Hello Folks,
The strength of this conversation is more than I could have hoped for and I appreciate the time and thought that you all have put into this.
I would like to start out by discussing some individual points then reform the discussion.
Ichon- Thank you for replying and sharing your expertise.
Ichon said:
“The big caveat is how to develop game "engines" which provide enough profit for a developer and are flexible enough to be used for a wider community which had little input in the outcomes of that design. “
Yes, if we break this down into the “business model” the “technology service” that supports the business model and the “Game super structure” that allows creative creates the actual offerings, we find that the time consuming part, and subsequent cost, is going to be game super structure and game engine. Note that we are talking in reality two different interlocking pieces here, the super structure and the game engine(s).
The original thought on this was that the development house would produce initially a game offering along with several other game offerings concurrently with other “Creative” development teams (some professional) who would have direct input into the development process of the engine and super structure. I also imagined that the game engine team would continue, through standard product marketing techniques; to improve the engine by evaluating feedback from the community of players and developers. Ie.. iterative product enhancements.
The “super structure” would be component that at time intervals would connect to a central server via the internet and validate the “time” stamps for players playing a product either as single player offering or as a multi-player offering. This is the downside of this concept, that it must be connected to the internet. This approach possibly would require some sort of encryption key that also validated licensing. This approach would enable the quick “assimilation’ of existing game engines and offerings. The downside is for each “engine” that the player was working with, it would require additional and perhaps significant downloads. This particular set of capabilities, adding multiple game engines, was not in the initial phase of release which was more focused on one engine, the initial superstructure and feeding that engine with a pipeline of game assets.
Ichon said:
“FPS, RTS, RPG, ADPOV, SIM, etc are hugely different categories and while I agree the high end of graphics technology is leveling off(until 3D becomes better) there are still big differences in requirements for the various genres. “
I would submit, humbly, that this is not necessarily true. The whole concepts here around these genres are fabricated marketing classifications designed to inform people about what the offering is about as they relate to similar titles on the market. A great example of this is what we are playing now: Mount&Blade - is it a FPS, a RTS, a SIM or a RPG? I believe you will find that the evolution of the relationship between entertainment and technology has given rise to these broad classifications and that what the players really want, transcends or better, combines, these marketing tags into holistic offerings.
Ichon said:
“Building an engine requires high upfront costs and I'd guess many people with the money to put into that would be very reluctant to adopt a model where they lack control over the distribution. How compensation worked would need to be fine tuned from what you are describing. Probably with a cost basis of diminishing returns based on publication date. IE- newer engines are compensated at a higher rate as what they offer is presumably worth more to creative developers who use the engine and the end users.
Also- how to sell this model without a proven example? A couple games which use such an arrangement and are at least semi-successful are almost necessary before a serious new engine is built and a game designed around that engine is economically feasible from an investment perspective. ”
You well articulated some of the initial hurdles to gaining financing for this type of project. We can easily see the pieces of this laying around the marketplace. We can point to some things that are “similar” to this model and service in different ways, but not brought together. The first hurdle I encountered is one of the product mindset that was articulated in “can you make a prototype in 12 months for under 100K?”. Some of the big problems is to connect to the right angel who has the experience and ability to understand this concept, and can share in the vision of what it can do as well as how to get to the appropriate milestones.
As for the success of this type of approach, just look at the modding communities that surround the various moddable type games. As has been pointed out here, in this small sub community of Taleworlds, we have people saying that they only play because of the mods of the game. In 2005, I took a hard look at Biowards Neverwinter Nights community that had over 5000 mods and over 300 persistent game worlds and I saw an underserved market. When you add this to the current paradigm of too many people who want to create games but cannot, and those that do on a professional basis rarely get to fully design their own concepts, but work on smaller parts of a greater whole you have a very large target market of producers and thousands of them with professional level experience.
I am aware of two companies that have partially travelled down this road and did not solve the right problems and adopted the wrong business model. That is Multiverse and Kaneva. Both have since evolved into different forms. Their main problem was that they aimed at the low end development teams and not the high end player. Ie, they did not lower the barrier to entry to the point that the value proposition was overwhelming to provider and had no value proposition to the consumer.
Ichon said:
“I hope Steam isn't the end result. I detest it and unfortunately gave up on some games that require a Steam account as I refuse to do that. “
I personally am not an advocate of any software company or service that runs a service on your system. I feel fairly strongly that this is invasive and possibly a violation of our individual privacy.
My thoughts along this were more of how we use MMORPG’s. You have to click on an icon that launches an application that then connects to the service via the internet. Through the application Interface you then select what you are doing to do (play, manage accounts, see what is new.. etc).
I concur with your assessment of cloud computing.
kaeldragor said:
Interesting thought to base compensation on time invested, but you might consider that some people would spend 1 hour... 50% isn't a huge insight into popularity. Of course, higher numbers of users and better averages give you a better control and method for divvying up the booty as it were, but you might consider a lower limit for "duds".
I am very glad you joined into the discussion kaeldragor.
My initial thought was a combination of “players time in relation to total time” and a player evaluation mechanism likely in the form of some kind of vote. The concept is that over a period of months some form of minimal player activity and votes would have to be maintained or the service drops the offering. My initial thoughts were to offer different development stages and servers and each would have different rules for either moving up or down. For instance we would offer an “Alpha Server”, where newly developed offerings are put up with the knowledge that these are early development efforts, not complete and full of bugs. Such an offering may have a guaranteed three months life and after that they may require enhancement and player vote to be offered.
Let me explain the time based concept a bit more. We tend to think of this as “how much time has been spent”.. and I am thinking of this more of “Where did the player spend his time in the last month”. I am not concerned over how much, but rather what % of his total time. If a hard-core player spend 200 hours last month playing among four games, his variable subscription fee would be split to among those four providers. If another player who only played 5 hours, but played only in one offering, that one offering would get his entire variable subscription fee.
I agree completely on your analysis of success. The trick is to make the creation of content EASY.. we do not want the writers to create the printing press.. we want them to write the book.
akuthia said:
And again, that 800 isn't going to support a single developer, as a paycheck, let alone a team.
Imagine that you are a 19 year old guy going to college. You have a great idea and you use this toolset to create a gaming world. (think of it as a role playing world). You spread the word, your friends and their friends get involved and with the various interfaces and tools you can create a dynamic game world that can respond to your players. Let’s say you get a mere 500 playing your offering and they are completely addicted to your work. That is $4000 a month for what will be part time work after the several months it took you to get it up and running. Pop for example has around 30,000 people playing it.
Griefer said:
Wow. Awesome discussion. I appreciate the appeal of the model in question but I admit I'm a bit skeptical on how it would work. As an example, www.skotos.net. It's a collection of MUDS that for a single subscription you can play. The problem is that it just doesn't pay. If you're going to go that route I would recommend a different approach to the quantity/quality debate.
First, you need basic free accounts. ..(multi-tiered accounts discussion)
Second, first tier paid accounts. This is your $15 a month account that provides perks and benefits. This is where a reasonable percentage of your free accounts will end up if you maintain a steady flow of content to promote consumer longevity.
Third, you need a second tier paid account option. This is where a lot of these sorts of approaches fail and where the most revenue is left on the table. You'll see the people who can end up here talking on these forums; older games like myself who have disposable income and if we see a value in something have no qualms spending money on it. I'd pay $50 a month for top-tier gaming and to support something like PoP 3.0 content - the issue is how to create this sort of tier without requiring developer/coder energy and effort to support. The typical mistake is to say that you get custom items/gear/descriptions which actually requires time and energy from the people who are probably just keeping up with maintenance.
The Sims is probably a more successful model to follow. You've got free content, inexpensive paid content and expensive paid content. The key to making it successful for the modders in question would be to put it through a single source. For example, suppose you did that with M&B. You'd have free mods, Tier 1 mods and Tier 2 mods that required you to keep a specific subscription level to continue to get updates for then instead of the several month development cycle, assuming it paid well enough to support coders/developers/testing you'd have weekly updates/fixes/inclusions....
which leads us back to the problem of a modder tiring of trying to constantly churn out expansions on their product.
Money can be found. Venture capitalists are more about knowing who to talk to and a willingness to make a deal with the devil so to speak than actually getting the money.
Endurance is a critical issue. Endurance in supporting and expanding the same product. The fundamental issue with attempting to create a resource for mods in a subscription service is maintaining an adequate quality of support for everything in your catalog. While I could say that PoP would continue to provide, what if your consumers get into some other mods as well and find that they do not? This will hit customer satisfaction and cost you consumers who can and will feel so burned by Mod X that they let their subscription go to the service even though they liked PoP.
I'd say you're going to do best with a combo of tiered membership and an option for single purchase updates - say, basic free subscription that gives you access to code updates and forums, $15 subscription that provides updates, forum, and new 'versions' (like PoP 2.5 to 3.0 but without the new models) as well as a 'download catalog' (see later), and some higher tiered subscription of say $30 to $50 a month that gives you everything in the previous tiers as well as free access to the download catalog. The download catalog would include all the models, skins, major additions (like say whole new companions and large plugins) that would have individual prices to be purchased.
It's late and I'm tired, wondering if that makes sense. From a marketing perspective there are two demographics that need to be included in a concept like this that tend to be left on the table by similar models - the 'free' tier that is actually going to provide your word of mouth advertisement as well as upsell market for tiered subscriptions and your 'A' consumers. Most subscription consumer services, from pay television to cell phone service, actually generate the bulk of their revenue from a 5-20% silver of their consumer base. The key is that this consumer base is either recruited by or developed from the lower value consumers. Your middle tier actually tends to be your most transient and unreliable demographic - least invested and most likely to move on.
Thanks Griefer, great response.
The most effective internet revenue models are hub models that link consumers and producers and create a value add to both sides that they never would have had otherwise. Lets take a look at this site in question www.skotos.net It is a package marketing site that is aimed at a set of consumers for these types of games that does not provide significant value along the channel either way. Look at Ebay or Amazon as good examples (from the business standpoint) as successful models of this concept.
The concept of free accounts raises some interesting questions. Thank you for this insight. In this model I had initially discarded the idea due to the relationship between server cost and the amount of people hitting those servers. Ie, there is a gap between cost to provide the service and the revenue to maintain it.
We could however offer it as free if we allowed advertising through the service. This could be cut off for paid subscriptions and indeed a motivator to becoming a paid subscriber. In other words, we could allow a player to play for free (or perhaps even limit what they can play in some cases), if we attach some mechanism that would generate secondary income. Direct Advertising would be a possibility (click play to and have to sit through 2 minutes of advertising). This would need to be explored and thought out carefully.
Your concept of a multi-tiered revenue model is interesting. The overall idea was to pass the responsibility of individual offering support to the creator of the content. This support would be part of a package of tools that the creative team was given to ONLY their own creation.
The “Development Team” makes the in-game asset, but it is the content creator that places that asset and creates the context around it. In your post and subsequent posts you advocate against this. I would like to explore this a bit more as to the underlying reasons that sustain your position.
Regarding the multi-tiered model, I am ambivalent. My only concern is that the model not allow a player to “buy success” in a head to head competitive situation. I am also concerned about simplicity of pricing, it must be straightforward which would generally exclude a micro-payment model which I feel is not completely above board as that revenue model is based upon addiction based psychological behaviors.
Ichon said:
I think a single large flexible engine for the physics could work if it was divided into modules. I'm not a huge fan of Bioshock as an overall game but I really loved the setting. An engine which could replicate the physical world but allow things like gravity, mass, permeability, flight, shadows, etc to be adjusted would have huge potential for numerous design objectives. The cost of creating such an engine would likely surpass the return for a single game but if it was built to create many games it has the potential to bring decent RoI.
A single middleman which owns the engine and leases the various modules and also hosts content for developers and encourages end users to use more limited toolsets to create and provides both types of users with some limited publishing ability(getting easier with the consumer adoption of online DL) might be feasible.
The main problem is financial and legal in the business world when you don't own your production content 100% you are at the mercy of the actual owners. Not even getting into the publishing side of it which can be soul sucking if you care much about the end product.
I think the time is getting close where such an engine would remain viable long enough to provide good RoI and also for the skills of users to increase and really take advantage of the engine. Most of the games released these days the development cycle is so intense many good ideas are never implemented or things the engine was programmed to allow are never used which is inefficient and raises the overall costs for everyone except the publishers who take their % no matter the cost of development. BTW- another issue with this model is the company which owns the engine would be doing quite many things at once... hard to excel in a single area let alone multiple ones.
Griefer make good points about a certain degree of isolation being necessary between the end users and the content developers but for modders that line is blurred and difficult to see how to establish a legal frame work that everyone is happy with. The particular design teams creating with the base engine would have to decide how robust a toolset to release and how to reward or support modders who take advantage of that.
Quality control is also an issue when people are paying for content... modding is definitely a learn as you go process. Would consumers be ok with numerous betas, hotfixes and other things when they are paying more for such additional content?
Another great post, thank you.
Most development companies build their own toolset and use it to create content. The toolsets are getting more attention as time goes by as it increases the life of their offering by releasing it to the general public and quazi-supporting modding. My contention is to spend more time and effort on the toolset AND create an initial offering. Partner with some existing professional and amateur development groups to deliver several offerings out of the gate.
In regards to paying for hotfixes etc.. well, yes they would. They are paying $15.00 a month for the service.. what they do “inside” the service is up to them.. they can play game “A1” a professionally developed offering, or game “B5”, or they can play game “Z98” knowing that “Z98” is still in beta.
The important thing is that they decide, and the only decision is “Where I spend my time”. This concept is a bit of a paradigm shift, and it takes some of our basic assumptions and twists them around. Some of the comments from folks here are from the perspective of one game which is not entirely applicable.
One of the main aspects of this model is an assumption that the engine gives the content providers two important things. The first is a way to design a dynamic game environment and the second is that the tools the content creator is given allows them to modify real-time on-line offerings on the fly. Both of these things exist in other offerings to a greater or lesser degree. My apologies, I take this assumption for granted.
Enough for now.. I will be back later and pick up some more points.
Best,
Saxondragon
