Hello
everyone! Time for another selection of great content in this week’s News and
Views. March is fast approaching, and with it comes a tidal wave of anticipated
releases. It is not here yet, though, so here are some articles to tide you
over. This week, I have assembled stories about the cultural symbolism in a
controller, a look into the changing nature of how we understand games, and the
rise of companion apps. I hope everyone has a great weekend—I know I can’t wait
to binge on some House of Cards! Live
long and prosper.
I do not know much (read: anything)
about the UFC, but the appearance of signature moves is hilarious, and Slack
gives an interesting comparison to Street Fighter. Nothing
tops a Jaguar Kick or Tiger Knee, though.
This became a surprisingly divisive topic this week. I support anyone who wants to make games, and I am interested
to see what comes of this. West’s music career began with him playing around on
a game music-making program, after all.
I am a huge fan of Telltale’s work.
This new partnership with Lionsgate could make for some interesting new
experiences. Worth keeping an eye out for, I think.
My Hearthstone obsession continues. BGH is single handedly shaping the metagame, and
is worth addressing as the game moves forward. MTG pro Brian Kibler crafts a
salient argument against the card.
I don’t mean to advertise, but what a sale. My wallet might be hurting
come late April. Hotline
Miami 2, Axiom Verge, Bastion, Titan Souls, and Shovel Knight all call out to me.
Brenda
Iasevoli, NPR Iasevoli does a good job outlining
the very real struggle Ph.D.s face in the current job market. Getting a tenure
track position is increasingly difficult. I’m looking elsewhere when it comes
to my career, thankfully.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
DLCvolve: Evolve, Confusing & Pricy DLC,
and Controversy
Article
Abstract: Evolve, an asymmetrical
competitive first person shooter by Turtle Rock Studios, was one of my most
anticipated titles for 2015 for over a year leading up to its release. My love
for science fiction and monsters, coupled with an appreciation for Evolve’s innovative take on multiplayer
initially had me hooked. Over time, as my gaming priorities changed so too did
my interest in Evolve. A confusing
content distribution scheme coupled with steep pricing ignited outrage in the
video game community, and snuffed out any of my remaining interest in
purchasing the game. As anger grew, misinformation spread. Evolve’s DLC controversy is representative of the large problems
surrounding the video game industry, especially the need for controversy
itself, and serves as a lesson for future releases.
For over a year I was excited
to try out Evolve. Things changed. But
first, a bit of background. Evolve is
a competitive first person shooter made by Turtle Rock Studios—the same people
who made Left for Dead 1 and 2. Evolve’s biggest selling point was its
novel approach to multiplayer. Matches in Evolve are asymmetrical, featuring 4
players pitted against 1. Nearly every competitive game features an even number
of combatants on either side. For instance, fighting games are usually 1v1 or
2v2, many competitive shooters are 6v6, and so on. In Evolve, you choose one of two sides: hunters or the monster. The
hunters are a team of 4 people whose primary objective is to trap and kill the
monsters roaming around planet Shear. The monster is 1 player, whose goal is to
feed on the fauna of Shear to grow bigger and evolve, gaining the strength
needed to defeat the team of hunters. Within the course of a standard game, the
hunters will attempt to quickly find and kill the monster before he grows too
powerful, and the monster will attempt to hide and feed until he reaches his
final evolution (and then kill the players). Games therefore (should) end up as
an action packed tug-of-war between the hunters and monster, resulting in
brutal clashes, tense moments of combat, and satisfying victories. And I was
excited.
Evolve sold me on its premise. For one thing, I am a total sucker for Sci-Fi
settings and monsters of any kind. I grew up reading Heinlein, Asimov and
Bradbury as a kid, and watching Star Trek
and Babylon 5 on tv. I could not, and
still cannot, get enough science
fiction. And I think I like monsters even more. I naturally developed a passion
for horror movies, and have spent a lot of time educating myself on the genre.
Monsters can be amazing: they exude both terror and creativity, and are often a
highlight of the media in which they are featured. Particular favorites are the
Alien xenomorph, the creature from Cloverfield, and essentially everything
from The Mist. Naturally, when I
heard about Evolve’s premise: space
hunters fighting against giant monsters/aliens, I was all in. I was also
intrigued by the asymmetrical element of the multiplayer. Evolve was doing something new, at least to me, and I gave it the
respect that its innovative approach demanded. I envisioned the tense battles
in the jungles of Shear, sneaking around as the burly Goliath monster waiting
to destroy my foes. The asymmetrical gameplay means Evolve is both a competitive and co-operative multiplayer, and each
fight comes across like a boss battle. All of that sounded great, especially
the last part. I’m a huge proponent of boss fights (when done well), but that
is for another article at another time. Finally, I got caught up in the
marketing hype for the game. Evolve was
prominently featured at the biggest gaming events leading up to its release,
from E3 to PAX and beyond. Touted as a seminal and revolutionary experience, Evolve gobbled up the headlines and took
home many convention awards. To sum all of this up, Evolve was a big deal: to me, to the gaming press, and to the
market.
Evolve's monsters look great and seem to be a blast to play.
Over time, though, my
interest in Evolve began to wane. Initially,
this loss of interest was not the fault of Evolve
or its publisher, 2K. First, I gradually moved away from multiplayer
experiences from the time I first heard about Evolve. Because I do not play with any friends, online experiences
are often lonely and have the tendency to get dull quickly. Further, I often
get overly concerned with the incremental progression that is characteristic of
those games, which causes me to neglect playing other titles in hopes to rank
up just one more time. Playing a reward-based multiplayer game without making
much progress irks the completionist side of me, so I try to avoid that
frustration. More importantly, though, I have been craving diversity in my
gaming experiences. I can only play so many first person shooters in a given
year without fatigue. I like to switch between games like the story-driven
virtual novels Telltale makes, to pure platforming experiences in Rayman Legends, to the beat-‘em-up
metroidvanias like Apotheon. As we
moved further into 2015, more and more games popped up that I was interested in
playing. I still want to pick up console games like Life is Strange, Super Mega
Baseball and Hand of Fate, and
have an ever-growing backlog of titles on other platforms like Kentucky Route Zero and Risk of Rain. And finally, many of the
games I purchase these days are weeks or months after release, as a combination
of wanting a cheaper price and finding the time to play. Online multiplayer
centric games like Evolve pose a
serious problem with this acquisition method, though. Evolve relies entirely upon an active online community to make the
game playable & enjoyable. Many competitive online games only have a highly
active community for a month or two following release—and the small pool of
players that are leftover after that period are usually quite skilled, making it
even tougher for a new player to jump in. A month of two before Evolve’s release, I was on the fence.
And then the downloadable content (DLC) fiasco happened.
When you need a spreadsheet to figure out where to get
all the DLC, something is wrong.
My interest in Evolve hit is nadir when DLC talk for
the game started making its way through gaming news outlets. Essentially all
AAA big-budget releases these days have DLC, and are announced prior to
release, so I was not shocked when Turtle Rock Studios started talking
additional content. What stood out about Evolve’s
DLC plans, however, was the sheer quantity that was announced. Everything from
player skins, monster skins, new hunters and new monsters were announced to be
in the works. All of this is fine, but with so much planned, questions arise
about whether or not the content could have been released with the game at
launch. To make matters worse, this content was not cheap. 2K/Turtle Rock Studios were charging $25 for a season
pass, and $15 for a new monster. The big annoyance here was that a great deal
of content was not covered in the
season pass, demanding users pay even more money to get all the released
content. If all that was not bad enough, how to obtain all the DLC was
downright confusing. Exclusive DLC was spread between special editions, console
specific versions, pre-orders, season passes, etc. Even as someone like myself
who follows gaming news closely, I had no clue how to get each piece of
content. To show you just how complicated it is, Reddit user AirPhorce compiled
a list of all DLC and how to get it. Not so clear, right? This kind of DLC rubs
me, and many others, the wrong way. It comes off as exploitative and
underhanded. It left a lot of people confused, and even more pissed off. The backlash was so bad creative director Phil Robb did an
interview attempting to defend the DLC plans. What resulted was controversy.
Pricing was the main issue
fueling the Evolve DLC controversy. As
more and more people and outlets began to weigh in on the issue, a pronounced
proliferation of misinformation occurred. Outrage, in general, misconstrues facts.
Several sites postedarticles adding up how much it would cost to purchase all the Evolve DLC, and emphasizing how much of
that was not covered by the season
pass. Going through each and every piece of content you could purchase looked
bad for Evolve, and naturally the
vitriol towards the game only grew. Everyone wanted in on this juicy
story—nearly every site I frequent had an article covering the subject.
Controversial stories get a lot of clicks, and clicks mean money. Now, I don’t
normally fault gaming sites for running stories like these. They are important, and you need money to
keep a website afloat. What bothered me, though, was the pricing breakdown that
made its ways across all the sites was wrong.
The number that stuck was $136. For this amount, you could obtain all of Evolve’s downloadable extras. As many
commenters pointed out, however, this number included overlapping DLC packages,
including duplicate prices for the same piece of content. When broken down
correctly, what you get is as follows (credit to Reddit):
“The $1.99 and $2.99 items are individual hunter weapon and monster
skins, respectively. The $4.99 and $6.99 items are weapon skin packs, and
monster skin packs (of the items you could also buy individually). So the
actual cost to get all the skins is the total cost of the packs, or $60.89. Less than half the
amount in the headline.”
As it stands now, none of the
articles I read have corrected their false cost assessment. That is probably
for a number of reasons, but one those is this industry’s need for controversy.
Everyone loves to be mad; if nothing else, it gives people something to talk
about. Week to week there is something new the gaming community at large is
enraged about. The week of writing this, everyone was angry that The Order: 1886 was too short. This
week, and nearly every week, some new outrage spreads throughout the Hearthstone community. Before that,
everyone was up in arms about Evolve.
And before that, controversy over framerates, release delays, exclusive titles
for the consoles: the list goes on and on. Heated topics make for great
articles too, and with each controversy comes an onslaught of opinions and
reports, whether it is journalists or YouTube personalities. All of this hubbub
comes at the expensive of facts. The stories get so aggrandized over time, like
with Evolve DLC, that misinformation
can spread rampantly. I take issue with this whole outrage cycle, but misconstruing
the real story irks me even further. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be
any great solutions to stopping this phenomenon. I am not even sure anyone
wants it to stop, to be honest. Gaming sites profit from the traffic and, for
good or bad, certain games can gobble up entire news cycles. I would be curious
to see if there are any statistics on how Evolve
sold compared to expectations, and whether or not analysts attribute any impact
to the DLC controversy. I can image it could have impacted the sales in either
direction.
Reviews are good and players seem to be enjoying Evolve. Will there
be any lasting effects of the DLC controversy?
In the end, I probably will
not be picking up Evolve. Unlike
many, though, the main determinate is not the DLC fiasco, but a natural loss of
interest. Evolve’s release represents
so much that is happening in the gaming industry today though: delayed
releases, launch DLC, “overpriced” content releases, the exponential growth of
gaming controversies, and so much more. At the very least, Evolve gave me something to think and write about. For that, I am
grateful.
Friday, February 20, 2015
News & Views
2/14/15-2/20/15
What’s
that? You want some articles to read before the Oscars this Sunday? Well here
you are!This week I have gathered some
spicy ones. From talking framerate controversies, to Smash Bros controversies,
to The Last Guardian seemingly being cancelled for the dozenth time. It wasn’t,
thankfully. I still have hope that I will be able to play it before I finish my
Ph.D.! Enjoy the weekend and see you all here again very soon. Here is to
hoping Birdman wins best picture!
The Smash Bros. community was in a
tizzy about the leaked Rayman DLC. Turns out it was fake, but a lot of hard (and interesting) work when
into making it. Some definite technical wizardry on display here.
I love monster movies, and
Alien/Aliens are some of my favorites. I enjoyed District 9, and I am excited about what Blomkamp could do with the Alien
universe.
NPR A sobering look into the Ebola-ravaged
Barkedu.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Don't Fear the Reaper
Review
Grim Fandango Remastered, Double Fine (PS4)
“Scaring the living is technically against the rules, but we all do it.”
Abstract: Grim Fandango shoulders the weight of
tremendous expectation. Since its original 1998 release, I have heard tremendous
praise for the game. Many stated that it is the best adventure game of all
time. Following my first playthrough of Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts in 2005, I too felt the excitement to jump into the
world of Grim Fandango. In every regard,
Grim Fandango lives up my expectations:
for better and worse. On one hand, Grim
Fandango exudes the same brilliant inventiveness in world, game, and
character design that is characteristic of all work by Schafer. The writing is
hilarious, the characters are unique and memorable, and the game is truly
unlike any other game that exists. On the other hand, Grim Fandango met my negative expectations as well. I read many
complaints about how cryptic and infuriating the puzzles in Grim Fandango can be. This held true
during my experience with the game. Despite the opaque puzzle design and a
particularly frustrating second act, however, Grim Fandango’s unique wit and charm makes it an unforgettable
experience that I would recommend to anyone.
Grim
Fandango is a game I thought I might never get to play. Originally released for
PC back in 1998, Grim Fandango was
met with wide spread critical acclaim and quickly developed a passionate cult
following. The game was helmed by the already famous Tim Schafer, whose work on
early adventure games helped to both invent, and popularize, the genre. From The Secret of Monkey Island to Full Throttle, Schafer’s work exuded
creativity and resonated with audiences worldwide. Grim Fandango was no exception: bursting at the seams with
inventive characters and ideas, the game was lauded as one of the best
adventure games of all time. Many hold it in the same regard to this day.
Unfortunately for me, by 1998 I had largely moved away from gaming on the PC. My
earliest gaming years were spent on the computer. I played games ranging from Math Rabbit to Freddi Fish to Marathon to
Descent. I purchased my first console
in 1997, the Playstation, and from that point forward I largely neglected
computer releases. By the time I had heard about Grim Fandango, and had experienced some of Schafer’s other work, it
would have been both expensive and challenging to set up a computer to play the
game. This bothered me quite a bit, especially because I had recently become a
huge fan of Tim Schafer.
My first Schafer title was Psychonauts.
The game was released in 2005 for the Playstation 2 and, after reading some
good press about the game, I picked it up. What a great decision 16-year-old me
made. Psychonauts is bizarre and
wonderful, placing you in the shoes of the young Raz, Razputin travels to camp
Whispering Rock to become a psychonaut: a person gifted with psychic abilities
who trains to fight evil. This trippy platformer is witty, hilarious, and
filled with a great cast of characters. I was hooked on Schafer’s work from
that point forward, and have since played Brutal
Legend, Costume Quest, and Broken Age. In the back of my mind, though, I
always wanted to find a way to play Grim
Fandango. My desire was brought to a fever pitch with the massive rebirth
of the adventure game genre recently, chiefly helmed by Telltale Games and
their excellent The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. So, when Tim Schafer
got on stage at E3 2014 and announced Grim
Fandango would be coming to PS4 in early 2015 I was ecstatic. As soon as
the game was released, I purchased it, played it, and here we are. Now, to the
meaty part of the review.
Grim
Fandango is unlike any game I have ever played, and succeeds on so many levels. From
everything that I had heard about the game, to my own expectations of Schafer’s
eccentric charm, Grim Fandango had
quite a substantial promise to fulfill. I am happy to report that everything
that I expected to be good about the
game was great. Schafer’s fortes are story, world, characters, and
dialogue, and all shine through in Grim
Fandango. Let’s start with the story. You play as Manny Calavera, a reaper
and travel agent at the Department of Death. Manny’s job is to escort souls
from the mortal world to the Land of the Dead, and then figure out, based upon
how good they were when alive, how long their journey to the final resting
place will take. What starts out as an average day for the below-average travel
agent Manny, quickly spirals into four-year journey across the Land of the Dead
facing off against syndicated crime to help a client who was robbed of her
quick passage. As heavy as that sounds, Grim
Fandango keeps everything light and humorous. The story stays interesting
throughout the roughly 10-hour game, adding new dimensions and unexpected
twists throughout the four act structure.
The world of Grim Fandango is
zany fantasy hybrid of a 1920’s crime noir and the Land of the Dead inspired by
Dia de los Muertos. The world is diverse and interesting, featuring grimy
cities, fancy casinos, and even underwater fortresses. Around every corner are
pleasant eccentricities. Whether it is the maintenance demon who resembles a
gorilla-starfish mixture, or birds with skeletonized human heads, nothing about
Grim Fandango’s world is dull. And
even in the face of such craziness, everything in the world feels like part of
a consistent idea. I didn’t bat an eye when I came across the submarine piloted
by a giant squid or a crowd of people placing bets on giant cat races. There is
a tremendous depth to the game world too, that goes far beyond the scope of the
main story. This place, this land of the dead, is essentially its own
character. Few games work so hard to create such a memorable, complex world. A
fantastic soundtrack reinforces the already fantastic art direction and world
design, and stands out as a highlight when looking back at the game.
Manny is just one of the many great characters
in Grim Fandango.
As great as the world is, the characters are even better. Manny Calavera
is the heart of Grim Fandango. The
sharp-tongued Manny is a blast to play. Every interaction Manny has is
hilarious, and his sarcastic and quippy demeanor is one of the chief driving
forces behind the game’s charm. As down on his luck do-gooder, Manny’s antics
resonate immediately with the player and are fun to carry out. For an adventure
game that places a high demand on having a protagonist you can relate to and
enjoy playing as, you do not get much better than the goofy and charming Manny.
Much like Schafer’s other games, the whole ensemble is littered with fantastic
and memorable characters. Glottis, Manny’s speed-addicted, lounge-singing,
alcoholic demon sidekick is as much fun to talk to as his description would
suggest. Domino, Manny’s co-worker, is a self-obsessed corporate tool who
constantly harasses you. He’s also hilarious. From Meche to Salvador to Celso
to Lupe, nearly every single character is great. You will want to talk with
them until all their dialogue options run out, every time. The only character
that leaves something to be desired is the main antagonist, Hector LeMans, who
winds up being bland and underdeveloped. But with such a large cast of
unforgettable characters, his weakness hardly detracts from the final
experience.
I want to spend a little extra time covering the excellent dialogue in Grim Fandango, since it is so crucial to
the experience. Grim Fandango is
funny. Despite the few moments of physical comedy that take place, the game
relies on the dialogue to carry the full weight of its comedic aspirations. And
it totally succeeds. A game being
actually funny is not an insignificant achievement. So few games even
attempt humor, let alone are successful at it. Many games that try to be funny stumble,
or try so hard to “be funny” that ends up too over the top or pandering. A
recent example is Sunset Overdrive, a
game that, despite the pedigree of funny game writing at Insomniac (makers of
the Ratchet & Clank series),
comes off as desperate to get laughs. Borderlands
2 is another funny game, and one I quite like, but even it sometimes
stumbles in its attempts to be funny (Tiny Tina was way too much for me). But
Grim Fandango is genuinely and consistently funny. The jokes, puns,
and gags are evenly spread throughout the game, and no one kind of humor is
overwrought. Whether it is in conversations with other characters or
environmental interactions, you can count of Manny and the ensemble to give you
laughs. In my experience, this is one of the hallmarks of a Tim Schafer game. Psychonauts, Costume Quest, and Broken Age
are all funny without giving the impression they are trying hard to do so, and Grim Fandango is probably the funniest
of the bunch.
"Run you pigeons, it's Robert Frost!"
While Grim Fandango happily
met all of my positive expectations, it unfortunately also confirmed the
veracity of the criticisms levied against it. Grim Fandango retains many of the issues that plagued adventure
games in the late 90s, which almost certainly led to, in part, the decline of genre. The faults all fall
under the umbrella of accessibility, or really, lack thereof. Progression in Grim Fandango is non-obvious.
Aside from conversations, the only other key element of gameplay is the
puzzles. “Puzzles” is a generous term, though, since many of these require
figuring out interactions that are only very subtly indicated by the
game. Puzzles in Grim Fandango range
from clear, to opaque, to utterly inscrutable. Unless you are using a
walkthrough, you are going to get frustrated while playing Grim Fandango. The puzzles are just that tough. Grim Fandango exists at a point in time
for adventure games when solving puzzles was less about gathering contextual
clues or thinking outside the box, but moreso reading the mind of the game
developer. Putting yourself in Schafer’s shoes. For instance, one puzzle
solution requires taking the skeletal arm of a body you come across, putting it
into a snow making machine, and grinding it in a sewer to reveal the path of a
character you’re following. What? The second act in particular is filled with
confusing, challenging puzzles. Further, there is a puzzle at the end of the first
act that is not only difficult to figure out, but also required precise timing, resulting in frustrating trial and
error. “Trial and error” is a good way to describe a lot of puzzles in Grim Fandango.
You can say that again, Manny. Some puzzles are infuriating.
Grim
Fandango does little to make puzzle solutions obvious, and disregards any form
of hand holding. To solve puzzles, you require using objects obtained from the
environment. In modern adventure games, key objects will be highlighted upon
approaching them. This lets you know you might need them for a solution later
in the game. In Grim Fandango, you
have to know that you can pick up
the item or, as the case was for me, often mash the “pick up” button to make
sure I don’t miss an item. Mashing results in repeated dialogue, which adds to
the frustration already built up by the opaque puzzles. The game letting you
know what you can, or can’t, use to solve puzzles would certainly help in
solving them. A hint system would have been nice, or contextual dialogue that
leads you to the next step of the solution, but neither really exists in game. As
a final point of contention, situations arise in which you have the item and
know the solution, but the game will not let you “solve” the puzzle. This
happens because many of the interactions have to occur in a very particular
way, or very particular place. Grim
Fandango is a game that demands a smooth playthrough. With such great
characters and story, it feels all the worse when you’re stuck trying to figure
out how to get a book from some beatniks. As a point of disclosure, I did use a
guide at points to get through the game, which made the experience so muchbetter. If I got stuck for days on end trying to beat Freddi Fish when I was a kid, there is
no way I was going to rip my hair out trying to figure out everything in Grim Fandango, especially not with so
much on my plate.
As far as the “Remastered” part of this review is concerned, there is
not that much to write about. The improved character textures and lighting
looked great, and the remade songs sounded nice. I wish more had been done to
improve the static backgrounds, or more had been done to make the game look a
little crisper. Grim Fandango is not
a game that requires the best graphics, though, and the game played great. That
is what mattered the most to me.
Grim
Fandango is a fantastic game. It completely lives up to its reputation, both the
praise and the criticism. Adventure games of recent years have taken a turn for
the deadly serious, so it was a breath of fresh air to play through such a
whimsical, funny game. Grim Fandango
creates a memorable world and characters that make the game an unforgettable
experience; I just wish I could forget how annoyed I got when trying to solve
some of the tougher puzzles in the game. Ultimately, the frustrating puzzle
design does detract from the final package, but only slightly. Grim Fandango demands to be played so
that it can share its wonderful creativity and wit with you. Just be sure have
a guide handy.
Grim
Fandango Remastered
4/5
Friday, February 13, 2015
News & Views
2/7/15-2/13/15
Happy
Valentine’s Day weekend everyone! No stories this week are particularly
romantic, but all of them are worth reading. I have put together a wide
selection this week, from lost fortunes to the worst pizza party ever. As always,
let me know what you think and please post anything you found interesting.
Spider-Man has long been my favorite
Marvel character, and I am interested to see how
he falls in the MCU. I would take anything over the abysmal “Amazing”
Spider-Man movies at this point.
A tearful farewell from Colin and
Greg, two big names in the social media side of Playstation coverage. We’ll see
how the podcast fares following their departure.
Jon Ronson,
The New York Times A great look at the (scary) power of
social media. Protip: don’t tweet out ignorant things. It generally
doesn’t go so well.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Welcome to Now: Free-to-Play Mobile
Game Ads and the Super Bowl
Article
For my
entire life, I’ve had only two reasons to watch the Super Bowl: to know what
people are talking about the next day, and the commercials. The latter has been
my main motivation for viewing. Companies jump at the chance to get their
product seen by the colossal Super Bowl viewership. To fight through all the
noise, companies often put together bombastic spots that are funny, crazy, and
memorable. Buying airtime for their commercials isn’t cheap either, coming in
at roughly $4.5
million for 30 seconds this year. So, you can imagine my shock when I saw
not one, not two, but three
different ads for free-to-play (F2P) mobile games during the football game. These
ads had some serious star power behind them, too. I watched as Liam Neeson
channeled his Taken movie persona in
the Clash of Clans ad, and Kate Upton
clad in fantasy armor telling me about the amazing Game of War. After my initial surprise I began to think: what did
this mean? Is it important? And here we are.
Clash of Clans ad featuring Liam Neeson. The other two are at the end of this article.
I want to
get this off my chest before I get into anything deeper: video game ads are
strange to me. No avoiding it. But they are strange in two very different ways.
First, until very recently, television spots for games were few and far
between. I can count on one hand the number of different game commercials I
remember from my childhood, or at least ones that were solely dedicated to
marketing the game itself. Two in particular stand out: this fantastic
commercial for the original Super Smash
Bros. (below) and for the original Kingdom Hearts. For
the most part, I heard about new games through reading magazines, hearing from
my friends, or seeing what was for purchase at the store. Ads were a rare treat,
often punctuated with years between memorable spots. Nowadays, though, game ads
are everywhere. I saw ads for Destiny
and Grand Theft Auto V during AMC’s The Walking Dead, trailers for The Master Chief Collection playing in
movie theaters before show time, and a countless number of ads shown when watching
Twitch or Youtube. The shift wasn’t gradual either: it seemed that, all of the
sudden, game ads were everywhere. Especially when shown on tv or in theaters,
video game commercials still weird me out. Just a bit.
This Super Smash Bros. tv spot is goofy and fantastic.
On the
other hand, video game ads are strange because there are so few of them.
Contradictory? Let me try to explain. For every game ad I see in my normal movie
going or tv viewing, I see easily 5-10 times as many trailers for movies. Video
games are a huge industry. New game
releases are consistently the biggest entertainment product launch of the year.
The most extreme case of this is in 2013 when Grand Theft Auto V launched. In the first three days of its
release, GTA V racked in over $1
billion in sales, making it the largest entertainment launch ever. Compare that to The Avengers, which took 19 days to
reach those sales. GTA V isn’t the
only example, with big franchises like Call
of Duty and Madden putting up
massive units sold through to consumers yearly. Even smaller releases can have
substantial sales. One of my favorites from last year, Transistor, has sold 600K
units in 8 months, which is pretty great. All of this is a long-winded way
of saying that it is strange how “few” game ads there are. Obviously, many of
these games know their core audience does not rely on tv spots to know about
the product, or that ads will sway purchasing decisions. But it surprises me
more of these AAA games do not try to market to general audiences, especially
with how large new games releases already are. Destiny clearly made this push, as I saw their ads everywhere
September-November 2014, but they are the exception, not the rule.
That brings
me to the Super Bowl, and the three ads for F2P games that aired. These ads
speak to the nature of these F2P games themselves, and the industry as a whole.
For free games like Clash of Clans,
users are their number one resource. The games are largely social in nature,
and being able to play with your friends, attack random groups of users, and
post about it on Facebook or Twitter are integral to their success. Their
revenue is solely dependent on the number of active users too. Because the game
is free to download and play (depending on your definition of “play”), many
users never spend any money on the game. According to Supercell the developer
of Clash of Clans, about 90%
of players never spend a dime. Yet, at the moment of writing this article, Clash of Clans is the number one top-grossing
app on the iTunes app store, and Game of
War is #2. In fact, all games in the top 10 grossing apps are “free” to
start. Developers of F2P titles therefore must play a numbers game: the more
total users you have, the more money you are able to make with a 10% total
conversion rate from free to paying users. What better way to grow your user
base than to show it to one of the most viewed television events on the year? The
most shocking thing to me was that these games are so successful that paying for a Super Bowl ad made financial sense.
Yep, all games there are F2P.
The top two had Superbowl ads.
Marketing to
grow their user base is the biggest part of a F2P game. This, unfortunately, is
one of the reasons games like Clash of
Clans leave a bad taste in my mouth, and the commercials irked me. For the
sake of this article, I’m not trying to argue that F2P mobile games are inherently bad. For what it is worth, I
have heard Clash of Clans is a
relatively competent mobile action strategy game. The issue that arises with
games like these is two fold. First, to make money, pay-to-skip time walls are implemented
to artificially restrict playtime, or paid gameplay boosts help paying users
have an advantage over free users. Second, as evidenced by these Super Bowl
ads, a hefty portion of F2P games’ budget is spent on advertisement. When the
number one goal of these games is to gain more users, spending money to make more
and better content for the games can fall by the wayside. If I had to guess, I
would think that it is more profitable to get new users to pay for the same
content than it is to fund and create new content to charge your old users for.
Again, I can’t speak for these games in particular, but trends like these hold
true when looking at the overall F2P market. A final point of general sourness
about these F2P games and their Super Bowl ads is their deceptive nature. This
is an endemic problem in the games industry. Game advertisements often feature
no gameplay footage whatsoever, featuring flashy and highly polished
pre-rendered sequences “representative” of gameplay. Or, like the route taken
by these F2P Super Bowl ads, say nothing about the game. The Liam Neeson Clash of Clans ad had me smirking, sure,
but it told me nothing about what it is like to play the game. Game of War
is a more egregious example, where the live action sequences (made to look like
what the game play entails), are dramatically different than the game itself. I
will not belabor this too long, as F2P games are certainly not the only guilty
party here, but it did leave a final
bitter note to the already unpleasant taste in my mouth about the whole thing.
These
Superbowl ads are also reflective of the state of the industry as a whole. Besides
blockbuster franchises like Grand Theft
Auto, Madden or Call of Duty, the
tremendous production cost of AAA titles limits revenue for many IPs. Despite
great reviews and tremendous word of mouth, sales of Wolfenstein: The New Order by MachineGames were low. Another
example is SquareEnix, who expressed disappointment over sales of the recent Tomb Raider reboot, despite it selling
millions of copies across PC/PS3/Xbox360. These F2P games are the products that
are proving the most profitable in the current market. I don’t have to look far
for proof of this: let’s just take SquareEnix again. On the AAA front,
SquareEnix has had limited success recently. Tomb Raider sold well, but not to the expected levels, and other
titles like Murdered: Soul Suspect
have similarly underperformed. Yet, despite the dearth of successful releases,
SquareEnix recently announced that its profits
have doubled largely as a result of their recent push to release free mobile
games with paid incentives like Sengoku
IXA and Dragon Quest Monsters Super
Light. Will more game makers and publishing studios, like SquareEnix, move
towards releasing more F2P mobile titles? It’s hard to tell. All I can say for
sure is that it seems to be pretty darn lucrative. And, if this does happen, it
is still too early to tell if development of these titles would impact the
quality or quantity of large console releases. I doubt it, but it certainly
seems like something worth considering.
In the end,
when thinking about the F2P ads during the Super Bowl, I’m left with more
questions than answers. Certainly, they are representative of the primary goal
of these games, to grow their user base. They also represent the significant
market share F2P mobile games occupy. Recent reports show that mobile only
gamers make up as much as 20%
of the market, a number that is no doubt growing. They also hint at the
challenges big-budget AAA games and game makers face, as their profits
generally pale in comparison to these F2P mobile games. And finally, these
commercials may be the harbinger of things to come, as more developers and
publishers (like SquareEnix) emphasize mobile game development, potentially at
the expense of AAA releases. The future is wide open. Without any other great
solutions, the impetuous falls on game makers, journalists, and lowly bloggers
like myself to advocate for the great games that are being released today. I
would love it if mobile gamers knew about some of the truly special titles out
there, like Hearthstone, Monument Valley, Faster than Light (FTL), or Framed.
So check them out, if you have some time. I think you will be happy you did.
