Barrier to the Big Games
- Transfer
In 1997, with the advent of Ultima Online, games became much larger. In 1999, the scale of the games again increased significantly after the release of Everquest . It became possible to build complex social relations in a virtual space and even have virtual work that yields more income than “real” (This is me, “Lee”, in an article in 2000 ).
Then the upper bound skyrocketed again with the release of two games in 2003: EVE Online from CCP and World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment. Both of these games became the benchmark of the “Big” game in our industry, and they kept on getting bigger. But then a strange thing happened.
Nothing has happened.
The arena of "big" games has turned into a real Avenue of the Damned, strewn with applicants who failed. Millions of dollars flew into the chimney in this battle, and investors panicked. There were just a few exceptions that managed to stay afloat, such as City of Heroes from Cryptic Studio (NCSoft) and Final Fantasy XI from Square Enix. Applicants who believe that their game should be even bigger, bigger, were waiting for a terrible and terrible death in the market. I could name the names, but I don’t think that a few pages, streaked with a listing of the lost billions of investments, would be appropriate here.
I’d better tell you a secret that I have been keeping for several years. It's not about scale.
The point is Capital .
When you put a lock on a door in your house, you do this not only for the sake of protecting your life, you also want to keep your belongings. Both of these have a value for you, which has grown over the time you live. When you call the police, they come to help you protect your capital and possibly other people's capital. This is how our society works, and so we have been taught from the moment we first learned to say "this is mine."
We often describe this in games as “constancy,” but in reality we always talk about capital. If I reached the tenth level, I left the game and upon returning the next day I found my tenth level intact - my capital was saved. My labors were not lost. If I go out with a hundred coins and return to them, my capital is saved again.
This is the reason why everyone is afraid of the terrible “server rollback”. It's not that the player is scared by the idea of re-passing some part of the game. Players in League of Legends again and again playing the same characters every day. But in the rollback, the acquired capital is lost. That is what makes him so painful.
Similarly, if you are the only owner of a horse in the virtual world, this horse has incredible value due to its rarity. If you go in one day and find that, due to a bug or exploit, half a hundred people now also own horses, then the value of your horse has become almost insignificant. I explain this in more detail in my article “ Mona Lisa and the Alchemist". Thus, despite the fact that nothing happened to my property, I experienced a catastrophic loss of capital. I will be unhappy! I can even abandon the game.
What if I spent three months hunting an in-game horse, and then a few days later I discovered that half the other players now own horses too? But this did not happen because of a bug, but because the developers decided that the horses are cool and the players are ready to pay real money for them. I also write about this in the mentioned article . Now the horses are not cool at all and my capital has been destroyed. I am not satisfied! More importantly, now I have lost faith in the game world and its creators, because I know that they will not protect my efforts. It's like calling the police (the people you pay for protection), and they come and rob you! I know this happens in some parts of our planet, but that’s not what you want in your game.
In this way,all micropayments that sell game content at the same time destroy capital . This applies to everything that is usually "earned" in the game, whether it be levels, things or titles.
When the game loses its freshness and the development team decides to release an add-on, the appearance of new things gives new opportunities for the accumulation of capital. It's good. When the same addition makes previously valuable things useless, it destroys capital. If it took me a thousand hours to get the best sword in the game, and thanks to the new addition, an even cooler sword can be obtained in a hundred hours - I just lost my capital. And although usually adding a new one to a game is a good change, such dynamics can be insidious, and designers who are unaware of this may even finish off their game with the latest additions.
Another way to destroy capital in games is to divide resources into “levels”. If to create the coolest items in your game you need only “top grade” resources, then you basically intentionally destroyed the capital of all the lower levels. This upsets the players. This design was copied from Everquest in World of Warcraft and even in Guild Wars 2 a decade later, despite the presence of an economist in the development team.
So how do you create a gaming economy without these mistakes? Glad you asked!
In EVE Online, the simplest and most common resource is tritanium. It never becomes obsolete, it just needs more during the game. Your tritanium never loses value, so even after ten years your capital in the game is saved. The main source of capital loss is the output of supplements, but usually this is the most pleasant form of loss. Proper game design is the reason EVE is the only game in the world that boasts that it has only grown in the last ten years.
It's all about capital, baby.
The only sad thing is that despite all the motivation of the players to spend thousands of dollars a year on the game, CCP did not create a monetization model that would raise this money. They tried to add micropayments, but this did not work for the above reasons. The appearance of PLEX was the second attempt to introduce micropayments, but in fact, one source of income (players buying PLEX) had a bad effect on another source of income (players who are most willing to pay now played for free).
World of Warcraft was another game that did everything right, because in 2003 it started with a weak economy. Why is it good? Because a weak economy is much better than its absence, as it was with competitors (with the exception of EVE) The inclusion of a well-designed auction and a decent crafting system was a big step forward for the MMORPG genre. Players literally spent days in the auction ignoring everything else in the game, because, in their opinion, this was the best part of the game.
Blizzard's weak economy and inability to fully monetize demand have led entrepreneurial third parties to profit from WoW . For example, IGE managed to cause a lot of trouble and at the same time earned billions of dollars that could go to Blizzard. The sight of all this money disappearing for nothing and the opportunists cluttering the game chat with their advertisements was traumatic enough for me to become an applied virtual economist specializing in the search for countermeasures.
The industry as a whole reacted differently. In the absence of these countermeasures, the companies either tried to copy WoW (a waste of money), either introduced monetization models with micropayments (to remove intermediaries), or simply stopped making Big Games.
Micropayments, as I said, destroy capital and thus quickly reduce the life of gaming products. The unlimited subscriptions used in WoW encourage a “game of hard drinking”, which again shortens the life of the product due to the fact that players quickly consume all game content. The solution in the form of frequent patches and additions is practical only if you already have a large number of players. Due to the fact that wow allowed to grow for so long without any serious competition, it turned into a real monster of game content, with which new products simply do not have a chance to compete using the same mechanisms.
The general desire to abandon the Big Games did not appear due to technical or budgetary restrictions. It appeared due to the limitations of monetization models, which set a limit on the size of games. I love big games, I can’t deny it. The thought of a very, very BIG game makes me sweat and reflexively get my wallet. I know that I'm not the only one. Therefore, everything that I have done since 2005 in the field of virtual economy was aimed at eliminating these systemic large-scale restrictions.
Meanwhile, several bright “smaller” games were released that experimented in trying to circumvent the limitations of subscription and micropayment models. In particular, World of Tanks and League of LegendsWe avoided the dangerous pay to win trap using the original hybrid model that I wrote about in my Supremacy Goods article .
Of the two models, I like the model in World of Tanks more , because it allows users to build up capital while they progress through the tank tree. League of Legends is less concerned about the loss of capital when selling game content, because capital is poorly expressed in the design of the game. While LoL's simplicity of design lowers the entry threshold for casual players, it also limits the depth of potential monetization and paves the way for competitors. One of the most important limitations of WoT design , in my opinion, is the lack of gender neutrality in the game.
Speaking of competition, I cannot help but recall that Marvel Heroes is coming out this week . The game is essentially Diablo 2/3 with a wide range of superhero avatars that are sold on a monetization model almost identical to LoL . The game is larger and allows the accumulation of capital in the form of levels and equipment, and therefore, although it is still simple from the point of view of the virtual economy, it is still much deeper than LoL or WoT . It is not based on PvP, which may alienate some users, but is likely to attract as many or more people among those who prefer a single or cooperative game.
In addition to the mentioned games, I got a short-term pleasure from the scale.Guild Wars 2 . The gameplay was amazing, but, as I said in my short review of its economy, the concept of capital was poorly implemented in almost every reward mechanism, turning the economy into a burden for gameplay and, ultimately, monetization.
Then the upper bound skyrocketed again with the release of two games in 2003: EVE Online from CCP and World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment. Both of these games became the benchmark of the “Big” game in our industry, and they kept on getting bigger. But then a strange thing happened.
Nothing has happened.
The arena of "big" games has turned into a real Avenue of the Damned, strewn with applicants who failed. Millions of dollars flew into the chimney in this battle, and investors panicked. There were just a few exceptions that managed to stay afloat, such as City of Heroes from Cryptic Studio (NCSoft) and Final Fantasy XI from Square Enix. Applicants who believe that their game should be even bigger, bigger, were waiting for a terrible and terrible death in the market. I could name the names, but I don’t think that a few pages, streaked with a listing of the lost billions of investments, would be appropriate here.
I’d better tell you a secret that I have been keeping for several years. It's not about scale.
The point is Capital .
The role of capital in games
When you put a lock on a door in your house, you do this not only for the sake of protecting your life, you also want to keep your belongings. Both of these have a value for you, which has grown over the time you live. When you call the police, they come to help you protect your capital and possibly other people's capital. This is how our society works, and so we have been taught from the moment we first learned to say "this is mine."
We often describe this in games as “constancy,” but in reality we always talk about capital. If I reached the tenth level, I left the game and upon returning the next day I found my tenth level intact - my capital was saved. My labors were not lost. If I go out with a hundred coins and return to them, my capital is saved again.
This is the reason why everyone is afraid of the terrible “server rollback”. It's not that the player is scared by the idea of re-passing some part of the game. Players in League of Legends again and again playing the same characters every day. But in the rollback, the acquired capital is lost. That is what makes him so painful.
Similarly, if you are the only owner of a horse in the virtual world, this horse has incredible value due to its rarity. If you go in one day and find that, due to a bug or exploit, half a hundred people now also own horses, then the value of your horse has become almost insignificant. I explain this in more detail in my article “ Mona Lisa and the Alchemist". Thus, despite the fact that nothing happened to my property, I experienced a catastrophic loss of capital. I will be unhappy! I can even abandon the game.
How do we underestimate capital
What if I spent three months hunting an in-game horse, and then a few days later I discovered that half the other players now own horses too? But this did not happen because of a bug, but because the developers decided that the horses are cool and the players are ready to pay real money for them. I also write about this in the mentioned article . Now the horses are not cool at all and my capital has been destroyed. I am not satisfied! More importantly, now I have lost faith in the game world and its creators, because I know that they will not protect my efforts. It's like calling the police (the people you pay for protection), and they come and rob you! I know this happens in some parts of our planet, but that’s not what you want in your game.
In this way,all micropayments that sell game content at the same time destroy capital . This applies to everything that is usually "earned" in the game, whether it be levels, things or titles.
When the game loses its freshness and the development team decides to release an add-on, the appearance of new things gives new opportunities for the accumulation of capital. It's good. When the same addition makes previously valuable things useless, it destroys capital. If it took me a thousand hours to get the best sword in the game, and thanks to the new addition, an even cooler sword can be obtained in a hundred hours - I just lost my capital. And although usually adding a new one to a game is a good change, such dynamics can be insidious, and designers who are unaware of this may even finish off their game with the latest additions.
Another way to destroy capital in games is to divide resources into “levels”. If to create the coolest items in your game you need only “top grade” resources, then you basically intentionally destroyed the capital of all the lower levels. This upsets the players. This design was copied from Everquest in World of Warcraft and even in Guild Wars 2 a decade later, despite the presence of an economist in the development team.
So how do you create a gaming economy without these mistakes? Glad you asked!
Games that did it right
In EVE Online, the simplest and most common resource is tritanium. It never becomes obsolete, it just needs more during the game. Your tritanium never loses value, so even after ten years your capital in the game is saved. The main source of capital loss is the output of supplements, but usually this is the most pleasant form of loss. Proper game design is the reason EVE is the only game in the world that boasts that it has only grown in the last ten years.
It's all about capital, baby.
The only sad thing is that despite all the motivation of the players to spend thousands of dollars a year on the game, CCP did not create a monetization model that would raise this money. They tried to add micropayments, but this did not work for the above reasons. The appearance of PLEX was the second attempt to introduce micropayments, but in fact, one source of income (players buying PLEX) had a bad effect on another source of income (players who are most willing to pay now played for free).
World of Warcraft was another game that did everything right, because in 2003 it started with a weak economy. Why is it good? Because a weak economy is much better than its absence, as it was with competitors (with the exception of EVE) The inclusion of a well-designed auction and a decent crafting system was a big step forward for the MMORPG genre. Players literally spent days in the auction ignoring everything else in the game, because, in their opinion, this was the best part of the game.
Blizzard's weak economy and inability to fully monetize demand have led entrepreneurial third parties to profit from WoW . For example, IGE managed to cause a lot of trouble and at the same time earned billions of dollars that could go to Blizzard. The sight of all this money disappearing for nothing and the opportunists cluttering the game chat with their advertisements was traumatic enough for me to become an applied virtual economist specializing in the search for countermeasures.
The industry as a whole reacted differently. In the absence of these countermeasures, the companies either tried to copy WoW (a waste of money), either introduced monetization models with micropayments (to remove intermediaries), or simply stopped making Big Games.
Micropayments, as I said, destroy capital and thus quickly reduce the life of gaming products. The unlimited subscriptions used in WoW encourage a “game of hard drinking”, which again shortens the life of the product due to the fact that players quickly consume all game content. The solution in the form of frequent patches and additions is practical only if you already have a large number of players. Due to the fact that wow allowed to grow for so long without any serious competition, it turned into a real monster of game content, with which new products simply do not have a chance to compete using the same mechanisms.
"Big" battle
The general desire to abandon the Big Games did not appear due to technical or budgetary restrictions. It appeared due to the limitations of monetization models, which set a limit on the size of games. I love big games, I can’t deny it. The thought of a very, very BIG game makes me sweat and reflexively get my wallet. I know that I'm not the only one. Therefore, everything that I have done since 2005 in the field of virtual economy was aimed at eliminating these systemic large-scale restrictions.
Meanwhile, several bright “smaller” games were released that experimented in trying to circumvent the limitations of subscription and micropayment models. In particular, World of Tanks and League of LegendsWe avoided the dangerous pay to win trap using the original hybrid model that I wrote about in my Supremacy Goods article .
Of the two models, I like the model in World of Tanks more , because it allows users to build up capital while they progress through the tank tree. League of Legends is less concerned about the loss of capital when selling game content, because capital is poorly expressed in the design of the game. While LoL's simplicity of design lowers the entry threshold for casual players, it also limits the depth of potential monetization and paves the way for competitors. One of the most important limitations of WoT design , in my opinion, is the lack of gender neutrality in the game.
Speaking of competition, I cannot help but recall that Marvel Heroes is coming out this week . The game is essentially Diablo 2/3 with a wide range of superhero avatars that are sold on a monetization model almost identical to LoL . The game is larger and allows the accumulation of capital in the form of levels and equipment, and therefore, although it is still simple from the point of view of the virtual economy, it is still much deeper than LoL or WoT . It is not based on PvP, which may alienate some users, but is likely to attract as many or more people among those who prefer a single or cooperative game.
In addition to the mentioned games, I got a short-term pleasure from the scale.Guild Wars 2 . The gameplay was amazing, but, as I said in my short review of its economy, the concept of capital was poorly implemented in almost every reward mechanism, turning the economy into a burden for gameplay and, ultimately, monetization.