work then have to drive another hour to replace it. Or perhaps the disc is scratched, I really don't want my player working 2x as hard just to read it. That is just me though and my quirks

Plus I really love all these great Indy games coming out. Chivalry may aswell be GOTY IMO. Brilliant indy game. Endless Space was another I really enjoyed. My fav 4X since Moo2 and it's an indy title. STEAM really has ushered in a new erra of gaming and is allowing almost anyone to make and develop games. It's also pushing the modding scene and a few other areas of innovation all for free.

 

[bullfrog]

Re the OP, I think that David may need to relinquish the unique discs idea because it is bad timing, the whole business is going to move to online distribution and that will happen within the decade before unique discs will get up and running. At this point, when there is no physical object in the players hand, it will be possible psychologically to sell the idea of licensing games to players rather than as individual copies, if, as he says, there is a pricing benefit. I can see his perspective that if someone plays a game then the creator of the game deserves a royalty to reward them and facillitate future creativity.

This raises the future possibility of cloud gaming, where a player can access their game from anywhere they can prove their identity, which I suspect is a principle which will apply to many services and will eventually take us to ubiquitous biometric scanners but that is by the by. For now accounts and passwords will have to do. Steam is on the case with this already and even allows some horse trading among its customers tied into a complex loyalty scheme.

What you have to bear in mind is that people generally are very fed up with being hogtied and taken for a ride by Machiavellian entrepreneurs the world over and are not going to settle willingly for a system which they feel restricts their freedoms or abuses their custom. Any licensing system has to please the customer as its primary priority. Personally I am aghast at the kind of idiocy I have seen in DVDs which have the gall to lecture me about piracy when I bought the wretched DVD which is why I have to sit through that propaganda. The only people who wont have to sit through that rubbish are the pirates and their customers who will have it edited out. Punishing the innocent and compliant for the crimes of others is a not only a perverse class error it is entirely counterproductive, stupider than stupid and an abuse of power. Better have been recent DVDs which thank people for actually buying them, even so it is a mistake in the media business to make your product your battlefield. Your product needs to be just what people want at a price they cannot resist, no more and no less. You cannot bully people into spending money. Its a big problem for monetarist idealism that people who focus on money lose touch with their human priorities and make the wrong decisions. As a general principle I think it is always better to give human beings' concerns the priority and use money wisely to help make them happen not give money the priority and make human beings live their lives subserving the calculation of profit.

I think its true for example that big budget games lately (last 10 years) have been increasingly dumbed down by stereotype-myopia from the investors, they have only been funding the likes of FPS and other "winner" genres and titles. They have no feel for the games themselves or for niche genres and markets because they are obsessed by money and enjoy that not games, so they dont have the awareness to decide which games should be funded.

Angry Birds must have surprised a lot of people but IMHO the fact is the pigs who stole the eggs are a parody of suits and fat cats and bankers etc ie the thieving hoarders and the angry birds are 'us', the ordinary people who are fed up with being messed about by piggies.

The Angry Birds are harbingers of change and the power of the masses. That is why and how people backed two space sims in the last few months.

I also want to try to qualify Davids off the cuff analysis in the OP that games makers are competitors. IMHO its like saying musicians are competitors, the fact is that if people like your stuff they will buy it and if two producers make similar stuff then fans will buy both not buy one and not the other. The competitor paradigm applies to big budget utility items like cars and fridges that people dont need two of, they only choose one. In the games business it also applies to platform hardware like XBox Playstation and PC Graphics cards and other hardware, but games are cheaper by comparison and not mutually exclusive like say CPU brands, once someone is invested in a platform IMHO they will get all the games that they like the look of, just as a music fan into punk new wave will have many punk albums, they wont restrict themselves to only listening to Public Image and refuse to buy the Buzzcocks. So having multiple titles in a genre is synergistic and expands the market for the genre on a given platform and is not a competition in the sense that for one to win the other must lose, that is not how it works in my game purchasing anyway. There is no doubt that games producers need to be aware of innovations in their genre to stay in the running but that is about understanding their customers and keeping their customers satisfied and interested in their creation and is not about immitating or defeating another title in the same genre.

 

[Zplintz]

The price for any/all games would come down if the price we were prepared to pay were lower - ie If you refuse to buy a game because it is overpriced then the prices would drop.

The reason that games (including digital downloads), cost as much as they do is because we are paying that much. This is also the reason that games cost on avg 2 x the amount offered for the same game 6 months later.

Personally I think the amount of money lost to software developers through piracy is a great deal less than the large software developers would have you believe. If there are 1 million illegal copies of UberSquish III in the world you shouldn't automatically assume that those 1 million copies would have been bought if no illegal copies were available. As with the music and film industry - because its free people are far less picky in the packages they acquire - often getting hold of far more material than they could realistically hope to use.

This ultimately has little affect on the prices (IMO) which is set by whatever the developing companies to whatever they think they can get away with. (Of course this applies to every single product sold in the world today not just software - and I am not suggesting that this is wrong but I think we need to be careful we don't cloud the issues with the excuses given to journalists by the huge production houses.

A far better answer to any questions about the costs of your product is simply "This is the price we think people are prepared to pay because our product is worth this much".

For example I have seen nothing in the cost model/pledge rewards for Elite D that leads me to believe that FD are either being unreasonable or dishonest - I may be slightly biased though (*grin) but my expectations are extremely high (*bigger grin).

 

[psuamier]

Re the OP, I think that David may need to relinquish the unique discs idea because it is bad timing, the whole business is going to move to online distribution and that will happen within the decade before unique discs will get up and running. At this point, when there is no physical object in the players hand, it will be possible psychologically to sell the idea of licensing games to players rather than as individual copies, if, as he says, there is a pricing benefit. I can see his perspective that if someone plays a game then the creator of the game deserves a royalty to reward them and facillitate future creativity.

No. Simply no. Quite the contrary is the case as you can read on the Steam thread. Especially for games I (and many others) prefer to have something physical in hand in addition to the virtual fun. There are so many regions in the world with bad internet connection that this kind of distribution will be available far longer than only 10 years in the future. It's a fact that low populated areas have difficulties with internet connection as it's not economic to build up infrastructure in these regions. Also the mass mobile connections are still much too slow (and much too expensive) for larger downloads.

This raises the future possibility of cloud gaming, where a player can access their game from anywhere they can prove their identity, which I suspect is a principle which will apply to many services and will eventually take us to ubiquitous biometric scanners but that is by the by. For now accounts and passwords will have to do. Steam is on the case with this already and even allows some horse trading among its customers tied into a complex loyalty scheme.

It's much more complex than this. Many platforms are coming back, Windows sales are dropping considerably, PC market sales are going down. While authentication is easy, even simply bying a game is not localized. Most require a credit card still being quite uncommon in many countries (mainly due to being more expensive). The main problem though is the question how to easily move from one device to another (for whatever reasons). If I have to redownload everything a huge amount of resources is wasted.

What you have to bear in mind is that people generally are very fed up with being hogtied and taken for a ride by Machiavellian entrepreneurs the world over and are not going to settle willingly for a system which they feel restricts their freedoms or abuses their custom. Any licensing system has to please the customer as its primary priority.

I agree that the customer might want to have that (though many do not seem to care at all as long as they can buy the game). But the licensing is primarily made to protect the game producer (and/or publisher), not to satisfy the customer nowadays.

Though I find DVD/BD just a vessel to deliver the game and less a copy-protection theme. Pirating a game is only interesting as long as it's economical interesting for the pirate. The customer itself will decide if the positive side of systems like steam will lead to more fair game distributions in addition to physical boxes if required (yes they will be more expensive and I'm ready to pay the extra-price for it).

...
Your product needs to be just what people want at a price they cannot resist, no more and no less. You cannot bully people into spending money. Its a big problem for monetarist idealism that people who focus on money lose touch with their human priorities and make the wrong decisions. As a general principle I think it is always better to give human beings' concerns the priority and use money wisely to help make them happen not give money the priority and make human beings live their lives subserving the calculation of profit.

Completely agree on that part. It has to be balanced so both the producer as well as the customer will be satisfied. Unfortunately I don't see this to happen any near time in the future (Politics here in germany are absolutely crazy about changes for their "publishers benefit protection" rights).

So having multiple titles in a genre is synergistic and expands the market for the genre on a given platform and is not a competition in the sense that for one to win the other must lose, that is not how it works in my game purchasing anyway. There is no doubt that games producers need to be aware of innovations in their genre to stay in the running but that is about understanding their customers and keeping their customers satisfied and interested in their creation and is not about immitating or defeating another title in the same genre.

Many sides of the coin come into play here. As the replay interest of many old games (or retro-games) shows that game producer can live in non-innovative sectors. Certainly many large game producers adapt themselves while smaller ones actually being innovative. Also it's difficult to decide wether to do small addictive or the larger ones (the only ones I play except some game-in-game sometimes). Still even within the many game variants a customer usually only plays one at a time, so competiition is not only within the same genre or the same game type (small/large). Frontier certainly will want to gain customer normally only playing these casual games (in a way like "want to try something new ?").

 

[Oddball]

My pennies worth....

I have said for many years now that copy protection does not work whether it be a Steam server authentication type system, manual protection or any other system for that matter. There are always going to be people who are for it (the devs) and people who are against it (the consumers). But it needn't be like this today.

There is another solution and that is to make the game free for all with no form of DRM what-so-ever. This may sound stupid but read on....

Sponsorship can generate massive amounts of money so if developers can can attract sponsors to advertise their products in their games the income is assured. Also, in this day and age, digital only downloads save the developers even more money because there are no reproduction/packaging costs.

The devs are happy because they get their income in advance from the sponsors.

The sponsors are happy because they get a huge circulation because the game is free.

The consumers are happy because they get the game for free with no DRM at all.

Everyone is happy. (Apart from the crackers because for the first time they have nothing to do). Or am I missing something.....

 

[Ashton Black]

My pennies worth....

I have said for many years now that copy protection does not work whether it be a Steam server authentication type system, manual protection or any other system for that matter. There are always going to be people who are for it (the devs) and people who are against it (the consumers). But it needn't be like this today.

There is another solution and that is to make the game free for all with no form of DRM what-so-ever. This may sound stupid but read on....

Sponsorship can generate massive amounts of money so if developers can can attract sponsors to advertise their products in their games the income is assured. Also, in this day and age, digital only downloads save the developers even more money because there are no reproduction/packaging costs.

The devs are happy because they get their income in advance from the sponsors.

The sponsors are happy because they get a huge circulation because the game is free.

The consumers are happy because they get the game for free with no DRM at all.

Everyone is happy. (Apart from the crackers because for the first time they have nothing to do). Or am I missing something.....

Sponsorship in a game set in the future? How would that work?
the Ford Cobra Mk III? Lave Station, brought to you by Daz Ultra?
It's a nice idea, but not for a sci-fi game, I suspect.

 

[Oddball]

Sponsorship in a game set in the future? How would that work?

Have a think about it. I'm sure you could come up with some ideas of your own.

 

[Zedd]

I recon downloads registered with a user account should be the way to go. Something you could install and play on another pc and one instance of your user allowed at a time. Something you could re download and reinstall if your pc went boom. Its got to be the cheapest fastest and most secure against pirates too, (not those from the game that is.....). If you want a disc copy why not download an image file and make one yourself?
As for the second hand games market, the new X-Box will be hammering the first nails in the coffin for that by having a one time activation code making second hand useless to anyone else.
I havent bought many games for ps3 or xbox recently and if I did , there wouldnt be much chance of an 'original' game, they all seem to be derivatives of what has been before. Plus theres nothing like Elite on either. Long Live The PC.

 

[Bifford]

One thing I detest are games that insist you have the cd/dvd in the drive to play. Serialisation of the game disc is a very fine idea as long as it writes it's serialisation into the game executable and you no longer need the cd/dvd except to re-install (or play on another console if such is your want).

On my PC I use GameJackal. This works out which bits of the game disc are accessed during startup and keeps that information on the harddrive so it is accessed rather than the disc.

Perfectly legal because all the games are owned by me. It also stops the disc and dvd drive wearing out! I've got friends who hammered WoW (or other similar games) so much when it came out that the DVD had to be replaced.

So yes, i'm all for serialised discs, as long as we don't have to keep it in the drive when starting/playing the game!

 

[The Land]

Anything that limits the re-use of a software product or makes it more difficult will make it more difficult to shift units. It's easier to buy a new game for £40 with the expectation that when you're bored of it you can sell it on for £10. Indeed, it's easier to buy a new game for £40 when you're trading one in for £10 so you only have to find £30 cash.

 

[Bromley86]

Anyone else think David's about to perform a five finger death punch in that OP-linked photo?

On topic, whilst I like being able to buy second hand games, I personally think it's a bad model for the industry assuming there's no subscription model in place. In the example you give Land, the point is the new game wouldn't cost £40 if (a) resales were prevented and (b) consumers spent roughly the same amount on games before and after the change.

Even if consumers spent less because each player might risk spending an extra £10 every quarter on a second hand disk, but won't risk spending an extra £40 a year on a new disk, it might still make sense. I.e. if that £40 price was based on the developer selling 100,000 units. For every extra 1 sale the developer now makes because someone can't buy a 2nd hand copy, the sale price could be reduced. So if there are another 20,000 sales at publisher price because the 2nd hand market is closed, that means the price could be dropped to £33.33 and the publisher could still make what they'd planned to earlier. Call it £35 to allow for the cost of the dvd & case.

 

[Ashton Black]

Have a think about it. I'm sure you could come up with some ideas of your own.

Yes plenty, but none that don't break the emersion between the real world and the game world. Not a good idea, from a storyline perspective.

 

[Thargon]

Yes, I am for digital downloads (especially so if it helps secure the financial future of Frontier Developments), but part of me still wants to hold that Elite IV box (which is ever so slightly, a little small to hold all the manuals, fiction, key cards, galaxy map, disk and who knows what else), which pops open to reveal it's hidden treasure within.

I too like physical disks - I don't like completely relying on "The Cloud". Steam works in some areas, but not others - and can be especially annoying when it decides to "Sync" and crash the app you are currently trying to play!

 

[lemonrev]

I agree fully with the article, The Last Part of it however If a movie required me or anyone else to put a code into the menu at first run then i think people would not pay for the physical goods and just rip everything or get something with out that code.

However saying this I do believe a code should be required only when playing online or to enter once like steam does it so every time you go to reinstall a game the game has the code linked to the account and allows you to use the disk as a way to progress the installation of said game to install its main files before say going online at all and downloading extra files that the game might need for say a patch.

On the console market, I believe the physical copy of the disk in machine is as much of a drm as you need since if you dont have the disk in the drive it wont play or at least wont let you load it up. But you do need a way to check to see if the game has been copied and a code wont stop that because that too can be passed with cracked or copied game. I think when they first started to come out with drm for disks even on pc i remember they had like a error or disk bug type thing happing where if you put the disk in and it did not have those bugs or errors then the game would see that and just load up and say put the correct disk in drive.

I Too hate the used market because theres soo many idots out there that scratch the living crap out of disks and then sell them off to the vender and just go do it again to another disk. Meaning that the person who cames into the store wanting said used game gets a disk that barely can be used to play or even install a game.

I am another person who likes orgional copies of games. That is why i paid money to get a physical good plus it allows me to install files on my computer first before having to download updated ones from the net .

The way consoles are presently traveling are either going to go down that silly one way track mind set and just try to use every part of it untill the people playing on them just get fed up, Im actually hoping this happens more often than any other time.

I HATE console players coming into the world of pc's and ports of games that require you to use a gamepad or to make it available to those idots who want to play with a game pad.

Now dont get me wrong some games actually are much better played with a gamepad but as it stands far too many stupid games have come out and abuse the rights over the keyboard to gamepad and the limitation on say a gamepad compared to a keyboard is soo narrow its hard to miss.

BAH, Thanks for the updates i should go back and read them all. I Dont tend to visit that side of things much as the forum was what i thought was the only source of info that was coming out about the game besides that lave radio podcast .

Thanks.

 

[SuperG]

I disagree, first I use steam to on PC and I play on console. I buy a lot of games and retail means a lot of cases and disk that make up a pile.

So for me I would prefere going for digital distribution

And to me its a great thing to know that retail games using steam are acount bound and not disk.

So I got metro2033 want to play it agian on a fresh new OS install. Have steam running. Klik metro2033 in my game libary and it install from internet 9GB.

Easy smeasy no disk jokkin an after hour I can play. You have to do it once. So next time I can play all my installed games without diskjokkin.

My brothers Ps3 BF3 disk damage cant play anymore.

So we play cod instead. On PS3 with disk on.

My brother now keeps to digital distribution because of this problem.
My its more because I buy a lot of games.

Second hand isue is with pure digital distribution also solved.
That where the game industy shift to. Bit slow.
So xb_one was bit to early . We are in long migretion time.

 

[Thargon]

I disagree, first I use steam to on PC and I play on console. I buy a lot of games and retail means a lot of cases and disk that make up a pile.

So for me I would prefere going for digital distribution

And to me its a great thing to know that retail games using steam are acount bound and not disk.

So I got metro2033 want to play it agian on a fresh new OS install. Have steam running. Klik metro2033 in my game libary and it install from internet 9GB.

Easy smeasy no disk jokkin an after hour I can play. You have to do it once. So next time I can play all my installed games without diskjokkin.

My brothers Ps3 BF3 disk damage cant play anymore.

So we play cod instead. On PS3 with disk on.

My brother now keeps to digital distribution because of this problem.
My its more because I buy a lot of games.

Second hand isue is with pure digital distribution also solved.
That where the game industy shift to. Bit slow.
So xb_one was bit to early . We are in long migretion time.

Nice, and what happens when your internet connection dies? Oh, you can't play you say? Hmm DRM needed to unlock the game. Can't play you say? This is the achilles heel of DRM, and hence why I hate it.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Nice, and what happens when your internet connection dies? Oh, you can't play you say? Hmm DRM needed to unlock the game. Can't play you say? This is the achilles heel of DRM, and hence why I hate it.

Steam allows you to continue playing offline.

ED will continue to work offline - according to KS information you only need to be online once to authenticate during installation.