Sam and Max - one of the few episodic game series

Warning – this is a long post. I tend to wax poetic in these kinds of things, taking the long road because I like the scenery. So for the TL:DR crowd: I want more episodic games. Anyway, here we go:

So, I read comic books every other week, when I make it around to getting to the comic shop to pick up new issues. I like letting them build up two or three weeks because I only collect a few books and like to read comics for two hours instead of just a few minutes.

The thing about comics is that I’m glad there aren’t new comics to read every day, but I’m glad I don’t have to wait a year or even six months to read new comics. They come out at just the right speed – just often enough that I can keep up with them but also savor the anticipation right before the next issue of a particularly engaging storyline. I like the serial system. It’s one of my favorite things about comics and it means that I get to look forward to a small pleasure every few weeks.

So, why can’t games do that?

Now, before the flames – there have been some serial games. The most successful, of course, is probably the multi-season “Sam and Max” adventure game series, but they aren’t the only notable entry. There are also Half-Life 2 episodes, the Penny Arcade game, and a few others. But aside from Sam and Max, none of these games are really great hits. The Half-Life 2 episodes probably could have been if the “episodes” came out more than once every two and a half years.

My fear is that game developers are going to look at debacles like the Half-Life 2 episodes and think that episodic gaming isn’t a reliable business model. But I don’t know that any developer has really tried it the right way – less like games and more like television or comics, with reliable release schedules, yearly seasons, and cheap back catalogues.

The thing that makes comics and television successful is the subplot and overarching plot mechanic. I like that I can pick up a new comic and reasonably understand what’s going on within a few issues, because subplots are always starting all the time. I don’t particularly want to start a new series in the middle of a subplot, but I can rest assured that a new sub-plot will start soon. This makes it easy for new readers to pick up an old series. Outside of the subplots, there are always mega-arcs, or overarching arcs going on in the background. If you think about television series, you often have a season-long arc, split up into single or double episode sub-plots. I think this model is the first thing that must be understood when sitting down to design an episodic game: short subplots, long mega-arcs.

With television it’s easy to see where each overarching arc begins and ends – there is one per season. One can reliably guess that the major plot of season one will differ from season two, and two from three, etc. With comics there is less differentiation between different mega-arcs, simply because there are no seasons – a comic is produced on a regular schedule all year round. Some comics have different schedules (three issues a month, one issue a month, bimonthly, etc.) but the series never stops unless it’s cancelled.

So with those ideas in mind, how do we use them to create a good episodic game and the accompanying business model? Well, the most basic idea we have to start with is the idea of progression. As new episodes come out, the player has to feel like they are moving forward in some fashion. Whether this means that the storyline advances, the mechanics change, the difficulty increases – these things matter by genre and by game, but for our purposes, a general sense of progression in some aspect of the game is integral to making an episodic game work. This seems like such an obvious idea that it pains me a little to even mention it, but it’s so important that we can’t continue our discussion without it.

Next, I want to talk about genre, because genre will help us understand what type of progression we want to focus on. Not only will this help us determine what production resources we’ll need to reliably and regularly deliver new episodes, but it will also help us consider which genres might be better suited for an episodic experience.

Now, as I understand it, games basically take three major production cycles to produce: tool-creation, design, and art assets. Tool-creation (with some high-level game design) seems to come first. You can’t make a first person shooter game without a level editor of some sort. Next, the levels are designed, and after that the levels are created and the art assets are produced. I realize that this is a very general overview, but it gives us a basic idea of how the process works so we can start looking at how an episodic game might differ from a traditional game.

Both a standard game and an episodic game must begin with tool creation. This is a given. You can’t make a game without tools, so we have to start there. However, once that phase is done, here is where we split. Ideally, an episodic game would like to reuse as many resources as possible for every episode, so this should be taken into account when designing and making tools. If we choose a first person shooter genre, this means being able to cleverly arrange the same set pieces in multiple ways, so as to minimize what I believe to be the most time consuming aspect of the process after tool-creation: art assets.

Keeping those two ideas in mind, progression and clever reuse, let’s start talking about genre. Each type of genre is afforded a different method of progression. Keep in mind that there are essentially two levels of progression – one type that each new episode MUST have, and another type that doesn’t have to be put in every episode, but must be put in regularly enough that the player also feels a sense of secondary progression (Note, the one major genre I’ve overlooked here is MMOs, as those are already under constant progression):

First Person Shooter, Western Role Playing Game, Action, Action Adventure

Must have: New Areas, More Storyline

Occasionally have: New abilities, new weapons and equipment, and new enemies

Adventure

Must have: New puzzles

Occasionally have: New areas and characters

Real Time Strategy, Strategy, and Tactics

Must have: New scenarios

Occasionally have: New units

Puzzle

Must have: New puzzles (usually meaning new mechanics, but this is a wide-genre)

Occasionally have: Graphical upgrades

Sports

Must have: New players

Occasionally have: New mechanics

Simulation and Racing

Must have: New scenarios (or tracks)

Occasionally have: New units

Fighting Games

Must Have: New abilities, new characters, new storyline

Occasionally Have: new areas, more characters and abilities

Japanese Role Playing Games

Must have: New storylines, new equipment

Occasionally have: New areas, new enemies

Okay, so first things first – this list doesn’t cover all the genres – there are so many nowadays and they are blending together in so many ways that it’s almost getting as bad as trying to label music (Neo-grunge electronica opera, anyone?), but I tried to cover the basics.

So let’s start by looking at each genre one by one to see if it’s a feasible candidate for episodic releases. Remember, we want to focus on two major things here: maintaining a sense of progression and minimizing the creation of expensive resources. The best genres for episodic game play, from a business perspective (and also a player perspective because it means releases will be more reliable and more frequent) are those that give the maximum sense of progression while using the minimum of new and expensive resources.

First Person Shooter, Western RPG, Action, Action Adventure

Since we need new areas on a regular basis for these types of games, we’re going to need a dedicated art and design staff. Even though we plan to reuse textures and objects as much as possible, we still need to give players something new in every episode. We’ll also need a writer to keep pumping new storylines. The writer is important, since a storyline that constantly moves forward is one of the easiest ways to maintain the illusion of progression. Players may be willing to retread old areas if they have a new reason to be there – as long as the storyline is compelling players won’t mind retreading old ground as much. Now, occasionally, new abilities, enemies, and equipment must also be created, so there is not much in episodic versions of these games that we could cut from a traditional production staff.

This makes these, perhaps with the exception of WRPGs and Action, as poor candidates for episodic gaming. WRPG’s are saved because they usually exist in a “persistent” world (rather than “level” based) that came be incrementally expanded, thus reusing much of the old content. Action games would probably be cut too, with the exception of a side-scroller game like the metroidvania series that allows levels to be built with reused tile sets. First person shooter games could be a candidate, but my instinct tells me that the art assets needed would be too much, since much of the enjoyment of FPS games rests on killing new things with new weapons in new places and unlike the WRPG, the FPS player is less motivated to retread old ground for a storyline carrot. This, of course, is assuming a single-player campaign. A multiplayer FPS system could work, but players are already trained to receive new FPS content in the form of DLC rather than subscription or episodes.  One could argue the same for WRPG players, but I believe the storyline carrot is strong enough that this could be overcome.

The last thing to note here is the subset of action games, the hack and slash, or dungeon crawler. This genre is a stellar candidate for episodic gaming, since the excitement from the game rests largely, like World of Warcraft (say what you want about WoW, it’s successful) or Diablo, not on the game mechanics, but on new content. The way you play WoW, Diablo, or Torchlight never changes (with the exception of major updates), but the areas in which you use those mechanics change regularly. (Note: I know that Torchlight and Diablo levels are randomly generated, but the assets these levels are made from are not). Since these games are a world that the player exists in – expanding the world expands the game. Coming up with storylines and the occasional new area seems vastly easier than creating new game mechanics.

Games that could work as episodes: Bethesda games, Bioware games, Metroidvanias, SNES-era Zelda

Games that probably wouldn’t work: Doom games, Crysis, 3D Action-adventure games

Adventure

Sam and Max is already doing this and they seem to have it down pretty well – the problem I see with their model is that I’d like to see smaller, more regular releases that never end, rather than more expensive episodes. One of the reasons I keep buying comics is because they are so cheap – 3 bucks doesn’t mean much to me. Over time, certainly, I’m sure I’d be chagrined at how much I’ve spent, but a player is much more likely to pay 3 dollars weekly than fifteen dollars monthly. It hits a different psychological price point. Aside from that, we can just assume this model is fine – new puzzles, new areas, obviously the staff found a way to make this business model feasible. This means a whole staff, though.  We can’t cut anything except the initial tool-makers (though I imagine they will still be needed for the occasional new tech). However, that’s more than we could say for the above genres, so it’s something at least. I’m not going to provide examples here because there is already a tested example.

Real Time Strategy, Strategy, and Tactics

RTS probably has the easiest content pipeline for creating new content (because the tools used to create these games are often so simple they can be released to the player base), but must struggle against players wishing to pay for that content. Since the genre is primarily multiplayer, the current expansion pack method will probably still reign for a long time. Strategy and Tactics are primarily single player games, in my opinion (the games are either turn-based or very long, which makes for poor multiplayer), so these could be candidates for episodic gaming assuming the storyline provided enough content to keep players playing and the new scenarios were interesting. These types of games would also have a good content pipeline and editing tools, but might suffer a little if the modding community is strong, since that minimizes the professional impetus to stifle the community in hopes of making more money. Still, I feel as though Strategy and Tactics could be good candidates for episodic game play, both because of the easier pipeline and natural tendency of these games to automatically break their game play into large several hour blocks anyhow, which would make new episodes a natural progression of their type.

Would probably work: Final fantasy tactics, Disgaea, Total War games

Probably wouldn’t work: Civilization, 4X games

Puzzle

I don’t see puzzle games as a good candidate for episodic game play. Subscriptions, possibly, but not episodes, simply because a sense of progression in a puzzle game comes from mastering ever increasingly complicated mechanics or a higher speed of the same mechanics. Not only does this most likely have a playability ceiling (Tetris gets pretty hard at higher levels), but the constant creation of new mechanics requires new tech and lots of new design, which is slow. Game “content” doesn’t really exist and cannot be easily expanded. Now, new puzzle games in the Professor Layton style (each puzzle is a separate piece, a storyline joins them) could be possible.

Could work: Professor Layton games, Ace Attorney games

Wouldn’t work: Tetris, Bejeweled, Plants v. Zombies, Braid

Sports

Sports games seem like they would be a given, considering the seasonal nature of professional sports. Each episode could be another matchup or two, based on your favorite teams. However, and this is essential, enough new content would need to be created that the player felt like they were getting enough for their money. If the only thing that changes is the teams and players, users might not feel the impetus to keep buying episodes. Not only that, since there is no real sense of “storyline” in sports games (with the exception of something like wrestling games based on the LOLDRAMA of professional wrestling leagues with “characters”), new mechanics are the only real way to show the player progression. Much like puzzle games, this would probably become unsustainable very quickly. Now, a sports game might work as an MMO, but would unlikely work as episodes. Yearly releases are of course possible, but this is already the accepted model for sports games.

Could work: Wresting games

Probably wouldn’t work: Traditional sports games

Simulation and Racing

Simulation and Racing games are strange things to lump together, but I lumped them together because they both seem to require the same things: new areas to use the same mechanics. For racing this is obvious, the game never changes – it’s negotiating new tracks with new vehicles that make the game interesting. The same with other simulation games – dog-fighting, flyers, etc – it’s the areas and vehicles that make it new and interesting to the player. This is another case where the addition of a storyline could add some needed sense of progression to the player. The only real hurdle to overcome here is this: players would need to believe that the new tracks or locations were worth purchasing. This could be a hard sell, so I feel as though the price point for these episodes would have to be lower than say, something like an RPG, for a player to bite. Since these games occasionally need new units (cars, planes) for the player to use, this could be overcome by having micro-episodes (tracks, levels) and macro-episodes (tracks, levels, and units) – these releases could overlap, with a discount to players who purchased all the micro episodes as they were released. It’s a complicated model and would require some player education, but I feel like it could work.

Could work: Racing games, Flight Sims

Probably wouldn’t work: games where the mechanics matter more than the levels – I’m not sure what these would be, but certainly they exist.

Fighting Games

I don’t think fighting games would work with this model, simply because so much new needs to be added to add more characters (new art, new tech, balancing and design), but there is little incentive for the player to purchase new episodes. The only real carrot is a continuing storyline, but fight game storylines have traditionally been tacked on as afterthoughts and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Could Work: none

Probably wouldn’t work: fighting games

Japanese Role Playing Games

I left these for last because I think these are the best candidate for episodic gaming. They keep the same mechanics and tool sets while adding new areas, items, and storylines as the game moves on. They have obsessive fan bases who would probably be likely to continually purchase new episodes as they are released, and, most importantly, storyline is a major factor in the sense of progression. Storyline is cheap and easy to produce and retains players who would be considering quitting. Not only that, there is a high sense of progression in these games that can easily be raised each month with higher numbers.

Could Work: Most JRPGs

Probably wouldn’t work: Some games, depending on the combat systems

Other Essential things to Consider

Okay, so this is getting a bit long, but we still have one major thing to think about before we all sit down to make millions designing our new hit episodic games: episode pricing and content delivery.

A stellar system for episode delivery, and I can’t stress this enough, is the singular most important thing when it comes to user adoption of the episodic model. Let’s say that again, just so we’re all sure how important this is.

Got it? Good.

Episode delivery should be as seamless and hassle free as possible. The fewer clicks between player’s wallets and playing the game, the less time they have to wait, the better. What this means is this: episodes should preload themselves through a system like Steam, so as soon as a new episode is released, even before it is purchased, it should preload onto player systems if possible. How would that be managed? I envision it like this:

Each game should come with a Steam-like platform (or even use Steam) to manage the content outside the game itself. This client would run in the background, minimized to the taskbar, at all times, just like Steam. When a new episode is available, the episode is preloaded on to the player machine and ready to purchase. Obviously, players must be given an option to turn off this preload, but players should be educated to the advantages of the preloading system. Episodes should be released early in the morning (wee hours) or during the workday, with the idea that once the player gets ready to play it, all they have to do it click a button to purchase the episode (since payment information is already loaded) and start playing the game instantly. Even if a preloading option is not available, the game should be optimized to download new areas in the background while the game is playing so players can begin each new episode as soon as possible.

Episodic games should be treated like comic books or television shows – small, bite-size bits for the adult gamer, finish able in one sitting in a few hours. They should be ready to play as soon as they player decides to play them. They should be released on a regular basis, monthly, if possible, though a bi-weekly or weekly schedule might be even better, if this type of development could be sustained.

Seasons

Ideally episodic games would function like comic books – they never end. However, in the event that tech needs to be overhauled or refreshed, the television model of seasons could be used, with the game running for half a year, then taking a half-year break to refresh tech. Episodes should be able to be purchased individually or with a “season” pass that prepays for all episodes in a season up front. Also, once a new season begins, players should be able to purchase a previous season at a discount.

Conclusion (for now?)

So, this post has already gotten epic – it’s licking the heels of 3500 words already. It’s time to wrap it up. I feel as though I’ve done my best to describe the ideas here clearly and accurately, but invariably I’ve missed something. Please leave your questions, comments, flames, and nerd-rages in the comment field below.

Thanks for reading!

Today over lunch I was talking with my buddy Shawn about Steam, the social network/storefront for titles by Valve and other games, too. Shawn and I use Steam to play all sorts of games, and consider the Steam interface vastly superior to Windows Live, which does the same sort of thing, but uses that annoying fake currency that so many companies use to psychologically distance you from your money (after all, you’re not spending money, you’re spending Microsoft points! Except, your points cost you money. It’s stupid and works stupidly well, especially on children).

But Steam is useful: it offers a great service for free, and brings me the only targeted advertising I actually appreciate: their weekly video game specials. I don’t mind seeing them, because the deals are so good, and I’ve bought games through their weekend specials more than once.

But as Shawn and I mulled over lunch, we wondered how Steam would succeed as a subscription service. You know, monthly payment, access to any games you wanted on Steam, that kind of thing. Would be profitable for the company? For the players? What were the ups and downs of that kind of thing? How would developers be compensated, especially independent developers?

We got to thinking about it. Obviously, we don’t know the hard numbers, so like all the ideas on this blog, discussion is encouraged, but please, no flames over the hard numbers. Hard numbers are put up to aid in discussion, not to be the singular point of contention.

The reason we chose to discuss Steam, instead of Windows Live, or the new (and not yet launched) Battle.net, or even something like XFire, was because Steam already has built into it the core feature that would be needed to properly make a subscription fee work for both players and developers: playtime tracking. Steam tracks how long games are played, both by player and total game time. This information would be key to determining how much a developer made for including their game in this theoretical monthly subscription service. You can see the stats from Steam’s play tracking system here.

Basically, it works like this: Say you have 100,000 users all paying 10 bucks a month for a Steam subscription. Say you also have 4 entities: Steam (Valve), Developer A, B, and C. Steam’s gross take per month is a cool million for all those subscribers. Obviously, these numbers are contrived, don’t reflect taxes, and other costs, I know, we’re just talking, so chill. They take their cut for running the service, 30 percent, let’s say, just like Apple and their App Store, and that leaves 70 percent of that million, or 700,000 to distribute between Developer A, B, and C.

Now, say that Developer A’s game is a First Person Shooter. It kicks ass, and all the kids are playing it, which is great, because Developer A spent a truckload of money making it. Luckily, they made a good game and people want to play it.

Developer B, on the other hand, spent about three days slapping together a crappy puzzle game. It’s awful and no one wants to play. Who cares, right? They spent three days on it.

Developer C created a simple Real-Time Strategy game that has a hard learning curve, so it’s slow to learn, but once players learn it, they have a blast and play it for hours.

So what happens? We take the 700,000 left over after Steam’s cut and split it between the three developers, based on percentage of total playtime. If those 100,000 players spent 700,000 hours (a number we’re picking because the math is easy) playing the three games in the month, then that equals to about a dollar an hour for the Developers. But not all three games were played at the same percentages.

Developer A’s FPS did great in the beginning of the month, then evened out as the month went on. Their Total playtime was 78% of the total game hours spent on Steam that month.

Developer B’s crappy game sucked, so hardly anyone played it. 3%

Developer C’s game wasn’t very popular at first, but as word of mouth that the game was fun and worth a play spread, the percentage rose. 19%

Based on these percentages, the three developers earn for the month in question:
Developer A: $546,000
Developer B: $21,000
Developer C: $133,000
Okay, so these are just throwaway numbers, you say. Fine. Let’s try it with some real numbers, taken from Steam’s website. Also, to make the math easier on me, let’s make some assumptions:

Assumption 1: Let’s use one day, instead of a month, since I don’t wanna do the math for a whole month. This means that instead of 10 bucks to split up per player per month, we have 33 cents per player per day.

Assumption 2: Also, for ease of use, let’s say that each player only plays one game in their playtime in one day, instead of splitting their playtime between games.

Assumption 3: Let’s assume that all users spend an equal amount of time for any game they play, so 1 user = 1 hour. This makes the percentages easier to calculate, and saves me math.

Assumption 4: Let’s limit it to a few games, since I don’t want to do more math than I have to do.

So, here is a screenshot of Steam’s stats page that I took when I was getting ready to do these calculations:

This screenshot says that the highest unique users on Steam, at the time I took the screenshot, was 1,748,066. Now, based on our assumptions, that would mean Steam would take in 33 cents per user, so the total take would be 576,861.78 for today for a subscription service.

Less Steam’s 30 percent cut, we have 403,803.25 to distribute between the developers today.

Counter-Strike: Source, 89681 users, 0.051% of the total Steam usage time, or $20593.97

Counter-Strike, 65389 users, 0.037% of the total Steam usage time, or $14940.72

Empire: Total War, 9491 users, 0.005% of the total Steam usage time, or $2019.01

Killing Floor, 2032 users, 0.001% of the total Steam usage time, or $403.80

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, 597 users, 0.0003% of total Steam usage time, or $121.14

Obviously, these numbers are very rough estimates (due to rounding percentages, and all that noise), and they are also based of playtime on a random Tuesday. Steam numbers probably fluctuate quite a bit, especially over weekends. However, they can give us a few other ideas:

Here are the current prices for these five games on Steam:
Counter-Strike Source – 19.99
Counter-Strike – 9.99
Empire: Total War – 49.99
Killing Floor –17.99
Call of Duty 4 –39.99

We can use these prices to determine the break even number for these games, based on playtime, if we pretend these numbers are good. If developers cannot move this many copies of the game per day, they are losing money by not going with the subscription model.

Counter-Strike: Source needs to sell 1030.21 copies per day in order to break even with what the game would be making via this subscription model. I doubt they are selling that many copies a day.

Counter-Strike – 1495.56 copies per day. I really doubt they are selling that many copies a day, especially for an old game.

Empire: Total War – 40.38 copies per day
Killing Floor – 22 copies per day
Call of Duty 4 – 3 copies per day.

So what do these numbers tell us? Several things, but first, some caveats:

Valve games do better on Steam, because that’s how Valve games are played. Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike can only be played over Steam, so obviously those numbers are going to be much higher, since they represent the total player base for the game (aside from private servers), rather than just the player base that is using Steam to play the game. The data for Call of Duty 4 and Empire: Total War, which can be played without Steam, should be taken with a grain of salt. I don’t have access to the total player numbers of those games separate from Steam. Obviously, those numbers would make a significant difference.

Is this a model that would really benefit smaller developers? Well, it depends on costs. Assuming these numbers were the same for every day in a year (which would never happen, but again, it makes the math easier): a small developer that was able to maintain 500 users a day would make 113.06 per day, or 3391.94 per month, or 41268.69 per year. That’s an acceptable (maybe a little low) salary if you’re a one man shop, but won’t work for even two people. This means that, roughly, you need to command at least 500 users a day per person, in order to be able to barely support a small studio on this model. That’s probably not feasible for a small company, especially one just starting out.

Keep in mind, however, that I went with the low end of the price spectrum in my calculations, at 10 bucks per user per month. I think that users would support more, possibly even up to 25 bucks a month, for all the games they could play. It depends on what the market would allow, really. At 25 bucks a month, that same 500 users per day nets your small company 103171.73 per year, which is much more feasible for a two person (or three person, if you all wanted to rough it and live and work together in the same space, like a rented house or something).

These numbers would probably shift due to players widening their game choices, too, since if players had access to everything for one monthly fee, they would probably try more games. Most people on Steam play Counter-Strike Source because they already own it and don’t have to pay anything else for it. If the cost of playing a new game was nothing more than the time it took to try it out (because they already paying a subscription fee), players would probably try more games, because the psychological “price” is free.

Anyhow, since we’ve already passed the math speculation phase of our discussion and answered our “could this work?” question (answer: possibly?), let’s talk about the benefits and drawbacks of the system:

Benefit: this system encourages game developers to continue to support their games, because more support (new content, community building, etc.) means more playtime, which means a higher percentage of the profits. This also means that companies would be more likely to continue to support a working title than create a large expansion patch and arbitrarily calling it a new game. I’m looking at you, Left 4 Dead 2.

Benefit: this system encourages better games. Games are one of the few marketplaces where better content directly equals better sales. If a huge blockbuster movie comes out over a summer, it will probably recoup its costs, simply because of the economics of film. People will pay to see a movie in the theater, whether it sucks or not, simply based on a huge marketing campaign or established IP. Games aren’t like that, possibly because of their price points, possibly because gamers are sick of getting burned on awful games. Bad reviews can easily kill a game, because many gamers wait for reviews.

Sure, some game companies can sell millions of copies of a game on brand name alone (Blizzard Entertainment), but those companies are rare. How often do gamers buy a game just because EA made it? Or Relic? Or someone else? Almost never. You wait for the game to come out and you wait for the reviews. Fanboys aside, gamers are pretty discerning purchasers.

However, if money made on a game was based entirely on playtime, companies would be much more focused on making good games that kept players engaged.

Benefit: it’s nice to have a budget: Everyone likes to know what their monthly bills are going to be. It makes budgeting easier. If I know I can play any game on Steam for 25 bucks a month, and that’s my total gaming budget each month, it’s going to mean I play a lot more games, a wide variety of games, but also probably spend more time gaming. And since the more time I spent playing the game, the less it costs me per hour (please, no gaming has the hidden cost of wasting time arguments, so does television. we all need to relax sometimes. the method isn’t important), which is great.

Benefit: it’s good for companies, because it encourages them to trim the fat from their business models. If I can release a game on Steam that gets me 100 hours of playtime per month, but costs me 80 of those hours for overhead, I’m going to figure out how to streamline my infrastructure to cut costs so I can net more than 20 hours a month profit. This doesn’t mean cutting quality, however, since I don’t want to drop under those 100 hours a month.

Benefit: it encourages game companies to focus on good gameplay, rather than flashy graphics. Flashy graphics cost a lot, and probably sell games in the “buy a game once” model. However, when profits are about sustaining players, spending the entire budget on flashy graphics and making an awful game means that I’ll see an initial surge in gameplay, but once players realize my game sucks, they’ll stop playing.

Benefit: it keeps games on the market longer. Sometimes I still wanna play Warcraft 2 or Lords of the Realm 2 or Heroes of Might and Magic 3, because those games rocked. Right now, my continued interest in those games nets Blizzard, Sierra, and New World Computing exactly no cash per month since I already own them. If old games find even a small percentage of playtime on the subscription service, companies still make money, even for old games they no longer support.

So those are some of the benefits, what about possible drawbacks?

Possible Drawback: Gaming of the system: companies using botted computers to play their games 24×7 to skew playtime percentages. Sure, this is a drawback. However (and I’m sick of doing math, so I’m just gonna wing this question), I’m not sure if the 25 buck a month investment for the company (to set up a subscription account per computer) would show a return on that investment. Would 25 bucks a month for a subscription (plus computing costs) return at least 25 bucks a month in higher percentages? I doubt it. The numbers just don’t work. Plus, Steam could easily spot accounts that spent 24×7 logged into a game and remove their playtime from the overall monthly percentage. I doubt this would be an issue.

Possible Drawback: more gaming timesinks, ala MMORPGs. Since MMOs already use a subscription service, they are a good place to look for timesinks, and they are full of them. Travel time, cooldowns, raid lockout timers, they use them all to make sure you can’t accomplish as much as you want to accomplish in the game, so you keep playing it. Would all games adopt timesinks to encourage players to keep playing? Possibly.

However, the real question is this: would players put up with it if they can just play another game that’s fun and doesn’t use artificial timesinks to keep them playing? I’m not sure, this is one that would definitely have to be tested. One thing to note, however, is that more content =/= timesink. I hope that developers would simply make more content for their games, instead of more timesinks. Still, it’s hard to know without a test.

Possible Drawback: Wal-Mart syndrome. If Steam is the place to go to play games, then Steam gets to call the shots. Once they become big enough, they can push people around, just like Wal-Mart can push around companies that do business with them. This is a tough drawback to avoid, and I’m not sure how to solve it.

On the other side, a subscription service would only work in Steam had all the hot new games. If a subscription service meant that I would have to wait to play a new game, then the subscription service isn’t worth it.

Possible Drawback: no game ownership. With the current “buy a game once” model, once I buy a game, I can play it forever, as long as I can get it to run on my hardware (Damn you, Vista 64!). However, a subscription-based service doesn’t work like that, even with current subscription gaming models, MMOs. If I stop paying for World of Warcraft, I can’t play the game anymore. This bothers me, because I like to go back and play old games sometimes, and it would be nice if those games were free. There are several options for solving this:

1. Give games an expiration date and after that, make them free. Say that once a game was on Steam for 15 years (or some other reasonable number, we don’t want another Digital Millennium Copyright Act pile of BS) it would no longer require a subscription fee to play. Or better yet, say that once a game was no longer supported, it would become free. Hell, abadonware rules do this sort of thing anyway. This option probably isn’t feasible, however.

2. Give players “unlock a game forever” points after so many months of paying the subscription fee. Just like companies give bonuses for being with them for awhile (I hear employees of Blizzard get a sword after 5 years – that sure beats a crappy watch or a plaque) , let players build up “unlock points” for service. If they decide to leave the subscription model, they can use these “unlock points” to take a few games with them. Think of them like frequent flyer miles or something like that.

3. Continue to allow players to purchase games outside the subscription model. Thus, if Dr. Jack Goobertop wants to play Counter-Strike and doesn’t want any other games, let him buy Counter-Strike. There’s no reason that both a subscription service and a “buy a game once” model can’t coexist, so long as revenues from those who bought the game once, but still played the game online, only came from subscription-based players.

Possible Drawback: this idea won’t work because of the numbers. Yes, that could be a problem, but one best suited toward the financial wizards. Unless you are such a wizard and have all the numbers, shut up. No one knows if this would work until someone tries it.

Anyway, that’s all I have for know. This post is already way too long.

This is an idea that requires more thought, but definitely something to look into. I’m sure companies already are looking for this, including Steam. Why else would Steam already be tracking all those stats?

-mispeled out.

We plan to use a Flash Game License for Spirit of the Staircase, the game we’ve almost finished. However, we’re not quite sure yet how we want to approach the next project. Obviously our intent is to fund all the hours we’re putting into it somehow, but whether we use a FGL is still up in the air.

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about Gabe Newell’s community funded projects idea. Newell would like to use Steam (no surprise, since he works for Valve), but a community not based on an established game company seems a better idea, if only to make the legal mumbo jumbo easier. Recently an independent community-funded interface was launched, called Kickstarter, and it looks promising.

On Kickstarter, people with project ideas can put up a project and ask the community to help fund it. It doesn’t have to be just games – there are novels, music, travel projects, and all kinds of other stuff on there. The site is young, but growing, and there are already a number of success stories on there. In return for backing projects, project leaders are able to set up tiered rewards for different levels of backer funding: a copy of a CD for ten bucks, mentioned in the special thanks for 100 bucks, that kind of thing. It’s not investing, so the project manager keeps the rights to any IP s/he creates, which makes it an interesting experiment for a creative business model. The way that Kickstarter greenlights funding for projects is also very interesting, but I’ll let you read that for yourself.

Will it work? I’m not sure. It depends if the community is willing to support independent projects or not. So far, however, the site seems to be doing well, which is great to see.

Anyway, the reason that I bring it up: my brother and I have considered using Kickstarter to fund our next game, after Spirit of the Staircase is released. We haven’t decided yet, but for creative people with good ideas, Kickstarter looks like a cool way to get them off the ground.

Now, seven years later, I’m moving again. Sure, I’ve moved four other times between leaving for college and now, but this time seems different. It’s the first time I’m moving into a place that I’m actually excited about: a loft in downtown Des Moines – it’s a beautiful place, polished concrete floors, granite counters, old brick walls, soaring windows, vaulted ceilings, a nice view. I’m excited.

But, good god: moving. My girlfriend and I have so much stuff. I know that two people will always have more stuff than just one, but we’ve rented a fourteen-foot truck and I’m a little worried it’s not going to be enough.

We aren’t people who collect things, either, but stuff tends to accumulate somehow. I can count the number of DVDs we have on my fingers. We don’t own any CDs anymore – all our music is digital. So are most of our movies. I try to keep my video game media as digital as I can, but sometimes I can’t bring myself to throw out all those pretty boxes.

But as I was packing my seventh box of books last night, I took a break to look into the Amazon Kindle and Sony E-Reader. I’ve looked at them before, but I couldn’t help but wish for digital books while taking a break from packing my physical ones. I’m not ready to take the plunge yet, but I’ll probably be there soon, once the Digital Rights Management gets a little more lax. After reading recently about the hidden number of downloads some Kindle books have, I’m not at all eager to spend money in that arena.

But, ebooks are a big enough topic that I could devote an entire post to them, and I don’t want to get too sidetracked. This post is about stuff and the digital movement and ebooks are only one aspect of the whole thing.

I have to admit, I don’t understand physical collectors, no matter what they collect – DVDs, books, CDs, angel-shaped ceramics, pets or anything else. I’m not talking about stuff in general – I have stuff that I use everyday, but collections, that’s what I don’t quite get.

Going paperless has been a business goal for a number of years and many people have almost gotten there. But I advocate taking the paperless movement even further for all types of media – movies, music, books, and any other information that can be displayed on a screen or played through a speaker.

Ideally, I’d like to get rid of all my books, my last few DVDs, my video game boxes, and everything else. All I want is a desktop, a laptop, a phone, a television, a ebook device, a mobile gaming device, and maybe a console system. I don’t want to own any of the media for those devices. I want to download it all, or have it available online. I’m sick of stacks of books, movies in various formats, game boxes, and all the rest. I want everything digital. I’m sick of stuff.

Of course, this isn’t my idea – it’s already happening. Steam, iTunes, and other digital distributors are taking off. I just want it to happen faster. But when it comes to changing culture, it always comes down to cold card cash.

As a dirty example: there’s a reason that organic farming and other pro-environment causes haven’t taken off (a digital lifestyle could be looked at as a pro-environment cause), and it’s simply about money. You can talk the advantages (for the land, the consumer, and the farmer) of organic farming until you’re blue in the face and the customer will nod her head and go along with you, until she gets to the cash register and notices all her organic veggies cost a dollar or two more.

Instead, people try to change cultural expectations with awareness drives and guilt-mongering articles and all that other touchy-feely crap that doesn’t do a goddamn thing. Change the money, friends. Give organic farmers a tax break. Raise the taxes of non-organic farms. Lower the price at the cash register. Do that and everyone will be organic within a few short years.

The same thing needs to happen to encourage a digital lifestyle. Change the money. The average consumer isn’t stuff-phobic like me – the average consumer likes to own and collect stuff. Talking up the cultural advantages of a digital lifestyle aren’t enough. Change the cash.

Ebooks, digital movies, and digital music should be half the price of a physical copy. At least. Cheaper is better. In fact, the cheaper the price point, the more people will buy it. If nothing else, the iPhone App Store is teaching us that. Put up a game up at five bucks and twenty people will buy it. Drop the price to 99 cents and a hundred people will buy it. In the end, you make more by moving more units. And it’s not like digital sales cost you a dime. The old laws of supply are demand are thrown on their heads when supply is digitally infinite.

Of course, there are disadvantages to the digital movement – DRM is a problem, especially if a company goes out of business. Internet access is also an issue – if you don’t have it, you’re stuck. But those problems are being worked out. DRM seems to be losing – music can be bought DRM free and so can some video games. Web access is becoming more and more widespread – people are getting connected everywhere.

It’s an exciting time, but I wish it would speed up so I could purge as much stuff as possible. Cash incentives would help with this. So would offering consumers more value instead of more packaging, discs, paper, and other stuff.

I want to get rid of the rest of my stuff. In the meantime, you’ll find me cramming it into a truck, sighing, and dreaming of a digital lifestyle.

-m. out

p.s. come help me move. I’ll give you some stuff.