Video Game Trend: The Decline Of The 'Game' And The Emergence Of The 'Living Game World'
from the a-brand-new-world dept
Normally, reading a report on an earnings forecast by a video game company is no more interesting than it would be if the company made, say, toilet bowl brushes. But every so often, you can catch a glimpse of where a company thinks the gaming industry is going and how gaming might evolve next. One such report on Activision's earnings has some interesting tidbits to go along with the company's acknowledgement of the known trends in digital distribution.
The report starts off with Activision reporting that its overall sales strategy is focused on shifting as much effort to digital/internet sales as possible. This is no surprise of course, as the trend for gaming to shift away from shiny discs and towards downloads has been in place for a while now. Still, hearing Activision report that three-fourths of its revenue now comes from sales over the internet is jarring. But the really interesting stuff comes when Activision talks about how the internet has made it possible for a gaming company to go beyond making "games" and instead creating living, evolving game worlds for players to immerse themselves in.
Activision also said two of its newest games -- the space-age shooting game Destiny, and the digital card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft -- have accumulated more than 50 million registered users and are now responsible for more than $1 billion sales. Hearthstone, for tablets and smartphones, is offered for free to download, and makes its money by charging for upgrades and additional items over time. Destiny is also designed to get players spending money over the next ten years of its development by offering additional storylines and other items. Activision says Destiny's player base clocks around 3 hours of playtime a day.MMOs are not new. As the quote above notes, WoW is over a decade old. That said, gamemakers might have waited until recently to decide that evolving, online gaming worlds are going to be the new norm in gaming. The way Activision is talking about this sounds like the idea of making "games" is going to take a backseat to making evolving, always-running, decades-spanning game worlds in which the sales strategy will be an ongoing participation by gamers, rather than simply having them plunk down $40 at a retailer to take their shiny disk home and pop it into a console.
The 11-year old World of Warcraft game is one of Activision's best known and longest-running active games. That has helped executives see the value in creating titles of all types that operate less as products burned onto physical discs and played over a short time to living titles, regularly expanded and updated over time. So far, it's paying off. Activision said a record 76 percent, or $538 million, of its total revenue came from sales over the Internet of full-game downloads and in-game adds-ons.
Activision isn't alone in this line of thinking.
This shift, though more dramatic with Activision, follows an industry trend with other large game makers, like Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive, which have both seen consistent boosts to sales over the Internet in recent quarters. These companies are beginning to see success in the games industry as less a matter of selling the most units and more a question of how to get gamers to play a single game for longer -- and spending real money in the virtual worlds as well.Ten years ago, the method for measuring the play time in gaming was measured in hours. Ten hours was a short game, twenty was about average, and a forty-hour game was massive. Now game developers are looking to measure game time in years, not hours. It's a massive shift in business models.
This isn't to say that the more traditional "game" is immediately going away, of course. Activision is still going to pump out Call of Duty games, and is even reportedly looking to revive the Guitar Hero brand. But this sort of reminds me of how it felt at the start of the adventure game decline fifteen or so years back. They didn't die off immediately, or at all, really. Instead, the industry just slowly stopped making as many of them, bit by bit, until the point-and-click adventure game became the niche market it is today. Will old-fashioned "games" follow the same trajectory? The money trend seems to indicate it might.
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Filed Under: games, living worlds, trends, video games
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Me, I have had zero interest in multiplayer ever since the LAN cafe died. Been playing for a long time, hopefully I won't live to see gaming completely pass me by.
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No
But games with online elements that people actually want are still a long way from wiping out the traditional single-player experience. There is active hostility to micro-transactions and cynical DLC nickel and diming strategies (see Bethesda’s “Horse Armor” in Skyrim). Multiple attempts to replicate WoW's success have failed (The Old Republic, Elder Scrolls online etc.). The online/multiplayer euphoria of marketing execs destroyed the Dragon Age franchise.
I doubt that senior execs in the gaming megacorporations really know what people want.
We went without old-school RPGs for years because the gatekeepers said that there was no demand for them - and now crowdsourcing has resulted in Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin. And now we have Tides of Numenera and Sword Coast Legends on the way.
Hopefully the greed and cynanism of these companies will be their undoing.
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Re: No
Then you have those pay2win games that COULD be awesome but if you don't shell out tons of money you won't go anywhere. I'm actively avoiding 'freemium' games. My old collection seems more and more attractive these days.
I doubt that senior execs in the gaming megacorporations really know what people want.
They aren't interested unless it can make them a lot of money.
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games workshop lowered the quality of the products and raised prices. as a result they lost massive amounts of customers. So what have they done in the decade or more since they started this strategy. They keep raising their prices, and funny enough they are losing massive amounts of money because of this as fewer and fewer people buy their products. Certainly a few executives have succeeded in milking the company for all they can.
In my opinion activision is being milked for all its worth by a several of their executives. Much like the company milks the gaming population for every last dime they can.
It's a dam shame Activision has destroyed Blizzards good name in the long run in the desperate search for short term profits.
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Take heart, point-and-click adventure game lovers
It may be a niche market, but there seems to be a lot of good effort put into it.
And we may see first-person shooters fall out of AAA favor, but that will give more room to the indie community to make competitive games.
And they still seem to make games for the love of games rather than the love of money.
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Re: Manik
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It's better to view modern online games as casinos, rather than actual games.
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Mobile Free-to-play games are certainly in line with casino mentality
They even use a casino term whales (what were big-stakes gamblers in casinos) as their high-paying customers who are compelled to sink cash into game resources.
The difference is that to Casinos, whales are good for publicity so they comp their whales a lot of perks. In F2P whales are the target audience and the source of 90% of the profits.
It is almost an admission that they are capitalizing on addictive behavior of a marginal group.
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registered users vs actual users
acheage prolly has 10 million users regestered but i bet its a tenth or less that actually play
same with eldar scrolls
they would be lucky to have 2 million playing , everyone i know is disappointed with destiny
back to guild wars 2 people
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Re: registered users vs actual users
There is a lot of disappointment with Destiny, but there are also a lot of people playing a lot of hours.
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The major AAA corps are going to arbitrarily decide 'people don't want traditional games anymore, they want our oversensationalized drip-pay games'.
The major AAA corps will then steadily distance themselves from the 'traditional game'.
A ton of people are going to realise the market voids now left behind by these major corps, and rush to fill the gap. We will get games built by people trying to make good game, see more innovation in the current space as AAA publishers vacate it, and ironically, AAA games will gradually grow to >become
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Destiny does seem to be working.
Activision is slowly recovering from the debacles of its glorious leader, Bobby K. the lovable CEO that gets sued for hundreds of millions because he didn't want to honor contracts. With him out of the headlines the business seems to be making progress.
For commenters there are many gamers that enjoy the MMO worlds and digital is more important to them as there will always be updates in that type of game. Acquiring addition physical discs is a hassle. New generation has a different sensibility. If it has any at all.
For the author: massive was GTA-4 where the initial play through was closer to hundred(s) of hours. 40 was long, not massive.
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