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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
So we left yesterday's post at a time of great flux, as physical stores are closing, entire names that have been regulars in mall spaces and other places are gone, replaced by bigger conglomerates that sell the same things everywhere. It'll be a little bit before retro nostalgia really kicks in with a vengeance and we start seeing used game stores popping up in those same places to sell new systems that can read old cartridges and play those games, while also offering those same cartridges and sometimes, the rare variations of older systems themselves, for sale. They often have accessories as well, and the ones that aren't necessarily chain-based stores also sell arcade cabinets or offer tournaments and play spaces for old games and new.
As physical spaces to sell games (and other goods and media, really) are declining, the World Wide Web is taking off. So much so that it's starting to be affordable (for certain values of) for a person to get broadband Web access thorough the same provider that gives them pay television access. Technology is improving to the point where a person can have a theater-quality experience with high-end televisions and sound systems, and indeed, many game consoles are also movie playing devices. (The project now known as Kodi started as XBMC - XBox Media Center, transforming the Microsoft console into a full-fledged media center that could do much more than just play games.) This is a bit of an enticement to get a game console, at least for me, because then I get to both play games and use the console as a media center of sorts, so long as the console ends up being able to use the winning format in the format war.
This is also the point in time where games really start trying to be cinematic in their presentation. Games that used Full Motion Video aren't new (Night Trap, after all, was filmed in 1987, even if it didn't release until 1992), but they are a limited technology for interactivity, in that the player jumps around from place to place, playing pre-recorded clips based on when the player chose to interact during the clip. The technology that went into making those games (and the big boom of FMV games that happened through the early 1990s) isn't actually all that limited, either, given that chroma key techniques are already in use by this point, and motion capture technology is able to take the inputs of martial artists, like Carlos and Daniel Pesina, and digitize them so that your favorite pallette-swap ninja (or other character) for Mortal Kombat comes through crisply. Of course, all of these techniques rely on actual humans doing the motions, which often requires stunt work and chroma-key work. Technology, at this point, is switching over to the idea of filming actors using motion capture technology and then match moving the performance into the desired environment, which has usually been built completely digitally. (Or, in the case of many theatrical films and television shows, match moving them back into a filmed environment where stand-ins or actors are filmed for the non-effects characters to look at. Which itself might also have chroma-key backgrounds.) With more powerful processors and video units, as well as sharp jumps in the amount of available storage on both disc and disk media, the additional computing resources needed to make a cinematic, sweeoing experience full of motion, rather than characters walking across painted backgrounds, are finally on consoles and computers. (By which I mean PCs one might buy in an electronics or warehouse store, not customized, ground-up built gaming rigs specifically meant to have fast CPUs, large amounts of video memory and powerful GPUs, an abundance of hard disk space and RAM, and possibly an aftermarket cooling system designed so that the processor and all of its components can be run at a faster clock speed than the processor itself is rated for or sold at.) To see how far things have come since the FMV era, one only needs look at gameplay from Final Fantasy VII's original Playstation release (you can see the characters in all their polygonal glory moving over FMV backgrounds in, say, the opening video to FFVII on the Playstation, which was mostly the same on the PC release) compared to how the characters move and play in the Remake that will be arriving in 2020 (a boss fight, in all its glory, as an example here, including the use of several Limit Breaks and Summon Materia). There's twenty years of technological improvement at work there, and it shows.
All of this technological improvement, however, comes at the cost of needing space for all of it to go. Before the availability of widespread broadband, games had to generally be pressed to a physical medium, which would mean that some games needed to have a disc change when a certain amount of the game had passed. PCs could often get around this limitation because the data on the disc could be copied to the hard drive, but some games had their audio tracks still on the disc and needed to access those tracks anyway. (It was a weird time between cartridges and DVDs, okay? 700MB wasn't actually all that much, so a four-disc RPG was pretty common at the time.) Once storage media caught up to the requirements, we were back to single discs (and Blu-rays by now can mostly hold games, of the numbers I'm setting to download hold on correctly), but we're also in the timeline where Amazon is proving rapidly that it can apply the techniques it has learned with regard to books to everything else, as well, and has been at the forefront of some new ideas about how people might enjoy having a single device that can hold an entire bookshelf's with of books on it and that holds a charge for a really long time. (Have we mentioned as well that the landline phone market is slowly drying up as mobile phones become small, affordable, and, most importantly, smart?) The Kindle, the iPhone, and Android, combined with the ubiquity of broadband over cable, WiFi, and cell tower, make it feasible for even large games to be downloaded over the Internet, from machine to machine, with no need for a physical anything in the intermediate stage. (It was possible before, but when you're trying to get something that's gigabytes of data over dial-up, you really hope you've got that dedicated second phone line, or you set the download up to happen overnight.)
One of the first players to come on to the scene with a digital distribution method is that same company that Sierra distributed Half-Life hit, Valve. Initially intended, as best I can tell, as a way of buying, downloading, and playing Valve games online, Steam took the next logical step after Doom and Quake provided the infrastructure needed to run the servers for multiplayer games over the Internet as part of the game (whether it was a client computer acting as a server as well or a dedicated server somewhere hosting games all the time) and companies like Blizzard provided official servers to play their games with/against other players on (Battle.net is still the moniker they tend to use for this idea), with temptations and rewards, like ladder servers, for people to stick to official servers instead of setting their own up and configuring them to their liking. On Steam, you could not only play the games and register them and get updates for them, you could buy the games digitally and have them downloaded to your computer. Steam has become a giant platform for many digitally distributed items, not just games, to the point where their sales are legendary events.
At a certain point, other large game publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard decided they didn't want to use Valve's platform for playing and distribution of their games, and so now there's Origin, and the Battle.net launcher, and a Bethesda launcher, and ArenaNet has a launcher, and, and, and. Each company is putting their catalogue on their own service exclusively and banking that there are enough people who will use that and purchase from it for the digital service to be viable. Which is something that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have been doing on their own new consoles for a while now, offering back catalogue across their history through emulation. Some of those games have worked their way across to other platforms, like Steam, through emulation, so it is legally possible to play the Playstation version of a Super Nintendo game through Steam and the DS version on an Android phone because Square-Enix or Sega wants to release those games for different markets. Mostly, though, rather than being able to get your content in a single platform any more, it's become a fragmented media space again, and each place is clamoring for some amount of your time, attention, and money to play the AAA game catalog they have available (or the casual games they own the digital adaptations of).
There's been one really big winner, though, in the digital distribution department. An independent game designer that can muster the entry fee (last I knew, it was $100, which would be donated to charity from Valve) and has a game product can get themselves onto the Steam platform and sell their game for the amount they think it is worth. Since there are no physical media to have to manage, inventory, and get into stores, a game, once in the Steam store, can sell copies of itself for as long as it is listed and the Steam service exists. And because of those same things, it's possible for games to list their prices at less than the $60 that a standard store AAA game would cost, or even the $20 that a "Greatest Hits" re-release usually costs (and often includes updates or what was separate downloadable content released from the original game), making it more attractive for a person to take a chance on a game they might not otherwise have seen or ever known about. Steam also has some wishlist features and had invested pretty heavily into a system to provide recommendations (in the form of a queue) so that someone looking for a game like one they enjoyed they could find more of them. Modulo Steam selling versions of games that would be M-rated and under, even if the actual games themselves are AO-rated (especially in the visual novel genre).
Digital versions of these games, and if games that were popular in yesteryear, are sometimes offered in different stores. GOG, for example, focuses on games of earlier DOS and Windows spaces, with some forays into more modern games, with an entirely optional launcher and manager available. GOG focuses on delivering their games without any digital rights management (DRM) attached, which is great for people who want to be able to take their games with them wherever and however they want. Unfortunately, that limits the available software they can offer to things like "good old games" for the most part. (Here's a preview of tomorrow's post: DRM is evil and most digital goods sales don't actually sell the thing itself, forcing a person to hope that the thing they buy will continue to exist into the future.)
Certain games can also get themselves included in various bundle sites or offers, like the ones offered by Humble Bundle, Indie Royale, GOG, and others. Epic Bundle does a pretty good job of keeping track of what's going on at all the other bundle sites around. Which brings us to the other problem of buying your games in groups - it becomes very easy, very quickly, to have a library greater than your available time to play each of those games to their fullest. Even if Sturgeon's Law applies, unless you like games that finish quickly, for your definition of finishing, there's a good chance you'll run out of time and hard drive space before you run out of games. It can cause a certain amount of decision paralysis to try and choose from 1,000+ games obtained to play in your limited free time. It helps if you can stash certain ones in "nope, never going to play", but, well, right now, I've got 32 games that Stream thinks are "perfect," by which we mean all the achievements that were available have been obtained. Some of those games never had any achievements to start with, of course, and may be more of a comfort to own rather than a thing that needs a specific replay.
As with many things in life and media, it's a mixed blessing when it comes to the new ways of business. People who would never have had a shot at becoming creators and seeing their creations end up making them money are able to make their living on those things through the power of there being enough people that enjoy it that they'll give money (or watch ads) for the content. At the same time, that content is monetized and often locked behind DRM or restrictive licensing agreements by big companies that control the platforms those media elements can be distributed on for the widest audience and reach. There's lucre and convenience and a lot of things going for the widespread adoption of a single platform, and there are also things that are not at all good from a single platform gathering an outsize influence. Interoperability would be the best thing ever, but unfortunately, companies don't actually want to play nice with each other, and so we are scattered across the four winds wishing at some point to be able to have all of our things in one space, even if it is a metapackage that pulls everything together and makes it available under one roof.
So we left yesterday's post at a time of great flux, as physical stores are closing, entire names that have been regulars in mall spaces and other places are gone, replaced by bigger conglomerates that sell the same things everywhere. It'll be a little bit before retro nostalgia really kicks in with a vengeance and we start seeing used game stores popping up in those same places to sell new systems that can read old cartridges and play those games, while also offering those same cartridges and sometimes, the rare variations of older systems themselves, for sale. They often have accessories as well, and the ones that aren't necessarily chain-based stores also sell arcade cabinets or offer tournaments and play spaces for old games and new.
As physical spaces to sell games (and other goods and media, really) are declining, the World Wide Web is taking off. So much so that it's starting to be affordable (for certain values of) for a person to get broadband Web access thorough the same provider that gives them pay television access. Technology is improving to the point where a person can have a theater-quality experience with high-end televisions and sound systems, and indeed, many game consoles are also movie playing devices. (The project now known as Kodi started as XBMC - XBox Media Center, transforming the Microsoft console into a full-fledged media center that could do much more than just play games.) This is a bit of an enticement to get a game console, at least for me, because then I get to both play games and use the console as a media center of sorts, so long as the console ends up being able to use the winning format in the format war.
This is also the point in time where games really start trying to be cinematic in their presentation. Games that used Full Motion Video aren't new (Night Trap, after all, was filmed in 1987, even if it didn't release until 1992), but they are a limited technology for interactivity, in that the player jumps around from place to place, playing pre-recorded clips based on when the player chose to interact during the clip. The technology that went into making those games (and the big boom of FMV games that happened through the early 1990s) isn't actually all that limited, either, given that chroma key techniques are already in use by this point, and motion capture technology is able to take the inputs of martial artists, like Carlos and Daniel Pesina, and digitize them so that your favorite pallette-swap ninja (or other character) for Mortal Kombat comes through crisply. Of course, all of these techniques rely on actual humans doing the motions, which often requires stunt work and chroma-key work. Technology, at this point, is switching over to the idea of filming actors using motion capture technology and then match moving the performance into the desired environment, which has usually been built completely digitally. (Or, in the case of many theatrical films and television shows, match moving them back into a filmed environment where stand-ins or actors are filmed for the non-effects characters to look at. Which itself might also have chroma-key backgrounds.) With more powerful processors and video units, as well as sharp jumps in the amount of available storage on both disc and disk media, the additional computing resources needed to make a cinematic, sweeoing experience full of motion, rather than characters walking across painted backgrounds, are finally on consoles and computers. (By which I mean PCs one might buy in an electronics or warehouse store, not customized, ground-up built gaming rigs specifically meant to have fast CPUs, large amounts of video memory and powerful GPUs, an abundance of hard disk space and RAM, and possibly an aftermarket cooling system designed so that the processor and all of its components can be run at a faster clock speed than the processor itself is rated for or sold at.) To see how far things have come since the FMV era, one only needs look at gameplay from Final Fantasy VII's original Playstation release (you can see the characters in all their polygonal glory moving over FMV backgrounds in, say, the opening video to FFVII on the Playstation, which was mostly the same on the PC release) compared to how the characters move and play in the Remake that will be arriving in 2020 (a boss fight, in all its glory, as an example here, including the use of several Limit Breaks and Summon Materia). There's twenty years of technological improvement at work there, and it shows.
All of this technological improvement, however, comes at the cost of needing space for all of it to go. Before the availability of widespread broadband, games had to generally be pressed to a physical medium, which would mean that some games needed to have a disc change when a certain amount of the game had passed. PCs could often get around this limitation because the data on the disc could be copied to the hard drive, but some games had their audio tracks still on the disc and needed to access those tracks anyway. (It was a weird time between cartridges and DVDs, okay? 700MB wasn't actually all that much, so a four-disc RPG was pretty common at the time.) Once storage media caught up to the requirements, we were back to single discs (and Blu-rays by now can mostly hold games, of the numbers I'm setting to download hold on correctly), but we're also in the timeline where Amazon is proving rapidly that it can apply the techniques it has learned with regard to books to everything else, as well, and has been at the forefront of some new ideas about how people might enjoy having a single device that can hold an entire bookshelf's with of books on it and that holds a charge for a really long time. (Have we mentioned as well that the landline phone market is slowly drying up as mobile phones become small, affordable, and, most importantly, smart?) The Kindle, the iPhone, and Android, combined with the ubiquity of broadband over cable, WiFi, and cell tower, make it feasible for even large games to be downloaded over the Internet, from machine to machine, with no need for a physical anything in the intermediate stage. (It was possible before, but when you're trying to get something that's gigabytes of data over dial-up, you really hope you've got that dedicated second phone line, or you set the download up to happen overnight.)
One of the first players to come on to the scene with a digital distribution method is that same company that Sierra distributed Half-Life hit, Valve. Initially intended, as best I can tell, as a way of buying, downloading, and playing Valve games online, Steam took the next logical step after Doom and Quake provided the infrastructure needed to run the servers for multiplayer games over the Internet as part of the game (whether it was a client computer acting as a server as well or a dedicated server somewhere hosting games all the time) and companies like Blizzard provided official servers to play their games with/against other players on (Battle.net is still the moniker they tend to use for this idea), with temptations and rewards, like ladder servers, for people to stick to official servers instead of setting their own up and configuring them to their liking. On Steam, you could not only play the games and register them and get updates for them, you could buy the games digitally and have them downloaded to your computer. Steam has become a giant platform for many digitally distributed items, not just games, to the point where their sales are legendary events.
At a certain point, other large game publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard decided they didn't want to use Valve's platform for playing and distribution of their games, and so now there's Origin, and the Battle.net launcher, and a Bethesda launcher, and ArenaNet has a launcher, and, and, and. Each company is putting their catalogue on their own service exclusively and banking that there are enough people who will use that and purchase from it for the digital service to be viable. Which is something that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have been doing on their own new consoles for a while now, offering back catalogue across their history through emulation. Some of those games have worked their way across to other platforms, like Steam, through emulation, so it is legally possible to play the Playstation version of a Super Nintendo game through Steam and the DS version on an Android phone because Square-Enix or Sega wants to release those games for different markets. Mostly, though, rather than being able to get your content in a single platform any more, it's become a fragmented media space again, and each place is clamoring for some amount of your time, attention, and money to play the AAA game catalog they have available (or the casual games they own the digital adaptations of).
There's been one really big winner, though, in the digital distribution department. An independent game designer that can muster the entry fee (last I knew, it was $100, which would be donated to charity from Valve) and has a game product can get themselves onto the Steam platform and sell their game for the amount they think it is worth. Since there are no physical media to have to manage, inventory, and get into stores, a game, once in the Steam store, can sell copies of itself for as long as it is listed and the Steam service exists. And because of those same things, it's possible for games to list their prices at less than the $60 that a standard store AAA game would cost, or even the $20 that a "Greatest Hits" re-release usually costs (and often includes updates or what was separate downloadable content released from the original game), making it more attractive for a person to take a chance on a game they might not otherwise have seen or ever known about. Steam also has some wishlist features and had invested pretty heavily into a system to provide recommendations (in the form of a queue) so that someone looking for a game like one they enjoyed they could find more of them. Modulo Steam selling versions of games that would be M-rated and under, even if the actual games themselves are AO-rated (especially in the visual novel genre).
Digital versions of these games, and if games that were popular in yesteryear, are sometimes offered in different stores. GOG, for example, focuses on games of earlier DOS and Windows spaces, with some forays into more modern games, with an entirely optional launcher and manager available. GOG focuses on delivering their games without any digital rights management (DRM) attached, which is great for people who want to be able to take their games with them wherever and however they want. Unfortunately, that limits the available software they can offer to things like "good old games" for the most part. (Here's a preview of tomorrow's post: DRM is evil and most digital goods sales don't actually sell the thing itself, forcing a person to hope that the thing they buy will continue to exist into the future.)
Certain games can also get themselves included in various bundle sites or offers, like the ones offered by Humble Bundle, Indie Royale, GOG, and others. Epic Bundle does a pretty good job of keeping track of what's going on at all the other bundle sites around. Which brings us to the other problem of buying your games in groups - it becomes very easy, very quickly, to have a library greater than your available time to play each of those games to their fullest. Even if Sturgeon's Law applies, unless you like games that finish quickly, for your definition of finishing, there's a good chance you'll run out of time and hard drive space before you run out of games. It can cause a certain amount of decision paralysis to try and choose from 1,000+ games obtained to play in your limited free time. It helps if you can stash certain ones in "nope, never going to play", but, well, right now, I've got 32 games that Stream thinks are "perfect," by which we mean all the achievements that were available have been obtained. Some of those games never had any achievements to start with, of course, and may be more of a comfort to own rather than a thing that needs a specific replay.
As with many things in life and media, it's a mixed blessing when it comes to the new ways of business. People who would never have had a shot at becoming creators and seeing their creations end up making them money are able to make their living on those things through the power of there being enough people that enjoy it that they'll give money (or watch ads) for the content. At the same time, that content is monetized and often locked behind DRM or restrictive licensing agreements by big companies that control the platforms those media elements can be distributed on for the widest audience and reach. There's lucre and convenience and a lot of things going for the widespread adoption of a single platform, and there are also things that are not at all good from a single platform gathering an outsize influence. Interoperability would be the best thing ever, but unfortunately, companies don't actually want to play nice with each other, and so we are scattered across the four winds wishing at some point to be able to have all of our things in one space, even if it is a metapackage that pulls everything together and makes it available under one roof.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-17 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-17 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-17 05:53 pm (UTC)I have a Humble Monthly subscription. I had one before, collected a swarm of games I'll never play, and stopped. Then I rejoined to get access to the Trove. So now I'm pretty much committed to $12/month for "1-2 games I think I might like, updates on the small handful of Trove games I care about, and 5-7 big-name games I will never even import, much less play."
The video game industry is due for a major collapse soon, because after teens become adults and get through the initial craze of "I can buy three dozen new games every paycheck!!" and discover they don't have time to play them, there are just too many platforms to settle into one or two as their long-term "home."
I don't know what the fallout will be. For movies, it's "increased pirating" as the streaming platforms keep changing contents and pricing. Pirating games is harder, especially multiplayer games. But I suspect we'll see fewer powerhouse "everyone plays this" games as people choose a favorite platform or console and just don't look outside of it.
...And lootbox legislation is going to cause interesting changes to the industry, none of which are going to be pleasant for the players, even if the eventual result is better, less-expensive games.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-17 06:30 pm (UTC)I agree that a big crash is likely for a lot of media spaces, games included. I suspect there will be some amount of piracy, as there always is, but if the point is to collect achievements and things, then I suspect there will be a lot more key sharing instead of outright pirating (and now we are back to keygens, speaking of blasts from the past).
I have so many games that I am probably never going to play-play, but by install and idle in to collect trading cards or other similar collectibles that don't actually require me to play the game. And having those games on my library contributes to levels that might mean getting more of the trading card collectibles, even if it also contributes to a certain amount of choice paralysis.
I think lootbox legislation is going to be good for game players, so they don't end up spending large amounts of money in small bits they don't notice as they chase rare things or rebuy powerups at a dollar apiece or something similar. Of course, I am also pretty salty at anyone who would claim that removing lootboxes removes a major fun aspect of their game. You can make a good game without having to rely on lootboxes. (I may also be salty about "hang on, I paid this much money for this game, and now you're telling me that to play it well, I'm going to have to invest more money into trying to get good gear by luck? Nope.")
no subject
Date: 2019-12-17 07:10 pm (UTC)What would go a long way toward fixing lootbox problems:
1) Ability to turn off all lootboxes on an account, requiring a master password to change, so kids can't rack up thousands of dollars on their parents' accounts.
2) Statement of how much you've paid every time you go to purchase a lootbox: "You have spent [$45/$200/$1575] on premium currency this month. Do you wish to continue?"
3) No accidental/single-click purchases of premium currency, use of premium currency, or lootboxes.
4) Leaderboards that showed achievements done with and without premium/ultra-rare equipment or bonuses - have a ranking system that shows "this was all achieved without spending money."
And so on. Instead, we're likely to get laws that help but don't take into account the games where premium purchases aren't stripping bank accounts and aren't ruining the game for other players. (I like my fake dragon game. It doesn't have lootboxes, but i'd likely be destroyed by anti-premium-currency legislation that's been proposed.)
I haven't heard anyone who actually plays, say that lootboxes are fun. Just company shills. But those are the ones lobbyists often listen to, so this is going to be an ugly fight. :(
no subject
Date: 2019-12-17 07:35 pm (UTC)Admittedly, I have less like for games where having the premium currency means getting better progress and exclusive items as a whole, but I can choose not to play them. I would also probably be pretty salty about a game that is stingy with the currency that's necessary to play the game or to progress past a certain point and instead chooses to lock it away in purchase packs. (So that makes me one of the people who really liked the gym revamp to Pokémon Go.)
I've seen a lot of people playing Flight Rising. What does the premium currency for it actually do?
no subject
Date: 2019-12-17 10:09 pm (UTC)Dragon "breed" and "genes" can be changed with "scrolls." Some scrolls cost treasure, which you earn by in-game activities; some cost gems, which you mostly buy. You can earn them through play, but it's very slow. (E.g. if you keep your dragons fed, you get 1 per day after the first three days. 1200-2400 gems buys a gene scroll...) Sample dragon - currently all basic (no genes) but with lots of apparel; scroll down in the "info" box for ideas of how I could scroll her up. (Almost none of those options involve premium-currency scrolls, because I'm usually not willing to pay for them.)
You can also buy some apparel and "familiars" with gems, and of course, there's an in-game economy that involves both treasure and gems.
But there are no unique gem-only items. Once players have them, some of those players will sell for treasure; current exchange rates are roughly 1000 treasure to 1 gem. I can easily pick up 100k treasure in a day (in about an hour of play, maybe an hour and a half); hardcore players who go all-out can make a lot more.
So the split between "money players" and everyone else isn't as bad as in many games; often, it's a trade-off between "money players" and "time players" who have the time for grinding for treasure.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-18 06:22 am (UTC)Also, pretty dragons.