Gaming on mobile platforms
The marriage of the decade may not involve glossy
paper celebrities at all, but rather video games and mobile platforms. This includes
cell phones, but also handheld consoles and touch-screen hardware.
As such the iPhone/iPod
Touch is the game platform nobody expected. The hardware is good, Apple has integrated
the distribution method into the hardware, and the revenue sharing scheme is
significantly better than for other mobile media.
Even if the machines themselves are powerful, the
design limitations of mobile platforms do not appear to be quite compatible
with our current gameplay mechanisms -- the screens are small, and the keyboard
does not allow one to play with more than two fingers. Touch screen-based
phones offer a much more comfortable screen, but don't solve the control issue.
However, as always, specialized game mechanisms will surely appear. The use of
the accelerometers in the iPhone is a smart way to circumvent the control issue
and explains the success of Crash
Bandicoot Nitro Kart on this platform.
We can wager that new forms of games will emerge that
circumvent the weaknesses of mobile phones: role-playing or strategy games that
do not require complex graphics and can work with limited interfaces.
WAP-, SMS- or MMS-based games, applications
complementing more traditional games, games utilizing integrated cameras, co-op
puzzle games where each individual holds some of the pieces, gambling games, social
games, etc. While these examples are only speculation, I want to emphasize the
fact that innovation always arises where we least expect it to.
Mobile games are probably the next horizon of
multiplayer gaming as it is the only platform that, in the medium term, can
open multiplayer gaming to the true mass market.
The downloadable content breakthrough
I already addressed this trend in a previous article.
Its impact on game design and on the economic model of game commercialization
will probably be significant. Fiction? Hardly. It is already the case with
massively multiplayer games, as well as with the numerous free games relying on
microtransactions to generate revenue.
EA DICE's Battlefield Heroes
This business model has been pioneered
by Asian publishers and developers and is likely to sweep our shores. It is, in
fact, the path taken by EA for Battlefield
Heroes, one of the forthcoming titles in the Battlefield series developed by the talented Swedish studio DICE.
Single player games are making use of downloadable
content: new equipment, levels, missions, game modes, settings, opponents, etc.
There's every chance this will become increasingly extensive.
We can easily
predict the impact of this development on the economic model for publishers;
that is to say, significant revenue generated by a game will no longer
necessarily stop with the initial distribution of the box.
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If the issue isn't taken seriously it might perhaps result in automatic high age restrictions on the mmo genre.
A good read indeed!
The big problem is the quality of life of a lot of people in general.
http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/qna.html
How would you redesign poker to motivate people to play less? Can you cure gambling addiction by having people gamble with redesigned games? Gamblers Anonymous would disagree.
"The arrival of cooperative gaming modes has allowed players of different skill levels to have fun together. I think it is one of the main reasons for Counter-Strike's success, where players of any level are playing together as a team."
The first sentence in this quote makes perfect sense. The second sentence is...well, have you ever played Counter-Strike? We're talking about the same Counter-Strike, right? The one where new players get killed in under a minute and spend 80% of their time waiting for the round to end so they can killed again really fast - that Counter-Strike?
Hardly the first example that pops to mind of a game that's inviting to players of all skill levels. It's a nitpick, but I couldn't not say it.
I agree, and I see a real opportunity for the industry here. An idea I've been knocking around for a while now (http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2008/06/living-world-massively-single-pla
yer.html) is the possibility of merging the business model of MMORPGs with the gameplay design of open-world games.
The typical business model for developers of single-player games today is built around making one big, complex game, then dropping that product completely (or with at most a couple of bits of downloadable content) to go make some other different game, and hoping that one of them is a commercial hit before the studio runs out of money. The "Living World" business model would be to create a large gameworld space and then, over months and years, extend that gameworld with high-quality content in the same way that MMORPG operators continuously refresh and expand their content.
This model would appear to offer two advantages over today's usual model of making a series of unrelated single-player games and hoping one of them goes big:
1. It designs in a long-term revenue stream for paying back the usually-steep initial development costs, rather than requiring one-time sales to be strong enough to cover all costs. This reduces investment risk.
2. It minimizes loss of revenue due to piracy by shifting revenue generation from a one-time sale of copyable content to repeated sales of download-only content.
Adopting this model would create a game development studio whose core business process is to fund a mid-sized team to create a large single-player gameworld, then spin off to a smaller external development group the long-term enhancement of that gameworld through high-quality DLC in return for a percentage of the income generated by DLC sales. In effect, this builds the business around monetizing the most capable modders.
We can already see small versions of this starting to appear, as with making DLC production for Little Big Planet part of the business plan. It remains to be seen whether some developers will choose to structure their entire business on this model, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that someone's already headed down this path.
However, many games tend to reward addiction, or long term play. For instance TF2, when I play a lot my Steam Rating is "10 - EAGLES SCREAM!" Wow, I'm cool! But when I don't play for a couple of weeks it says something like:
"2 - Nearly Lifeless" Wow, I suck.
Now, I know the Steam Rating is pointless, it's not skill level, but how much you have played over the past couple of weeks. Of course it is meant as a purposeful jab to the user to keep them playing.
In the end, the industry has to create addictive games, the user has to want to play it. But it is the user that must be responsible for his or her time and social well being. So supporting and encouraging addiction may be the real problem. Perhaps reminding the player to take a break after playing for long periods.
Maybe the Steam Rating should say:
10- Dude get a life!
or
2 - Thanks for playing!
So I do agree with Bill, addiction usually is a symptom of problem with the user but games that reward addiction also tend to anger those players with less time on their hands and/or work against them being responsible.
So great article and good comment Bill, i agree.
I couldn't agree more!!!
You know, TV has a lot of channels and a lot of shows on each channel. I bet that if I tried to watch every episode of every TV show one time (no reruns), even if I never needed to leave my TV, and I skipped all the commercials, and I were independently wealthy and lonely enough to do it, I would still die before reaching that goal. In fact, the amount of unwatched material would go up the longer I tried it, because they make new episodes and new shows faster and faster, on more and more channels, and I can only watch one thing at a time.
So does my TV set need a warning? No, it absolutely does not. I need to take control of my life. I need to be responsible on a very basic level for my own actions.
good reading! In this case one should mention the phenomenon called eSports (electronic sports), which relies on multiplayer gaming and that has to deal with the problems mentioned by the author:
1. Cheaters who abuse a game's bugs or design errors
2. Bad players or sore losers who log off during a session and leave their team-mates hanging
3. Pro gamers who have mastered a game so thoroughly that their presence leaves no chance of survival to newcomers... or to anyone else!
4. Players who lack the team spirit necessary for tactical play
5. Thugs with rude or even outright xenophobic or racist behavior
The eSports legues have developed solutions to get along with these problems and to ensure a good development of social gaming. Take the ESL for instance, more than 1000 volontary admins keep the system work. Maybe this should be pointed out the next time!
Best regards
Ibo
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