Why piracy and sales are both dead ...
by Jeremy Alessi · 02/25/2008 (10:33 am) · 25 comments
In a recent forum discussion I mentioned that piracy was dead. Someone else mentioned Steam as a solution. To a degree Steam is a solution. More to the point though is that content is going free. As some may have noticed my latest game Full Contact Debate is free. I did this honestly for a few reasons. First of all it's not a game just for a game's sake it's a game to promote voting in a free election so charging for it would be a bit of an oxymoron. After conceiving the idea I realized though that I could still monetize this game without selling it.
Most cinema isn't sold directly to the consumer and neither is most music. TV and radio push through more programming than any other source within their respective mediums. All of that content is paid for by advertising physical products. Since games are in their infancy compared to TV and radio we just hadn't hit the point where we needed this segment of the market to open up.
Now the cool part. Games are a better source for advertising than TV or radio. Many people flick the channel or turn the station when advertising comes on in those other mediums. Unless it's cinema with product placement (which is usually only for a split second) people can ignore it. In games however (especially mutiplayer) people play over and over and over viewing the same scenes hundreds or thousands of times. If you advertise in those scenes you've got the best source of advertising yet seen.
The best part about this is that the games still need to be great. If you make a crappy game no one is going to play those levels countless times. So a developer must still make the best damn game they can muster. In fact you'd actually have to go a step further in making sure the gameplay doesn't get old because you'll no longer be able to rely on your marketing, licensing, etc... to push your game along for you. With Ad supported games it's all about how good the gameplay is. If it's not long lasting you won't make any money.
How does this all relate back to piracy? You want to give this game away and just have as many people play it as possible. Gone are the worries about someone copying this and passing it around for free ... instead you want this to happen. Alternative revenue stream supported games turn piracy into a benefit!
Will there still be hackers who do stuff to your game? Sure but with no barrier to entry it'd be more work for other people to use a hack that disables advertising or whatever than it would to just install the regular game and have fun. As I said above the bottomline is actually better games that are longer lasting and less focused on hype (though without some hype or good hook people won't play it in the first place). I have a feeling too that this new model will weed out a lot of clones. If it's all free gamers won't be afraid to take a dive into something different and if that different game is also really fun and long lasting it'll make money.
The gaming landscape is changing rapidly... unless you're making one of the top 15 games of the year selling your game to individuals won't be an option much longer. Someone somewhere will be making something for free that rivals or kicks the snot out of whatever you're trying to sell. Of course on the bright side you won't have to bang your head against the keyboard worrying about piracy anymore.
Most cinema isn't sold directly to the consumer and neither is most music. TV and radio push through more programming than any other source within their respective mediums. All of that content is paid for by advertising physical products. Since games are in their infancy compared to TV and radio we just hadn't hit the point where we needed this segment of the market to open up.
Now the cool part. Games are a better source for advertising than TV or radio. Many people flick the channel or turn the station when advertising comes on in those other mediums. Unless it's cinema with product placement (which is usually only for a split second) people can ignore it. In games however (especially mutiplayer) people play over and over and over viewing the same scenes hundreds or thousands of times. If you advertise in those scenes you've got the best source of advertising yet seen.
The best part about this is that the games still need to be great. If you make a crappy game no one is going to play those levels countless times. So a developer must still make the best damn game they can muster. In fact you'd actually have to go a step further in making sure the gameplay doesn't get old because you'll no longer be able to rely on your marketing, licensing, etc... to push your game along for you. With Ad supported games it's all about how good the gameplay is. If it's not long lasting you won't make any money.
How does this all relate back to piracy? You want to give this game away and just have as many people play it as possible. Gone are the worries about someone copying this and passing it around for free ... instead you want this to happen. Alternative revenue stream supported games turn piracy into a benefit!
Will there still be hackers who do stuff to your game? Sure but with no barrier to entry it'd be more work for other people to use a hack that disables advertising or whatever than it would to just install the regular game and have fun. As I said above the bottomline is actually better games that are longer lasting and less focused on hype (though without some hype or good hook people won't play it in the first place). I have a feeling too that this new model will weed out a lot of clones. If it's all free gamers won't be afraid to take a dive into something different and if that different game is also really fun and long lasting it'll make money.
The gaming landscape is changing rapidly... unless you're making one of the top 15 games of the year selling your game to individuals won't be an option much longer. Someone somewhere will be making something for free that rivals or kicks the snot out of whatever you're trying to sell. Of course on the bright side you won't have to bang your head against the keyboard worrying about piracy anymore.
About the author
#22
02/28/2008 (12:16 pm)
Ads or no ads the game has to be good. No one is arguing that. What is being argued is whether your good game for sale can compete with another good game for free. For example I went to the movie theater to watch the movie Untraceable not long ago and it was good. However, it was merely CSI good. I could have watched an episode of CSI for free instead of paying $30.
#23
My argument is that people are still paying for trash games like Horizons.. enough people to keep the game afloat.. and they are paying the exact same ammount (if not more) for it than they would for WoW which, like it or hate it, is the measuring stick for financial success. So my argument isnt that your game has to be "Good" but it does have to be playable. The concept has to be solid and there has to be something there to make people want to play it more than once or at least have the demo leave them hanging.
So many indie games are barely what would be considered alpha level. I agree completely that the game industry is changing. The face of the game industry is totally changing. I said this 5 years ago that the power of the Internet and freeware/cheapware engines (like Torque) were going to revolutionize the gaming scene.. and they have. Now we have hundreds of thousands of brilliant minds out there creating with very affordable engines. Of course that means we get a directly porportional level of crap coming out of the indie scene but it also means that the consumer now has the power to choose. They can choose your racing game .. or they can choose the next guy's game. Now if the next guy has got a better "hook" than you do you arent going to make any money..
So again it boils down to taking a close look at what you are trying to do with your game. To date all of my game programming has been a learning experience. I've got to work (unpaid as nothing more than a rabid fanboi) directly with closed testing teams from Verant, Mythic and Turbine. The reason I can get in with those people is because I can talk about things I've learned during my hobby developments and apply them to their platform. I am not sad because I havent made any money at it. I would love to work for a development company some day but it'll be another 10 years before companies actually "get it" and stop having idiotic physical offices and start workign in a virtual office space. I've got a sweet house and a great setting with my family and I aint giving it up:)
So many demos/betas that people post here are so badly setup that they'll never get any playtime or respect. 90% of the games I download from here (not out of the commercial store mind you those are nice) barely run (if at all) and when they do run either the network lag is completely and utterly unplayable (because they arent using the datastream properly) or the graphics are literally from 1980. Throw in a core concept that has been done to death a hundred times already and it becomes painfully obvious why no one will buy those products. Why would I buy a game today that basically ammounts to Duke Nukem 3D that I gave up playing over 15 years ago? Where is your hook? Where is the ingenuity? Where is the effort to show the consumer something that makes them WANT to give you money. And better yet why not make it EASY for them to give you money? Now all of the sudden your problem is what the hell to do with all that friggin money :)
No offence, but the Candidate game is not even ready for alpha IMO. I have tried it from 2 different PCs. Two totally different rigs with diff processors one AMD one INTEL, diff vid chipsets one NVidia and one ATI and it is just unplayable. For no apparant reason the game starts in windowed mode (even after I tried to force to full screen), It takes about 30 seconds before I can even start moving and then when I do start moving it locks up at zero frame rate whenever the grass object activate. I can appreciate that it was done and released as a beta test but about 1 minute into the game (on both rigs) I started getting yellow whitewashes and tearing across the screen. To me that is an example of something that isnt worth even downloading. It's simple the default capture the flag game from the torque engine with the buggies added from the driving demo with new skins.. Thats it. and it just doesnt work. I am not saying this to bash your game or your work but to shed some light on the problem for you..
You mentioned that you made the decision to make the Candidate game Free.. Umm yeah.. that's because there is no market for that game. Legal issues on using the character likenesses of the potential president of the United States aside... It's a poorly done capture the flag that has a short term public intrest hook due to the current political debates. Now redo the game abit... Come up with a better hook and a less illegal IP and you could have presidential debates online till you are blue in the face :)
I am sorry for coming down on the Candidate game but I think it is a good example of something that some people might see as an "indie" level release and TBH it isnt anywheres near ready for people to be playing it. On my first rig it locked up after about 15 seconds of trying to run through the grass (Afterwards I traced this down to a huge memory leak) and on the second rig I couldnt play it because the constant "yellow" screen blackouts. Even the bugs aside.. it's the default Torque game with different models/skins.. It's a simple capture the flag that isn't even at the level of Tribes which is now some 15+ years old.
Come up with something that works and somthign kithy and you can sell it. Come up with somethign that has been done a thousand times and yeah.. I agree you are going to have a tough time charging money for something a person can play with much more entertainment value as a javascript game on any free gaming website.
02/28/2008 (8:03 pm)
Jeremy I must be confused about your point then.. And you must be confused about mine.. My argument is that people are still paying for trash games like Horizons.. enough people to keep the game afloat.. and they are paying the exact same ammount (if not more) for it than they would for WoW which, like it or hate it, is the measuring stick for financial success. So my argument isnt that your game has to be "Good" but it does have to be playable. The concept has to be solid and there has to be something there to make people want to play it more than once or at least have the demo leave them hanging.
So many indie games are barely what would be considered alpha level. I agree completely that the game industry is changing. The face of the game industry is totally changing. I said this 5 years ago that the power of the Internet and freeware/cheapware engines (like Torque) were going to revolutionize the gaming scene.. and they have. Now we have hundreds of thousands of brilliant minds out there creating with very affordable engines. Of course that means we get a directly porportional level of crap coming out of the indie scene but it also means that the consumer now has the power to choose. They can choose your racing game .. or they can choose the next guy's game. Now if the next guy has got a better "hook" than you do you arent going to make any money..
So again it boils down to taking a close look at what you are trying to do with your game. To date all of my game programming has been a learning experience. I've got to work (unpaid as nothing more than a rabid fanboi) directly with closed testing teams from Verant, Mythic and Turbine. The reason I can get in with those people is because I can talk about things I've learned during my hobby developments and apply them to their platform. I am not sad because I havent made any money at it. I would love to work for a development company some day but it'll be another 10 years before companies actually "get it" and stop having idiotic physical offices and start workign in a virtual office space. I've got a sweet house and a great setting with my family and I aint giving it up:)
So many demos/betas that people post here are so badly setup that they'll never get any playtime or respect. 90% of the games I download from here (not out of the commercial store mind you those are nice) barely run (if at all) and when they do run either the network lag is completely and utterly unplayable (because they arent using the datastream properly) or the graphics are literally from 1980. Throw in a core concept that has been done to death a hundred times already and it becomes painfully obvious why no one will buy those products. Why would I buy a game today that basically ammounts to Duke Nukem 3D that I gave up playing over 15 years ago? Where is your hook? Where is the ingenuity? Where is the effort to show the consumer something that makes them WANT to give you money. And better yet why not make it EASY for them to give you money? Now all of the sudden your problem is what the hell to do with all that friggin money :)
No offence, but the Candidate game is not even ready for alpha IMO. I have tried it from 2 different PCs. Two totally different rigs with diff processors one AMD one INTEL, diff vid chipsets one NVidia and one ATI and it is just unplayable. For no apparant reason the game starts in windowed mode (even after I tried to force to full screen), It takes about 30 seconds before I can even start moving and then when I do start moving it locks up at zero frame rate whenever the grass object activate. I can appreciate that it was done and released as a beta test but about 1 minute into the game (on both rigs) I started getting yellow whitewashes and tearing across the screen. To me that is an example of something that isnt worth even downloading. It's simple the default capture the flag game from the torque engine with the buggies added from the driving demo with new skins.. Thats it. and it just doesnt work. I am not saying this to bash your game or your work but to shed some light on the problem for you..
You mentioned that you made the decision to make the Candidate game Free.. Umm yeah.. that's because there is no market for that game. Legal issues on using the character likenesses of the potential president of the United States aside... It's a poorly done capture the flag that has a short term public intrest hook due to the current political debates. Now redo the game abit... Come up with a better hook and a less illegal IP and you could have presidential debates online till you are blue in the face :)
I am sorry for coming down on the Candidate game but I think it is a good example of something that some people might see as an "indie" level release and TBH it isnt anywheres near ready for people to be playing it. On my first rig it locked up after about 15 seconds of trying to run through the grass (Afterwards I traced this down to a huge memory leak) and on the second rig I couldnt play it because the constant "yellow" screen blackouts. Even the bugs aside.. it's the default Torque game with different models/skins.. It's a simple capture the flag that isn't even at the level of Tribes which is now some 15+ years old.
Come up with something that works and somthign kithy and you can sell it. Come up with somethign that has been done a thousand times and yeah.. I agree you are going to have a tough time charging money for something a person can play with much more entertainment value as a javascript game on any free gaming website.
#24
It sounds like you were running the game on two sub-standard systems for TGEA. There is a TGE port in the works so that will probably suit your needs better. TGEA is a bit unwieldy right now but it makes for the best screen shots and pleases the hardcore folks who create a great sticky center for a grassroots game like this.
In addition, I've done a game out of the Garage Games game store called Aerial Antics so I know how to make a nice product spend a year working on it and get next to no sales. You can check the game out on Reflexive where it's currently published:
http://www.reflexive.com/AerialAntics.html
We did a lot of testing on FCD and a lot of people have been playing it with few hiccups. There are a lot of issues with TGEA that have some adverse effects on the game right now but without getting the community up and running testing out the back-end as well as the game on a lot of machines it would never go anywhere and it's far too big of a concept to try to make it as an indie without an active community around the development. I call it beta because that's what most people understand to mean "still in development".
02/29/2008 (12:39 pm)
Well, I'm sorry the game didn't work on your machines. It is far from a default Torque game with engine modifications and bug fixes made to nearly every aspect of TGEA which at the current version has quite a few bugs that I'm always squashing. I used Torque for this game because I wanted combat oriented gameplay which Torque does well. It's obvious that due to your technical difficulties you weren't able to appreciate some of the finer details of the game which set it apart.It sounds like you were running the game on two sub-standard systems for TGEA. There is a TGE port in the works so that will probably suit your needs better. TGEA is a bit unwieldy right now but it makes for the best screen shots and pleases the hardcore folks who create a great sticky center for a grassroots game like this.
In addition, I've done a game out of the Garage Games game store called Aerial Antics so I know how to make a nice product spend a year working on it and get next to no sales. You can check the game out on Reflexive where it's currently published:
http://www.reflexive.com/AerialAntics.html
We did a lot of testing on FCD and a lot of people have been playing it with few hiccups. There are a lot of issues with TGEA that have some adverse effects on the game right now but without getting the community up and running testing out the back-end as well as the game on a lot of machines it would never go anywhere and it's far too big of a concept to try to make it as an indie without an active community around the development. I call it beta because that's what most people understand to mean "still in development".
#25
02/29/2008 (12:52 pm)
In addition, technical difficulties aside I'm on a truncated time-line to make this work because of the election so there's really no choice but to make a run at this. This isn't the sort of game you can work on "until it's done" so if you want to explain the memory leak you stumbled upon that'd be great, hook up with our forums and let's fix it. Someone else was having issues that stemmed from the pixel specular and bump mapping. By turning those off they were able to escape the inevitable crash. 
Torque Owner Flybynight Studios
- Alot of small gaming companies and most indies scream about how there is no money to be made.. World of warcraft makes several hundred million dollars of profit every month.. I fail to see the argument that there is no money in gaming ;)
- Then people say that only the very best games make money.. (Or the top 15 in this case) again I say phooey. Look at the stinkers like Asherons Call 1.. The MMO that never sold more than 50k boxes and never updated it's graphics engine is still kicking after almost 10 years!!! Look at the massive stinker that is Horizons.. Another MMO that is somehow still around after countless years of complete idiocy. Take your non MMOs.. Games like Elder scrolls, Ultima, Halo, Your EA Sports franchise games like NHL, NBA, NFL..., Take your rally racing games.. Take your 1v1 fighting games...
No I would have to say I disagree hands down.. The money is still out there and piracy is NOT the problem. (Although piracy is an everpresent monster pillaging a good percentage of gaming revenue which really hurts small companies hard.)
So whats is the problem? Quality folks.. It's just as simple as that. Quality. Sure it's a little bit about debugging but not even so much debugging anymore as the simple casual regard people have for putting out half baked crap and calling it a game. Memory leaks, texture tears, bad animation.. Sure all those things add up but the #1 biggest crime I see comitted by indie game developers is not making "good" products.. but instead settling for products that are "Meh, good enough".
No point in making examples of specific games here in the GG community as this isnt about calling out someone. We all do what we want with our time and when we release something it shows the community what we are about. Personally I don't enjoy showing work that is broken or crashes constantly or makes me look bad because it simply doesnt play.
On the flip side of this, take examples of games that DO work. Take Minions of Mirth for example.. Josh didnt have a multimillion dollar studio backing him to make MoM.. HE busted his hump for 12 months with the help of his wife and they produced a working MMO in just over a year of development. And it plays well.. One of the best if not THE best (And it has been awarded as "The" best more than once) indie MMO of all times. What sets Josh apart? Attention to detail and working at the job untill it's done, and done right. Not settling for "Good enough" but looking at it and saying "Yeah it's good, but how can I make it even better."
I see so many indies sitting back and telling each other how hard it is and how there is no money in it. Hey, news flash.. You show me a job where you can roll in with no experience, no skills and no education in and have it make you a hundred thousand dollars and I'll show you an indie studio that can do the same..
It's all about effort vs reward. (Well that and setting realistic goals for ones self. Sure an indie can build an MMO but you better bloody well know what you are doing). Dont just use a level editor and make a race track, insert a dune buggy with a new skin on it and wonder why no one is buying your great new "game". Now take your platform a little further.. Add in variances for different tires, suspensions, chasis adjustments, engine adjustments... Now add in driver customizations and a website with online scorekeeping and a points race and all of the sudden you have a very active and eager base of players.
Consoles have the same pircay issues to deal with as PCs. The PS3 mod chip is almost done and the rest of the consoles are already 100% hacked. Being a low budget indie doesnt make you more or less of a piracy victim. If your product is good it will sell.. If your product is "Meh, good enough".. it will sell less. People pay $150 a year for a wow account.. double that for the majority of folks who have more than 1 account. People pay EXACTLY the same ammount to play Horizons, arguably one of the worst MMOs ever to launch. (from a technical standpoint) IMO it's not about the money but what you are getting for the money..
Give a consumer value and they will play. Do you have to make a WoW clone to make money? No, just go to Horizons to see what peopel are willing to suffer through and still pay for. I dont say that indie devs are lazy, maybe the tweaks and design changes needed to make their venture profitable are beyond some of them.. but thats just nature and the cruel fact that we cant all be genius game developers. Dedication and a thirst to learn and become the best will always be met with success. If you want to make money.. focus on your drive to be successful and never settle for "meh, its good enough". It's not good enough untill it's done right.