Sid Meier Warns the Games Industry About Monetization (bbc.com) 50
Speaking to the BBC on the 30th anniversary of Civilization, American developer Sid Meier says if major companies continue to focus on monetization or other things that are not gameplay-focused, they risk losing the audience. From the report: "The real challenge and the real opportunity is keeping our focus on gameplay," says American developer Sid Meier. "That is what is unique, special and appealing about games as a form of entertainment. When we forget that, and decide it's monetization or other things that are not gameplay-focused, when we start to forget about making great games and start thinking about games as a vehicle or an opportunity for something else, that's when we stray a little bit further from the path."
The financial model that supports how games companies make their money has changed dramatically in the past decade or so. Now many developers and publishers rely on in-game purchases to help with their bottom line rather than solely on the up-front cost of buying a title to play. [...] Some games companies are also exploring the introduction of non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) - a form of digital art that players can buy and own -- into their games. [...] Sid Meier says that if major companies continue to focus on ways like this to monetize gaming, they risk losing the audience: "People can assume that a game is going to be fun and what it needs for success are more cinematics or monetization or whatever -- but if the core just is not there with good gameplay, then it won't work. "In a sense gameplay is cheap... The game design part is critical and crucial but doesn't require a cast of thousands in the way some of the other aspects do. So it's perhaps easy to overlook how important the investment in game design and gameplay is."
The global games market is reported to be worth around $175 billion and is forecast to almost double in five years. But Sid Meier says that continued growth isn't guaranteed: "There are lots of other ways that people can spend their leisure time... I think the way the internet works, once a shift starts to happen, then everybody runs to that side of the ship. "I think we need to be sure that our games continue to be high quality and fun to play - there are so many forms of entertainment out there now. We're in a good position... but we need to be sure we realize how critical gameplay is - and how that is the engine that really keeps players happy, engaged and having fun."
Sid says he has no plans to retire just yet, and explains the most gratifying change he's experienced during his more than 30 years in the industry, is the wider public's shift in attitude when it comes to games. People were telling him back in 1991 that he was "wasting his time" working in games - now he smiles, as people say to him: "I wish I could get a job making games."
The financial model that supports how games companies make their money has changed dramatically in the past decade or so. Now many developers and publishers rely on in-game purchases to help with their bottom line rather than solely on the up-front cost of buying a title to play. [...] Some games companies are also exploring the introduction of non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) - a form of digital art that players can buy and own -- into their games. [...] Sid Meier says that if major companies continue to focus on ways like this to monetize gaming, they risk losing the audience: "People can assume that a game is going to be fun and what it needs for success are more cinematics or monetization or whatever -- but if the core just is not there with good gameplay, then it won't work. "In a sense gameplay is cheap... The game design part is critical and crucial but doesn't require a cast of thousands in the way some of the other aspects do. So it's perhaps easy to overlook how important the investment in game design and gameplay is."
The global games market is reported to be worth around $175 billion and is forecast to almost double in five years. But Sid Meier says that continued growth isn't guaranteed: "There are lots of other ways that people can spend their leisure time... I think the way the internet works, once a shift starts to happen, then everybody runs to that side of the ship. "I think we need to be sure that our games continue to be high quality and fun to play - there are so many forms of entertainment out there now. We're in a good position... but we need to be sure we realize how critical gameplay is - and how that is the engine that really keeps players happy, engaged and having fun."
Sid says he has no plans to retire just yet, and explains the most gratifying change he's experienced during his more than 30 years in the industry, is the wider public's shift in attitude when it comes to games. People were telling him back in 1991 that he was "wasting his time" working in games - now he smiles, as people say to him: "I wish I could get a job making games."
Appreciate it Sid (Score:3)
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Frak them. Just support the ones who don't monetize.
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I'll say if it was JUST about money, then titles like ultima online and tiberium alliances would not be around. the whole concept of users also being developers of software seems to be the priority in some cases and unfortunately so, all things equal if most people were not actually immoral slobs, titles like the ones mentioned would not exist in their current form that rewards their slobbery. I do agree that monetization is a huge problem though which is weaponized as a total lack replayability that trad
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monetizing your mom was the best decision I ever made
Sid didn't make Master of Magic...
I think that ship has sailed (Score:2)
I mean, they're trying to force NFTs down our throats, and they're literally out there saying "gamers will except them eventually" with "whether they like it or not" left unstated but well understood.
When we let them put a literal casino into a basketball game we lost. At that point we need to accept that predatory monetization is going to be a thing short of bringing in th
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That's why I mostly look at games from indie developers and small studios. They need good games to attract sales instead of relying on their company name and huge marketing budgets. ... and then they become big enough that they get bought by bigger studios, get assimilated and corrupted, and then release crappier and crapper games before being closed by the bigger studio which bought them, wondering why people stopped buying Game Sequel 5.
TL;DR: big game studios are cancers.
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They're literally saying, "gamers will except them eventually"?
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"accept" is the word you're looking for here.
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No different than premium items. (Score:2)
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Maybe it's worth taking a moment to consider what it is he's saying rather than dismissing him as so
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False. Gamers keep lapping it up. (Score:1)
I hate to say it, but that is false. A gaming company puts out pay to earn, gamers lap it up. NFTs? Gamers buy them as achievements. Monthly subscription to play games? Here's the credit card. Paying 2-4x for a console? Where is the line? I'll pay $2500 for a PS5 or XBox so I can play the latest CoD, Madden, or other game.
It doesn't matter what game companies do, many gamers will lap it up and consider themselves blessed that they even get the privilege to play on the console.
Until there is another
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Gamers are NOT lapping it up. SOME gamers are.
Pay to win will always be around, because people will always look for a way to win easily. That's why people cheat. Pay to win is simply legally sanctioned cheating.
NFTs are appealing to a small niche that want "collectibles" in games. The larger player base as a whole seems to be soundly rejecting it
Subscriptions? Well, that happened since the 90s with MMOs. The challenge here is that people are playing online, and online gaming has been charging to keep conten
Said the man with a wealth of $40M USD (Score:2)
Easy making bold statements with such an amount of money in the bank.
Re: Said the man with a wealth of $40M USD (Score:3)
People have him money because he made good games, not the other way around. Sid had been pushed it out the industry by businessman and companies like EA
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People like him made good games, but you have to buy those games in installments. Remember when you got a game for $50 or whatever and then maybe there was one expansion later for $30 or so? Civ games have like a dozen expansions or more now. No big deal if you only play single player, but you and anyone you play multi with has to have all the same stuff or you can't use it.
That's still better than effectively mandatory loot crates and other obviously onerous bullshit, but it's also monetization that detrac
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Sid hits the nail on the head (Score:3)
He's absolutely right, but there's a lot he's not saying. Microtransactions are just an accessible example, the subtext of his speech is 'beware not making games fun anymore.' I think the 30-40 year old crowd has expectations built back in our youth of what's actually fun for us... and due to the boom of the industry we can always find something that appeals, after all a lot of the senior game designers are also in our demographic and we have a shared language, if you will, of the things we grew up with and the things we tend to enjoy.
Once our generation is gone, the industry risks cratering for reasons that Sid kind of presciently sees. It's easier to make derivative crap than something original, and it's easy to forget that originality and game design is what created the industry in the first place. In other words, its fine to make a game that's kind of like street fighter, or quake, or Super Mario, even with microtransactions, as long as the designer keeps the core of what makes those games fun and there's an audience that 'gets' what the designer is referencing.
But sooner or later we're going to have the iphone generation in charge, making games for their peers and the padded-corners generation, and then all bets will be off. We're going to have consolidated corporate overlords who make the video game equivalent or Disney Star Wars or Amazon Wheel of Time (ironically both franchises feel like video games put on screen). They will be so cliched and so poorly executed that they won't develop meaningful fan bases. And that could easily lead to the death of the gaming industry as it is today. Just like there are people who see a movie every week who are propping up Hollywood's current dumpster fire, there are people who buy a new game every month who will prop up the future gaming industry, but the casuals and the connoisseurs will leave and never come back. They will, as Sid says, have too many options to ever care about returning.
Re: Sid hits the nail on the head (Score:2)
Disneyfying the games industry will only collapse the industry if each new batch of young people fails to become more stupid than the last. Unlikely.
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there are people who buy a new game every month who will prop up the future gaming industry, but the casuals and the connoisseurs will leave and never come back
I wish this was true. I fear the reality is that producers of entertainment will get better and better at exploiting the biological drives and weaknesses of everybody, but especially of the casuals. We call them casuals because they don't really care about the game itself, as long as they feel entertained.
Look at all the Farmville-like crap, Candy Crush, Flappy bird, and what have you. Soul-crushing skinner box-like grinding machines for anyone who is paying attention to what they are doing. 'Fun' for billi
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Even back in the 80s and 90s, most games were crap. The North American video games crash of 1984 was caused by there being too many clones and derivative games that were hastily thrown together and not a lot of fun to play.
It never really got better. The early 90s was saturated with copy-cat platform games, the late 90s were developers struggling to make the transition to 3D. Then in the 2000s every game looked grey and bland, with a forced tutorial level.
There were exceptions and those are the ones we reme
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However, there are plenty of games out there that work and that have young people play (Fortnite?), or even stupid phone games (Bejeweled-like) that millions of moms play. The industry evolves and adapts, and while these games don't look fun to me, objectively
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But sooner or later we're going to have the iphone generation in charge, making games for their peers and the padded-corners generation, and then all bets will be off. We're going to have consolidated corporate overlords who make the video game equivalent or Disney Star Wars or Amazon Wheel of Time (ironically both franchises feel like video games put on screen). They will be so cliched and so poorly executed that they won't develop meaningful fan bases. And that could easily lead to the death of the gaming industry as it is today. Just like there are people who see a movie every week who are propping up Hollywood's current dumpster fire, there are people who buy a new game every month who will prop up the future gaming industry, but the casuals and the connoisseurs will leave and never come back. They will, as Sid says, have too many options to ever care about returning.
But Dr Evil... that has already happened.
The casual era came years ago. The dumbing down started with the PlayStation, as did the rampant monetisation. It just didn't get really bad until the 2010s. EA, Ubisoft, et al. are all just selling the same shit year in and year out. FIFA 20xx, Madden, COD, Battlefield, Far Cry... Name your series that practically has a yearly instalment that is, for the most part just a reskin of last years instalment. Phone based games now have TV ads. These games have never be
Not just the game industry though.... (Score:2)
I fear this has been a trend across the entire culture. You speak of the 30-40 year old crowd having expectations built in their youth of "what's actually fun" in the world of video gaming. (I'd say that's actually more accurate if you just include the entire Gen-X audience, many of whom are around 50, like myself, at this point.)
But I see this in modern music too. In the last decade or two, there's been a slow shift away from producing any popular music that requires a high level of proficiency at playing
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As a preface, here's where I'm coming from: I'm an amateur musician, I took classical piano lessons for a decade when I was young and kept going after that, but switched to making songs and arrangements on my own both on a computer and in the traditional pencil-and-paper-and-keys fashion. I like the process of doing things the old fashioned way more but I like the end results of doing them the digitally better.
Since sequencers and virtual instruments have gotten so insanely much better and the state of the
re: music (Score:2)
Yeah, I'd partially agree with that. But live performances have become a lot more important to musicians hoping to make any kind of decent living making music. The era of subscription-based streaming has pretty much slaughtered the ability to make good money creating albums in studios and selling them. Now, even well-known and respected artists are literally making pennies from people streaming their tracks on Spotify and the like.
I see a lot more "grass roots" efforts to sell music now, via multiple online
This already happened (Score:2)
And they mostly lost my interest a decade ago, there still are some good games most of which come from studio startups
Indie developers = the future of decent gaming (Score:2)
Time and time again, it has been proven you don't need a team of 50 or more to produce a hit game.
It has been proven that super realistic graphics are not a replacement for awesome gameplay.
The big gaming giants are rapidly following the same route as the big Hollywood producers - re-hashing the same game over and over again.
So who do we turn to?
Small indie developers.
In many ways, we are in the golden age of video gaming - and the distribution method of games has now effectively made it a whole lot easier
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I disagree that this is the golden age.
The golden age was the late 70's to the mid-late 80's when you had TRUE innovation and the birth of almost all the gaming archetypes (platforms, shootem ups, sports, combat, puzzle, adventures etc.) which grew from the arcades and early computers. Then I'd argue the silver age came late 90's to mid 2000's with the second wave of archetypes (MMO's, RTS, RPG, simulations) and bumps in technology capability that moved the other genres ahead (like adventures moving from
This is true for all consumer markets. (Score:2)
Marketing and advertising monetize everything to the detriment of our focus and attention on whatever it is that we engage in doing. Shameless excessive, saturation of mass media is obviously successful enough at monetizing most all of the free internet. Its an old idea that funds newspapers, magazines, and television and radio, and it remains the greatest revenue on the world wide web. But there is not a single person that needs or wants it. Moreover, there are many who quite resent it - and its this r
Sad (Score:1)
weird to hear this from Sid (Score:2)
game industry is a market. there is no particular need to warn anyone about dangers of overdoing monetization; that line between "doing" and "overdoing" is defined by the players and not by product managers or C-levels. what we see today may seem like overdoing monetization by some, but if the market can bear it, who's to say that is bad? if people ARE paying for it.
Gaming Subscription Services (Score:1)
Making a bad entertainment product is a bad idea (Score:2)
A really bad one, he is perfectly correct about that. Not only do people in no way need these products, they will be very vocal about having their leisure-time ruined by a bad game. A lesson that the greed-driven part of the entertainment industry has to learn time and again, because bean-counting will not cut it. It has to be fun, engaging, entertaining or you are better off not making it in the first place.