An Alternative Biggest changes in the Video Games Industry of the last 10 years.
1. D.L.C.
Downloadable content (dlc). Admittedly, through the internet, the distribution of free, user-generated-content for retail P.C. games had benignly existed for the first half of the 2000's (Steam rolled out in 2003). However the monetisation of dlc really began, on the scale it is today, with the release of the Xbox 360, and the subsequent consoles equipped with internet connectivity and and the capacity for large data storage.
The distribution of video games and additional content to consoles slowly but surely built up over the last ten years. The release of the Horse Armour dlc for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in April 2006 is commonly cited as a starting point to offering console gamers virtual items for real money. The lucrative nature of the dlc revenue stream lead to increasing attempts by publishers to find ways and means to charge consumers for their content; map packs, expansion packs/episodes, additional characters, alternative endings, season passes, unlocking encrypted data found on the purchased game (the paradoxical 'on-disc dlc'). Many publishers now rely on dlc as a means to monetise gamers choosing to purchase pre-owned games.
By the same digital means, the ability to patch/fix console games after release was greatly improved. It is hard to say the patching infrastructure we see for console games today could exist without the success of dlc. Yet this too was a double edged sword. It enabled the ethos of buggy rushed releases to extend to consoles games (where it had previously been a problem confined to PC gaming), with the perspective that the necessary fixes could be offered at a later date.
Without the financial viability dlc has offered, we would not have free-to-play or mobile phone gaming.
2. WoW
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (mmo). It was released in 2004, but it still has over seven million subscribers at the start of 2015, and at it's peak in 2010 had 12 million. It was not the first subscription based mmo. However the sheer scale of WoW's success over the last decade has cast (if you'll excuse the pun) a huge shadow over the rest of the Video Games Industry.
In referring to dlc, WoW can be seen as one of the founding blocks for it's psychology: A gamer, as a consumer, desiring a virtual item so badly they will pay real money for it. It was the success of WoW, and it's in-game economy that lead to Gold farming. Without the free enterprise instigated by WoW's auction houses this might never have happened.
As in the past a successful game has created it's imitators. WoW created a whole sub-industry of mmo WoW clones desperately trying to garner even a tenth of it's success. In fact it was in this competitive field that many of the benchmarks for free-to-play gaming were set. Developers/Publishers conceived that there was more money to be made selling gamers the mmo's in-game currency, than by forcing a subscription charge on the game, and risk losing market share in the genre.
3. Achievements
Achievements were introduced to Video Games with the Xbox 360. The concept was not new, previous era games offered rewards and medals for accomplishments within the game itself. Xbox achievements was different. It was the first system to tally successes across all the games played on the console, with a single gamer profile ('Gamertag'). The successes -Achievements- were tallied numerically, offering a player a unified 'Gamer score' for all their achievements.
The big change this brought to video games was in providing alternative motivation to gamers for buying and playing video games. The harder question is whether achievements have served to make Video Games any more entertaining than they were previously.
The psychology of Achievements and Gamerscore was not initially clear, but has now become an integral part of the Video Games Industry. Publishers and Developers commonly use achievements as a selling tool for games. Common practices included offering achievements within the first ten minutes of gameplay, or offering additional achievement points with the purchase of dlc.
The success of Achievements as a gaming concept in the last ten years is clear, and it has been adopted multiple times, notably in Steam and on the Playstation network (the PSN system retitling the award system to Trophies).
4. Wide Blue Ocean Gaming
The Wide Blue Ocean strategy was used by Nintendo in their release of their DS handheld and Wii console. In the first half of the 2000's Nintendo found themselves struggling to compete with Sony and even Microsoft in the console market. So Nintendo decided to take a different approach to whom they would market their next video game devices.
In presenting devices which minimised the technical skill required of the gamer, through touch screen and WiiMote, Nintendo achieved enormous success with both the DS and the Wii. However the huge sales figures for the Wii in particular did not result in dominance of the console software market of it's generation.
The success of the Wii in particular caused a schism in the mainstream Video Games Industry. It was the first time such an underpowered console (compared to the Playstation 3(PS3) and Xbox 360) had outsold it's competitors. The closest prior situation had been the original Gameboy's success in the handheld market. It also proposed a dilemma to developers and publishers. Opt to develop more of exactly the same types of games as in the past (with bigger and better graphics), or risk venturing new approaches to gaming with innovative controls, yet with less impressive graphics.
Both Microsoft and Sony tried to play catch-up to Nintendo with their Kinect and Playstation Move devices, for Xbox360 and PS3 respectively. However in the development window of both these items, the Wiimote's novelty had evaporated, and there were no new games coming out attempting to meet the potential the Wiimote had offered, outside of Nintendo themselves. The Kinect and Moves' collective fates were sealed as gimmicks in the same class as 3DTV.
The schism, and choices made by publishers, was reflected in the software output for the Nintendo Wii. As years progressed it clearly polarised. Triple A quality Nintendo games, often classics of the era, would be released sporadically alongside appropriately titled 'shovelware' third party games. The titles by small developers were aimed to mimic the appeal to 'non-gamers' (see point 6) of prior titles like Wii Sports and Wii play, yet uniformly lacked their quality. The quintessential shovelware title of note being Carnival Games, the third best selling game on the Wii.
There were Wii versions of popular franchises, for example the Call of Duty series, and an infamous port of Dead Rising. Yet the technical quality of these ports by the large third party publishers often appeared wilfully poor, in comparison to the standard of their own titles on the previous generation's consoles (Playstation2/Xbox/Gamecube).
Nintendo themselves did not adopt the 'annualisation' mentality of other publishers for their franchises, meaning many gamers found themselves with nothing new they wanted to play on the Wii console.
It became a cliched classification that if a gamer had not already sold their Wii, it was in the cupboard gathering dust.
Whilst the Nintendo DS fared better, it still suffered the same ignominy of shovelware titles.
So there were changes that the Wide Blue Ocean strategy brought to the Video Games Industry. The issue was decisively pushed, that a majority of the largest publishers would always choose better graphics as a means to sell their titles, and that innovation was a lesser priority. Secondly, the DS and Wii showed the commercial viability of shovelware titles that would spread simultaneously into mobile gaming over the decade.
5. Free-to-play Gaming
Free-to-play (f2p) games are one of the biggest changes to the Video Games Industry in the last decade. Their ascent has come from three directions, the competitve mmo market, accessible games played through web browsers (including Facebook games) and mobile gaming. Their draw in the industry is two fold, to both the gamer and developer. For gamers it is the straight forward statement, the game is free to play, any payments made are optional. For the developers, in the case of web browser and mobile phone games in particular, it is the hope that their low risk, low-budget title(s) can lead to a constant revenue stream, where there is no 'final purchase' made by the gamers who do choose to spend money on their games.
In the same way that Achievements have changed the psychology of gamers, their motivations and the question of entertainment that the games themselves present, so too have f2p games. Common mechanics of f2p games involve a tiered economy, where the use of game currency, paid for with real money, can be used to bypass grinds associated with given rewards. This is taken further where artificially imposed delays to gameplay, in games designed to be addictive, prey specifically upon a players urge for 'just one more go'.
Perhaps the problem for gamers in general is the hypothetical point where a big budget game will no longer be published to be sold in a retail form. Rather than all the gameplay mechanics to an open free flowing standard, publishers and developers will deliberately switch to a f2p model, having weighed up the financial viability of imposing in-game purchases.
6. The Misclassification of gamers
At some point between 2005 and 2015, there was an industry wide attempt to polarise gamers into two categories, casual gamers and hardcore gamers. It was a brilliant coup for people in the business of marketing video games, and for people trying to rationalise the success of the Wide Blue Ocean strategy. The generalisation would be made, in a gaming dialogue, that a community supporting a particular franchise might be vocal in their disappointment to the general quality or the changes made to the latest sequel released in the series. Rather than accept the criticism, or even objectively reject it, the developers of said sequel might choose to outright dismiss the criticism, on the basis it only came from a hardcore gaming minority, and that everyone else was happy.
Part of the problem, -or perhaps part of the success- of this classification system is a vagueness of definition. It might seem easy to define casual gamers as anyone outside a stereotypical demographic (males under the age of 35), buying a Wii, DS or playing web browser or mobile games. Yet at some point -for example playing hundreds of hours of Farmville or CandyCrushSaga- shouldn't these gamers become considered 'Hardcore'? How about a gamer who has subscriptions to all the biggest games magazines, owns all the latest consoles and a top-end gaming P.C., but chooses to only spend a few a hours a month actually playing games, the highest quality games available.
An alternative categorisation, which maybe better suits the way gamers see themselves, and reflects how the Video Games Industry has changed, breaks gamers down into three -by no means distinct- groups. Gamers, informed gamers, and non-gamers.
Although it might seem a contradictory description, the easiest way to confirm a non-gamer is to ask a person if they like to play videogames. They may well have reached level 172 of CandyCrushSaga on their phone. Even spent real money to carry on playing that one time their train was late, or when they were kept waiting for the kids, sat in the carpark. Yet you ask them if they play videogames and they would say not at all. On the other hand an informed gamer might be as avid a player of the game, but be able to tell you the makers of CandyCrushSaga tried to sue another company because their game also had the word 'Saga' in the name.
The difference between gamers and informed gamers is naturally a matter of knowledge, or choice of wanting to know. An informed gamer is more likely to know that a new franchise title about to be released is going to be good, because it's been developed by people who have made classic in the past, even if they are working under a different company name. Similarly they might even know that the next iteration in a yearly updated franchise will not be as good as previous sequels, because the majority of staff members who made the franchise popular left the company years ago. On the other hand regular 'gamers' may well have pre-ordered the next title, looking forward to spending hundreds of hours playing it, regardless of any decreases in quality.
Fundamentally it may have been useful to categorise gamers into different groups for the industry, even if those categorisation do not really match the actual differences.
7. Mobile (Phone) Gaming
Gaming on mobile phones has dramatically increased over the last ten years. In 2015, it's market share of revenue generated in the industry is forecast to overtake the PC gaming market. The ascendance of mobile gaming ties in with the other major changes to the Video Games Industry. As previously mentioned, non-gamers may not have a games consoles, but almost every non-gamer has a mobile phone.
The change to the focused industry attention on mobile gaming is a simple case of financial viability. Cheap shovelware and f2p games can be developed indefinitely for the burgeoning worldwide non-gamer market, without financial risk or the kind of brand-reputation risk associated with the release of poor quality titles on P.C. or games consoles.
8. Gamers are the Stars of the Industry
It is undeniable the impact Youtube and Twitch has had on gaming in recent years, gamers creating entire careers for themselves purely from playing games and streaming/uploading the footage. Particular events have gained popularity over the years, for example the yearly World Cyber Games and EVO fighting game tournament. But the stars of the Video Games Industry that have emerged on the internet, don't necessarily represent the best players of games. Showing how games can be entertaining, fun, enfuriatingly difficult or laugh-out-loud hilarious. It seems appropriate that the stars of the industry should be the people demonstrating just why people want to play games.
9. The Restructuring of the Japanese Games Industry
Konami.
10. The Widening Gap between the Gaming Industry and the consumer/gamer.
What seems to have happened at some point in the last decade is that lines have somehow been drawn between the Video Games Industry and informed gamers. The antagonism has escalated through the years, partly through several scandals, which have tended to question the allegiance of some gaming journalism outlets.
Without wanting to provoke antagonism in this piece, if asked, would a Video Games Developer or Publisher happily accept a consumer base purely of gamers pre-ordering yearly updated established franchises (regardless of technical faults at launch), or a wide blue ocean of non-gamers downloading their next addictive f2p mobile game. Everything would be so much easier without informed gamers, scrutinising motives. Forget the youtube interviews, where the hapless interviewer accidentally asks why your unnecessary sequel to a reboot is still inferior to a twenty year old game whose brand you appropriated. Just get Kate Upton to advertise your game on T.V.
Thankfully through some of the same means that gamers have become the stars of the industry, they have been able to vocalise where and when the industry has gone awry. Whether it has been the ridicule of a launch price point for a new console, or planned Digital Rights Management that was then scrapped, there have been successes and failures for the Industry to react to the sentiment of gamers. There is only hope for the next decade that the industry can try to supply what gamers actually want from their games, whilst maintaining the need to make a profit.
