Loot Boxes Suck, But What Takes Their Place?

[miscu]

Let’s do napkin math coz god I love napkin math.

I took this graph from a 2010 LA Times article, which itself was sourced from an OnLive CEO at the time, so some things may have changed (if anything the profit margins have likely skewed higher due to increase of digital sales lately).

Let’s then look at a game that was very upfront about the sales numbers and development costs, The Witcher 3 (while being cognizant of the fact that the development culture there was known to be toxic and crunch-heavy). Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Development Cost: $81 million

Before its release, over 1.5 million people pre-ordered the game[…]The game sold over six million copies in the next six weeks[…]

7,500,000 x $27 = $202,500,000 (not accounting for sales or discounts)

We can get really theoretical here with the games that don’t disclose any of this. Let’s say a game like Dishonored 2 cost $10 mil to make (probably a lowball), which was reported to have “disappointing” sales, so we can probably guesstimate around 500k in opening weeks.

500,000 x $27 = 13,500,000

Obviously not a huge success, and possibly a small loss if the budget was over $10 mil, but technically the publisher hasn’t lost anything. But there isn’t any reason why another Dishonored couldn’t hit at least half the sales of a Witcher 3 through better marketing and fan goodwill from the games at least being pretty good over the years.

At its core, a lot of this gets back to what I was saying earlier, that publishers aren’t willing to take small risks for longer payoffs vs big payoffs with long term losses. And on top of that, they’ll consider a break-even a failure worth potentially shuttering a studio over.

It’s less that the only answer to the industry’s problem is “instate luxury space communism”, but demands for more transparency and push for unionization to prevent publishers from scrapping mid-tier studios in order to go all-in on super projects that slowly undermine the stability of the overall industry. It’s bad business, y’all.

ᶦᵗ’ˢ ᵃᶫᶫ ᶦᶰ ᵗʰᵉ ᶰᵘᵐᵇᵉʳˢ

[WeedLordVegeta]

Hmmmm, I’ve run the numbers and this post is: Good.

[MisterAlex]

I was fine with the way hero unlocks used to be handled in Heroes of the Storm. You could (gradually) earn them through gameplay or buy them directly from the in-game store. Skins were strictly for-money purchases, but that didn’t bother me, and I sometimes bought ones I liked when they were in the weekly bargain bin.

I hate the pressure created by limited-time content, but the amount of real money required to keep up with any limited-time skins in Heroes was pretty minimal, so there wasn’t any huge wallet-gouging going on, and I was fine with how it worked out.

The change to a currency-separated and lootbox-driven model in Heroes 2.0 is the reason I quit playing that game. I also finally uninstalled Overwatch a few weeks ago.

[Nyarlathotep]

The problem with your napkin maths is that a game needs to do a hellofa lot more than break even for a game studio to continue to exist.
A game breaking even is like a one free spin token - they can try and do it all over again, and hope that nothing unexpected happens that makes their try all over again project cost any more.

The realities of game development are that only one in ten projects are successful, and it is that one in ten success that has to fund the other nine failures, break evens or marginal successes.
If you’re doing napkin maths and deciding that a game that makes a marginal profit after 5 years development is “successful” then you are completely oblivious to how tenuous such a situation is for that studio; investors don’t put money into a business that offers them their money back after 5 years. Employees don’t want to work somewhere with frozen wages and no promotion prospects for 5 years.

[sputnik]

Excuse the tangent, but this thread reminds me of when the Skullgirls devs raised 150,000 on indiegogo for one new character, were asked about the cost, and broke it down for everyone:

[Shivoa]

Worth noting in the changes from 2010 to digital (again, with Ubi reporting 85% digital revenue, I think we can talk about the digital current rather than the digital future and do the numbers from there)…

Retailer margin is gone (distribution), so is the cost of goods (production), so is what they list as returns (that is the cost of returning and disposing of unsold stock). There are no more warehouses, only servers that generate a new key once the payment processing goes through. Platform royalty is now bundled into the digital distribution and digital retailer cut at 30% (so $18) unless you’ve got a nice deal and they take less than that blanket figure. The publisher just got handed $42 rather than $27.

What if they sold the game for $40? That 30% cut (for doing everything but making the game) is still 30% so rather than a fixed cost (like cost of goods, that couldn’t go down) it’s now only $12. The publisher got handed $28 of every sale. So… basically the same as they got handed from each $60 sale in 2010. And that’s before you start selling copies on your own platform where you pay yourself the 30% cut to sell it (minus server upkeep and payment processor fees) via EA Origin or Ubisoft uPlay.

[Arenow]

I don’t have a problem with loot boxes. Loot boxes can be fun if made properly, just like the way items drop in Diablo II or how stats raise in a JRPG when leveling up.

Lootboxes can feel like a reward, not a gamble.

The main problem I have is with games designed in a way that makes me suspicious they’re balanced to make me buy extra content. I have a problem with endings behind an extra paywall, I have a problem with ridiculous difficulty spikes when there’s a pay-to-win currency. I have a serious problem with that. When I feel I should throw some extra money to keep having fun, that means this game has been designed to stop being fun.

When I open a lootbox in Overwatch, I feel a bit anxious and hopeful to get a cosmetic skin. When progression for the latest Need for Speed game comes through lootboxes that don’t feel fun (as Jeff Gerstmann put it in the last GBombcast), it’s a sign they’ve pushed it too far.

[miscu]

That Ratchet & Clank reboot from last year launched at $40 IIRC and it was reported as a successful title (though no numbers provided), and you wouldn’t get much argument that it was a surprisingly gorgeous game despite the semi-budget pricing.

I don’t really have any issue with a shift to $40 target, I’d rather have a satisfying one-and-done 5-10 hour game than the current suite of 40-100 hour time dump service games.

Also this Paste Magazine article gets to most of what we’re saying here and I’m not sure if there’s any new ground we can really cover with this subject.

[dogsarecool]

Strong developer unions and a concerted effort to focus on art design rather than graphics.

[Atlas]

And people still didn’t believe them even after they broke it down. This is the problem when AAA companies aren’t trusted: that skepticism filters down to smaller productions. It’s why so many message board arguments end up at “The devs are just greedy!”

Game are crazy expensive to make, but most people don’t follow things closely enough to see the difference in scale. They take their anger of massive studios trying to get every dollar they possibly can and put it towards smaller studios asking for a lot of money on Kickstarter because that really is how much development costs.

[Shivoa]

Art design can be extremely expensive. “Graphics” can be a new equation that makes a basic surface type look correct in all scenarios so that rather than having the artist paint every inch of dirt to be correct for the local conditions, the algorithm just samples the local conditions and correctly renders all dirt in the entire world as if it was painted by hand.

Smart use of material types (now using physically based shaders) is a great efficiency in the art pipeline and is pure “graphics”. We need to reject oversimplification of how we perceive the final product and how much it costs to make it. There’s a great Designer Notes about just how tiny (handful of people) and rapid the Minerva’s Den production was due to the building blocks for the game being there (the expensive work of building out the materials and most of the props, the slow task of bringing a vision from concept art to a cohesive art direction for the world) and having mature tools everyone was familiar with. That’s a lovely looking game (which you can buy standalone) that cost peanuts for the publisher to greenlight (with an untested lead being given a chance).

Meanwhile, Telltale Games spends a fortune on staff costs to produce games that are consistently technically a mess and technically years behind where we expect “graphics” to be, while trying to paper over it with art direction. But that is far from a cheap studio to run.

Some cutting edge visuals are labour intensive, but we shouldn’t (when talking about budgets around $10k/seat/month staffing) automatically assume that technological innovations are necessarily increasing costs rather than part of the work to keep costs in check (and so have been advancements that facilitate the budget slack in AAA to pay for some of the excesses of detailed environment design rather than enforcing the cost). The “graphics lead to costs” causal link is far from the only way to read the asset pipeline’s development over the years since early 3D emerged.

[ricotta]

Perhaps an obscure title to reference on the subject of microtransactions, but I’m fond of the monetization in Pokemon Picross. It’s a free-to-play game, with the usual design of such games. You buy Picrites with real-world money to bypass endlessly grinding in-game currency to unlock new puzzles or speed up timers, but once you have bought 5,000 Picrites… they are free.

5,000 Picrites was about $30, I believe. It had enough content that, if you enjoyed it up to that point, it’s worth buying for the cost of an eShop puzzle game. I think I spent more on Trozei, back when that came out. And it can’t become an addictive money sink because it caps out at ‘retail’ price.

In a way, it was a glorified demo, but honestly I prefer that to Nintendo’s latest freemium experience (seriously, I think I’ve nearly hit the Pocket Camp paywall and I’m less than two days in).

[anon59431647]

@ricotta

seriously, I think I’ve nearly hit the Pocket Camp paywall and I’m less than two days in

What.

You need to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to speed this game at all. Or you can wait, because it is “Animal Crossing”. You know, the game that tied to real life clock and you supposed to wait for days, or even weeks for stuff to happen.

Sorry, I’m not trying to be flippant or anything, but what are you trying to do, so you feel like you need to spend money? The game is addictive, sure, but I’m 30 days in, paid 0 money, bought a bunch of stuff with free Leaf Tickets, and now contemplating getting Tom Nook’s chair (that bastard!), again, for free.

[Shivoa]

Here’s some timely discussion of budgets, $30 price points, and AAA visuals/“graphics” and general tools (like high-end motion capture work). There is also a text write-up for those who prefer to read the quotes.

Good to hear about the concrete outcomes of exploring “triple I” (studios with 10-25 person team sizes who are used to AAA projects/workflow and aim to bring the same level of visuals to independent projects without major publisher funding that comes with handing over project control and meeting those external milestones for continued funding).

[ricotta]

I’m happy to wait a while, play once a day, but I’ve hit a point where it’s going to take me a week of logging in multiple times a day doing every favour I can to make a single item a camper wants just because of how much material it requires, and I’ve started getting recipes that take over 24 hours to craft. I can log in, catch a few fish and shake a few trees, make like… four cotton and six steel. And in order to get the next villager to visit my camp, I need about a hundred cotton. Plus the dozens of hours subsequently to actually craft each item. It’s just beginning to feel like a grind, without even the reward of a new chair or something every time I log in to make up for it.

Not to mention, I’ve already got nearly every stretch goal (still need to get around to finishing the blue series) and the level ups are slowing down considerably, so I can see how the leaf tickets are going to be scarce.

[anon59431647]

But that feels like every “Animal Crossing” too me. I played “New Leaf” for half a year: maybe I would get something new and cool once a week, but other than that, it was chipping away at couple of projects (black and white flowers alley, filling up museum, paying off Nook, etc.).

“Pocket Camp” (feels) actually way faster, because something happens every 3 hours. Which is my problem: yes, I can technically play once a day, but I can’t stop mys… Sorry, 3 hours is up, gotta go!

Again, I’m not saying that there is no pay2win stuff, or that it doesn’t tries to hook you up, but it’s so toned down compared to what others tried to pull off in $60 games.

[ricotta]

I don’t know, I never felt like I couldn’t pop into New Leaf and achieve something. Sometimes it was just making another 10,000 bells, sometimes I found a new fossil, sometimes I caught a new bug, sometimes I could just have a nice interaction with my favourite villager (the dialogue in Pocket Camp is mostly just tutorials, at least so far). I enjoy the grind of daily tasks like weeding the village, it feels gratifying in a way that giving someone apples and getting 1/40th of the cotton I need to make a single sofa does not.

But I guess it depends on how you enjoy playing. I’d still like to see them emulate the Pokemon Picross model, where you could choose to pay for a ‘full game’ or just play at the mobile pace.

[keydemographics]

This is the best answer I’ve seen in this thread. The foundation of the argument in the piece is misbegotten.

[amonjay]

Ninja Theory’s HellBlade, also a $40 title with slick realistic visuals, performance capture actors and all that high production polish, just turned profitable ahead of expectations. The industry needs to reevaluate it’s pricing ASAP, Titles focused on Service should have different options, cheaper packages with single or multiplayer modes only for instance.

[EmuPrime]

This touches on a topic that I’ve sensed recently in a few places, that could probably get spun out into its own (maybe it already has): rewards that don’t feel like rewards. Like in your example, you didn’t get anything for weeding, but it still felt good. Giving someone an apple doesn’t, though, because when they give you cotton back, you’re reminded of how far away some other goal is.

In the Giant Bomb quick look of Battlefront 2, Dan has a blast playing Heroes vs. Villains, but then when it pops him back to the menus and gives him credits for his efforts, he’s reminded of how messed up the progression is in that game, and it just bums him out. It’s pretty interesting, psychologically.