Temporarily. Denuvo is incredibly effective, but it still gets cracked eventually. But, no piracy for 1-9 months in many cases is definitely an improvement.
Seems like multiplayer + freemium model is the ultimate "DRM".
I wonder if there are any popular private or reverse engineered League of Legends or Fortnite servers. These are also the most profitable games in the world.
I have to wonder if a game like World of Warcraft, if it were released in 2019, would even consider a monthly subscription given what it has to compete against these days. I would assume private servers for WoW made sense because people wanted to dodge $15/mo.
My experience with private servers for WoW is that they offer a very different gameplay experience than retail World of Warcraft, which is their primary draw. The lack of a subscription fee is a nice side bonus.
People do a lot of gaming on consoles. I know I do. There is piracy there but it is certainly not overwhelming.
In the case of music and video it seems that DRM is 100% ineffective, and particularly once the content is cracked it can be moved entirely outside the DRM system. In the case of games you still need a runtime environment which is at least somewhat proprietary.
Both music and movies have been devalued to a $10 month "all you can eat" scenario which has nowhere near the revenue potential of a $100 a month cable subscription or buying Blu-Ray at $20 a pop.
Almost all of it gets cracked. The key is to make buying it and providing the content so much more convenient compared to stealing it that people just don't bother.
DRM only needs to work well enough that people can't copy and paste it to their friends. Most games have online multiplayer modes now that can endlessly check for a valid copy from a central server though.
Multiple root access hacks were created for the PS4, I assume some used it to pirate. Console piracy is general has effectively always been rarer than on PC, presumably due to the higher technical barrier. Dragging a cracked .exe into a directory is a lot harder than installing some sort of Homebrew on your console.
PS4 and Switch both have kernel level hacks which have allowed folks to boot pirated copies of games.
But for the most part, I'd say that yeah priacy is effectively dead. The ease of hacking the consoles and running pirated games isn't there (IMO) and thus the percentage of users who are doing it is very small. Much more an enthusiast community moreso than a community of pirates who want to play games.
This could all change, but I don't think that the piracy scene for the newest generation is anywhere close to the last two.
Hell, I remember flashing the firmware on my xbox 360 disk drive within the first year.
Or soldering a modchip into my OG Xbox. RIP that console, best console ever.
For some developers (iD /Bethesda for example) only need DRM to work for the first few of the games lifespan so if you come up with something agressive enough to keep its secrets for a while then it doesn't matter if it gets cracked.
Almost all of it eventually gets cracked. But these days Denuvo is enough to prevent the game from going up within a week or two, which is when a majority of sales are.
Console piracy is effectively dead.
I'm not saying that DRM is a large reason that movies/TV are behind, but I don't think this is a good counterargument.
To a certain extent, ars has an article about "issues" with DRM in video games.
>One of the biggest arguments against anti-piracy checks built into video games (commonly known as "digital rights management," or DRM) is that they punish paying customers with stuttering, loading times, and other detractive gameplay issues. While leading DRM vendor Denuvo has long claimed that its tools don't hamper video games, the stats keep piling up to suggest otherwise.
DRM is anti-consumer in a huge amount of ways that have nothing to do with the mere prevention of unauthorized copying. To describe any form of DRM as 'working' is charitable to say the least, and sophisticated "gamers" are highly aware of this.
I say this as an avid PC gamer myself, but PC gaming is a niche. The vast majority of games are bought and played on mobile and consoles, and those are DRM by nature.
Even on PC, more games are going towards always online/multiplayer and lootbox/cosmetic/etc., which are also DRM by nature.
> He added: "Growth has been fuelled by the dominance of free content and in-game monetisation, which expands the adoption of games but also removes the cap on spending for those gamers that are really engaged in the experiences.”
I always wonder if these experiences can be priced accordingly
Flagship games have been priced at $60 for 25 years and should be priced higher to reflect a variety of other things, but their primary purchasers dont have the money for more. People really into games dont have money, and children’s parents dont respect the medium to want to pay more. (Fortunately there is the aging demographic of everyone else, who do have money and dont mind preordering)
But with the price of a game being mentally fixed in the collective conscious I wodber what the average price per user is now with the in game transactions factored in
Aren't many consoles sold at or near (or even below) cost, on the assumption that software sales will make up for it? Also, how would a console sold by Sony or Microsoft subsidize in any way a game sold by a third party publisher?
Evidence #1: The ever-present existence of potato masher PC configurations (cheaper and more powerful than a console in qty 1) makes me doubt that consoles are loss leaders. The crypto bubble played with that math but it seems to generally hold.
Evidence #2: Sony keeps bragging about how many consoles their investments in first-party game studios have been able to move. Importantly: that's how they phrase it.
Evidence #3: This particular narrative has held true for several people in my bubble, including myself. People will buy a console to play Bloodborne, Horizon Zero Dawn, or God of War. The center-of-mass for single-player narrative-driven AAAs seems to be moving away from the PC, and the ones that stay on the PC seem to be bogged down with "alternative" monetization models.
Respectfully, there's another number in the equation: install base.
25 years ago there was a much smaller base of game systems and capable PCs than exists today. At basically 0 incremental cost for each additional copy produced the big game publishers are still making more money than they did previously.
> their primary purchasers dont have the money for more.
There's some of that, but I think it's more just gamer entitlement. Any company that prices a game above $60 will be crucified on Reddit, YouTube, and the gaming media, because games are "supposed to" cost $60 and anything more than that is "greedy".
Then the same people will say they don't understand why everything has microtransactions now.
Gamers got EA voted "worst company in America" two years running over companies that actually, literally killed people.
They're hocking near-zero marginal cost goods and their pricing is already high enough to deny potential consumer base - despite technically being able to afford it, I rarely buy AAA titles until they're available at big discounts or from less than reputable 3rd parties, I just don't see most games as that valuable, it's a bit of a gamble whether they're even worth playing.
Compare this with $10/mo for Netflix or Spotify - gamers are getting a rough deal already just buying a few AAA titles a year. Personally I'm all for microtransactions so long as they don't impact gameplay in unfair ways - many developers are already doing this quite successfully, Fortnite and Overwatch being popular and generally well liked examples.
So this is mostly a confirmation that the "loot box" monetization model has been resoundingly successful? This controversial model exploits gamer psychology, is sometimes implemented along the veins of "pay to win", and is seen by some as a sort of in-game form of gambling.
I wouldn't say that's the reason. This statistic has already been true for some time in the US, I believe. I think this article is specifically talking about UK produced games. I could be wrong, though.
Cosmetics are a billion dollar industry, why do you write it off so quickly? People pay money to make their face look different from others, why wouldn't they pay money to make their digital self different?
I have not played the game, so this is only from what I've read [0], but it is my understanding that they designed a progression system that strongly pushes people to pay. Also, while not strictly "loot boxes", you are still able to indirectly pay for random items because the drops are linked to level progression, which can be sped up with micro-transactions.
The loot box model was tried with the new Star Wars Battlefront II, and it had an amazing amount of pushback, to the extent the developer gave up on the model in the game. It seems these days the most successful monetization model is in-game purchases, particularly for skins and whatnot, a la Fortnite.
The reason for the backlash on StarWars was because you pay for (some of) the game, where as FortniteBR is free.
And I believe StarWars made it so you can pay to be the more powerful characters, where as I believe FortniteBR doesn't contain any Pay-to-Win
I'm completely convinced that cosmetic/skin purchases are by far the best way to make a sustainable continuously updated pvp game. Nobody feels bad about not being able to invest money to be able to win, it encourages (and funds!) active development of the game and its visuals, and rare/cool skins and associated animations can be delightful to see even on other players.
I think it can create new jobs in the future (and maybe now?) as well. If you had an open market where aspiring artists could design and sell skins for something like Fortnite, with the developers taking a cut of the profits, it could be worth learning Photoshop/CAD and just selling assets. I think the Unity store is like this.
The "loot box" is starting to die in preference for the "battle pass", which basically offers transparent incentives for continued & skilled play by paying a single fee for a set amount of time, usually called a "season".
This is one of the reasons why Fortnite has been so successful: its easier to justify a single 10 dollar payment for a few weeks and know what you're getting based on what you play.
I've collectively dumped hundreds of hours in Factorio, Stardew Valley, and Kerbal Space Program.
You dont have to look very far to find games which have long play times and no lootboxes (which is a fairly recent thing). Sometimes, games are just good without exploitative mechanics
I think between factorio, oxygen not included, minecraft, no mans sky and gemcraft (tower defense game) I'm probably in nearing 10 thousand hours of collective gameplay for a grand total of under $200. $0.02/hr is a hard number to beat. I don't think its possible for a movie or a song.
Even though these numbers are very anecdotal. The amount of money spent on a game vs the number of hours played shows that extra value could be extracted from the customer.
Netflix/Spotify model comes to mind. The collective pool of subscriptions fund creation of AAA titles just like the EA pass.
Perhaps, though I notice not a single one of the games I listed is an AAA title. I'm struggling to think of any AAA title that has held my attention for longer than 25 hours. I'd hate to subsidize the cost of an AAA title on the backs of indie developers who seem to be making games with a lot more sticking power/entertainment value.
I was an early fan of KSP. I've spent long, long hours in FTL. My latest gaming obsession was Heat Signature. No lootboxes in any of those. (Except as a joke in Heat Signature, and you can't convert real world currency into one of those.)
They specifically compared games to movies. If we're talking about theaters, then no individual purchase will ever provide hundreds of hours of entertainment. Even if we are talking about blu-ray/dvd/digital download, very few people are going to ever get hundreds of hours of entertainment out of any single movie.
> A good album can also provide hundreds of hours of entertainment for $10.
Passive/supplemental entertainment maybe. Outside of a very small percentage of serious audiophiles, I don't know anyone listening to 1 album for hundreds of hours other than as background noise.
I'm a huge Mass Effect fan. I played Mass Effect: Andromeda for about 30h at launch. For a CAD$80 game, that wasn't a good investment.
I also love System of a Down. Probably paid sub-$100 for their discography. Must have hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
I'm also a huge Star Wars fan. The $30 I paid for the movie ticket and the popcorn combo when I went to see Rogue One brought me much more pleasure than those 30h of ME:A, so was this a better value?
I know, that's one game, one artist, one movie, but that's just to illustrate that it's not that clear-cut.
The parent was clearly talking about averages/the typical case. Sure, you can cherry pick cases where a single item under/over performs the average but it doesn't invalidate the above point.
If we're only talking averages, the average game isn't a very good value either - a whole lot of them suck bad and are, even at a discounted rate, a total waste of money. I'm still not really sold on this argument.
We're not really talking about "the average game" either though, otherwise we'd have to include "the average movie" which must necessarily--like games--include amateur and very low budget projects.
We're talking about is the games you actually end up playing versus the movies you actually end up watching. For me the value for money is crushingly in favor of games, both in terms of hours per dollar and in terms of subjective enjoyment.
Other people might have a different overall experience, but let's at least compare the right things.
> We're talking about is the games you actually end up playing versus the movies you actually end up watching. For me the value for money is crushingly in favor of games, both in terms of hours per dollar and in terms of subjective enjoyment.
Fair enough. Really depends on the type of games you enjoy though. They really don't all have the same replay value. As you said, other people might have different experiences.
I appreciate that games might not be your thing, and I am sure many share that sentiment and thus spend their time and money elsewhere accordingly. I am not sure, however, how you can objectively reach the above conclusion. I would encourage you to browse through https://steamdb.info/graph/ which, among many other metrics, tracks average and median hours played for each title on Steam. If you hover popular titles like PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS or Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, you will find average total hours of 330.6 and 165.6, respectively. You can naturally also find niche titles with fewer hours; e.g. Broforce at 10.5 hours, or Blood Harvest at 7.0 hours, though niche titles tend to be cheaper (and shorter!) than mainstream triple-A games. It thus goes without saying that for those who do enjoy games, many find dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours of enjoyment in a single title.
Games definitely are my thing. It's actually why I feel confident in saying a whole lot of them are terrible.
Average play time doesn't mean much in terms of actual game quality and value for your money. I've played games just to go through them, get the story and play the sequel, the one that's actually good.
I appreciate that you have found enjoyment in some games despite categorising most of them as terrible. However, whilst the quality of any game is entirely subjective, I would very much argue that most people would not spend time playing a game they do not enjoy. I thus reckon a metric like average time played is a telling one in terms of whether people who purchased the game actually enjoy it. Mind you, most platforms offer refunds with no questions asked should a given game not meet your expectations.
I never said the whole lot is garbage. But a huge portion of them are at best passable or forgettable.
Average time played is not a good metric because people on both extremes will skew it heavily, like any average - people who bought the game but never played it, or people who play it way too much. It also depends a lot on the game. On an okay-ish game that has a +/-20h campaign will be pretty easy to munch through just to check it off, but one can easily abandon an okay-ish game with 5-10 minute matches after a handful of hours.
I apologise, I misread your initial message. I have edited accordingly. Thanks for the heads-up! I understand that you consider a huge portion of games as being at best passable or forgettable; but that is your inherently subjective opinion. It is not one which you can assume everyone shares, nor one you can use to draw objective conclusions. Indeed, the same can be said about music and movies. I only distinctively remember a subset of the movies I have watched, for instance.
I understand the point you are making in regards to average time played, but surely the people who, quote-unquote, play the game way too much, enjoy that specific game very much? Please note that you can also see the median playtime on the abovementioned website.
most platforms offer refunds with no questions asked should a given game not meet your expectations
Is that a common practice? I once accidentally bought a "standard" version of a game instead of the "ultimate" on my Xbox One and had to deal with a couple of support people to refund my original purchase in order to get the other.
That is my impression, yes. If a platform operates within the EU, consumers have the right to withdraw from a purchase within 14 days. Platforms like Origin and Steam have gone above and beyond to simplify the process even further. As for Xbox / Microsoft Store specifically, I believe, today, you can simply click 'Request a return' on the item in your order history.
You should have been alert to EA screwing up the Mass Effect franchise from all the garbage they pulled on Mass effect 3 (Weak ending, making Javik DLC when he was clearly a main character, etc.)
Waiting 30-60 days meant that the game was available for less than half that.
There are definitely great indie games out there - Binding of Isaac is excellent, Pillars of Eternity (I & II) are what a modern Baldur's Gate would feel like - yes, Obsidian was bought by Microsoft but that's after the release of these two, and they were still considered indie before then - and Into the Breach is easily in my top 3 for 2018 games.
A music streaming service provides me with hundreds of hours of entertainment for $120/yr, guaranteed.
If you include hardware costs I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on video games. The number of games I've spent more than 200 hours playing is in the single digits.
>A music streaming service provides me with hundreds of hours of entertainment for $120/yr, guaranteed.
And that music streaming service probably comes close to maxing out the entertainment most people can get from purchasing music, so for most people, music isn't really competing against games in their entertainment budget.
If we're talking about concerts though, you're talking about a higher cost per hour than movies. Not comparable to $120 for hundreds of hours.
>market for music merchandise
I'm going to avoid merch because games have merch too, so it doesn't really seem worth comparing.
>and musical instruments
Musical instruments, for people who are interested, probably do provide a higher entertainment value per dollar than games, but they are definitely a much smaller niche market.
I don't think you should get down voted. I spent $60 and listened a little under 600 hours on Spotify in 2018.
I understand the reasoning, but time spent is not really a great measurement of value. I probably spent hundreds of hours on a couple of games back in middle/high school and I'd be lying if I said I didn't regret at least some of that.
I wouldn't directly equate the quality of a product by how much time it kills for you. I've seen 90 minute films that enriched my life far more than games I've played for dozens of hours.
I think you want a score that's a function of (a) the time spent doing the thing, (b) the time spent reminiscing about and talking about the thing, and (c) the quality of the thing.
A trip to Disney for somebody might conceivably be something that they remember for the rest of their lives and that has value.
How do you define "entertainment value"? It's going to be different for different people. I enjoy video games, spend money on them, and have played some for a couple hundred hours I'm sure. But personally there's not a single one that I would take over my favorite albums, movies, or books.
So while there is a greater value per hour of use for games, that does not necessarily equate to a "better entertainment value" for all users.
Why is dollar per hour a good metric of entertainment value? I don't think entertainment is a binary yes or no. Entertainment is a scale, and it's possible you get more total entertainment from something that you enjoy intensely for 30 min vs something you mildly enjoy for a hundred (or so) hours.
Dollar per hour is not necessarily a good metric, but it is a metric. And we need a metric like that to quantitatively compare different mediums.
What you say about the complexity of entertainment is absolutely true, but we somehow need to model it in a relatively easy way, and that means throwing out some details.
And from in naive guess, people don't enjoy themselves significantly more watching film than playing videogames. So dollar per hour is a good enough metric for our purposes.
I've listened to some albums for 20 years. I've inherited some vinyl from my mom that's 50 years old. There are some movies I've watched dozens of times.
Sure, but 2 hours of playing a video game isn't necessarily as compelling as e.g. seeing a 2-hour film.
One of the things I've been paying attention to as I get older is how many unique experiences a thing offers. Games that are hundreds of hours long, or otherwise provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, generally involve a lot of repetition. Repetition is intrinsically unmemorable.
The games keep you busy, and you might not describe yourself as bored while playing them, but it's not like you can remember all of the riveting times you fought a Zubat. And in that sense, was it an optimal use of time? Sometime I find it disturbing to think about. There are games where my total playtime adds up to literal months, but the number of unique memories I have of actually playing are depressingly few.
Gaming may be "worth more" but culturally it's still frowned upon. With smartphones, you can "hide" the fact that you're playing. Not so easy to do that with a Switch in public.
Maybe it's not everywhere, but where I live, playing video games are still seen as a sign of immaturity and lack of social skills. Doesn't matter that there are mature rated games that require voice communication to play properly, doesn't matter that tons of gamers are in at least one gaming community.
Somewhere in the mid 00s, society established a new gamer stereotype as some lazy man child who prefers to sit around reading comics and playing games to going out and "grabbing life by the horns" or some other nonsense.
Because gaming is pretty ubiquitous and accepted in American culture (at least in the coastal areas I've been to).
Playing games and identifying as a 'gamer' are definitely different, however. I play a lot of core games (PUBG, Overwatch, etc.) but I definitely do not label myself a 'gamer'.
Years of marketing video games to a way-too-narrow demographic with no disposable income - boys and early teens. It's not the only media that was stuck in the "kids only" camp - look how long it took cartoons to break free of that mould. Thank The Simpsons for that one.
There has definitely been a shift here, though. Note the high-budget prime time PS4 commercials over the last few years featuring actors in and targeted to the 18-40 demo. The message seems to be packaged escapism there. Similarly, Nintendo is marketing the Switch like a lifestyle brand would (Apple, Samsung), although that shift started with the Wii. Just slicker and less quirky.
I think Nintendo's idea of incorporating it into life is way more successful than the "escapism" route (which may be contributing to those negative stereotypes we all know and loathe by now).
Marketing video games to enhance a social setting rather than a way to escape one probably appeals to parents who are worried about the whole "screen zombies" thing.
And yet AFAIK little of that money makes it back to the creators. In the movies hit products pay millions to the stars, millions to the director. In games devs might get a small bonus after lots of overtime.
If I understand correctly it used to be the same in movies until the directors and stars started demanding more. IIRA United Artists was started because of these issues.
Also few games have the budget of movies. There's a few exceptions like say GTA5 or RD2 but mostly title for title game budgets are at least an order of magnitude lower than movies.
Off the top of my head: Carmack, Sweeny, Rami Ismail
Could probably come up with many other examples. As someone who did dev in that industry I knew plenty technical people who had a outsized impact on gameplay, tone and style.
Well, I'd agree that John Carmack is more comparable to a film director than a crew member. On the other hand, John Carmack is better compensated for that, as he is worth $40 Million[0], the same as film director Spike Lee[1] (who has been active a bit longer).
Their net worth isn't really comparable though. Spike Lee makes polarizing movies that appeal to niche audiences. Carmack made a couple of the best and most popular games of all time. He also achieved revolutionary technological advances that pushed gaming beyond what people thought was possible on the hardware that existed 3 generations in a row. Arguably 4.
Given that the game industry is so large, his net worth should be comparable to lucas, Cameron, or Spielberg.
When it comes to excelling in a field, I don't even think Spielberg, Lucas and Cameron compare to Carmack. I can think of some actors that might, such as Daniel-Day Lewis, but not a director.
Carmack is a hero for a certain generation of programmers, but id's most successful titles in it's heyday would be considered mid-tier indie successes by today's standards. Games derived from idtech (most Call of Duty games, most Valve titles) have seen orders of magnitude more success than anything released by id. I imagine at this point that most of Carmack's networth comes from the sale of id to Zenimax followed by Facebook stock granted for joining Oculus, not from game royalties.
Doom and Quake are more niche than many movies Spike Lee has directed if you are outside of a tech/gamer bubble. According to wikipedia Doom as a series has sold 10 million units (by comparison a single Call of Duty game sells 30 million+) and Quake sold 1.1 million units life time (Gone Home sold 700K units). I agree that Carmack's impact and influence on the industry isn't captured in his networth (although really he's still ridiculously rich...)
My comment was a direct response to you having Sweeney's name in the post I responded to, I had not read the earlier post where you mention investor classification. Why use Sweeney as an example if you think he's an exception, which he is.
I agree with this point. Earlier today I made a similar comment regarding the lack of political strength among software developers, for such a well paid (relative to most Americans) trade, it's hard to name a powerful special interest group for developers.
There are lots of theories regarding personality types that lead to speculation of why this is the case, but I'd really like to see some research that digs into this. Labor by developers is becoming more and more valuable, with this you expect more political strength.. but it does not seem to be happening.
Most of us believe the world being this meritocracy and we all get what we deserve and work for. And think the only people who would band together are the weak ones that can't compete on merit.
People may not agree, but every argument I've heard against unionization contains this sentiment. Even if it isn't expressed so boldly.
> Which is why we earn a historically tiny proportion of the value we add.
In capitalism the amount you get paid is dependent on supply and demand. The "value" you add is irrelevant if they could easily replace you with someone else.
Funny thing is that in Hollywood, the best actors, writers, and directors, tend to be the most pro-union.
Because before they were on the A-list, when they were no-names struggling to get by, it was the union rules that made it possible for them to eke out a living while they waited and worked for their big break, and it was the union rules that protected them from being exploited when they finally got their big break.
Because programmers are so in demand that for the most part, anybody skilled at it can get a job in the industry. If you haven't worked in other industries it might be easy to think that the whole world works like that.
Are there any politically powerful labor groups in America anymore? The Democrats pay lip service to unions, but tend to ignore their priorities when making policy.
> I agree with this point. Earlier today I made a similar comment regarding the lack of political strength among software developers, for such a well paid (relative to most Americans) trade, it's hard to name a powerful special interest group for developers.
Please excuse my ignorance, but I was always under the impression that special interest groups are more likely to form for those whose conditions are pretty poor. I feel like programmers are treated pretty well compared to most other professions, especially when considering the lack of money and time required to enter the field so I'm not even sure what I'd want from a special interest group.
There are definitely powerful SIGs that operate on behalf of more traditionally marginalized groups, the NAACP stands out. But a look at some other SIGs highlights that those in powerful positions often exert their political influence through SIGs. The ACLU, NRA, AARP and US Chamber of Commerce (surprise! it's not actually a part of the government) are notable examples.
This is being downvoted, but I would curious to hear an argument for why it isn't true. It seems to me the skill set for a star in the movie business is rarer than a skill set for a star in the game industry. Also Tom Cruise isn't only a paid well because because he is a good actor, he is also paid well because he is a movie star. People go to the movies just to see him. Are there many people in the gaming industry that engender that kind of loyalty when they work on a game?
Also only one Hidetaka Miyazaki. the impact these people have is not entirely reflective by their salary, rather it is their status and reputation among the game purchasing public that tends to reflect their contributions to any given game development project
I mean the reality is that developers can only have a limited impact on a game.
People don't play a game because it's got 100% code coverage and the greatest end to end tests. Most of the time people play a game because it's fun. Programmers don't make games fun; it's the game designers that make it fun.
Sure the game would not exist without programmers, but you can take one set of programmers and replace it with another set and largely the game will be the same to the players, assuming the skills/experience of the programmers are similar.
In a way, programmers are necessary, but the most they can do is stop the game from completely falling apart. It's the game designers that have a much greater potential to make a game great.
I love the assumption of the oppressed worker class mentality of some folks in the bubble. Not saying you are in the bubble necessarily, but there's been a lot unionizing and oh-the-poor-worker talk in this thread.
It's easy to forget what absolutely touched lives we developers have, even the grunts.
Anyhow, it is incumbent on every technical worker to find and establish their niche over time. If you get called a "unicorn" in whatever field you land in, you're in a good negotiating position for things like salary.
I love this writeup[1] of the kit artists at Bethesda for example.
> Of course, there’s another reason that Skyrim had only two full-time kit artists; kits are really complicated things to work on. Kits require not only the artistic ability to produce high quality visuals, but also a technical competency in their art tool, a deep understanding of the editor and design workflow, and so on. This unique blend of left and right brain is somewhat at odds with what many art professionals value. I've worked with great artists who make excellent kits but hate working on them - so they don't.
> So when you’re trying to identify somebody with the the aptitude and interest to be a great kit artist, you’re basically looking for a unicorn. They're rare.
And they better be paid accordingly so they don't bolt and start their own game studios! You get to negotiate if you're a unicorn.
> Programmers don't make games fun; it's the game designers that make it fun.
Not really.
About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Solid tech chops, but also with an eye towards gameplay you can bet they tweaked the shit out of our game system. We only had 3 'dedicated' designers so a non-trivial amount of work fell in the dev's hands.
To get concrete the smoothing/sticky algorithm and tuning of our aiming mechanism was created and owned by a single dev. Take a look at this[1] for a good breakdown of what goes into something like that.
> About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Solid tech chops, but also with an eye towards gameplay you can bet they tweaked the shit out of our game system. We only had 3 'dedicated' designers so a non-trivial amount of work fell in the dev's hands.
I don't feel like you're disagreeing with me.
It just sounds like the roles on your team were more blurred but the point still stands. What's meaningful isn't your title but the type of work you do. The more influence you have over the design of the game, the bigger an impact you will have on how fun it is.
No, I'm very much disagreeing with you. I can take any title I worked on and point to art, code, production or design work that dovetailed into what makes a game "fun".
In fact the want to know what the largest predictor of if a game is going to be fun or not?
Talk to any game designer and they'll tell you it's the iteration cycle time of their tools. They'll be the first to admit that they don't know what fun is(otherwise we'd just formulate it, bottle it up and fire all the game designers). The more they can throw things at the wall that "stick" the better chance a game has at being fun.
I also can't think of any team I've been on my career(or other teams I know of) where roles weren't "blurred" it's expected and required in the industry even on large, AAA teams.
Definitely in agreement with you, the parent analogy seems to work well. There are indeed people who just buy a Kojima or Kamiya (Resident Evil 2, Okami, Bayonetta) game. More than a few games that I probably would have ignored if it wasn't for their names. Luckily, none of their games have disappointed me so far (note: haven't played MGS V yet).
As someone who spent a bit of time in that industry the best way I've been able to describe it is a production schedule that looks like film but with a financial structure closer to the music industry.
Your studio gets an 'advance' on development with milestones and the like. Only after you've paid back your advance + more do you start seeing royalties come to the studio. That advance allotment also usually includes the marketing budget which can be as much or more than the studio dev cost.
Studio employees are usually a tier below that as well, in my time I never saw a penny of royalties, bonuses or the like. Combined with a pay that's 40-70% below standard dev rates it's not really a great industry if you live in a high cost of living area.
I feel like the programmers and artists are far more important to a game than the grips and extras are to a movie. For sure, there are some programmers and artists that work on trivial grunt work, but I'd absolutely consider lead P&As to be the equivalent to star actors. If you change any one of them out, you'll probably end up with a very different game feel.
The movie equivalent of devs is probably set builders, prop builders, people working on visual effects, costume design and artistic makeup. These are highly skilled jobs, but these people are considered replaceable by the movie executives, and so are not paid millions. The same can be said for devs. If you want to be paid a lot, you have to convince people that you are not replaceable.
>If you change any one of them out, you'll probably end up with a very different game feel.
The feel of the game is created through the cinemtography, sound, visual effects, assets, acting, etc. The only way programmers actually have an effect on the way the game feels to the player is if they screw up and introduce some game breaking bugs or fail to implement face rigging properly or something like that.
Otherwise, no, I'm sorry, but programmers are to modern games what production staff are to movies. Necessary, but utterly inconsequential in terms of the value of the final product for the consumer.
Take Fallout 3/4 and New Vegas. The concepts for the games were largely the same, so was the initial tooling. The difference was the development teams. The games have a completely different feel.
Dev teams are not interchangable cogs. Different developers will have different ideas for solutions to problems, game mechanics, etc. And different artists will create a completely different assets, even if given the same themes to work with.
I might be biased as a programmer but I'm also guessing you've never worked on a video game and have a slightly romantized view of game development? If you have worked on games potentially you've worked on a product that had very clear separation of responsibility and where game play programmer and game designers were the same role?
Just like PMs and designers don't wholly own product direction for a web or mobile application, game designers and artists don't entirely own game feel and even if they do they are often gated or empowered by systems developed and designed by programmers. In most cases designers are also programmers ("scripters") so you can make the further argument that game system design actually is just a form of programming, even if the designers aren't always writing code in the traditional sense.
Games have the equivalent of directors who receive millions, like Sid Meier, Tim Sweeny, John Carmack, Gabe Newell, Markus Persson.
And movies have the equivalent of underpaid overworked devs: extras and grips and so on.
No, they really don't. Sid Meier, et al, make relatively little of the money of the games sold under their name, with the exception of Carmack and Newell, who own/majority owned their studios outright.
In contrast, the spoils in Hollywood and Music are shared with a much larger group, which sustains the industry in a way that the obscenely hit-based nature of gaming can't.
Also, to note: almost all workers on a Hollywood production (meaning movies released in America, not just those actually made in Hollywood, CA) are union members or protected by union rules even if they aren't yet members. Even extras. After your third role as an extra, you generally have to get/qualify for SAG-AFTRA membership.
Finally: Hollywood has the lovely concept of overtime. I have a great many friends who work in the industry, and they love overtime. It starts at time and a half, and the multiple increases every few hours over the day and week so that theoretically a crew member (but not cast member) could be making 5x of their base hourly rate after a few days of Hollywood's equivalent of crunch time. (Exact amount of hours in a day/week before hourly rates go above 1.5x varies per union, but generally starts at 12 hours/day or 50 hours/week). Needless to say, because abusing their workers gets so expensive, studios plan production to limit crunch time during a production. While it's relatively common for production schedules to include overtime, generally only mismanaged productions run into crunch time.
There is no equivalent in the gaming industry, and so crunch time of a year or two is common (see e.g., EA and Telltale Games). F/X studios operate like gaming studios, so those workers are relatively abused. Like game programmers and other game studio employees, they have largely resisted unionization and so are generally the only group of Hollywood workers that can be said to be both unpaid and overworked.
I saw a joke on Twitter, can't remember who said it. Is Netflix's new Black Mirror Choose Your Own Adventure a movie or a game? It's a movie, you can tell because everyone involved got paid for overtime.
Yes. The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839,[1], which represents most of the major studio animators in California, has tried to organize game developers, at least the artists and animators. They have not been successful. They'd be glad to talk to you if you're a game developer. I've seen their union reps at local SIGGRAPH meetings.
No one is buying a game because Joe Programmer worked on the network stack. People often see movies simply because they like the lead actor/actress. Additionally, programmers are not directors, and the vast majority of them are not akin to movie stars. This analogy fails on many levels.
Are they, though? It's more that the causal connection is more obvious. The audience can immediately see the face has changed. However, bugs and missing features are just as loudly complained about. It just takes longer to notice, and the audience lingers on in dissatisfaction a bit longer.
People caught onto this in comic books, however. There are savvy readers who follow writers and artists, not characters. There are savvy fans of Anime who do this as well. There are even people who do this with books and movies. There are some gamers who do this with games.
Same old story. There are those fooled by surfaces, and those who try to see beneath them.
>There are savvy readers who follow writers and artists, not characters. There are savvy fans of Anime who do this as well. There are even people who do this with books and movies. There are some gamers who do this with games.
Yes, but game developers aren't the ones doing the art, or writing, for games.
We don't pay people based on 'effort'. We pay people based on their output, in particular their ability to take create situations where money changes hands.
If somebody thinks they can get more money with less effort then we want them to try working that way instead.
We pay people based on their output, in particular their ability to take create situations where money changes hands.
In other words, corporations make a cost/benefit calculation. In the case of software developers and lead software developers, my experience is that most corporations can concretely read the dollar amount as cost, but often drastically underestimate the potential cost of bad software.
There are situations where many people are valued below market for a long, long time. Markets aren't omniscient and infinitely fast.
At the game studios that I'm familiar with the term "game developer" refers to anyone working on the game and not just the programmers. So an artist or writer would generally be considered a game developer but the studio's accountant and CEO would probably not be considered game developers.
This is the big problem with forming unions. Those who are in the best position to bargain are generally happy the way things are, even if they could be better. And those who have the most to gain have little leverage. The junior devs and QA are expected to put in 70+ hour weeks without extra compensation. Unlike other industries where developers work in gaming it is common to layoff much of the staff during preproduction at a gaming studio, and then attempt to hire them back on later, or layoff staff after a release is finished.
It depends. If he was significantly more wealthy, he'd have more opportunities to fund new projects and companies. Imagine Steve Jobs had been worth only a few million back in 1986 (who really needs more than that, right?), he wouldn't have been able to found NeXT, or bankroll Pixar.
Funds flowing to proven creators, successful entrepreneurs and shrewd investors is a good thing because those are exactly the people who know how to deploy those assets productively.
Having said all that, I've no idea specifically about Carmack.
That's a good point. Seems like a bit of a hole in the system though. Why does it have to be so hard for an organization succeed without an existing connection to success? If Steve hadn't funded Pixar, then we wouldn't have gotten a bunch of cool stuff. I would guess there are hundreds of Pixars that had no Steve. Of course there is no obvious answer to this problem, and the system we have is way way better than what was available historically.
Pixar came out of the Lucasfilm digital arm and didn't really have any existing connection to Steve Jobs.
How to link investors up with startups and growth opportunities in businesses is an old problem that ideally needs multiple solutions available.
[rant]I think the success of capitalism has partially been the reward mechanism, but it's also been that it allows and encourages multiple mechanisms for capital to link up with investment opportunities. The alternatives have all offered grand ideal, theoretically perfect mechanisms for the distribution and allocation of assets. It's not that those mechanisms are necessarily all useless, I do think a degree of state capitalism and central planning for really big, long term or essential projects have their place, but they can't be the only solution. At it's core capitalism is about individual freedom, and that includes the freedom to own your own small business, or to aggregate together into large group enterprises like banks and corporations, or to vote for governments that fund essential services. These are not natural opposites IMHO, and ideologies on the left or the right that force them into opposition do so only because they themselves are flawed.[/rant]
It's more than a reasonable amount of money. But Carmack is not a reasonable amount of developer. For the guy who popularized an entire genre of video games, no.
Yeah, but framing this as an issue in the gaming industry is disingenuous. A lack of unionization is a problem in programming in general, not just video games.
There's definitely exploitation, but it's also market forces at play. When you have a never ending stream of devs who can't wait to work for you, well, you don't have to pay as much.
There's a never ending stream of aspiring actors and writers too. Forming a union has offered them some protection from being exploited by studios and perhaps game developers should do the same.
> Forming a union has offered them some protection from being exploited by studios
If the Weinstein scandal is any indication, no it hasn't. Unions are not without their problems, while more widespread awareness about the actual working conditions in any given industry (be it acting or game development) is highly effective, one way or the other. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
And most of them aren't getting jobs. Software development and acting are barely comparable professions. The average programmer is far better off than the average actor, even with their Union
Electricians earn more than janitors do. But the existence of service workers' unions doesn't make the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers any less legitimate.
Actors and Actresses don't face issues getting roles on the basis that they've been priced out of the market.
Issues in getting jobs have to do with the limited supply of capitalized projects, high project transactional costs (including fairly high financial, equipment and professional costs), restrictions upon actor country of origin on the basis of bilateral entertainment tax treaties and a number of other structural issues. All of these issues mean that there's a substantial amount of activation energy required to get an entertainment product off the ground, which limits the amount of product projects in motion at any given time.
Feel free to look up the various guild pay grades. The minimums are very low, and they're designed to prevent the 'be in this motion picture for free for exposure' race to the bottom, not to price small projects out of the market.
Programmers in general are treated waaay better then game programmers. Specifically, programmer can have 40 hours week, bigger salary then game programmer and (subjectively) reasonably interesting work "at a same time".
It takes some fighting and searching to get all three, the last seeming most hard. But it is possible and not really hard.
I am not at all opposed to unions in principle but I'm not sure unionizing would be good for us. For skilled, high-demand labor like coding there are a lot of downsides to unions. Corruption, bureaucracy, union fees, increased regulation etc.
Collective bargaining would not yield Tom Cruise-like returns or even exceptional returns.
The reason is that devs are ultimately a commodity.
Actors, by the way - even good ones - are even more of a commodity. There are tons of spectacular actors who would work cheap.
What brings in the audience is not the quality of the acting, it's the familiarity of the person, or the 'living brand'.
The 'human being Tom Cruise' obviously has the most amazing, unbreakable IP protection on the 'brand Tom Cruise'.
And it's the 'brand Tom Cruise' that has value. (And He only has to be a decent actor, not a even a great one)
Unions might help with some things ... but generally that's not going to be it.
The other thing to consider is the hugely risky and hit-driven nature of the business. Any 'investor' in games is risking so much, that the returns may be a little biased.
Consider that even for a game that 'made a lot of money' - it still may not be rational to have invested in that game! It still maybe overall a 'bad investment' to invest in such things.
I don't see AAA video games as inherently more risky than big budget films. I also don't think you have to reach Tom Cruise levels of success to be better off than a game developer.
A union could do a lot for those who work in the game industry. Game developers work such insane hours during crunch time when there's really no need for it. With a union mandating a standard work week, the onus would be put on the producers of the game to plan effectively in order to meet a deadline.
Game producers would have us all believe that games are uniquely complicated in a way that sets them apart from films and requires such ridiculous time commitments. That's rubbish. The vast majority of the work that goes into a triple A game is asset creation (graphics and sound). This makes games extremely similar to films which are dominated by CG and post-production work these days.
That's a good point. Though I don't know if I'm sure about the risk, it would be good to see some data on that.
Some games, especially follow ons of well established 'game brands' I can see as being less risky ... but for new titles?
But yes, there's no reason for the countless hours, that's basically just taking advantage of creatives no doubt and admittedly unions may help in some way.
I'm not sure who told you that but they clearly are unfamiliar with the WGA minimums... Writers get paid a minimum of $500k for a Hollywood film with a budget of $5 million or more. TV writers for broadcast and cable make a minimum of $75k per episode regardless of budget. In both cases, this does not include royalties.
I am looking at the WGA contract...that's where I get my info from. Your average staff writer gets nowhere near $75k per episode. A bit above $4k which is a far cry from $75,000.
You must be looking at the wrong contract. I've a good number of friends who are WGA members and they've all been able to buy houses with the earnings from a single scripted episode of a broadcast network show based solely on the WGA negotiated amounts. They're all just parts of the writer's room, not show runners.
I'm not sure this analogy works though because the difference is that most game developers could choose to work in a different industry with the same skill set and make a lot more. They nevertheless choose to be there and there are plenty of people who are willing to take their spots if they don't want to be there.
I'm guessing once people get fed up enough they just leave which is much easier than forming some kind of special interest group or union.
A quick google search says game developers make around $100k. That's a lot more than what the bottom 99% of musicians and actors make.
Let me know when there's a star developer who's name on the front of a video game cover will guarantee a moderate number of sales no matter how bad the game is. That's when the comparison against the top 0.1% of actors will make sense.
Yeah, no where close to that. Entry level is around 30-40k, after a 3-5 years you can be expecting 50-60k if you're lucky.
There are exceptions but I saw my salary double when I left the industry and from talking with other people it seemed like a pretty common pattern.
FWIW games follows the 90/10 rule(90% of revenue goes to 10% of the market) so while the 100k average may be "accurate" it doesn't paint a clear picture.
Yup, lower for Art and even lower for Design usually. Producers/PM tend to be close to dev salaries.
The real twist on this is that these aren't stable jobs either. Every studio I know had some sort of closure/downsizing around the 3-5 year mark. I know many people who had to be constantly moving between SEA/SF/Austin/etc just to keep a job across a career.
Don't be fooled by HN and the hype of the SV bubble - the vast majority of programming work in the real world is the digital equivalent of factory assembly line labor.
I'm hiring people that build game engines to do 3D graphics programming for medical applications. The salary range is much better than game programming. tony[at]uniformteeth.com.
I made more than that in base compensation in 2001 in video games and I'm no rockstar. Of course if I reentered the video game industry the pay would be about the same 20 years later...
I'm going to go with John Carmack on that one. I think Oculus was a great example of that. I'm not saying they didn't have potential before he joined, but merely him moving to there caused a huge amount of press.
it doesn't matter that they are paid well. what matters is that aren't sharing in the spoils. if the industry is doing so well salaries and bonuses should be higher.
as an example Sony has 10-15 divisions. TVs, batteries, Lcd screens, cameras, etc. For the last 10 to 15 yrs all of them have lost money except the game division but the game division has the lowest salaries.
At the super high end Tim Sweeney and Gabe Newell are both billionaires on the Forbes list, but they are both owners and founders of their respective companies so that's a little different than director. Jason West and Vince Zampella (directors of Call of Duty) had 36 million in owed royalties for Modern Warfare 2, the Housers who are directors of GTA and RDR get millions in royalties, etc. Anyone that has made a popular indie game (like one that people have heard of) has made millions.
Your average game industry employee is not equivalent to directors and stars in movies though. They're much closer to employees/contractors at visual effects companies or grips, none of them are getting millions even on the biggest films. At least as a mid-tier engineer on a hit AAA game you can get total compensation equal to or better than big tech pays in some cases, and as an artist you can make more than you would in film with more stability.
This is a good description and aligns with my experience of the last decade or so in the industry. VFX for films is the closest to games but I would sooner work in games as an engineer than VFX in terms of compensation or job stability.
We really messed up the "superstar" aspect early on. Anyone else remember John Romero? He single-handedly made an entire industry reconsider "Great man theory". After that, the idea of the "rock star developer" sort of died in gaming.
How is your gaming union going to make international developers and game designers of the entire world stop producing games at heavily discounted rates?
Avoiding publishers is one way to deal with it. Crowdfunded gaming has grown, but it also hit certain ceiling.
Companies like inXile, Obsidian and Compulsion Games were using crowdfunding, but got swallowed by MS apparently because they couldn't sustain projects of the size they wanted to, using just crowdfunded money.
I see lots of replies that a network programmer is not a name to anyone. To that I'd say that's a strawman. People, the game director, the art director, maybe the lead programmer, are all people that generally have a reputation for making hits. They arguably deserve at least as much credit as Sorkin or Spielberg or Fincher.
The talk about points out no one cared about directors until the directors started doing their own PR and then eventually convincing the powers that be that promoting the staff "You'll love this new game because it's made by the director of the last game you loved" is a huge marketing advantage.
Is it possible that a lot of the money is from microtransactions? and that there is a gambling addiction that is being taken advantage of by lootboxes and other such pay-to-gain-random-reward microtransaction mechanics?
I remember reading a post about a Path of Exile gamer who successfully convinced Grinding Gear Games to put in special rules for his account because he was a gambling addict.
> Is it possible that a lot of the money is from microtransactions? and that there is a gambling addiction that is being taken advantage of by lootboxes and other such pay-to-gain-random-reward microtransaction mechanics?
Where've you been for the past five years? That's what microtransactions are all about. Hijacking our brain's reward system to extract maximum money.
For me personally I have barely ever performed microtransactions so I can't relate. I've purchased DOTA2 compendiums mostly every year to fund the prize pool because I enjoy watching, but that's about it.
My point there was that there is no such equivalent in video & music. I guess if you factor in "superchats" for video you could count those.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadI wonder if there are any popular private or reverse engineered League of Legends or Fortnite servers. These are also the most profitable games in the world.
I have to wonder if a game like World of Warcraft, if it were released in 2019, would even consider a monthly subscription given what it has to compete against these days. I would assume private servers for WoW made sense because people wanted to dodge $15/mo.
In the case of music and video it seems that DRM is 100% ineffective, and particularly once the content is cracked it can be moved entirely outside the DRM system. In the case of games you still need a runtime environment which is at least somewhat proprietary.
Both music and movies have been devalued to a $10 month "all you can eat" scenario which has nowhere near the revenue potential of a $100 a month cable subscription or buying Blu-Ray at $20 a pop.
DRM only needs to work well enough that people can't copy and paste it to their friends. Most games have online multiplayer modes now that can endlessly check for a valid copy from a central server though.
But for the most part, I'd say that yeah priacy is effectively dead. The ease of hacking the consoles and running pirated games isn't there (IMO) and thus the percentage of users who are doing it is very small. Much more an enthusiast community moreso than a community of pirates who want to play games.
This could all change, but I don't think that the piracy scene for the newest generation is anywhere close to the last two.
Hell, I remember flashing the firmware on my xbox 360 disk drive within the first year.
Or soldering a modchip into my OG Xbox. RIP that console, best console ever.
Console piracy is effectively dead.
I'm not saying that DRM is a large reason that movies/TV are behind, but I don't think this is a good counterargument.
>One of the biggest arguments against anti-piracy checks built into video games (commonly known as "digital rights management," or DRM) is that they punish paying customers with stuttering, loading times, and other detractive gameplay issues. While leading DRM vendor Denuvo has long claimed that its tools don't hamper video games, the stats keep piling up to suggest otherwise.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/evidence-continues-to...
Even on PC, more games are going towards always online/multiplayer and lootbox/cosmetic/etc., which are also DRM by nature.
Since there is no other word for requesting that something be readable by the consumer and not readable by the consumer at the same time.
I always wonder if these experiences can be priced accordingly
Flagship games have been priced at $60 for 25 years and should be priced higher to reflect a variety of other things, but their primary purchasers dont have the money for more. People really into games dont have money, and children’s parents dont respect the medium to want to pay more. (Fortunately there is the aging demographic of everyone else, who do have money and dont mind preordering)
But with the price of a game being mentally fixed in the collective conscious I wodber what the average price per user is now with the in game transactions factored in
It's terribly inefficient in every possible way, but it appears to work.
Evidence #1: The ever-present existence of potato masher PC configurations (cheaper and more powerful than a console in qty 1) makes me doubt that consoles are loss leaders. The crypto bubble played with that math but it seems to generally hold.
Evidence #2: Sony keeps bragging about how many consoles their investments in first-party game studios have been able to move. Importantly: that's how they phrase it.
Evidence #3: This particular narrative has held true for several people in my bubble, including myself. People will buy a console to play Bloodborne, Horizon Zero Dawn, or God of War. The center-of-mass for single-player narrative-driven AAAs seems to be moving away from the PC, and the ones that stay on the PC seem to be bogged down with "alternative" monetization models.
25 years ago there was a much smaller base of game systems and capable PCs than exists today. At basically 0 incremental cost for each additional copy produced the big game publishers are still making more money than they did previously.
There's some of that, but I think it's more just gamer entitlement. Any company that prices a game above $60 will be crucified on Reddit, YouTube, and the gaming media, because games are "supposed to" cost $60 and anything more than that is "greedy".
Then the same people will say they don't understand why everything has microtransactions now.
Gamers got EA voted "worst company in America" two years running over companies that actually, literally killed people.
Compare this with $10/mo for Netflix or Spotify - gamers are getting a rough deal already just buying a few AAA titles a year. Personally I'm all for microtransactions so long as they don't impact gameplay in unfair ways - many developers are already doing this quite successfully, Fortnite and Overwatch being popular and generally well liked examples.
[0] https://kotaku.com/the-free-gear-in-black-ops-4-is-an-unforg...
This is one of the reasons why Fortnite has been so successful: its easier to justify a single 10 dollar payment for a few weeks and know what you're getting based on what you play.
I've collectively dumped hundreds of hours in Factorio, Stardew Valley, and Kerbal Space Program.
You dont have to look very far to find games which have long play times and no lootboxes (which is a fairly recent thing). Sometimes, games are just good without exploitative mechanics
Netflix/Spotify model comes to mind. The collective pool of subscriptions fund creation of AAA titles just like the EA pass.
Can u recommend some sort of a factorio for star-exploration type game ?
Kerbal itself is far too complex and detailed oriented for me
Now that's value for money.
Love single player games with good story, but really sink time into challenging dexterity games I can play in short sessions for a break.
That's much better entertainment value than a $20 movie.
However, not all games, music, or video provide 100s of hours of entertainment so I'm not sure I understand your generalization.
> A good album can also provide hundreds of hours of entertainment for $10.
Passive/supplemental entertainment maybe. Outside of a very small percentage of serious audiophiles, I don't know anyone listening to 1 album for hundreds of hours other than as background noise.
I also love System of a Down. Probably paid sub-$100 for their discography. Must have hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
I'm also a huge Star Wars fan. The $30 I paid for the movie ticket and the popcorn combo when I went to see Rogue One brought me much more pleasure than those 30h of ME:A, so was this a better value?
I know, that's one game, one artist, one movie, but that's just to illustrate that it's not that clear-cut.
I was just ignoring the games and movies that suck and would be a waste of time and money.
We're talking about is the games you actually end up playing versus the movies you actually end up watching. For me the value for money is crushingly in favor of games, both in terms of hours per dollar and in terms of subjective enjoyment.
Other people might have a different overall experience, but let's at least compare the right things.
Fair enough. Really depends on the type of games you enjoy though. They really don't all have the same replay value. As you said, other people might have different experiences.
Average play time doesn't mean much in terms of actual game quality and value for your money. I've played games just to go through them, get the story and play the sequel, the one that's actually good.
Average time played is not a good metric because people on both extremes will skew it heavily, like any average - people who bought the game but never played it, or people who play it way too much. It also depends a lot on the game. On an okay-ish game that has a +/-20h campaign will be pretty easy to munch through just to check it off, but one can easily abandon an okay-ish game with 5-10 minute matches after a handful of hours.
I understand the point you are making in regards to average time played, but surely the people who, quote-unquote, play the game way too much, enjoy that specific game very much? Please note that you can also see the median playtime on the abovementioned website.
Is that a common practice? I once accidentally bought a "standard" version of a game instead of the "ultimate" on my Xbox One and had to deal with a couple of support people to refund my original purchase in order to get the other.
It cost you $2.66/hr for entertainment, that sounds like a great investment.
> Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
Not necessarily. One required active mental participation, one was passive. The big question is what value did you get out of each one?
You should have been alert to EA screwing up the Mass Effect franchise from all the garbage they pulled on Mass effect 3 (Weak ending, making Javik DLC when he was clearly a main character, etc.)
Waiting 30-60 days meant that the game was available for less than half that.
www.humblebundle.com -> Great place to find indie deals
www.factorio.com -> Game I've invested 100s of hours into because building and number management. Plus Mods!
If you include hardware costs I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on video games. The number of games I've spent more than 200 hours playing is in the single digits.
And that music streaming service probably comes close to maxing out the entertainment most people can get from purchasing music, so for most people, music isn't really competing against games in their entertainment budget.
There is a large population of concert goers, and large market for music merchandise and musical instruments.
I'd be surprised is music streaming services comprise 50% of the total music market, although they might be more than 50% of all recorded music.
If we're talking about concerts though, you're talking about a higher cost per hour than movies. Not comparable to $120 for hundreds of hours.
>market for music merchandise
I'm going to avoid merch because games have merch too, so it doesn't really seem worth comparing.
>and musical instruments
Musical instruments, for people who are interested, probably do provide a higher entertainment value per dollar than games, but they are definitely a much smaller niche market.
I understand the reasoning, but time spent is not really a great measurement of value. I probably spent hundreds of hours on a couple of games back in middle/high school and I'd be lying if I said I didn't regret at least some of that.
A day at Disney World costs far more per hour than a movie. Does that mean people should stay away from Disney World?
There's a huge continuum beyond the "am I entertained?" binary, and that matters much more than dollars per hour.
A trip to Disney for somebody might conceivably be something that they remember for the rest of their lives and that has value.
So while there is a greater value per hour of use for games, that does not necessarily equate to a "better entertainment value" for all users.
What you say about the complexity of entertainment is absolutely true, but we somehow need to model it in a relatively easy way, and that means throwing out some details.
And from in naive guess, people don't enjoy themselves significantly more watching film than playing videogames. So dollar per hour is a good enough metric for our purposes.
So I wouldn't jump to that conclusion so quickly.
One of the things I've been paying attention to as I get older is how many unique experiences a thing offers. Games that are hundreds of hours long, or otherwise provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, generally involve a lot of repetition. Repetition is intrinsically unmemorable.
The games keep you busy, and you might not describe yourself as bored while playing them, but it's not like you can remember all of the riveting times you fought a Zubat. And in that sense, was it an optimal use of time? Sometime I find it disturbing to think about. There are games where my total playtime adds up to literal months, but the number of unique memories I have of actually playing are depressingly few.
Somewhere in the mid 00s, society established a new gamer stereotype as some lazy man child who prefers to sit around reading comics and playing games to going out and "grabbing life by the horns" or some other nonsense.
Because gaming is pretty ubiquitous and accepted in American culture (at least in the coastal areas I've been to).
Playing games and identifying as a 'gamer' are definitely different, however. I play a lot of core games (PUBG, Overwatch, etc.) but I definitely do not label myself a 'gamer'.
Marketing video games to enhance a social setting rather than a way to escape one probably appeals to parents who are worried about the whole "screen zombies" thing.
I had no answer for that.
If I understand correctly it used to be the same in movies until the directors and stars started demanding more. IIRA United Artists was started because of these issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Artists
Also few games have the budget of movies. There's a few exceptions like say GTA5 or RD2 but mostly title for title game budgets are at least an order of magnitude lower than movies.
Could probably come up with many other examples. As someone who did dev in that industry I knew plenty technical people who had a outsized impact on gameplay, tone and style.
How many average people watching movies recognize Tom Cruise?
0 - https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/busine...
1 - https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/direct...
Given that the game industry is so large, his net worth should be comparable to lucas, Cameron, or Spielberg.
When it comes to excelling in a field, I don't even think Spielberg, Lucas and Cameron compare to Carmack. I can think of some actors that might, such as Daniel-Day Lewis, but not a director.
Doom and Quake are more niche than many movies Spike Lee has directed if you are outside of a tech/gamer bubble. According to wikipedia Doom as a series has sold 10 million units (by comparison a single Call of Duty game sells 30 million+) and Quake sold 1.1 million units life time (Gone Home sold 700K units). I agree that Carmack's impact and influence on the industry isn't captured in his networth (although really he's still ridiculously rich...)
On the whole, video-gaming profits accrue almost entirely to the investors.
There's a reason for that, and it's not because movie producers are nicer than game producers.
There are lots of theories regarding personality types that lead to speculation of why this is the case, but I'd really like to see some research that digs into this. Labor by developers is becoming more and more valuable, with this you expect more political strength.. but it does not seem to be happening.
People may not agree, but every argument I've heard against unionization contains this sentiment. Even if it isn't expressed so boldly.
The truly smart recognise it’s not their co-workers taking money away from them.
In capitalism the amount you get paid is dependent on supply and demand. The "value" you add is irrelevant if they could easily replace you with someone else.
Because before they were on the A-list, when they were no-names struggling to get by, it was the union rules that made it possible for them to eke out a living while they waited and worked for their big break, and it was the union rules that protected them from being exploited when they finally got their big break.
I feel like I notice this more in my dev friends than my non dev friends. I wonder why?
[1] https://aflcio.org/
Please excuse my ignorance, but I was always under the impression that special interest groups are more likely to form for those whose conditions are pretty poor. I feel like programmers are treated pretty well compared to most other professions, especially when considering the lack of money and time required to enter the field so I'm not even sure what I'd want from a special interest group.
And there's no path for modern devs to get any sort of selling star power unless they also do game design (Zacktronics, Kojima, etc).
There's only one Shigeru Miyamoto.
People don't play a game because it's got 100% code coverage and the greatest end to end tests. Most of the time people play a game because it's fun. Programmers don't make games fun; it's the game designers that make it fun.
Sure the game would not exist without programmers, but you can take one set of programmers and replace it with another set and largely the game will be the same to the players, assuming the skills/experience of the programmers are similar.
In a way, programmers are necessary, but the most they can do is stop the game from completely falling apart. It's the game designers that have a much greater potential to make a game great.
It's easy to forget what absolutely touched lives we developers have, even the grunts.
Anyhow, it is incumbent on every technical worker to find and establish their niche over time. If you get called a "unicorn" in whatever field you land in, you're in a good negotiating position for things like salary.
I love this writeup[1] of the kit artists at Bethesda for example.
> Of course, there’s another reason that Skyrim had only two full-time kit artists; kits are really complicated things to work on. Kits require not only the artistic ability to produce high quality visuals, but also a technical competency in their art tool, a deep understanding of the editor and design workflow, and so on. This unique blend of left and right brain is somewhat at odds with what many art professionals value. I've worked with great artists who make excellent kits but hate working on them - so they don't.
> So when you’re trying to identify somebody with the the aptitude and interest to be a great kit artist, you’re basically looking for a unicorn. They're rare.
And they better be paid accordingly so they don't bolt and start their own game studios! You get to negotiate if you're a unicorn.
[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/...
Not really.
About half the devs on my old team were "gameplay programmers". Solid tech chops, but also with an eye towards gameplay you can bet they tweaked the shit out of our game system. We only had 3 'dedicated' designers so a non-trivial amount of work fell in the dev's hands.
To get concrete the smoothing/sticky algorithm and tuning of our aiming mechanism was created and owned by a single dev. Take a look at this[1] for a good breakdown of what goes into something like that.
[1] http://drstrangevolt.blogspot.com/2012/12/aim-acceleration-i...
I don't feel like you're disagreeing with me.
It just sounds like the roles on your team were more blurred but the point still stands. What's meaningful isn't your title but the type of work you do. The more influence you have over the design of the game, the bigger an impact you will have on how fun it is.
In fact the want to know what the largest predictor of if a game is going to be fun or not?
Talk to any game designer and they'll tell you it's the iteration cycle time of their tools. They'll be the first to admit that they don't know what fun is(otherwise we'd just formulate it, bottle it up and fire all the game designers). The more they can throw things at the wall that "stick" the better chance a game has at being fun.
I also can't think of any team I've been on my career(or other teams I know of) where roles weren't "blurred" it's expected and required in the industry even on large, AAA teams.
Your studio gets an 'advance' on development with milestones and the like. Only after you've paid back your advance + more do you start seeing royalties come to the studio. That advance allotment also usually includes the marketing budget which can be as much or more than the studio dev cost.
Studio employees are usually a tier below that as well, in my time I never saw a penny of royalties, bonuses or the like. Combined with a pay that's 40-70% below standard dev rates it's not really a great industry if you live in a high cost of living area.
And movies have the equivalent of underpaid overworked devs: extras and grips and so on.
The feel of the game is created through the cinemtography, sound, visual effects, assets, acting, etc. The only way programmers actually have an effect on the way the game feels to the player is if they screw up and introduce some game breaking bugs or fail to implement face rigging properly or something like that.
Otherwise, no, I'm sorry, but programmers are to modern games what production staff are to movies. Necessary, but utterly inconsequential in terms of the value of the final product for the consumer.
Dev teams are not interchangable cogs. Different developers will have different ideas for solutions to problems, game mechanics, etc. And different artists will create a completely different assets, even if given the same themes to work with.
Just like PMs and designers don't wholly own product direction for a web or mobile application, game designers and artists don't entirely own game feel and even if they do they are often gated or empowered by systems developed and designed by programmers. In most cases designers are also programmers ("scripters") so you can make the further argument that game system design actually is just a form of programming, even if the designers aren't always writing code in the traditional sense.
No, they really don't. Sid Meier, et al, make relatively little of the money of the games sold under their name, with the exception of Carmack and Newell, who own/majority owned their studios outright.
In contrast, the spoils in Hollywood and Music are shared with a much larger group, which sustains the industry in a way that the obscenely hit-based nature of gaming can't.
Also, to note: almost all workers on a Hollywood production (meaning movies released in America, not just those actually made in Hollywood, CA) are union members or protected by union rules even if they aren't yet members. Even extras. After your third role as an extra, you generally have to get/qualify for SAG-AFTRA membership.
Finally: Hollywood has the lovely concept of overtime. I have a great many friends who work in the industry, and they love overtime. It starts at time and a half, and the multiple increases every few hours over the day and week so that theoretically a crew member (but not cast member) could be making 5x of their base hourly rate after a few days of Hollywood's equivalent of crunch time. (Exact amount of hours in a day/week before hourly rates go above 1.5x varies per union, but generally starts at 12 hours/day or 50 hours/week). Needless to say, because abusing their workers gets so expensive, studios plan production to limit crunch time during a production. While it's relatively common for production schedules to include overtime, generally only mismanaged productions run into crunch time.
There is no equivalent in the gaming industry, and so crunch time of a year or two is common (see e.g., EA and Telltale Games). F/X studios operate like gaming studios, so those workers are relatively abused. Like game programmers and other game studio employees, they have largely resisted unionization and so are generally the only group of Hollywood workers that can be said to be both unpaid and overworked.
[1] https://animationguild.org/
People caught onto this in comic books, however. There are savvy readers who follow writers and artists, not characters. There are savvy fans of Anime who do this as well. There are even people who do this with books and movies. There are some gamers who do this with games.
Same old story. There are those fooled by surfaces, and those who try to see beneath them.
Yes, but game developers aren't the ones doing the art, or writing, for games.
If somebody thinks they can get more money with less effort then we want them to try working that way instead.
In other words, corporations make a cost/benefit calculation. In the case of software developers and lead software developers, my experience is that most corporations can concretely read the dollar amount as cost, but often drastically underestimate the potential cost of bad software.
There are situations where many people are valued below market for a long, long time. Markets aren't omniscient and infinitely fast.
Even games released by superstars like Edmund Mcmillen have flops. The culture around game designers isn't to this point YET.
Sid Meyer Christy Marx Richard Garriott
Well at least i did anyway. Maybe i am alone in this.
Funds flowing to proven creators, successful entrepreneurs and shrewd investors is a good thing because those are exactly the people who know how to deploy those assets productively.
Having said all that, I've no idea specifically about Carmack.
How to link investors up with startups and growth opportunities in businesses is an old problem that ideally needs multiple solutions available.
[rant]I think the success of capitalism has partially been the reward mechanism, but it's also been that it allows and encourages multiple mechanisms for capital to link up with investment opportunities. The alternatives have all offered grand ideal, theoretically perfect mechanisms for the distribution and allocation of assets. It's not that those mechanisms are necessarily all useless, I do think a degree of state capitalism and central planning for really big, long term or essential projects have their place, but they can't be the only solution. At it's core capitalism is about individual freedom, and that includes the freedom to own your own small business, or to aggregate together into large group enterprises like banks and corporations, or to vote for governments that fund essential services. These are not natural opposites IMHO, and ideologies on the left or the right that force them into opposition do so only because they themselves are flawed.[/rant]
You don't have to be a star in order to collectively bargain, you just need to organize with your colleagues.
If the Weinstein scandal is any indication, no it hasn't. Unions are not without their problems, while more widespread awareness about the actual working conditions in any given industry (be it acting or game development) is highly effective, one way or the other. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Issues in getting jobs have to do with the limited supply of capitalized projects, high project transactional costs (including fairly high financial, equipment and professional costs), restrictions upon actor country of origin on the basis of bilateral entertainment tax treaties and a number of other structural issues. All of these issues mean that there's a substantial amount of activation energy required to get an entertainment product off the ground, which limits the amount of product projects in motion at any given time.
Feel free to look up the various guild pay grades. The minimums are very low, and they're designed to prevent the 'be in this motion picture for free for exposure' race to the bottom, not to price small projects out of the market.
It takes some fighting and searching to get all three, the last seeming most hard. But it is possible and not really hard.
Collective bargaining would not yield Tom Cruise-like returns or even exceptional returns.
The reason is that devs are ultimately a commodity.
Actors, by the way - even good ones - are even more of a commodity. There are tons of spectacular actors who would work cheap.
What brings in the audience is not the quality of the acting, it's the familiarity of the person, or the 'living brand'.
The 'human being Tom Cruise' obviously has the most amazing, unbreakable IP protection on the 'brand Tom Cruise'.
And it's the 'brand Tom Cruise' that has value. (And He only has to be a decent actor, not a even a great one)
Unions might help with some things ... but generally that's not going to be it.
The other thing to consider is the hugely risky and hit-driven nature of the business. Any 'investor' in games is risking so much, that the returns may be a little biased.
Consider that even for a game that 'made a lot of money' - it still may not be rational to have invested in that game! It still maybe overall a 'bad investment' to invest in such things.
A union could do a lot for those who work in the game industry. Game developers work such insane hours during crunch time when there's really no need for it. With a union mandating a standard work week, the onus would be put on the producers of the game to plan effectively in order to meet a deadline.
Game producers would have us all believe that games are uniquely complicated in a way that sets them apart from films and requires such ridiculous time commitments. That's rubbish. The vast majority of the work that goes into a triple A game is asset creation (graphics and sound). This makes games extremely similar to films which are dominated by CG and post-production work these days.
Some games, especially follow ons of well established 'game brands' I can see as being less risky ... but for new titles?
But yes, there's no reason for the countless hours, that's basically just taking advantage of creatives no doubt and admittedly unions may help in some way.
Writing staff on hit tv shows also don't see the monetary gain that actors do unless they own the production, which is rare.
I'm guessing once people get fed up enough they just leave which is much easier than forming some kind of special interest group or union.
Let me know when there's a star developer who's name on the front of a video game cover will guarantee a moderate number of sales no matter how bad the game is. That's when the comparison against the top 0.1% of actors will make sense.
...until he finally oversold his overselling, that is.
I seriously doubt most game developers make anywhere near that.
There are exceptions but I saw my salary double when I left the industry and from talking with other people it seemed like a pretty common pattern.
FWIW games follows the 90/10 rule(90% of revenue goes to 10% of the market) so while the 100k average may be "accurate" it doesn't paint a clear picture.
I mean it's still a lot more than the zero that most musicians and actors make, but an extremely surprising amount nonetheless.
The real twist on this is that these aren't stable jobs either. Every studio I know had some sort of closure/downsizing around the 3-5 year mark. I know many people who had to be constantly moving between SEA/SF/Austin/etc just to keep a job across a career.
.
I know they are a joke in the gaming world, but at least they pay people what they are worth.
As does Valve.
as an example Sony has 10-15 divisions. TVs, batteries, Lcd screens, cameras, etc. For the last 10 to 15 yrs all of them have lost money except the game division but the game division has the lowest salaries.
Your average game industry employee is not equivalent to directors and stars in movies though. They're much closer to employees/contractors at visual effects companies or grips, none of them are getting millions even on the biggest films. At least as a mid-tier engineer on a hit AAA game you can get total compensation equal to or better than big tech pays in some cases, and as an artist you can make more than you would in film with more stability.
Companies like inXile, Obsidian and Compulsion Games were using crowdfunding, but got swallowed by MS apparently because they couldn't sustain projects of the size they wanted to, using just crowdfunded money.
It's a problem really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhmYENdFZc8
I see lots of replies that a network programmer is not a name to anyone. To that I'd say that's a strawman. People, the game director, the art director, maybe the lead programmer, are all people that generally have a reputation for making hits. They arguably deserve at least as much credit as Sorkin or Spielberg or Fincher.
The talk about points out no one cared about directors until the directors started doing their own PR and then eventually convincing the powers that be that promoting the staff "You'll love this new game because it's made by the director of the last game you loved" is a huge marketing advantage.
I remember reading a post about a Path of Exile gamer who successfully convinced Grinding Gear Games to put in special rules for his account because he was a gambling addict.
Where've you been for the past five years? That's what microtransactions are all about. Hijacking our brain's reward system to extract maximum money.
My point there was that there is no such equivalent in video & music. I guess if you factor in "superchats" for video you could count those.