At some point in the future as more people with digital ‘wealth’ get older and die the need for the ability to transfer or re-sell digital products will grow.
What happens when any digital games once sold can be easily re-sold or transferred to another?
Would this reduce profits for games developers further, as ‘long tail’ sales drop into this second hand market?
Or will we all be running our games as subscription/patreon services by then?
Or each transfer of a game to another person has a small transfer fee so that the publishers make extra money on each transfer and won’t be against it.
Very likely, 99.9% of digital ‘wealth’ would be worth next to nothing 5-10 years after it was made, due to frantic competition, changing customer preferences and becoming technologically obsolete. I don’t think this is going to be a problem. You might as well worry about how to re-sell an analysis of the stock market 20 years from now.
There’s a desperately small number of digital products that are likely to be able to evolve and survive that period of time, and besides being large products that are managed by multi-billion dollar companies (thus pretty much irrelevant to us), they almost certainly won’t include a significant number of games.
Interesting point but what is the active lifespan of a new game, hours, days, weeks, a month, several, a year or two?
http://steamspy.com/year/2017 → Average playtime: 5 hrs 24 minutes.
In theory on average 6 hours after purchase a game could be on the second hand market.
I agree. I have tried to show people old games that I still have disks for, so I could explain why those old games were able to create such a lasting impression on the industry. Most people these days cringe at the sight of the old games. Nobody would pay to be able to transfer Doom (1993) or Descent (1994). If somebody really wanted to play something old, there is usually already an inexpensive way to simply purchase the old game through Steam or something similar.
Additionally, a lot of really old games are available in other ways. For example, I played Sinistar yesterday with one of my cousins. He had the ROM and an emulator for it on his phone. None of the young kids wanted to play it. Several kids had tablets that could have run the game, but none of those kids even wanted it. They all wanted to play modern games.
Well sure, that’s not a question of years any more. I think games half a fairly short half-life as a product.
That is an oversimplification. Some recent games like PUBG and ARK have been played a lot, while some games have barely been played. Grabbing an average to use as a “second hand market” point does not really make sense. Some games like “What Remains of Edith Finch” have a set playtime. For example, you can play through all of “What Remains of Edith Finch” in about 2 to 2.5 hours. So “What Remains of Edith Finch” would be ready for a “second hand market” well before your 6 hour point. By contrast, PUBG can easily be played for hundreds or even thousands of hours. A player would likely keep PUBG until they could no longer tolerate the network lag issues and other bugs in the game.
Someday when I die, my entire Steam library will be worthless. Even if I could transfer it, nobody would want it. The entire idea of transferring digital licenses of old games is a bit silly.
How long can copyright law really last in the digital age? I think within about 50 years, everything creative that is made will be owned by all humanity. It will be as if the human race is a hive mind. We will just create things for the joy of creation itself. Freely using anybody else’s digital work at will.
Enjoy this 100 year gold rush of digital copyright of software while it lasts. Bill Gates invented it and became the richest man on the planet. But soon they will see the emperor has no clothes.
Most games will end up being licensed not owned for digital transactions. This way, it’s licensed to a person and not transferable.
Typical indie games, yes. But AAA is migrating to GAAS, which is full of … well, microtransactions of course!
To spell it out: AAA already knows that games have a short window in which to be profitable and consumer trends are moving toward purchasing fewer unique titles and spending more on the same title. This was covered in the final issue of Develop mag, and you can probably find that online with a ton of supporting evidence.
TLDR: want the income stream and user habits of a subscription MMO without the hassle or genre.
Interesting - though probably not surprising given the way that AAA games seem to be heading collectively for a Facebook business model of positioning their game in the center of their players lives, and keeping it there as long as possible with microtransactions and dlc.
But still, I don’t think this is all that relevant to most indies. It’s very hard and expensive to pull off that sort of game to begin with, let alone build up the infrastructure and momentum to make it still relevant within even a few years. For most of us I think the games we are making will occupy a very short time in a player’s life, which is fine with me since I think that’s sort of where games belong - though it would be nice to make the sort of game that leaves a lasting impression, which is the greatest honor I think any art can achieve.
Yeah but you know, invasive tech from a young age doing that as standard means that the profit margins for indies get progressively smaller by the day. So this is fine if you’re not making money. It’s fine for it to be art, but it’s difficult to rely on for a living.
I thought that’s how it already was? There are exceptions, but isn’t the default position that aside from gift purchases games aren’t transferable between accounts, and we’re not supposed to allow anyone else access to our accounts?
And this isn’t limited to games. I read an article a while ago about a couple who had inherited a relative’s book collection and was trying to figure out what to do with it. They didn’t want to throw it away, but they had nowhere to keep it long term, and nobody else wanted the books because they were of no value. Personally, my thoughts are that the value in that collection is mostly in the collector’s enjoyment of putting it together rather than in the physical books themselves.
In that case, the couple inherited a burden because they suddenly had all of this valueless stuff to store which they were sentimentally disinclined to throw away. Digitising things has its downsides, but that at least is one problem it solves - even if you do keep it, digital storage is cheap.
I think that game collections are likely to be similar in terms of future value to anyone other than collectors. Even looking at my collection of physical games here, the vast majority aren’t going to be played again and have no value other than as reminders of fond memories which are specific to me.
Add compatibility issues to that as well. If I want to play my old copy of Anachronox will it even work on any of my current PCs? Or would I need to visit gog.com in hopes they’ve got a version with compatibility updates anyway?
We need to abolish our dependence on money, first.
And even if it was financially viable for people to step all over other peoples’ creative works, is it creatively viable? If you create something successful are you open to the idea of immediately losing control of the IP because other people freely jump in and start making their own versions / continuations / spin-offs? This is something definitely worth experimenting with since it does work in software. That said, my gut feel is that with the Internet being what it is, if open and free creative projects had a chance of taking off in a mainstream way we’d have seen some by now.
That’s true. The solution, in my opinion, is to develop a competitive game store business model based on high barrier to entry, manual review of products, and a guaranteed (relatively) high visibility and promotion for anything that gets through. I think at the highest level of the market that indies can reach, it should be excruciatingly difficult to get accepted.
It’s not possible to be competitive where you are up against an option that has high mass appeal and high consistency of quality (AAA games) and your corner of the market is overloaded with rubbish amongst which might be found a gold nugget here and there.
It’s like trying to make people choose to come and bin-dive for food for $1 when they can cross the road and spend $5 at Macdonalds. The only customers you’ll get are fanatics and crusaders who will gladly sort through the crappy food if it serves their ideology.
On the other hand if you open some kind of carefully curated ‘indie’ restaurant across from macdonalds, jacked up the price and made sure everything was unique, stylish and well-done, you could get a decent piece of the pie. Unfortunately, for games this sort of thing does not exist to any substantial degree. Until it does, indies will always be fighting the market, fighting eachother, and fighting the powers-that-be that are making people evilly head toward macdonalds instead of trying something different.
Steam had a good run. Greenlight is dead.
That was something, but nowhere near enough IMO. Regardless of where most indies go to peddle their wares, if a place does not exist in the market where let’s say only 1% or less of indie games are good enough to get through, I think something is missing and indies will suffer for it.
What a lot of people I think fail to realise is that the very strength of indies is in their ability to do some aspect(s) of development better than AAA, or at least different in a way that it does not make sense for AAA to even try to follow. Niches, essentially. And if you have only a few, very high quality niche products, you have a very good business position, one that’s very defensible against mass appeal competition.
If you think about Amazon, and the reason why they are opening a range of physical bookstores even as many very well established physical booksellers are going out of business, I think this is analogous to the situation of the game market and what indies should be doing. Amazon’s physical stores are very small places with a very small range of books that have been carefully chosen, and the whole thing is created around an experience that’s aesthetically very difficult to do with masses of products.
If indie developers creating great games on small budgets want to make an escape from being small fish in a huge ocean, populated by anything from plastic bags to great white sharks, they have to head for the ‘narrow way’ as they say, that takes a lot of hard work to get through, but which offers an opportunity to make much, much more of their particular strengths than they otherwise would.
Otherwise (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this happens) AAA studios will capture this niche ideal, this ideology, this opportunity for themselves, the same way that Amazon captured both ends of a market where their competition was fighting the market itself instead of adapting.
But that’s exactly what Greenlight was…
And indies are not competing with AAA and I don’t think they ever did or will. It’s not even the same market.
Are you saying less 1% of games that tried to get greenlit actually succeeded?
In any case, the greenlight process had a lot of faults. For one thing there’s pretty much no standard except what the ‘internet’ is feeling like doing that day, and there was all sorts of abuse and trolling (not just negative but voting in random crap for jokes) going on from what I heard. Not exactly a great way to run a business.
What needs to happen is a place with maybe a couple of hundred games max, handpicked by the store as the very best that the indie scene has to offer, a gold standard for indies to aim toward. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but the approach and the setting has to be right to communicate the right message.
Of course they were ‘competing’ on Steam, in the sense of rubbing shoulders on the same store and competing for customer attention. Whether or not they were utterly outmatched is a different story.
I know not many games got through.
Games are entertainment industry. “what the ‘internet’ is feeling like doing that day” is the whole business model.
Do you have an idea for a service that provides something better than literally voting for memes? Because that sounds like economic opportunity. And the fact that you aren’t making millions right now leads me to believe you probably don’t have it.
Yes I’m sure stores know exactly what a good game is. There is absolutely no way a store would ever prioritize sales over item quality.
Incidentally this brings us to your point[quote=“Billy4184, post:18, topic: 687612, username:Billy4184”]
Of course they were ‘competing’ on Steam, in the sense of rubbing shoulders on the same store and competing for customer attention. Whether or not they were utterly outmatched is a different story.
[/quote]
I said they’re not the “same market”, not “same store”.
You don’t find condoms very far from comic books.
I clicked reply to argue against this, but reread it before I started, and nope. nevermind, I read it wrong the first time. I definitely agree, but I’m here, so I’ll do this anyways.
The indie devs as a whole will not suffer. The “cut-and-paste for a week to cash in quick indies” would.
There would be more blood, sweat and tears put into indie games to make the cut, and the general quality of the indie world would definitely benefit, and indie devs would stop getting a bad rap for all being the cut-and-paste variation.
Devs and players both hit a win-win. Games that actually have effort put into them, will get seen, and players wouldn’t have to pay AAA prices for good games.
There is my un-disagree.
Is there a strict grading marketplace in the works?