Category: business

Fuck yeah D00ds!!!!!!!!! Welcome back to another FUCKing BLOG post. YEE-HAW!!!! and it’s me Cliffski! Your Gaming commentator who TELLS IT LIKE IT IS! Lets see what KRAAAAAAAAZZZZY things are happening in the world of games!!!111oneoneone.

Every now and then gamers take part in incredibly self-righteous debates about how games are ‘art’ and a mature art form, and are being unfairly discriminated against compared with more ‘established forms of media such as books, films, TV and the theater. Why is gaming treated as some ‘lesser’ art form or media when other areas of the media are held in comparatively high respect?

I think it’s pretty clear why. or to put it in gamer-coverage terms, DUDE, it’s like FUCKING obvious you Noob!

I’m 45 years old. I have a bald spot, own slippers and have a pension. I play games, and so do a LOT of people my age, and a bit younger. Pretty much everywhere, everyone treats me like an adult. When I read a book or magazine, it treats me like an adult, ditto for most websites I visit, or events I go to. Except when any of those involve games. When it’s games related, suddenly I am targeted as though I’m a horny and stupid 13 year old boy who wants to shout a lot and say ‘fuck’ because mom isn’t watching. This hasn’t been something that appeals to me for about THIRTY YEARS.

As a quite committed, serious gamer, I can ignore a lot of that and still enjoy what is my hobby as well as my job, but it *must* turn away a lot of people my age and in their thirties. I am EMBARRASSED at a lot of gaming coverage, whether it’s in a magazine, or online, and especially in video. Lets not even mention TV. I would have assumed that the situation would have got better over the years, as more people into gaming like me grew up, but if anything, the youtube obsession has made it much, much worse.

Lets face facts, gaming will NEVER be taken seriously until it sheds this infantile image. Tax-breaks for the gaming industry? how do you make that argument to a politician my age (or older) when a quick search online for interviews with game developers shows them being quizzed by embarrassing kidults in bandanas holding skateboards saying DUDE and FUCK at every opportunity? You think that appeals to anyone who is in their forties? It’s not just journalists. even the head people at gaming divisions for Microsoft and Sony have the tendency to start saying stupid dumb things and doing high fives on stage the minute they talk about games.

Some games are deliberately immature and silly and aimed at kids. Some aren’t. All of them get reviewed by people who think they are making adverts for nerf guns. Please grow up, it is acutely EMBARRASSING to see 30+, or 40+ men pretending to be ‘down with tha kidz’. The next time you are posting a video review of a game, see if you can manage it without adopting a stupid voice, and without swearing. If people can review books and movies in a normal voice without screaming and making knob jokes, I theorize the same can be done for games.

There is some twitter discussion about this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28363729

With controversy about this:

The Commission said: “These include not using the word “free” at all when games contain in-app purchases,”

I fully support this. I think we have an absolute basteridsation of the word free, and that governments should regulate the hell out of it. There are various books on the topic of how the word ‘free’ sets off all kinds of triggers in our brains that ‘very very very cheap’ is nowhere close to. It seems we respond overwhelmingly positive to ‘free’ and ignore all the caveats and disclaimers around it. Basically a ‘free to play’ game is BETTER to our subconscious than a game that is not ‘free’.

But come on, you and I both know F2P games are anything BUT free. They are designed to get as many people as possible (but realistically not all) to pay for ‘upgrades’ and ‘customisations’ and ‘conveniences’ within the game. The business model depends on the game experience being dissatisfying to the extent that you pay to skip bits you don’t like, or improve things you are unhappy with. Why give the player 100 unlock points per battle when you can give them just 5, and charge $1 for 100 unlock ‘gems’ instead? Cynical, cynical bullshit…

The trouble is, this WORKS. it works well. It works in the way cunning modern advertising works, it plays to tricks in our brain, and the way we are easily fooled, lured, confused and misdirected. We are not vulcans, but massively irrational animals who are at the mercy of our primitive subconscious desires and pattern matching. The idea that any of our purchasing decisions are rational is a joke, and the idea that we are not being manipulated by cynical F2P business models is a joke too. It’s perfectly understandable that so many of these F2p companies employ pyschologists. They aren’t there to make the game fun, they are there to make you spend money. Lots of it.

This isn’t new. There were scandals many years ago about subliminal techniques in advertising, and advertys are regulated to prevent the blatant techniques that some ad agencies would like to use. The trouble is, it’s difficult to ‘rule’ on these topics, because it’s all open to interpretation. For example, is this an advert for a sandwich…

Or is it a pretty obvious, and crude and blatant comparison to oral sex? Now prove that in court…

The difference between ‘fuzzy’ issues like that, and F2P games using dodgy practices is that it’s pretty easy to regulate F2P to curb it’s worst excesses. For example, if a game actively prompts the player to purchase add-ons within the game, than I don’t think it’s fair to call the game ‘free’. No game should allow you to purchase more than ten times in a day, or more than some limit per week, and above a certain amount, they absolutely should ask you to re-enter your password, or confirm that you know you have spent $1,000 on gems this week.

Some people are addicted to alcohol, even though most of us aren’t, so we as a society tolerate warnings on advertising and branding pointing out the dangers, and in the UK we ban drinks ads in many environments. The same is true of Gambling. Most people who drink, or bet are not addicts, but we place curbs and restrictions on those activities because we know to some people they are VERY addictive.

Alcohol makers and Betting shops got lucky, they happened to create a product that was already addictive to us. People who employ psychologists for their F2P game are Actively and KNOWINGLY working to generate addiction in their customers so as to milk them as much as possible. Profiting from selling games is fine. Knowingly creating a marketplace full of addict by using psychological tricks is not an entertainment industry I want to be associated with. Legislate the crap out of them.

Yup, big topics. This blog post is kinda prompted by this: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-07-16-blurred-lines-are-youtubers-breaking-the-law

But it’s a topic that has been around a while now. Basically the days of just hoping a famous youtube celeb likes your game and propelling you to stardom are ending, youtube is becoming more of an advertising marketplace than ever before.

I have long blogged about and evangelised about advertising as a viable option for indie game developers. I like advertising as a PR system for many reasons. It’s fairly flexible (you can spend $1 or $1,000) it’s very target-able, it’s relatively simple and hands-off to setup (no talking to people or traveling) and also, not much discussed…its very very honest.

Now I know that ‘advertising and honesty’ are not terms often thrown together. I read a LOT about ads. They can be sneaky, suggestive, manipulative, full of weasel-words and misleading comments, but the one good thing about an advert is that it is an unmistakably paid-for piece of promotion designed with the interests of the product maker in mind. When you see an advert for Audi, it may try and suggest this, or imply that, or convince you of dubious claim X, but you know that it’s being paid for by Audi, and you can take that into account. You don’t consciously think you are getting an unbiased opinion. (unconsciously you probably do…due to all kinds of cunning neuromarketing techniques…but I digress…). In other words, you know when you are being advertised to, and when you are not.

With product-placement and more nebulous sponsorship deals, like the ones that some youtube celebrities are getting involved in, the situation is very different. Suddenly someone is saying they love a product and you have no idea why. We tend to assume people are being genuine unless we know for a fact they are paid to say stuff. I love Bose headphones (yeah I do, so sue me), Aeron Chairs, Ibanez Guitars and Lexus cars. Nobody has ever paid me a penny to tell anyone that. We tend to assume youtube lets plays and reviews of games are the unbiased opinions of the presenter, but is that really the case any more?

I’ve never had someone ask me for money for a lets’ play, but I suspect thats because I’m a mouthy arrogant and sometimes quite confrontational British dude that is an unknown quantity to a lot of people. I also blog a lot, and occasionally say very unpopular things. If I was looking to do hush-hush sponsorship deals, *I* wouldn’t approach me, but I know it goes on. So who do I blame?

I blame adblock, and the early internet culture of ‘everything should be free’. Online content costs money, it just does. Writers need to be paid, webhosting needs to be paid and so on. Now I admit, I have adblock installed. It’s normally turned off, I click it on just for a handful of unbearable sites that have so many flashing, noisy animated blinking monstrosities I can’t cope with reading them, but they aren’t my regular sites anyway. Reddit handles advertising very well, so does googles homepage, and most other sites I visit.

Nobody likes ads. I don’t go to a games forum for the ads, I go there for the content, but I actually LIKE seeing ads because that way, I *know* thats how the site exists. If not, then basically I’m at a site that is run at a loss by a generous benefactor (unlikely) or the site is making money in other ways. Everyone screamed at The Times newspaper when it put up it’s paywall, but frankly, I think it’s a fair and a brave move. Why shouldn’t we pay for online content? It’s just not an option because the ‘general wisdom’ is that people won’t pay for it. A paywall is even better than ads, now YOU are directly, not indirectly paying for the content.

The thing is, if we REFUSE to pay subscriptions to read (for example) Rock Paper Shotgun, then they have to get money elsewhere. They have a lot of writers to pay. Ads is the obvious solution, but what happens when everyone blocks those too? Every time we do that, we push the writers closer to the need for sponsorship, endorsement, ‘paid features’ and so on.

I know a few journalists. It amazes me how honest they are. It amazes me even more because I know they don’t earn a lot. And it amazes me again because I know how much money *could* be available if they were corrupt. In a  recent experiment I was paying $2,300 A DAY in facebook ads for a game of mine. That buys a lot of cocktails and goodwill gifts for corrupt journalists. I could have binned the ads and sent a brand new fuck-off huge top-of-the-range flat screen Television to a different journalist I knew each day instead saying ‘A gift from the makers of Democracy 3.’ I can even see that (assuming some theoretical journalistic corruption) that would possibly be a GOOD DEAL.

What I’m getting at, is that it is absolutely fucking amazing that we still have a generally independent and honest games press. They are mostly paid for through advertising. We should understand that, accept that, and embrace that as gamers. The alternative is much worse. I KNOW that Jim Rossignol actually likes Eve Online, I don’t have to wonder if he took a brown envelope full of cash to write about it. I like things as they are, with a nice demarcation between content and advertising. If you like  it too, turn off your ad blocker for a while, and the next time a site you like offers premium subscriptions buy one.