Barrier to the Big Games
In 1997, with the advent of Ultima Online, the games became much larger. In 1999, the scale of games again increased significantly after the release of Everquest . It has become possible to build complex social relationships in the virtual space and even have a virtual job that gives more income than the “real” (This is me, “Lee”, in the 2000 article ).
Then, the upper boundary again skyrocketed with the release of two games in 2003: EVE Online from CCP and World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment. Both of these games became the benchmark of the “Big” game in our industry, and they all continued to grow bigger. But then a strange thing happened.
Nothing has happened.
')
The arena of the “big” games has turned into a real Alley of the Damned, strewn with fiasco applicants. Millions of dollars went down the drain in this battle, and investors panicked. There were only a few exceptions that managed to stay afloat, such as City of Heroes from Cryptic Studio (NCSoft) and Final Fantasy XI from Square Enix. Applicants who believe that their game should be even bigger, even bigger, awaited a terrible and terrible death in the market. I could name the names, but I don’t think that a few pages dotted with a listing of lost billions of investments would be appropriate here.
I'd better tell you a secret that I have been keeping for several years. The point is not to scale.
The thing is in the Capital .
When you put a lock on the door in your house, you do it not only for the sake of protecting your life, you also want to save your belongings. Both have value for you, which has grown during the time you live. When you call the police, they come to help you protect your capital, and possibly other people's capital. This is how our society works, and this is how we learned from the moment when we first learned to say “this is mine.”
We often describe this in games as “constancy,” but in fact we always talk about capital. If I reached the tenth level, I left the game and when I returned the next day I found my tenth level intact - my capital was saved. My labors were not lost. If I go out with a hundred coins and return to them myself, my capital is again saved.
This is the reason why everyone is afraid of the terrible "server rollback." The point is not that the player is frightened by the idea of ​​re-passing some part of the game. League of Legends players play the same characters every day again and again. But in the rollback is lost capital. That is what makes it so painful.
Similarly, if you are the only owner of a horse in the virtual world, this horse has an incredible value because of its rarity. If once you come in and discover that because of a bug or an exploit, a half thousand people now own horses too, then your horse’s value has become almost negligible. I explain this in more detail in my article Mona Lisa and the Alchemist . Thus, despite the fact that nothing happened to my property, I experienced a catastrophic loss of capital. I will be unhappy! I can even give up the game.
What if I spent three months mining an in-game horse, and then a few days later I discovered that the other players were also in possession of horses? But this did not happen because of the bug, but because the developers decided that the horses are cool and the players are ready to pay real money for them. I also write about this in the mentioned article . Now the horses are not cool at all and my capital has been destroyed. I am not satisfied! More importantly, now I have lost faith in the game world and its creators, because I know that they will not protect my efforts. It's like calling the police (the people you pay for protection), and they come and rob you! I know that in some parts of our planet this really happens, but this is not what you want in your game.
Thus, all micropayments that sell game content destroy capital at the same time . This refers to everything that is usually “earned” in a game, whether it be levels, things, or titles.
When the game loses freshness and the development team decides to release an add-on, the emergence of new things provides new opportunities for capital accumulation. It's good. When the same addition makes previously valuable items worthless, it destroys capital. If it took me a thousand hours to get the best sword in the game, and thanks to the new addition, you can get an even cooler sword in a hundred hours - I just lost capital. And although usually adding a new one to the game is a good change, such dynamics can be insidious, and designers who are unaware of this may even finish off their game with new additions.
Another way to destroy capital in games is to divide resources into "levels." If to create the coolest items in your game, you need only “top grade” resources, then you basically deliberately destroyed the capital of all lower levels. This upsets the players. This design was copied from Everquest to World of Warcraft and even to Guild Wars 2 a decade later, despite the presence of an economist on the development team.
So how do you create a gaming economy without these errors? Glad you asked!
In EVE Online, the simplest and most common resource is tritanium. It never becomes obsolete, it just needs more as the game progresses. Your tritanium never loses value, so even after ten years your capital in the game is saved. The main source of capital loss is the exit of supplements, but usually this is the most pleasant type of loss. The right game design is the reason EVE is the only game in the world that can boast that in the last ten years it has only become more.
It's all about capital, baby.
The only sad thing is that, despite all the players' motivation to spend thousands of dollars a year on the game, CCP never created a monetization model that would collect this money. They tried to add micropayments, but that didn't work for the reasons mentioned above. The emergence of PLEX was the second attempt to introduce micropayments, but in reality one source of income (players buying PLEX) had a bad effect on another source of income (the players most willing to pay now played for free).
World of Warcraft was another game that did everything right, because in 2003 it started with a weak economy. Why is it good? Because a weak economy is much better than its absence, as was the case with competitors (with the exception of EVE ). The inclusion of a well-designed auction and a tolerable crafting system was a big step forward for the MMORPG genre. The players literally spent days at the auction ignoring everything else in the game, because, in their opinion, this was the best part of the game.
Blizzard's weak economy and the inability to completely monetize demand led to the fact that enterprising third parties began to profit from WoW . For example, IGE managed to bring a lot of trouble and at the same time earned billions of dollars that could go to Blizzard. The spectacle of all this money disappearing in vain and the opportunists who littered the game chat with their advertisements was traumatic enough for me to become an applied virtual economist specializing in the search for countermeasures.
The industry as a whole reacted differently. In the absence of these countermeasures, the companies either tried to copy WoW (waste of money), or introduced monetization models with micropayments (to remove intermediaries), or simply stopped making “Big” games.
Micropayments, as I said, destroy capital and thus quickly shorten the life of gaming products. Unlimited subscriptions used in WoW , encourage "the game avidly", which again reduces the lifespan of the product due to the fact that players quickly consume all game content. The solution in the form of frequent patches and add-ons is practical only if you already have a large number of players. Due to the fact that WoW was allowed to grow for so long without any serious competition, it has become a real monster of game content, with which new products simply do not have a chance to compete using the same mechanisms.
The wholesale desire to abandon the Big Games did not appear due to technical or budgetary constraints. It came about because of the limitations of monetization models that set the size limit for games. I love big games, I can not deny. The thought of a very, very BIG game makes me sweat and reflexively get my wallet. I know that I'm not the only one. Therefore, everything that I have done since 2005 in the field of virtual economy was aimed at eliminating these systemic large-scale restrictions.
In the meantime, several smaller smaller games were released, which experimented in attempts to circumvent the limitations of subscription and micro-payment models. In particular, World of Tanks and League of Legends avoided the dangerous pay-win trap using the original hybrid model, which I wrote about in my article Supremacy Goods .
Of the two models, I prefer the model in World of Tanks , because it allows users to build capital while they are moving along the tank tree. League of Legends is less worried about the loss of capital when selling game content, because capital is poorly expressed in the design of the game. Although the simplicity of the LoL design reduces the entry threshold for casual players, it also limits the depth of possible monetization and opens the way for competitors. One of the most important limitations of WoT design, in my opinion, is the lack of gender neutrality in the game.
Speaking of competition, I can't help but remember that Marvel Heroes is coming out this week. The game is essentially Diablo 2/3 with a wide range of superhero avatars that are sold according to the monetization model of almost identical LoL . The game is bigger and allows the accumulation of capital in the form of levels and equipment, and therefore, although it is still simple in terms of the virtual economy, it is still much deeper than LoL or WoT . It is not based on PvP, which may alienate some users, but most likely will attract as many or more people among those who like a single or cooperative game.
In addition to the games mentioned, I got a momentary pleasure from the scale of Guild Wars 2 . The gameplay was amazing, but, as I said in my short review of its economy, the concept of capital was poorly implemented in almost every reward mechanism, turning the economy into a burden for gameplay and, ultimately, monetization.
Then, the upper boundary again skyrocketed with the release of two games in 2003: EVE Online from CCP and World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment. Both of these games became the benchmark of the “Big” game in our industry, and they all continued to grow bigger. But then a strange thing happened.
Nothing has happened.
')
The arena of the “big” games has turned into a real Alley of the Damned, strewn with fiasco applicants. Millions of dollars went down the drain in this battle, and investors panicked. There were only a few exceptions that managed to stay afloat, such as City of Heroes from Cryptic Studio (NCSoft) and Final Fantasy XI from Square Enix. Applicants who believe that their game should be even bigger, even bigger, awaited a terrible and terrible death in the market. I could name the names, but I don’t think that a few pages dotted with a listing of lost billions of investments would be appropriate here.
I'd better tell you a secret that I have been keeping for several years. The point is not to scale.
The thing is in the Capital .
The role of Capital in games
When you put a lock on the door in your house, you do it not only for the sake of protecting your life, you also want to save your belongings. Both have value for you, which has grown during the time you live. When you call the police, they come to help you protect your capital, and possibly other people's capital. This is how our society works, and this is how we learned from the moment when we first learned to say “this is mine.”
We often describe this in games as “constancy,” but in fact we always talk about capital. If I reached the tenth level, I left the game and when I returned the next day I found my tenth level intact - my capital was saved. My labors were not lost. If I go out with a hundred coins and return to them myself, my capital is again saved.
This is the reason why everyone is afraid of the terrible "server rollback." The point is not that the player is frightened by the idea of ​​re-passing some part of the game. League of Legends players play the same characters every day again and again. But in the rollback is lost capital. That is what makes it so painful.
Similarly, if you are the only owner of a horse in the virtual world, this horse has an incredible value because of its rarity. If once you come in and discover that because of a bug or an exploit, a half thousand people now own horses too, then your horse’s value has become almost negligible. I explain this in more detail in my article Mona Lisa and the Alchemist . Thus, despite the fact that nothing happened to my property, I experienced a catastrophic loss of capital. I will be unhappy! I can even give up the game.
How we underestimate capital
What if I spent three months mining an in-game horse, and then a few days later I discovered that the other players were also in possession of horses? But this did not happen because of the bug, but because the developers decided that the horses are cool and the players are ready to pay real money for them. I also write about this in the mentioned article . Now the horses are not cool at all and my capital has been destroyed. I am not satisfied! More importantly, now I have lost faith in the game world and its creators, because I know that they will not protect my efforts. It's like calling the police (the people you pay for protection), and they come and rob you! I know that in some parts of our planet this really happens, but this is not what you want in your game.
Thus, all micropayments that sell game content destroy capital at the same time . This refers to everything that is usually “earned” in a game, whether it be levels, things, or titles.
When the game loses freshness and the development team decides to release an add-on, the emergence of new things provides new opportunities for capital accumulation. It's good. When the same addition makes previously valuable items worthless, it destroys capital. If it took me a thousand hours to get the best sword in the game, and thanks to the new addition, you can get an even cooler sword in a hundred hours - I just lost capital. And although usually adding a new one to the game is a good change, such dynamics can be insidious, and designers who are unaware of this may even finish off their game with new additions.
Another way to destroy capital in games is to divide resources into "levels." If to create the coolest items in your game, you need only “top grade” resources, then you basically deliberately destroyed the capital of all lower levels. This upsets the players. This design was copied from Everquest to World of Warcraft and even to Guild Wars 2 a decade later, despite the presence of an economist on the development team.
So how do you create a gaming economy without these errors? Glad you asked!
Games that did everything right
In EVE Online, the simplest and most common resource is tritanium. It never becomes obsolete, it just needs more as the game progresses. Your tritanium never loses value, so even after ten years your capital in the game is saved. The main source of capital loss is the exit of supplements, but usually this is the most pleasant type of loss. The right game design is the reason EVE is the only game in the world that can boast that in the last ten years it has only become more.
It's all about capital, baby.
The only sad thing is that, despite all the players' motivation to spend thousands of dollars a year on the game, CCP never created a monetization model that would collect this money. They tried to add micropayments, but that didn't work for the reasons mentioned above. The emergence of PLEX was the second attempt to introduce micropayments, but in reality one source of income (players buying PLEX) had a bad effect on another source of income (the players most willing to pay now played for free).
World of Warcraft was another game that did everything right, because in 2003 it started with a weak economy. Why is it good? Because a weak economy is much better than its absence, as was the case with competitors (with the exception of EVE ). The inclusion of a well-designed auction and a tolerable crafting system was a big step forward for the MMORPG genre. The players literally spent days at the auction ignoring everything else in the game, because, in their opinion, this was the best part of the game.
Blizzard's weak economy and the inability to completely monetize demand led to the fact that enterprising third parties began to profit from WoW . For example, IGE managed to bring a lot of trouble and at the same time earned billions of dollars that could go to Blizzard. The spectacle of all this money disappearing in vain and the opportunists who littered the game chat with their advertisements was traumatic enough for me to become an applied virtual economist specializing in the search for countermeasures.
The industry as a whole reacted differently. In the absence of these countermeasures, the companies either tried to copy WoW (waste of money), or introduced monetization models with micropayments (to remove intermediaries), or simply stopped making “Big” games.
Micropayments, as I said, destroy capital and thus quickly shorten the life of gaming products. Unlimited subscriptions used in WoW , encourage "the game avidly", which again reduces the lifespan of the product due to the fact that players quickly consume all game content. The solution in the form of frequent patches and add-ons is practical only if you already have a large number of players. Due to the fact that WoW was allowed to grow for so long without any serious competition, it has become a real monster of game content, with which new products simply do not have a chance to compete using the same mechanisms.
"Big" battle
The wholesale desire to abandon the Big Games did not appear due to technical or budgetary constraints. It came about because of the limitations of monetization models that set the size limit for games. I love big games, I can not deny. The thought of a very, very BIG game makes me sweat and reflexively get my wallet. I know that I'm not the only one. Therefore, everything that I have done since 2005 in the field of virtual economy was aimed at eliminating these systemic large-scale restrictions.
In the meantime, several smaller smaller games were released, which experimented in attempts to circumvent the limitations of subscription and micro-payment models. In particular, World of Tanks and League of Legends avoided the dangerous pay-win trap using the original hybrid model, which I wrote about in my article Supremacy Goods .
Of the two models, I prefer the model in World of Tanks , because it allows users to build capital while they are moving along the tank tree. League of Legends is less worried about the loss of capital when selling game content, because capital is poorly expressed in the design of the game. Although the simplicity of the LoL design reduces the entry threshold for casual players, it also limits the depth of possible monetization and opens the way for competitors. One of the most important limitations of WoT design, in my opinion, is the lack of gender neutrality in the game.
Speaking of competition, I can't help but remember that Marvel Heroes is coming out this week. The game is essentially Diablo 2/3 with a wide range of superhero avatars that are sold according to the monetization model of almost identical LoL . The game is bigger and allows the accumulation of capital in the form of levels and equipment, and therefore, although it is still simple in terms of the virtual economy, it is still much deeper than LoL or WoT . It is not based on PvP, which may alienate some users, but most likely will attract as many or more people among those who like a single or cooperative game.
In addition to the games mentioned, I got a momentary pleasure from the scale of Guild Wars 2 . The gameplay was amazing, but, as I said in my short review of its economy, the concept of capital was poorly implemented in almost every reward mechanism, turning the economy into a burden for gameplay and, ultimately, monetization.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/189206/
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