What Went Wrong with Gaming?

I love video games they've been my main hobby for most of my life and now I make videos about video games which is great but recently I've been analyzing new games and critiquing new systems and I've noticed a slow but Insidious Trend toward games becoming more and more monetized but not fairly monetized anti-player monetized it's the feeling you get when you look at a battle pass in a game you've already paid full price for it's the tiny sliver of sadness when a game you want has different exclusive levels for different consoles and you'll know you'll never get to experience every part of that game now it's that cosmetic you want costing 1005 gems but the gems are sold in packs of 1004. it's the knowledge that year on year the micro transactions from FIFA Ultimate Team alone make more money than Elden Ring's entire sale run it's the unfortunate reality of gaming after the Marketing Executives took over and it's hard to explain exactly how or when it changed but explaining things is what I do so let's go back to the start of gaming and work out when this whole mess started and then I'll actually pinpoint the exact thing the specific design Choice which makes new games feel wrong welcome I'm Josh Drive Hayes let's work out what the hell went wrong with the monetization of gaming as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon Twitch and YouTube who keep the channel alive more information on how you can support at the end for now let's begin let's go back to the 1980s and early 1990s the video game Revolution was kicking off but home consoles weren't yet mainstream so we went to arcades you put your money in and play the game effectively making arcades the socially accepted pay to play model there's no denying arcades were bloody expensive I remember dropping way more than I should have done to complete Time Crisis but while this was expensive there was a very simple relationship between the game the money and the player pay money get access to the whole game Victory depends on your skill game designers knew it was a simple transaction and they knew someone would simply play as long as they were able to so they had to make the game hard so you would die more and so pay more this is why the turtles game had that underwater bit it's why House of the Dead bosses were damaged sponges it's why ghosts and goblins was everything that ghosts and goblins is in the early days of Home consoles when people would rent games we even call difficult levels Blockbuster levels designed to make the rental period longer and so you'd have to keep renewing it so why don't these money-hungry games make us feel the same way as modern money-hungry games well it's because the trade of money for game was simple and there was nothing Insidious about the transaction itself you knew what you were giving and you knew what you were getting and if you were to break down the design time of a game into a pie chart at that point it might look something like this story Graphics narrative connections between them mechanics marketing play testing and then how much a go at the arcade costs there was a lot going on in the development of a game at these times but it's all focused on making a game good because at that time good games make the most money when a company discovered a successful game they couldn't just augment the original with down loadable content or extra levels because that technology didn't exist yet they'd have to make a complete Sequel and so Gamers got more games jump forward to the mid-1990s the Home console Market had taken off you buy console you buy a game and then you play that game now the whole lives mechanic in games at this time was a holdover from the arcade design space and wasn't actually needed in home consoles because you didn't need the player to put more money in dying when you have three lives then restarting from your last save or just dying and restarting from the save anyway with no arbitrary life limit was functionally the same thing but design moves slowly away from the arcade model you no longer paid per play and you now paid per game and you then played as much as you wanted games were expensive of course but when you bought a game it was complete if it shipped with bugs it would just have bugs forever if it shipped with secret unlockable stuff it would have that forever when you owned the game you owned the ability to play as much as you want of the complete experience and this was a very simple and fair transaction while the arcade was here's a game pales to have a go the console was here's a game pay us to keep it and play it whenever but the home gaming scene wasn't just consoles it was also PCS now back then PC gaming wasn't as mainstream as it is today but it did come with one major advantage because the PC held a load of data files on its hard drive instead of just reading them from the disk or cart like a console developers could create additional content for a game and sell that like the incredible RPG balder's gate releasing in 1998 and then the multi-hour long expansion tales of the sword Coast in 1999. this was a time in gaming where developers could develop additional content but when they did it was usually a lot of content PC games saw expansion after expansion Morrowind seeing the tribunal and blood moon expansions Diablo 2 then the Lord Of Destruction expansion and all the extra modules for Neverwinter Knights this was additional content for a game without being a sequel but again Gamers didn't hate this because the transaction was very simple to understand and it felt fair you gave them money you got an experience designed to be the most fun it could possibly be the biggest difference in this era is there's no trickery you're not being manipulated it's just a straight up understandable product if we again take the idea of breaking down game development time into a pie chart you've probably got a few new bits to the pie by Now Magazine adverts and articles some TV ads and the arcade price replaced with a box price but it is still mostly make a good game and you will make good money then in 2004 online gaming really started to kick off with World of Warcraft being released but blizzard aren't the bad guys in this story at least not yet for now we need to look to the east to another popular online game from Korea called MapleStory now in Japan these small toy capsules gachapon had been popular for years you put money into a gachapon machine and get a random toy of varying Rarity these systems appeal to people who like collecting things and people who like random chance or mystery it's basically gambling on a rather inconsequential level but the psychology behind it is very very powerful so MapleStory introduced an in-game gachapon style system 100 yen got you a ticket for a random in-game item and many people consider this to be the first example of a random loot box but more importantly this was the first moment in mainstream video games where you could pay money and not know what you were getting you were no longer paying for the game or for an established product you were paying for the mystery the ephemeral moment of what if between purchase and eventual prize and this system made a lot of money because MapleStory was online and other people could see what you want so it was no longer about having the game and enjoying the game it was now about a sense of community and Prestige when you have something somebody else doesn't if you make your game multiplayer competition amongst players becomes a thing and there are a subset of players who enjoy being seen as the person with the best stuff and unlike real gachapon machines which were either a physical distance to traveled to or had a cue by them or sometimes just sold out virtual gachapon tickets were unlimited entirely within the company's control and could be bought constantly MapleStory already had the in-game items made so they were selling the excitement of chance and they were tapping into the collector and completionist mentality of many hardcore Gamers so game developers began to see they didn't actually need to sell a gaming experience anymore they could instead sell these small adrenaline Spike of potential this was a turning point a moment investors realized it was completely worthwhile to dedicate at least some game development time not to the game itself but to systems within the game designed simply to extract money from the player after they had started playing but without giving them a complete new game this is the first part of the puzzle for where we are today so let's put this idea of sell random chance into a little box a box of all the design tricks which don't favor the player or make the game necessarily any better a box of design tricks which don't make you think oh my God this is amazing I need to tell all my friends but instead use the game as a simple vehicle for additional monetization now the techniques in this box are not games themselves they cannot exist on their own they aren't symbiotic with a game because they don't enhance each other they are parasitic because they need the game to survive but don't necessarily improve it we'll call this box abusive monetization strategies or from or catchy title Pandora's box of bad design the main danger of this box is if we were to take the pie chart of game development time now knowing that this box exists and knowing the techniques inside it can make a decent amount of money the finance people know they need to find space for the techniques within this box somewhere on the pie chart which means something else must lose out jump forward two years to 2006 the Western gaming Market hasn't yet discovered the mass appeal and psychological dominance that loot boxes have but they have discovered something just as important Gamers will pay money to look different and it all kicks off with this stupid horse now I've made a complete video on the history of this horse but the short story is the Elder Scrolls Oblivion was a great game with some great DLC Knights of the nine and the Shivering Isles but you could also pay a few dollars to give your horse armor now it's important to understand this is completely cosmetic it doesn't actually make your horse any better in combat or defend it but you can buy it and people did in fact a lot of people bought it and this highlighted another thing making a game takes a long time but once the main game is made the development time it would take to make a cosmetic for that game is relatively short and that cosmetic can be sold for a small amount of money but it can be sold many many times the cost is micro but the sales volume is high hence micro transaction separate from the idea of a complete expansion which would expand a game and make the game experience bigger a micro transaction adds hardly anything beyond the original experience it's almost inconsequential but it's not free so now developers know expansions are a bit risky but microtransactions are very safe and very small even if they don't sell it's not a great waste of developer time so the focus shifted away from selling a main game with lots of expansions to selling the main game and then lots and lots and lots and lots of small additional things the problem with this is now developers had a vested interest in keeping the coolest Cosmetics or the most fun little things out of the base game and instead releasing them as additional microtransactions which is something we'll see happen more and more and this absolutely does not favor the player because it leads to an experience where you as a player even though you have bought the game when you sit down to play it you do not feel like you have access to the whole game because you don't it used to be you bought a game and got a game now it's you buy a game and you get the main framework which you need to pay pay more to flesh out so let's add sell small additions to your game as microtransactions to the box of abusive monetization strategies and as the Box grows so does the space it would need to take up on the game development pie now we head into 2009 to the rise of Facebook and one of the cornerstones of casual gaming and monetization progression Farmville Farmville was everywhere in the late 2000s made by Zynga and these guys were Masters because Facebook was everywhere everyone was on it and even non-gamers were gaming which sounds great but they were burning through the game too quickly they were enjoying it and then just moving on which was not great because Facebook is all about retention so Farmville did something really counter-intuitive to increase player retention they gave you daily energy so you couldn't progress more than a certain amount every day now these games were mostly played by people on phones and laptops and people got bored pretty quickly and one of the best ways to prevent boredom is to limit your time with something absence makes the heart grow fonder as they say so Energy Systems limiting what actions you could take or timers connected to Growing your crops or building things and you couldn't progress them quicker by making the player progress only in short but intense bursts and then wait for their next fix of game you either force them to pay more money to gain more energy or to skip the timers or you make them return tomorrow and this is game design focused on the formation of daily habits the psychological power of the Habit has been studied for years motivational speakers talk about themselves help books push them and now gaming companies were looking to use them as a way to turn players into users because it wasn't just about the game being fun anymore the focus wasn't on giving the player the best experience you could give them and letting the player enjoy it at their own pace the focus was about the game being effective at encouraging a specific behavior response from the user encouraging the user to return day after day is habit forming someone who plays your game have habitually is more likely to remain playing even after the game itself has stopped being enjoyable they're just continuing their habit along with this game designers knew you would also have friends on Facebook that may not be playing the game and they wanted those friends to play the game which is why they put the mechanics in the game of share this achievement with your friend to get bonuses and get boosts a huge amount of people began playing Facebook games not because they thought they would be the type of game they enjoy but because they were doing their friend a favor by starting up they were supporting their Farm they were joining their Mafia and just like maplestory's gacha being viewed by the players in the game you could share the progress of your farm you could show off how far along you were which spurred competition so we can add limiting progression per day and encouraging you to invite your friends to start the game to give yourself advantages or the ability to share your progression with the community which is why achievements on almost all consoles and PCs are publicly viewable into the box of abusive monetization strategies and why while habitually playing something isn't generating money in itself it does keep the audience around longer so they can be exposed to other more successful strategies now some people will point out that paying to advance more or paying to skip timers is in some ways similar to the old arcade process of dying and then putting more coins in to continue and it is similar but there is a crucial difference with an arcade game you could in theory finish the game entirely on skill these timers and energy bars in games such as Farmville cannot ever be finished on skill alone because you will hit a wall that you will need to either wait for or pay to remove but this wasn't everything nowhere near Farmville had other strategies you had timers and you could pay to make them progress faster but not with money directly now you have to convert real money into a proprietary currency in this case Farm books and this is one of the most prevalent designs we still see used because it does several psychological things disgustingly well if you can buy something directly from a game you can see the cost in a currency that you understand but if the game displays items in their own proprietary currency such as Gems or coins or platinum or farmbox or whatever they want to call it you have to make one mental step converting the currency from what you understand to what you don't understand so all these things are now one mental step away from having real value and that is hugely important because even one step is further than most people are willing to go so let's add that into the box proprietary in-game premium currency to obscure real world value by a single step bonus points if it makes you convert the currency to multiple other in-game currencies which is almost completely impossible to track in your own mind so you need to buy the currency and this is the next trick the currency is usually sold in packs and these packs are specifically sized to either be just under what you actually need or very very close to the next best thing making you consider the next pack up for example if you need 100 gems to buy something in the game and Gem packs are sold in packs of 90 or 200 105 you may as well buy the 205 pack but then there's a really good item in the game for 210 and you're only 5 gems short but the next pack contains 500 gems but there's a mega item for 505 gems and you're only 5 gems shy of that now you're not thinking about the number 505 you're thinking it's only five and then only another five much smaller jumps for much higher jumps in value you'd be a fool if you didn't take them right so that's going in the box of bad design but let's say you do buy a pack whatever pack you buy you will spend your unique in-game proprietary currency but then you'll discover something else the currency is non-refundable and it is almost impossible to spend all of it you'll always be left with some random number like four Gems or two bits of platinum it's never zero and this will bother you because in your mind that's a waste and you don't like waste and if you don't spend that currency then the game is keeping it and you've paid for that but the only way to make this useful is to buy another currency back I mean you'd be a fool if you didn't do that right you can't have premium currency just sitting there in strange unspendable amounts it's annoying and it's by Design so add that to the box but maybe you know all this and you're not a fool you won't spend a lot you'll wait for a sale but oh look you're a brand new player and there's an offer a load of Premium currency a boost a few Cosmetics it's a limited time offer and it's all for the low price of just under a dollar now you'd definitely be a fool if you didn't buy this if you've ever wondered why the intro packs to almost any game are such good value it's because Studies have shown people who buy a single purchase are much much more likely to make another purchase so you want to make the first purchase really enticing and it's because some phones need you to authorize in-app purchases but once you've authorized one it will not double check for any extra purchases so you confirm that you want to buy the cheap pack and then it doesn't double check for the expensive packs because every screen between the player and the purchase is a moment they could doubt and reconsider so you want to get those are you sure you want to purchase this checks agreed with and out the way early unusually cheap intro micro transactions just to get you into a habit let's add that to the box and while the box is looking pretty anti-player and anti-consumer so far it's nowhere near full to truly see how effective this ugly design can be we only need to go forward one year to 2010 and look at FIFA's Ultimate Team mode now I'm not really into football games but the FIFA franchise of games actually highlights the game design shift really well it shows how games have moved from being a fun experience by themselves to a fun enough framework that other monetization tactics will cling to like limpets in FIFA you can buy loot boxes which contain random cards of players and use these to build up your ultimate team the Ultimate Team mode takes several of the box ideas and combines them and now the Ultimate Team mode makes more money than the Box sales of FIFA itself in fact since 2018 FIFA Ultimate Team has generated over 1 billion dollars in Revenue per year for EA in 2021 they made 1.6 billion and it happens every single year and the cards you buy in the ultimate team for one year cannot be used in the next year meaning the microtransactions now have a shelf life horse armor May last forever but what if it didn't what if you could make a player pay for it again and again every year let's add that to the Box yearly repeating microtransactions now as a developer you'd look at this thing this box and think wow selling my game isn't the profitable thing anymore it's what I can sell within the game by now the box of abusive monetization strategies is so big it's almost impossible to ignore if you are making a game one year later in 2011 the MMORPG RuneScape is suffering they had a major update to the combat system which a huge majority of the player base hated and this made them lose a lot of players this is a mistake worthy of its own video but the bottom line is they are a monthly subscription game losing subscribing players and they need to find a way to either recover paying members or to stem the tide of people leaving enter the Loyalty program every month of membership you now earn loyalty points and you earn more for every consecutive month that you remain subscribed and then you can spend loyalty points on cool exclusive Cosmetics or mechanically powerful auras and boosts so now canceling your membership wasn't just a case of thinking I'm not enjoying the game so I won't pay which is a very simple understandable Fair transaction it's now a case of thinking I'm not enjoying the game but if I unsubscribe I break my loyalty streak and will earn far fewer loyalty points over the long run which will put me at a disadvantage if I ever do want to come back in the future which is not as Fair the transaction used to be simple but now we're putting the player in the position of give money even if you don't want to play because you don't want to break a habit that's going in the box and by now the box is demanding a bigger and bigger slice of the game design pie chart two years later 2013 sees the release of Dead Space 3 the third installment in a terrific horror Trilogy well sort of well Dead Space 1 and 2 were indeed terrific horror games with tension and pacing and balanced gameplay and great stories Dead Space 3 did something strange it took the idea of you being a lone engineer trapped on an infested spaceship struggling against incredible odds using only your small collection of mining tools and very limited Ammunition To Survive and it added in the ability to let you buy in-game guns with real cash from the cash shop a horror Survival game selling you in-game guns and ammo completely defeating the atmosphere and Vibe the game was going for selling players things they could use within your game to make the game easier let's add that to the box that's effectively selling power this one manages to out monetize even the arcade it would be like putting more coins into Time Crisis and getting a rocket launcher or removing the time limit in Crazy Taxi it sort of defeats the purpose of the original game along with dead space selling guns we now see the MOBA game Dota 2 release what many consider the first major battle pass system now when this craze started I remember walking into gaming shops and seen the phrase battle pass everywhere and I had no idea what they were effectively they are optional purchasers which unlock a series of challenges or processes you can go through to unlock more stuff in the game but they are time sensitive so you buy the monthly battle pass and if you play a certain number of hours or kill a certain number of enemies or achieve a certain number of whatever it wants you to do you can advance along the battle pass and unlock new stuff now you could just have the unlockable stuff be available for everyone to unlock anyway but by limiting it to a timed battle pass you're doing a few manipulative things you're creating a fear of missing out or fomo as players know if they don't have this month's battle pass they may never get the full experience or that rare cosmetic ever again so you are encouraging an unhealthy amount of gameplay because if you're not advancing a battle pass you're losing precious time so now you're actually discouraging players from enjoying any other game and forcing them to focus entirely on progression within yours this design is of course at odds with the limit playtime technique because they appeal to different demographics remember a battle pass or limited time progression track doesn't always actively improve a game but it does always increase that game's Revenue so throw it in the Box by now even the concept of a fun well-made game is starting to look like a horrifically augmented shadow of its former self imagine what a well-made game would look like if you tried to shoehorn in all of the techniques in this box and unfortunately eventually you won't need to imagine we're seeing it more and more later that same year one of my favorite games comes out Assassin's Creed Black Flag a fantastic Pirate game that's just one problem unless you own both the PlayStation and an Xbox and are willing to buy two copies of the game you can never experience the full game Black Flag featured console exclusive levels which not only fueled the petty console Wars but also highlighted the fact that Marketing Executives were now powerful enough to tell games developers exactly what their player as deserved or more importantly what their non-players don't deserve this is not player focused design at all and while I completely understand the power of console exclusives when I walked into a game shop and picked up two copies of black flag and realized no matter what I choose there is a mission I won't get to play because I don't have the right console that didn't leave a good taste in my mouth so while DOTA may have started the battle pass idea it was almost perfected four years later in 2017 by fortnite season 2 which replaced the season Shop with a battle pass system and then later in November of 2017 we witness a bit of gaming history and it fills us all with a sense of Pride and accomplishment Star Wars Battlefront 2 was an amazing game which released back in 2005 not to be confused with Star Wars Battlefront 2 which was a mediocre game which released in 2017. it was a full price game and yet also had a loot box system in it along with premium currency system this led to a Reddit user complaining that even though they'd bought the 80 deluxe version of the game they still couldn't play as Darth Vader from day one unlocking Darth Vader means buying his hero crate which costs 60 000 in-game credits or you can spend real money now you can earn an average of 250 credits per 10 minute match at the time so you'd have to grind for roughly 40 hours of constant gameplay longer than the average completion time of most video games to unlock a single rare character or you could pay crystals in the premium shop and spend those on hero crates and just hope EA responded to this Reddit complaint saying the reason crates were so expensive or take so long to unlock is to give a sense of Pride and accomplishments to players who did manage to unlock them this becomes the most downvoted comment in Reddit history so locking premium parts of your full priced game behind either hours of grind or spending even more money to unlock the cool stuff before other people who bought the same game as you now it's important to understand that games having things locked within them is not necessarily bad design one of my favorite games of all time is SSX tricky the snowboarding game and as you play through that you unlock new characters in new boards and new tracks progression within a game and rewarding that progression with new mechanics new characters and new areas is not bad the problem was progression wasn't the only way to unlock this you could simply pay more money to get it immediately and because it was a competitive game people who paid the extra money were at an advantage over those who did not this is a video about how new games feel wrong and it feels wrong to buy the same game as someone else and to know that they will have an advantage over you if they pay more throw that in the box of abusive monetization why not it's going to work and then five years later Diablo Immortal happened now I've already covered Diablo Immortal pretty extensively in the video the diabolically immoral Diablo Immortal and its follow-up about the legendary crests because it took basically every idea from the big box of abusive monetization and sprinkled them liberally over a somewhat Diablo looking game including multiple premium currencies a deliberately similar in-game item which functions slightly differently to a paid version of the same thing and multiple battles is all called different things but don't worry because everyone assured me that Diablo Immortal was a mobile game and thus would not be representative of the actual next Diablo game which would be Diablo 4. everyone told me Diablo 4 would be a full game by itself with no cash shop with gameplay first and none of the strategies from the big box of Badness so of course there are various digital versions of the game the more expensive ones giving you an accelerated battle pass bonus allowing you to progress quicker and there is a cosmetic cash shop using its own proprietary currency and if you're thinking Diablo doesn't need all these extra bells and whistles to be a good Diablo game you are correct these have not been added because they make the game better they've been added because they make the game money and then dark tide released which is a full price game with an abusively priced cash shop or you can grind for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours to get some of the cheap things in that shop and now we're here so why have games become like this simple because games are businesses games have been businesses since arcades since consoles allowed you to buy the game and have it in your own home they have always wanted to make money but up until now the best way to make the most amount of money was to make the best game you possibly could because people would buy it and that was it the transaction was finished it was fair the best way to make money on Modern games is to make the best framework as a holder for these strategies and companies have experimented with various methods to increase income over the years from gacha loot boxes to pre-orders console exclusives to battle passes Energy Systems to just straight up selling power and instead of hiring game designers they hired psychologists to build habits to reinforce addictive behaviors to design gameplay Loops which encourage spending the problem was these techniques were never about the player having fun they were about the user being monetized and when a marketing executive pictures you playing a game you aren't pictured smiling and laughing with friends you're pictured opening your wallet and reaching for your credit card because that's their goal and eventually the Pandora's box of abusive monetization strategies was so full of proven effective techniques that making a game is often no longer about the game at least not for the people in charge of the money the game is now simply a life support system for as many of these systems as you can design into it the game is a host and the parasite of monetization has begun to take over and the unfortunate reality is this works even with a breakout incredible success like Eldon ring which won game of the year and sold over 18 million copies as of this video at sixty dollars a sale that's over a billion dollars in sales worldwide that is still slightly shy of how much money genshin impact made this year it is still shy of how much money FIFA Ultimate Team has made every year for the last four years the reality is when companies look at that pie chart of game development time and how they divide developer time or invested money that big box of abusive monetization strategies that Pandora's box of terribleness is so effective they would be hurting their own profit to not put at least some of the techniques in the older designers simply didn't have the knowledge of this box and even if they did they didn't have the technology to act on it at the time modern design often puts the player into an awkward position where the game has spent more time focusing on the manipulative abusive systems than it has on just being the best game it could be so what is the exact Choice which makes games feel wrong is it maplestory's fault for adding gachapon is it oblivion's fault for the horse armor is it dota's fault for the battle pass FIFA's fault for the success of ultimate team is it farmville's fault for mastering the addiction cycle or is it EA's fault for locking away Darth Vader unfortunately it's kind of all of them it's just the reality of games designed today you cannot close the lid on Pandora's Box designers can't unknow the effectiveness of these techniques and every game made for the rest of time has to either use them or actively choose to avoid them so the exact choice that makes a game go from being the best it can possibly be to anti-player or anti-consumer tumor is when a designer or a marketing executive stops thinking about how they can make the best game they're capable of and starts throwing some Sly glances toward the box in the corner and when they say hey this technique may not fit our game perfectly but it's proven to make a lot of money do you think we could put it in our game that is the moment any specific game goes downhill from what it could be from a player's perspective and the worst part is that big evil box and all its dark design knowledge is constantly being added to and when you play a new game and spot the cash shop on the battle pass and the premium currency in the awkward pack size and the loot boxes and exclusive levels and when you just feel sad that the game didn't have to do that that's when you know that the pie chart of design of this game had at least a small slice dedicated to that stupid box a small slice focused on making the game a little bit anti-player in the name of a lot of profit but personally I also know it can be very cathartic to be angry at a instead of a concept so let's all just collectively agree to blame the stupid horse cheers for watching another massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon Twitch and YouTube who keep the channel alive you can support from only one pound a month check the description for links to the patreon twitch Twitter and our Discord and as always have a great day

Channel: Josh Strife Hayes

Views: 2,173,073

Keywords: mmo podcast, mmo discussion, mmo design, mmorpg youtuber, mmo news

Id: g16heGLKlTA

Length: 32min 19sec (1939 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022