Fridays are for compiling a list of interesting reading across the week for the RPS readership’s attention to be posted on Sunday, because I almost certainly won’t be around and/or sober on Sunday due to some Best Man Duties and if I do it now, I can set it to go up automatically then and not worry about it any more. Let’s just hope I don’t do it in such a rush that I end up linking to some bally pop music.
- 2K Marin’s Steve Gaynor writes about what he describes as Single A Games. As in games which are neither the hyper-budget AAA nor the deliberately restricted aesthetics of the underground indie/retro scenes. Cases in point, Zeno Clash and The Path. He wonders whether this is a sustainable new niche between the two. The comments thread is also interesting, to say the least, as Jonathan Blow notes it’s almost certainly Zeno Clash making enough cash to pay for its team. Of course, there’s an expense of living aspect to that too. SF is a little bit more expensive than Chile.
- Gamasutra publishes an off-cut from the book Vintage Games, this time a length piece about the origin of Rogue and what followed it. Good stuff, and clearly something I always like.
- Webcomic about my occasional nom de plume Ada Lovelace. Part of me suspects she may have been the first games journalist, in that she seemed to grasp that something like the modern videogame was out there. I may be reaching.
- Comments-threader Helm writes about the artistic aesthetics of ancient adventure games. Pictures are down at the time of writing this, which is somewhat sad.
- Picked up from the comments thread about Qwak – which you really should bloody well play - there’s an interview with its developer about its history, touching on a lot of indie-centric topics.
- This was mentioned in the podcast, but think it’s worth lobbing here too. The Tale of Tales have a think about the nature of games some more. It’s a more subtle and radical argument than you may initially think, if a little semantic and one-hand-clapping. Single player games aren’t games. They’re actually more akin to tests. There’s something there, even if you have to reject it for other reasons.
- It’s been Plans Versus Zombies’ week. In which case, let’s join the celebration with The Examiner’s interview with Popcap about it. I think I’m the only member of RPS to not write about it yet. I suspect we’ll do a verdict, but it’s just plain lovely. In case anyone was wondering what I made of it. I also find Tall nut sexy.
- Not really about Videogames, but this New Yorker article about asymmetrical warfare – as in, David Goliath – around Basketball is dazzlingly written and a fascinating piece of journalism. Anything that ties Laurence of Arabia with something called Full-court-press has my attention. I got it from this thread about the Darkfall situation. Since I’m sort of involved with it, I’m not saying anything else about it. At least, yet.
- So, at the wedding – and this is a last minute edit -the first dance was this: Bobby Darin’s Beyond The Sea. Well, at the time of writing “Will be”. But still – it’s beautiful, it’s human and these things matter… and was done for nowt to do with Bioshock, though if it becomes a midnight rumble with mutants, we’re well up for it. Congratulations to Peter and Josie.
Failed. But who cares?
Related Stories:
Undead dolphin hacker, the people not finishing games issue is actually a serious problem. We saw a lot of it in the post about the stats on Steam and a good example in the post about the first Mafia game, where the infamous race still causes people nightmares. Dismissing people as just lousy gamers doesn’t help anyone.
And the solution is simple: just add an adjustable difficulty level to your game.
Then again, it should also be easy to let people skip all those logos at the start of the game, or to quit to desktop in one click, or… well, you know.
Regarding Jonathan Blow’s comments, maybe if he sold his game at a reasonable price he’d end up with more sales. I was very much looking forward to the game and bought it for a tenner (£ sterling) and was quite disappointed at how short it was. If it was a fiver I’d have no problem, and I’d expect he’d get a lot more sales.
I think some of these indie developers perhaps are so attached to their product and have worked so hard that they feel it’s worth more than it is, and this is counter-productive when it comes to sales. Crayon Physics Deluxe has come out at £16 on steam, that’s absolutely absurd. I’d buy that game in a heartbeat at 5 quid, it’s great fun and is really well designed but come on, £16?
If I recall, Left 4 Deads sales went up 3000% when they had a 50% off sale so lower cost = more sales = more profits. Start selling these things at more appropriate prices and they’ll shift more units. I very much doubt the added profit from overpricing outweighs the added sales you’d get from making it reasonably priced.
Sonic Goo: its a lot more complicated than difficulty settings
i remember when i tried Mafia, the very first mission took me like 5 tries until i got used to the city map and controls (this one was difficult because of a design flaw, dont put a freaking timed mission without giving the player a chance to learn the basics)
then they send me to play taxiboy for like an hour (again a stupid design decision, like the old fps stupidity of “Marine, your mission is to infiltrate and obliterate hell, you will have to fight gigantic demons and vicious demigods and unrelenting cybernetic-zombie-ninjas, any allies present will die before doing anything useful, here is your load out, a bb gun, 3 bullets and a hairspray, good luck” i don’t need to start with the bfg but gimme an assault rifle and “some” ammo at least)
when i was about to quit they give me a bat and tell me to go blow something up (cool! i thought), i started having fun!
and theeen that they tell me to go back to taxi ppl around, well “screw you!” i thought, and never played it again
that was waaaaay beyond a difficulty problem, adding an easy mode would not have fixed that crap, they just forgot we play games to have fun not to do boring chores to “earn” the right to have fun, thats why so many ppl say saints row 2 is better than gta4, yeah the production values are lower but if you are ever bored you can just grab someone and chuck them down a bridge, or start spraying shit everywhere, or go on a streaking rampage, or kill zombies, or … whatever
incidentally this is why i have very low expectations for mafia2
JKjoker: Wow. Totally your loss.
@Squiffy: yeah, yeah, i heard it a hundred times, uuh mafia this, uhhh mafia that, MY opinion is that it sucks donkey balls and that kind of beginning even if the rest is the best freaking chocolate in the world, it is still wrapped in shit and there is no way to have the good stuff without tasting and smelling the bad part
Nafe: Indie developers have to eat too. Unfortunately, there’s no-one paying us a wage y’know?
That’s not to say that some indie games aren’t overpriced, of course, but a blanket £5 or lower doesn’t necessarily translate into putting food on the table as Minter found out with the 360 release of Space Giraffe.
It’d be nice if reality sort of worked like that and we could afford to punt out games at a fiver a pop. Sadly, it just doesn’t.
As for Braid, bought it twice now – both on the 360 and the PC. Don’t regret a penny of it, absolutely worth the money. But then, I judge a game on how much I got out of it, not how much time it takes to play through. YMMV, of course.
“And the solution is simple: just add an adjustable difficulty level to your game.”
*nods sagely*
A friend of mine uses the motto “there’s no such thing as too easy” and I’m inclined to agree with that. It’s easy to get hung up and precious about your design when making games, but y’know, adding a difficulty level that goes right down to “no death” if necessary still keeps your design intact. It doesn’t take away the standard difficulty level.
So what if people choose to use a lower setting? Why deny someone some enjoyment over something so inconsequential?
I can’t see how that’s such a difficult concept for people making games to grasp yet like most accessibility issues, it is. One day!
There’s nothing worse than a game that’s too easy. It’s harmless to include a “retard” option but the main design should focus on providing a comfortable level of challenge for most levels of gamer. It’s far, far too uncommon for big budget games to provide a challenge on ANY setting these days, so I make a point of supporting any game of a genre I enjoy which is designed with challenge in mind.
Some of you guys are those people that were playing Doom on god mode with idkfa, aren’t you? I never could figure out the appeal of a braindead-easy game. Not that you shouldn’t have the option, but there’s little point in designing a game for people that can’t stand the idea of losing.
@Vinraith: yeah the lack of difficulty options and the fact they keep porting games without any attempt at optimizing them for pc (that includes adding mouse support AND tweaking the difficulty for the new, faster and more accurate controls)
so in the end we get action games that are too easy on pc because of the mouse, or strategy games that are too dumb because you cant micro with a gamepad (The last remnant is a sad case of this, a really nice game killed by dumbing down the unit control up to the point the AI takes all the big decisions and all you can do is tell it “use magic a little more” or “try to heal yourself”, that is, IF you get those option)
However i have good hopes that this will change soon (at least on the control thing) since developers are all “the PC is the next big thing!” now that everyone bought a netbook and the consoles are aging fast while the big financial blows MS and Sony took with the economic crisis on the background means a next generation of consoles is pretty much on hold if not canceled
@Oddbob
The thing is, are you absolutely certain that increasing the price increases the profit? I’m not asking it to be cheaper purely because I don’t want to fork out the cash. I genuinely think it’s a wise business decision. Once you’ve finished the game it’s all digital so you can price it however you like. If selling it at $20 nets you 5 sales and selling it at $10 nets you 15 sales then clearly the latter makes more sense.
I appreciate that you’re trying to earn a crust, infact I really enjoy buying indie games particularly because it feels like I’m supporting hardworking devs, not just some faceless corp like EA. However, I’m just not sure that some of these indie games are price right for the customer *or* the dev, you might be able to make way more money by making it cheap.
Out of interest Oddbob, do you, or anyone else for that matter, have any stats to back up either suggestion? If you’re selling a game at a certain price, how did you arrive at that decision. What made you think that was better than making it lower/higher?
Oh and with respect to Braid – I really enjoyed it but I don’t think longevity can be overlooked. I think 8 quid is more appropriate than ten, but I guess that’s being really picky. Fantastic game though, I just think indie devs need to sell at the most efficient and profitable price (which may mean lower) and not think of it as “based on the hard work, this game is worth £x”.
It’s probably worth pointing out that there IS something worse than a game that’s too easy. And that it’s a game that’s too hard.
If a game’s too easy, it gets boring more quickly, and isn’t quite as interesting or effective as it could be. But if a game’s too hard, it gets frustrating and you get stuck and you stop playing. Being too easy makes a game mediocre; being too hard breaks it.
I think that’s why mainstream games tend to be leaning towards easy-mode. Since a game that’s too hard ends up being MUCH worse than one that’s too easy. And given the bell curve of skill possessed by their audience of gamers, adding an extra Nintendo Hard level of difficulty to the top that will only appeal to the very tip of the curve isn’t really a justifiable expense.
i think both extremes are just as bad
but i think its nice to get a “nintendo hard” game once in a while as long as it gives you room to improve, infinite continues, correctly placed checkpoints and randomized challenges (no memorizing enemy positions)
the problem is the very idea of a “main-stream” game, its very difficult if not impossible to make a great game for a wide-spectrum public (the “masses” are stupid means that when you look at ppl in big groups, since each person excel at different things, you tend to average to the lowest common denominator, they cant help it), it would be better to make games for different kinds of gamers like they used to make, but to do that they first need to lower the dev costs so that they can break even with a few thousand units and that wont happen as long as they keep putting the graphics above everything
‘[Malcolm Gladwell] is genius, but I can’t quite figure out what he’s a genius at?’
He’s an explainer.
I think that it’s fair to assume that you’ll see experimentation from us going forward… nothing is off-limits. Are we going to do an MMO? Probably not – but you can never be sure.
Dear lord. Can you imagine a Popcap MMO? That would be it; game over for the entire human race. We’d all turn into pod people and never leave our PCs…
(well, moreso than ALREADY, at least)
“Can you imagine a Popcap MMO?”
Sure: Each of us is playing a peg, and we wait and chat until we’re hit by a ball.
I would play a blue peg of course. Orange is for pros.
“Of course, there’s an expense of living aspect to that too. SF is a little bit more expensive than Chile.”
This is true and a major factor in the feasibility of Zeno Clash.
@Nafe. I give my stuff away for nowt as I do indie dev because I enjoy it so I’ve no figures of my own I can reveal (other than War Twat made me £70 in donations which I was more than happy with)
Most Indie devs I know play with their pricing a bit rather than taking a standard “well, this is how much effort I put in, this is what I think I deserve” and settle on the price that works best for them.
It’s a funny market though. Puppygames stuff does better at the standard Indie price points, Bullet Candy sells better at around 3 Earth squids (how much of that is down to Steam presence is an unknown), Space Giraffe would have sold the same amount of copies whatever the price and me, I’ll continue to get the odd fiver here and there from kind folks.
There’s no across the board rule you can apply because it depends on a lot of factors – are you targeting a specific niche, is it likely to have a broad appeal, is it a five minute quickfire game or a thirty five hour epic, do you need to recoup x amount to make your next game etc…
A quick browse around the Indiegamer forums will give you a lot of anecdotal evidence (and in rare cases, hard figures) on price vs sales. Generally though, it just doesn’t follow that lower price=increased sales or increased profit. Honourable exceptions go to limited time offers such as the Steam sales – everyone likes a discount.
That’s not to say I don’t agree with you – a £5 or less game falls into complete no brainer for me and I’ll instapurchase without a second thought, a £10+ game not so.
From all I gather, people like me aren’t purchasing indie games in enough numbers to make that work for most folks.
@Vinraith
“Not that you shouldn’t have the option, but there’s little point in designing a game for people that can’t stand the idea of losing.”
It’s worth noting that difficulty levels are entirely relative. Where it starts getting muddy is that most people judge a perfect difficulty level as relative to their own skills. What you might find a challenge, I might find frustrating or on the other extreme, far too easy y’know? It’s not about whether someone can stand the idea of losing or not – it’s about folks abilities to play. I’m glad that you’re physically and mentally able to play hard games, it doesn’t follow that we should exclude those who can’t or judge them as having to use “retard” levels, right?
The truth is that everybody has different abilities and that goes from puzzle solving down to how physically able they are. The more people you can open up your game to, the more people who can play it. It’s why I have no qualms in writing a colour blind “friendly” version of one of my games, why I don’t object to putting in a practice mode where you simply can’t die. It leads to stuff like this which I’m immensely chuffed to see happen. It doesn’t effect the people who don’t use them but makes the difference between someone being able to play and experience a game and not.
So there is a massive point to doing this stuff.
It *enables* more people to play games. That’s a bloody good thing.
Rock Band does a good job of demonstrating the problems with difficulty levels. First, the different instruments have fairly disparate skill sets. Sure, the guitar and drums share an interface, but the controllers are radically different. And the vocals are really out there. For example, I can barely manage Easy on vocals, I can do Hard pretty well on guitar, and I can make it through most of the game on Expert on drums. And I know people who can sing whatever on Expert but can’t get their head around the guitar in the slightest.
Even sticking to one instrument, songs that are theoretically similar have difficulties vary quite a bit based on what strengths and weaknesses the player has. Can they pick consistently at high speed? Can they shift chords well? Can they do hammer-ons and pull-offs at speed? And then there’s the more game-based skills like use of Rock Energy for score multipliers or just survival. And knowledge of a song has a huge effect as well. How do you balance that?
The enjoyable songs are going to be a subset of what is balanced for a particular difficulty. So frequently a player will like to play about a third of the Tier 6 and 7 songs on Medium, a third of the Tier 3, 4, and 5 songs on Hard, and about a third of the Tier 1 and 2 songs on Expert. How do you balance that or even indicate it to the player?