Being right is awful sometimes. I predicted that Funcom's dark urban fantasy MMO The Secret World would struggle, and struggle it has according to Funcom's 2012 second quarter financial report (via Rock Paper Shotgun).
Is anyone surprised by this? They're charging full triple-A retail price plus premium-price monthly subscriptions (higher than premium, in fact, for UK players) for an experimental, work-in-progress, niche-genre game without an established IP or a standard free trial, competing with Guild Wars 2 and a new World of WarCraft expansion - not to mention the fact there are now more free-to-play MMOs in existence than there are people.
The Secret World is a good game, if perhaps not a great one. I for one enjoyed it probably more than any other MMO I've encountered. But I'm not going to spend £100 to play it for six months, especially not when getting the same length out of Rift or Guild Wars 2 would cost me significantly less. Gaming's typical price-based snobbery ("if you think it's too expensive, it's your fault for being poor") is alive and well in The Secret World's community, but that attitude completely misses the point - sure, if you can't afford it then don't buy it, but market forces work both ways and each person who either can't or won't play due to the pricing structure represents one less subscription. A balance must be struck. If a game's takeup is low, it doesn't bode well for that game's future.
At 200,000 accounts, The Secret World's takeup is low.
It was never going to compete with WoW or EVE in terms of market share, so it shouldn't be placing itself in economic competition with those titles. A friend of mine said she was interested in The Secret World, but not interested enough when she was also paying for EVE and Rift. I'm not suggesting that The Secret World should move to a free-to-play model, but if it was cheaper, might she have been interested enough to try it? And while some of The Secret World's players may not like to hear it, any subscription-based MMO is in competition with free-to-play equivalents, and comparison is necessary. Every gamer draws their own line in regards to where they're willing to start paying a subscription, and if someone can get almost as much enjoyment out of a free game as a paid game, how many will realistically fork over £12 a month? Maximising what one gets with one's money is as much the consumers' prerogative as it is publishers' prerogative to charge, and publishers have a lot more to lose than consumers. On reflection, I think that's why many Kickstarter backers get so up in arms by a perceived lack of communication with the developers; it's seen as a form of investment, with the ultimate return not being liquid capital but rather a game.
I've seen it argued that the likes of GOG, Steam sales and free-to-play MMOs have spoiled players into expecting to pay under the odds for games. But that's economic reality. Developers report that during sales on sites like Steam and Green Man, their profits increase. Not just sales, profits. Why, then, shouldn't that trend continue for as long as it makes developers money and lets gamers buy their games cheap? You can argue about whether it devalues games as a desirable commodity, whether it negatively affects purchasing decisions, whether it brings down the incentive to experiment in big-budget titles. But you can't excuse publisher actions with the free market defence if you then lambast players for doing, fundamentally, the same thing. And yet some people try to do just that.
Showing posts with label Kickstarter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kickstarter. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
Sunday, 26 August 2012
We did kickstart the fire
Now that Kickstarter's no longer this Shiny New Thing, and is increasingly becoming a standard part of gaming culture, it's interesting to see how the crowdsourcing concept is progressing. The sheen hasn't dulled, if a couple of recent titles are anything to go by; Reaper Miniatures' Bones closed today and became the third highest grossing Kickstarter project ever (and achieved the highest ever funding percentage over its original target), while the much-hyped Oculus Rift is doing pretty well for itself - almost a week to go, and it's on target to make 1000% of its initial target. Neither of them were ever in danger of knocking off Pebble (which seems inherently superfluous to me, but I'm not a gadgety person, so what do I know?), but they're still both runaway successes.
Friends of mine, even skint ones, have pledged hundreds of dollars to Bones. A few have hyped it to me, too, despite the fact they know I'm not a wargamer. I suppose you could use the figures for D&D 4th Edition too; sadly, I know about two roleplayers within gaming distance of me currently, and neither would touch D&D with a ten foot bargepole. Also I still prefer 3.5 (I accept 4th is the better game, but 3.5 is geared more towards my personal preferences). All that aside, I know that for those who would make use of the miniatures, the deals Reaper are offering are outstanding value, and they seem to be good sculpts. And hey, one of the low-tier rewards is a naked succubus on a motorbike... they obviously know their audience.
Personally, I'm more interested in Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse. The first two Broken Swords were excellent, and the third was good. I never played the fourth, sadly. The new game will be returning to the 2D, hand-drawn style of the first two instalments; it's broken the halfway mark on its target after less than two days live, further proof - after the success of Double Fine Adventure - that traditional adventure gaming still has a commercial market.
Of course, like previous Kickstarter successes Shadowrun, Wasteland and Carmageddon, Broken Sword is a fondly remembered cult classic with legions of fans to this day. The Great Giana Sisters? That's, well, the videogame equivalent of pub quiz trivia. Oh, sure it has its fans (some of whom hilariously believe that it's better than Super Mario Bros.), and it had a fairly low-key DS remake, but do enough people care about a Giana comeback for it to hit its target? With just under a week to pull in $35,000, probably, but I bet a fair chunk of Project Giana's backers are in it more for irony value than for a genuine love of the original.
As for the new game, it too looks like a close, ahem, "homage" of a popular title, although not Mario this time. The visual design, the physics puzzles, and the instant switching between multiple characters with different skills - the whole thing screams, to me at least, 'Trine clone.' Now Trine was a fine game, and in its defence Project Giana looks like a mixture of Trine and the kind of traditional, old-school platformer which doesn't really get made anymore, so there may be something worthwhile there. I think I'm interested enough in Project Giana to get it when it comes out, but not enough to back it.
Perhaps I'm picky about the things I back - or perhaps more people than I thought see Kickstarter as way of pre-ordering a game for cheap. Carmageddon's campaign closed two months ago, and some fans are up in arms about what they perceive to be a lack of updates since then, never mind the fact the game was still in pre-alpha when the Kickstarter closed. They already released gameplay footage far earlier than almost any developer has ever done, and surprise surprise, a portion of the backers complained about it looking ugly. Um, it's pre-alpha build, so yeah. Every game looks ugly at that point in its development! That the modern gamer's sense of entitlement is present on Kickstarter is straightforward; that crowdsourcing feeds said sense of entitlement so strongly is both inevitable and sad. I still believe that crowdsourcing is a good thing overall, it's just that some people need learn to to STFU, for totes.
It's easy to forget that Kickstarter isn't all smashed targets and commercial success. There's one project I saw which had only a single backer after almost a week live. The pitch was awkward all round, trading on the fame of a name I for one had never heard of, and poorly written both syntactically and informationally. How many people are going to back a creative project when the blurb is full of grammar and punctuation errors? As an intersection of venture capitalism and web 2.0, it seems inevitable that Kickstarter would come with a significant volume of projects which are nowhere near ready for presentation, and it's surprising that said volume isn't much, much higher than it currently stands at. I know there's a lot of legal tape involved in a Kickstarter project, but that doesn't usually stop people.
And the blurb CAN make a difference. It's the main reason I didn't back the OUYA. As interesting as the concept is, the pitch came off as condescending and elitist. No indie creativity in the traditional console market? XBLA's waving hello. If Braid, Limbo and Super Meat Boy aren't your idea of success stories, your standards must be bloody high.
Finally, I'm sure Planetary Annihilation is very good, for those weird people who care about real-time strategy. You know who you are... freaks. Nah, seriously, I dig what they're trying to do and if I was into the genre I'd probably be backing it. But I'm not, so I'm not.
Friends of mine, even skint ones, have pledged hundreds of dollars to Bones. A few have hyped it to me, too, despite the fact they know I'm not a wargamer. I suppose you could use the figures for D&D 4th Edition too; sadly, I know about two roleplayers within gaming distance of me currently, and neither would touch D&D with a ten foot bargepole. Also I still prefer 3.5 (I accept 4th is the better game, but 3.5 is geared more towards my personal preferences). All that aside, I know that for those who would make use of the miniatures, the deals Reaper are offering are outstanding value, and they seem to be good sculpts. And hey, one of the low-tier rewards is a naked succubus on a motorbike... they obviously know their audience.
Personally, I'm more interested in Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse. The first two Broken Swords were excellent, and the third was good. I never played the fourth, sadly. The new game will be returning to the 2D, hand-drawn style of the first two instalments; it's broken the halfway mark on its target after less than two days live, further proof - after the success of Double Fine Adventure - that traditional adventure gaming still has a commercial market.
Of course, like previous Kickstarter successes Shadowrun, Wasteland and Carmageddon, Broken Sword is a fondly remembered cult classic with legions of fans to this day. The Great Giana Sisters? That's, well, the videogame equivalent of pub quiz trivia. Oh, sure it has its fans (some of whom hilariously believe that it's better than Super Mario Bros.), and it had a fairly low-key DS remake, but do enough people care about a Giana comeback for it to hit its target? With just under a week to pull in $35,000, probably, but I bet a fair chunk of Project Giana's backers are in it more for irony value than for a genuine love of the original.
As for the new game, it too looks like a close, ahem, "homage" of a popular title, although not Mario this time. The visual design, the physics puzzles, and the instant switching between multiple characters with different skills - the whole thing screams, to me at least, 'Trine clone.' Now Trine was a fine game, and in its defence Project Giana looks like a mixture of Trine and the kind of traditional, old-school platformer which doesn't really get made anymore, so there may be something worthwhile there. I think I'm interested enough in Project Giana to get it when it comes out, but not enough to back it.
Perhaps I'm picky about the things I back - or perhaps more people than I thought see Kickstarter as way of pre-ordering a game for cheap. Carmageddon's campaign closed two months ago, and some fans are up in arms about what they perceive to be a lack of updates since then, never mind the fact the game was still in pre-alpha when the Kickstarter closed. They already released gameplay footage far earlier than almost any developer has ever done, and surprise surprise, a portion of the backers complained about it looking ugly. Um, it's pre-alpha build, so yeah. Every game looks ugly at that point in its development! That the modern gamer's sense of entitlement is present on Kickstarter is straightforward; that crowdsourcing feeds said sense of entitlement so strongly is both inevitable and sad. I still believe that crowdsourcing is a good thing overall, it's just that some people need learn to to STFU, for totes.
It's easy to forget that Kickstarter isn't all smashed targets and commercial success. There's one project I saw which had only a single backer after almost a week live. The pitch was awkward all round, trading on the fame of a name I for one had never heard of, and poorly written both syntactically and informationally. How many people are going to back a creative project when the blurb is full of grammar and punctuation errors? As an intersection of venture capitalism and web 2.0, it seems inevitable that Kickstarter would come with a significant volume of projects which are nowhere near ready for presentation, and it's surprising that said volume isn't much, much higher than it currently stands at. I know there's a lot of legal tape involved in a Kickstarter project, but that doesn't usually stop people.
And the blurb CAN make a difference. It's the main reason I didn't back the OUYA. As interesting as the concept is, the pitch came off as condescending and elitist. No indie creativity in the traditional console market? XBLA's waving hello. If Braid, Limbo and Super Meat Boy aren't your idea of success stories, your standards must be bloody high.
Finally, I'm sure Planetary Annihilation is very good, for those weird people who care about real-time strategy. You know who you are... freaks. Nah, seriously, I dig what they're trying to do and if I was into the genre I'd probably be backing it. But I'm not, so I'm not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)