Putting players first: how gaming is evolving
Hobby? Passion? Waste of time? Sport?
With approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide considered to be gamers, it’s become nearly impossible to ignore the rapidly growing industry, with an estimated £123 billion to be spent by consumers on games in 2019 alone. So where is gaming headed? And why should we care?
With Cyberpunk 2077 making the possibility to create gender-neutral and transgender characters a reality, gaming is becoming more and more accessible and progressive. And it is important to ensure that it continues to be a force for good, providing people with escapism and entertainment, and in some cases education.
Since the move away from arcade machines into home entertainment, with consoles, PCs and handheld devices, gaming has become an extremely lucrative and widespread phenomenon. It’s one of the few industries where, although certain companies could be considered to have a monopoly, if those companies were to step their foot off the gas they would fall away into redundancy. As such it’s important to understand that both the producers of the consoles and the developers of the games should both be completely driven by what their customers want and need from gaming. And as customers gamers are some of the most passionate and fanatical around, and if they don’t like where something is headed they will be quick to kill it in the public eye.
There are many ways that they can achieve this, and in this article I’ll explore three features that have seen great success or failure over the past decade.
Different payment methods
The way in which we pay for games has been changing from simply paying a flat fee for a finished game into multiple different models, not all of which are completely purposeful or fair to the user. In addition to the flat fee you-get-what-you-pay-for standard payment models, certain games have started to give players the option to pay for the game in advance and access an early build of the game that will be iterated upon until full-release. But they will charge you for the full game all the same. It’s similar to paying a deposit on a house and only being able to live in the living room whilst the rest of the house is being refurbished. I see multiple problems with this payment type as it gives very little incentive to the games company to finish developing the game if customers pay the full price of the game to access what is essentially an unfinished product. There are certain games where this model has been fully justified. Subnautica, for instance, adopted this payment model but continued very dedicatedly to develop the game until full release four years after it released in early access. The reason most developers adopt this model is to help fund the development of the game as they might not have the necessary funds to complete it otherwise. This is more applicable to the traditionally smaller or less successful studios however some of the larger studios do occasionally adopt this strategy. However, this method does mean the customer has to go years playing an unfinished game with the possibility, like with Earth: Year 2066, that the game may be unplayable or will never get finished.
Another method is the freemium model adopted by many Massively Multiplayer Online games, mobile games and other Multiplayer games, where the player has the option to either play the game for free or pay for an upgraded version of the game. In most of these games, excluding perhaps the mobile games, it’s entirely possible to play them without having to spend anything and have your experience be enjoyable. The best examples of the freemium model, in my opinion, are the ones that only include cosmetic options as paid extras; things that don’t affect the core mechanics of a game, but instead make your character look and feel more unique and personal to you. However, a lot of these games will include items that drastically give you an advantage over other players and offer them only to those willing to pay for them. This is known as ‘pay-to-win’ in the community and is generally greatly frowned upon as dubious and money-grabbing. One of the best examples of the freemium model is Fortnite, which although it has become a bit of a joke, the business model Epic Games executed by releasing their game for free in a genre of flat-fee games, and only charging for cosmetics, and making it family friendly, was a huge success and has made it one of the most successful and most played games of all time.
Of course a dishonourable mention has to be given to those companies that practice the freemium model, without the free element. Those companies that charge extra to acquire in-game items and cosmetics by paying on top of paying for the base game. Often hiding these items in lootboxes — glorified slot machines. This mechanic is hated by the majority of the community of a certain age demographic, but for children it’s easy access gambling they don’t truly understand and is exceptionally dangerous. Thankfully the community and certain regulatory boards have started to mount a proper defence against this practice. Most notably Battlefront 2 got massive backlash for its lootbox model leading to them receiving the most downvoted comment in the history of Reddit. Consequently, they retroactively want back in their game and removed the mechanic altogether.
Single-player back from the dead
With the most sold and critically acclaimed games in the mid 2000s being Multiplayer titles like Call of Duty and Battlefield, it seemed that Single-Player titles were in the decline. There wasn’t as much appetite for these games if they didn’t have at least some element of Multiplayer in them. Games like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed, which traditionally were only Single-Player, included Multiplayer into their releases in addition to the Single-Player content in order to tap into this trend. FIFA, Battlefield and Call of Duty had been constantly moving away from their single player content and focusing on their Multiplayer offerings.
But this started to change with the release of the Witcher 3 in 2015. Although the results of this change wouldn’t be seen until 2018. The Witcher series had always been acclaimed for being some of the most immersive and well executed Role Playing Games in the market. Witcher 3 really pushed the boat out on this and took it to the next level. And the massive popularity and the quantity of awards it garnered turned the heads of the other companies in the industry. Come 2018 PS4 announced a plethora of immersive, single-player only games which again stole the spotlight from the Multiplayer titles and proved that there’s a real and growing appetite for these games. With games like Cyberpunk 2077 and the Last of Us 2 coming out next year I can only see the appetite growing.
Emergent tech
Finally what of VR, AR, Voice, Haptics…? Where is the world promised to us in Ready Player One and Sword Art Online where we can finally put ourselves into the games and feel like we’re truly there? The ultimate escapism and immersion into those universes is not as far away as we think. VR is making great strides in what’s possible both graphically and in terms of the amount of content that is available to be put into it. The trick is where these technologies all come together and interact with each other to create that ‘deep-dive’ into a game universe. We aren’t currently in a position where this is an affordable option for your everyday gamer, but that day is not too far away.
Callum Ewings works at Potato London as a Business Development Associate. A self-confessed ‘massive nerd and escapist’, the rich worlds created by games grabbed him at a fairly young age and he’s been hooked since. Get in touch if you’d like to talk with him about games, supernatural lore or digital product development.
