I’ve read a couple of articles regarding these. The ones that advertise using movie stars and models, the “Evony” types … they make enough money that they can afford fees from AAA Hollywood types. People spend thousands each week just to keep their virtual armies going … one guy was spending 25,000 a week before he quit and he wasn’t the top spender on the game.
A bunch of those things are basic copy-paste but they still keep the cash flow incoming.
Micro-transactions are becoming commonplace in AAA games as well. Take Two (makers of Grand Theft Auto) has made a lot of money in their online portion for the past four years.
It does so well (as a short term money maker) that EA continued the Mass Effect multiplayer while giving up on the single player. 3 or 4 million invested gets them 100 million + with the “plus” part growing under paywalls.
Yet, the gaming industry is changing and this golden goose is going to be cooked for many if they try to keep their short term profit-making going. It just might take a bit to fully see these changes easily but change is starting to happen on this front.
Wow that’s amazing. I must admit, I’ve been surprised how they keep going and that must be how if people are attending that amount of cash. Thing is, many are obviously ripping people off (one game I was playing, you’d easily spend at least $30/day just to not keep hitting long wait timers and that’s not including accessing “premium” content which was extra, so I can see how it’d add up if you weren’t careful. It just strikes me as odd that if you’re going to spend $100+ to play a reskinned mobile game, why wouldn’t you just go out and buy a console Game for less and you can play it to your heart’s content forever. Anyway, I hope you’re right @Eiwynn, I’d like to see the return of reasonably priced games you can buy outright, or even monthly subscriptions instead of the money sink freemium models.
These games have learned a lot from casinos. I mean, they even refer to their big spenders as ‘whales’.
I wasn’t kidding about the casino comment. They deliberately go the manipulative route, and unfortunately some people are really susceptible to it, spending a lot of money even if they couldn’t afford it.
(bear with me, I haven’t read all of the thread closely, so I might easily repeat what’s been said before)
I’m no fan of giving a bad rating because of a short playthrough length. Granted I DO check before what the total wordcount is (if given, the older games don’t have it as commonly I found) but still. Saying per se that a game is bad cause it is short seems… elitist.
Especially (and some might hate m for this) when you have games (not naming anyone specifically) where, wow, yeah, it’s long AND has multiply parts, but good bleeping hells, this is on bad-ya-cliche-drama-fest if I ever saw one, why the heck does it have such a high rating?!
It’s subjective, I know, but I feel quality should rang higher than sheer quantity.
Also I’d say there’s a difference between ‘choices not mattering’ and outright ‘railroading’. If the story can logically get you from A to B semi-regardless, that’s fine with me. Hells, to me that can easily become a reason to replay it, just to see what changes.
But if a game has only ONE possible outcome at points (like no matter what you do, you will fail because the plot demands it), no matter WHAT you try, or only ONE way you can actually succeed, then… nope.
You may be right in that assessment but for the most part it doesn’t really apply to me. I’m an avid reader that just happens to read fast, that doesn’t mean I skim through the text and hop from choice to choice. I definitely don’t skip on my first playthrough but since I usually only play it once or twice that means I rarely ever reach a point where I want to skim… the issue with this playstyle is that it never really allows me to truly see everything a CYOA-style game has to offer, thus shortening my experience on a game that is already small.
The problem here for me personally is that I enjoy playing visual novels, the longer the better and when you play something akin to the Grisaia series, or any other title meant to offer at least 10 hours of reading in a single playthrough, every other game suddenly feels shorter. Its not a fair comparison I know, but it sets a standard, so when you’re suddenly faced with a 50k word game split into different paths… the difference is noticeable.
All of this is more of a psychological thing for me than anything else, kinda like staring at a tall glass next to a shorter but wider one while both containing the exact same amount of liquid. The former FEELS like it has more when in reality you’d be drinking the same amount from each, no matter the presentation. A game split into more page breaks with more choices would certainly help but at the same time, as Lys has mentioned, wouldn’t do much in the long run because you’d be setting fake choices just to extend a game that otherwise was meant to be short. And that’s no go because it affects quality.
In the end its not really your fault here but my own - buyers all have their own standards and expectations, its unhealthy to expect or even hope to appease them all.
I would say that these two things are very different. The first one is closer to what you were saying about “railroading” – i.e. it’s not bad unless it’s done badly – (unless it’s a case where every choice has only one outcome), but the second is one thing I really dislike. If there’s only one option that will succeed, then it’s not a choice; it’s a guessing game.
Hey! I think I know the conversation you’re referring to. We discussed it on another WIP thread. For those who want more, you can start with this comment and read on.
I’ve really enjoyed the discussion on this thread, though. A lot of valuable input and different viewpoints that have given me a lot to reflect on. More to the main theme, I agree it’s frustrating when a game, whether on the purchase page or the marketing copy for a store, clearly states the word count or that a game only offers a few chapters for free or that it’s part of a series and people still don’t read or understand that and knock down the game’s overall rating for it (the reasons for which CoG as a business or the authors personally might choose a certain way is a whole other discussion I know a lot of us have had on even more threads, lol). Or they just don’t tell you why it got one star at all! But we also have the benefit of understanding what those counts mean that the average non-writer or coder probably does not. And while there may be ways of wording the descriptions differently, I still think that will always be a problem to some extent, even if only for a small percent of our readers. You know, humans on the internet being humans and all.
I meant games where no matter what you pick, there’s only failure. No matter how good your stats are, no matter what you learned before etc, it won’t matter. The game needs you to fail. Even though the level of how hard you fail varies, it’s still lazy writing.
Especially if said fail involves fridgeing an NPC so the MC get’s motivation. (Why the hecks do writers STILL do that? Seriously, why?)
The second one gets especially bad, imo, when you not only have to GUESS but to also have to have your stats be in a very specific way. I had the feeling that was going on in Evertree, but I might be mistaken. But there are games that pretty much force you to play a very specific way to succeed.
I would say not necessarily. It’d probably work best if you could achieve at least a partial success, though, and if it happens near the start of the story, when the MC is less experienced.
Agreed. Especially if it’s an RO (or at least someone who was set up as an RO).
That’s pretty much how Krendrickstone works: if your choices always match the ones you’ve made before, you get an okay story; if you slip up even a few times, you get a terribly depressing story about a failure hero who sucks at everything (and yet, for some reason, is still treated as a great and mighty hero…)
@DesuVult
Coding doesn’t account for as much as some people think it does. It’s probably only 5% of the word count on average, and it’s an integral part of making the story. So it’s the difference between saying the story is 100k long or 95k long. Plus, the average play through lengths given by random test exclude the coding word count, so the readers would have a very accurate estimate of how much story they’re seeing each time they play. (Like 40k, for example.)
Yeah, but that only works for larger games. There are games in Hosted Games that are free to play with ads that only have about 1,000 downloads, so ad revenue isn’t really going to make any money.
Also, ‘mobile gaming is not going to make you pay for a game’? Good joke there. Every ‘larger mobile game’ with ads and microtransactions is designed to be outrageously frustrating at some point unless one does purchase ingame currency. Most ‘larger mobile games’ make the majority of their money through that, not through ads.
For people who use Choicescript, the term “fake choice” is very literal. It means you’re actually using the *fake_choice coding option, in which the player makes a choice that literally doesn’t effect the rest of the game at all. For any other choice that effects stats or branching in any way, even if the change is only minor, you have to use the *choice coding option, which means it’s not technically a “fake choice”.
Stats can be changed with *fake_choice now, I believe (that feature was added some years ago, if I recall correctly). One can also redirect from *fake_choice; I do, sometimes, if I have several options that go into the next paragraph and only one that redirects to elsewhere, for instance.
So I would think that ‘*fake_choice’ and a ‘fake choice’ (which is to say, options which do not affect much, save perhaps a bit of flavour text) are two very different things even in ChoiceScript, at least with the relatively recent titles.
The idea that the definition of ‘fake choice’ could stem from the readers’ perceptions, rather than the choice’s actual function (I think this is sort of what you were saying, @Lys?) is a very interesting one, though. How to make games feel as though choices are important, and how does that intertwine with mechanics, storytelling, and the PC’s attributes?
Thinking through what best gives the illusion of power to a reader is sort of fascinating to me. I wonder if the actual percentage amount of change via *choice or *fake_choice sometimes has less to do with how railroaded a game seems; maybe a lot of it is the other aspects, like where the changes occur, or how starkly the different outcomes contrast.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true at all. I use a lot of *fake_choice functions for things that have big effects later on. The difference for me is that a *fake_choice choice will usually have a boolean dug into there set true or false that can have some major repercussions later on.
Or I use *fake_choice because while, say, two out of the three possible choices there will redirect the player to an entirely different scenario, the third scenario is directly below, so it cuts out a *goto and just generally makes everything easier for me to reread and edit as I go along.
In fact, I pretty much use mainly *fake_choice functions, with some *goto functions within there but I find that they allow me more freedom and ease of mind when it comes to flow. (Even if *choice would serve essentially the same purpose.)
It’d probably work best if you could achieve at least a partial success, though, and if it happens near the start of the story, when the MC is less experienced.
Especially if it’s an RO (or at least someone who was set up as an RO).