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Sure, there's that precision potentially, but with touch you necessarily have to block what you're doing -- you have to get in your own way. And it can also be quite taxing on your fingers if you have to do a lot of dragging and that sort of thing; it can actually dry up your fingertips really quickly. It's halfway more intuitive, but also more difficult.
BC: Yeah, exactly. There are great advantages -- you get direct manipulation of things, but your hand is in the way. And on console or PC you've got this disconnected interaction with things via a crosshair or via a mouse point, but you're not obscuring things. When people move from product to product there's always a tradeoff, right?
It's a case of, when you add and subtract everything together what's the best experience? And I think that the convenience of mobile and the low price of mobile, and the ubiquity of the content and the connectivity kind of makes up for some of the issues around control and also the slightly lower power in the device.
Moving on from there, earlier you mentioned that you feel like Facebook is decreasingly a viable platform for browser games, as Zynga kind of has that tied up. What do you think is the alternate platform? Is it serving games yourself, or what?
BC: Browser? I don't know if there's anyone serving up something which is interesting in terms of growth. If we compare... for the same development costs you can make a game on mobile, or you could do a game distributed through Steam. I don't see anyone offering a viable alternative.
For me, Facebook Connect integration is extremely valuable, especially as user acquisition becomes more expensive on mobile. Facebook as a social graph and a viral method is going to be very useful for mobile and perhaps console games in the future, but I mean, who's setting up a browser game startup at the moment? There are very, very few people doing that.
And you know, Kongregate were bought, Bigpoint haven't really grown, sites like Miniclip haven't really grown that much, and probably are declining. Jagex haven't had any success since Runescape, Runescape's diminishing, and then you've got Habbo Hotel and the issues that they've had. So I don't see a lot of buzz or interest or excitement around browser games, or anyone really able to offer a viable alternative to Facebook.
Right, though I could foresee individual games being served that way.
BC: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Like if you play World of Warcraft in your browser, then that's a compelling thing. But I do wonder how network and internet caps are going to affect that sort of thing. Do you think that Apple is eventually going to have to or want to give up its Flash ban? Because I think as Facebook grows on mobile -- especially on iOS -- if developers want those games to be served they need Flash, essentially, or porting houses. Unless HTML5 really takes off.
BC: Yeah, and I think if you look at what Apple do when they abandon any proprietary technology -- like they abandoned floppy disks or they abandoned CDs -- I mean from a hardware point of view, Steve Jobs was talking about this a couple of years ago. It's difficult to know whether it's happening with Flash, but they seem to make the right bets when it comes to abandoning things that then become...
Obsolete.
BC: Obsolete, was the word I was looking for. So I think it's more likely that's just the influence of Apple not allowing you to access Flash on these fast-moving devices. But also the halo effect, the negative halo effect that that gives Flash, is more likely to just sweep Flash to one side and make HTML5 kind of standard. And we're already starting to see startups doing mobile games, or doing HTML5 games focused on mobile usage that run quite fast on iPads.
There was a bit of a one-two punch with Apple not allowing Flash, and then Adobe being like, "Flash... don't really know what to do with it! It's kind of here; we're not really going to support it that much. But you guys can take it!" It's been like one of Adobe's best, most used things that's not Photoshop, and yet they've never known what to do with it. You know, it's not a platform; it's not precisely a language. It's this weird thing that if they don't keep pushing it I could certainly see it going away.
BC: I mean look at Flash Video -- who is serving Flash Video now? Probably a small minority. And I browse the web on an iPad most of the time, and I very rarely come across video that can't be played. Even on all of the web sites, all of the gaming web sites that you assume are mostly being touched by a PC or a Mac, and I think that that transition will probably happen with games. I wouldn't make a game in Flash, even if I was making a browser game.
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And I bring BFH up because Ben Cousins was a lead designer on that.
That's exactly what I say to our team all the time.
"Sure, there's that precision potentially, but with touch you necessarily have to block what you're doing -- you have to get in your own way."
Like in all console FPS and TPS titles that obscure half the 60 fov screen with ADS or the character's backs.
Really? This is the future of monetization this F2P visionary sees as the way forward?
It doesn't come through in the text of the interview, but I sort of get the impression there was an awkward silence after Brandon's comment there :)
Honestly this whole frustration based Free 2 Play thing irks me. I can't really articulate why exactly, but something about it just seems wrong and a bit scummy.
Sup Rob. Because without that inconvenience of a grind you have a boring game. If you can get everything you want there is no tension, no struggle, no fun, no game. Its like being full and showered with candy. So you need to stagger the game and pace out the candy rewards... the unlocks, the attaboys, the new features. As soon as you add F2P to it, this appears arbitrary deliberate design decision to enhance profit. If you make it premium it appears a genius design decision to enhance the flow.
This is what I struggle with in the case of Ridiculous Fishing, for all intents its the perfect free to play game design. It even borrows what appears to be freemium consumables such as the 'head start' but puts it in the context of a premium game. To me that game could retain all of its game design decisions but equally exist as a F2P game. However I think the perception of the games deliberate grinding aspects would suddenly appear a bit more nefarious. You could make this 'grind' easier if you could pay money to unlock the infinite fishing line straight away, and thus the game is deliberately slowing your progress with a paywall.
I think you're confusing grind with challenge. All games should have some level of challenge, but it's only considered to be 'grind' when you're being asked to repeat the same tasks over and over before the game will allow you to 'continue', whatever that means in the context of your game. In a typical JRPG for example, most of the combat is roughly the same task, being repeated over the course of 20+ hours. This is not considered grinding by itself though. When people consider it to be a grind is either when too many similar battles are strung together in a row without advancing the plot, or when a really tough boss is thrown at you, forcing you to seek out random battles just to 'level up'. Grind is not just repeating gameplay, grind is repeating gameplay to the point where people feel like the only reason they're doing it is to make the game last longer.
I've been playing Ridiculous Fishing too, and one of the things I like about it (other than just that the core elements are fun) is that you always seem to be one or two games away from unlocking something new. Sure you could have made this freemium, but if people can always get something new with one or two more games (and there are no consumables that I can see), then why would anyone spend money on it? This is essentially what happened to Punch Quest. They released a good game into the world, with an ingame store, but balanced in such a way that you were unlocking content at a rate that nobody found annoying. So they never had a reason to buy coins. The same thing would happen if Ridiculous Fishing were freemium too, unless, like Mr Cousin's suggests, they were to balance it differently in order to be able to monetise speeding it up. And by different, I obviously mean worse. Less enjoyable.
My point is largely that developers have control over the rate of progress and its required to slow this rate down. If its freemium this rate tends to be viewed cynically as a way to force a sale, if it's premium then its accepted 'as the game'.
Punch Quest is a great example that's almost self consciously free. Its rate of unlock was at the point it didn't give me a chance to fully master or understand each new ability before being given another one. That's a problem that exists regardless of monetization. To label that as 'the reason' it didn't sell well is probably ignoring a few other factors.
A counter example is JPJR, designed as premium and switched to freemium without altering the game unlock structure to force more sales (as far as i know?), and still sits in the top 200 grossing of most territories. There are not many success stories like that, but to say you need to shove a spanner in a game to make freemium work is not correct.
I'm really confused about this one. Why exactly are premium game developers required to slow the rate of progress down? The only time I can imagine this being true is if they didn't have the content required to fill the duration of time they wanted people to play their game, but even then it's a choice, and not one that many players would thank them for. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't recall ever reading a review where the writer said "I'm glad that game really dragged on so that it lasted 12 hours instead of 8".
There may have been other factors in Punch Quest's story, but I'm basing my comments on their own words:
http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/when-a-huge-audience-isnt-e nough-how-punc
h-quest-tweaked-an-economy-into-pr
Everything in there suggests that the real solution to their monetisation problems was to drastically increase the price of the early items, making for more repetition without new content, and hence more of a grind.
Jetpack Joyride is an interesting case. I don't know if they changed the economy, but they did add many new expensive items, in addition to having a 90 metacritic score, a million paid downloads and tens of millions of free downloads. I'm also pretty sure the amount of time you'd have to play it to unlock everything would be far greater than Ridiculous Fishing, based on what I've seen thus far, so the comparison isn't a great one. If you're trying to claim that the kind of game that can get great reviews and a million paid downloads doesn't have to be as much of a grind as one that can't, then I'm not going to argue.
I don't think it is viewed more negatively if it is free. Probably the opposite actually.
Who wants to pay a lot for a game that is padded with lots of grinding? You can forgive it if the game is free.
Plenty of folks complained that WoW was too much of a grind, for example.
So you are not enveloped by every level, ability, weapon, puzzle, and piece of content at once.
But then your comment makes no concession to the idea of good or bad pacing, the idea that new content can be delivered at different rates, and the reality that if you're selling the ability to speed up this delivery rate, then by definition you have an incentive to make it slower than you otherwise would.
I don't think it's being all that cynical to recognise that incentive, especially when so many of the most successful social/freemium games are explicitly based on real-world waiting periods.
If you think about it, the spring-loaded joystick is more realistic than point and shoot. In real life, you would have to drag your sights across the field to focus on your target. Your wouldn't just shoot on point from where your eyes are looking. You have to physically drag your weapon so that your arms meet your gaze, and then you shoot. Also, if you were to slow your head and eyes down, you would see that they drag from Point A to Point B, and not jump from Point A to Point B, i.e. touching the screen and your character suddenly focuses on that point, without taking the road from Point A (where the camera was looking) to point B (where the camera is now looking).
So is Cousins correct about his point of precision? Absolutely, but the reality factor kicks in, which is a major factor in getting gamers to relate to their character and immerse themselves into the game.
Ultimately, I think in-game adverts will prevail and it's probably the best solution. I don't mean a pop up mid game, I mean within a game, a billboard that's running an advert - or in a racing game, the bridge has an advert on etc etc etc - advert space assigned in game and dynamically loaded according to who's paid for a slot. It needs to be done right still, I mean a billboard advertising washing up powder as you walk into Orgrimmar might impact the immersion somewhat :)