Posts Tagged expectations
What games are worth to players
Posted by Adriaan in game industry on January 18, 2010
A few months ago, the makers of World of Goo did an experiment. They gave away their game for any amount of money that you would pay for it. The result were fantastic:
http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/
The first thing I realized when I read through the results was that people are currently paying money for games they have not played before. And that is somehow strange, because how can we know its value when we have no idea of how much it will entertain us? I find it a dangerous thought that the amount of money that you have to pay resembles the amount of joy you will have from the game. And even worse is the way we think about a game that we have already bought, see http://goo.gl/eBqX for the reasoning. So not only are we probably paying way to much for games, we think about them much better when we pay a high price.
The second thing that crossed my mind was Runescape. They have a pretty good pay-model which would let people play the game, let them see what their fun is worth – and if they like it, they can pay for it and receive even more fun!
What is interesting about the World of Goo experiment is that they ask the player how much they think the game is worth BEFORE they have played it. So this experiment is all about expectations. And this simple thing is what all games have to cope with. It seems very interesting to do some more research into expectations and how to raise them. Ain’t that what marketing is all about?
An interesting next step would be to ask a player how much a game is worth after he has played it. How should that work? Interesting thought.
Expectations
Posted by Adriaan in game design on September 17, 2009
In a previous post I talked briefly about how the experience and expectations of players influenced game designers and game developers, to create games for the people who were already familiar with other games and their habits. But there is another problem: what about the expectations of the designers themselves?
Designers have been playing games too. Disappearing bodies, health bars, WASD controls, all of these things are elements of games that designers often fall back too. And there are tons of them. Pick up any random shooter and you will find at least 20 of these cases that would not be believable in the ‘real world’. And let’s be honest; I can’t do it either.
But it is not just the designer himself who causes this. There are programmers who tell you what they are capable of (or everything they are not capable of), producers, investors and marketeers that ask you to come up with cheap solutions so that the job can be done faster and there are gamers who will always expect a certain level of familiarity. In only a few cases, designers have almost absolute freedom in what they design – too bad that in these cases, designers create what players want and that is, unfortunately, mostly what they expect.
So what is it for me? Is there a way to overcome these game habits and create something that is more believe able than any other recent video game? Let’s hope so…
My name is Adriaan de Jongh and I am a student at the Utrecht School of the Arts where I study Game Design. I like to sail, to kite surf and to play drums.
I worked on games including:
