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EA responds to fevered 'Dungeon Keeper' paywall criticism

tabtimes.com

Earlier this week, Electronic Arts released Dungeon Keeper, an iOS and Android version of the classic PC strategy series (read the TabTimes Games review here). Many were excited for this tablet and smartphone remake, but when they finally played it they were instead disappointed, even angered, by the game’s rather aggressive microtransactions.

We reached out to EA Mythic’s Jeff Skalski, the game’s senior producer, who was eager to respond to the criticisms. See the first part of our interview here.

TabTimes Games: So let’s start with a little background. How do microtransactions work in Dungeon Keeper?

Jeff Skalski: With Dungeon Keeper, and just about any free-to-play title, the burden is on the developers to ensure that we’re giving players the most entertaining mobile gaming experience that’s as true to the franchise as possible. The benefit of free-to-play games is that it empowers players, there’s no risk involved to download it and try it out. They can experience the game and determine what level of commitment they want to make. We specifically chose to make the game this way so the classic franchise would be accessible to as many people as possible. 

One thing we really want to express—and it’s something that hasn’t really been touched on in a lot of the discussion about the game that we’ve seen—is that in Dungeon Keeper, all content is accessible to paying and non-paying players. We didn’t design this as a “pay to play” or “pay to win” game. It is designed as a free-to-play title where players can commit time or money towards their play experience, and every piece of content in the game is accessible without having to spend a dime. 

So what could you pay for in the game, then? If you’d like, you can pay to expedite wait times, dig times, unit production and upgrades, cosmetic enhancements, and bolster defenses for a period of time.

Why did you decide to go this route with them, as opposed to a different way?

In mobile games, there are two models: pay-to-download and free-to-play. Pay-to-download puts up high barriers to bringing new people into the game; with free-to-play, a lot more people will be interested in trying it out and seeing what Dungeon Keeper is all about. 

Our challenge was figure how to best adapt the Dungeon Keeper humor and lore we love so much to the model and platform. Luckily for us, tower defense strategy games are already well-established in mobile and we had a good starting point to innovate from.

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As you’re hopefully aware, this has become a point of contention with fans. Some have said there’s too many microtranscations, that the game is structured in such a way that you have to buy stuff to make any real progress. Do you think these criticism are fair?

We’re very aware. The team that worked on the game has read pretty much every tweet, article, Facebook post, and blog comment that’s been written about the game since it launched. Most of us spent our weekend scouring the Internet. We’re huge fans of the PC game, and like everyone on the Internet who’s commented on our mobile version, we’ve played the original version and we get pretty nostalgic about it. By the same token, we all play a lot of mobile games ourselves so our primary goal was figuring out how to make the game free-to-download so as many people could try it as possible. As I noted earlier, we wanted to share some of the Dungeon Keeper joy with people who have never played, or even heard of, the original PC game. 

It’s important to emphasize that we designed a game that is built around the typical mobile play patterns. This means Dungeon Keeper is meant to be played on the go multiple times a day with a few minutes here or there. This way of playing allows fans to naturally progress as a free player. 

That’s not to say you can’t quickly blow past 30 minutes in one sitting by summoning new minions, reorganizing your dungeon layout, find a keeper to attack, check in with your guild, queue up your next digs then take on a new event raid before calling it a night. 

To that end, yes, we’ve designed the game to offer players the option to spend money if they’d like to speed up their gameplay.

As for whether we think the microstransactions are fair? Well, most of the team, including myself, played as free players all throughout our 15 week soft launch. It was important for us to know that even a non-spender could enjoy our game and make progress. 

Right, but it’s not just critics, fans have been making the same complaint.

We’re still figuring that out. One of the important data points we’re looking at is our store ratings and downloads. At the time of this interview, App Store ratings currently sit at 4 out of 5 stars and Google Play ratings sit at 4.5 out of 5 stars [Ed. Note: It's been one day since this inverview was published, and the App Store rating has fallen to 3 out of 5 stars. I've also been told that the game somewhat underhandedly attempts to prevent players from rating it below five stars, which probably helps explain some of the high ratings.] We’re also seeing a lot of game downloads and in-game engagement so that tells us there is a large group of people who are playing and enjoying the game. Obviously, this is counter to some of the angry reactions we’ve seen around the internet, so we’re still trying to look at all of these data points.

I think any time you re-make anything that is much beloved and has a great sense of nostalgia for people—be it a game, a movie, or whatever—people are going to be very protective of it. They have fond memories of it. We, as gamers, have our own fond memories of it. For a lot of gamers, the original Dungeon Keeper was one of their first experiences with great strategy games. Our intention with the mobile version was to give as many people as possible a taste of that original Dungeon Keeper experience, and for some people, that’s not the way they want to re-visit the franchise. 

Part of the problem, it’s been suggested, is that you can no longer dig gold yourself, and that to get gems, which are the more important currency, you have to buy them. Do you think that’s part of the problem?

There are ways to win gems by the event raid that we run weekly, even for those players who dig out every one of their tiles. Moving forward we will be introducing even more ways for players to acquire gems. 

Some have also said that this lacks the humor of the original. Again, do you think these criticism are fair?

I would disagree with that. We have a lot of funny content within Dungeon Keeper. In fact, there are over 500 recording lines just from the original Horny voice actor and fan-favorite Richard Ridings, but we also understand what’s funny to one person may not be to the next.

Are there any plans to change anything? 

Mythic is committed to continuously fine tuning the player experience based upon fan feedback. We’re looking at a ton of data right now to help inform that: media reviews, comments, and reviews from players, and a bunch of in-game data like downloads, and engagement. It’s too early for us to get an accurate sense of what changes might be needed, but we didn’t make this game for ourselves, we made it for the players. We know that you can never please everyone, but we want this to be a game that most of our intended audience enjoys. 

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How in-app purchase is not really destroying the games industry | Sealed Abstract

sealedabstract.com

So there’s an article on HN today about how in-app purchase is destroying the game industry. There are a couple of problems with this theory.

An early in-app purchase example

See, in the in-app purchase model actually predates phones. It predates video game consoles. It goes all the way back to the arcade, where millions of consumers were happy to pay a whole quarter ($0.89 in 2013 dollars) to pay for just a few minutes. The entire video games industry comes from this model. Kids these days.

But in fact, the model predates computers. I can trace it at least as far back as the Periscope mechanical arcade game from Sega in 1966 that offers to sell you ten lives for 25 cents ($1.80 in 2013 dollars).

The original in-app purchase?

So IAP is not a new model. It is a very old model, the model that started the industry, that everybody forgot about. It’s hard to imagine now, but according to Steve Kent there were some 400,000 arcade street locations in the United States. Compare this with only 121,000 gas stations or 190,000 grocery stores. That is a lot of interest in video gaming under a pay-to-play model.

So let’s talk about the sort of world game developers operate in. I’m not one, I lean more towards productivity and enterprise apps in my development. But I sell on the same market, so I know something about it.

The fundamental problem with selling games is that you have 150,000 games that you could play instead. If you think you have a unique game, you probably don’t. And even if you do, it doesn’t matter, because nobody will ever find out–they’ll just play whatever game is in the top list or that their friends saw in the toplist, because nobody is playing any appreciable fraction of 150,000 games.

This is, basically, a problem that is unique to the games market. If you want to take notes on your iPad for example, there are maybe 25 apps that realistically will do what you want. And so you if you are really motivated you can try all those apps for yourself. Or you can look on the internet and find an article where somebody’s done that for you. But nobody’s playing 150,000 games. Not me, not you, not IGN. Nobody. Nobody’s even going to play 1,000 games, which is well under 1% of the games market. And this is why marketing games is very hard. (You’re beginning to discover why I’m not a game developer.)

It’s also unique to mobile. Back in the arcade days, people were limited to playing what games were available in their geographic region. But of course with mobile we have no such constraint; game developers in Pakistan are competing with game developers in the US over the same customers. This is, I think, some of the motivation behind the “apps near me” feature in iOS 7: creating geographic markets where apps can be considered “popular” even if they are not popular in the global market.

In the console wars, there is a similar force that acts to restrict the market: dev kit fees. It generally requires between $2k-$10k to get started developing real console games for consoles, plus yearly fees and profit cuts. After that you have to strike another deal with a licensed publisher, which offers terms on par with any RIAA music label. These forces combine to allow only a thousand or so games for your xbox. That’s still a lot, it’s still much more choice than an ordinary person can rationally consider, but it’s way less than on iOS.

Nintendo even requires you to have a brick-and-mortar office.

]9 Nintendo even requires you to have a brick-and-mortar office.

People like to reminisce about the glory days of shareware but back then there weren’t 150,000 titles either. DOS games indexes some 600 shareware titles. The Internet Archive indexes some 2,400 items in its “shareware CD collection” that includes such exciting titles as “The Linux Format Magazine Issue 177″ and “HP Web Mouse Suite”. Basically, the number of actual shareware games you could realistically run on your computing platform did not number in the thousands.

Getting people to play your game in a market of 150,000 alternatives requires a different kind of marketing. For example, if the user can choose to pay $0.99 for your app, or pay zero for another app that’s probably just as fun, they’ll pick the free one. The result follows: 90% of apps are free in 2013 when weighted by monthly average users. And when you look only at those apps that use an experiment/test/data-driven approach for their pricing, you see a strong upward trend in more free apps. So the pricing experiments that these developers are running (you know, actual flipping research, not just speculating baselessly in an HN comment) are telling them it’s better to go free.

Let’s throw some math at the problem. Now I’m just making figures up, but people in the actual game industry don’t like to talk about their own numbers so this is probably as close as we are going to get without a lot more people who make actual money from this opening up their books.

The average revenue per user for a successful game varies widely, but let’s take $1.00 as a benchmark. Most games make most of their revenue during short bursts, say 15 days. If you want to earn enough money, say, to put your $200k development cost in the black in 15 days, that’s about 14k installs per day. Meanwhile there are 5 million downloads per day so that kind of traffic is a tiny, tiny fraction (0.3%) of the daily volume.

Alternatively, say you want to price your game at, I don’t know, $4.99. Now you only have to move 2600 units per day, which sounds a lot easier. However, remember those 5 million downloads? 96% of them are at prices less than $4.99, so the total daily volume in your price bracket is less than 200,000.

Over 96% of downloads are less than $4.99

In fact, it’s significantly less, because of the top 25 apps of all time, only 60% of them are games. So let’s say that the total games volume above $4.99 is 120k downloads per day. And now you have to move 2.1% of the daily volume in your price bracket each day for 15 days, instead of 0.3%. That is almost a full order of magnitude more by percentage, and it means your marketing team has to reach a much higher number of iOS users than if you only needed to capture 0.3% of the daily volume.

The principle is this: the higher your price is, the less people want to buy it, so you have to raise your price, meaning that even less people want to buy it, and so on. You can pick a price that is high enough to offset the exponential drop in market size, but it is way, way higher than people’s expectations. For example, the console market seems to function at $60/title. You could probably build a mobile games market that functioned at a similar pricepoint.

The trouble is that even software developers, who make their money from selling software, don’t want to spend that much. If you grep the HN comment thread you see all sorts of people who would “gladly spend” $5 or $10 for some game. Very few people are thinking about $40, $60, or $80. That is the kind of pricing it would actually take.

Another topic that gets lost in this conversation is market segmentation, or, as software developers tend to know it, “camels and rubber duckies“:

You see, by setting the price at $220, we managed to sell, let’s say, 233 copies of the software, at a total profit of $43,105, which is all good and fine, but something is distracting me: all those people who were all ready to pay more, like those 12 fine souls who would have paid a full $399, and yet, we’re only charging them $220 just like everyone else!

See, the trouble with gamers is that they are non-uniform. Kids in elementary school play games. Your wife in the checkout line plays games. And these people–well, they have vastly different spending power.

The magic of IAP is it allows a software developer to segment its market; to take in the $.10 in ad spend that the elementary school kid can pay, the $5 that the college student with a side job can pay, and the $100 that the suburban housewife can pay. In fact, something like 51% of all revenue is a transaction over $20:

51% of all in-app purchase transactions are over $20

This means that simply by giving that housewife something to buy, you double your revenue.

If we want to replace IAP, the first order of business is to do some requirements gathering. After all, if we delivered a solution that didn’t meet the requirements, the game developers would look at us funny, and that is exactly the way the conversation between game developers and game customers has gone so far. Step one is to create a solution that meets the requirements. So let’s list them:

No loss in revenue for game developers

Ability to segment customers and make more money from richer customers

A console-style market, with console-style gatekeepers and console-style prices, would meet the first requirement, but not the second. Also, developers tend to dislike gatekeepers, so there’s that.

Following the old DOOM and QUAKE model of giving away the first levels and charging for the rest of them might work. The trouble is that when most people think about the “unlocking levels” model they think about charging $1 or $5 for more levels. Meanwhile DOOM charged $40 ($64.49 in 2013 dollars) to unlock the rest of the game. And that was in a market with probably 5 or so competitors, not 150,000. So for this model to work we are talking about $65 upgrade fees, minimum. I would certainly be interested to watch some iOS dev try this model, but I suspect a $65 upsell is quite a lot harder in 2014 than it was in 1993.

Ultimately what I suspect to be true is that you can either have a system with gatekeepers, that limits the supply of games, and $60 up-front cost for a title, or you can have a free-for-all that tries to nickle and dime you.

It may even be possible to have both systems: there is nothing to stop Apple from creating a special, curated section of 100 or so “premium” games that charge console-quality prices. The “Editor’s Choice” and “Featured” lists have some precedent for this. When I say “nothing to stop them”, I mean “other than developer angst about the App Store not being very ‘open’”, which may be significant.

But I doubt it is possible to have the benefits of one system without its inherent drawbacks. When you have 150,000 games competing for the same customers, paid apps aren’t a realistic option unless you have some marketing trick up your sleeve that can overcome a 90% market handicap. The only thing you can do is draw as many customers in as possible and then once you’ve got them in the door bleed them for whatever they can afford, and that’s why we’re here.

Actually there is a third possibility: iOS games could go the way of flash games, where it’s more of a hobby than a viable business. Some 70% of flash game developers are only part-time, whereas only 36% of iOS devs are moonlighters. So there’s a very sobering outcome that we should consider in our analysis: we should consider that there may not be a business model for mobile games that works at all.

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sealedabstract.com

Slot machines - rant-dom

rant.monkeydom.de

In essence, the current free 2 play model equals a slot machine in a bar. It preys on the poor people who get hooked, tries to hook them as quickly as it can, and in pure business logic, tries to get as much out of them as possible.

Where insult comes to injury is if you look at the App Store revenue numbers. No matter when you look at the top grossing lists, the first 3-10 titles are free 2 play titles. So most of our bars have turned into casinos by now already, trend rising. That is very shortsighted, bad for customers, bad for Apple and bad for the industry.

And for me it just boils down to: I don't want to build slot machines.

rant.monkeydom.de

Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games

gamasutra.com

By Mike Rose

This story is being highlighted as one of Gamasutra’s best stories of 2013.

“I’d use birthday money, I’d eat cheaper lunches, I’d ask my wife to pay for dinner so I’d have a spare $10-$20 to spend in the store. Which does mean, I guess, that I was thinking about it even away from the game.”

Chris was in his mid-20s when he began spending a few dollars here and there on Team Fortress 2. All of his friends had recently moved out of town, and his wife was now working a nighttime job, leading him to take solace in an online TF2 community.

At first he’d simply buy some TF2 “keys”, use them to open some item crates, then dish some of the contents out to players online and keep the good stuff for himself. He enjoyed the social interactions that came with these giveaways, and it seemed worth it for the money he was paying.

But soon Chris discovered his first “unusual” item, marked with a purple seal. “I had this unbeatable rush of adulation and excitement,” he says. “For someone who didn’t get out much I was on cloud nine. And at that point things changed — I started chasing that high.”

Addict-to-play

For around six months following this discovery, Chris found himself draining his bank account until he didn’t have a spare dollar to his name — all for a selection of pixels that would hopefully be wrapped in a purple glow.

“My savings got wiped out pretty quickly — although it should be noted that at the time I didn’t have much put away to begin with,” he explains. “The real trouble wasn’t that it cleaned out my bank account, but that it put me in a really delicate situation. With no savings and every dollar not spent on food, shelter, or utilities going to digital hats, any unexpected expense became a really big deal.”

Chris even had a few health scares along the way, and found that he couldn’t afford to pay the medical bills because his savings account had been stripped for TF2 money.

“It got so bad that at one point Steam actually blocked my credit card, thinking I was some sort of account scammer, and I had to open a support ticket to tell them, ‘No, that really is me spending whatever savings I have on this stupid game with fake hats.’” he says. “And like any addicted user, my social element didn’t help — most of my outside-of-work contacts were people I just played TF2 with. At work I just wanted to be uncrating things, and when I was uncrating things I just wanted to see better results.”

It was when his out-of-control spending began to have an effect on his relationship with his wife, that Chris finally realized that this needed to stop.

“I’ve never really been addicted to anything else, so I can’t say for certain whether a ‘real’ addiction would be stronger,” he notes. “I would say that it felt akin to what I’d expect a compulsive gambling addiction would feel like — social pressures reinforced a behavior that kept me searching for an adrenaline rush I’d never be able to recapture, even as it kept me from making progress in life.”

“There were nights where I’d be up until 3 am drinking beer and playing Team Fortress and chasing those silly hats with purple text, ignoring the gambler’s fallacy and swearing that if I dropped another $50 I’d be sure to win this time,” he adds. “Then I’d wake up the next morning and see that I’d not only spent over a hundred dollars on digital hats, but failed my only objective by uncrating a bunch of junk.”

Those were the mornings that felt the worst — when the reality of what Chris was doing hit home the hardest. He’d feel hugely depressed and worthless, and swear to himself that he wouldn’t be back again… and yet, the moment another paycheck came through, it was gone as quickly as it came.

Chris’ behavior during this time is how people in the video game industry would describe a “whale”— someone who spends large amounts on free-to-play games, and essentially makes the business model viable by balancing out the 99 percent of players who don’t ever fork out a dime.

And while Chris is happy to admit that a portion of his addiction was no doubt down to his own silly mistakes, he reasons, “I have to question whether a business model built on exploiting ‘whales’ like me isn’t somewhat to blame. Free-to-play games aren’t after everyone for a few dollars — they’re after weak people in vulnerable states for hundreds, if not thousands.” 

Whales in the woodwork

This exact musing is why I recently began tracking down free-to-play “whales” to hear their stories. I found myself questioning just how many free-to-play game developers are building their games around the concept of pulling vulnerable players in, and rendering them addicted to some banal yet compelling activity that they feel they must spend large portions of their money on.

In particular, I pondered whether these “whale” players are fully consenting to the hundreds and thousands of dollars that they are spending, or whether they are being manipulated and exploited by underhanded design that purposely aims to make the player feel like they simply have no choice.

That’s why I began trawling game forums and social media over the last couple of months, asking players how much they spent on free-to-play games, and why they chose to do so.

It must be noted at this point that a good portion of the “whale” correspondence I received was from players who felt that, despite spending in the thousands, they had got their money’s worth. To many players, they had simply spent a lot of money because they were having lots of fun, and felt that they were happy to throw cash at the developer.

Other players also told me that they loved the free-to-play model, and that if they ever did feel like they were spending too much on these games, they could easily stop any time they wanted. There are plenty of happy free-to-play customers out there, and the aforementioned story from Chris only makes up a very tiny portion of the tales I received.

But it could be argued that to focus on the ratio of exploited to non-exploited customers is to completely miss the point — that a business model where even the smallest portion of players can find themselves losing control and essentially ruining their lives, is a model that must surely face scrutiny, whether on a industry or governmental level.

Although Team Fortress 2 was brought up by many of my “whale” respondents as a real killer, Valve’s team-based shooter was far from the only title named. 

Kyle describes PlanetSide 2 as his “danger game,” thanks to the financial situations his obsession with the game put him in.

“I’m in a position where I’m living paycheck to paycheck for the moment as the result of that spending — beyond incurring overdraft for my rent (for a few months in a row starting in January this year and a couple other scattered times),” he says.

“There were a few times I found I ran short for food budget and had to eat ramen for a week instead of something decent,” he adds.

He says that the feeling of instant gratification, allowing him to purchase weapons and cosmetic items with a couple of clicks, is what lead him to spend in the hundreds.

“You know you’re getting your stuff right there on the spot, and you can do whatever you want with it right away,” he says, adding, “I don’t think I ever found myself in a position where I said ‘I really need to have this one thing, even though it will put me over for rent’ — it was more a case of deciding I could ride out the consequences and that a mild amount of hardship might even make me appreciate what I obtained even more.”

Kyle doesn’t regret his PlanetSide 2 spending, however: “I never thought of the items as investments, more like disposable entertainment, like movie tickets or a night at a nice restaurant, because when it comes to free-to-play, who knows if the game is going to be around in six months or a year?”

He adds, “Now that I think about it a bit, it’s almost a way for me personally to feel a bit richer than I really am. I might have an older car and a bit of a run down apartment, but online I’ve got all this nice swag that lots of people aren’t willing to spend on. It’s a nice way to make yourself feel special.” 

Heroes of spending

Battlefield Heroes was another free-to-play game brought up on my journey to find big spenders. Unlike Kyle, John hugely regrets his free-to-play spending — he was working a part-time job at the time that he became addicted to Heroes, and he ended up splashing out the majority of his paychecks on the game, spending over $2,000 in total.

“I would call it the creme of the crop in terms of pay-to-win,” he says.

My research didn’t just focus on triple-A PC games either — many of Nexon’s free-to-play titles came up numerous times. One player told me that he has spent around $3,000 on MapleStory, including dropping a whole $500 in an attempt to create a single weapon in the game. But he says that he is easily one of the lower-end players, and that he regularly talks to people who have spent upwards of $10,000 on the game.

“It’s pretty much for more numbers, if I had a gun put to my head,” he says — and he’s not done yet. “The gear grind is pretty much infinite, and the only reason I’m not playing right now isn’t because of the money, but because I’m waiting for the level expansion as well as a raised damage cap, which are out in the Korean server but not the global one.”

Another player I talked to found themselves spending more than $5,000 on a Nexon game called Mabinogi, mainly on cosmetic items. “There were plenty of times when the rent would go unpaid because I had spent the money on the game instead,” he says. “However, I don’t know if I can blame the game for that. If I hadn’t spent the money on Mabinogi, I would have spent it on something else.”

“I can’t say I really regret the spending,” he says. “I loved the game, and I still miss the friends I played with. Five or six grand isn’t too much to pay for the amount of happiness I got out of it.”

However, he admits that it definitely felt like an addiction. “Both buying the points, and gambling those points on random drops would give me a rush,” he says.

I also came across numerous far more outlandish stories. One player, who called himself Gladoscc, told me that he used to play a web-based MMO called eRepublik, in which players waged wars against each other.

In total, Gladoscc spent more than $30,000 on the game. “The geniusly evil part about eRepublik is that you have to spend money in order to neutralize the enemy’s money,” he says. “It’s spreadsheet PVP, though. The social aspect is what kept me in.”

When he managed to finally kick the habit, a random stranger added him veryon Skype weeks later, only to discover that it was the creator of eRepublik. He had hunted down Gladoscc’s details so he could ask him why he had quit, and try to entice him back.

By far the worst story I discovered was that of a mother who became addicted to Mafia Wars on Facebook, and ended up sinking tens of thousands of dollars into it. As her obsession grew, she began to withdraw into the game and care little about the life going on around her.

“The last time I can remember going over, her entire room was filled with just hundreds of pizza boxes and McDonalds bags,” says an old friend of her son. “When you enter the house, the smell just smacks you in the face, even though she basically just stays in her room.”

The friend even alleges that as a direct result of the mother succumbing to the allure of spending more and more on the game, her son ended up dealing drugs simply so he could afford to keep payments up on the house and keep food on the table.

Ex-free-to-play

I also received messages from people who claimed to be ex-employees at free-to-play companies, and who told me that their respective employers would often build games purposely to entrap these “whales.”

One such response in particular (for which I was able to verify the respondent as having worked at the company he named) gave a stark picture of what’s going on behind the scenes. I’ve chosen to blank out the name of the company as I see this as being able to apply to multiple game studios, rather than just the one discussed.

“I used to work at [company], and it paid well and advanced my career,” the person told me. “But I recognize that [company]’s games cause great harm to people’s lives. They are designed for addiction. [company] chooses what to add to their games based on metrics that maximize players’ investments of time and money. [company]’s games find and exploit the right people, and then suck everything they can out of them, without giving much in return. It’s not hard to see the parallels to the tobacco industry.

This employee chose to leave the company as a direct result of feeling dishonest due to the work being done — feeling like they were making the lives of a select few players worse.

“The creation of addiction-driven games needs to stop, for the sake of everyone those games take advantage of,” they continued. “If companies like [that company] refuse to change how they conduct business, then the problem will only be solved if they go out of business. While it is unfortunate that people are losing their jobs, that may be a necessary, painful step in ridding the world of one of the harmful aspects of gaming.”

I showed the stories I had found to the employee, who found them upsetting. “When people play games, they are entrusting the developers with their time and money,” they told me. “As developers, we have a responsibility to make sure that we give them something equally valuable in return.”

The ex-employee says that it all comes down to one main point: “Enabling self-destructive behavior is wrong.”

“It’s wrong when the tobacco and gambling industries do it, and it’s a shame that portions of the game industry do it too,” they added.

Despite this, the former free-to-play employee says that they don’t believe government regulation would be a good way to fix the issue. As they point, some of the mechanics utilized in these games are used elsewhere in a more positive way, “so regulation could cause collateral damage across the games industry.”

They added, “Based on their track record, I certainly don’t trust Congress to pass responsible legislation dealing with video games.”

And yet, the trouble still remains: The free-to-play model has been proven to work best when games find and exploit whales.

“Any [free-to-play] game that makes it virtually impossible to advance beyond a certain point without spending money was almost certainly designed with whales in mind,” the employee notes. “Games that allow players to advance to the highest level without spending anything are less exploitative. At least they don’t actively encourage addiction.”

Now that my source is out of the free-to-play space, they are happy to be making games that don’t exploit players anymore. “I’m now working on serious games, which have the potential to produce a substantial, positive effect on the world,” they tell me. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done, but I promise to more than make up for it in the future.” 

Free-to-play developers speak

It’s clear, then, that while a large portion of free-to-play consumers are able to take business model in stride, there are also those whose lives are being strained and, in some cases, even ruined by a number of these games. With this in mind, I took the commentary I had found straight to the developers, to gauge what exactly is going on, and why these people are spending as much as they do.

Battlefield Heroes is an instructive example of a developer moving toward an emphasis on incentivizing players to pay. When the game originally launched, it was a true free-to-play game. Players could jump into the game, sample everything it had to offer, grind a bit to unlock specific elements, but generally get plenty of enjoyment out of it for free.

Unfortunately, the amount of money coming in wasn’t good enough to keep the game afloat, and so a large-scale price restructuring was developed, as detailed in this article. With this in place, players were now a lot more restricted in what they could see and do, and had far more grinding to go through to unlock items — unless, of course, they chose to pay real money.

Ben Cousins was the senior producer on Battlefield Heroes back at the time when John (whose story is told above) found himself addicted to the game. Cousins now works on free-to-play games for DeNA, and is an outspoken proponent of the free-to-play model.

Upon reading John’s story, Cousins remarked that numerous Heroes players were upset when the price restructuring occurred within the game. This led to lots of negative comments on the official forums, and stories such as John’s.

However, Cousins notes that the restructuring led to an influx of revenue, it had the effect of safeguarding of many jobs on the Heroes team. Essentially, by forcing players to grind just that little bit more for items in the game, and by introducing weapons that gave paying players an advantage, the development team at EA caused an uproar among fans — yet suddenly its long-term revenue was assured, as many of these very same players stuck around and submitted to the new pricing regime.

“I believe that the responsibility to control spending on any product or service lies with the consumer, unless there is some scientifically proven link to addiction as is the case with products and services like alcohol and gambling,” Cousins tells me. “When these links are established, I feel industries should self-govern first and if they fail to act responsibly, be subject to governmental control.”

He adds that there is currently no proven link between free-to-play “whales” and addiction. “I would personally like to see wide-ranging independent studies done before we jump to any conclusions about any negative psychological effects.”

Cousins is also keen to stress that the overly negative responses that I received may well only represent a very small proportion of “whales.”

“When looking at a small sample size there is always going to be a lack of certainty in extrapolating that data to a larger population,” he says. “I think if we see a broad proportion of the spending userbase reacting as they claim to have in these accounts, it’s easier to read this as the developers having discovered a damaging method of psychological consumer manipulation.”

“When a very, very small proportion of the userbase react in this manner, while sad, it’s easier to read this as perhaps individual issues with those people which may be expressed in any number of negative ways, not just with spending in free-to-play games. I’m sure small numbers of very negative stories could be found for spending on almost any product or service.”

He clarifies: “I’m not suggesting either is true, just that we would need to do a broader set of data gathering before I’m comfortable reaching any conclusions.”

I ask Cousins what systems his team at DeNA has in place to reduce the number of players who can potentially be exploited in its free-to-play games.

“The systems we have in place are simply our own moral judgment as a team of game developers,” he answers. “We regularly reject ideas out of hand because we feel they are potentially exploitative. I suggest other developers do the same, but individual games are unique and there are no hard-and-fast rules.”

An industry source at one major social game company told me that the stories I received are “pretty extreme, and definitely not the norm.”

The source noted that game companies are already subject to a number of regulations — consumer protection laws that require companies to treat players fairly. Citing the stories I received, the source said, “We wouldn’t want our players to be playing like this, because it’s just not fun, and it’s not what the purpose of our games is.”

“Our games are made so that you have short play sessions,” the source added. “Our games aren’t meant for these long play sessions where” — the source references the story of the mother playing Mafia Wars — “those are not what [our] games are about.”

The source said the company’s game sessions are short — about 10 minutes for some of its most popular games. The company purposely makes game sessions short, such that players will connect with others, the source said. Like most free-to-play businesses, very low percentages of customers pay any money at all.

I also got in contact with other free-to-play developers, including those mentioned in the stories I received. Nexon’s North American director of PR, Mike Crouch, appeared to be interested in providing me with answers, but after weeks of correspondence went quiet on the topic.

Meanwhile, Valve’s Doug Lombardi chose not to respond to my multiple requests for comment, even though he did get back to me on an unrelated topic in the meanwhile.

And while it at first appeared that Sony Online Entertainment might talk to me about PlanetSide 2, I was eventually told that the company wasn’t interested in responding. 

For the greater good

Not every free-to-play studio is gunning for the “whales.” While I was conducting my research, World of Tanks developer Wargaming.net revealed to Gamasutra that it is changing up its free-to-play strategy, removing all “pay-to-win” options and making sure that players cannot pay money to gain an advantage in battle.

“We don’t want to nickel and dime our players,” Wargaming.net’s VP of publishing Andrei Yarantsau told us. “We want to deliver gaming experiences and services that are based on the fair treatment of our players, whether they spend money in-game or not.”

“Free-to-play games have the challenge of being sometimes viewed as low quality, and we want World of Tanks to serve as proof that a quality and balanced free-to-play game is possible,” he added. 

Wargaming.net isn’t the only company that feels this way. Hi-Rez Studios has released a string of free-to-play titles, including Global Agenda and the more widely acclaimed Tribes: Ascend.

Both are notable in that players are very accepting of these versions of “free-to-play”: You can download the game for free, and then play for as long as you want, with no advantages given to those people who choose to purchase vanity items and the like.

Todd Harris, COO at Hi-Rez, tells me that his company’s free-to-play philosophy is simple: Players will remember which games and companies are exploitative, and gradually over time, we’ll see a shift away from these money-grabbers, to the games that treat the players with respect.

“The players in the stories [you’ve related] are likely to not play a game from that publisher or developer again,” he reasons. “Our perspective is a long-term thing, thinking about the studio brand.”

“I think there’s cases where it financially works in the short-term for that title,” he continues. “In our case, our studio brand and positioning is different, and we are particularly looking for gamers that expect a fair battlefield, and we want them to know that in a future Hi-Rez game, from past experiences, that they should get a fair battlefield and not get an exploitive feeling.”

While you might guess that Hi-Rez doesn’t make as much money as some of these more exploitative studios, it’s notable that around 10 percent of Tribes: Ascend players choose to pay money — a figure that is much larger than the 1, 3, and 5 percents that I’ve heard from the majority of other free-to-play developers. Harris reasons that this is down to trust, and players feeling like they are getting their money’s worth.

“I don’t have a crystal ball, but our studio thinks that there are enough players that want more of a sports-like fair game,” he says. “That’s the type of titles that we are developing. Whether the audience of the other type — ‘pay for status’ — whether that is growing or shrinking… you know, studios have to place their bets.”

“I personally think that it’s going to go down over time,” he adds, “because if you look at the games that are having the most success — League of Legends, Dota 2, as well as our own titles — they are not perceived that way, not perceived to be pay-to-win as much. So those games seem to be having more traction.”

I asked Harris whether he would advise other free-to-play studios to consider taking the approach that both Hi-Rez and Wargaming.net are currently running with. His response was simply, “Better late than never.”

Harris is also of the view that government regulation would not be a good idea — in fact, he describes it as “the last thing gaming needs.”

“But game journalists and reviewers could play a valuable role — in reporting how ‘exploitive’ specific titles are or are not,” he says. “I don’t think a game critic’s rating of ‘Graphics Quality’ or ‘Audio Quality’ is all that important anymore — now that so many games are free-to-play, people can try for themselves. And even with buy-to-play, potential buyers can see graphics and gameplay on YouTube or via live streaming.”

“But ‘exploitive mechanics’ could be harder to detect in a single ‘Let’s Play’ video, so game critics could help a lot in that area,” he adds. 

Research in the field

Dr. Mark D. Griffiths is a psychologist and director of the International Gaming Research Unit in the psychology department at Nottingham Trent University. The professor is well known for his research in the field of video game addiction and gambling.

Griffiths published a paper last year in which he argued that social games have gambling-like elements, even when there is no money involved whatsoever — rather, they introduce the principles of gambling through in-app purchases.

“On first look, games like FarmVille may not seem to have much connection to gambling, but the psychology behind such activities is very similar,” he argues. “Even when games do not involve money, they introduce players to the principles and excitement of gambling. Companies like Zynga have been accused of leveraging the mechanics of gambling to build their empire.”

One element that Griffiths has found to be particularly key in encouraging gambling-like behavior in free-to-play games is the act of random reinforcement — that is, the unpredictability of winning or getting other types of intermittent rewards.

“Small unpredictable rewards lead to highly engaged and repetitive behavior,” he says. “In a minority of cases, this may lead to addiction.”

Griffiths also points to a “growing body of research” that indicates that players who are presented with virtual representations of money (virtual currency) will find that spending and gambling with this fake cash is hugely exciting.

In those instances when there is no money changing hands, players “are learning the mechanics of gambling and there are serious questions about whether gambling with virtual money encourages positive attitudes towards gambling.”

On the topic of in-app purchases, Griffiths says, “The introduction of in-game virtual goods and accessories (that people pay real money for) was a psychological masterstroke.”

“It becomes more akin to gambling, as social gamers know that they are spending money as they play with little or no financial return,” he continues. “The one question I am constantly asked is why people pay real money for virtual items in games like FarmVille. As someone who has studied slot machine players for over 25 years, the similarities are striking.”

Griffiths argues that the real difference between pure gambling games and some free-to-play games is the fact that gambling games allow you to win your money back, adding an extra dimension that can potentially drive revenues even further. This, he says, is why some free-to-play game studios like Zynga are currently moving into the pure gambling market.

Griffiths goes on to reason that the lines between social free-to-play games and gambling is beginning to blur, bringing along with them “various moral, ethical, legal, and social issues.”

In another paper published earlier this year with his colleague Michael Auer, Griffiths argues that “the most important factors along with individual susceptibility and risk factors of the individual gambler are the structural characteristics relating to the speed and frequency of the game rather than the type of game.”

“The general rule is that the higher the event frequency, the more likely it is that the gambling activity will cause problems for the individual (particularly if the individual is susceptible and vulnerable),” he adds. “Problem and pathological gambling are essentially about rewards, and the speed and frequency of those rewards. Almost any game could be designed to either have high event frequencies or low event frequencies.”

As a result, he argues that the more potential rewards that are offered to the player, the more problematic and addictive an activity can become.

Griffiths goes on to argue that it would be potentially possible for a “safe” scenario to be achieved, by which a game is designed such that players cannot spend money past a enforced structural limit — this would ensure that players were not able to develop a gambling problem, regardless of their susceptibility.

Griffiths is keen to stress that, as of yet, the psychosocial impact of free-to-play games are only just beginning to be investigated by people in the field of games.

“Empirically, we know almost nothing about the psychosocial impact of gambling via social networking sites, although research suggests the playing of free games among adolescents is one of the risk factors for both the uptake of real gambling and problem gambling,” he adds. “Whatever research is done, we can always be sure that the gaming industry will be two steps ahead of both researchers and legislators.” 

Tit for tat

Most recently, a pair of analyses on the topic of free-to-play spending coercion versus pay-to-play spending coercion was spread far and wide via social media.

Ramin Shokrizade, an industry consultant who has written numerous papers on the topic of free-to-play monetization, detailed his research into how social games will trick players into making in-app purchases through incomplete information and virtual currency.

Part of this method involves providing the player with “fun pain” — a term coined by Zynga’s Roger Dickey to denote the situation in which a player is put into an uncomfortable position, and then offered the chance to remove the “pain” by spending real money.

There’s also a sort of opposite monetization method to this, which Shokrizade calls “Reward Removal.” A free-to-play game offers the play a huge reward, and then subsequently threatens to take away the reward if the player doesn’t fork out cash.

“To be effective with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not,” he says. “The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful is the effect.”

But the use of virtual currency is where the coercion really takes off, says Shokrizade. Griffiths stated before that spending virtual currency teaches players the mechanics of gambling, but Shokrizade goes a step further and argues that when players see their real-world cash in terms of virtual currency, it lowers the sense of anxiety and allows them to be less apprehensive about spending larger amounts.

Elsewhere, Shokrizade details what he calls “Ante Games” — those free-to-play titles that appear to be games based on skill when you first boot them up, but gradually turn into a money game, as the more experienced players put real money in to beat other players. It’s worth reading Shokrizade’s entire article on the topic, which also delves into “Progress Gates” and sales boosts.

Though there’s no reference to Shokrizade’s piece in it, Spry Fox’s Daniel Cook posted a blog a few days later titled “Coercive Pay-2-Play techniques,” in which he takes to task many of the arguments against free-to-play with a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal of his own.

He notes that pay-to-play games invite players to spend large amounts of money without ever having played the game first, while some companies purposely use videos, adverts and previews to artificially increase excitement for upcoming and released games.

Cook adds that this pre-release “propaganda” means that developers don’t need to worry as much about the actual game design, and can simply make the sell by “having a catchy theme, pretty graphics and the ability to turn out short sequential games rapidly.”

He also targets Skinner Box game design, the various methods of sale such as bundles and time-limited discounts, and other forms of manipulation in free-to-play games. He closes by jokingly suggesting that pay-to-play games are hurting the industry, and are an immoral practice.

Cook is, of course, is making light of the free-to-play arguments a fair bit, although the overall point of the article is to compare just how “coercive” the free-to-play model actually is — especially when these worst-case scenarios are compared to the worst-case scenarios for pay-to-play games. Cook’s blog is well worth a read. 

Other perspectives

Laralyn McWilliams is a video game designer and producer who has previously worked on SOE’s free-to-play kids’ game Free Realms as creative director. She has written at length about the strengths and weaknesses of the free-to-play model.

I sent McWilliams much of the information I had uncovered while researching this article, and she told me, “From a practical perspective, people will always find an activity that attracts them to the exclusion of many other activities.”

She notes that whether we should be encouraging or discouraging this common human behavior comes down to two main factors:

1. Whether the activities being included are considered “valuable” or “worthwhile,” and whether the activities being excluded are (or are considered) “essential.”

2. Universal elements like food, sleep, health, hygiene, maintaining a source of income, and paying important bills.

“The first criteria is largely subjective and varies tremendously based on who’s doing the evaluation,” she notes. “Most people would agree that spending money at the casino to the extent that your bills go unpaid and you get evicted is a behavior we shouldn’t encourage. Most people would also agree that playing a game so many hours in the day that you don’t sleep or eat and your health deteriorates is also something we shouldn’t encourage.”

Where the conversation gets muddy, McWilliams argues, is when you begin to compare free-to-play spending with traditional retail video game spending. She notes that while we might pull a face at someone spending thousands of dollars on a single free-to-play over a year or so, you could argue that many players who purchase console and PC games may spend just as much over the same period of time.

“I suspect that if he’d spent the money on retail games, he’d walk away saying, ‘I keep having trouble making rent because I’m buying a new game every month. I have to figure out a way to cut back,” she says of one of the stories I collected.

“He probably wouldn’t question too much whether games in general are worth the money from the objective perspective — just about whether he’s buying them too frequently,” she continues. “There’s something in the way he spent money in the free-to-play game, though, that made him question on a fundamental level whether his money was well spent. Sure, some of that’s probably the social perspective right now that free-to-play games in general and virtual goods in particular are not expenses we value as much as expenses for other hobbies (including retail games), but I suspect he might still feel the same way even without that social input.”

With this in mind, McWilliams believes that are two fundamental questions that free-to-play developers should be asking themselves:

1. Should we try to be aware of unhealthy spend patterns in players and find ways to limit/discourage them?

2. Are we providing good value for money spent, and if we are, why doesn’t it feel that way to many players?

Says McWilliams, “Even if the percentage of players who fit in the first category is very small when you look at actual data (and compare it to the behavior patterns recognized as unhealthy addiction in gambling, for example), we should be concerned about the fact that public perception — even from our own players — would put far, far more people into the ‘unhealthy spend’ category, because there’s a fundamental feeling that any significant amount of money spent in the game is money that didn’t result in meaningful value.”

To put it simply: “If you sat down right now and dropped $60 on Remember Me, and the quality of the game was what you expected, would you feel the same about that as if you sat down right now and dropped $60 on Clash of Clans? A lot of people wouldn’t, even if they play the games for the same length of time.”

She continues, “Is it the intangibility of virtual goods? The fact that once you buy Remember Me, it doesn’t ask you to spend that same amount again next week?”

The International Social Games Coalition is a group that was set up earlier this year, with the aim to better educate people about the inner-workings of the social games business. I spoke with the group’s CEO Luc Delany regarding my findings.

(I should note at this point that the ISGC was set up by Zynga alongside a variety of social casino game companies, and it was a Zynga representative that suggested I talk to Delany. I say this not to undermine any of Delany’s points, but rather to give you the full picture when reading his views, and to explain why much of the discussion is focused around comparing free-to-play “whale” spending with “whale” spending in the gambling industry.)

“Lots of people have tried to draw the parallel between people spending money in social games, and real-money gambling,” he tells me. “However, the motivations for playing a gambling game versus any other game, or any other type of entertainment, are very different.”

He notes that in gambling games, there is a risk of loss, and the opportunity of winning — therefore the addiction that players have to free-to-play games is very different.

“There is a documented history of people being addicted to video games, and other forms of entertainment,” he adds. “I spend too much money on iTunes, and films I’ll never watch, just because I make an impulsive buy. People spend so much money on handbags, on golf clubs, on all kinds of other forms of entertainment, but gambling is very clearly defined as games where there is a stake, a chance, and a win or loss.”

I ask him about the example of Chris purchasing Team Fortress 2 “keys” in the hope that he will be rewarded with an “unusual” item, and then continuing to purchase keys until he found such an item. Isn’t there an element of stake and chance there?

“I don’t see it as the same issue as gambling,” he answers. “Under that scenario, how do you compare it to certain TV shows that are essentially the same thing? People text in to play along with a game, trying to find the money in the box — yet that’s not a regulated gambling service. As a society, we’ve judged that to be the motivation of a payout, that creates a certain risk amongst players. Therefore we’ve decided that this level of regulation is necessary.”

Delany is keen to stress that social games are already heavily regulated — there are consumer rights, data protection acts, unfair commercial practice directives, and more — and he questions, “Is there proof that this form of entertainment is more harmful or addictive than other forms of entertainment?”

At this point, I questioned how harmful or addictive a free-to-play game would have to be before we, as an industry, should have to take it seriously.

“I don’t have an answer for that,” answers Delany. “If you look at stories about people being addicted to things, whatever is the latest form of entertainment gets hit with that badge. In the ’90s it was games consoles, in the ’80s it was television, before then it was radio — radio was going to destroy culture etc. So it’s not a new discussion, that people scrutinize new forms of entertainment. It’s a healthy part of society.”

“However,” he adds, “today there is no evidence to suggest that this is a particularly dangerous form of entertainment, as opposed to any other form of entertainment that people spend money on. We know that people spend too much money is all forms of entertainment.”

The road ahead

There’s a lot to take in here, and clearly my delving into the underbelly of free-to-play is just the tip of the iceberg. Whichever way the signs appear to point, a hell of a lot more research is needed to truly paint the full picture of what is going on behind the scenes.

It’s clear that no-one’s idea of a good step forward is to get government bodies involved in the process, regardless of whether it would benefit free-to-play players or not. As part of my due diligence for this article, I did get in touch with both the Federal Trade Commission and the UK’s Office of Fair Trading, to assess their views. I don’t expect to hear back from them for a while, given the volume of correspondence they no doubt receive, but I plan to relay any response to do receive.

In the meantime, it would seem foolish to let the topic lie, especially while the conversation is well and truly flowing. While research into the potential psychological elements of free-to-play game design continues, it’s my hope that free-to-play studios will at least take a hard look at the current design manifestos being carted around, and consider how they may be affecting the lives of their players.

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Fun, fun pain: Hearthstone | Video Game Tourism

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Hearthstone ist eine Verkaufsplattform mit Kaufanreizsystem in Spielform.

Während Diablo 3 ein Hybrid war - ein Vollpreisspiel, das dank Echtgeldauktionshaus und Item-Grind als Endgame im Spieldesign seltsam verkrüppelt verblieb -, ist Hearthstone als reiner Free2Play-Titel in gewisser Weise ein offenes Produkt, ehrlich, geradlinig. Dabei erübrigt sich die Frage nach der Moral: Natürlich ist Free2Play ein völlig legitimes Konzept, natürlich kann Blizzard, das hier wie wenige andere alles richtig macht, dieses Monetisierungsmodell nicht vorgeworfen werden.

Blizzard will natürlich Geld verdienen, auch wenn Hearthstone kostenlos spielbar ist. Warum auch nicht? Es ist ein Hochglanzprodukt, das Spaß macht, leidlich originell ist und mit einem Ausmaß an Polish daherkommt, der anderswo fehlt. Es ist Geld wert. Der Reiz, sich in seinen ineinander verzahnten Systemen zu verlieren, vom Crafting übers Sammeln über die Arena bis zum Tüfteln am perfekten Deck, soll aber seine Spieler nicht nur, wie in World of Warcraft mit seinem Abosystem, möglichst lange an das Spiel binden, sondern sie vor allem dazu animieren, tatsächlich Geld auszugeben.

Daran ist nichts Verwerfliches.

Hearthstone zwingt nicht, es verführt. Dementsprechend zelebriert Blizzard den Moment direkt nach dem Geldausgeben, wenn wir unsere Geschenke auspacken. "Open Pack", so heißt ein eigener Menüpunkt, und hinter ihm verbirgt sich eine intime Hinterbühne, auf der wir unsere Neuerwerbungen mit größtmöglicher Haptik auspacken und unserer Sammlung einverleiben. Von Hand ziehen wir unser gerade erworbenes (oder aber im Schweiße unseres Angesichts erspieltes) Kartenpack in die Mitte, ein Feuerwerk an Sound und Effekten untermalt die Enthüllung unserer neuen Spielmöglichkeiten. 40 Packs um ca. 50 Euro, also den Vollpreis von Diablo 3, zu kaufen und hintereinander auszupacken - das ist fast liebloser Hardcore, aber hey: Zeigs uns. Wir wollen es.

Auf der großen Vorderbühne wird mit Karten gespielt - doch auf der fast intimen Hinterbühne geht es um Geld und Endorphine.

Die Blizzard-Psychologen, die hier mit uns spielen, waren ihr Geld wert. Natürlich ist auch Hearthstone wieder ein einarmiger Bandit, in den wir unser Geld schieben sollen, denn natürlich setzt man sich letztlich, trotz aller Skills, die im Spiel tatsächlich gefragt sind, einem Zufallsgenerator aus, der bestimmt, ob in unserem eben gekauften Pack die heiß begehrten Rares, Epics, Legendaries und Golds sind oder nicht. Es ist, wie schon bei Diablo 3 und seinem Loot-Drop-Algorithmus, ein mathematisches System, das per Münzwurf Endorphinausschüttungen generiert. Gerade häufig und selten genug, um uns zu motivieren. Um diese Enorphinausstöße wieder und wieder zu erleben, musste man bei Diablo immer viel Zeit investieren - bei Hearthstone darf man sich konsequent mit Geld von dieser Zeitinvestition freikaufen. 

Doch halt: MUSS man denn Geld ausgeben? Die kurze Antwort: Nein - aber das Design bringt einen dazu, es zu WOLLEN. In täglichen Quests lassen sich Goldstücke verdienen, mit denen man sich die intime Kartenpack-Stripshow auch im Spiel und durchs Spielen selbst finanzieren kann - besiege drei Gegner im Ranked-Modus für 40 Gold! -, doch auch hier ist die Imbalance zwischen Belohnung und Aufwand meisterhaft gestaltet: Pro Tag kann ich mir so gemeinsam mit dem Geld für Siege mit nicht ganz unbeträchtlichem Zeitaufwand insgesamt 100 Gold erspielen - genau so viel, wie ein Pack kostet. Um die restlichen 60 Gold freizuspielen, kann ich "Golds" zerlegen, craften oder 18 Partien gewinnen. Eine Partie dauert etwa zehn Minuten, im Crafting-Menü verbringt man auch eingige Stunden - macht solide geschätzt drei Stunden. Pro Tag. Für 100 Tage. Fun Pain at its best.

Fun: Es macht Spaß, zu spielen, sein Deck zu tunen, Karten zu studieren, sich zu messen. Pain: Der Schmerz, der uns dazu bringen soll, zu kaufen, ist hier aber zumindest einer des Verlangens, der Sehnsucht - und nicht, wie etwa in Tiny Tower, jener dumpf bohrende Schmerz der Langeweile, der mit der Erledigung stupidester Aufgaben wie Liftfahrten einhergeht. Dafür ist Blizzard zu gratulieren, denn hier verlieren andere F2P-Titel ihre Spieler: Man fühlt sich schnell zu sehr gegängelt, wenn das Spiel seine Reize hinter stupidem Bestrafen fürs Nichtbezahlen versteckt. Hearthstones spielerische Vorderbühne, das Kartenspiel mit immer neuen Motivationen, bleibt als Spiel immer  da, ob bezahlt oder nicht. Es wartet als grundsolide Belohnung neben  all der Monetisierung, fast abgekoppelt von der intimen, fast versteckten Hinterbühne, auf der Geld getauscht wird, atemlos Packs aufgerissen und ganz andere, noch intensivere Endorphinschübe erlebt werden. 

Oder zumindest: halb abgekoppelt. Denn wer beginnt, im Ranked-Modus  oder gegen andere als die vom Matchmaking vorgeschlagenen Gegener zu spielen, bemerkt sehr schnell, dass das Versprechen aller Trading-Card-Games, dass auch ohne den Kauf all der Booster-Packs und Specials gespielt und gewonnen werden kann, schon wieder nicht ganz eingehalten werden kann. Pay2Win, die große Verurteilung jedes F2P-Systems, sie lässt sich nicht widerlegen. Wer bezahlt, hat auf jeden Fall buchstäblich die besseren Karten - zumindest aber hat er sie früher. Den Worten Helfrieds für diese Seite vor zwei Jahren ist wenig hinzuzufügen.

Wer bezahlt, hat auf jeden Fall buchstäblich die besseren Karten - zumindest aber hat er sie früher.

Versuchen wir eine kleine Rechenaufgabe, um herauszufinden, wie viele Packs man kaufen muss, um garantiert alle Karten zu besitzen oder durch Crafting hergestellt zu haben. Nachdem mir die Wahrscheinlichkeiten nicht bekannt sind, werde ich hier nur  grob schätzen können. (Natürlich, so ein berechtigter Einwand, wird niemand ALLE Karten besitzen wollen, sondern sich auf einzelne Charaktere spezialisieren.) Die Wiki-Datenbank listet momentan über 500 verschiedene Karten auf, einer laufenden Erweiterung steht aber nichts im Weg. Fünf Karten gibt es pro Pack, und der erwähnte Zufallsgenerator sorgt dafür, dass wir normale Karten sehr oft, seltene und epische aber nur sehr selten zu sehen bekommen. Egal: Behaupten wir mal ganz blauäugig dass wir mit dem Kauf von 100 Kartenpacks so gut wie alle Karten zu sehen bekämen - manche gibt es ja von Vornherein gratis, und besonders rare lassen sich durch das Craften weniger seltener auch herstellen. 

Wollen wir uns nun ohne Geldausgeben diese 100 Packs erarbeiten, brauchen wir 10.000 Goldstücke. 100 kann man pro Tag maximal gewinnen, wofür wir, wie oben erwähnt, mindestens drei Stunden spielen müssten. Klar: Auch in der Arena lassen sich Gold und Karten gewinnen - doch nur gegen den Einsatz von 150 Gold darf man sie betreten, und ein Sieg ist keinesfalls garantiert. 100 Tage für 10.000 Goldstücke, für 100 Packs. Ein Dritteljahr also müsste man täglich wohl drei Stunden in Hearthstone grinden, um - vielleicht! - in den 100 Packs alle Karten zu bekommen. (Wahrscheinlich, darauf sei nochmals hingewiesen, bräuchte man sogar noch mehr Packs; andererseits wird wie erwähnt kaum ein Spieler ALLE Karten haben wollen.)

Die Zahlen - grob geschätzt, wie sie sind, und obwohl sie die tatsächliche Drop-Häufigkeit der rarsten Karten nicht berücksichtigt - zeigen uns, warum wir in Hearthstone etwas kaufen wollen. Fun Pain -

something that is simultaneously entertaining and a little bit annoying. [Buyable items that reduce this pain] were extremely popular among players, even though they only existed because it was painful to play the game in the first place!

Fun pain und ihr Heilmittel. Geld auszugeben reduziert unseren Schmerz, der vom Spiel und seinem quälend langsamen Grind verursacht wird. Für 50 Euro bekommen wir 40 Packs auf einen Schlag, in einer Sekunde. Verglichen mit 100 Tagen Mühsal ist das eine Belohnung orgiastischen Aumaßs.

Free2Play ist, wenn es richtig gemacht wird, ein extrem lukratives Geschäftsmodell. Blizzard könnte alternativ ein Spiel zum Vollpreis verkaufen, das alle Karten zum stückweisen Freispielen enthält. Die Einstiegshürde wäre eine Investition von 50 Euro, und diese Hürde ist hoch. Free2Play lockt viel mehr Spieler an, das Gebotene macht Spaß, ist perfekt produziert - und weckt in uns den Wunsch, Blizzard Geld geben zu wollen. Shut up and take my money.

Ist das unmoralisch? Mitnichten. Es ist nur, das ist klar, etwas anderes als das Produkt, das wir normalerweise kaufen, wenn wir ein Spiel erwerben. Hearthstone ist mehr als nur ein Kartenspiel, in dem wir kostenlos gegen Spieler aus aller Welt antreten und dank genial verunmöglichter direkter Kommunikation diesen Spielern nicht zu nahe kommen müssen. Es ist mehr als nur eine Sammlung perfekt in Szene gesetzter Appelle an unseren Komplettierungs- und Sammeltrieb. Es ist auch mehr als nur ein extrem clever gamifiziertes Craftingsystem.

Hearthstone ist all das, aber vor allem eins: Es ist eine Verkaufsplattform mit Kaufanreizsystem in Spielform. Wer das im Hinterkopf behält, wird auf höchstem Niveau unterhalten.

videogametourism.at

How In-app Purchases Have Destroyed The Industry

baekdal.com

I don't like writing negative articles that don't include a solution to the problem, but in this case, there is no solution. The state of in-app purchases has now reached a level where we have completely lost it. Not only has the gaming industry shot itself in the foot, hacked off their other foot, and lost both its arms ... but it's still engaging in a strategy that will only damage it further.

Why are these gaming studios so intent of killing themselves?

Note: Image from the wonderful 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'.

We have reached a point in which mobile games couldn't even be said to be a game anymore. Playing a game means that you have fun. It doesn't mean that you sit around and wait for the game to annoy you for so long that you decide to pay credits to speed it up. And for an old geezer like me who remember the glory days of gaming back in the 1990s, it's just unbearable to watch.

With the help of NerdCubed (great guy), let me illustrate just how bad in-app purchases in games have become. Let's compare a game from the 1990s with the same game on the iPad today.

I think you will be as shocked as I am.

Dungeon Keeper, 1997

Back in the 1990s, one of the best game developers in the world was a company called Bullfrog Productions. It created some of the best strategy games. You might remember games like Syndicate, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper.

Obviously, the games' graphics look horrible today, considering that the high-res screen resolution back then was only 640x480. Your iPad is running at 2048x1536.

But let's look at one of these games: Dungeon Keeper.

It's a game that you can buy today (full game, everything unlocked + all expansion packs included) for $5.99 over at GOG. It takes place underground. Your task is to build up your 'dungeon' by digging out rooms and battling other dungeon keeps around you.

Below is a (long) video from NerdCubed of what it is like to play. You don't have to see the whole video, just go to 2:20 and watch how fast and easy it is to build a room.

He is building a treasure room to store all his gold and jewels. It's 45 squares big, and it takes the game about 2 minutes to complete. It's fast and it's fun. You feel the energy and the rhythm of the game.

So this is the old days:

Full game price + expansion packs included: $5.99

Build a large treasure room of 45 squares in just 2 minutes.

Just remember that.

Dungeon Keeper for iPad/Android, 2014

Now let's look at exactly the same game, but reimagined for the iPad/Android and in-app purchases.

And once again, NerdCubed reviews it. The review below is 8 minutes long, but you have to watch it all the way to the end. It perfectly illustrates just how mind bogglingly bad things have gone.

The modern-day Dungeon Keeper is not even a game. It's just a socially engineered scam. And since people don't remember what real gaming was like in the 90s, they are giving it the highest rating in the app store.

It's just unbelievable.

Two things before you watch it:

Remember the original game play. The total price: $5.99, and it only takes 2 minutes to dig out 45 squares.

Also, Nerdcubed does have a rather liberal use of words, and you probably shouldn't listen to it in the office.

But you *must* watch this because most people don't know how bad things are today.

What EA has done here has nothing to do with gaming, and the same is true for pretty much all other 'free-to-play + in-app purchase' games. We don't have a mobile gaming industry anymore. We have a mobile scamming industry.

There is no game here. And you know what the worst part of this is? Let me show you.

This crap is featured as one of the five top picks on the front page of Apple's app store, as an Editors' choice.

How absolutely f*cked up is that? (...sorry for my choice of words, but this is one of those times where profanity is justified).

As NerdCubed said in his review, the problem is that all the future generations of gamers are going to experience this as the default. They are going to grow up in a world, in which people actually think this is what gaming is like. That social engineering and scamming people is an acceptable way of doing business.

It's not!

It's a scam... done by sick people who have nothing left in their lives other than selfish greed. They should be thrown in jail for deceptive business tactics, and not featured in the app store as an Editors' Choice.

This is outrageous.

You and I have a responsibility to speak out against it. This is not what we want our future to be like. This is completely unacceptable behavior.

As I started out saying, I wish I could end this article on a positive note and a constructive solution. But there is no solution here. There is no way to fix this other than stop doing it.

So for you mobile game developers I simply ask this of you. Walk into the closest bathroom and look yourself in the mirror. Do you like the person that you see? Is this what you want to be remembered by? Or do you want to be remembered as a game developer like Bullfrog, whom everyone loved because they made real games worth playing?

And if you are one of the very few developers who are still making real games (without the in-app purchase crap), I salute you. You are my heroes.

Games like Oceanhorn, Minecraft, XCOM and others. You guys are freaking brilliant, and I absolutely love you for having the courage of sticking to your principles.

Also read: "Optimizing Your Industry to the Point of Suicide", in which I show you how it will cost you almost $3,500 to unlock everything in Asphalt 7.

---

In response to the many wonderful comments, I have published another article (29 pages) about how to do in-app right (without the element of deception).

Update: I made this short comic to visualize the real problem. The problem is not asking people to pay, but the deception in that game developers promises that we can 'play' for free'. Waiting is not the same as playing.

Founder of Baekdal, author, writer, strategic consultant, and new media advocate.

Baekdal PLUS: Premium content that helps you make the right decisions, take the right actions, and focus on what really matters.

There is always more...

baekdal.com

Play free or pay | NES is dead

nes-is-dead.de

Von Pascal Simon, am 04.02.2014

Free to play ist einer der Triggerbegriffe in Gamingcommunities im Internet. Wann immer ein Entwickler “Free to play” auf eine Packung oder neben einen Downloadknopf schreibt, ist der Hass der lautstarken Masse gewiss, während die nicht so lautstarke Masse fleißig kauft und den Firmen den goldenen Swimmingpool finanziert. Denn würde es sich nicht lohnen würde es schon seit einiger Zeit niemand mehr tun. In gewissem Umfang verstehe ich das: Leute, die sich sehr viel mit Videospielen beschäftigen, sind natürlich immer etwas besorgter um aktuelles Geschäftsgebaren, weil ihr liebstes Hobby darunter zu leiden hat. Jetzt bin ich aber immer an vorderster Front, wenn es darum geht, Free 2 Play zu verteidigen. Es gibt da ein paar feine Unterschiede.

Team Fortress 2 – Heavy mit Fez

Dabei ist das oft kritisierte Pay To Win, das Bezahlen für echte, spielentscheidende Vorteile, für mich auch oft gar nicht entscheidend. Klar, Multiplayerspiele werden dadurch absolut ruiniert. Spiele ich für mich alleine, stört es mich oft gar nicht, wenn ich die Option besitze, mir Teile des Spiels durch Geld zu vereinfachen. Spiele von NimbleBit sind mit die schlimmsten Vertreter dieser Kategorie, Nimblequest spiele ich trotzdem ab und an ganz gerne und alle Spiele mit Tiny und Pocket am Anfang machten mir immer einige Stunden Spaß. Ich kann da durchaus die Leistung aufbringen, es zu ignorieren. Aber es gibt eine Mechanik, die mich wirklich auf die Palme bringt. In den letzten sieben Tagen habe ich zwei Spiele gespielt, eines neu erschienen, eines schon einige Monate alt. Beide hatten das Potenzial ziemlich gute Spiele zu sein und beide sind nur an dieser Mechanik gescheitert, die sofort aufhören muss. Es handelte sich dabei um Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign und Dungeon Keeper iOS.

Marvel Puzzle Quest ist alleine schon deshalb gut, weil ich Puzzle Quest liebe. Ich verliebe mich sofort in jedes Spiel, das RPG-Mechaniken mit einem Puzzle-„Kampfsystem“ mischt. Und das als Iron Man, Wolverine und Deadpool (Ich habe in Wahrheit keine Ahnung, ob Deadpool spielbar ist, aber jede Chance, Deadpool zu erwähnen, ist eine gute Chance)? Da wäre ich sogar bereit gewesen, ein paar Euro für Gegenstände springen zu lassen. Aber es wurde mir verdorben. In Dungeon Keeper ist wirklich irgendwo ein ziemlich gutes Spiel versteckt, auch abseits jeglicher Nostalgie, die vermutlich bei jedem über 25 aufkommt. Und auch das wurde mir verdorben.

Wütender Kommentator

Sind wir ehrlich: Das ist ein großer Haufen Scheiße und man hat als Spieler keine andere Möglichkeit, als sich damit verarscht zu fühlen. Und es macht mich traurig, dass dieser Schund den ganzen Begriff “Free to play” in den Dreck zieht, weil ich glaube, dass für höflich kostenlose Spiele durchaus Platz ist. Ich weiß nicht, wie erfolgreich dieses Modell ist und in Zukunft sein wird, aber selbst meine persönliche Grenze, die schon tief im Land der Vermutung guten Willens liegt, ist weit überschritten. Niemand sollte Geld für diese Praktiken ausgeben. Ladet euch Dungeon Keeper herunter, spielt es, bis ihr zum ersten Mal zum Bezahlen von Edelsteinen aufgefordert werdet – denn damit werdet ihr sicher als Metrik in einem Statistiksystem enden –, bewertet es mit einem Stern und löscht es. Ladet euch Marvel Puzzle Quest bei Steam herunter, damit ihr eine Rezension geben könnt und vergebt den Daumen nach unten. Lasst jeden, den es interessieren könnte, wissen, dass jeder Cent, der in solche Spiele fließt, es ein bisschen schlimmer macht.

Ja, das ist der Punkt, an dem ich sogar pathetisch schreibe: Wir müssen kämpfen. Mit Unmut, mit unseren Stimmen, mit unseren Geldbeuteln.

Wir sind natürlich nicht die ersten, die sich anlässlich Dungeon Keepers über diese Unmechanik auslassen. Besonders ans Herz gelegt seien euch hier die Reviews von Jim Sterling und Fabu.

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nes-is-dead.de

A new Dungeon Keeper has been announced!

thegamingdaily.com

Predictably, EA has ruined yet another franchise.

This screenshot  (Thanks, Blitsie) is a timely reminder (as if we needed one), that EA’s track record of buying IPs and then milking them for every last cent is alive and kicking.

Need more proof?

The Dungeon Keeper of old was brought to us by none other than Peter Molyneux (Black and White, Fable) way back in 1997. It was his last game with the company before leaving to form Lionhead, the company we know for Fable and B&W. In the 17 years between DK 1 and today, there have been some shifts in the gaming scene. We can ignore most of them, but critically, it’s now out on mobile devices (specifically Android and iOS, rather than PC). With this new platform comes a completely new way of making money, which EA has grabbed with both hands.

Now, we have this. It’s a free to play time sink on par with Candy Crush Saga. With a slight difference. When you run out of action points, you can either wait a while  doing other stuff (breaking game flow), or pay up real, actual money to EA in order to progress. I would dearly like to meet the executive who came up with the idea to entertain people, draw them in, and then ransom the rest of the entertainment. And then hit him over the head with an iPad.

Sure, some people will think, “What’s the harm, people should be allowed to spend their money however they like, no matter if it encourages detrimental practices that are bad for gaming as a whole”. First of all, no. That’s a horrendous idea. The nature of the mobile industry means that this horrible business practice isn’t something that EA has developed, but something that has been deployed time and time again, by many developers.

It has to stop if gamers want more great titles to come out on mobile platforms. Many popular games (not just the offer a sort of “energy bar”, that when depleted can be replenished by either not playing the game or by paying money, the galling thing is, they make a whole lot of cash doing it, and therefore aren’t under any pressure to stop putting this mechanic in.

Some game developers however, have come up with ways to get money out of their customers without turning the mobile gaming scene into an arcade. Because that’s what in-app purchasing is. It’s the terrible “lives” system of arcade gaming back in another form.

Triple Town by Spry Fox in particular did have a free version of the game that was cursed with this, the most irritating of mechanics. In the game, you swipe the screen to create combinations of icons. (Each swipe costs an action point, once your action points are gone, you have to wait for them to regenerate).

To alleviate this, they did something very sensible. For a nominal sum (less than the prices that EA is charging for most of its gem bundles in the screenshot above), you unlock access to the full game. In eons past, we referred to this as “the demo version”. However, in this modern era of mobile gaming, it’s still the only real choice for developers that don’t want to be seen as parasitic money-factories, taking once loved franchises and turning them into nothing more than ruined husks of their former selves. So to Spry Fox, well done, well done indeed.

Another mobile developer who I love, Kairosoft, does something similar. Its games are far more in-depth than Triple Town or what Dungeon Keeper. They are, with one exception, time management sims themed around various facets of life. There’s the well known Game Dev Sim, a simulation where you manage a fledgling game studio, or Cafeteria Nipponica (my favourite), where you manage a small cafe. Kairosoft’s approach to all of its games is “here is a free demo, if you like it, there is a full version of the game, ad free, available for a price”.

Now remember, the only reason that developers wouldn’t run a system this way is if they were convinced that they’d make more money in, not providing a better game experience for their customers, but by designing and implementing a system that forced gamers to pay money to keep going.

So who lies at fault here, where developers are going back to the days of the arcade, and consumers are playing along? Unfortunately this problem lies not with the EA’s of the world, but with the consumers. If there wasn’t such a huge and proven demand for pay to win, pay to play and similar game mechanics, a company like EA wouldn’t be implementing them in this latest game.

Gamers! We can’t keep endorsing these practices and expect anything decent to come out of the AAA mobile industry. Corporations will always take the route that offers the biggest return on their investment, so it’s up to us to reward developers and publishers who offer demos and ethical ways of making money on titles (Spry Fox, Kairosoft) and punish those who peddle “free” games that come with more in-app purchases than you can shake a stick at.

Liked the article? Check out some others,

like the one that says that too many people are  trying to make Minecraft again.

or the one that suggests true freedom in gaming is found far outside the Open World genre

thegamingdaily.com

The Assassins' Failure | PopMatters

popmatters.com

Assassin’s Creed III brings an end to the “Desmond Arc” of the series. The story will continue, but the central conflict will no longer revolve around the end of the world by solar flare in 2012. As a kind of “season finale,” one expects a certain amount of closure and resolution. Unfortunately, how the game resolves its Armageddon conflict is the very definition of anti-climactic.

However, while the conclusion to its plot leaves a lot to be desired, its thematic conclusion is the complete opposite. The game ends with a definitive statement about the merits of the Assassin ideology. It tells the story of the failure of the Assassin’s Creed.

Assassins vs. Templars

To understand how the creed fails, one must first understand the creed itself: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” In Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Ezio explains “…it is an observation of the nature of reality. To say, ‘nothing is true’, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say, ‘everything is permitted’, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic.”

It’s a belief that puts a lot of responsibility on the individual. The Assassins believe that people are inherently good, if flawed. Leave people to act on their own and they will inevitably make mistakes, but they will learn from those mistakes and society will grow in a direction that emphasizes goodness, kindness, and freedom.

Their eternal enemy, the Templars, believe that people are not inherently good. Leave people to act on their own, and they will only create chaos. The only way that social and human progress can happen is through the strength of leaders. People need strong leaders to tell them what to do, to keep them in line.

Minerva vs. Juno

At the end of Assassin’s Creed III, the Assassin group led by Desmond finds a magic button that will save the world from a massive solar flare, but salvation comes at a cost. Pushing the button will release Juno, a captive god who will then go on to rule over the world. (Of course, she’s not really a god but a member of ancient alien race with technology so advanced it makes them seem godly. But that’s semantics). Another “god,” Minerva, warns them against this course of action and tries to convince them to let the flare hit earth.

Minerva represents the Assassins’ ideology of individualism and consequences taken to their extreme: We failed to stop the flare using our own abilities, so we should accept the disaster that entails. However, her most important words, and the most damning evidence against the Assassins, is her prediction of what will happen afterwards: The Assassins will survive the apocalypse, hidden in the cave with the “gods” and emerge years later to bring order to what’s left of society. Desmond will become a leader, people will follow his words of wisdom, but when he eventually dies, his words will be distorted by fanatical followers. He will be deified and his words will be used to justify slaughter and war. This is perhaps the worst fate for any Assassin: his words of inclusiveness used to justify prejudice.

Minerva’s story paints a very bleak picture of the future. This would have been a society guided by the Assassin ideals from its very inception, yet it still descends into chaos and war. The people let their prejudices twist the words of Desmond, rather than the other way around. In short, Minerva tells us that a world built by the Assassins is still doomed to repeat the cycle of hate that the Assassins fight to stop.

Juno represents the Templar’s ideology of dictatorship taken to its own extreme. We’ve proven that we can’t save ourselves, so we need a strong and uniquely capable leader to protect us. The last four games in the series have criticized this form of government by showing us what would happen if the “select few” in charge didn’t care about the people, but Assassin’s Creed III argues for this ideology by suggesting that if the “select few” in charge really do care about those beneath them, then society might flourish. It’s all just a matter of living under a dictatorship as opposed to a benign dictatorship, but we don’t know which one Juno will embrace.

Faced with this kind of symbolic choice, it might seem that the real ideological failure is how the four Assassins in the room react to this news. Desmond sides with Juno, seemingly without a second thought or hesitation. He even says, “I have no choice.” His father objects, but only because he doesn’t want to see his son die, not for any ideological reason. In this moment, not one Assassin seems willing to stand up for their beliefs.

Of course, one can’t ignore that in this context “standing up for their beliefs” means killing multiple billions of people on Earth. That stacks the deck rather unfairly on the side of the Templar ideology. The fact that no Assassin is wiling to sacrifice the world for their beliefs doesn’t signal a lack of conviction. It’s more like an embrace of practicality generally. The important part of this ending conversation is Minerva’s prediction. Desmond is actually quite right that he doesn’t have a choice. Siding with Juno is the only option with the potential of preventing more prejudice and war. Humanity has proven incapable of stopping such things themselves, and the Assassins will be proven incapable of doing it as well. The only logical choice is to go with Juno and hope for the best.

A lot of what the Assassins do is based on faith, Altair says as much in his journals in Assassin’s Creed II. They kill with the faith that this death will make the world a better place. It’s not a religious kind of faith, but a faith in the Brotherhood itself and a faith in humanity to rise above its prejudices when given the opportunity to do so. Desmond’s last act is very much in keeping with this faith. Minerva paints a very detailed picture of life post-flare, but Juno gives no details as to how she will rule the earth once given power. Desmond makes his choice on nothing but faith. In this way, his actions are in keeping with the spirit of the Assassin’s Creed, even though he chooses to put his faith in the enemy.

Connor

The failure of the Assassin’s Creed doesn’t come out of nowhere in this final cut scene. The game spends a considerable amount of time setting up this thematic shift by demeaning the Assassins and justifying the Templars.

In previous games, we played as a Grand Master Assassin, the highest rank achievable, or as a young man who would rise to become Grand Master. By contrast, Connor, the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed III, is neither of these things. He’s not a Grand Master; he’s not even much of a leader, though in his defense, he doesn’t get the same training as Ezio or Altair. The Assassin Brotherhood of the New World is a weak shadow of its former self by the time that Connor comes along. There’s only one Assassin left alive, and he’s an old man incapable of fighting. Then the Revolutionary War begins and Connor gets caught up in that conflict. He spends most of the game taking orders from the Patriots and arguing with his Assassin mentor. By the time that he starts recruiting people into the Brotherhood he hasn’t had time to develop a deep understanding of the Creed, so he builds his Assassin army not using the Creed as a foundation, but using his own moral compass as a foundation. And his moral compass is colored more by the Patriot revolutionaries than by any Assassin leader.

It’s easy for him to fall in with the Patriots since they seem to share the Assassin’s belief in individual freedom. However, their definition of “individual” is severely limited. When Connor talks with Samuel Adams about freedom for the Colonies, he points out the hypocrisy of such propaganda coming from a slave owner. Adams tells us that his servant is a free woman who simply works for him (and she was) and that he despises the practice of slavery. However, “he also says, We must focus first on defending our rights. When this is done we’ll have the luxury of addressing these other matters.” Connor pushes the subject a little more, but then he drops it and the game doesn’t mention slavery again until the very end. Conner puts his faith in these men, that the freedom they speak of applies to all people, and puts all his effort into helping the Patriot cause. As a result, he stops thinking like an Assassin and starts thinking like a Patriot.

This concept is best encapsulated in the character of Stephane Chapheau, a mutual friend of the Patriot cause who refuses to pay taxes to the British. One day his footlocker goes missing, and he’s convinced that the tax collector broke into his home and stole it. He grabs a knife and goes shouting into the streets, picking a fight with every Red Coat he meets, forcing Conner to intervene and kill them even as Connor tries to talk him down. Stephane eventually finds a tax collector and then Connor instructs him on how to kill his target. Afterwards, they learn that tax collector was not actually working for the British, but for a Templar; neither of them seem to care.

Stephane’s explosive show of defiance doesn’t stem from a place of reason. He doesn’t go out with any particular goal in mind. He just wants to kill Red Coats and tax collectors. His actions actually stem from a deep seeded prejudice against the British. His father died fighting for the French in the French and Indian War. Afterwards, Stephane fled Canada for Boston, but he still couldn’t escape the reach of the British. Given his history, it’s understandable that a minor slight would release his pent up anger, but the Assassins normally strive to be above such sentiments. Ezio may begin Assassin’s Creed II with revenge in mind, but by the end, he allows his enemy to live because he realizes there are more important things than his revenge. Stephane’s show of anger is precisely the kind of narrow minded vengeance that should prevent him from becoming an Assassin because it’s clear that he’s driven more by anti-British sentiments than he is by pro-freedom sentiments. Yet he’s the first person that Connor recruits into the Brotherhood.

Stephane’s recruitment isn’t surprising considering that Connor is caught up in his own quest for vengeance. Unlike Ezio, Connor does follows through with his revenge but gains nothing from it—not for the Assassins and not for himself. After the war is won and all the Templars are dead, Conner watches as a group of slaves are paraded out on the docks of Boston, being prepared for sale. Later, he returns to his village only to find it abandoned: The land sold, his tribe fled. In these moments, he realizes that he was duped, not purposefully or maliciously, but duped nonetheless. While he fought for the freedom of all men, the Patriots fought for themselves, and in this aftermath, Conner sees the futility of his fight and the Assassins’ fight.

Haytham

Before considering Haytham as a character, it’s important to consider how he and the other Templars are presented. In previous games the Templars were always on the side of tyrannical leaders, which made them great video game antagonists, but Assassin’s Creed III takes pains to develop them beyond this cliché. The Templars are not against the Patriots; they also fight for the Patriot cause. They have the same goals as the Assassins, but different tactics. The Templars focus more on how to strengthen the Patriots rather than on how to weaken the British. This is an important distinction because the Patriots are portrayed as freedom fighters, both in the game and in larger American culture. Even though the game paints the Patriot proclamations of tyranny as overblown at times, it never outright demeans them. They are still clearly the “good guys” in this conflict. So by aligning the Templars with the Patriots, the game prevents us from instantly dismissing the Templers as the obvious bad guys, and we’re forced to reconsider our opinion of them. 

The similarities are even represented through gameplay. Haytham has a hidden blade and he can climb on buildings just like Altair and Ezio and Desmond. This Templar plays just like an Assassin. There’s no physical different between the two sides; the only difference is ideological.

This is where the character of Haytham becomes important. Haytham is well-spoken; he can better articulate his stance and beliefs and the logic behind his plans. Connor, on the other hand, is so invested in the Patriot cause that he can only repeat what he’s been told. When these two men argue about how to best accomplish their goals, Haytham always sounds like he has the better plan. It’s almost pointless to pit these two against each other in a verbal sparring match. Haytham always comes out the winner, which further erodes the moral high ground of the Assassins.

George Washington in forthcoming DLC for Assassin's Creed III (Ubisoft, 2012)

Some of your Templar targets also have understandable justifications for their actions. William Johnson was trying to buy land from Connor’s tribe in order to ensure its safe keeping. Charles Lee tried to assassinate George Washington because he thought that Washington was an inept military leader who would lead the Patriots to failure. Conner stopped both of these plans, and while things worked out well regarding the latter situation, he only made the former situation worse. Lee’s motivation strikes a particularly resonant chord, since he’s thinking through the problem like an Assassin would, killing (or trying to kill) with the faith that this death will have a positive impact on the world.

Of course, not all the Templars are driven by such selfless motivations. One of your targets is a mercenary in it for the money, and another turns traitor to join the British. This variety of members and motivations is important in fleshing out the Templars as a group of individuals rather than as a single monolithic evil entity. The Templar Order may attract leaders with a lust for power (since their ideology is based around promoting the “special few”), but Assassin’s Creed III asks us not to dismiss the entire Order based on the actions of certain leaders at certain points in history. The Borgias and Abstergo have certainly tainted the Templar name, but Haytham represents the possibility of real change, the possibility that the Templars can actually be a positive force in the world, or at least as much a positive force as the Assassins, as long as the right person is in charge.

“Represents” doesn’t equal “is” however. While the game makes us sympathize with the Templars, it never goes so far as to re-cast them as good guys, and this works to the game’s advantage. It erodes the Assassins’ moral high ground while also casting us in the role of a classic hero. The game then pits us against smart, relatable enemies while also casting them in the roles of a classic villain. We go through the typical Assassin’s Creed narrative arc, vanquishing the villains, but this time our victory feels more tragic than heroic. It’s impossible not to come out of Assassin’s Creed III feeling a little hypocritical.

In every game the Assassins fight the Templars, and in every game, the Assassins win. However, by the end of Assassin’s Creed III, it becomes clear that while the Assassins may win the physical battles, they lose the ideological war.

popmatters.com

The Age of Entitlement

newstatesman.com

A businessman pauses to check his phone outside the Bank of England. Photograph: Bloomberg

Nobody loved Bowater House in Knightsbridge. The demolition of this late-1950s, modernist mess in 2006 was greeted with general relief. Yet it did have one virtue. Through its core was cut a wide opening for a roadway that gave us all a view of Hyde Park and of a sinewy, thrilling Epstein sculpture of a family group, urged on by the god Pan and racing on to the green sward.

There is no such large opening in One Hyde Park, the building that replaced Bowater House. Instead, Pan has been relegated to the end of a much smaller public road that has been intimidatingly designed to look private. The great people’s invitation into the park has been lost. The public realm has not been abandoned altogether, however. At ground level there are shops, punctuated by some very limited planting. So, if the people care to struggle across the hellish confluence of roads that forms the heart of Knightsbridge, they can peer through the windows to see Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, Rolex watches or McLaren cars. Things they cannot have.

One Hyde Park was developed by the Candy brothers and the Qataris and was designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, the current incarnation of the once-idealistic Richard Rogers practice. The 86 flats start at £20m; a penthouse sold in 2010 for £140m. The building is an aesthetic, planning and social catastrophe. An inaccessible, menacing fortress looming over Knightsbridge, it symbolises the dark wealth of the entitled elite who have claimed the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea as their own. But it is just one big sign of a ruthless landgrab among many little ones.

Staff at the Kensington High Street branch of Carluccio’s – a pleasant, neighbourhood place – dread being sent over to South Ken. That’s banksterland. Mothers disrupt service with their giant baby buggies, the children are rude and even the toddlers snap their fingers at the waiters. Then there are the shops. In Knightsbridge’s “golden triangle” of streets and around Brompton Cross are all the “flagship stores” of the highest of high-end retailers. I used to like going there to watch and marvel at the very rich and to see the beauty that money could buy. Once in a while, feeling a bit flush, I might buy something. Not any longer.

Recently, in an idle moment, I wandered in - to the Ralph Lauren shop at Brompton Cross. I noticed a pair of shoes, quite nice, about £300, I reckoned, allowing for the location and the general flagshipness of the place. The shoes were £750, a price that bore no possible relation to either the cost of manufacture or the quality of the design. These people, I realised, don’t care about only fairly affluent me or my class any more. They’d rather I left, because they can sell all their stuff at any price, in effect, to the bonus boys and girls.

“Almost by definition, these things aren’t for you,” John Lanchester tells me on the phone. He is the author of Capital, the 2012 novel that defined the moral climate that led to the last financial crash. “The whole thing about luxury goods is that they’re an inter - national language. The prices don’t track the middle-class, aspirational market; they’re for the super-rich, who don’t really care what things cost. In fact, they want them to cost more, because the price signifies only that most people can’t afford them.” (Lanchester captured entitlement in the character of Arabella in Capital, a woman so ignorant, vain and greedy, she did not even understand the possibility of being unable to afford something. Now I see and hear Arabellas all around me when lunching in central London.)

Perhaps it was ever thus: the rich have always been different. But that’s not true. Some - thing big, something moral, has changed. Driving through Knightsbridge (occasionally one must) I noticed a huge, absurd, orange and, in London, practically undriveable Lamborghini illegally parked. Once, I would have been amused, but now I feel angry because I know – we all know – it was probably bought with stolen money.

“Shocking” is too soft a word to describe the crimes of the financial sector. They are almost thrilling in their creative abundance – laundering money for drugs cartels; defrauding old people, small businesses, investors and shareholders; rigging markets; sugarcoating dud loans to look like good ones; loading the world economy with ever greater levels of risk and throwing millions of people out of work. And so on. All the time, they were enriching nobody but themselves. The banks and their buddies have been on a crime spree that would have glazed over the eyes of Al Capone.

Yet here they still are, with their undriveable orange cars, their buggies, their dark fort - resses and their rancid sense of entitlement because, in short, they don’t get it. Apparently the bonus boys see “casino banking” as a flattering term rather than the insult intended. Furthermore, the use of vast sums taxpayers’ money to save the banks is seen as no more than their God-given right.

“I live near Wall Street,” the economist Jeffrey Sachs said at an event. “The sense of entitlement is beyond quantification. They could not figure out why anyone might be mad at them for having nearly destroyed the world economy, taken home $30bn a year of bonuses, gotten bailed out to the tune of another trillion dollars and then lobbied for no regulation afterwards . . . I don’t think they were kidding anyone except themselves. I think they don’t get it.”

But we get it and we don’t like the rich any more because they all seem tainted. Lanchester points out that real business people – those who do useful things – are as angry as we are, accusing the bankers of wrecking and discrediting capitalism. (I sympathise. I have always regarded myself as a conservative and still do, but these shenanigans have tainted even that gentle world. Like most true conservatives I know, I regard the failure forcibly to end these abuses as a disgrace and a grave threat to the social peace we crave.)

Certainly people’s attitudes to companies in general has changed. Energy suppliers, telcos, retailers are all treated with a grim, resigned mistrust. To be allowed to participate in the society of entitlement, you have to agree to be ripped off. In spite of this, globally, politicians have decided to ignore the insights and sense of justice of their electorates and shown no desire to restructure a failed and still dangerous system, not even to imprison the most egregious wrongdoers. So the Age of Entitlement endures. What does this mean for society as a whole?

First, it is necessary to understand the origins of this psychology of entitlement. Economically, it can be said to be neoliberalism, the cult of free markets and deregulation that swept the world from the 1970s onwards. In neoliberal thought, expressed most trenchantly by Milton Friedman, the job of a company was to obey the law and reward its shareholders; it was not obliged to take on the wider ethical and moral concerns of society. In the 1980s, this became “greed is good”, certainly not what Friedman meant. I witnessed the cult’s apotheosis at the World Economic Forum in Davos in the early 1990s – I sat in on a meeting at which sharky young businessmen more or less said they would trample on their grandmothers for the sake of the bottom line. Viciousness had been validated. That is the enduring view in the financial sector.

“There is no incentive in the financial world,” a very prominent insider told me, “to be moral.” The point is that society rewards company directors with the enormous blessing of limited liability and, in return, should expect them to behave not just technically within the law but responsibly as persons. Failing – or refusing – to understand this underpins the sense of entitlement. Because much of what they did was not tech - nically illegal, the bankers feel that they did nothing wrong. Yet, in our own lives, we know perfectly well that some of the worst things we can do are not illegal. The financiers’ defence is made even more hopeless by the banks having been anything but good neoliberal institutions. Far from believing in free markets, they acted like a cartel and did everything in their power to rig the markets in which they operated.

Coupled with this was a generational change, identified by Jean Twenge and W Keith Campbell in their book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. From the late 1970s onwards, they detected a rise in narcissism among the young. Unlike the generation of the 1960s and early 1970s, these young people did not identify their goals as social or political but solely as personal. “There was a big shift in the 1980s away from the 1960s and 1970s,” Twenge told me, “. . . making a lot of money was no longer suspect. In the 1960s and 1970s it was not cool, but that flipped around.”

So, in the 1990s, a socially and politically quietist, narcissistic and self-seeking generation was well prepared to take advantage of the progressive deregulation of the financial system, primarily orchestrated by the then chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, a card-carrying believer in the doctrines of the hyper-libertarian fruitcake Ayn Rand. After 1997, the British Labour Party drank disgracefully deeply of this toxic, superstitious cocktail. Peter Mandelson declared that he was “intensely relaxed” about people getting “filthy” rich. In the midst of what turned out to be one of the most lethal (and preventable) bubbles in financial history, this was one complacency too far.

Both psychologically and theoretically, therefore, the Age of Entitlement was firmly established by the mid-1990s; indeed, so firmly established was it that it was imper - vious even to the overwhelming evidence of its fragile foundations. The collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 nearly brought the US economy to its knees – even though it had Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, creators of the critical equations on which financial neoliberalism was based, on its board. The neolibs sailed on regardless.

And still they sail on. Throughout the crisis, the beneficiaries of the criminality and rigged markets into which neoliberalism had descended continued to enrich themselves. In 2012 the 100 richest people across the world grew $241bn richer, taking their total net wealth to $1.9trn. The poor and the middle classes, naturally, got poorer. Levels of inequality of a kind that threaten the social fabric – especially in the US and the UK – are one of the most alarming legacies of the Age of Entitlement. The crisis is not over; in fact, it may hardly have begun.

Part of the problem is the way the wealthy entitled have managed to make their world so easily selfsustaining. They are certainly good at outsmarting our elected leaders. “George Osborne and his friends go down to the City with some idea,” one hugely rich but very politically aware financier told me, “and the bankers blind them with science – saying, ‘Well, you could try that, but we wouldn’t be responsible for the consequences’ – so, nothing happens.”

The new entitled live in a mirror-lined bubble. Also a legally protected one. I was told of a hedge-fund boss so vile that investors withdrew their money but did not sue, because other hedge funds would then refuse to do business with them. On top of that, they are protected in Britain by libel laws and a tax system that, as John Lanchester points out, not only shields our own entitled from scrutiny but also encourages equally entitled foreigners to come here.

“You might as well say, ‘Bond villains, come and live here,’ ” he says. “Our libel laws don’t help. There are a lot of zillionaires about whom we are going to read the truth uncensored only when they are dead. It’s an astonishing situation, when we have such a proliferation of incredibly rich criminals.”

If that is the tragedy, the comedy is almost as alarming. Even the Financial Times last month was stunned to discover that bankers have been invited into schools to teach our children about money. The Royal Bank of Scotland, our most thoroughly disgraced financial institution, was, of course, represented. I can think of many people I could ask for advice about money. None of them is a banker.

Or there is the way the incontinent vanity of the newly entitled spills over into insults directed at their closest political allies. Towards the end of last year, Kevin Maguire reported in the New Statesman that members of the Bullingdon – the clownish club for the cream of Oxford society (the rich and thick) of which Cameron, Osborne and Boris Johnson were once members – had taken to burning £50 notes in front of beggars.

Most comical, but also most sad, are the attempts by the entitled to fit in with and compromise with the ordinary lives of others. In a remarkable piece for the Sunday Times Style magazine published in December, Kate Spicer interviewed members of the entitled generation that will reap the rewards of the wave of criminality that engulfed our financial system.

Goldman Sachs, Spicer reported, runs a course for partners on “how not to f*** up your kids” which encourages them to take the bewildered brats to the supermarket occasionally. (A friend of mine whom Goldman Sachs attempted to recruit in the 1990s was struck by the way, late at night, there were cars waiting to take the employees home, so that they need never see any street life.)

Unfortunately, the lesson “be nice, be normal” often fails to sink it. Spicer wrote of how Nell, the twentysomething daughter of the strikingly unpleasant former boss of Barclays Bob Diamond, defended her dad on Twitter by suggesting that Osborne and Ed Miliband should “go ahead and #hmd” – “hold my dick”.

Spicer also quoted Alexa, aged 17, who thought it “quite funny – people have no understanding, interest or involvement in something and then suddenly get all het up about it. I went on a drama course. I was one of very few private-school kids. This guy said, ‘Your dad f***** up the country,’ but he had a complete lack of understanding of the situation.”

Sorry, Alexa, but that guy was spot on.

The kids are worried about discrimination. Bankers’ brats now account for between 30 and 50 per cent of the intake of private schools, but they run into trouble when they have to talk to egalitarian-minded university interviewers and tell them that Mummy and Daddy paid for their gap-year adventures.

What is striking, reading Spicer’s interviews and copious other evidence, is that the narcissism Jean Twenge identified as having blossomed in the 1980s is still rampant. The children of the bankers do think they are better than the rest of us and that making money is what matters most.

“You commonly hear from companies now,” Twenge says, “that this generation really have new social goals, helping people and so on. Unfortunately, that is not backed up by the evidence from what the young people actually say. There is no resurgence in the idea that we really want companies to be responsible.”

One final feature of the Age of Entitlement must be mentioned. It is the viciously reductionist mindset behind what now happens in finance. In part, this derives from machines. Computers are like alcohol to Homer Simpson: the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems. Computers made the bubble possible and the 2007 crash (and the next one) inevitable. They created high-speed, mechanised trading and enabled the application of mathematics to the markets – bad maths, as it happened, given that the primary equations were derived from physics that dees not apply to human affairs.

But more important is the reductionism that was implicit in neoliberalism as it became in the hands of the entitled. Money, in this view, is the measure of all things. An angry and very serious financial player told me how he had spent 20 years helping build a company; then the private-equity people moved in and told him he wouldn’t get a penny because he had put no money in. “They were saying all you need to make money is money – you can forget about the decades of work that went in before they even joined the party. They were arrogant beyond belief.”

This reductionism is perhaps the most dangerous assumption of the Age of Entitlement. Money, as Bob Dylan sagely observed, doesn’t talk, it swears, and for this swearing to be effective it must be embodied in an ethical, moral, political and social realm that cannot, in and of itself, be reduced to money. That realm is being eroded rapidly, not only by the entitled, but also by the craven worship of cash that now suffuses the culture. It is this that is successfully disseminating the depraved idea that merely to be rich is to be entitled. To sample the idea, go to the Rich Kids of Instagram tumblr, a website of images of the young wealthy swigging from magnums of champagne and posing next to private jets. The site’s tagline is, “They have more money than you and this is what they do.”

Taxation cannot change this, as the French are learning. The next crash might and several hundred – or several thousand – bankers in prison would help, as would the demolition of One Hyde Park to give us all a view of the green sward. What would definitely change the climate of entitlement would be a dismantling of its psychological basis, the mindset that has created a super-rich class with no allegiance, obligation or connection to wider society. The ears of the entitled need to be unstopped so that we can whisper to them, ever so gently, “If you’re rich be grateful and, here’s another great idea, earn it.”

newstatesman.com

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