“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?

xbox 360 achievement unlocked for president elect barack obama

A friend sent this image around and after I finished laughing, it made me wonder how many games have featured a positive African American role model as a playable character? My friend suggested two games, Shadow Man and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I haven’t played either of them but after doing a bit of research on the less familiar game of Shadow Man, I’m not confident these are games that depict the kind of positive role model I am thinking of.

What about you? Can you name any playable characters that are African American and positive role models? I loosely define a positive role model as someone who inspires someone else to be a better person.

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!

NOTE: The following has other questions and responses removed for the sake of keeping this shorter.

JT: Okay, so now they’ve got a better idea. How do they put it into effect, if it’s not already built into the structure of the game?

WW: …they can now have an intelligent debate about how they think it differs from the way the world really works.

JT: I agree with you. But, again I’m eager to understand how learning to be good at a game makes you good at life, makes you good at changing the world, and gives you skills that are going to allow you to reinvent your environment. Because, in the game, you play against an environment that’s been given to you.

WW: I don’t think of games as something to replace traditional education… If you can spark an interest in a kid, then you just have to get out of the way.

JT: I keep thinking about the generation that’s getting exposed to all this wonderful, rich opportunity of game-playing as education, and that they expect to be able to manipulate the real world the way they do the game world. How do we bridge that? How do we turn them into socially functioning members of humanity on one planet?

WW: It’s funny, because I think they are able, more and more, to manipulate the real world like the game world. If you look at the tools that they have available on their cell phones, Google Maps, and such, the amount of formalized information that we can extract from the world around us is skyrocketing. And it’s very much based upon things like game interfaces.

Here he doesn’t answer the question. I think this is a very important question developers of social issue games are trying to answer. How do we make a game that motivates people to affect change in the real world?

JT: Right. But this takes me back to what we’re doing as we use games to study evolution. I mean, are you, Will, the great Pied Piper who is leading our kids into a future where they will accept enhanced attributes in, or on, their own bodies and give up some of the biological aspects of humans as we know them now? Are you leading the way to the singularity?

WW: Well, as I said, if there’s one aspect of humanity that I want to augment, it’s the imagination, which is probably our most powerful cognitive tool…

A different but equally important question Jill asks, is basically, what do our games say to people? It’s a bit of a stretch to assume Spore is trying to get people to buy into the idea of the Singularity. Yet, it is important to be aware of the possible ways our games can be interpreted by everyone. Something I don’t particularly enjoy is that most of the games I play and develop basically say that violence solves everything. I don’t personally believe in that and wish more games had a different message.

Back to how to get players to affect change in the real world. Without making games that are directly tied to our environmental, political and economic systems a game has to make players care about the issue and motivate them to get involved directly. There’s a five step process explained in Made to Stick that has influenced my approach to social issue games. Make players:

1. Pay attention

2. Understand and remember the issue

3. Agree/believe it

4. Care about it

5. Be able to act on it

Biggest challenge is getting players to care about it, step 4. That’s why I believe character driven games can help, because with relateable characters players can empathize with them and understand the situation more.

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 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.

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.

There a many sports videogames, Skate, Madden, Need for Speed but few have engaging storylines. Why not create a story mode for Madden and give it an engaging narrative treatment that transcends the value we currently give to sports videogames?

Rudy! How could I forget Rudy.