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Oh, man.
I just watch this on Hulu.
One of their best episodes ever, and extremely poignant.
EDIT: Oh, man. It didn’t show the REALLY depressing part where it talks about “whales” being 99% the revenue and how “whales” are people with compulsive addiction.
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This makes me feel sick to my stomach.
There is still a market for using the old payment model. But the wealth of available “free” games (often with pretty good quality, actually) has driven the bar up. Waaaay up.
I see this as a good thing, personally. I intend to work hard and release complete products for complete prices, that will sell by virtue of being really good.
Every market is oversaturated with crap, to the degree that plenty of people complain that they can’t sell their crap anymore. But it’s always, ALWAYS possible to stand out and above the masses with sheer quality and innovation,
Build it and they will come.
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I thought it was pretty good the idea you dont want to make your game too fun otherwise they wont pay.
In the mobile space its really hard to stand out and unless your getting tens of thousands of downloads a day your game will very quickly buried under a mountain of new releases
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lol
One of the problems is that big companys push out great looking games for no money into the mobile space (with IAP). Users (especially younger ones) now expects this as a standard. If you as a smaller company need to compete with the polished feel and look of the popular games then a few sales at 1$ won’t get your money back.
The users are as much a problem as the developers, its a bad cycle.
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The most popular games tend to be like this. They are more like work than actual fun.
Examples:
WoW: past the early levels, it becomes a huge grind. The stories are mostly ignorable.
Farmville: have you ever tried to work on a farm in real life? It’s pretty damned hard work.
Minecraft: gotta do lots of work to dig up those materials for your artistic creation.
Competitive games: LoL, Dota, Starcraft etc. The story isn’t important anymore. You practice them over and over and over again to out-perform your friends.
Candy Crush: highly repetitious level grinding
Flappy Bird: stupidly repetitious, but people push through it to outscore their friends.
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I think only Farmville match the “barely fun” structure. Even Candy Crush is actually quite fun when solving puzzle, but they force you to wait for energy and ask friends for pass
Not saying they aren’t fun. But people wouldn’t play them nearly as long if they weren’t like work.
Take Minecraft, for instance. The “fun” part is exploring, being creative, and building up new structures. The work part is collecting the materials. If they just gave the fun part without the work part, no one would play it.
I have to strongly disagree with you on Minecraft here.
Part of the fun in Minecraft actually comes from the effort required to build your creations. The endless mining. The mass-smelting. The creation of railways to travel more efficiently back and forth between my construction site and my mine. The planning ahead. It was all part of the fun back when I still played on a server with friends.
I’m a gamer. I like my games challenging.
It’s skill vs. instant-gratification. If you want to “just build” your creations, you play creative mode. You have access to all the blocks and - as additional bonus - won’t die and can fly through the air.
Also:
Why is this video so accurate? 
I’m not sure we’re disagreeing so much here …
Those things you mentioned, the endless mining, mass-smelting etc are very much like work. It just reinforces the idea that in order for these games to be fun, they NEED to be like work, or at least part of them has to be.
There’s a subtle difference, though, between grinding and waiting in a traditional game and the same thing in a freemium game, and it’s entirely psychological:
In a freemium game, every design choice draws skepticism. You start to wonder, is this element supposed to make the game better, or to make more money? The two concepts are suddenly decoupled, so every inconvenience feels like it’s designed to squeeze more cash and less enjoyment from its players.
Grinding is far more forgivable in Minecraft, for example, where you paid once for the game. The developers have no incentive to lessen your enjoyment of the game, so the conspiracy theories simply don’t emerge.
Even in World of Warcraft, which ironically has an extremely similar incentive to encourage grinding (longer subscriptions!), it feels more fair because you have no other option. You are paying, and you have to grind. There’s no option not to pay, or not to grind. When these choices are pitted against each other (pay or grind), it becomes extremely uncomfortable. You don’t like spending money, and you don’t like grinding. Which one can you tolerate more?
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Not necessarily. Looking at Yahtzee’s review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wgQvij3rVE
If the game just gave you your golden cock and balls, you’d simply walk away after not much time. So you have to work for it. That means you’re going to be playing the game longer. And if you’re playing the game longer, that means you have more time to tell your friends about it, and more time to broadcast to potential buyers on Twitch.
Why do you think Farmville went so viral? People would keep on coming back day after day, always increasing the chance of giving the “virus” to their friends.
There definitely IS an incentive to dragging it out.
On top of that, Notch worked at King.com games for years before making Minecraft. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that influenced his design of Minecraft.
Human psychology: You generally value things more if you paid for them than if they were free. If you “worked” for those pixels in the game, you earned them and they matter to you, at least subconsciously. If the game just had them sitting there for free when you logged in, you would not value them as much.
Minecraft’s creative mode can actually all function this way. Instead of building small from the resources worked for, the resources free and some people put the effort into building massive or complicated structures. The time is still spent, the “work” is still put in, and the brain still assigns value.
All of which is generalization, of course. Still, human psychology has been addicting us to things since we were first figuring out where to find the most reliable sources of food.
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And it’s disgusting.
That’s how I feel put into an exact explanation.
Strong disagreement is at least 11x more powerful than regular disagreement.
I know a whole bunch of people who would disagree with you about where the fun of Minecraft comes from. Mostly because there’s no way of knowing what different people consider fun.
The rapid fire listing of things that sound cool. Abuse of the word “the”. These are examples of things you may have done, but Minecraft can be played in many different ways.
I know even more people who would argue that challenge isn’t even a part of gaming.
South Park!
I feel like the wealth of available free games has driven the bar waaaay (had to match the number of a’s in yours) down. I see Indie games with pixel art selling well. I think that’s cool. People just expect more for less and so spending years honing your craft is, well… it’s not very Generation Obama, now is it?
Amen.
Hahahahahaha. Mental picture…
Ask Disney, Nintendo, McDonalds. They aren’t necessarily raking in record profits right now, but I’ll burn everything I own for some of that money.
Really? A Field of Dreams reference? Do you even know what that’s from?
Or are we?
They usually are, that is what makes them genius. Certainly this ep was no exception. (though, for me it comes second to the Gluten episode).
Like the gluten episode (and most episodes), it paints a generally accurate picture. But also like every episode, they exaggerate aspects for effect. This is one of those parts. The whole as perception and understanding of “whales” has been hugely distorted. (largely because it was poor choice of terms in the first place). They aren’t a personality type or even a demographic, they aren’t even a “they” exactly. It just refers the small percentage of people who pay.