Looking at this year's GDC sessions what impress people most? Everyone will tell you it's social games. When you search "social games" at the GDC website, you will find 115 sessions, 52 speakers and 16 exhibitors. All the phenomenon shows that social games is a huge success in last year. There are bunch of reasons makes social game so popular and everyone holds his/her own opinion, but how social games make money? For games on facebook, there's only one answer: Micro Transaction (MTX).
MTX are financial transactions involving very small sums of money. In game marketing, it means player spend small amounts of money, like 5 or 10 dollars, to buy some game points, and use these game points to trade for virtual items. These virtual items could make you level up faster, decorate your virtual represent - like avatar, home, etc - to make you more special . In a word, you can get some special things by paying and these stuff could not been achieved by normal playing. Because of MTX get very little money and the payback is obviously noticeable, it's a really easy decision for player to make.
For most of the social games, MTX mostly affect the game play positively. Because these kind of social games are casual and non-competitive, so player buy MTX items to improve their own avatar, decorate their own house/farm/restaurant and to send gift.
But considering a MMORPG(multi-player online role playing game), especially, a PVP(player VS player) MMORPG, what would happen when player could get MTX items. In MMORPG, the possible MTX item should have the following functions: 1) to help level up easily. 2) to be powerful weapon. 3) can provide special effect. But these items are really easy to ruin the balance of the game, destroy the fair game environment and ruin the virtual game society.
That doesn’t mean for MMORPG, MTX items could not survive in a fair game. Actually in Asia it’s almost a common sense that most online games are free to play, and players need to pay for the additional value of the game. But there’s several way to control the impact of the MTX items. For Maple Story as example, the MTX item is mostly like assistance: the pet which could help you pick up items; the shop allows you to trade with players; or ability to not lose experience points while being killed. So these kinds of items give players more convenience but for the really power and level of the character, it’s almost still the same. So even players without the items could still enjoy the game in full experience, just lack some level of the convenience.
That comes to the question “what would be the game moment that players are willing to take out their credit card?”, or “which kind of the MTX items are the one people would like to buy mostly?” In general, if a player is just a little bit far away from the point of “success” - the definition of the success could be reach another level, finish some epic building or finish one quest – player would be very glad to buy something just to reach the point. It also satisfied the desire to success without feel painful of the money. One other part is to “train player to be lazy”, game could design some small annoy tricks purposely, and player could use the MTX item to get convenience. Once the player’s get used to the item and don’t want to be bothered anymore, they would like to pay for keeping the convenience.
But there’s also some strange phenomenon which is worth to think about, and this question bothers me a long time. A huge successful MMORPG in China named “Long Journey”, announce itself as the game for “RMB players”. That means, the more money player paid in the game, the more fun and enjoyment he could get. Players who buy powerful weapon could easily kill the guy working hard to level up. Player also could pay to get some special right in the certain city. If he’s rich enough, he could become a land master and hire other players to work for him.
In that situation, the player who could afford the high spent in the game, we can consider him already a successful person in the real world. So what’s the motivation for him to make another similar success in game again? Is it really meaningful to map the real life into a virtual world?
To answer that question, maybe we need to think back to a basic question first - What is the biggest mental desire everyone has? The answer is the feeling of importance. A feeling of importance can be represented by a feeling of achievement, success, being listened to, opinions being appreciated by others. For those people who achieved success in real life usually have a stronger need to feel importance than others. So if they start playing game, they still could not give up this psychological desire, especially when they are aware of the other characters they meet in the virtual game world are real person. In that case they would really willing to pay “money”, what they already earned a lot, instead of “time/effort”, which they might be probably lack of, to defeat other player in some certain level. And, for those people who have a lot of time, they could play the game to earn money! What an attractive deal. So this situation explains why the game which leans so over to the MTX still makes a huge success and earns a lot.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy and self-supporting system. In long term, if the game fails to attract these rich people, it would lose the main incoming resource. And if the non-RMB players feel the world is too unfair to keep playing, they would also leave. So how to keep the satisfaction balance between the RMB and non-RMB player is another tough problem to think about.
In conclusion, MTX could only affect the casual social game in positive way, but it’s way more complicated in games contains competition and challenge. How to balance the impact of MTX items, how to make them really important to players so they would be willing to buy, but for those who just want to enjoy the “play” of the game, to try to keep them stay in the game without making them feeling unfair, is something critical to consider in designing the whole system.
2010-02-17
What is a game and what makes a game good
This is a topic everyone can talk a lot about. This is a question no one can answer perfectly. It's easy to come up with thousands of game examples, and each of the examples reveals several elements a game would have, but there would still be a lot more. In this essay I would only talk about my personal opinion of what is a game and what are the elements that make up a good game.
To me, a game is an entertaining interactivity which has some rules to reach a goal, and this goal is not relevant to players' real life.
First, a game should be an activity audience or player can participate in. The user/audience/player can contribute effort to change the process and the output of a game. It differs game from other entertainment like movie, music or book.
Second, a game must provide some kind of entertainment. For players while playing the game, they should feel enjoyable, relax or achievement. Player should get any kind of satisfactions from playing a game. From shooting/fighting games player can relief the pressure, from role play games player can enjoy stories, from racing games player can get the excitement of speed, from puzzle games player could enjoy the self evaluation and satisfactions of the wisdom, from simulation/raising games player can enjoy the achievements. These are typical elements for typical game types, actually when take a close look at individual games, each game could provide some of the combination of these entertaining elements, which guarantees to attract player to join the game.
Third, a game must have some rules to obey. There's something you can do in the game, and there must be something you cannot do. Rule makes the game more challenging and interesting. Also rules can help player focus on the goal of the game, and would not get attracted by something not relevant at all.
That comes the forth point, a game should have a goal which would not affect the real life. Without a goal, player would lose interest very easily and get confused, which also make no sense for player to participate in. Some people might argue with games like Sims seems doesn't have a goal at all. Actually the goal of Sims is just not that obvious, but you still need to raise a person, make him/her live good and grow up well. These trivial elements are still goals of the game. Some people would argue another point of the goal should not affect the real life. They would say while playing gambling games people would take the risk of losing money which might affect the real life. But my point is, even without gambling with money, these games are still game. The gambling events are just the adds-on of the game, but not the elements of it.
So, with the definition of game, it's easy to think about which kind of elements could help to make up a good game.
For the interactive part, the more player can control, and the stronger player's participation would affect the game, the more player would eager to enjoy. That's why some open environment role play games are very successful. The designer should do the indirect control but it really would be appreciated that players have the feeling of control their own life.
For the entertaining part, of course traditional entertainment way could help a lot. Some jokes and tricks; a good background theme, a nice story, etc. Also the art style and quality would affect a lot of how good the game could be.
For the rule, the game balance should be very important for all the kinds of games. For FPS and RPG games, if the enemies are too strong players would be easy to get depressed, but if it's too easy then players are easy to get boring. It's even more important for multiplayer games because the unbalance system would make player feel unfair and not willing to return anymore.
For the goal, it's hard to define which kind of goal is good, but in my opinion, we need a goal in the game but it would be better that the goal is hiding in some place waiting for player to find out. It depends on different type of games, but it's true that people would be more happy if they feel like it's their ability to find out the goal and solve the problems.
To me, a game is an entertaining interactivity which has some rules to reach a goal, and this goal is not relevant to players' real life.
First, a game should be an activity audience or player can participate in. The user/audience/player can contribute effort to change the process and the output of a game. It differs game from other entertainment like movie, music or book.
Second, a game must provide some kind of entertainment. For players while playing the game, they should feel enjoyable, relax or achievement. Player should get any kind of satisfactions from playing a game. From shooting/fighting games player can relief the pressure, from role play games player can enjoy stories, from racing games player can get the excitement of speed, from puzzle games player could enjoy the self evaluation and satisfactions of the wisdom, from simulation/raising games player can enjoy the achievements. These are typical elements for typical game types, actually when take a close look at individual games, each game could provide some of the combination of these entertaining elements, which guarantees to attract player to join the game.
Third, a game must have some rules to obey. There's something you can do in the game, and there must be something you cannot do. Rule makes the game more challenging and interesting. Also rules can help player focus on the goal of the game, and would not get attracted by something not relevant at all.
That comes the forth point, a game should have a goal which would not affect the real life. Without a goal, player would lose interest very easily and get confused, which also make no sense for player to participate in. Some people might argue with games like Sims seems doesn't have a goal at all. Actually the goal of Sims is just not that obvious, but you still need to raise a person, make him/her live good and grow up well. These trivial elements are still goals of the game. Some people would argue another point of the goal should not affect the real life. They would say while playing gambling games people would take the risk of losing money which might affect the real life. But my point is, even without gambling with money, these games are still game. The gambling events are just the adds-on of the game, but not the elements of it.
So, with the definition of game, it's easy to think about which kind of elements could help to make up a good game.
For the interactive part, the more player can control, and the stronger player's participation would affect the game, the more player would eager to enjoy. That's why some open environment role play games are very successful. The designer should do the indirect control but it really would be appreciated that players have the feeling of control their own life.
For the entertaining part, of course traditional entertainment way could help a lot. Some jokes and tricks; a good background theme, a nice story, etc. Also the art style and quality would affect a lot of how good the game could be.
For the rule, the game balance should be very important for all the kinds of games. For FPS and RPG games, if the enemies are too strong players would be easy to get depressed, but if it's too easy then players are easy to get boring. It's even more important for multiplayer games because the unbalance system would make player feel unfair and not willing to return anymore.
For the goal, it's hard to define which kind of goal is good, but in my opinion, we need a goal in the game but it would be better that the goal is hiding in some place waiting for player to find out. It depends on different type of games, but it's true that people would be more happy if they feel like it's their ability to find out the goal and solve the problems.
2010-01-14
Innovation VS Polish
There is a very strong relationship between innovation and polish. Creative ideas need to be polished, and when designers are polishing their products, they want to do it creatively. It would be ideal if both of these aspects could be done perfectly, but apparently, nothing can be perfect. So if we have to make a choice, what should we pay more attention to?
A lot of people would choose innovation instinctively, because they believe innovation is the spirit of games. But in real life, whether a game is good enough not only depends on the spirit, sometimes the appearance is even more important. Just like a person, no matter how kind or smart you are, if you cannot show that to people, it's still hard to make other people like you.
When people first start thinking about game design, the first idea that jumps into their mind is, "I want to create some fun stuff that no one has ever thought about before!" and when people come to judge a game, they will always ask, "Does this game provide an entirely new game mechanic that has never been seen in previous games?" This kind of common sense shows that we put too much focus on innovation in game design, but the fact is that in many cases it's the polish that improves an idea from average to good and from good to awesome.
In reality, "PURE" innovation doesn’t exist in game design. We don’t lack for ideas, but if you look closely enough at the ideas we do have you can always find something in it that existed before. The history of human beings playing games can be traced back thousands of years ago. That means that millions of ideas have already been thought up. So don't force yourself to think hard about what has never existed and get discouraged when you fail in that.
Instead, let's pay more attention on how to polish an existing idea. Don't think it's easy. There are a lot examples to show that even if you have a great idea, if you fail to execute it well people will fail to see how good your idea is. They will lose patience on keep exploring. Think about how painful it could be if the graphics are poor, or the balance is off, or-the worst case scenario-the game just keeps crashing. As a player, would you keep playing a game that is plagued with those problems, or would you rather change to another game that you are already familiar with, but still can entertain you without a problem?
Besides, to be effective at polishing ideas, innovation is also important. Just think about how many improvements designers made in these series: Sims 1,2,3; Warcraft 1,2,3; Need for Speed 1-13; FIFA; NBA, etc. The later generations of course inherit some similar game mechanics, some traditional UI design, and some familiar stories. But what makes people keep trying each new generation and having fun with them? It's the new features added in, better visual enjoyment, and fewer bugs. These changes cannot be defined as revolutionary, but definitely can be said to be innovative polish, and the innovative polish makes sure the new generation is better and still can succeed.
Thinking about the current situation in the industry, there are two very different kinds of developers; varying in how much value they place on innovation or polish. Most of the designers focusing on innovation work in the indie game market while those with an eye for polish design larger titles in big companies. Young people find it easy to adore these indie gamers because they feel more like cowboys, full of adventurousness, willing to sacrifice, and eager to challenge authority. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing and the industry definitely needs this fresh input. But still, for the huge amount of players, they need someone to make sure that after they pay upwards of sixty dollars to buy a game, they get an enjoyable experience that’s worth the money.
So please don't only compliment the few innovation geniuses who bring you whole new gaming experiences. Those unnamed designers who make mature games that are full of rich elements and really enjoyable to play, they also deserve applause.
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