http://gamerlimit.com/2010/05/editorial-what-if-all-games-were-free/
Read it. Comment. Love you guys.
Lastest as in latest or last?
Haha, whoops. Most recent.
Ehh… I think the practice of padding JRPGs’ length so they can scream “100 hours of gameplay!” wouldn’t go away just because they were free. We’re jaded enough to realize that nowadays “100 hours” really means “10 hours in actual gameplay and 90 hours redoing the same stuff you did in the first 10 to grind levels/items/whatever”. I stopped looking at length a while ago. Some of my most enjoyable games have been under 20 hours. Long games wouldn’t go away though - one couldn’t honestly say they would have the same level of emotional involvement in FF7 if it was 20 hours instead of 40; the story just takes that long to tell. And apparently there really are people who like doing the same thing over and over again, or I imagine half of the games released today would never see the light of day. 8-(
I get the logic of if games were free, developers would stop trying. I can certainly see more shovelware being produced as a result. But really, if games were free then they’d have to find some other way to make a profit. I see them taking their current “10 dollar solution” and running with it. I can see them putting out a game with just the bare bones single player campaign or story mode, and then charging for everything else from online content to any bonus quests or missions that would otherwise be programmed into the main game.
And not that Ive played the new Rocket Knight yet, but unless there’s anything else by way of content, 1200 points for 2 hours of game IS way too much.
I don’t doubt that some games like that would remain, but there are plenty of people who play those games just because the time-to-money ratio is really good. I think that’s a big reason why the current model of JRPGs is so prevalent in North America, especially when the average gamer insists that JRPGs are on the decline and WRPGs are on the rise. I’m also not saying that long = bad; like you said, FF7 is good, but the difference is that it didn’t waste any time (although it tends to take me 30 hours, heh). Most JRPGs just flat-out waste your time, period.
People do enjoy doing the same thing over and over again, but mostly because if they find something they like, they know they can count on it to be the same, and be a safe monetary investment every time.
I think you’ve reaaally missed the point of this article. Mulling on the logistics of how developers would turn a profit if games were free is really not that important, because I’m not making the argument that games should be free, or even trying to suggest possible ways to make it happen. On the contrary, the real argument of my editorial is that if we start looking at games as TIME investments - and not MONETARY investments - video games in general will probably be more diverse and healthy, with developers more willing to take risks.
As I said in the end of my article, what did it really take to make that theoretical world exist, but a change in perspective? The games devs would make will be different, not simply because games are free, but because we would think about how we want to spend our time on them in a different way. For example, people might wise up and realize that $7.50 an hour for fun on Rocket Knight is really not that bad when they spend 60 dollars on an 8-10 hour game, or buy a $7 movie ticket for a 90 minute movie (which, I should point out, is not replayable on harder difficulty levels…or, at all, for that matter).
If I had a nickel for each time I was told I missed the point, I’d have a shitload of nickels. I can’t help but look at it from a financial POV. That’s just how my mind works. I just re-read it a couple times (Sorry, it’s a really abstract way of thinking), and I think I get what you’re saying. If games were free to make and purchase, devs wouldn’t be pressured by corporate restrictions in regards to what sells, and instead of competing for gamers money, they’d be competing for gamers’ time and enjoyment? If that’s what it was, it’s an interesting idea. Its still hard for me to remove the monetary aspect of it.
Yeah, that’s more or less the theoretical world I came up with. A lot of people seemed to think that I meant “games should be free”, but it was just the best hypothetical situation I could come up with so that devs would try to make the truly most enjoyable games by trying new stuff and taking risks. It was merely the best way to get to my point. Maybe it’s just difficult for other people to think in that way, too, which is why there’s such a misunderstanding. But, at the same token, that’s exactly the problem with gaming, right now, imo. People don’t want to have the best time they can have with a game; they want the MOST time. I dunno…that just seems kind of sad to me.
Of course the best solution is to make a good game that’s replayable. Fallout 2, Starcraft, Super Mario World show it can be done even if it’s rare.
I think the first time I ever said “This game wasn’t worth the money” over length was Heavenly Sword for the PS3. I dropped $65 for it, and it took maybe 15 hours to finish. It bothered me because $65 towards WoW or FFXI would have netted hundreds of hours of gameplay over 5 months.
FFXIII was well worth the $65 to me because I put in over 100 hours, and generally enjoyed the game when I played.
“X hours of gameplay” = just throwing in some huge repetitive easy to code dungeon that takes forever to finish. To me that’s fine, if the combat system is fun, the game keeps you interested, and there’s some reward that you’re working for.
I don’t think my gaming habits would be affected much. I usually buy cheap used games so price isn’t much of an issue; also I buy only one RPG at a time and then play the heck out of it until I finish it. My only problem is with games like Disgaea that took years to sell cheaply enough for me to buy.
I have a bigger problem with American comics, which were my first hobby: pretty soon the average price for all will be $3.99. I’m sorry, but pay FOUR DOLLARS for 22 pages of story- that I can read in 5 minutes? No thank you. Compare that with, for example, La Pucelle, which I bought for 7$ and got over 30 hours of fun.
(To say nothing about how much comics SUCK these days, but that’s another topic.)
This is only slightly on topic, but why not review some good free RPGs? Hot, sexy RPGs like Vacant Sky or the Last Scenario? Funny that the only Japanese style RPGs that seem to be worth playing nowadays are made by English speaking people for free. <_<; It’s not just a perception that western roleplaying games are better, it’s just fact. Compare Mass Effect II to anything done within the last year by a Japanese company, and the latter game is going to be beaten into a pulp.
GAP, I’ll download Vacant Sky but Last Scenario annoyed me right at the beginning. Should I give it another try?
The plot gets from being cliché to subverting cliché about quarterway through, if that was what annoyed you. If the difficulty annoyed you… well… it gets harder. Much harder. x.x
It was partly the story and partly the damned music. Mainly the music.
Very interesting article. As a fan of many of those really long JRPGs, I have to say that sometimes, there’s nothing quite like digging into the gaming equivalent of, say, Lord of the Rings, and some games can be really interesting and long without having too much padding.
That said, I am also a poor gamer, and I tend to shy away from paying more than ten dollars or so for certain indie gems. In a perfect world, yeah, the only deciding factor in getting a game or not would be fun factor. But my funds are limited, and I like my games to be, if not long, then at least replayable.
I think gamers would take games less seriously if they were free. There’s something about handing money over for a product that people find gratifying. It gives them confidence in what they’re getting and raises their expectations a bit. This is understandable if you accept that the price of games is decided by the market. When you’re browsing for games and you see something that people are willing to part with $80 for, you think, even if only in a small way, that it must be pretty damn good. You might start to want certain games BECAUSE of the way their price indicates their value. It’s not foolproof, but it’s a significant amount of pressure.
Whether it would have an effect on the quality of games depends on two things imo: How you define quality, and where the money is coming from. You’re obviously not talking about a money tree situation, since you said the designers would still receive money for the number of units “sold,” implying that someone, somewhere would be interested in regulating their payment. So who’s funding them? A government organization that redistributes tax money? In-game product placement and advertising? A larger organization that makes all of its money from other products?
I don’t think I like your hypothetical situation. It’s like… you’re trying to make it so game designers are pressured to distribute as many units as possible, implying that they would create higher quality games (which to you I guess means a better fun/time ratio, which is subjective) to impress as many people as possible. But it wouldn’t work exactly that way unless you also create a hypothetical organization that would fund those designers based on “sales” alone for absolutely no financial reward. And even if that organization existed, these designers would still have their own pockets to worry about. Making a game that might not sell very well is just as much of a risk to them as it would be to whoever used to be paying them. They’d still want the time THEY spend to be worth the money THEY earned. Their interest in creating riskier games would be marginal if you ask me. It might be higher at first as they move away from the strategy of using cheap gimmicks to increase the length of their games, but it would settle down before long.
You can also look at sites like kongregate.com and see that the amount of innovation in hobbyist gaming communities isn’t much higher than in the professional gaming market.
Because of all those things, I have to disagree with you for now.
I have to disagree with this on principle, because otherwise used games, piracy (of newer games on torrent sites), and emulation wouldn’t be nearly as prevalent as they are. I see a lot of people arguing this, but I think if it were the majority opinion, none of the things I mentioned would really be happening in the first place. That isn’t to say that there are people who value games more if they have to spend their hard-earned money on them, but I don’t think this is really that big of a deal in general.
Whether it would have an effect on the quality of games depends on two things imo: How you define quality, and where the money is coming from. You’re obviously not talking about a money tree situation, since you said the designers would still receive money for the number of units “sold,” implying that someone, somewhere would be interested in regulating their payment. So who’s funding them? A government organization that redistributes tax money? In-game product placement and advertising? A larger organization that makes all of its money from other products?
I don’t think I like your hypothetical situation. It’s like… you’re trying to make it so game designers are pressured to distribute as many units as possible, implying that they would create higher quality games (which to you I guess means a better fun/time ratio, which is subjective) to impress as many people as possible. But it wouldn’t work exactly that way unless you also create a hypothetical organization that would fund those designers based on “sales” alone for absolutely no financial reward. And even if that organization existed, these designers would still have their own pockets to worry about. Making a game that might not sell very well is just as much of a risk to them as it would be to whoever used to be paying them. They’d still want the time THEY spend to be worth the money THEY earned. Their interest in creating riskier games would be marginal if you ask me. It might be higher at first as they move away from the strategy of using cheap gimmicks to increase the length of their games, but it would settle down before long.
I have two main problems with this:
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Indie gaming is very popular - more popular than you might realize. Gamer Limit, the site I write for, puts an emphasis on Indie Gaming where other sites that cover mainstream gaming do not, and it’s a pretty nice edge for us. Otherwise, there’s proof in numbers: when Cave Story moved to Wiiware, it instantly became the best-selling Wiiware game of all time. What I’m saying is, I think developers want to try and do new things with their games - as Cave Story did - and gamers want to see this.
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I think you’re also just too focused in general on my hypothetical situation. As I stated earlier in this thread, the ‘what if games were free’ scenario was just a means to demonstrate something: namely, that we CAN start seeing games turn out the way I described, if we start looking at games as if they were TIME investments. As it stands, people feel like they’re wasting money if they buy a game that doesn’t give them the MOST time, when I think people should feel like that way when they’re not getting the BEST time. In other words, we can make gaming more diverse and less samey, with developers more apt to take smart risks, if WE, the gamers, start changing our perspective on how we go about buying games. Next time you go buy a game, instead of asking yourself “Is this worth my money”, ask, “Is this worth my time?”
You could say that to designers too, because the fact is, even if customers have the option of deciding whether a game is worth their time, you’re not giving the same option to the designers. Innovation is a lot more work than convention and in order to get people to create innovative games you need to put them into a system that rewards it. You’re suggesting that they still only get paid for sales, and if that was the case, I don’t think designers would innovate any more than they already do. And let’s be honest, even though many games are similar to each other now, it’s not like the gaming landscape is some kind of dried up wasteland. There’s already enough innovation to keep any gamer satisfied if he knows where to look, imo.
I’m not really sure what you’re expecting to happen here anyway. What is it that you wish people were making games about they they aren’t already, that making games free would supposedly enable them to do? At the end of the day you’re still just pushing buttons in slightly different patterns while different images appear in front of you as a result. If none of the recent combinations of those things tickles your brain anymore, maybe innovation isn’t the problem. Maybe needing a new hobby is the problem. And I say that without any desire to be aggressive. If you feel like no one’s been able to make a game that challenges you lately, it might be a more personal thing.
You’re still caught up in the hypothetical example. Forget about the developer aspect for a second; I threw that part in there just to try and tone down the amount of people getting caught up in the logistics (which clearly failed, heh). Think about how that would change the way you decide to buy games. Or, better yet, since you don’t feel like you’ve earned a game that you didn’t buy, think about the average gamer. Tons of gamers pass on really good games because they find them to be too expensive compared to their length.
This is what I’m against; not how the game industry gets paid, but how we decide to buy games. In my hypothetical situation where all games are free, people wouldn’t do that. People wouldn’t say, “Hmm well this game is $15 and only two hours long. That just doesn’t seem worth it.” If you don’t believe that gamers think this way, take a look at this:
This critic had virtually no complaints about this game whatsoever, except the price. The only ‘negative’ things said about the game in the review were that it’s too expensive for its length, and the achievements are hard to get (stop the presses, you have to achieve them!?!?). How does a game with excellent gameplay mechanics, controls, level design, and aesthetic get a 7.6/10?
The price.
Whether or not this is indicative of how you choose which games to play, this is absolutely how most gamers do their shopping. Great games are passed up because of their short length, and long games which range from ‘average’ to ‘pretty good’ are taken instead. Why should a developer try something interesting, when they can just do something that’s guaranteed to satisfy the lowest common denominators of the gaming demographics?
That’s what ‘free’ games would change…but more importantly, the BIGGEST point you should be taking away from this is that games don’t HAVE to be free to make this change. In my fantasy free-game world, people changed the way they looked at games because they were free, but it wasn’t like “Oh games are free, I suddenly like different stuff.” It was because, if games didn’t cost money, their perspectives on how they buy things are different. Now, they don’t say “Hmm Rocket Knight is only two hours, I dunno if I wanna buy this game for 15 dollars.” Now, they just go “Fuck yeah, I heard Rocket Knight was badass, let’s try it.” The way they look at gaming is completely different, cos they’re not worried about money.
Games cost money, but you don’t HAVE to worry about the price. Of course I don’t mean that you can buy every game in the world, but don’t we vote on what we like the most with our purchases, rather than voting on what gives us the most quantity of gaming time? The two are not mutually exclusive, sure; but how many times are they really one and the same?