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Author Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O  (Read 12997420 times)

Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147405 on: September 26, 2019, 06:45:56 am »

If you want a gaming Netflix, I heard about this thing. Prepare to be amazed:

https://www.episodeinteractive.com/

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/293928/How_Episode_became_the_worlds_biggest_interactive_fiction_platform.php

You become the biggest by making something nobody else wants to make. Like those "hidden object" games in the PC bargain bin at game shops. Basically nobody who dreams of being a coder wants to make point-and-click games for 35+ year old women, so they got the market cornered, whereas places that make "cool" stuff have layoffs all the time. Just make the girliest shit possible and you probably got that market segment to yourself: male devs and 'woke' devs won't be crowding in to compete with you.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/OmTandon/20170103/288564/Will_you_pay_2_to_kiss_a_game_character_Episode_Choose_your_Story__The_Good_The_Bad_The_Ugly.php

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Browsing and selection of UI is similar to popular media and video consumption platforms like HULU and NETFLIX (as seen below) which resonates with most young players existing mental model - of how to consume this content - and creates a strong mental model of time shifted media content rather then just a game or interactive comics.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2019, 06:52:39 am by Reelya »
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scriver

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147406 on: September 26, 2019, 07:04:19 am »

I don't see what physical/digital makes renting less of a valid idea. There are books/movies/games that I want to own. There are books/movies/games that I just want to read/watch/play. In my mind renting makes even more sense when there's no physical media necessary since there is less "to own".

I'm very much not against streaming games in itself. For example, I don't usually play FPSers or say the Assassins Creed games, but every so often, I get a strong urge to play such a game for whatever reason. I usually opt not to play these games since, well, I have to buy them and I know I'm likely to put them down after a few hours and never think of them again. If I instead could rent the game for a few days then I think I would prefer that.

Opposedly there's games like ck2 that I definitely want to own myself to have available and for modding.
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147407 on: September 26, 2019, 07:36:34 am »

I think the reason renting hasn't made sense with digital is that it doesn't fill a need. Some tech video about rental explained that originally, video rental made sense because VHS tapes were expensive to make. The tapes, but also the process of duplicating tapes was expensive, since you had to run the tape machines for the time needed to copy them. So you had big banks of tape copying machines, it was labor intensive and it was slow: note that you'd have to start both recorder and player, and after recording a copy, you'd have to rewind the original each time. You're constantly loading and unloading tapes, hitting play, record, stop, rewind. Renting VHS tapes thus spread that cost out over multiple people, since it really did cost $30 to make one and you couldn't realistically lower the price.

DVDs were much cheaper to make: a machine just stamps a never-ending stream of blank discs and you pay people to shove them in cases. Note that video rental stores started dying out well before streaming became the viable go-to option for most people. Streaming was just the nail in the coffin. You can make cheap DVDs of movies and sell for $2 in a case.

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In 1998, when DVDs were emerging as the new video medium, Warner Bros. offered CEO John Antioco an exclusive rental deal. Blockbuster was to have rights to rent new DVD releases for a period of time before they went on sale to the general public. The studio was to receive 40% of rental revenues in return, which was the same deal already in place for VHS rentals. Blockbuster turned the offer down, and the studio responded by lowering its DVD wholesale price in order to compete with the rental industry. Walmart seized the opportunity and in a few years surpassed Blockbuster as the studios' single largest source of revenue. Other mass retailers soon followed suit.

So, DVDs actually killed Blockbuster, not streaming. There's very little difference between the price you can afford to sell DVDs and the price at which you can afford to rent them. The concept of rental only makes sense when you need to spread the cost out of some scarce or expensive-to-make thing among multiple people. It makes no sense as a match for digital goods.

EDIT: to the point, imagine you have a rental for a game, and you charge some percentage based on time you played vs full time in the game. You can get plenty of games for say $5 that give you say 50 hours of game time. Are they going to charge you 10 cents an hour? One issue is that the first hour of content may have cost "X" to produce, but the first two hours of content definitely don't cost "2X" to produce: they generally cost a lot less than 2X because the development costs of code and assets are spread across the content and play time. So, there's a big problem here in that for a single-player game, the idea of "pay per hour" doesn't match where the actual development costs were, so it's going to be suboptimal. For example, say you have a new game that theoretically would go for 40 hours, and based on expected sales you can afford to sell it for $40, as a complete game. If you instead charge people $1 per hour, then you're actually going to be losing money, since many players will only play a little, you'll only make that $40 off people who finish the game. Say the average person only sees half the game, you're now losing money and you'd be forced to raise the hourly price, say to $2 per hour, so people who play the whole game will have paid $80.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2019, 08:01:18 am by Reelya »
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TamerVirus

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147408 on: September 26, 2019, 07:58:10 am »

Blockbuster also had the opportunity to buy out Netflix very early on, when streaming = DVDs in the mail
But they didn't, because the CEO thought it was a joke
It just seems like the company was fated to fail
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scriver

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147409 on: September 26, 2019, 07:58:27 am »

It does still fill a need and that is the need of the user -- I do not have the room to store every piece of game and movie in the world, I don't even have the room to store the tiny speck of information I'm interested in. I have no interested in turning my bedroom into a super computer database -- somebody else is going to have to. And presumably to afford the upkeep of it they're going to have to charge the people who make use of it, ie me.
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dragdeler

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147410 on: September 26, 2019, 08:06:08 am »

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« Last Edit: November 21, 2020, 11:22:33 am by dragdeler »
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scourge728

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147411 on: September 26, 2019, 08:07:45 am »

Here's a shocking idea: Just uninstall games you've beaten or otherwise do not plan to play anytime soon, and then use that space to install the ones you do want

Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147412 on: September 26, 2019, 08:08:17 am »

Well if you download a game then play only part of it, the actual distribution costs are almost identical. So owning the whole thing isn't sufficiently different in costs to "rental". There is going to be so much content that's re-used between sections in the typical game. You may as well just have digital rights to the entire game, and only have it installed when you want. A big thing is about the size of the units of content development that make sense, economically, in terms of delivering people content. If you deviate from that, then what you offer won't be perceived as offering value for money.

And as I said in my example, the development costs of a typical game are heavily front-loaded. It makes more economic sense to charge a "gatekeeper" amount to get access to the whole lot of the game, rather than charge people per-hour or something. The marginal costs of giving you an extra hour of gametime are so low compared to developing the thing in the first place. So that's one reason digital game "rental" doesn't make much sense, and things work out better if you ship a $60 game then do free-to-play or something.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2019, 08:09:51 am by Reelya »
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dragdeler

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147413 on: September 26, 2019, 08:12:04 am »

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« Last Edit: November 21, 2020, 11:22:10 am by dragdeler »
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147414 on: September 26, 2019, 08:30:22 am »

It could still carve out a niche. Remember what I said about rental making sense when it's sharing something scarce? Server time on a server rack counts for that. However, if you're gaming 24/7 on the service then of course it's costing you more than just buying a high-end machine and getting the games yourself. But for someone who's time-poor then it could make economic sense. If you game on the streaming service 2.5 hours a day then they effectively need to charge you 10% of what that high-end gaming rig costs to run to break even. Consider that if you own 100% a high-end gaming rig, you still might only have time to game 2.5 hours a day, or getting 10% of the capacity-use of the device. So, paying for the 10% of one machine you actually use might save money.

Game rental thus makes no sense for the reasons I already outlined, but game streaming might. Just expect that it will be streamed from a third-party, not the developers, for the same reason that movie studios never liked rentals.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2019, 08:36:20 am by Reelya »
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dragdeler

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147415 on: September 26, 2019, 09:01:16 am »

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« Last Edit: November 21, 2020, 11:22:14 am by dragdeler »
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Doomblade187

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147416 on: September 26, 2019, 09:38:30 am »

So, Game rental actually does have a strong niche - Redbox rents out AAA games at low daily prices, enabling people to play them on consoles without dropping 50-60 bucks on it. They unfortunately have limited selection, and depending on how popular consoles stay, it may go away, but it does have a niche.
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147417 on: September 26, 2019, 09:45:36 am »

Ok, I got you, you mean most economic way to ship copies of the game.

However. where I think game streaming will get it's niche is in the 'holistic' benefit to the consumer: the total investment in hardware + software being lower than needing to buy all that stuff yourself. Also, while it's true that both game-makers and hardware-makers lose out in this scenario, arguing that this is an economic loss is not hoiiistic enough - what the consumer saves here on costs is money the consumer can spend elsewhere. Maybe instead of a $3000 rig he buys a bigger $3000 screen or better furniture. Resources are freed up for other things when not spent on doing something that could be done for less. Society as a whole benefits when we work out ways we can offer equivalent service at a cheaper cost to the consumer.

So, Game rental actually does have a strong niche - Redbox rents out AAA games at low daily prices, enabling people to play them on consoles without dropping 50-60 bucks on it. They unfortunately have limited selection, and depending on how popular consoles stay, it may go away, but it does have a niche.

Because those are still physical they have a niche, since the cost can be spread out among multiple people for a single purchase. The limited selection is because it's marginal - there are only a handful of new-release or very popular titles it works for. Compare that to a VHS rental store of yore: every conceivable movie they could cram in would be there, even obscure ones. For rental games in Redbox, some games would be more in-demand than others, and only the most in-demand dozen or so games on the latest platform are there: all the others are below the marginal threshold for stocking them.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2019, 09:57:30 am by Reelya »
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scriver

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147418 on: September 26, 2019, 10:18:19 am »

Um yeah so you can just rent harddrive space, like dropbox. Physical limitations are a really good point. The whole market strategy and narrative is only an odious attempt to preserve the kind of profit margins that were allowing these places to run in the first place when technical limitations were different allowing them to bar normal people from ownership.

If I'm renting hardware space from a third party then we just come back to the problem of the data just going poof when the third party goes down and with it goes my claims to owning the media (just like with Steam). Whether it's on disks or on a drive I still need to keep the data somewhere myself to keep it.


And at the point of renting space to keep games I own but aren't interested in actually taking up again, why wouldn't I just sent them? It's much less of a hassle. I rent Call of Assassin's Creed 43, stream the game, and when I'm done I forget the game ever existed.

Here's a shocking idea: Just uninstall games you've beaten or otherwise do not plan to play anytime soon, and then use that space to install the ones you do want

If I uninstall the game from my computer I still need to store the data somewhere. If I don't have anywhere to store the data that makes up the game I can't install it again later. So I need to either store it myself, pay a third party, or hope that the venue I purchased it from originally still exists so I can download it from there again.

For example, I buy a lot of games on GoG, who sells their games DRM free which means I am free to copy and move the data wherever I want to. I don't, though. I'm not interested in keeping a lot of that data around - my laptop has too little space and I don't want to keep dozens of burn disks around or devote an external hard drive to it So I rely on GoG to store it somewhere for me. If GoG goes bankrupt, all my claims to owning that data/license will rip with them.


Well if you download a game then play only part of it, the actual distribution costs are almost identical. So owning the whole thing isn't sufficiently different in costs to "rental". There is going to be so much content that's re-used between sections in the typical game. You may as well just have digital rights to the entire game, and only have it installed when you want.

As far as I know, streaming the game means you aren't downloading the whole game like you do with say Steam. Isn't that the entire point of the concept of streamed games?
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #147419 on: September 26, 2019, 10:28:54 am »

That's the problem of cost right there. If you stream the whole game, you used more data than it would have taken to just download the entire game. The cost would exceed buying it digitally and just having download rights.

Game streaming's advantage isn't that you're "renting" rather than "buying" digital rights at all, that's a misconception. Where you're saying money on streaming is because you didn't have to invest in hardware.

What they'll do is say that you can buy licenses for the games, as normal for any other service, and once you own the license you can play that game as much as you like. However, you're charged for the cost of the server you're running on per hour, regardless of what game you're running. This is not the same as "rental". You'll have an ever-growing library, the same as Steam. Think about it: the more possible choices you have, the more time they can keep you on their service. If they time-limited any particular game then you might have less choices, you might use the service less.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2019, 10:49:42 am by Reelya »
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