Reiding…

I recently read an article that sparked me to think about how video games could use better market segmentation strategies. The article defines segmentation as follows:

“separating your customers into different groups according to how much they are willing to pay, and extracting the maximal consumer surplus from each customer.”

The video game industry historically does not have the varied strategies of selling their products in the same way the movie industry or book industry does. For a given movie, they have theater sales, DVD, Pay-per view, rentals and so on. Books have the books itself and audio versions. For videogames we pretty much sell it once and that’s it. I don’t think we receive revenue from used game sales or rentals. I lump digital distribution and retail sales as one because the user experiences the game in the same way. In contrast with movies, people experience the content in vastly different ways with theater, DVD and broadcast delivery mechanisms.

I’m growing impatient with the industry continually creating games that are much to long for their own good, often damaging to the overall quality of the game experience because the game has to be padded with extra content to meet some arbitrary requirement for length of gameplay experience. I long for a game much like Full Throttle or Portal where it’s about 2hrs long to play through. Admittedly, Full Throttle and Portal took me at least 4 hours to play, but they are the closest example I have to what I’m looking for. My responsibilities and interests (such as writing articles like this one) do not allow me to sit for hours on end to play, let alone finish epic games of 10+ hours. These days, a game that is advertised as being more than 20+ hours really turns me off.

In an effort to introduce some ideas for market segmentation (focusing on singleplayer games) and satisfying my desire for much shorter games I propose the following various “packages” of games:

$30 - Core Experience Package

Contains the 2hr core gameplay experience package. No extra collectible items (t-shirt, art book, etc) or downloadable content access codes.

$60 - Extended Experience Package

This is more like the current offerings of games, like Halo3, GTA IV or Gears of War 2. The overall story and progression is the same, you even get to see all the same enemies, locations, characters, weapons, power-ups, etc that the Core Experience Package has but everything is longer. The battles are extended to include more waves. The cinematics may have extra scenes that provide extra context. Think of this as equivalent to a movies’ “Director’s Cut”. It’s the same overall experience but with more of it.

$80 - Collectors Extended Experience Package

Same as the $60 Extended Experience Package, but includes the extra collectible items, like the art book, toy figures, strategy guide, t-shirt, or access code for one piece of downloadable content.

$100 - Lifetime Collectors Extended Experience Package

Includes everything from the $80 Collectors Extended Experience Package plus lifetime access to ALL future downloadable content at no extra cost.

$20 - Lifetime DLC Package (Note: DLC = downloadable content)

Includes lifetime access to all DLC at no additional cost.

Players could combine packages, such as the Lifetime DLC Package and the Core Experience Package, totaling $50. Still cheaper than the $60 Extended Experience Package. Or if they are a light fan of the game they only have to pay $30 for the Core Experience and then maybe one or two DLC offerings, if that.

Personally, I don’t think I’d ever go pay for more than the $30 Core Experience but I do know people that I suspect would even go for the $100 package. Despite my confidence there are some important open questions I have:

1. In what ways can the Extended Experience game be different from the Core Experience game without Core players feeling like they are missing out on the overall experience? You can’t risk leaving out a cinematic or gameplay mission that core players feel would hurt their experience.

2. Do players see any value to the price points? How much could one person spend if they paid for all DLC separately? Does the Lifetime DLC package potentially save them money?

What about you, do you see potential for this idea or do prefer to see it die in a fiery death? Any suggestions for improvement?

For almost every game I have worked on I have had my teammates sign a box with their autographs. With Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, it was no different, except for the fact that we were running out of room for people’s signatures. Check it out below, clicking the “thumb” will bring up a 200+KB (1280×866).jpg. If you want, check out the 3324×2249 large one (1MB .jpg) or ask me for the 20MB .tif version.

Starkiller Force Pushes autographs into your FACE!

The crazy thing is… this might be half of who worked on the game. It was great to be able to spend one last evening with many of the folks I worked with 2 years on the game. The following day the movers came and loaded all my furniture on to a truck. Now I am in Eugene, OR working for Buzz Monkey as a game designer on <censored>!

Cheers!

There’s a problem with crediting standards in the videogames industry… we don’t have one. After reading about a recent situation I remembered I was left out of the credits of Sin Episodes. Officially, I wasn’t working on the project but I did contribute dialog for a phone message players can listen to in game. If I recall correctly, some panicked guy says he has stolen documents from a major pharmaceutical which implicates them in a big scandal related to deaths of their users. He says, that big pharma can’t be trusted and they aren’t in the business to help you get better but actually sicker so they can sell more drugs. Then you hear the door being busted in and he’s frantically screaming “they’re here”, oh no and then gun shots ring out and the line goes dead.

I thought this contribution to Sin Episodes fit really well within the fiction of the world and left an open hook for future episodes to latch on to. It was also really personal for me, as when I was younger, I took Accutane to help with my acne, which it did, but it destroyed my immune sys and in 1997 I was diagnosed with Crohn’s. Enough of that, my point is, I put something personal into a game and wasn’t credited for it. It’s partially my fault. I was upset when I didn’t see my name in the credits, but I didn’t speak up. Let this be a lesson to all you young game developers, if there’s a crediting problem, do speak up. You’ll be proud for standing up for yourself.

The other thing I want to mention is, as an industry, we need to band together and take credits more seriously. I mean the actual credits in a game. Take the time to read them in the manual or watch them scroll during the game. You might be surprised to see many old friends pop-up or new pals you met at GDC. Here’s another thought, why don’t we as an industry make achievements and trophies, etc, to reward people who do go through the credits… to the very end? I should be securing a new job soon and I’ll push for this at my new gig, who’s with me?

I wonder about the value of selling a game to your audience via the technology it uses. I’ve been reading feedback on the Force Unleashed demo and many people confuse the middleware technologies we used in the game. They’ll call Euphoria the “Euphoria Engine” that handles AI and material physics. Not entirely true. Euphoria only handles a small part of AI behaviors, it doesn’t deal with attacking, defending or pathfinding. It’s used mostly to react to damage and physical forces inflicted on them or to jump out of the way of oncoming hazards for example.

I don’t blame the players for being incorrect, it’s really difficult to keep all of this technical information straight. Is it worthwhile to include technology related information in communications with players? What might be better is to describe and show the experiences possible in a game but leave out the technology that makes this happen. I think at the end of the day, while players may get some satisfaction from being able to talk the talk, what they ultimately care about is walking the walk, i.e. playing the game and enjoying it for what it is.

Gold members of XBox Live can download the XBox 360 version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. This is the game I worked on for two years while at LucasArts. I am quite happy with how the demo turned out, proud of my contributions as well as everyone else’s. We all had lots of challenges to overcome but the demo speaks for itself that some amazingly talented and dedicated people helped make it happen.

I didn’t expect to see the Grip Tutorial in it, but it makes sense. I contributed significantly to the gamepay scripting for that, along with another gameplay programmer, game designer, artists, voice actors, sound designers and… yeah, it’s amazing the amount of work and collaboration that goes into a tightly focused tutorial level like that.

Here’s hoping SW:TFU brings lots of joy and excitement to others when the full game comes out this September 16th, 2008.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed demo will hit Xbox Live and Playstation Network this Thursday, August 21st. I and everyone else that worked on it are proud of what we accomplished. Here’s hoping everyone else enjoys it.

I learned about a series of torture flash simulators from watercoolergames.com and read the MSNBC article linked from there. The last line of the 2 page article says, “I think it’s merely a reflection of our sick, sick, sick times.”

While it is true that we do live in sick times full of sick people in power who spin the truth and pretend that they aren’t torturing when they are… I have to wonder if a simulator like this could have been just as popular in any other time in our history. You know the saying, “boys will be boys” meaning that there are certain things boys have always liked or ways they will always behave. When I talk to young boys, violence and blood are “COOL!” and that’s it. They aren’t sick people, I’m sure when I was younger, I was enthused by violence, decapitations and water fountains of blood. I remember playing Space Quest III, cutting myself on some metal and blood sprung from my character like a powerful water fountain. That was “COOl!” I thought at the time. Now, I’ll chuckle about it for the cartoony-absurdity of it all, but it isn’t cool in the same way.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, that even though we’ve never seen a torture simulator before it shouldn’t be surprising that people actually want to experience it.

There was a lot of interest at the 2008 Game Developers Conference regarding creating videogames for social good, explore human themes or that at least are embedded with something important to say. I’m really happy to see this because it’s a goal of mine to create games around social issues that inspire people to take action.

Related to that, Philip Zimbardo (social psychologist of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment) is interviewed on Wired.com about his work and his theories as to why good people can become evil and treat others inhumanely. He says during the interview, “But once I switched to being the prison superintendent, I was a different person. It’s hard to believe that, but I was transformed.”

Here’s something to think about. I do believe videogames can be used to transform people, help them to be more open to different ideas and possibilities, to be more tolerant, and accepting of others. That’s all fine and dandy, but if I believe that to be true for the positive side of videogames, shouldn’t I be able to admit that videogames can do the same for the negative side? If videogames can make people more tolerant of others, can’t they also have the power to make people less tolerant?

It’s a scary thought, because, as creators of the most immersive and potentially most influential medium yet, we have a great responsibility not to screw things up for everyone else.