It Is Time to Remove the Daily Grind

In their latest conference call, Activision-Blizzard announced that World of Warcraft ( or WoW) subscribers lost 1.3 million subscribers. At the end of the previous quarter, subscribers were at 9.6 million. So only 3 months later, the game has gone down to 8.3 million. Some will say it is because free-to-play is taking over, but I do not believe that. I think it is because of the daily grind.

Now, some may not consider World of Warcraft to have grind. Compared to earlier MMORPGs like Everquest and Ultima Online, that would definitely be true, but I go by a more standard definition of grind:

grind (graɪnd) n. – requiring the player to repeat content long after it has become boring.

To me some amount of grind is essential to the authenticity of the game. It makes sense that a faction in the game will not immediately give you all the best items. You have to help them, build up a relationship, and then maybe they will welcome you.

Simply looking at non-MMOs it is easy to see the difference when it comes to grind. Non-MMOs just do not have any grind. Some of them, such as games in the Elder Scrolls series, can have grindy things like having to travel vast distances for more realism, but they also have “fast travel” systems in case you get tired of it. World of Warcraft (like most MMOs) is still stuck in the past when it comes to this.

Sometimes it makes sense for content to need to be repeated. If you start a new character, that makes sense. You are going to need to level them up and gear them up to do endgame content. Blizzard has even added some convenience to this with mounts and pets being account-wide. However, daily quests in WoW are an artificial grind.

It is interesting when it comes to daily quests. When they were first put in the game, the intent was for them to be the casual player’s way to keep up with the hardcore player. The hardcore player could farm monsters for hours to get the necessary gold and reputation for endgame group content. The casual player had a hard time doing this without daily quests.

Over the years though, I have come to believe that daily quests, in fact, make it harder for casual players to catch up. Take one week off of the game, and you are now one week behind everyone else. You are not able to do a daily quest seven times to make up for the seven days you missed. This is a fundamental problem in the game for casual players.

We should be able to play when we want to play. We should not be forced to login every day. Say the a particular reputation takes 50 hours to grind to Exalted. The player should be able to split up those 50 hours however they want. Logging in daily should not be the only option. We are not casual because we have no free time; we are casual because are play time is sporadic. One day we have all the time in the world while the next day we have no free time at all.

Maybe this month I am really busy and cannot play at all, but next month I have 30 hours of free time per week to put into the game.  With daily quests I am a month behind everyone else. Most times I sit down to play game, I am in it for the long haul. I have 4 hours to play, I want to make a lot of progress, but dailies restrict me to only 1 hour of progress per day. There are days when I think of the fun I had in WoW and want to return, but every time my thoughts come back to this needless daily grind.

There is an easy solution to this problem. For reputation daily quests, just add small reputation gains for killing monsters. You would still want to do the dailies for the best reputation gain per hour but also would have the the ability to grind monsters. Grind itself is not bad; it is these artificial limitations that turn players off. For daily quests that give out tokens, add a repeatable quest that gives a token for every X mobs killed.

The player now has more control over the grind. They are playing the game on their terms. They are empowered. They are having a positive experience. They will stay in the game.

The Free-to-Play Crash

Free-to-play has been around for a while now in Asia but has only recently become popular in the West. I remember playing international versions of Asian MMOs in indefinite “beta” status on PC, with cash shops and all, way back in 2001. They were not technically free-to-play, and some of them did release eventually, but the ones that did not were basically free-to-play.

On the other hand, mainstream MMOs in the West still had the normal box fee + subscription model until Lord of the Rings Online switched over in 2010. On PS3, the first free-to-play title was Free Realms in 2011. Xbox 360 players had to wait until 2012 with Happy Wars. (Technically, there were some free promotional games released earlier.)

Free-to-play sounds great at first. We have all kinds of game options available to us now. They all use slightly different business models, so we get to pick and choose which game fits the best for our interests and budget. Later, it becomes a problem. We have only to look at the Apple App Store to see the results.

When it first came out, the App Store was revolutionary. Finally, indie developers could get their game seen by potential buyers just as much as the big publishers could. The earliest games were being priced around $5, $10, or $20. Unfortunately, the system got so popular that a small price drop was enough for a massive spike in sales. A massive price war ensued until the minimum price of $1 became the norm.

Now, everyone is switching to free-to-play. Some of them are still very successful, but it is becoming an extremely low profit margin business. A little bad luck or one small mistake is enough to bankrupt a game company. It has gotten so bad that many developers are abandoning the mobile games market for a PC-only approach such as Steam Greenlight.

This is a warning for free-to-play on the other platforms. On Xbox 360, PS3, and PC, game prices could easily tank because of the amount of competition. Worse, most free-to-play games try to attach their players by giving out rewards through time sinks. Not only is it hard to make a profit with a game given out for free, the players have a really hard time switching to try out a new game. A new game comes out and most players are sticking with the games they already have. That is a sure way to kill the market.

The market thrives on people buying and playing new games continually over time. The companies make money by continually selling new games. They can get by on microtransactions for a while, but ultimately, players will want new games. If too many players stop trying out new games, the free-to-play market will die. I see no way around it. In a few years, there will be so many free-to-play options but not enough players to go around. A bunch of those publishers and developers will go out of business with just a few left standing.

Now, I have predicted before a crash in digital distribution. That to me is more long term, the next 10-20 years maybe. The free-to-play crash is going to happen sooner. My guess is within 5 years. Most companies in this space are just barely getting by, and yet, numerous new companies with new free-to-play games are entering the field.

For MMOs, I expect there to be a small rebound back to subscription-based MMOs. There will be a more even balance between them. For the short, casual games free-to-play does not fit. They will all go back to upfront fees. There are some other genres to look at too, like the Dota-style games. There have been so many of these released recently and many more in the future. Only a few are going to be left standing, namely DOTA 2 and League of Legends.

The Wii U Audience

When the Wii launched the immediate sales were mostly from hardcore gamers. It was a low enough price to buy alongside an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, and they were excited to see how motion controls would work. We all thought it would be the new way to play games. Well, like most innovations, it turned out motion controls were amazing for certain games but pretty weak for others, but Nintendo was very good with marketing the game to non-gamers. Just as the hardcore gamers were moving on from the Wii, the casual players started getting into it. Suddenly millions of people who did not consider themselves gamers were playing games.

Unfortunately, Facebook and iPhone came out. Facebook was an immediate hit for casual players. The games were easy to pick up and play, just like their Wii games. They focused on social connections with Facebook friends, just as their favorite Wii games focused on local multiplayer with their friends. But these Facebook games were free-to-play. You no longer needed to buy a Wii and the games to play with friends. You could do it for free within your web browser. The Farmville craze took over.

Gaming on iPhones had a slower start because of that initial cost of the phone. An iPhone cost more than a Wii. Most casual players would not even consider it. However, that barrier disappeared when phone carriers started offering older iPhones free with their phone contracts. Just like Facebook games, iPhone games were cheaper than Wii games. The smartphones also had the advantage of fitting in your pocket. Casual players with their busy social lives had all their games available wherever they went.

The casual players had left console gaming. It is no surprise that the Wii U is having trouble lately. The key demographic that made Nintendo the most money with the Wii is largely gone. Some of them will undoubtedly buy or have already bought a Wii U, but Nintendo cannot expect much from them.

So that leaves the hardcore gamers. The problem is they do not seem to be buying the Wii U either. Sure, it had fairly good launch sales, but they have dried up. One explanation is the games. Since launch there have been no major game releases for Wii U. The most popular games have been Nintendo’s own Nintendo Land and Super Mario Bros U. Both have received pretty good reviews and sold fairly well, but both were also released on launch day.

The big releases everyone was waiting for after launch were Rayman Legends and Pikmin 3. Both were delayed. Rayman Legends has been delayed until September, so Ubisoft can release it as a multiplatform game. Pikmin 3 was delayed until Spring. I think it will meet that deadline even though Nintendo has still not given a concrete release date. The only game not delayed is Lego City: Undercover, but sadly, its sales are going to suffer very badly. It is not a big enough game to be a system seller, and all the attention is on Sony and Microsoft’s new consoles right now.

That attention has all the hardcore gamers in “wait-and-see” mode. That is, ultimately, a bigger explanation why hardcore players not buying the Wii U. They will not buy any consoles until they have seen what all three are capable of. Nintendo absolutely must get a big game released on Wii U that takes good advantage of the touch screen to compete with the launches of these upcoming consoles. If they do not the Wii U will continue to suffer and could possibly be another Gamecube. The Gamecube was a great console, but it never took off like the original Xbox and PlayStation 2. It was a dark period in Nintendo’s history.

Right now, the Wii U really does not have an audience. A rosier way to say that is the Wii U has not found its audience yet. Nintendo succeeding in this is going to be one-hundred percent up to them. The casual players are no longer there buying up every Nintendo game they come out with. Hardcore gamers are much more picky especially when they have the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 to think about. Nintendo needs to create truly innovative games that utilize the touch screen. The Wii U cannot compete on graphics, only great games using the touch screen.

The Problem with Being Unique

Whenever a new console comes out, it is an exciting time. I like to follow the sales numbers and watch for unique games coming out. So naturally, I have been watching Wii U, but Nintendo is between a rock and a hard place. See, Nintendo has been making innovations with their hardware for almost a decade now. The Nintendo DS added a second screen with touch controls, the Wii added motion controls, the Nintendo 3DS added stereoscopic 3D to games, and finally, the Wii U adds a tablet controller.

The problem is those innovations directly push away the third party developers Nintendo tries so hard to get making games for their consoles. Publishers are out to make money. They make far more money if they can make one version of the game on the dominant console platform and then quickly port it to the other consoles. Profit margins are so low with most games these days, they just cannot afford to make a custom, unique port for the Nintendo systems.

The Wii U by being unique with the tablet controller forces publishers to either go all in or all out. While they could just port the games without supporting the tablet screen at all, I get the feeling Nintendo requires developers to make some use of it. The developers either have to make almost a new game from the ground up that works well with the Wii U tablet, or they just skip the Wii U. Guess which one is easier?

Now, the Nintendo DS and Wii did seem to get around this problem. The fact is they were extremely popular systems, so popular that developers could justify making a special port just for the DS or Wii. If you have 80 million systems sold, publishers can pretty much guarantee they will sell hundreds of thousands of units. There is still a risk they might just break even on the port, but with that many systems in people’s homes, there is a good chance they will make a profit.

The Wii U is starting out slow. It does not have the sales numbers to get publishers to port games for it. They feel like they have to make a unique game just for the Wii U. Otherwise, players will just buy the game for the other popular consoles, and the publisher’s money spent porting it was wasted. Remember that the 3DS had similar problems. It had a slow start, even slower than the Wii U, and did not really start selling until the price cut and the new Mario came out.

Until the Wii U’s sales go up, it is going to have trouble getting multiplatform games. While Wii U is doing better than the 3DS, it is still possible Nintendo may do an early price cut. Nintendo has stated they will not be doing this for the Wii U, but there is still a chance around E3 or the holidays depending on where the sales are at. It will largely depend on new iterations of Nintendo’s classics (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc.) to prop up Wii U sales. I am expecting one big Nintendo game for 2013′s Christmas season.

Videogames Are Not Art, Something More

Videogames are not art. But hear me out before you flame me. I have been thinking about this for a while and there is a key difference between videogames and the artforms. Videogames are interactive. Artforms are not. Just think of this example. What if you were watching a movie that let you choose the major decisions the character made? The movie sequences themselves you would consider art, but the act of making that decision is not art. Interactivity is not art.

Coming from a fairly hardcore gamer, this may seem like sacrilege. Videogames as art is the holy grail of the industry. We need the mainstream society to see games equally with films, music, and books. But we really don’t. Videogames shine through their interactivity, not the art. It’s great when the art is good, but every long time gamer realizes eventually that games are about the game play. You can put up with bad art if the gameplay is great. Certainly, good art can enhance the gameplay experience, but it is always about the gameplay.

And so, videogames are something more than art. The next evolution. Movies, music, and books represent the passive experience. Videogames are the first form of the interactive experience. I have seen some interactive movies and books. In a way these can be thought of as primitive videogames. Technology was not there to really provide full interactivity. I firmly believe the future will be about interactivity. Will there be something else, some new interactive experience that 1-ups videogames? Maybe, but we can at least be happy that videogames started this new revolution.

Gearscore Is Inevitable

In any RPG combat system involving damage and health, RPG characters can be boiled down to a single number representing their “power rating”. This is the character’s overall ability to succeed in combat. In systems based on health and damage, RPG characters are just math. There are no indeterminate numbers, and everything is finite. There may be many variables, but each variable only has a few possible values. Therefore, an exhaustive search using computer algorithms can optimize the variables. This may be hard to do depending on the game, but it is always possible with enough work.

Powergamers in tabletop roleplaying games have been doing this for years. In video games it first hit with Starcraft 1 but did not get popular until World of Warcraft. Hardcore players wanted an advantage, so they started theorizing how some of the stats and abilities worked with math and simulation. They then tested this ingame to see whether the theories were correct or not. Overtime, Blizzard Entertainment affirmed various theories as correct, turning them into fact (or law). This came to be called theorycrafting.

From theorycrafting with World of Warcraft came the terms Damage Per Second (DPS) for Damage Dealer classes, Healing Per Second (HPS) for Healer classes, and mitigation (or survivability) for Tanking classes. By calculating DPS, HPS, and mitigation, the optimal items and abilities could be found. This came to a head with Gearscore, an add-on that calculated the relative value of all the items a character was wearing and converted it into a single number representing their overall power gained from those items.

The huge interest in World of Warcraft made theorycrafting and Gearscore ubiquitous, but the same ideas can be used and has been used in other RPGs. Dragon Age with its MMO-like character roles easily adopted much of the same theory, and the community was able to create optimal builds for each role. The same concepts can also be used for RPG hybrids like Mass Effect.

Usually it will be about doing the most damage, but in some cases tanking ability is desired. In Diablo 3, characters have to both damage and tank monsters. The community came up with Effective Health, a number representing a character’s overall survivability. Blizzard also included DPS in the stat screens and a Gearscore-like item comparison system.

For games based on Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) rules, like Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, it is easy enough to adapt the tabletop powergamers’ strategies to the computer game. The D&D combat system is much more complicated than most games, but hardcore players could optimize the entirety of it with enough time and interest.

The only exception is in games with incomplete information. If you do not know how much damage a weapon does, you might not be able to compare it with other weapons. Likewise, if the game features random enemies with radically different tactics required, you cannot know the best items or abilities ahead of time. In these cases, it turns into probability; you have to predict how to prepare for the future. Very few RPGs do this; they are usually criticized for hiding game mechanics.

One false exception is player skill. It would seem that good player skill with a badly optimized character can trump bad player skill with a well optimized character. This is true, but in situations where this matters (Player vs Player), players will always strive to give themselves an advantage. Once a player reaches their skill cap, the only way to improve is optimizing their character. Optimization which gives birth to theorycrafting and eventually power rating (Gearscore).

There are many RPGs in which the community has not gone into theorycrafting and optimization. In single player games it is usually easy enough to complete the game without theorizing anything. Players could optimize their characters, but there would be no reward or necessity to do so. It is really in multiplayer games where competition between players directly (PvP) or indirectly (getting on the raid roster) causes players to optimize their characters to a single score.

All this is just to say not to get angry when “gearscore” or theorycrafting comes up in your favorite RPG. If it is popular enough, there will always be people looking for an edge. I see many discussions, especially in MMOs, where players claim that Blizzard and WoW ruined everything because of gearscore. The truth is gearscore was always there. There just was not enough interest by the majority of players to concentrate on it. A hugely popular game like WoW came out. It was simply inevitable that players would find the optimal paths.

My 2013 Gaming Predictions

It is time for this year’s predictions. The year 2013 represents “the last hurrah” of the seventh generation consoles. It looks to be one of the best years. I think I said that last year, but this year even more. A number of my predicted top games for last year were pushed into 2013. Then, there are all the games that were already planned for 2013 release. This year is stacked for big releases.

This post is a compilation of my predictions for the top games of the 2013 year. I have looked at the games that are expected to release in the coming year and made my predictions on the best in each genre. Last year, I made my predictions a little late, all the way in April. This year, I decided to make them in January.

As a rule, I do not cover game genres that I do not play, so I do not make predictions for the Racing, Sports, and Fighting genres. I also do not play handheld games; I make no predictions of 3DS and Vita or iOS/Android (smartphone/tablet) games.

I make my predictions based on a combination of factors. Mostly it is hype surrounding the game, but I also think about other factors such as the developer’s history of games, the previous games in the series if it is a sequel, and what I personally think from the preview footage of the game. I generally weight full game releases higher than expansion packs. An expansion pack has to be perfect to beat a new full game.