Civilization 5 Announced

[MJW (ya that one)]

I find that unlock keys are very silly. I'm okay with Steam.

2k better make the Babs SP-only or a bad civ. No one who plays MP will take the game seriously if 2k does not.

[sunrise089]

So why didn't you wait until BtS was released (and patch 3.19 available) before buying civ?

Darrell

Hey, he said "complete" not "complete and then made worse" And yes, I'm still fighting that battle 4 years on...

I've said before that I'd pay money, say the $20-30 an expansion costs, for a total graphical overhaul of CIV and/or a total performance overhaul . But that's because I still play this game more than anything else I've got on my PC or PS3. I'm certainly not in the majority of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of purchasers, and we need to remember that none of us are.

I actually think that both Steam-like programs and micropayments are great additions if they are executed properly. We can pine for the pure gameplay of SMB1 or FF1 all day, but the simple truth remains that those games were basically made in a basement by like 2-3 people compared to the media-heavy big budget titles we have today. Modern games cost big bucks, and that means 1) something has to be done to combat piracy and 2) you need some sort of cash rolling in for it to make sense to keep supporting a game.

Piracy is a huge problem - it's simply something that didn't exist in any quantity 15 years ago, and ballooning game budgets and ballooning bandwidth and storage capacities mean it will only get worse. I don't know if Steam or rootkits or the old-school "what's written on page 36 of the manual" system is best, but unobtrusive well-designed copy protection is simply necessary to keep game costs down and/or keep quality up. I don't understand the argument against the theory of copy-protection.

As for micropayments, at their core they're simply giving you the option for a little more game for a little more money. Sullla is 100% correct that we shouldn't be charged for basic gameplay components at launchtime, but there is still a place for micropayments. People started buying expansions for PC games back in the 90s. All an expansion is is something less than a full game and more than a patch. All downloadable content is is something even smaller. Such content may not even be ideal for a game like CIV or CiV, but it makes a lot of sense for something like an FPS. Imagine an FPS with a well-balanced online mode and a popular SP campaign. Adding a new SP campaign 6 months after release makes tons of sense. At a certain point adding one more SP feature to a game stops being worthwhile pre-launch either due to needing to get the product out the door or needing to keep the cost reasonable. But after launch, when sales numbers are firmer and time is less of a factor, players can find their game experience expanded and the developer can get compensated for it. I think the key is not charging for core game features and not fragmenting the user base unnecessarily.

In CIV terms I think things like scenarios or first-party mods make a lot of sense right away. To me those are like "new self-contained campaigns or levels" in an FPS game. Then a year or two past release, when no economic case can be made for more dev time, a system like BtS's espionage could be added via a micropayment transaction. It splits the user base, but at a time where it makes sense - sales of new units are low and existing players are either casual and probably not playing competitively or with other humans, or else they're enthusiasts who probably long for new content. And while CIV, on a PC, should still have access to user-created content for free, there is still plenty of room for micropayments: hosting user-content or helping install it, really high-quality first-party content, or what would be user-content on consoles where cool people like Ruff and Solver can't make changes to games even if they want to.

Could a company abuse the system and ban user-content or charge too much for first-party stuff? Sure, but then don't buy that game. The fact that Gigli or Pluto Nash dared charge the same price as Avatar or Dark Knight for their tickets doesn't mean there's something wrong with movie pricing, but rather that the marketplace is working and weeding out the bad products. Ultimately look at WoW and other MMOs - they charge a fee every month, people can quit whenever they want if the $12 or whatever stops being worthwhile, and the devs have an incentive to keep adding content and balancing features to the game. Do they always do a perfect or even good job at it? Of course not, but you have to pay for the servers somehow, and it's crazy to expect new content for free. In the case of a game like CiV obviously $12 a month is too high, but if we're expecting content long after release isn't paying a small fee a worthwhile tradeoff?

The last thing I want to say is that I'm not convinced that modern games are better than old ones, but nothing is stopping us from still playing old games. So if someone likes Contra better than Perfect Dark better than Halo better than the newest CoD game then that game and others from its generation remain available to you. And if you've tired of those games, similar games can be found free online. If you like the old games exclusively, and don't like the modern java successors, well then sadly the market just doesn't agree with you. People simply aren't lining up to pay $60 to buy Contra VIII and have barely evolved gameplay versus 1992. An alternative would be to charge $10 and have 6x the sales (or a bit more considering fixed costs) but that also isn't happening (budget titles of non-casual games sell like crap). Second alternative is to charge $10 and make the game for 1/6 the cost of a big budget title. Again though, for whatever reason people don't buy such games. There's an awful lot of competition in the gaming industry, certainly at least on the PC side. If a company could challenge the EAs of the world making $60 throw back games, $10 throw back games that get huge sales, or $10 throw back games made on a shoestring I think they would be doing it already. We may all wish there was such a company, but the numbers don't agree with us, and that doesn't mean that the companies that do give the market what it demands are "evil bastards" or whatever the phrase of choice may be.

[T-hawk]

Good video games are vastly underpriced compared to the value one gets out of it. Pricing for downloadable content (DLC) just reverts to the mean. It's commonly cited that (large, replayable) video games cost the least over time of common entertainment options. Compare to a movie at 2 hours for $10, a music album at perhaps 5 hours of listening for $15, or an amusement park at $40 for a day. The video game price point of $60 for 50-100 hours is a really good deal.

Games like Civilization or Diablo or Half-Life that can deliver that kind of extended experience should probably be priced around $200. But the marketplace is not discerning enough to distinguish and support great games at that price point. The masses can't tell the difference between a true Diablo and the endless pile of schlocky clones. They're all packaged in the same boxes.

In economic terms, there's a considerable consumer surplus associated with a large and replayable video game, where the seller cannot capture all of the revenue that some segment of the customer base would be willing to pay. DLC pricing can and does capture this. And the MMORPG pricing model is essentially a perpetual stream of DLC, where players are willing to pay $200 or more over time.

Before DLC was technically feasible, this effect was approximately but inefficiently captured by expansion packs, which typically charged half the price of the original game for a small fraction of added content. PC gamers got used to that, but in the long run, that was an aberration. Now that game manufacturers have the technical capability to micro-segmentize their market, they can extract more revenue overall, and will do so.

Every non-video game charges for micro-addons. You buy tennis balls and rackets, right? Ever paid by the game for bowling or golf? Bought bicycle parts or running shoes? Why should video games be different?

[Krill]

Yes, if you can get the extra content free from modders, and distribute it yourself within communities such as this.

[darrelljs]

I estimate I've paid more powering my computer to play civ than I spent on the game and two expansions. Seriously, that's not a joke, I did the math. I've played the equivalent of 83 straight days (give or take) of civ. I pay about $0.06 per hour to run my machine, which works out to $120, vs. $110 to buy the game + expansion packs. Another way to look at it is I'm paying a nickel an hour for this entertainment, and that doesn't even include time spent on the forums .

sunrise089, I like the micro term...micropayment for microcontent. Why wait for the entire expansion to be complete when I can get cool stuff faster? This isn't the 1990s when the distribution was limited to mail, and only a beefy upgrade was worth the cost. Things are better now, not worse .

Darrell

P.S. Biggest arguement for Steam IMO is I don't have to stick the stupid CD in every time I want to play a different game.

[darrelljs]

I've played the equivalent of 83 straight days (give or take) of civ.

And, just to be clear, if you ever try to reach me by IM and get my wife instead, and tell her this, there'll be trouble .

Darrell

[wrapper]

So why didn't you wait until BtS was released (and patch 3.19 available) before buying civ?

Some of us did....

I learned my lesson from the Heroes of M&M series. The games were so much better -- not to mention so much CHEAPER -- once the bugs were worked out, the masses had their protests heard about leaving such-and-such out (e.g., caravans, map editors), the patches were included, etc.

[sunrise089]

Good video games are vastly underpriced compared to the value one gets out of it... Compare to a movie at 2 hours for $10, a music album at perhaps 5 hours of listening for $15, or an amusement park at $40 for a day. The video game price point of $60 for 50-100 hours is a really good deal.

I both strongly agree and disagree. Agree that people vastly underestimate the utility they get from enjoyable activities they do for many many hours. I'm trying to convert my friends who use laptops as their main PC (shudder) to using Solid State Drives as their primary storage. I argue that at hundreds of hours on a computer per year the cost of the drive is absolutely trivial.

However I think you're way off listing all of the different activities and their prices. Music fans listen way more than five times per album, movie fans watch movies many times, and when you go to a theme park you've making a memory. That's not a cliche - the more exotic recreation activities like travel add utility due to conversation, memories, and even status. Also, while you can't give away a theme park experience once you've visited, and while you can give away a video game you suffer from a window of opportunity (many people wouldn't be very impressed receiving Half Life 1 in 2010), movies have great secondhand value. Sure some people want to watch Avatar the day it comes out on BluRay, but if I buy something like Casablanca in the $5 bin I can watch it and then gift it to a friend. A few re-gifts on and that $5 has been a pretty solid buy too.

[Jowy]

They should just concentrate on making as good a game as they can. The money will come if they succeed. For example WoW was selling a new mount for 25 euros. There's over 100 different mounts in the game and this new one wasn't really that special, yet according to my sources atleast 70 000 players bought one on the first day. That's a completely unnecessary, overpriced and not thrown in your face DLC, but it sold like hell because the actual game is so good, not because they tried forcing everyone to buy it..

[Sareln]

They should just concentrate on making as good a game as they can. The money will come if they succeed. For example WoW was selling a new mount for 25 euros. There's over 100 different mounts in the game and this new one wasn't really that special, yet according to my sources atleast 70 000 players bought one on the first day. That's a completely unnecessary, overpriced and not thrown in your face DLC, but it sold like hell because the actual game is so good, not because they tried forcing everyone to buy it..

Well, that's the arithmetic on DLCs in general in action there. If your installed base is large enough, it makes sense (market-wise) to offer a DLC. Even if you only get 5% of your installed base to buy it, you're positive. Hopefully they'll do the smart thing (let you play against CIVs you don't "own") and not split the multiplayer community.