Console gaming general discussion thread

[Brian]

Basically, a 'post of the day' or 'interesting news' thread for this forum.

I'll start us off:

http://ilikecode.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/stupid-stupid-xbox/

[Dracos]

Games with no demos sell twice as much https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=us6OPbYtKBM#t=624s


Jesse is a pretty smart guy.  I had a class with him back in grad.  It's an interesting bit on the statistics there.

[Brian]

Plus, demos cost money.

It makes all kinds of logical sense that this is the case, but it makes me a bit sad.

Though, being honest, I don't ... often play demos anymore.

Well, one thought, even if it does bypass the console topic a bit:

Steam occasionally makes full games free-to-play for a weekend or something.  Which would eliminate the overhead for making a demo, but I'm not sure if I want to see that on consoles.

Something to think about.

[Grahf]

TotalBiscuit recently put out a video talking about pre-orders and things of that nature. It's primarily motivated by the recent hubbub surrounding the release of Aliens: Colonial Marine. It's long at a twenty minute runtime roughly, but I believe he raises some good points:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf5Uj4XIT1Y

[Dracos]

*eyes*

RANTON

man, this guy got a chip on his shoulder and speaks from a position of complete ignorance on just so many topics I don't even know where to begin.  It's particularly epic to see one of the games I worked on being bitched about for it.  There's just so many angles from which it is stupid.

Let's take the hard core fan route.  The guys who are all revved up about your game and are going to be buying it right as it comes out.  They want it.  They don't care about the review or read a review of it's japanese release or just trust the guys making it to know where Utopia is (Since he's referencing Jesse's talk, I shall too).  It's a sure buy to them because they've been invested in that series for years.  When you spun up your game, they were raving in the forums before the first picture went live.  In the 70s, these guys paid the same price as everyone else at the highest price point for nothing.  In the eighties and early nineties, companies added the concept that "Hey, our hard core fans get EXTRA things.  Like a t-shirt or a shitty tattoo."  Then it became, "Hey we can include swag packs, and it'll enhance the experience they're going for" in the early 2000s.  Working Designs was a fore-runner there and the whining when they weren't doing their swag packs for RIDICULOUS MONEY was incredible.  Now, not only do all of these products get sold for peanuts after a little while, but they're often packaged in to reward those who were planning to buy it early anyway.  Usually, they also get tons of prizes in the lead up to a AAA game as well, to make the entire road up to sale an experience.  Art contests, random trivia for posters and controllers, raffles for free stuff.  Pretty much being a hard core fan is more rewarded than it has ever been in history.  But no, let's give nothing to our hard core fans.

Or the boutique game store route?  Hey, distribution of product that doesn't move is expensive.  Why are we charging 5 bucks?  Does it mean that we won't get more 'hey I'm pre-ordering, but changed my mind last minute, leaving you with a package you paid 30-60 dollars to ship to your store to sell me?"  Sign me up for not just letting anyone say they want a copy and getting a completely false message of how much product to order.  Also sign me up as a store owner for having a locally driven market research program paid for by the customers.  But no, I charge them peanuts just because it makes the more willing to finish the transaction.  It has nothing to do with other considerations when moving physical hit driven products that often have only a month long shelf life and are my primary product line (So I need to be really aggressive with how I sell them because I'm not moving other products to take the hit for mistakes like Target or Walmart or Toys R Us).

Hey, how about the technical route?  In a modern game, effective DLC delivery is a customer expectation.  Of course, verifying your digital content updating pipe before launch would be foolish right?  Preparing a handful of small products that you can before going gold to make sure that you can update the product effectively after launch is just something that is done out of greed, and not because it's simply good engineering practice to make sure that you can not only update once but 2-3 times minimum before the product is shipped, printed on disks, and then really difficult to change.

Tomb Raider ranting is extra clever.  :)  It's not like there weren't other projects going on, and perhaps one of them might have not shaped up, so we used that staff to make some extra DLC instead?  It's not like many companies don't just outsource a bit of that to also test their outsourcing of additional content pipelines either. :P  But no, the game totally suffers for having additional content and had resources split away from it and the early consumers are just losing out.  We should've just fired those folks instead.

Oh, what about those crazy marketing people.  They couldn't recognize that we're a hits and trend driven industry and having a poor units moved launch or even a sluggish one can make it difficult to move product a week later even if reviews are all stellar.  Or that fiery first day sales can inspire future sales as people talk about their product.

But yes, consumers are idiot sheep for paying attention to the greedy game industry, trying to loot their money with shittyproducts :P  There's no higher reasonings on how come the industry has been moving this way.  It's clearly terrible for the consumer to have multiple price options with inclusive swag, pre-launch contests and parties, well tested dlc updating routes, and a small amount of free content.

RANTOFF

[Grahf]

I have to say that I'm continuously surprised by the amount of divergence in our views, Drac (not that that's a bad thing, I enjoy seeing what other people think, especially people actually in the industry) ... wait, you worked on a game he mentioned? Which one, if you don't mind my asking?

I'm not sure that TotalBiscuit is talking exclusively about the hardcore crowd who would be picking up the game ASAP. It seems more directed at the people who picked up the game in part because of how good it looked and with the pre-order bonus as an extra incentive, and now are left unhappy with the end result. Going down this route of course the idea of caveat emptor comes in, but waiting for the reviews to come out at least allows for a slightly more informed decision, assuming that you agree with the reviewers themselves. Of course if you buy a crappy game, even on pre-order, then you still have a right to complain. In this case especially there seems to have been a large degree of chicanery going on in the background.

These days it does seem like more and more games are offering free stuff if you're willing to take the gamble, the problem is that some people apparently just have really poor self control, so when confronted with "buy this now or lose the swag forever" they leap in head first and regret it later. Whether or not companies are actively capitalizing on this is up for debate.

Anyways, here's another thing from the recent DICE Summit: http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/what-theme-park-tickets-have-to-show-us-about-the-hell-of-free-to-play

[Merc]

I kind of agree with TB on a lot of issues about preordering and the industries. There's three situations where preordering is/was nice (for me).

1) The game has had a lot of rave reviews/history and you know it's going to sell out, so getting it reserved may save you the hassle of visiting 10+ shops. This was much more of an issue in the days of the brick and mortar, but it's not that hard to get copies still off Amazon or some other website on/after launch nowadays. Particularly games that are available as digital downloads.

2) Decent discount rate. It may be a bit of a gamble, but if you were planning to buy it anyway, saving a few bucks is nice, and chances were if you hadn't preordered, you wouldn't have heard it sucked by the time you bought it.

3) I guess just wanting to support a developer you know has done well by you with past products. This is one reason something like Kickstarter has succeeded as well as it has for companies like Double Fine, Evil Hat, Order of the Stick, etc.

'Nice rewards' never really felt like a good reason to preorder a game for me though, and in a lot of cases, the same things that bug Biscuit about them bug me too. I don't agree with him totally, but a lot of it didn't seem unreasonable.

For rewards, cosmetic stuff generally wouldn't get me to preorder, I don't consider that a 'nice' reward, but I don't have issues with it, some people will like it, and I don't feel cheated. If I really want something cosmetic and I can buy it later as DLC, I will. It's still a valid reason #4 for some people.

As a personal aside, I tend to consider cosmetic stuff to be things like outfit packs, items that have same effect as stuff you can get easily in the game but looks different, items that give new effects but are well balanced with stuff you can find, and maps that don't actually add gameplay. Multiplayer maps, for example, I generally consider cosmetic. Maps to explore or that have lore stuff in a roleplaying game, I probably wouldn't.

Anyhow, continuing with things like DLC, day one DLC that's cosmetic stuff doesn't bother me (obviously, see above), but I do agree I tend to feel just a bit cheated and like I'm getting an incomplete package with things that actually involve gameplay or add storytelling/lore. Yes, that may be a way to keep people hired or testing DLC delivery, but I can't help but feel that way.

"Why do I have to pay -more- to get the full experience? Aren't I paying enough already? Aren't I supporting you by buying this game early instead of waiting for the Steam sale?"

It sucks, but there it is.

I'm more okay with the "Day One DLC" that's free for original purchase but has to be bought by a resale consumer. Someone's still ending up feeling cheated at the end of the day, but I understand that with pretty much all resales, the original game developer is seeing ZERO dollars otherwise. And hell, I got -my- full experience.

For brick and mortar shops, I agree with the points Drac brought up, and I think TB's rant about being invested and such is overblown. Back when I bought in physical shops, I was perfectly fine with being charged $5 to preorder something, so long as it's discounted from the final price. Yeah, I lose out a little bit because of cost of money vs time, but it's such a tiny loss, it helps the shop tell what people are interested, and I -know- I'll have the game waiting for me when I go pick it up. I did think shops that charge you money just to preorder and then you still have to pay full price for the game were kinda scummy though.

That said, one point about shops and preorder bonuses that I fully agree with TB? I -REALLY- dislike the concept of shops having access to different preorder bonuses.

I tend to feel like when I was a kid and comic books came out with variant covers (which they still do, and I still think it's a nasty practice), and I wanted to have all the covers, and I could only get the one (well, I could get them all, but I wasn't going to be -stupid- with my money). Comics were actually worse, since sometimes the cover I wanted was sold out, and I had to settle for another one. So cheated! ;_;

Last point on the review embargos and false advertising through trailers/demos...I really can't do anything but agree fully with TB here, Drac. False advertising is just plain dirty, and I don't see how review embargos can be a good thing. Word of mouth advertising is one of the things that best drives a lot of GOOD game sales. If you're trying to keep people from reviewing your game because you're not expecting good word of mouth advertising/reviewing? Uh, well, that's still pretty much false advertising because you're chipping in on false expectations now.

I pretty much never pre-order nowadays. Reason #1 was the biggest reason I tended to pre-order in my youth, Steam has ruined me on reason #2, and reason #3...well, I've got zero developers I actually tend to want to support amongst the AAA crowd.

[Dracos]

*glances up, fairly sure he didn't say anything about review embargos and all that shit*  I agree that false advertising, demos, etc are bullshit that should die.  The review folks usually have the stuff weeks ahead of time and should be talking about it weeks ahead of time, though all at the same time.  Embargos to support that are actually things the review folks usually want, because otherwise it becomes a race to first publish.  "Hey, if I race through the first half of this game, publish, my magazine will sell way more issues than those other guys".  Games aren't 2 hour movies, so having enough time to play it and review it without it being a business disaster to do so is important for the people doing the reviews.

I also don't think I've ever voiced support of Day 1 paid DLC.  It sucks when that happens, though it's often a more complicated thing as DLC that is far after the game is often less valued by consumers.  I don't see any problem though with Preorder gets DLC that is then sold afterwards (usually later) or Original Purchase gets DLC that is then not available for repeat purchases.  These are things that are also developed in the process of vetting the tech and often (EA being the fancy exception) simply given away to paying customers.

I can actually answer the whole "Different shops having different things".  I agree, for the customer wanting everything, this is kinda lame.  I agree, and get that and don't like it either.

But the option going on here is not "Hey, these would be included for everyone" or "Have it like this".  The options are "Do it like this" or "don't bother to do it at all".  Anything you're seeing there is coming out of marketing budget, not dev budget generally.  It's money that would've been spent on some other facet to get your attention if they weren't being spent on added in game content.  Personally?  I'd rather that money get spent on more in game content than the latest set of commericals to go across the radio and if it helps sell the game, all the better.

How does it help sell the game though?  It's not the consumer that they're products for.  It's the end retailer who wants to be the one in town selling the games to you instead of the target across the street or the amazon shipping it to you.  They're businesses that need to make money and those things are a bribe for them.  How valuable a bribe?  Often they transform a mere  6k payment by marketing to have an artist work on a new outfit into a tens to hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars spent by the end retailer pushing the game and announcing how they'll have this cool knicknack nobody else will.  Is it great?  I'd still sort of prefer these things get packaged/made free after a while anyway, but it certainly isn't being done of some great bait and switch evil.  But overall, it tends to produce more content for less money for the end consumer.

I rarely preorder these days, usually when buying a set to play with friends.  But I don't look at those who do and go 'They're retarded'.  Basically, TB to me is an uneducated asshat going "Oh god, everyone who preorders is terrible and pissing in the game dev pool, and the game devs who build stuff for them are also terrible people".  I also thing it is more than a little unfair to be looking at 'people with poor impulse control and regret' and go 'this is an evil practice that should die'.  This isn't Gambling and aside from occassional BS with reviews, most the industry is pretty straightforward with what they're selling.  Game Dev is a business, and things that succeed long term in it tend to do so because they make good business sense.  Sure, there is scum in the waters too, but that was just a garbage video.

[Dracos]

Mmm, Just adding another musing:

I think really it's pretty cool how we're in a kind of renisance for marketing across the globe.  More marketing dollars than ever before are being spent to actually add real value to things or do really cool things: whether its performance artwork about a subject, guiness record breaking stunts, additional content for games, funding fan based creations, etc.  It's a nice move from being all about the tv broadcasts/trailers.  Even if marketing folks still do a dance to have their name above an opposing company having hard times.

Man, my spelling today is terrible.  Lazy.  Back ta work. :)

[Grahf]

Ah, I think I understand the situation a little now. I think this whole Aliens thing is kind of a special case, but you're right in that not every single preorder is something to be loathed and stopped. Like, I guarantee that there will be a preorder for the next GTA game, and people know that it's more than likely going to be solid, so there's no real harm in that.

To me the whole issue seemed to come from over-incentivizing jumping on the bandwagon early. You're right in that people generally have more self control than most give them credit for, it's just that in some cases like what happened with this Aliens game there are more factors at play.

I think perhaps that it's easy to blame preorders for "tricking" people into buying games that turn out to be duds. However, that's really not the case a lot of the time. Given that preorders are often for sequels and large releases that a fairly good amount of information is known about it's not impossible to make a semi-informed decision or indeed just not care because you're a fan of the franchise.

On a completely different note, what looks to be the prototype PS4 controller looks goofy. Not PS3 Boomerang goofy, but still pretty goofy.

[Grahf]

As suspected the announcement from Sony today was "Hey, PS4".

I've caught parts of the stream, but I'll likely just wait for it to be posted somewhere. What I did catch wasn't exactly stuff that had me jumping out of my chair either, things like more social networking integration, being able to broadcast games live or have friends take over for you, and potentially being able to demo anything you see in the online store. That last one is the one I found the most interesting, but also arguably damning given the article linked earlier in this very thread.

[Dracos]

Steam seems to do very well without offering demos of everything under the sun.  Making a press demo given under pretty controlled circumstances is a big difference from the hardening needed for giving to a million people.

I can't see more pressure to make fancy demos working out well for the end consumer.  About the only model I really click with there is the ancient (and awesome) shareware model, where there's just a lockoff point but otherwise it is just the beginning of the game anyway.

[Grahf]

Just watching, or rather mostly listening, to the Sony conference now. However, I also found this: http://gameological.com/2013/02/more-more-morehow-do-you-like-it/

Christ, and I thought I was bitter. The condescension in that article almost seems palpable. That's not to say that he doesn't have a point about some things, but lord almighty.

[Dracos]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6d1A2row6I

That's kinda nostalgic.  Looks like they pretty much took the NES mechanics.

[Jason_Miao]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6d1A2row6I

That's kinda nostalgic.  Looks like they pretty much took the NES mechanics.

I liked what Tim Schafer had to say about the game.