[TRENCHES] Thursday, February 14, 2013 - Vespertine
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Vespertine
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/vespertine
Why You Should Pay For Free Games
AnonymousI was selected to take part in a closed beta test of a game created for a popular social network, one that—if I had to describe it—was a “multiplayer single-player game”: each player manages his/her own environment, but players can interact in limited ways like sending gifts or purchasing each others’ items.
The game was rough, but I loved it. I played every day without fail, for varying increments of time, and almost at the expense of everything else. I couldn’t fathom how the company could profit from such an asset-intensive game, where most of the work clearly went into the number of different things that the player could interact with… until the game went to open beta, and premium items and cheats were introduced as a way for the game to pay for itself.
Almost immediately, it seemed, there was an uproar about the premium items. Not problems with how they worked, but the fact that they were premium at all. “Why should I have to pay real money for health?” ignoring that it was a cheat for those who wanted to keep playing instead of losing a battle. “I’m not giving out my hard-earned cash for pixels!” ignoring that it’s free-to-play, whereas the entry fee for an off-the-shelf game is upwards of $60 USD. Between the game’s persistent bugs and the steadily diminishing interest, it’s really not surprising that the game was finally taken offline after all of a few months of testing.
I just want to take this opportunity to say, please, with sugar on top. DON’T complain that the premium items in games cost money. They’re premium items for a reason, because nobody can afford to work their asses off and get nothing to show for it, especially in this economy. Multiplayer games in particular take a significant amount of time and money to implement correctly, and if none of the thousands of subscribers will pay even $1 toward a game they’ve otherwise enjoyed for months, how can the game possibly keep going?
If you like something that’s being offered to you completely free of charge, support it. That’s how social games, especially, get to keep going. I appreciate the service they’re providing, and I’ll gladly throw in a dollar now and again if you can’t afford it, but I can only pay so much on my own.
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I'm not going to continually drop cash on expendable packs like extra health.
But extra features...well if the game is good enough I don't see why not.
Though as a sweeping generalization, good free2play games make a shit load of money with premium items.
I think TF2 would be the best example but someone please feel free to correct me.
if you're going to go with free2play/pay games then follow something like teamfortress 2 or league of legends.
How many freakin mobile games are the utmost garbage? Because they go the freemium route; you cant advance unless you buy their severely overpriced crap for a game thats not really even that fun; just something to kill time.
We have so much potential now for awesome games and awesome experiences that we can share with our friends; but instead we recieve nothing but garbage; i have no problem with ads like angry birds in game. let the popularity of your game pay for itself.
how many farmville type game mechanic clones are out there?
how many mafia war clones are out there?
ugh.
And I really, really, reeeeeeaaaaallllly doubt their 'social game' would've ever sold for $60.
Sincerely,
Lord Zynga
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Excellent comic again. The whole Cora's Dad thread has been great.
This is not something unique to mobile gaming, though. There are a glut of copy-cat games for triple A titles, most of which feature paid DLC. Just because a game goes through a lengthy and costly development process doesn't guarentee that the game will actually be good. I don't take it personally when I download a free game onto my phone, play it for ten minutes and realize I don't like it because the cost to me is literally nothing but the ten minutes. And I don't even have to play Farmville or Mafia War clones, because I don't download things blind. Everything has pictures and demo videos. It's not like we're being tricked into buying free-to-play games.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
You don't need to have pay-2-win in your f2p games. While most people will not put any money into the game, if it's fun and doesn't feel like its constantly locking you out of content some people will be happy to spend several dollars on it. Often more than they would have payed for a full-fledged retail game.
Battle.net: Fireflash#1425
Steam Friend code: 45386507
If you create a product that can't survive because people wont support it, that's capitalism. It's the creator's collective fault that they had a flawed design.
Yeah, I'm guessing the reason that game failed had nothing to do with the premium content. Go to any corner of the internet and you'll see people bitching about *something*. If the game was truly good it would have survived despite people bitching (hell, look at the forums for any Blizzard or BioWare game)
I like the idea of CD (Cora's Dad, I wish they would give him a name) sitting up into the wee hours, staring into the fire. I feel like he should have a glass of brandy there or something though.
And? The story is part and parcel with the comic posting. And considering we are being led blind through this comic arc and have no idea what the hell is going on, what about the comic are we going to talk about? The gloriousness of the beard drawn on Cora's dad? His "wearing a kilt makes you a woman" jokes? Some in-comic in-jokes that I have no idea the relevance of or why we are supposed to get?
Let me guess, you're also one of the people who wanted to CAD up yesterday's PA comic with little explanatory banners because you were utterly bewildered by the triptych layout.
*Silently cursing the name "Franzibald" as he did.
But the bigger flaw with the writer's logic, and the problem with "free-mium" in general is this: they assume players complain because they have to pay for the game. Which is not the primary complaint. I have no problem paying for a game. But what I have a problem with is that money - real-world money - has an in-game impact. You can gain a competitive edge by paying for it. Which just seems really, really unfair and contrary to the way games are usually designed - a reward system based on ability, not on wealth.
There is one other thing, which is a debatable point. And that's the fact that with free-mium games, you can easily feel cheated. Like the developer trying to extort you - hold you hostage. I'm playing a free-mium game right now, which is single-player, but any item which is half decent needs to be paid for with real cash (and quite expensive, too). And the difficulty curve suddenly ramps up after about 30 minutes into the game. And if you don't pay for premium, you're stuck using the crappy beginner's weapons. The game was designed in such a way to draw me in, get me emotionally invested, then make further progress difficult or impossible unless I pay. It feels like they tricked me, which makes me resistant to go along with it. They're entitled to do with the game as they wish and it's really just an emotional, irrational decision on my part, but still doesn't make that bad taste go away.
The funny thing is, if they'd just made me pay some cash up-front to buy the game, I'd probably have been fine with it. As it is, I feel cheated and rather than just hand over the cash, I just don't really want to play anymore. Even if I did pay for it - I just don't want to play. And since the game has been free for me, up until this point, I don't have enough invested in this to make walking away from it an issue.
So free-mium has that flaw. And unless you do it correctly (TF2 comes to mind) people are just gonna walk away.
I take it you missed my point. Though since that seems to be what you are trying to do, I don't know why I am going to bother trying to explain.
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/pivotal
Even aside from the fact we are jumping from comic to comic blind without any idea of what the current thing is about other than "hey, let's talk to Cora's dad about this thing or other" so there is nothing to discuss about the overall story because we have no idea what it is, what the hell is THAT comic about? Sure, it's trying to convey that Kilt Kilterson is using some sort nostalgia argument to convince Cora's dad to help. Great, the point is obvious, that doesn't mean the comic makes any sense. "Hey, in this comic universe, you know that thing I am off-handedly referring to like everyone knows what I am talking about? That was me." You know what the point of in-references is? To get people that understand them to feel like part of a connected group. "Hey, I got that reference, cool!" But the in-reference is an in-universe reference to something we know nothing about. It's like someone read the psychological theory on in-jokes but missed the entire point. It serves the purpose of convincing Cora's dad, but it just alienates the actual reader here in the real world because there is literally no way they can understand the reference.
PS. The stories coming along with the comic are roughly 200% more discussion worthy than the comic itself.
Portrayal isn't endorsement. We can laugh at a character's homophobia without being homophobic.
The last 8 comics have been dealing with Cora and Q making their pitch to Cora's dad, without any cutaways or interruption.
The story is that Q has started a new game studio and they want to make a game out of the books Cora's dad wrote. As has been explicitly stated in the comics.
So what exactly would be necessary for you to feel like you understood what was going on here? For the comic to actually depict the incident in question in 1985? Depict all of the time and events which have taken place between 1985 and now in chronological sequence? For Gabe/Tycho/Scott to actually write and publish Cora's dad's books so you could be familiar with the characters?
No, none of that is necessary, because all of it is totally irrelevant to the main point which we are obviously supposed to take from the comic, which is: Q is showing Cora's dad that he is a long time fan of his books and actually cares about the property on a level besides just making a buck. If you understand that, you understand the comic, because the rest doesn't mean anything to us and isn't supposed to.
Since The Trenches began there have been people complaining every step of the way they can't follow what is going on. I have tried on many occasions when I see these people posting to help them get up to speed and I no longer care enough to bother. Yes, there have been a couple of somewhat confusing sections, like the end of the last "season," but the story arc right now is probably as straightforward and spelled-out as it has been at any point since the first month when the sum total of the story was, "This guy named Isaac needs a job because he's living out of his car."
Maybe the effort of following what's going on in a comic with ongoing story and continuity that only updates regularly twice a week is just too much for some people, maybe attention spans are too short. But mine is too short to keep typing posts leading them by the hand.
For the record, I don't read PvP (though I do enjoy it when I come across it.) And I've been reading Penny Arcade for just about damn ever. But...
...I'm kind of thinking that the complaints about continuity in the Trenches come mostly from people whose primary webcomic exposure has been PA. If you brag about your allergy to continuity, you attract & reinforce readers who share the allergy. Which isn't even a bad thing! But I suspect it does lead to the endless complaints about lacking the apparent ability to follow a plot via webcomic that we're seeing.
I totally agree with you. In fact, I've speculated about this before in past threads when people post who seem to find the plot of The Trenches impenetrable.
I've been following PA, PvP, Dr McNinja, CAD, OotS, and a couple other for years.
I saw exactly zero problem with last season, my problem is with this current wanna-be Kudzu-plot story arc.
People usually cite LoL on that front since they're basically the same game and model.
I have a hard time deciding what constitutes a "good" F2P scheme because my economic thought processes are such that I virtually never spend money on any of them. Take LoL for instance. I first played it during the release celebration, where all 40 heroes were available to everyone for a couple of weeks. I enjoyed it, and when it officially launched I wound up buying a pack of 20 champions for $20. Paying roughly half the cost of a typical game for half of the content in the game as it stood struck me as fair enough (especially since it was by and large my favorite half), and the difference in quality of life between owning zero heroes and twenty was substantial. But after that I never spent another cent on the game. Spending thousands of dollars on all the content in the game would obviously be ludicrous, and I could never stand the idea of spending $10 on roughly 1% of the game's content (close to the cost of most individual champions) given how much $10 can get you in the PC gaming market these days.
If League of Legends had cost $40-$50 straight-up I would have paid it. If heroes were overwhelmingly cheaper (like $.99 each or something) I'd have dropped another $5 on the game every couple of months. But as it stood nothing that Riot was offering was worth its price to me except that original $20 bundle, so that's all I ever paid. It's not like the fact that the game was hypothetically "worth" double that makes me feel obligated to spend that extra $20-30 on any old thing just because I can. My natural inclination is to obsess over value-per-dollar and total cost of ownership. The value-per-dollar of the game itself is essentially infinite (because I enjoyed it and it was free), but the value-per-dollar of dropping at least eight bucks for a single hero on top of the 25-30 I already had is abysmal, so I never did it.
My situation is even more drastic in Dota 2. Valve gives away everything even remotely related to gameplay completely free. The main thing they charge for is cosmetic items like skins and alternate announcers (although they also have a system where you can basically buy tickets to watch tournament games in the client, which is a whole other kettle of fish that I won't try to analyze). I don't personally care about cosmetic items all that much, especially when it's possible to get a few for free just by playing, so the value-per-dollar of those transactions is effectively zero. Thus, no matter how much I love Dota 2 and how much time I spend playing it, Valve will never see a cent from me because they simply aren't selling anything that I want. It's not because the game is worth no money to me, or that I'm fundamentally unwilling to spend money on the game; it's just that the transactions which are available in the store don't appeal to me.
And the fact that I, personally, don't buy microtransactions in those games doesn't mean their monetization schemes are bad. Both Riot and Valve manage to sell to a lot of people and make a lot of money. The confusing thing about free-to-play pricing schemes is that when you use one, your market isn't "the people who play your game". It's only some subset of those people. What you decide to charge for and how aggressive you are about withholding it from free players determines which portion of the community constitutes your actual customers. I could play Dota 2 obsessively for years and hardly be more a part of the Dota 2 market than someone who never even heard of the game.
Which brings me back to the original question: what makes an F2P market "good" or "bad"? It's easy to say that Dota 2's scheme is the "best", but that's only out of pure self-interest. I like that I can access 100% of the gameplay content for free while other players effectively subsidize the cost of the game for me. At the end of the day all you can say for sure is that the best F2P scheme is the one that makes the most money. If LoL charged $.99 per hero instead of almost $10, I probably would have spent more on the game, and the community in general would be having more fun, but for all I know Riot would have made less money overall because some small portion of the current playerbase is willing to pay them enormous sums of money. If so, then you couldn't call the hypothetical market with cheaper heroes and happier players the better one by any objective measure.
I guess the thing that scares me about F2P is that it reduces the incentive to make good games, in a manner of speaking. You aren't just making a game that people want to play anymore. You're making a game that extorts money from the aggregate playerbase as efficiently as possible. The fact that I like Dota 2 and don't like Farmville has absolutely no bearing on their respective success. They both got the same amount of money from me (zero dollars). Dota 2 isn't funded by people who think that Dota 2 is worth money; it's funded by people who think that digital armor skins are worth money. Obviously liking the game is a prerequisite for being willing to spend money on anything, but still, that's a really bizarre paradigm shift when you sit down and think about it.
We don't know obviously, but I feel pretty confident saying it was not "Money." Q may be a smart businessman who knows how to leverage an IP to make money, (at least I think we're supposed to believe so,) but it's been a consistent thread that Q has a real passion for the properties he works with. I think his initial business oriented pitch wasn't because money is what is important to him, but because he's learned that money is what makes the world go around. When he failed to sell Mr. Cora with money, he sold him with his passion.
Secondly, we know Mr. Cora doesn't really care about the money. He's an artist, and got infuriated with Q's business talk. He calls his world his "child." Whatever word Q used, it would have to be something that speaks to the artist in Mr. Cora. In my head, something like "Legacy" sounds about right.
True, but I also don't think the character is being homophobic exactly. I think rather than calling Q gay, he's calling him a woman because he wears a "skirt". It's more sexist than anything. Mostly it's a stern adherence to traditional gender roles. None of those are good things though.
More importantly, though, it's a joke and I don't get the impression it's really mean spirited. The impression I get from Mr. Cora is not that he is really bigoted or mean, but that he hides a soft heart under a gruff exterior. I doubt that Mr. Cora really intends to hurt Q, he's just ribbing him. He likes to put on an image, as shown by his "Slit a man's throat in a fox hole" story.
I'm a strong believer in good natured comedy having no limits. I grew up in a family of ball busters, where any little thing you said or did might be turned into the but of a joke at your expense. But the second things got too personal and someone took offense or got hurt, it was always made clear that wasn't the goal. My family is one of the most supportive, loving bunch of people I know, but we value a good laugh and we've got pretty thick skin.
At the end of the day, it's the intent behind the words that really matters. Sometimes being off color is the entire point. Something terribly offensive can be extremely funny just BECAUSE you know the person saying it would never seriously condone it. Comedy at it's core is the inversion of expectations, so of course someone who's not homophobic can make a homophobic comment funny, when done properly. The whole point is "Look at how ridiculous this is." What it all shakes out to is that it's not productive to be offended at words without true malice or ignorance behind them.
Louis C.K. can demonstrate much better than I ever could, by taking one of the most offensive topics on earth and turning it funny through the inversion of expectations:
The Trenches is character based, not plot based. Boiling down the plot into a summary serves no one, because what happens in the comic is not the appeal, it is who it happens to. Over the course of this comic, the actual events that happened could easily be contained in one or two paragraphs. The substance is in the characters. This comic is about the people and who they are, not so much about their story. It's like the Seinfeld of web comics.
The "in-universe" reference wasn't something you were supposed to get. The reference wasn't the point. The point was Q making the reference. It was a moment of demonstration where we learn something more about the character. Hell, the purpose is doubly served by us not having a clue what he is talking about. We are supposed to see Q nerding out and talking about something we don't understand with passion, to show how much he loves this thing that's ethereal to the rest of us. It's supposed to call to mind a comic book or D&D geek talking about a fictional world in such great detail that it may as well be greek to those who aren't in that fandom.
This might not be your thing. You may be a "plot person" as opposed to a "character person." You may prefer more punch and drama. You might simply have no interest in the characters as people. None of that, however, is the fault of the writing. The development of these characters has been well accomplished, and I think Trenches succeeds at what it attempts to be. What it attempts to be might not be for you, but that doesn't make it bad.
Trenches is not Penny Arcade. It's humor is dry, it's pace is slow, and the meat of it is character driven rather than plot or situation driven. I understand wanting to be a fan of something because you are a fan of it's creators and being disappointed because it isn't for you. However, taking that out on the creators is pretty immature.
A great deal of excellent writing has been done through character driven narratives. There are incredible works of writing craft that are about people living perfectly ordinary, droll lives. If you were to condense these stories down into a plot summary, it would be sickeningly boring. The entirety of the appeal is in getting to know the character.
People need to learn the difference between differences in taste and actual failures of craft. Just because you don't enjoy something doesn't make it bad or poorly done. You are not the be all end all judge of "good." In fact, it's entirely likely you enjoy things that appeal to your personal taste, but on a craft level are not very well done. Conversely, it's extremely likely there are things you detest that are masterworks of craft.
But no, just a joke.
That's usually how these things work, but I bets its probably going to be left as a noodle incident.
As for the tale: No problem with paying for games here (I've bought plenty in my life), and I even play lots of F2P games including ones from evil "Z." However I refuse to purchase just about anything since items quickly become obsolete and you usually need alot of them to have an impact, and I'm busy enough with work that I don't really need to purchase resource refills.
I have bought some company currency when a couple of times when it was DEEPLY discounted, and turned those into energy refills spread out over the course of a couple of months (since that assists with me actually playing the game), but most of the time I just don't see the value. Also, I don't bug my friends for things so any event progress or items that come from "face-nagging," I do without. Its just not worth it for a game I only play to kill time when I can't play something more involved.
No fucking shit. If you read my point, I explicitly stated that and THEN went on to explain why it was still bad.
Except we didn't. We really, REALLY didn't. What we learned about the character is he a fun of Cora's dad's fictional universe and has been for a long time. Lovely. But we still have no idea what that universe is or why anyone should give half a damn.
The phrase that applies here, in an interesting sense, is "cart before the horse."
Wannabe kudzu plot.
Again, if you had read my post, you would understand that just serves to alienate US, the reader.
If, for some bizarre reason, you would like to know more about a made-up fantasy series that was little more than an offhand mention in a comic strip, then you've probably found the right community because there is something collectively, but delightfully, wrong with people around here:
The works of Tycho Brahe
The works of L.H. Franzibald
Regarding Cora's dad, we know that he's the author of a fantasy novel series, apparently successful enough to have their own convention and one that has been in existence for decades. Q is a longtime fan and wants to make a game based off of it using his newly acquired wealth.
The particulars of the fantasy novel series aren't really needed to follow the plot so far. I'm sure that we'll learn more details as needed (which is how most stories work).
I, clearly alone, see all this inside reference stuff as alienating the readers since the entire plot hinges on all this stuff. It's not throw away data, it's central to the carrying out of the plot. To me, this is like watching a story about hobby aircraft where the entire thing hinges on two people talking to each other in hobby talk that means nothing to the third party watching. Or for a more followable, concrete reference, Darmok
I'm waiting for something followable to start happening.