Articole interesante legate de gaming

[paul]

As adauga Apple, care a taiat bugetul pentru finantarea de noi jocuri. Nici ei nu par sa inteleaga piata jocurilor video.

Amazon and Google are in games for the wrong reasons | Opinion
Amazon's Crucible won't be the last embarrassment if tech companies don't stop viewing games as a means to drive cloud service revenue

The games industry has its fair share of flops. From games which simply never get the audience and interest their creators hoped for, through to games which totally miss the mark and fizzle out rapidly despite strong pre-launch hype and decent pre-order numbers, every year brings a number of launches -- even from very major publishers and studios -- that just don't pan out.

Much less common, though, to the point of being almost eyebrow-raising, is a game that launches to such universal disinterest that its publisher straight-up un-launches it -- shoving it right back into its box and telling everyone to move along, there's nothing to see here at all.

That's pretty much what happened to arena shooter Crucible this week, though, with the game -- which launched at the end of May -- being put back into closed beta. It's not being shut down entirely, and development will apparently continue on the title, but since new players can no longer sign up it will now only be accessible to the pretty small audience of existing players.

This would be a pretty embarrassing about-face for just about any games company. It's rendered far more so, however, by the fact that Crucible was meant to be the big-budget PC title that would announce the entry of one of the world's biggest technology companies, Amazon, to the core gaming market.

Needless to say, the utter lack of interest in Crucible is a terrible way for Amazon to make a start. The company seems to have miscalculated basically everything around this game; the title itself is boring and derivative in its current form, the launch has been botched, and as for what it thought it was doing in terms of marketing and building awareness for the game... Well, let's just say it's mind-boggling that this is the best a company worth a trillion dollars off the back of selling things could do.

Yet it's worth stepping back for a moment and taking note of the fact that, on paper, Crucible was a solid prospect in some ways. Relentless Studios, its creator, has a solid roster of development talent with good track records. The budget was decent and the Amazon Lumberyard engine it runs on is a fork of Crytek's CryEngine, which is generally well regarded. If you looked merely at the people developing it, the resources at their disposal, or even the technology they were using, there's nothing about Crucible that leaps out and screams "disaster." Nothing, perhaps, except the one thing that looms over the whole project -- Amazon itself.

Look, Amazon is a great company. It's not just an amazing retailer, it's also done an extraordinary job of making itself into a top-tier player in a host of other areas including content delivery and cloud services. I would not bet against Amazon being one of the world's dominant corporations for decades to come -- in fact, full disclosure, I have done the opposite of that, and own shares of Amazon. However, Amazon is not a games company, and while the existence of Amazon Game Studios and its investment in titles like Crucible suggests that it wishes to become a games company, there are some pretty huge red flags around that entire business strategy, many of which are waving frantically over what's just happened with Crucible.

Actually, this isn't even just a story about Amazon, because the embarrassing "launch followed by oops, no, actually let's un-launch that" dance which the company just did isn't even the first such furore to happen in recent months. Late last year another trillion-dollar (or just about) tech giant also made its big pitch to become a player in the games industry, and fell flat on its face -- except that Google's Stadia was hyped up as a whole new platform, and thus an even bigger deal, and an even harder fall, than Amazon's efforts at becoming a game publisher.

Both companies, it should be noted, are down but not out. Neither of them has given up on the games business, but they've both experienced pretty bad pratfalls off the back of product launches that were supposed to put them on the map in this space and show how serious they are about being a force to be reckoned with in gaming.

I think there are two major threads that link both Amazon and Google's failures. One of them -- probably the most important -- is simply that neither company actually has a proper rationale for being in the games business to begin with. In both cases, their reasoning is entirely instrumental; they both operate major cloud services platforms, games happen to be a great way to leverage cloud services, so they want to make games that rely on the AWS or Google Cloud backends.

That's why these companies -- both of which have been giant players in tech for going on two decades -- are suddenly both interested in being in the games business. It's not a coincidence, it's convergent evolution. The same force that made online retailer Amazon and search engine company Google into competitors all of a sudden -- namely their overlapping desire to be a market leader in cloud services -- has also pushed both companies to try to make a splash in the games business.

The problem is that that's not a reason to make games; it's an end that they think games could fulfil. The games themselves are just a means to that end, which makes it entirely unsurprising when the games and services birthed from that philosophy aren't actually appealing or interesting to consumers. They're not designed from the outset to appeal to consumers; they're designed to connect a few things together in a corporate planning flowchart.

There's nothing in the DNA of these companies which actually lends itself to making great games. That's something you can bootstrap by importing great talent and experience from the games industry, sure, but the strongest seeds can still wither in barren soil. Coming at the whole notion of game and service development with the attitude that you merely want a product that fulfils a completely different corporate need is a surefire way to a pretty barren harvest.

This leads to the second commonality, which is that while both companies have indeed hired some pretty impressive talent behind the scenes -- people who do genuinely get games and who would, in the right environment, be able to make a pretty solid fist out of launching a major new competitor into the market -- there's still a fundamental and deep-seated lack of understanding or interest in games at the top levels of the company. As a result, the whole notion of being in the games business itself seems like a big risk and a radical move to the decision makers, which utterly extinguishes their appetite for taking any creative risk or making any radical moves in the games and services they actually offer.

The most important and undeniable criticism of both Google and Amazon's entries into the games business is that they're boring. Stadia is a boring service. Google seems convinced that changing the way games are delivered is exciting -- it is not. Games are exciting. The technical details of how they're played doesn't matter until it starts messing with the experience, at which point it's annoying. At its very best, it's not exciting, it's invisible. Google was so convinced that delivery mechanisms were exciting in and of themselves that it came incredibly late to the realisation that maybe they were going to need exclusive games for it, none of which we've seen yet.

As for Amazon, Crucible is an undeniably boring game; a cookie-cutter arena shooter that's got Design-By-Committee scrawled all over it and which shows little of the talent or creativity you might have expected given the pedigree of its developers. The fact that Amazon has the kind of financial clout to be able to develop a game, launch it, and then say "oops, nope, back to closed beta" without breaking a sweat is wasted here. With the capacity to fritter away cash like this, imagine the creative risks they could have taken. Instead, that money is being wasted because Amazon doesn't really get games, sees this whole experiment as being inherently "out there", and thus has backed itself into a corner where doing something uninteresting was the only thing that would fly with the firm's management.

These problems aren't unique to Amazon and Google, and there's plenty of hope yet that these companies might overcome their rocky starts. After all, Microsoft's Xbox team has literally spent decades fighting like tigers to protect their little fiefdom within the company, and that battle hasn't always been won without compromise. Xbox One was arguably the product of a badly tuned compromise with the company's inherently conservative ideas about games, and even Xbox Series X, for all that the hardware is impressive and the growing line-up of first party studios is hugely promising, is the product of a carefully balanced compromise between the people at Xbox who genuinely get games and the rest of Microsoft, who don't care about anything other than how games can complement Azure and Windows.

As for Sony, the Japanese firm had its own long series of battles for the soul of PlayStation and how it related to the rest of Sony's content and hardware line-up. That only really came to an end when PlayStation effectively consumed the rest of the company from inside out, with the promotion of Kaz Hirai to CEO in the early 2010s.

At their heart, though, both Sony and Microsoft currently make games because they see them as a pillar of their business -- or at least, enough people in senior decision-making roles see videogames as a pillar in itself, rather than a means to support other business ventures. That allows the freedom to make creative decisions and take risks based on what people who really understand video games think will entertain and delight their audiences.

Google and Amazon aren't there -- not yet, at least. They're making games because they think games could be a useful means to boost totally different pillars. Of course, there are passionate people in the games segment of both companies, but as long as the core thing they're working towards isn't "make awesome games that people love", but rather "fulfil these KPIs related to other business segments", it's impossible for them to unleash their talent and make games or services that are actually meaningful. Until Amazon and Google can find a way to insulate their creative processes and funding decisions from that kind of thinking, all their billions won't be able to buy success.

Amazon and Google are in games for the wrong reasons | Opinion | GamesIndustry.biz

[razvanrazy]

Apple a facut ce a facut, pentru ca jocurie nu aveau calitatea pe care o doreau ei si cu care vor sa atraga, probabil, oameni noi dar si faptul ca, asa cum se vehicula de ceva timp, ne pregatesc o surpriza (probabil ceva serviciu de streaming asa cum se vehiculeaza). Urmeaza probabil sa vedem in toamna sau la anu, cand vor avea ceva titluri noi de prezentat si vor face si anuntul final.

Referitor la Google si Amazon - ce nu are habar cel care a scris articolul (sau poate are, dar a vrut totusi sa scrie) e ca nu intereseaza pe nimeni cate titluri sunt naspa si alte chestii de genu asta. Ei efectiv acapareaza intreaga industrie bit by bit - efectiv asta le este scopul.

In cazul Google nu se doreste sa devina big game maker ci sa ii preia "in sistem" pe toti cei din jur - dintre care 99% s-au opus inca de la inceput, dar vedem cum incet incep sa intre in sistem si sa semneze contracte pe multi ani.

Asta e ceva ireversibil.

Pana si EA au zis ca-si fac propriul lor sistem de game streaming dar s-au razgandit si au semnat cu Google, pentru ca nu au 10 miliarde de investit in infrastructura (cel putin astea erau zvonurile, poate-si fac ceva, dar pana atunci, au semnat cu Stadia).

Ideea e ca in ultimile decenii, piata de "intermediari" (adica cei care isi iau comision de 30% sau whatever din orice vanzare) sunt Sony, Xbox, Steam si oarecum Nintendo - astia reprezinta de 1-2 decenii cei catre care se duce comisionul ala.

Ce vor Google si Amazon (si cine mai este in jocul asta mare) long-term e nu doar ca developerii sa vina direct la ei si sa le dea lor 30% (sau cat negociaza fiecare) comision, ci eventual sa devina locul in care insasi Sony, Microsoft, Steam, samd, sa existe la un loc.

Cat de Amazon, in continuare nu se stie mai nimic - doar treaba aia de anul trecut cand Sony au semnat parteneriat cu Microsoft ca sa faca fata noilor competitori Google si Amazon (deci stiu multe din interior si stiu ca au de ce sa le fie frica).

E foarte posibil ca Amazon sa mearga mai degraba pe modelul Apple, adica totul lansat si god to go de la lansare (chestie care dureaza mult mai multi ani), spre deosebire de Google care improves on the go.

[paul]

Ce inteleg: Amazon si Google sa decida daca vor sa fie doar cloud providers (tehnologiile de game, video streaming, etc.) sau sunt jucatori all-in-one pe piata (cu Twitch, Stadia, game studios, etc.).
Adica semnezi cu ei (EA, ca sa nu investeasca in propria infrastructura) sau ei iti sunt competitori pe piata (alaturi de Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony etc.)?

Autorul spune ca Amazon nu a reusit cu Crucible si nici Google cu Stadia si poate ar trebui sa fie doar providers.

Si eu cred ca vor de toate si invata din experientele acestea si se vor imbunatatii serviciile lor.

Consumatorul are de castigat din orice investitie in industrie.

[razvanrazy]

Pai Amazon inca nu si-a lansat serviciul, daor beta la joc.
Iar Google a lansat Stadia in stadul Beta si asa a ramas de atunci, aducand doar imbunatatiri intre timp - si nu alea importante pe care le asteptam - dar ei continua sa updateze serviciul.

[paul]

E o opinie de moment. Face analiza pe ce avem si nu prea avem.

Crucible a fost lansat si retras in beta: Amazon's Crucible Flopped So Hard It's Being Un-Released.

[Espiritus]

Serviciile de game streaming nu au cum sa castige teren in momentul asta si motivul e, poate nu foarte surprinzator, fix acelasi pentru care Xbox ar fi disparut de pe piata daca ar fi continuat cu aceleasi idei pe care le-au prezentat la E3. Online only inseamna ca nu pot vinde jocurile, ceea ce inseamna ca pierd $60-$70 cu fiecare titlu cumparat.


Daca ar avea sistem de trading online intre useri mi-as vinde consolele maine pentru Stadia. M-ar scuti si de drumuri pana la Unirii cand cumpar/vand de pe bazar.

[razvanrazy]

Pai stai putin, ce a anuntat Xbox la E3 si unul din motivele pentru care a pierdut generatia asta, este fix ce a facut Sony dupa ce au anuntat ca ei nu vor merge pe Online Only, desi fix asta fac si au facut toata generatia.

Online only e foarte bine si este safe (exceptand cele 2-3-5 momente in care si-a bagat cineva coada cu ddos attack) si cu siguranta asta va fi viitorul, fie ca ne place sau nu.

Cat de investit in jocuri la preturi full, in primul rand nu te obliga nimeni sa iei la pret full, dar oricum se va putea face, ca si acum si ca si la Youtube Premium, Google Music and co, family something, astfel ca poti avea share account cu cel putin inca o persoana.

Personal, nu am mai vandut niciun joc de vreo 2 ani cred (de cand cu magazinele JRC unde am preferat sa iau mai putini bani pe el, dar sa-l dau sigur si fara batai de cap - dar nah, s-au dus si astea datorita conducerii minunate ).

[Espiritus]

Prin online only ma refeream fara posibilitatea de a vinde jocurile. Nu stiu de ce zici ca Sony face asta, totusi. Mi-am luat consola la munte si cateva discuri, nu am avut nevoie de nicio conexiune.

Cat despre pretul full sau redus, nu e foarte relevant pentru mine. Imi calculez pretul unui joc ca fiind diferenta dintre pretul cu care il cumpar si cel cu care il pot vinde. Din partea mea pot sa coste si $100 bucata, cat timp le pot da cu $90 dupa ce le joc inseamna ca am platit fix $10. De cele mai multe ori insa diferenta e de 10-20 de lei, deci pentru mine cel putin nicio reducere pe care o poate face Stadia nu bate bazarul.

[razvanrazy]

Interesant mod de calcul. Eu calculez altfel - daca pe un film la cinema dau, sa zicem, 50 lei (100 lei 2 bilete) si am o experienta de 2, maxim 3h, consider ca daca pe un joc de 300 lei, am minim 10h placute (poveste buna, gameplay bun, fara bug-uri sau alte belele) consider ca a meritat investitia. Daca in schimb am peste 20-30...-100h, atunci e clar ca este un joc foarte bun care si-a meritat banii

Oricum sunt si destul de posesiv si mai ales daca mi-a placut jocul, ramane in colectie minim 1 an, timp in care-l mai imprumut unor prieteni si daca chiar nu-l mai joc, il vand dupa aia sau il dau la schimb.

Referitor la online only, nu ma refeream la chestia aia in care nu puteai revinde un joc (lucru care ar fi fost o cretinatate absolut in cazul jocurilor fizice si sper sa nu se ajunga niciodata acolo), ci la faptul ca jocurile rulau doar fiind conectat la internet si asta s-a intamplat si la Sony, desi doar Microsoft a fost mega blamat pentru asta - eu cel putin asta-mi aduc aminte de atunci.

Desigur ca sunt jocuri SP only pe ambele platforme care nu au nevoie de conexiune de internet decat pentru download si updates.

[paul]

AT&T seeks sale for Warner gaming unit, could fetch $4 billion

In portofoliul lor sunt Batman, Middle-earth, Mortal Kombat, Lego, Harry Potter, Injustice, Scribblenauts si altele.
E publisher pentru CD Projekt Red in US (seria Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077), Turtle Rock Studios (Back 4 Blood), IO Interactive (Hitman), Avalanche Studios (Mad Max), Techland (Dying Light) si altii.

Update:
Pe langa Activision, EA si Take-Two, si Microsoft sunt interesati: Microsoft Expresses Interest in Acquiring Warner Game Unit — The Information.

[Espiritus]

Mai stiu oameni care calculeaza in termen de filme la cinema si inteleg analogia. Ma rog, eu nu merg niciodata singur sau cu amici, doar ca date cu partenera, si atunci ma gandesc ca platesc pentru experienta sociala, nu pentru film. La filme oricum prefer calitatea televizorului de acasa peste orice proiector de cinema.

[paul]

[paul]

[paul]

Apropo de discutiile precedente despre streaming:

The Netflix of gaming? Why subscription video-game services face an uphill battle
Many tech giants are betting that the subscription model will become dominant in video games. Yet the things that make gaming such an entertainment dynamo are problematic for these types of services.

Recent announcements of new game-distribution services from Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tencent, as well as reports of a prospective Amazon offering, have caused widespread industry speculation that video-game distribution could move from the still-dominant à la carte model toward Netflix-style subscriptions. If subscription services were successful, power could shift from game studios and publishers to a few digital distribution giants with massive scale and market share—analogous to the rise of Netflix in digital video.

However, comparisons with the TV and film business don’t entirely hold up—digital subscriptions will not translate to video games easily. Gaming’s unique consumption model and economics arguably make the challenge of altering consumer behavior to create all-you-can-eat offerings at massive scale a lot tougher than anything Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix have faced.

Still, the stakes are so high—video games generated $120 billion in revenue globally in 2019—that the recent service launches are probably just the opening gambits. Any of the players making (or contemplating) bets on such a seismic shift in distribution and consumption would be wise to keep in mind that video games have several characteristics that make them ill-suited to the Netflix model.

Video games have several characteristics that make them ill-suited to the Netflix model.

Games are increasingly open-ended experiences, each offering thousands of hours of entertainment

Until the early-to-mid 2000s, video games were primarily linear forms of entertainment: gamers engaged with the narrative, and most games had a clear beginning, middle, and end, very much like movies. That design framework has since dramatically evolved. Although some linear experiences still exist, engagement with today’s most popular games relies, more often than not, on infinitely playable “loops,” which can be competitive (for instance, play to improve, and climb leaderboards) or loot driven (such as collecting a never-ending set of items of increasing rarity and value to face a never-ending set of increasingly difficult challenges). These loops feed the digital identities and status of players within their online communities.

Such experiences, by design, never end, which is reflected in the astronomical amount of time devoted to top games. According to Steamspy.com, players spend almost two hours a day, on average, in the popular MOBA game DotA 2 and more than one hour a day in the online shooter CS:GO. When Destiny launched, Activision announced that players were spending, on average, three hours a day in it. More than 70 percent of Fortnite players spend in excess of six hours a week playing, and at least 20 percent spend 16 hours or more. Since the average Netflix user watches it for just 18 to 27 minutes a day, Netflix as a whole generates less engagement than any of these games individually, despite spending $12 billion a year to produce 1,500 hours of original content and to license thousands more.

Games are turning into free-to-play services and platforms

One of the main motivations for the transition from linear narratives to “live” products was the desire of the game publishers to stabilize and more actively control their revenues. The traditional model required risky, multimillion-dollar bets, with uncertain returns, in search of blockbusters. In the live model, game publishers have turned their products into services, constantly investing in frequent releases of new content, features, events, and competitions to keep players active—all supported by an obsessive focus on analytics-based decision making. Games that demonstrate mass appeal become platforms and spur the creation of new communities: all-encompassing experiences with social, competitive, and personal-status elements.

To minimize initial barriers for new players, many games have embraced the free-to-play business model. Publishers are deeply committed to expanding their audiences and focused on the long-term sustainability of these businesses. They therefore willingly sacrifice upfront revenues (a one-time $60 payment or a monthly $15 subscription) for the longer-term opportunity to make money from usage, through microtransactions for in-game goods and services.

The world’s most popular games in terms of hours spent and the number of active players and revenues are mostly free to play. According to SuperData, for example, Fortnite generated $2.4 billion in 2018 and $1.8 billion in 2019, despite being completely free to play. According to AppAnnie, 99 of the top 100–grossing mobile games in the United States are free. So, on PCs, were six out of the world’s top ten titles (and four out of the top five) in April 2020. Console gaming has become the last bastion of the traditional paid model, but free-to-play experiences such as Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Roblox have launched on console and found significant success. Even Call of Duty, historically premium only on console and PC, was recently released as a stand-alone, free-to-play Battle Royale experience (Warzone). It is enjoying strong early momentum, with 50 million players in the first month from launch.

Premium games in a subscription format might not be a winning formula

These trends make gaming subscriptions a hard sell. The Netflix proposition is a practically inexhaustible library of compelling content, with a core that is exclusive to the service. Free-to-play games, by definition, don’t make sense behind a subscription paywall, especially on PCs and mobile (console providers charge a monthly fee to access online features). What’s more, the game-as-a-service model does not lend itself to a large portfolio of games, implicit in the value proposition of all-you-can-eat subscriptions, since that gaming model is all about limitless engagement with one destination.

To succeed, a gaming subscription would therefore need to offer access to otherwise-premium (paid) games, an $18.5 billion global market, which is smaller than the approximately $90 billion free-to-play market and growing much less quickly. The premium game market is heavily concentrated; the top ten franchises (such as Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Uncharted, Red Dead Redemption, and FIFA) account for roughly half of the market’s revenues. (By comparison, the top ten blockbuster movies accounted for only 33 percent of the US box office in 2018. ) These games would be prohibitively expensive for a subscription service to carry:

- Most users interested in blockbuster premium games buy them right away: on average, 50 to 60 percent of the lifetime units are sold in the first month after launch: for example, Red Dead Redemption 2 sold 17 million units in its first 12 days. To be attractive, a subscription service would have to feature blockbusters at or near their launch dates.
- Currently, a game publisher nets at least $42 per unit on a $60 game sold digitally or physically. That’s probably what publishers will expect from any distribution outlet, including subscription services, that offer their products. The leverage for blockbuster games lies squarely with the publisher—more so than for video entertainment.
- Licensing just two blockbusters a year could cost a platform $8 per user every month. That would be 80 to 100 percent of subscription revenues if game services were priced in the same way over-the-top (OTT) videos are.

Past game-subscription services (such as GameTap and OnLive) have faced this very problem and ended up with either older games that publishers were willing to license cheaply or with unsuccessful titles that quickly moved to the bargain bin. As a result, these remained niche services.

Game development for subscription services would be prohibitively expensive

The concept of a Netflix for gaming is even more ambitious than it seems. Services like Netflix attract subscribers with their own exclusive offerings. Repeating that playbook would probably require game-subscription services to develop first-party blockbuster titles and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on product development and marketing.

This is the strategy Microsoft seems to be pursuing with its Xbox Game Pass service: it offers most of its first-party titles as part of a subscription service when those games become available at retail. Microsoft has also been acquiring multiple studios, ostensibly to expand its subscription catalog. Xbox Game Pass has recently announced that it has ten million subscribers, but the economics of the service are unclear.

With Apple Arcade, Apple too has made a big wager on content, reportedly investing $500 million in small indie games. It is betting that the sheer quantity of titles will eventually outweigh “must play” content in helping to acquire players. Other companies are trying a lower-investment, long-tail strategy—for instance, Sony PlayStation Now, which had 2.2 million subscribers as of April 2020, focuses on the back catalog.

For pure-play subscription services, developing exclusive games would be a tall order. A triple-A game can cost $50 million to more than $100 million to develop, not including marketing costs, which can easily double that budget. Such games have no certainty of success. Competition is intense, particularly since gamers, unlike consumers of video content, are less likely to sample lots of different titles, focusing instead on just one or two titles for weeks or months at a time. Subscription platforms would need to become (or acquire) full-fledged game publishers with multibillion-dollar commitments in order to compete for subscribers against industry powerhouses: the à la carte AAA blockbusters and free-to-play games that already have vibrant communities of players and unpaid streamers.

A YouTube of gaming?

If the Netflix playbook can’t be easily rerun in gaming—where exclusive content, the free-to-play model, and a service mindset drive engagement—does this mean that no digital-content platform can serve as a model for reinvention? Not necessarily.

YouTube might be the better model. Much as its platform for user-generated content (UGC) disrupted traditional video, so might a UGC gaming platform create a profitable, scalable alternative to traditional games. UGC gaming offers open-ended experiences, created by gamers, that can generate revenues in a variety of ways (for instance, limited paid access, microtransactions, and advertising), even if none of them are subscription based. Minecraft (owned by Microsoft) and Roblox are the largest UGC experiences so far. But games such as Fortnite are adding UGC features, and new entrants, like Sony’s Dreams, are rolling out intuitive tools and templates to help users create and share content.

Minecraft, for example, is primarily a traditional paid product, boasting 112 million monthly active users as of September 2019. But it also has a thriving, fast-growing private-server scene, where community members create custom settings and rules that offer varied experiences, environments, and game-play types (from open-world adventures to shooters and anything in between). Some of these servers make money through donations and ads, and a select few have massive audiences. Hypixel, spun off into a stand-alone company (Hypixel Studios) that was recently acquired by Riot Games, reportedly has more than ten million accounts.
Fortnite’s massive success has been driven by studio-made content, but in December 2018 the game introduced UGC through its creative mode, providing players with spaces and tools to build structures and game modes and to invite friends to join. In mid-February 2020, Sony released Dreams, an intuitive environment with tools to create a broad range of experiences, from art showcases to actual games, that are published within the Dreams client on PlayStation 4.

All of these companies are sidestepping the cost of exclusive content by offering tools that tie creators to the platform in exchange for visibility and a captive audience. Traditional gamers might criticize UGC experiences because they look cruder and play less smoothly than professionally produced titles do. However, UGC gaming’s mass-market appeal cannot be denied, suggesting that low-budget, grassroots game designers can thrive, even in competition with deep-pocketed game publishers.

UGC gaming’s mass-market appeal cannot be denied, suggesting that low-budget, grassroots game designers can thrive, even in competition with deep-pocketed game publishers.

The gaming community’s creativity has been responsible for a meaningful amount of past gaming innovation. In fact, the entire MOBA genre (League of Legends and DotA 2, for example) was established by Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a mod for Warcraft III. The original class-based shooter Team Fortress (which inspired titles such as Overwatch) was originally a Quake mod. The hyperpopular shooter Counter-Strike was born as a Half-Life mod, and the cult zombie PVP game Left 4 Dead started as a Counterstrike mod. The entire Battle Royale genre, popularized by games such as PUBG and Fortnite, was first developed as a mod called PlayerUnknown Battle Royale for military shooter Arma 2. Even Minecraft is taking cues from its private servers to update the official game.

UGC gaming platforms are much closer to YouTube (or streaming services like Twitch) than to Netflix. They give gamers free access to potentially endless experiences while still offering financial incentives to nonprofessional developers. The ideas and genres they are establishing have found success with millions of engaged players and could provide the creative foundation of the next megahits (or become next megahits themselves). Part of the future of gaming might not be Netflix-like subscriptions but rather open platforms with unique experiences, built by trusted community participants, that grow organically into small to midsize development studios.

With the explosive growth of streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+, video games seem to be an obvious adjacent category for digital subscriptions. This is, after all, a booming entertainment sector in its own right, with a massive, fiercely devoted audience of users who return to the same free-to-play titles again and again, and even take a hand in creating games. Yet some of those very qualities, which help make video games such a unique dynamo, may also make them a dubious proposition for a Netflix-like subscription model.

About the author(s)
Dan Singer is a partner in McKinsey’s New York office. Enrico D’Angelo, a McKinsey alumnus, is vice president of product at Roblox.

Why subscription video-game services face an uphill battle | McKinsey

[RonanN1]

Why Speedrunners Play on Japanese Releases – Version Differences

[Xander RO]

https://www.xboxachievements.com/new...September.html

[paul]

Nu e locul aici pentru asa ceva. Potrivit e http://www.consolegames.ro/forum/f60...-console-club/.
Ubisoft zicea ca urmatorul Forward va fi "later this year" si defapt e peste 2 luni.
Hai cu Splinter Cell next-gen!

[razvanrazy]

Pai peste 2 luni e Septembrie, deci in toamna, deci merge later this year oricum

[paul]

Da, tehnic e corect, dar deja se exagereaza cu atatea eventuri incat nu mai sunt "speciale". Lipseste hype-ul de E3.
Se anunta ca se lucreaza, se anunta conceptul, se dezvaluie personajul principal, se dezvaluie o poza, primul trailer, previews in presa, gameplay trailer, gameplay preview in presa, influencers, pre-order trailer, launch trailer, etc. toate imprastiate pe ani de zile.
Pe de o parte, e bine sa comunice mult ca sa-ti fie mai usor sa te decizi ce joci, dar prea mult marketing strica farmecul.

[razvanrazy]

Complet de acord cu asta si detesc teaser la trailer si anunt cu 5 ani inainte sa anunte primul trailer, dar asta e industria si hype-ul vinde.

Cat de conferinte, cat mai multe si cat mai dese doar daca au ce arata - daca in schimb arata aceleasi jocuri, dar gameplay nou, mai bine scot trailere si focuseaza timpul si banii in productie.