Good and Bad news

January 18, 2012

I’ve given up. I was originally planning to look at game reviews and marks at Metacritic, but I can’t think of any good method to collect some sensible results and conclusions using this source. So I have decided to take a different direction.

In my revenue analysis and the Google trends post I believe I have already answered my main research questions.

Conclusion: The rise of social and casual games does not seem to have any effect on the success of the core games market.

The two markets are very different, with two different types of audiences. Core games will keep gaming like they are used to. They might play mobile games on the road and stuff, but at the end of the day, the pc or console is their home. Most casual gamers will probably never be interested in core gaming if they weren’t already.

I’ve decided to take a look at another topic which is tangentially related to what I have covered until now though I’m not going to research this in-depth.

What effect will the growing casual and social games markets have on those casual and social gamers?

To get why I asked this question, some background story might be in order.

About a year ago. In school we had a course about the development of social games. Among other tasks, me and other students were required to play various social games and analyse them. One game that I clearly remember was Bejeweled Blitz. It was boring… and then it was fun. Students were joking at each other about playing bejeweled while supposed to do other stuff. Most people stopped playing pretty soon after the course, but some kept going, clearing screens and screens of brightly colored gems, over and over. I joked it was like a slot machine in that the act of pulling the rod was all that was needed for some fleeting satisfaction. I wasn’t far from the truth. The game actually had a slot machine which you could use for free once every day to get bonus points you could use to buy aids in the game. Of course this slot machine could also be filled with facebook credit…

[caption id=”attachment_61” align=”aligncenter” width=”584” caption=”Do you think this is a game?”][/caption]

The point being, the game was addicting. Frighteningly so. Now there are also core games which can be quite addicting and suck huge amounts of time, but those games do not have micro transactions. Another anecdote would be a friend of mine, who quite some ago, complained to me about how he was tricked into buying smurfberries in a mobile game. This game might not have been very addictive, but it was arguably way too easy to spend a fortune on those smurfberries without realising it.

It seems I am not the only one to have noticed this:

Apparently a lot of people struggle with the lack of ethics the newcomers to the gaming market seem to have. My personal favourite is the piece by Insertcredit, which I believe is a very good description of some casual and social games developers groups’ thought process.

Using a variety of psychological tricks. The game developers try to milk gamers for all their worth. I wouldn’t be so bothered by this if not for the fact that it happens on an unconscious level. Some gamers will not realise how much they spend, at the end of the day. They will not be able to make rational decisions based on how much they spent or are willing to spend and how much entertainment is worth to them. It’s sneaky. It seems like something invented by people purely in the business for profit, but without passion for games.

Is this really where we want to be going? To a world where the gullible are so easily parted with their money just to continue their addiction to an otherwise pretty boring game?

Food for thought. And if you’re ever playing a game and being tempted to buy some small item or other thingy, think back on this and say to yourself: ‘Do I really want to buy this?’

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