Is Free Really the Future of Gaming? 230
TRNick writes "Is the future of gaming more or less free, perhaps funded by advertising or micropayments? A bunch of MMOs have pioneered the way, and now they are being followed by the likes of EA, Sony and id Software, each of which is offering some form of free gaming. But it's not just the big guys. TechRadar talks to a new generation of indie developers who are making names for themselves. 'I make most of my money from sponsors,' says one. 'We're all here because we love making games first and foremost,' says another. But can free games ever make enough money to fund the really ambitious, event games that get the headlines?"
While paid games aren't likely to be on their way out any time soon, more and more developers and publishers are experimenting with cheaper pricing, and the results so far seem positive.
Free and Open Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'm not interested in the varying methods that big game houses can extract revenue from their sweatshop produced big titles. I want to know about the future of Open Source game development, and where that'll go in the next decade. The Linux kernal and other big projects prove that large, complex projects can be accomplished under the FOSS model.
Given the right leadership and drive, I would really like to see an MMO spring up around an unlicenced universe (not one of the done-to-death and copyrighted to hell ones like Star Wars or LoTR) but one that is perhaps by an obscure author and in the public domain. This would allow content developers to develop the game's stories without needing to buy expensive licences so they can use the name "Harry Potplant" or whatever it is.
Perhaps an FPS with some new twists that the big houses are too gutless to try due to the uncertainty associated with stepping away from The Formula. Perhaps something like the original System Shock, where you truly do get cerebrally challenged. Most FPS games now have to appeal to 14 year olds with ADHD. Oh, how I miss the days when you actually had to *think* between firefights.
Where are games that break the moulds the way XCom, Syndicate, System Shock and Bioforge did? We just don't get that level of innovation in the gaming industry any more, and I think that FOSS should come to the rescue. We've put a gigantic thorn in the side of the likes of Microsoft, now let's stick it to EA and Rockstar. They're no less stifling to innovation than Microsoft so why should we let them get away unmolested?
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free and Open Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this is that open source tends to excel at function and suck at polish. Despite excellent function, most OSS developers can't develop an interface or decent icon artwork to save their lives. It's just not where their strength lies. Now, for many applications - compressing video, burning a CD, etc, this is something that we can easily live with. Our goal in using the app is to complete a task and so long as the task gets completed then everyone is happy.
Games are the opposite though. The artwork, interface, and general polish are essentially the main component. The actual background engine is just a minor piece.
Not to mention that you necessarily MUST maintain variety in games. As long as the OSS manages to produce ONE decent web browser then the rest are nice, but not really required. If we get ONE good OS kernel then that niche is covered. It leads to a consolidation of resources to make sure each particular need is taken care of. And the community can spend YEARS tweaking and modifying a single product to become progressively better. Games don't work that way. People play them for a while, and then get bored and want a new one. While purchasing dollars can keep them churning out fast enough to satisfy the masses, I'm not sure pure goodwill can make games fast and varied enough.
There's also an issue for things like MMORPG as to maintaining a unified authority. I don't have to choose which WoW service to subscribe to. All the players are consolidated into 1 place, and I can trust Blizzard to keep all the data trustworthy and not tamper with it (like giving their buddies free epics or the like). For certain types of multiplayer games without some authorative source, a lot of people wouldn't be interested in them.
A false dichotomy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Free games from independent developers won't "replace" current games any more than YouTube "replaced" Hollywood.
My amazing prediction is that in the future, people will indeed get a lot of entertainment from free and/or indie games, but at times they'll want the high-budget spectacle that only a major studio can provide.
(And by the way... If you think micropayments are the same as "free", you must think a credit card is some kind of magical money tree.)
Re:MMO and Open Source... LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
The Sims is the best selling PC game of all time, and there isn't much there in the way of content or gameplay. The users create it for themselves. Same with The Sims 2, and Spore. Then there is Second Life. So that market can work.
If a game is good it's worth money to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd pay $500 at the very least for a copy of Virtua Fighter 5R or a sequel to Chrono Trigger.
Starcraft, Unreal Tournament, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Super Turbo, Virtua Fighter. These games and series I've gotten thousands upon thousands of hours playing single-player or with others either locally or online. The measly $20-$60 I paid for those games has been overly worth it if you consider how many hours I got worth of entertainment out of those. I might spend $15 on a movie (NYC prices) at the theater and never see it again. My copy of Final Fantasy X was $55 new the day it came out and I've played 500 hours beating the game multiple times and writing an extended FAQ for it.
But for shorter games, or multi-player games with little variety that get very boring quickly, the cost of paying full price for them is just simply not worth it. I'll use Dead Space as an example. I was sold on the hype of the game, and paid $60 in full for a console version of the game. After the first playthrough, through extremely exciting, I new I wouldn't return to play the game probably ever again. So for one playthrough was $60 worth it? Probably not. I could have rented it and then returned it after beating it in two or three days.
But for Virtua Fighter 5? I specifically purchased an X-box 360 and multiple arcade sticks for the game, grand total let's say $1,000 between XBL gold over the years, 360 and accessories, and the game and DLC. But was it worth it? For me absolutely. I play the game for hours upon hours every week. I have people over to my house, I've even flown to other countries to play the game against international players which brings the grand total to even more (yikes).
How about Starcraft II? There are some people (including myself) who have been waiting for Starcraft II for a decade. When Starcraft: Ghost was canceled, part of my soul died. But now with SCII right around the corner, I'll be building an adequate gaming rig to play the game. Let's say that with the monitor and speakers the total cost to play SCII is $1,500. Worth it? For me, absolutely without question. After playing SC:BW and WCIII:TFT for years I am fully confident that Blizzard will deliver a long lasting and timeless RTS for the community to play for years. Also I'm sure my rig will get loads of Diablo III in it as well.
Lastly I'd rather pay for game than have it for free but chalked full of advertisements. I don't want to see any advertisements in-game in a respectable series like Virtua Fighter or Starcarft.
My point is that if you get hundreds or thousands of hours out of game it's easily worth the entrance fee of $60 if not way more than that. If you play a game for a couple of hours and then it's over...probably needs to cost less at retail. I always found it annoying that a game designed to be played in under ten hours was the same retail price as something designed to have unlimited replay value or extensive multi-player.
Free is OK and everything, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes, you need a professional touch on these things. That costs money, just as many of the professional touches in Linux have cost money.
A few years ago, I played and really enjoyed the Freespace 2 [wikipedia.org]. I enjoyed it so much, I thought I would try some of the free contributed content from enthusiastic fans. I played the campaign that was generally rated as the best and it was good fun, but there was a huge gulf in quality from the professionally produced content. The amateur stuff was laden with fan-boy excitement - the mission descriptions were far too long and the in game dialog chattered on and on. This was particularly tedious when you had to replay missions and listen to it over and over again. Also, the voice acting was incredibly hammy and it was so obvious that it had been recorded in geeks bedrooms.
These guys were doing their best, but they are not writers or actors. Maybe other projects are better at recruiting these kinds of people to work for free, but I suspect the overenthusiastic geek effect is probably quite difficult to mitigate.
Re:Free is an option, not the future (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree - I mean I can't imagine all those TV presenters working to no salary to provide me with some basic entertainment. All those people that expect TV to be "free" should go join a commune. Ad revenue sponsored gaming has real potential.
I dunno. I like gaming in part because it's more immersive than television. I'm always willing to put down a few bucks' worth of hard-earned income if it means I don't have to have my willing suspension of disbelief jarringly unsuspended by a Red Bull ad.
Not Greed (Score:5, Insightful)
Definitely no. But Greed and Ambition have nothing to do with it.
As a customer, I want a game that just works. Not a game with five dozen incompatible interfaces, two half broken configuration interfaces, inscrutable documentation written by an engineer who never took a writing class in his entire six years in college, untalented artwork, and random crashes justified by the credo "if you don't like it, dig through 100,000 lines of poorly commented code to fix it yourself".
For the non open-source "free" games, I want a game I can play, not one that's a one screen flash-animation that's really just an add for whatever is the latest kid-fluff being pushed on Nickelodeon.
As a customer, I want my GTA, Oblivion, Project Gotham, and a dozen other high quality games that could only be developed by paying real programmers, artists, and writers real money to work on them. So I am perfectly willing to shell out real money to pay for them to do so.
In fact, given the price of a couple of movie tickets and a family night out, I figure video games are still the best dollar per hour entertainment value out there.
Re:Free and Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. You don't want your game to end up irrelevant in a few months time, like Poker or Solitaire. It's the flashy, pop-culture references and glitzy, trendy looking artwork that give games replay value...
Free Games & Quality (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Free is an option, not the future (Score:3, Insightful)
While free games are certainly an option, I find it very difficult to believe that you are going to have a team of 10 developers working 5 days a week, for nothing to develop a game.
Who said anything about not paying developers? The article is about companies finding a different way to make money besides selling the game. They're still game companies, and they still pay their employees.
Re:Free is an option, not the future (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:MMO and Open Source... LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
Second Life only generates a profit (and a slim one) because their users can't do math.
(Not a troll--I've done some programming work for people in SL, and it's a neat concept. But they're only making money on the margins, and they're poor margins.)
Re:Free and Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MMO and Open Source... LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
If I customize Firefox, the Linux kernel, or Gnome to make it easier for me to do things, it does not affect the experience of anyone who is using the official client without customizations. If I do the same thing for an MMO - and change it to give myself an unfair advantage, such as the ability to see through wall, rather than just to make it work better with my video card - then it will affect the experience of other players. And given that we have seen this kind of behavior in closed-source MMOs, you can bet it's going to happen in an open source one. But it will happen faster.
Re:Free is an option, not the future (Score:3, Insightful)
Free games are actually very bad for new development. Large game dev houses can afford to make free game because they are widely known, they can get the sponsors, they can get advertisement deals, and they have the capitol to kick start game projects. This is however not the case with starters. In an economic stand point of view, free games are very bad for diversity and competition. I remember testing this theory out in one of the games I played. I made a high level blacksmith in an MMO, and offered people to forge for them for free as long as they provided materials. While I became the most widely known blacksmith and the best due to many people coming to me, I decimated the industry because I made it prohibitively expensive for new players to start making blacksmiths, and they can't make any money even after they become fairly high level. Further more, other players actually prefer coming to me due to the fact I have established myself and I break less. Real economy is fairly close to that as well.
what you don't understand is (Score:2, Insightful)
Ads are an option, not the future (Score:3, Insightful)
"Ad revenue sponsored gaming has real potential. In the same way TV advertising works - so could in game. It just has to be VERY carefully done so as not to alienate the players. "
Those who suggest ads, really mean, "Someone else foots the bill". Problem is, what do you do when everyone wants everyone else to "foot the bill"?
Re:Free is an option, not the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Valve games use elegant engines, from a more civilized age.
And they arrive precisely when they mean to.
Re:Free and Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey if that works for you then that's great, but I personally don't want to play the same three games all the time, especially if they're equivalent to what the commercial gaming scene put out ten years ago. I like variety and polish, and when FOSS can put out the depth and breadth of the commercial sector without re-using old commercially-developed engines, then I'll start looking at it as a viable option. Just because you enjoy the FOSS gaming scene doesn't mean its good enough for everyone.
Re:Free and Open Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a UI Designer, let me say I really doubt this. There just simply aren't the incentives for a designer to work on OSS as there are for a developer.
Working on an OSS project without the ability to code means my ability to get design done depends on influence. Influence that will likely have to be accomplished across chat or VOIP with people I've never met who may have worked on this for a while or have strong opinions about how it should be designed PLUS the ability to completely ignore me and check in whatever they want. Additionally, while a draw for a developer to work on OSS might be that you're working absent the processes and influences of other less-programmy groups (marketing and design for instance), this removes any organizational leverage I may have as a designer to get things done.
While my dev friend gets a cool way to try out stuff they want to play with absent all those annoying rules at work, I get stuck in a situation with so little ability to do my job that if it were something I was being paid for, I'd likely quit. I'd rather spend my free time either selling my skills to clients (allows me to build up a network if I ever want to go out on my own), working on my own projects (fun + might be better for the portfolio than the game where I struggled for 6 months to get something I'm really not happy with in the end), or just relaxing.
Perhaps in an OSS company focused on building games you could get the structure you need to make OSS design work for designers, but the traditional "give away the code and charge for service/support" model doesn't seem too workable for games so I'm struggling to see how a business would work.
Re:Not Greed (Score:3, Insightful)
As a customer, I want a game that just works. Not a game with five dozen incompatible interfaces, two half broken configuration interfaces, inscrutable documentation written by an engineer who never took a writing class in his entire six years in college, untalented artwork, and random crashes justified by the credo "if you don't like it, dig through 100,000 lines of poorly commented code to fix it yourself".
Wesnoth has none of that, and neither does Warsow. There's probably others though, they're just the two I've been playing the most lately.
For the non open-source "free" games, I want a game I can play, not one that's a one screen flash-animation that's really just an add for whatever is the latest kid-fluff being pushed on Nickelodeon.
So, you haven't researched the freeware gaming scene either, have you? if all you know is whatever flash-based crap Nickelodeon et al push on their webpages, then I'm sorry for you, but they're *not* the only, the best, or even representative of the average game that's available for free.
As a customer, I want my GTA, Oblivion, Project Gotham, and a dozen other high quality games that could only be developed by paying real programmers, artists, and writers real money to work on them. So I am perfectly willing to shell out real money to pay for them to do so.
Didn't you just say that you wanted something that "just works"? because neither GTA4 nor Oblivion fit that definition, haven't played Project Gotham either but it wouldn't surprise me if it did as well.
Seriously, I support commercial games too, but your arguments are shit. Do your research, see the true jewels of Free, free and commercial gaming, then come back and see what you think.
No such thing as "Free" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Free and Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Having designers is one thing, having programmers listen to them is another. A common attitude for opensource software is "you can get the code, implement it yourself!". People implement their own ideas, not those of other people and most people suck at having good ideas.