Games As A Service

How Free to Play Design Can Make Better Games

Oscar Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317908869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Digitale Medien

The games industry is serious business and the role of a games designer has dramatically changed over just the last few years. Developers now have to rethink everything they know about the creative, technical and business challenges to adapt to the transition to games as a service.

Games as a Service: How Free to Play Design Can Make Better Games has been written to help designers overcome many of the fears and misconceptions surrounding freemium and social games. It provides a framework to deliver better games rather than the 'evil' or 'manipulative' experiences some designers fear with the move away from wasteful Products to sustainable, trustworthy Services.

Oscar Clark is a consultant and Evangelist for Everyplay from Applifier. He has been a pioneer in online, mobile and console social games services since 1998 including Wireplay (British Telecom), Hutchison Whampoa (3UK) and PlayStation®Home. He is a regular columnist on PocketGamer.Biz and is an outspoken speaker and moderator at countless games conferences on Games Design, Discovery, and Monetisation. He is also a notorious hat wearer.

Chapter 1

Introduction

First Principles

Whatever you think about mobile or console games, I’m hoping that if you have picked up this book that there is something about the game design process that delights you. It’s more than just the pleasure of playing a well-crafted game (regardless of the platform). Game design combines an intellectual and creative challenge to manifest your ideas into something others can play through and want to pay you for the privilege of playing. We want players to be charmed, empowered, surprised, even scared. But unlike other art forms we want players to resolve the experience for themselves; to make their own game. People have been creating and playing games for centuries before the introduction of personal computers, consoles and mobile devices. However, since the 1980s, computer games have largely driven innovation and creative design for games, although arguably not always in the gameplay design itself.

Making a Stand

In this book I’m going to assume you have some idea about what makes a good game, and ideally that you have a little experience making games. Don’t worry if you don’t. I also plan to provide notes to suggest good sources of inspiration and insight. The purpose of this book is to provide a framework to make it easier for you to make games as services. This will take us back to some of the basics of game design to find lessons that lie at the core of every online, console, or mobile game; perhaps even elements that date back to old-school tabletop board games, card games, and maybe even role-playing games. I also want to show how these lessons can help us rethink the way we approach both the artistic and commercial elements to help you make the best possible games suitable for this era of always connected devices. The technical power and ability to leverage online services has so rapidly filtered into every home and every pocket with laptops, tablets, consoles, and—of course—the cell phone almost all of us now carry. The trouble is that we are still in the midst of this massive change and at the time of writing some of the biggest changes seem to be just over the horizon. So to avoid this book becoming out of date before it’s released, I have tried to focus on the deeper, lasting principles that matter to making games as services, rather than the particular trends currently popular. My plan is to then continue to add to this material using the companion website www.GamesAsAService.net; a site that I hope will become a place for designers to share ideas and learn from each other.

Service with a Smile

We are seeing the way we consume and experience games change faster than ever before and at the same time we are seeing this great entertainment medium at last reaching true mass-market audiences, something thought nearly impossible only ten years ago. In particular we are seeing a dramatic rise of ‘games as a service’ and of course the “freemium” business model, both of which I will argue go hand-in-hand. I believe this will be a driver for greater creativity, allowing us to make better games, not just more profitable ones. I will try to show why we can no longer afford to simply build a game, throw it over to the marketing team or publisher, and then hope that someone buys it. Hope is not a strategy.

In particular the old approach of creating retail ‘box-products’ is not just inefficient but dangerous, perhaps even suicidal, for game developers—and not just for mobile and tablet games. We need to rethink our approach to development and instead look at the way players now consume their content and use that to build games as services instead.

First Bite of the Apple

The tipping point that brought us this change, for me, was the arrival of the iPhone. However, unlike many people, I believe that it is wrong to think of this first iOS device as an extraordinary technical achievement. At the time it was released, most handset manufacturers had devices that were—at least in part—technically superior to the first iPhone. Let’s not forget that the most basic phone-call features of the first iPhone were pretty terrible. However, Apple’s little device showed us what was possible when you make the user experience seamless.

Many will argue that it was the simplicity. I’m not convinced by this argument, but this isn’t a book about user interface design so I won’t bore you with the details of that discussion. However, what I do think is relevant to this book is that, unlike all other handset devices at the time, the iPhone experience was both internally consistent and joyful to use. For me the genius of Apple at this time was making the mental shift towards delighting the end-user not just pushing the technical aspirations of the manufacturers. But even with this, the first iPhone doesn’t count in my mind. The really important stuff came in with the iPhone 3G and an almost incidental release Apple made the same day. On June 9, 2008, Apple launched the iPhone 3G and with it the new App Store,¹ which it described as:

providing iPhone users with native applications in a variety of categories including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. The App Store on iPhone works over cellular networks and Wi-Fi, which means it is accessible from just about anywhere, so you can purchase and download applications wirelessly and start using them instantly. Some applications are even free and the App Store notifies you when application updates are available. The App Store will be available in 62 countries at launch.

That’s it. That’s how the biggest innovation in application retail was introduced. In hindsight this might seem an inauspicious start, but we must remember that the original iPhone release didn’t even mention downloadable apps² in fact instead they talked about using Web 2.0 techniques to support third-party apps.³

There is no doubting that the Apple team did something amazing, even if I don’t believe it was deliberate. They opened access to everyone to release any app. It was (and largely still is) possible to get through the approval cycle within just a couple of weeks. You don’t have to convince anyone of the merits of the app you want to release. You just have to meet Apple’s documented rules. This has removed nearly all of the barriers to entry for developers of any size. It turned out to be a completely disruptive act and continues to have a profound impact on everything we do in games. They opened up the floodgates for new content and had immediately leveled the playing field so anyone could publish a game and access an audience of millions of users.

Supply and Demand Matters

Of course that has now led to an unprecedented volume of games and apps, and because the pricing was set by the developers themselves there was an inevitable consequence. The average price for a game went down.

This is a normal economics principle. The price we are willing to pay for any good, especially a luxury like a game, is determined by the supply of that item and its demand. If supply increases and demand remains unchanged then the price will inevitably fall. On June 10, 2013, Tim Cook announced that the App Store was now hosting more than 900,000 apps;⁴ but by the time of publication, I suspect we will be close to the 1 million mark. There are now more good games on the store that I could possibly play in my lifetime. This effectively infinite supply of content inevitably means that the “natural” price for a game will be nothing; free.

Not the only Game in Town

The emergence of Apple’s little device was not the first or only place where innovation for games pricing has happened. In 2003 we pioneered an early form of mobile in-App purchases at 3UK with the introduction of a “rent” game. It was too early and flawed, but the technical innovation was to allow a user to make a purchase within an app. Also in 2008 Sony introduced PlayStation Home as a Free2Play (F2P) experience for owners of the console. However, the first steps for F2P largely came out of the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) world, especially those wanting to target a younger audience—in particular online services such as Neopets (1999). Other MMOs followed suit, such as UK-based RuneScape (2001)⁵—still recognized as the world’s largest MMO⁶—and Korean-based Maple Story (2003). Maple Story and Neopets both involved the purchase of virtual goods within the game, but RuneScape initially only offered a subscription service for paying players.

Online browser-based games continued to innovate including notably Big Point’s Dark Orbit and the sale of their Droid X. This was a virtual good that, on paper, costs $1,000 of their virtual currency; however, when you look under the surface this tenth droid required that the player had all of the previous nine and only cost the full amount if you decided to buy it outright and hadn’t earned enough virtual currency already.⁷ How much money was actually spend on them is unclear, but the value was clearly set in the minds of the players who owned them.

The Only Certainty is Change

More change and more innovation is coming. The arrival in 2013 of the microconsole heralds another era of change and new device opportunities for developers but, at the time of writing, it seems unlikely that many of the first wave of these smaller, cheaper, open access options are quite right to take over the imagination of all players just yet.

Then of course in the same year we have seen the arrival of the next-generation Xbox One and PS4, both of which had a few missteps in their initial launch PR. However these are both likely to embrace greater flexibility in pricing and retail models and, hopefully, a deeper engagement by the prestige side of the industry with the world of indie development.

Change continues to come at us in many forms and on many devices. I may occasionally focus on the iOS platform as an example, but only as the place where the Darwinian forces are perhaps strongest, where competition is fiercest, and only the fittest will survive.

Whether or not you agree that iPhone’s arrival has, as promised, changed everything, the fact remains that everything has changed and the iOS market provides useful information to allow us to gauge that change. Further than that, I believe that change is only really starting. I believe that increasingly, rather than focusing on one device, we need to consider the opportunities and consequences of gameplay on all the available devices of all kinds of c...