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| What Console Makers Could Learn From PC Publishing |
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Consoles have become the undeniable kings of hardcore gaming over the last decade. Almost every triple A game that lacks VALVe's logo or falls into the strategy and adventure genres has been optimized, coded, and designed to be played with a controller on a television. When coupled with the erosion of previously PC-exclusive advantages such as practical online multiplayer and add-on content, there is little reason for any but the most hardcore of gamers to eschew the couch in favor of the swivel chair. Yet having grown up as a dual citizen of both realms, I've become increasingly disenchanted with the way in which console gaming has began to play less to its strengths and more like the little brother who wants to emulate his older sibling. The strict adherence to old school publishing models of the console makers, combined with their total control of the market, has created an online environment in which the rigidity in the publishing model has the potential to hold back gaming as a whole.
While that may sound like an overly broad statement, I believe it's a fair assessment since the PC has been the afterthought for many years now. What used to be the original SKU is almost always a port and with that comes the irrelevance of the PC's open publishing model.
The idea of publishers' direct-selling games or indie developers taking matters into their own hands i.e. [link]Jason Rohrer[/link] are clearly out of the question, but services such as Steam, Direct2Drive and Impulse serve as perfect examples for how console makers could adapt to the changing landscape.
Before assessing what the inherent flaws with the current closed-publishing approach are, it's important to understand why consumers should support it when it makes sense to do so. Closed publishing, in its current form, can best be described through example: Microsoft's XBox platform, Nintendo's Wii/DS platforms, and Sony's Playstation 3/PSP platforms. While companies like EA and Activision are publisher's in the traditional sense in that they fund the games, the console makers get the final say of what can actually be sold and how games can be distributed. Furthermore, the big three (Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony) expect a level of polish, quality, and Q/A testing which essentially assures that your hardware will play the game as intended and not corrupt any portion of your system through a bug. Or at the very least such an even occurring is the [link]exception[/link] to the rule. This idea of 'Buy. Boot. Play.' is the single strongest selling point which could never be replicated by another model.
Why would a developer be willing to lose some control over their creative legacy? It's because they share something in common with bloggers: most don't get paid when producing work. Thankfully unlike bloggers, there's a chance on return investment. Since competition in the console market is fierce, having exclusive rights to a game is worth fronting some cash; thus giving developers time to expand and hone their concept into a finished product. This is especially true with the [link]exponentially rising cost[/link] of development combined with Moore's Law. Producing even a high quality mod can often take up to five or six years when factoring in the small team and the need for day jobs. A project started when the PS2 was king of the hill would be a new release today -- and that's without having to produce the game's engine. As you can imagine, the standards for game design, graphics, and community integration are drastically different from 2004. When weighed against the amount of personal sacrifice required to make such a game, it would be impossible to justify the potential financial returns that may or may not materialize. The risk that your title will have lost its 'freshness' over the course of development is considerable even for the most talented teams.
On the other side, publishers are trying to offset this increase in game complexity and subsequently the increase in investment cost by taking advantage of the emerging connectivity of consoles. The systems are fast becoming meta-ized (It's a word now.) and infused with social networking and both first and third party publishers within the closed system have been drooling over the possibilities this could provide in extra revenue -- and rightly so. With Farmville netting an estimated [link]15 million dollars[/link] a month in net profit, micro-transactions and cross promotion, the space is incredibly lucrative.
However, the problem with transporting such a model over to consoles becomes apparent when viewing the implications of superimposing this revenue model on top of the constructs of closed-publishing. Because consoles are usually sold at a loss or at best, break even prices, the manufactures make all their income on software licensing and production. Unlike a game like Farmville which can be distributed for free and become profitable on micro-transactions, console makers can't absorb the cost as easily as the publishers. Not every Farmville player plays money, and for each of those players, the publisher's revenue only drops by the cost of bandwidth due to the primary expenditure taking place during production. For every player who didn't pay, the potential to severely damage the bottom line increases for the console manufactures. Even though they'd recoup losses through micro-transactions, the manufacturers would be perpetually losing substantial revenue with each non-paying participant (they bought the console for less than wholesale). The end result is the need for the big three to require a high cost of entry (a game purchase) to stay profitable.
Since micro-transactions are relegated to paid titles, the backlash against them has been more because of fears of what could come rather than what is currently going on. If you've ever read the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, then you know precisely the foundation of this argument. In 2006, EA's [link]Horse Armor[/link] debacle became the venerable poster child for micro-transaction abuse. The game Oblivion featured a purely decorative piece of horse armor cost an additional 2.50 USD on top of the 60 USD price tag. The outrage ultimately didn't stem from the item itself -- although gamers sometimes do unjustifiably feel a sense of entitlement. Rather, it was a warning sign of things to come.
While EA produced this armor as additional content, gamers feared that opening Pandora's Box would soon ultimately prove far less entertaining than God of War portrayed it to be. Flash forward a few years and you can now buy your own horse armor in the form of a Nike T-Shirt for your virtual avatar. But not every piece of DLC is a useless trinket or a full fledged add a la Burnout Paradise. Disturbingly, many of those fears have started coming true and now you can buy content you already have in your possession.
Games such as Bioshock 2 shipped with the DLC already on the disc. Purchasing it simply sent an unlock key to your console which enabled it to access that content. Whether or not this was an attempt by Irrational Games to fleece their customers is irrelevant. Even if they had the best intentions, the closed-distribution model doesn't provide a good way to get content out there because of the 'Buy.Boot.Play.' philosophy -- at least in its current form -- can't handle that type of implementation. The weeks or sometimes [link]months[/link] required to certify products with console manufactures seriously hinder or outright prevent developers from gauging reaction to their title for tweaks in the DLC. There's a window of opportunity for the first DLC release to maintain interest in a title. Microsoft pins this time at [link]one month[/link]. To hit that schedule, developers are faced with the choice of either preparing DLC content pre-release or rushing out the content after fans react to what they liked most. It's a lose-lose situation.
Steam, Direct2Drive and Impulse all provide an avenue for developers to almost instantly patch, update, or offer new content to their users. Games sold through these systems will also automatically apply these changes if the user wishes to do so. While allowing any random developer to introduce new code arbitrarily could potentially reek havoc for 'Buy.Boot.Play.', a middle-ground could open up so many possibilities.
If the big three were to offer a certification system where major publishers could take responsibility for their own releases, then the console makers could reap huge profits from the certification process and ease the workload for themselves.
After all, issues like Far Cry 2 's save data [link]corruption[/link] bug hurt Ubisoft far more than a platform producer like Microsoft. The console is already purchased and the user will continue to buy more games, but it's imperative for the publisher to sell the game they invested in. The blame almost exclusively fell on Ubisoft for the bug, so why should Microsoft spend the manpower and time certifying the game? It took Ubisoft seven months to release a patch. Granted not all of that time was for certification, nevertheless it certainly added considerably to the delay.
Under this certification model, publishers could tailor DLC to the most well-received aspects of their games; the big three could increase profit by not requiring as many certification employees; and users would be able quickly get back to throwing their controllers when a sudden bout of [link]malaria causes their character to drown[/link].
That being said, having the big three's management implement such a solution would only solve half the problem with DLC. The other policy issue is one of storage limitation. DLC is relegated to being implemented as add-on packs instead of traditional expansion packs. Since console manufactures' restrict the size of downloadable software, certain styles of games -- especially 3D games -- must heavily reuse disc assets or be severely toned down in scope. While Microsoft has gone from terrible to [link]inconsistent[/link] on this issue, Sony has gone from amazing to [link]mediocre[/link] and Nintendo remains clueless. The only way such a game can often be released is a disc-based product which makes the price of distribution compared to a digital release dramatically higher. The physical inventory distribution and production along with the potential used market are wasted dollars that could be better spent on just about anything. They could even spend it on something as frivolous as a private jet for the intern and it would provide more benefit (functional transportation).
Sony and Microsoft both have ample drive space through internal and external storage solutions so there's no reason to not allow this. Just like PCs, console storage can easily be upgraded and just like Direct2Drive, Steam and Impulse, there should be no storage limit.
These issues concerning DLC may seem relatively minor considering that they're still primarily in the realm of extra content or a self-contained game. On the other hand, when looked at in the larger context of game development cost and price-to-entry for consumers, these issues are vital toward achieving the publishing model which I believe will become increasingly important to the industry: episodic gaming. Under the current system of long certification processes and storage limitations, episodic development can't even start to be considered. There are [link]many[/link] [link]reasons[/link] [link]why[/link] gaming as a pastime is still niche, but price is quite possibly the biggest. The risk of spending 60 USD on a title like Sonic and the Black Knight can't be avoided without knowing the history of the series or performing a considerable amount of research -- something anyone who doesn't read a site like Pixelnauts could be bothered to do. By shifting to episodic gaming, the barrier to entry is significantly lowered for the consumer because they could exit at any time if the game doesn't connect with them.
While it's true that for every Tales of Monkey Island success there's a Half Life 2 episodic debacle, developers will, in time, become more attuned to the different production roadmap and work allocation demanded by this publishing model. Without the ability to rapidly deploy new episodes and the need to keep the data footprint under the acceptable limit, episodic gaming is simply dead in the water on consoles.
These issues don't affect primarily multiplayer titles nearly as much as single player games. Non-narrative based titles have an entirely different set of issues mainly focused on granularity; the ability for players to form islands of expected rulesets and communities provide an experience of consistency. The current matchmaking system usually employed by console games provides an easy barrier to entry since you're likely to be paired with players of equal skill, but skill is not the only determining factor. Similar personalities weigh as heavily, if not more so than skill in enjoying online gaming and such an automated system could never account for this variable.
So how could this issue be factored in? Let users make their console into a dedicated server. The lack of mods and console-paid subscriptions aside (which are discussions for another time), by allowing players to set up their consoles as dedicated servers, the big three can guarantee players will consistently enjoy their favorite game-mode, lag-free play, and training sessions. It would also go a long way in curing a major problem with console gaming: playing an online console game is subjecting yourself to hearing ideas unfit for even a restroom stall's graffiti.
Essentially every PC game allows dedicated servers and there's no reason to not also employ them on the console side. By making the dedicated server restricted to being run on their console, it will often provide an additional purchase; still have stats monitored online by the companies; and most importantly, seamlessly enable DRM checks to make sure pirated copies aren't being used.
That invisible DRM is a hallmark of 'Buy.Boot.Play.' and the major plus for consoles is their lack intrusive software like of SecuROM or Ubisoft's [link]consumer enhancement feature[/link]. If you have the disc, you can play it wherever there's a console, display, and some electrical plugs. However, the digital-distribution arm of the console's industry has all but forgotten this crucial concept. What could simply be handled by tying a digital product to a player's identity, instead has been needlessly complicated by the same overzealous fears that plague PC publishing. Sony puts a limit on the number of systems that can be have an activated game on it, but the problem stems from having absolutely no way to remotely disable a system. If your system breaks, you just lost one of your registration units. Making matters worse, the registration would seemingly be deactivated by deleting that username from the PS3 or PSP, yet that does not work. The only way to de-register a system is buried deep within the menu system in the XMB's PSN settings. As bad as this may sound, Sony's DRM sounds like a utopia when compared to the competition -- especially Nintendo. The Wii and DSi don't even have a central database to [link]keep track[/link] of your purchases. The only way to play your WiiWare and Virtual Console games on another system is to send it in for transfer; and by 'transfer' they mean downloading new copies of the games on the system so you actually lose your save files. Microsoft also ties your downloads to your system's serial number and only transfers them if you physically send your system into their repair center. Thankfully you can still play them on any system if it's connected to the internet, but if it isn't you're SOL.
Which begs the question, what happens when Microsoft turns the servers off? At least with Nintendo and Sony you can continue to play your single player games until the console breaks; when the lights go out at the Microsoft server farm, if you aren't using the original system you bought the game on and haven't had the sanctioned priests of Microsoft Repair Central perform their blessing, your purchases become binary bricks.
DRM invisibility is something that console manufacturers could without question surpass PC distribution platforms in implementation. Steam and Direct2Drive have their own DRM which actually acts more as a [link]feature than a hinderance[/link]. Although it's rare, companies can and still do place other forms of DRM on top of these built-in systems. Just like reading the recommended system requirements, users need to check to see if there's some hideous code hiding under the hood of their purchase. In contrast, the publishers are more at the mercy of the console producers than their PC counterparts. If a publisher doesn't like a content delivery system, there are a multitude of ways to still sell their product. With consoles, it's the big three's way or nothing. By implementing true Steam-styled DRM for digital downloads, console maker's could set the rules, prevent piracy, and provide added benefit to the users far beyond what any PC model could offer -- a guarantee that users already know the rules.
Services like Steam, Direct2Drive and Impulse are not the answer for consoles, but they do provide very important concepts which would be a huge benefit to the closed-publishing system. With digital distribution gaining ground and the cost of development/purchase price rising. There probably won't need to be a revolution in the console market, but without a dramatic evolution come next cycle, it's hard to see how the mass consolidation and do-or-die blockbuster mentality of almost every triple A title released could sustain itself. The big three need to take a step back and reevaluate the direction they're steering the industry in regards to digital distribution policy. Otherwise the next decade will provide a collection of unplayable vintage titles, missed gameplay revolutions, and consolidation -- not to mention our random teammates will impart us with more knowledge of unthinkable topics than Urban Dictionary ever could.
Consoles have become the undeniable kings of hardcore gaming over the last decade. Almost every triple A game that lacks VALVe's logo or falls into the strategy and adventure genres has been optimized, coded, and designed to be played with a controller on a television. When coupled with the erosion of previously PC-exclusive advantages such as practical online multiplayer and add-on content, there is little reason for any but the most hardcore of gamers to eschew the couch in favor of the swivel chair. Yet having grown up as a dual citizen of both realms, I've become increasingly disenchanted with the way in which console gaming has begun to play less to its strengths and more like the little brother who wants to emulate his older sibling. The strict adherence to old school publishing models of the console makers, combined with their total control of the market, has created an online environment in which the rigidity in the publishing model has the potential to hold back gaming as a whole.
While that may sound like an overly broad statement, I believe it's a fair assessment since the PC has been the afterthought for many years now. What used to be the original SKU is almost always a port and with that comes the irrelevance of the PC's open publishing model.
The idea of publishers' direct-selling games or indie developers taking matters into their own hands i.e. Jason Rohrer are clearly out of the question, but services such as Steam, Direct2Drive and Impulse serve as perfect examples for how console makers could adapt to the changing landscape.
Before assessing what the inherent flaws with the current closed-publishing approach are, it's important to understand why consumers should support it when it makes sense to do so. Closed publishing, in its current form, can best be described through example: Microsoft's XBox platform, Nintendo's Wii/DS platforms, and Sony's Playstation 3/PSP platforms. While companies like EA and Activision are publisher's in the traditional sense in that they fund the games, the console makers get the final say of what can actually be sold and how games can be distributed. Furthermore, the big three (Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony) expect a level of polish, quality, and Q/A testing which essentially assures that your hardware will play the game as intended and not corrupt any portion of your system through a bug. Or at the very least such an even occurring is the exception to the rule. This idea of 'Buy. Boot. Play.' is the single strongest selling point which could never be replicated by another model.