Category: business

Hi all, I’m back! I’ve also been reading. Despite the lure of watching Aaron Sorkins ‘newsroom’ on the plane, I also found time to read most of this book:

You can read about it on amazon here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0141033576

It’s pretty cool, but the bit that really stuck in my head was the bit about an experiment I’d read about before, but not fully grasped the implications of. It’s to do with ownership. In a nutshell, the tests ask a bunch of people to value something they do not possess, but are shown, such as a mug or a bar of chocolate. Different people are then given the item in question, and possess it for a while, during which they can see it, but are distracted by other tasks. Those people are then asked what their selling price is for the item. Overwhelmingly, people value the item they own much higher than the value people gave to it when asked to buy it.

In short, owning something makes it seem more valuable. Which is understandable, we want to appear rational. I know my car must be a bargain, and worth > X (where X was what I paid), otherwise I’d be a gullible idiot, and I don’t want to feel that…

So…relating that back to 2 topics I obsess over… the popularity of Free To Play Games and the price wars and low prices of non-free games…

Free to play works because it doesn’t ask you to value the game until you already feel you own it. How much would you pay for farmville to buy it outright? maybe $5? But play the game for free for a month, build up your farm, invest it, and then hit a plateau in the game where you really need to buy coins to continue…. and suddenly YOUR game is worth a lot more than $5. You value the game you already own very highly, and so buying add-ons for it is just common sense. I suspect this is why DLC works so well, and sells so well. You have already made a commitment to valuing the game, by investing your time. Only a fool could try to rationalize NOT spending money on it now…

Food for though.

I was curious, and none of the sites tracking this sort of thing could easily provide me with the stats per game, so I looked up what I’d paid for a few steam games and how much effectively I’d paid ‘per hour’ to enjoy them. here are some I checked…

Battlefield Bad Company 2 & vietnam add on	£0.15 / hour
Dishonored	£2.30 / hour
Hearts of iron 3	£1.87 / hour.
Sim City 4 Deluxe	£0.14 / hour
Defense grid	£0.43 / hour
Skyrim	£5.86 / hour
Tropico 4	£0.62 / hour
Wargame:European Escalation	£30.00 / hour

#It;s very interesting doing this, as it immediately shows me how impulse purchases at full price with no demo, based on a video are always my nemesis. Wargame:EE was a nightmare for me, whereas Battlefield BC2 is a huge gain. In fact, that figure is way lower if you discount the vietnam DLC. In that case, it’s a clear example of the company getting more from me in DLC (at full price) than the base game, something the stats show I’m clearly very happy to do (they clearly earned it). Something else that becomes clear is that this doesn’t really match my enjoyment of the game that much. Hearts of iron 3 clocked up a fair few hours, but did I really enjoy it as much as dishonored? I’d say definitely not. Another way to look at this is to say that, for example I’m happy to in general pay £1 an hour for quality gaming entertainment. By that measure the costs should have been:

Battlefield Bad Company 2 & vietnam add on	worth £107
Dishonored	worth £13
Hearts of iron 3	worth £8
Sim City 4 Deluxe	worth £17
Defense grid	Worth £4
Skyrim	worth £4
Tropico 4	worth £10
Wargame:European Escalation	worth £1

of course this assumes I have as much fun with each game, which isn’t entirely true.  Even so, who would have thought I could justify spending 100 times as much on one game as I did on another, but that has to be the rational conclusion. Maybe those F2P whales are more rational than I assume?

Just reading here:

http://www.develop-online.net/news/42752/Revealed-The-video-games-cultural-test

And considering how it would apply to my game Democracy 2…

Up to 4 points depending on the percentage of the video game that is set in the following locations

ok…how? how are we allocating percentages? What if there are 4 missions, and 1 is the tutorial mission which is 1/10th the size of the others? is that 25% of the setting? or less? How do we decide how big a level is anyway? by size? What if one level is a huge 16km square empty room with a union jack and the word ‘tax breaks’ written on the floor, and an arrow pointing to the door to the next level. does that count?

set in the United Kingdom or another EEA state

when? Now? how about during medieval times? or how about in the year 3000, with jet packs and robots and laser guns?

if there are more than three characters depicted in the video game, 4 points if two or three of the three lead characters are from the United Kingdom or another EEA state or from an undetermined location

What? I hardly know where to begin. If someone has an American accent but we don’t say where he is from, can we say he is from the UK? What if the game is set in an alternate history where Nazis have occupied London, are the Nazis from the UK? no? what about the Normans? how long ago must a culture have conquered the UK for it’s descendants to qualify? What is the definition of ‘lead’ characters? What if (like Democracy 2) the game has no characters, but has profile pictures of typical citizens? How do we decide which of them are lead? What if the game contains sentient robots, are they characters?

up to 4 points depending on the percentage of the original dialogue that is recorded in the English language or in a recognised regional or minority language as follows

What if the entire recorded dialogue for the game is one sentence, a strong American accent saying ‘tax breaks’. American accent, but English language. Do I still get my points there? If I was planning on zero recorded dialog, can i include some just to get the points? How vital is it that the player hears the dialogue? can it be bound to a cheat code? or only played over the end game credits?

It also doesn’t say if I’m allowed to be lead designer, programmer, composer and scriptwriter all by myself and get points for all of them.

This is a mess, as you would expect. Bureaucrats should no more be evaluating video games than they should be picking hit pop songs. This nonsense is entirely due to silly EU laws which conveniently forget the fact that the majority of video games are mad in countries where their laws do not apply. Absolutely bonkers.

Also, I haven’t even touched on engine development. What if you work on code that is enhancing the engine you will use for your next game. Is that work covered? What about time spent giving interviews? is that time covered?

Totally unworkable.