Needless to say, I’m bummed that we didn’t even warrant a mention, even though we were one of the first in the present push to get out there and do this. I’m cool with that because I know all of the other folks mentioned in the article (XNA, Whirled, LittleBigPlanet, Playcrafter) know who we are. ;-)

Hey, I’ve made that argument myself in the past. But I see the err in my thinking now. The argument is flawed by relying on a wrong premise: I pay $15 for a DVD and it gives me 2 hours of entertainment; I pay $60 for a game and it gives me 40 hours of entertainment; thus, games are a better value for your entertainment dollar.

Well, you could maybe make that argument in comparison to buying a ticket to a movie theater (where you do get 2 hours of entertainment for $7.50, or $3.25/hour). So, for a $60 video game, I’d need to put in 16 hours of gameplay to equal that. Not unreasonable, though definitely beyond the time investment the industry should expect in order to grow its audience (for most games).

But the real comparison is to DVDs or CDs. The gamer always seems to argue that, for some reason, DVDs and CDs don’t have replay value (or perhaps it doesn’t count?). I have CDs that are 10 years old that I’ve easily listened to 100 times. So, that $15 investment yielded at least 100 hours of entertainment or $0.15/hour. The last DVD I bought? $20 for a 2 hour movie I’ve already watched twice and will probably watch a dozen times during its lifetime: $0.83/hour.

So, how about we drop that argument as we’re really just trying to justify to ourselves why we spend too much on games. Because it is too much. *Most* video games are made for less than *most* movies, but because they *appeal* to a smaller audience they have to charge more to break even. But I’m not arguing for a dumbing down of games to appeal to larger audiences… the real solution is a dramatic overhaul of how games are made, marketed and sold.

I think it’s ironic how conservative our business is. And shameful. XBLA is the closest thing out there to a “better way” of selling and distributing games. As XNA improves, production costs will go down. As developers worry less (and audiences demand less) in regards to poly counts, production costs will go down further (as team sizes and schedules shrink). As distribution goes digital, those costs will drop. With free demos and social recommendation engines, marketing costs will drop.

And best of all, if consumers are only paying $10 for a product they won’t be upset if it doesn’t deliver 40 hours of entertainment. They’ll be happy with 10, or even 5 if they’re really good. Which further drives down production costs (and testing, and distribution). Which means that $10 has more and more room for profit.

And it also means that there’s more and more people who can afford it. My $50 game budget just got me 5 different games (variety, the spice of life!) instead of one game. That means 5 different developers got my vote of confidence. 5 different ideas got legs in the marketplace. Variety thrives. The medium evolves.

There’s also less pirating because it’s easier and faster to pay $10 for the real thing. And because pirating is no longer a big worry for developers their costs go down (no SecuROM licensing, for example, or extra time spent developing counter-measures).

I believe that if games cost $10 – $20 each the industry and its audience would grow dramatically. I’ve never seen any evidence that challenges that theory, but I’ve seen an incredible amount that bolsters it.

The Sporepedia, which serves as a clearing house for the most popular creatures created by players, employs a very clever (and very user-friendly) means to upload/download creatures: they embed the data in the PNG thumbnail of the creature. Instead of having some custom data format that’s opaque to the user (and basically worthless after it hits their desktop except for importing straight into Spore), the user has a traditional PNG that they can trivially view on any modern browser/OS. Embedded in the alpha channel data of the PNG, though, is a bunch of data (about 1K according to some estimates).

Now, this is an old trick, and you can do it “officially” with PNGs in custom chunks or in JPEGs, etc. It’s possible in almost any well-structured format. But it’s a very clever, modern, web way of handling it. It allows for trivial sharing by the user through whatever means they’re accustomed to because sharing an image is an almost universal feature of any collaborative software. So, user’s can attach the thumbs to their e-mail, or post them to their Flickr account, or put them on Facebook or their MySpace page, or send them in an IM.

Consider this inspiration! I’m now officially on the look out for how I can apply this technique to Mockingbird. Embedding the game’s description in its screenshot? Encoding ActionScript into the action icons? I don’t know, but I’m going to find something. And you should, too! Incorporate this feature into your products today!

UPDATE: I didn’t notice this, but there’s also a video clip. Interesting…

He neatly dodges the question of why the used market doesn’t seem to be the ruin of other industries, such as books, movies or music, or as one commenter suggested, cars. He says this about these other products:

Unlike books and other media, games have a short life in the hands of consumers. Books, DVDs and CDs are keep-ables, sometimes for years. Games, once they’re played out, are often not.

Here he actually reveals the problem, and it’s not with the used game market. The problem is that “games have a short life.” Which is horribly ironic considering how games compare as a medium to books, music or movies. Games are interactive and dynamic, the others are passive and static. Games are generative, the others are fixed. To “complete” a game ranges from 8 to 10 hours (for “short” games) to 30, 40, or more (for “long” games). Compare that to 1 hour for a CD, 2 hours for a movie, or 6 to 8 hours for a book.

The use game market is so strong because games are so expensive. I’ve got a large collection of DVDs, three or four hundred last time I counted. I could easily have twice that if I actually had a decent place to stick all of them. I’ve got a similar collection of CDs. I can look at these large collections and calculate how much money I’ve dumped into them: $6,000 on DVDs, $5,000 on CDs, roughly speaking. Considering I’ve been collecting them over the last decade, and many of them have been gifts, that all seems pretty reasonable (relatively speaking).

Now, what if I had 200 PS2 games that I had bought new? $10,000. And that’s assuming a $49.95 price point. And how many of them would I want to pop in and play today? I’ll let you guess… and then compare that number to how many of my movies I’d want to pop in and play today, let alone next year or 10 years from now.

I can only justify spending $60 on a console game because I know I can trade it in and recoup half that. I didn’t do that for a long time: I only bought new and I kept all the games I bought. At one point I realized that I simply didn’t care to play 90% of those games ever again. I traded them all in to a Gamespot and I’m sitting on nearly $400 in credit… credit that I’ll most likely spend on new games, though honestly I’ll spend it on a used copy if its available.

Because of the way our industry creates games we create the “problem” that Collin is arguing. We create sequels, we create derivatives in a genre, we create clones. I’m actually all for that: games are tricky design problems, and they’re software to boot, so all of this copying and cloning and making of sequels is simply evolution at work. Call of Duty 4 is a spectacular FPS, why would I go back to Call of Duty 3 (except for the WWII themes)? SimCity 4 is a near-perfect rendition of SimCity in my opinion, why would I want to play SimCity 3000 or SimCity 2000? The opposite is most often true in movies: “the only sequel that doesn’t make money is the last one,” therefore would can conclude that movies “devolve” with successive generations (of the same movie, not the medium as a whole).

All that’s too say is Collin’s comparison to other used markets is false, or at least using the comparison to bolster his argument fails. All it does it point the finger right back at the publishers. As one of the comments points out, the used game market forces publishers to create the best “first run” title, i.e. titles that demand to be purchased the day of release. Or, titles that demand to be kept long enough to dry up the used games market.

That’s the real problem. Publishers think that “units sold” should equate to the number of people who play/own their product. That’s why they hated rentals. It’s exactly how the “business” software industry likes to think, and it’s exactly what every DRM solutions attempts to enforce (including digital distribution). But this market perspective is only true for “consumables,” i.e. products whose purchase leads immediately (or nearly so) to their consumption, and thus removal from the market. Examples would be food, gas, printer ink, paper, or more abstractly (contractually) movie tickets, rent, utility bills.

Publishers want their market to be one of consumables. But it’s not. It’s a product-oriented market, like toys or cars or houses. Ownership is invested into something tangible and (relatively) permanent. Ownership only ever changes hands, even if it’s to toss the product into the trash. It’s property.

Basically, you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. If you want your product to be “property” then you can basically charge a very high cost beyond manufacturing, basically whatever the market will bare, but your market size is based upon how many people at any point in time want to own your product. So for example, if 500 people want to own your product today and a year from now 500 people want to own your product but it’s a different 500 people, your market size is still 500 people, and in an idealized market economy you may end up with only 500 total sales, even though 1000 people at one time or another “owned” or “used” your product.

Now, if you want your product to be a “consumable” it basically, or inevitably, becomes a commodity, i.e. it’s cost is driven by incredibly slim margins on the manufacturing cost, not the research and development cost. In the case of video games, a “consumable” cost would be very close to what CDs, DVDs and books cost, roughly $15 to $20. Instead, publishers try to factor all costs into the product cost, including research, development, marketing, manufacturing and distribution. It’s simply a luxury that the market will no longer tolerate.

Publishers will argue that there’s no way they could develop games if their retail price was $15 or $20. And they’d be right, if they continued to do business as usual. But as we should all realize — and if the web hasn’t taught you this I don’t know what will — the only constant is change, and if a business doesn’t change when its market changes it will become irrelevant (see music industry). The industry must change. Either the budgets have to be smaller or the market has to be larger. Pointing the finger at used games is no different than the music industry pointing the finger at a housewife sharing music on a P2P network (other than the strict legality of the respective practices): something is wrong with either the business model or the product if the market doesn’t desire one enough to put up with the other.

The problem: arguing that he’s a 13yrold playing a 17yrold’s game kinda concedes the point that the game may have caused the problem. While that may be possible, I kinda doubt it…

Another problem: arguing that playing a game can’t have a negative impact on you (can’t make you a killer) kinda goes against the assertion that games are art and can have impacts on the audience, express emotion, etc.

We can’t have our cake and eat it, too: games either have emotional/psychological impacts or they don’t. And if they do, the question is whether the game in particular has a positive or negative one (or if its even related to the case). Of course games have emotional impacts. The best ones aim for it. That does not mean they bear responsibility for its audience’s actions.

Games, like all media, broaden the consumer’s palette of experience. It’s experience-by-proxy. I wasn’t alive during WWII, but I feel as though I have some degree (incredibly slight, to be sure) of experiential understanding of it due to movies like Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, or video games like Medal of Honor. We have to admit, though, that 2 hours of Saving Private Ryan delivers a far deeper emotional impact than 20 hours of Medal of Honor.

Of course, most video game players focus on the mechanics, with the thematic elements being secondary. Thematic elements become repetitive. Much like a movie may revolve around its characters and their development, a game revolves around the mechanics and their application.

Of course, someone predisposed toward violence or who is desensitized to it or amoral for whatever reason may focus on the thematic elements. In fact, they may be attracted to the game because of the thematic elements, as opposed to the mechanics. And if they play obsessively, it may be a kind of “wallowing” in the themes, as opposed to “exercising” the mechanics.

Porn is an apt comparison, a slightly more socially acceptable pursuit that most males will (hopefully) have more experience with than violence. It’s base, just like violence, and is considered a socially undesirable (if not wholly unacceptable) recourse for certain “urges”. One can probably see the distinction between viewing porn “to get your rocks off” as opposed to becoming obsessed and entrenched in it. There’s a difference between getting aroused by hearing a woman moaning as she’s brought to (a likely faked) climax and being aroused by the male-dominating, misogynistic “fake rape” that can be found in some dark corners. It may be a thin line from some perspectives, and their may be no distinction in the eyes of others, but I’d guess most guys can see the difference.

The same applies to video games… the vast majority of the consumers are relishing the mechanics primarily and the themes secondarily. It’s not the life of a real mob assassin that we’re enjoying thematically, it’s the idealized, sanitized version. And we know it’s different. Hell, a 13yrold should know its different. If he can’t make that distinction, then there’s something wrong. A parent shouldn’t be oblivious to that.

So the parents do bare some responsibility, not so much for the child’s actions, but for the contributing factors to those actions. Now, if Rockstar was advertising GTA during Saturday morning cartoons, including it in cereal boxes, and distributing demos at elementary schools, then they’d be doing something wrong (though still not *responsible* for the actions of the players). But rating a game as M, selling it for $60 for a $200 game machine puts reasonable barriers to entry up, particularly for a 13yrold.

In other words, I’ve got absolutely no problem with the existence of pornography. I would absolutely have a problem with my 13yrdold son watching pornography. But if I bought it for him, and let him watch it, could I really turn around and sue Vivid when he got a girl pregnant? Could I honestly blame the makers of the porn for that?

Please note my comparison between porn and video games: the comparison is apt because in the eyes of those defaming video games they are on equal footing, yet they would never think of suing the porn makers (or maybe they would, but no lawyer would give them the time of day ’cause they’d lose). They are not the same thing, though. Porn is like a documentary: it is real people having real sex. GTA is crudely modeled and animated, very clearly not real people doing very clearly not real things (like running from one end of a city to another, and dying, and being resurrected, and getting hit by cars and not getting hurt, etc…).

So, the next time you witness a “games don’t kill people, people kill people” kind of debate, be clear about the point you’re arguing. Don’t diminish games by arguing they don’t have the emotive substance to effect their audience. Its a double-edged sword that we must be quite careful in wielding.

International move, you say? Yes, we (me, the misses, the baby girl) currently live in Vancouver (well, Burnaby, but that’s besides the point). A week from now, we’ll live in… well, in limbo, as it takes a while for all of our belongings to make the long trek from Vancouver to Austin, Texas. We’ll hang around our parents’ homes in Northwest Arkansas, enjoy Thanksgiving (American-style), and introduce our baby girl to all of her uncles, aunts and cousins. Two weeks from now, we’ll be sitting in our new home in Austin, unpacking what I’m sure will be several million cardboard boxes (now, where’s my crowbar…).

So, that’s the physical “now, what?” over the short term. But what’s really going to happen? What are my next steps professionally?

Well, it’s still a little too early too say. It’s not that I don’t know… I’ve known for nearly six months! But, due to my employment contract with EA, I was unable to act on my plans for world domination. It’d be no good if I went and created the “next great IP” and it defaulted to the folks who paid my bills, now would it? Thus, these next few weeks will see the creation, tangibly in copyrightable form, lots of IP.

What is this IP, you ask? Well… I can’t say now. I’ve spoken to some offline about it, to make sure I’m not crazy, and responses seem to favorably indicate that, at least in respect to this idea, I am not crazy. In fact, it sounds as if I may be providing an honest-to-goodness service for my fellow developers.

Service, you say? Games aren’t services! No they’re not. I am not making a game. You are. We all are. Have fun!

What turns me cold to Manifesto Games is the attitude that surrounds it, the “Fuck the publishers!” writ large in every message, memo, ad, logo and interview. I understand the sentiment, and I appreciate that most of these folks have some sincere experience that justifies their feelings. I just feel as though the image this portrays to those folks beyond our current audiences is one of brash, juvenille angst — in other words, exactly the negative stereotype we regularly defend ourselves against.

Ironically, these are exactly the creators who call for innovations in gameplay that lead to broader appeal. And they largely delivers on the call, at least in a raw indie film kind of way. The problem is that they then go and wrap it in a public image that accomplishes the same goal.

Sugar attracts more than salt… even if the bitterness is not directed toward your audience, the result is the same: when people who don’t live and breath games get a snapshot of this they get that same chill you get when your best “couple” friends have an argument in front of you. Coincidentally, the same feeling I got when I played Facade. ;)