T w e n t y S i d e d

My column this week shares my personal recollections of the gaming crash of 1983, and then uses that as a jumping-off point for talking about how modern games are sacrificing quality for monetisation, and how maybe that’s a really terrible long-term strategy.

In the column I mention this theory I’ve been nursing that sales of a given franchise suffer from a delay-by-one effect, where a terrible entry might not hurt sales until the next one comes out. The idea is that there are a lot of people who buy games without checking the critical reception, so if they’re in the habit of buying a Shoot Guy title every time one hits the shelves, they’ll still buy Shoot Guy V: Lootbox Boogaloo even though it’s getting panned by critics. They’ll have a lousy time and find something else to play. Then when Shoot Guy VI: Nostalgia Overload comes out, they’ll skip it despite good critical reception. From the publisher’s perspective, the lootbox-based game did well and the back-to-basics sequel did poorly. If this is the case, I am very worried the publisher might learn the wrong lesson.

I’m really curious if this happened to the Hitman games. Did the embarrassment that is Hitman: Absolution sell well despite the fact that it was barely a Hitman game? Did the sales of Hitman 2016 suffer despite the fact that it’s one of the best entries in the series? If sales did suffer, was the game being punished for the sins of Absolution, or for the obnoxious decisions to tie your single-player progress to an always-online server?

I have no idea how I could go about investigating this. The numbers are foggy for several reasons:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points: Quality Still Matters”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So Telltale Games is out of business. Like most of the rest of the industry – including the employees of Telltale – I had no idea this was coming. I looked at the popularity of their breakout hit The Walking Dead and the overall quality of some of their earlier adventure game offerings and just assumed this was a well-run company.

They stuck to a given style of gameplay and didn’t stupidly chase trends like online shooters, Battle Royale games, loot boxes, or any of the other fads that have pulled teams off course with the false promise of easy money. They weren’t wasting money on graphics for the sake of prestige. They weren’t chopping their games up into fragments of DLCI mean aside from selling the games an episode at a time, which is kinda built into the design from the outset. If anything, the episodic thing is better for the consumer in this case. You only need to buy the first chapter for $10 to see if you like it rather than paying full price for the whole thing.. They weren’t making any obvious mistakes, so I assumed everything was fine.

But as it turns out, the rot was there all along. This article on The Verge paints a pretty grim picture. (For the purposes of this article, I’m going to take everything The Verge says at face value.) The article calls the company culture “toxic”. I’m always wary of the word “toxic”. As I understand it, this word is used to describe a group where problems are directly attributable to the personalities of one or more people in leadership positions. It shouldn’t be used for more general sorts of problems stemming from poor decision-making. A company where the president picks dumb products, wastes money, and hires unqualified losers is dysfunctional. A company where the president builds a cult of personality, fires people who criticize him, and hires unqualified friends / relatives is toxic.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: Telltale Autopsy”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

My column this week is my attempt to do something different with the overdone topic of “loot boxes suck and I wish publishers would knock it off”.

Really, I think this entire topic just loops back to the point I was making a year and a half ago when I said that the people running these companies are not gamers, which makes them prone to expensive blunders that would be obvious to someone who knows the products and the culture. If the leadership at EA understood their customers, they could have introduced loot boxes in a way that didn’t make such a mess of things.

I obviously object to loot boxes because they tend to turn a game of system mastery into a slot machine. If a game has loot boxes, then the designer has a strong incentive to un-balance the game as a way to push you into using them. But let’s assume for a moment that I’m an amoral jackass that doesn’t care about videogames. All I want is piles of money. How would I expand the usage of loot boxes across the industry?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Loot Boxes Are Bad for Publishers, Too”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.