[Monday Musings] Gameplay Isn’t Everything?

[Denis Dyack said recently that "gameplay isn't everything". This week's post explores that topic in detail, and attempts to clarify some ambiguities in game design terminology that I believe have contributed to some confusion over what Dyack is actually advocating.]

“Gameplay Isn’t Everything”

A few days ago, Gamasutra reported on comments by Denis Dyack (of Eternal Darkness and Too Human fame… or infamy, depending on your perspective) with respect to the relationship between gameplay and narrative:

“Gameplay is not everything,” said Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness) founder and president Denis Dyack. “If you look at the most popular games today, they are far more narrative-focused. If games are to follow the trajectory of films, then the dominance of gameplay will diminish in place of an increased focus and importance on gaming’s stories and the ways in which they are told.”

I take issue with the suggestion that games ought to follow the trajectory of films, but I’ll reserve the industry’s film envy for a later post. Today I want to talk about this “gameplay isn’t everything” business. The first problem to address, however, is a semantic one: what exactly is meant by “gameplay”?

What Is Gameplay?

On some level, we all kind of “just know” what gameplay is. We know it when we experience it. But it’s a bit harder to really nail down, concretely, what defines it, what differentiates “gameplay” from “not gameplay”.

For purposes of this argument, I’ve chosen to define “competition” as the prime differentiator. If you have competition, you have gameplay; if not, you don’t. More specifically, the presence of competition distinguishes “games” from “experiences”.

Unfortunately, this creates another tricky clash of terms. We tend to use “game” colloquially to describe an entire spectrum of interactive experiences, from the abstract to the concrete, from the authored to the emergent. From here on out, I’ll use the term “video game” explicitly, to refer to any product of our medium. Within that spectrum, “game” describes a product which is built around competition, while “experience” describes a product which is not.

So then, why competition? For starters, note that I’m not exclusively referring to multiplayer. There exists a wealth of single-player games that are built around competition, usually (but not always) in the form of AI opponents. In any case, I started developing this line of reasoning after reading Jason Rohrer’s excellent article in The Escapist last August, Testing the Limits of Single-Player:

“The discussion of AI highlights that the human factor is not what allows simple game mechanics to blossom. It’s not what humans bring to the game, but what two competing players – human or not – bring that allows the beautiful complexity and subtlety to emerge… Go’s depth exists separate from the personalities that play it, like a property of the universe just waiting to be discovered whenever two entities sit down, in opposition, to explore it.”

In most cases, the opponent is concrete: the opposing players in Unreal Tournament, or the other civs in Civilization. Sometimes, the opponent is abstract: the obstacle-laden level designs of Portal, or the abandoned puzzle fixtures of Myst. In all cases, the opponent’s role is to prevent the player from winning the game. Player and opponent struggle against one another, forming a ludic narrative that lasts until victory or defeat is finally realized. This is the essence of gameplay.

What Isn’t Gameplay?

The defining characteristic of video games is interactivity. The defining characteristic of a “game” — in its specific definition as just described — is competition. But competition is not a prerequisite of interactivity, so it stands to reason that another kind of video game must exist, one in which competition is absent. I call this type of video game an “experience”.

Experiences, under this specific definition, do not have gameplay. But that doesn’t mean they’re not video games. Again, the defining characteristic of video games is interactivity, and experiences are fully interactive.

Experiences replace “competition” with “facilitation”. The game doesn’t work against the player, but rather works with the player to facilitate a particular experience. This might be the exploration of a fully-realized, authored storyline, or it might be an abstract realization of an emotional state or progression of states, or it might be anywhere in between.

Examples of experiences are somewhat rare. The Half Life 2 mod Dear Esther presents a linear progression through an environment coupled with a fractured progression through a narrated story, but with no challenge gates whatsoever. There is no opponent, either concrete or abstract. Independent developer Tale of Tales has focused on this kind of work: The Path is all about exploring an area in search of interesting tokens, but can in fact be “completed” by simply walking a straight line, unchallenged; The Graveyard is similar, involving the exploration of place and memory absent any opposition.

Is This All Just A Big Misunderstanding?

To return to Dyack’s assertion that “gameplay isn’t everything”: I’ve seen responses from the game design community run the gamut from enthusiastic agreement to vehement denial. My impression so far is that the response tends more toward the latter, and I’ll admit that was my knee-jerk reaction when I first read the article.

Further reflection, however, led me to differentiate “games” and “experiences” and to realize that both are fundamentally “video games”, as both share interactivity. And that, I think, cuts to the heart of Dyack’s point.

In my interpretation, Dyack is not advocating for experiences to replace games; he’s advocating for experiences to be recognized as being as valid as games. Pure experiences are rare right now, but they’re by no means unfulfilling. (Personally, Dear Esther is one of the most memorable video games I’ve played recently.)

So in the end, I agree with Denis Dyack, but with one little caveat. Gameplay isn’t everything… unless you’re making games.

(Also, our terms suck. We need more of this, please!)

[Monday Musings] Syndicating Games

[Last week I discussed how pricing flexibility and responsiveness can lead to dramatic revenue increases for games. Today I’ll examine another effective business method that’s just beginning to take its first steps: video game syndication.]

The Long Tail

The “long tail” refers to the period of time during which a game continues to generate revenue after the initial interest in its release dies off; depending on the game, this might begin anywhere from a few weeks to a few months after the release date. Historically, games haven’t had a very long tail. A typical game’s life cycle begins with a two-to-three week rush of interest — during which most of the game’s revenue is realized — followed by a couple months during which the price is reduced, marketing is all but ceased, and the revenue coming in is held at a mere trickle compared to launch. After that, the luckiest games are relegated to the bargain bin, and everything else is abandoned entirely.

Other media do it better. Movies have an incredibly long tail; it’s not all that hard, for example, to purchase a new copy of a DVD from 1995. Finding a factory-sealed game from 1995, on the other hand, is all but impossible. And not only that, but movies also tap the market more frequently and more deeply than games.

When a movie comes out, you get:

• Theatrical release (6-8 weeks)
• DVD release (a few months later)
• Pay-per-view release (e.g. premium TV providers)
• TV syndication (ad-supported)
• Rental contracts (e.g. Netflix, Blockbuster)
• Other partnerships (e.g. airlines’ in-flight movies, etc.)

When a game comes out, you get:

• Initial release (2-3 weeks)
• Price reduction/bargain bin (2-3 months)
• Rental contracts (e.g. Gamefly)

Obviously there are some missed opportunities there. The big one I want to tackle today is syndication.

What Is Syndication?

From the Museum of Broadcast Communications, with respect to television syndication:

Syndication is the practice of selling rights to the presentation of television programs, especially to more than one customer such as a television station, a cable channel, or a programming service such as a national broadcasting system. The syndication of television programs is a fundamental financial component of television industries.

In other words, syndication is the selling of broadcast rights to service providers other than a program’s original producer. This generates revenue for the content producer both directly (via the sale of rights) and indirectly (via access to the broadcasting partner’s audience); meanwhile, the broadcasting partner makes money via ad sales whose value increases as a result of the acquisition of more desirable content.

There is evidence of gamers’ desire for syndication in the abandonware community, on sites like Home of the Underdogs and Abandonia. As described by Home of the Underdogs:

The term abandonware was coined sometime in 1997 by classic game enthusiasts to refer to any game, regardless of age, that has been discontinued by its publishers. Due to the natural lack of organization in such fringe area of the law, the concept has, over time, been unfortunately misused to refer to any game that is 5 years or older (or 3, in some cases) regardless of whether or not it has in fact been discontinued. We believe that the definition of abandonware as it was first conceived is the only viable definition that draws a clear and only line between abandonware and “warez”: abandonware has been discontinued by the developers, while warez have not. While both are illegal, the motives and principles behind each are miles apart.

Unfortunately, the exchange of abandonware is legally indistinguishable from out-and-out software piracy. According to the U.S. Copyright Office (PDF), copyrights on most video games — insofar as most video games can be considered “work for hire” (the standard developer/publisher relationship) — generally last 95 years from the date of first publication:

For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the author’s identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.

However, the abandonware community is distinct from the more general pirate community in that abandonware proponents aren’t just cheap thieves; the community exists solely to provide access to games that are otherwise unavailable for purchase. (In fact, Home of the Underdogs hosts many game pages which, instead of linking to a free download of the game, link to a publisher’s online store where that game can be purchased; sadly, such cases are rare because many publishers are unwilling to continue supporting decade-old titles.)

The abandonware community fills an obvious market need — access to non-current, even vintage, games — which could be addressed in a legal and profitable way with a syndication model adapted to the video game industry.

That said, we do have a few legitimate portals through which some old games — a severe minority, but some nevertheless — can be legally purchased. GOG.com (Good Old Games) is one of the most recent and prominent of these. Steam has also been picking up some older stuff of late (several entries in LucasArts’ back catalog recently appeared, though sadly, Full Throttle remains absent…) In both cases, the portal is a different company than the original content producer/publisher; this looks quite a bit like a classic TV syndication model already, with the only problem being that only a very tiny percentage of old games are currently represented here.

Offsetting Production Risks

With portals like GOG.com and Steam starting to bring a form of syndication to the video game industry, it would seem like the problem’s already been solved. And to a certain extent, aside from the sparseness of the available catalogs, it has. But there’s another benefit to syndication that hasn’t yet been exercised in our industry:

Historically, syndication, whether domestic or international, served to underwrite the risky process of producing for American network television. From the late 1960s through the mid-1990s special regulations (the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules) governed relations between television networks and independent production companies. Under these rules ownership of the rights to the programs reverted to the producer/production company after a specified number of network runs. Profits from any other sales, including syndication, generally benefited the production community. For this reason many production companies were willing to produce original programs at a loss, betting on the enormous income that might rise from successful syndication. Many “failed” programs could be created with the profits from one or two successfully syndicated shows.

And from Wikipedia:

Just as syndication is a source of profit for TV producers and radio producers, it also functions to maximize profit for Internet content producers. As the Internet has increased in size it has become increasingly difficult for content producers to aggregate a sufficiently large audience to support the creation of high-quality content. Syndication enables content creators to amortize the cost of producing content by licensing it across multiple publishers or by maximizing distribution of advertising-supported content.

One of the most common phrases associated with the video game industry in recent years seems to be “skyrocketing production costs”. If it was a problem in the PS2/Xbox generation, it’s a catastrophe now. There’s been much talk of how we’re a “hit driven” industry, and much lament of the associated “sequelitis”. Long-time gamers complain that developers and publishers don’t take creative risks any more, that games are becoming cookie-cutter and dumbed-down. We’re stuck in a rut of risk-aversion… could a video game syndication model be the cure?

[Monday Musings] Flexibility Adds Value

[This week, I take a look at a couple of recent stories of game pricing flexibility adding value for consumers and resulting in big wins for publishers.]

Exhibit A – Left 4 Dead

Analysis firm DFC Intelligence recently released a study, covered by Gamasutra, which shows user activity for the PC version of Left 4 Dead outpacing user activity for the Xbox 360 version over time, with the greatest divergence happening directly after each of three key marketing events: the game’s 50% off sale on Steam in February, the release of the Survival Pack in April, and the subsequent free-play weekend on Steam, also in April. From the article:

DFC’s main takeaway from the study is that the flexible, quickly-adaptable nature of online distribution services like Steam allow for developers to use a broad variety of promotions and incentives to keep their game communities fresh; individual promotions like the Survival Pack had a positive effect on both platforms, but it was the one-two punch of that DLC plus the followup free weekend through Steam that had the most meaningful impact on the game at any point on either platform.

Perhaps obviously, the study bears out that lower prices attract players in waves. But more importantly in this case, the flexibility of Steam allowed Valve to make the most of temporary price drops as a means of generating interest precisely when it’s most needed, as indicated by sales and activity trends.

Exhibit B – Peggle

A few weeks ago, Peggle on the iPhone was selling for just $1. Kotaku carried a story explaining the sale, and its dramatic results:

As any iPhone owner will know, the device’s App Store charts are skewed heavily towards cheap, disposable apps; you’ll often see $1 games clogging them up while better, more expensive games (with lower sales) languish unseen.

Case in point: before the sale, Peggle was sitting at around #60 on the App Store game charts. And after the sale? Peggle was sitting pretty at #1, having sold “nearly as many units in those four days as they had in the 3 weeks afters [sic] the game’s launch”.

Here we have a similar situation, with the added wrinkle of gaming the App Store’s ranking system. Again, the combination of a lower price, and the flexibility to reduce that price at a time when it most makes sense to do so, resulted in a significant uptick in sales.

The Argument, Once Again

If you read Third Helix regularly, you’ll be sick of hearing about this by now, because I harp on the ridiculous cost of games on a regular basis. I did it back in February, in response to the aforementioned 50% off sale for Left 4 Dead:

The argument that game pricing has gone up to keep up with the increased cost of development is, in my opinion, arguing for the wrong solution. As Valve’s numbers clearly demonstrate, lowering the price increases the revenue dramatically, making it far easier to offset development costs than the standard price jump from $49.99 to $59.99 back at the start of this console generation.

Last August, I touched on the issue in response to Cliff Harris’s article, Talking to Pirates:

At $50-$60, games are currently an investment, and too often you’re not provided enough information to make an educated purchasing decision. (Ironically, the market with the best-developed demo program, Xbox Live Arcade, also hosts many of the industry’s lowest-priced titles.)

I was on this issue as far back as November of 2006:

So… I’m an advocate of lowering the core price-point of video games from the current $60 to something more DVD-like: $20-$25. If games were closer to $20-$25 apiece, more people would be willing to buy games. The way things are going now, games are becoming an *investment*. At a $20 price point, they could become impulse buys, just like movies. Then, not only would people buy [and play] *more* games, they would also be willing to take the [lower] financial risk on more *obscure* games. That would make the marketplace more friendly to those niche titles, those true works of art that stay with you forever, and would (should?) be the first step to combating the rampant sequelitis tearing through this industry.

…and as recently as May of this year:

However, even if such a ubiquity came to pass, games are still seen as a financial investment, due to the unconscionable $59.99 standard price point. The most common argument given by publishers at the beginning of the 360/PS3 generation for the price increase was that “next-generation” games were more difficult and, critically, more expensive to develop. While it is true that game development budgets increased significantly from the PS2/Xbox generation to the 360/PS3 generation, they are still, with the exception of a very few outliers, far below the average budget of a feature film. The key difference, as I have argued previously, is the difference in audience size. $10 DVDs sell to tens of millions of consumers and make a handy profit on $100 million dollar films. If a game sold to tens of millions of consumers, it wouldn’t need to be priced at $60 to make a profit on its measly (by comparison) $20 million development budget. And if you’re wondering where we find those extra customers, all you have to do is lower your price point.

But for the sake of argument, let’s indulge these publishers’ assertion that higher prices are necessitated specifically by higher development costs. Short-form games have dramatically lower development costs than long-form ones; notable short-form indie titles like Braid and World of Goo were done in their entirety for under $200,000. Such lower development costs should make reduced game pricing a non-issue, and as Valve’s data shows, reduced game pricing is highly likely to result in dramatic increases in net revenue… and that’s before we even factor in the short-form game’s superior focus, consistency, and ludo-narrative coherence, and the subsequent word-of-mouth and goodwill boost it’s all but guaranteed to receive!

As you can see, my past arguments have focused pretty much exclusively on the game’s price point. Today, I’m adding pricing flexibility to the mix. The DFC study and the Peggle experiment, while supporting the value of lower-priced games, also show that the ability to strategically reduce a game’s price — even temporarily — in rapid response to market conditions is an incredibly powerful driver of sales and long-term growth. This in turn seems to support the movement toward “games as services”, whether it’s via portals like Steam, Xbox Live, or the App Store, or other arrangements yet to be unveiled. Arrangements like syndication… but I’ll leave that topic for next week’s post.

[Monday Musings] Art Games: Reality vs. Potential

[This week’s all-new Monday Musings tackles the issue of “art games”, and how we’ve largely been doing it wrong.]

If A Tree Falls In the Forest…

One of the apparent principles of “high art” – in any medium – seems to be the expectation of a certain amount of effort on the part of the audience to understand the work, a concept elegantly described by the phrase, “You get out of it what you put into it.” When it comes to “art games”, however, this idea seems unnecessary, and tends to be badly abused.

Some creators have something substantial to say, and appear to do so effortlessly, producing art that resonates and endures. Other creators have little to say, or a poor idea of why they want to say it, but they nevertheless aspire to emulate their more focused counterparts. Often, such creators appear to have learned the wrong lessons from their role models: specifically, that a work that is hard to understand is more “arty” than one whose significance is immediately clear.

This leads to a kind of willful obfuscation of the meaning of a piece; an attempt – perhaps conscious, maybe unconscious – to mask the work’s fundamental lack of meaning. The misguided creator ultimately seeks to emulate the electrifying experience of total identification with a piece, but in fact succeeds only in emulating the frustration of failing to understand it, and then justifies the failing by falling back on the “You get out of it what you put into it” argument, retreating into a faux-elitist ivory tower from which to throw stones at the “uncultured masses”.

The idea that obscurity somehow increases the significance of a piece is wrong-headed and self-destructive. As goes the classic riddle, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear, does it make a sound?” so too we can ask, “If an artistic work expresses an idea and nobody understands it, did it express anything at all?”

Experience Is Universal

It is fairly common for “arty” literature, music, and films to require some effort on the part of the audience to achieve full understanding of and identification with the piece. This idea has been applied to art games, and in fact appears to be at the core of today’s definition of “art game”, but this approach entirely fails to embrace games’ unique advantage: the universality of experience.

Literature, music, and film are passive media: ideas are presented in fixed form, and the audience reacts to those ideas. As such, deep emotional experiences must arise from empathy:

empathy
noun
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Empathy is a skill, to be learned and practiced. When we say of fixed-media art pieces that “You get out of it what you put into it”, empathy is “what you put into it”. But some people are less empathic than others, and the value placed on empathy varies from person to person. It’s no surprise, then, that as fixed-media works require a more refined sense of empathy they simultaneously become increasingly niche.

Art games need not succumb to this fate. In games, the audience is having an experience, rather than empathizing with one. To experience is not a skill to be learned or practiced; rather, it is innate to the human condition. The problem of obscurity can be avoided for games by adopting an audience-centric rather than character- or plot-centric approach, thereby capitalizing on the universality of experience.

Breaking the Rules

In addition to willfully obscuring their meaning (if they have one at all) and creating indirect, empathy-driven experiences in what should be a directly-experienced participatory medium, art games have shown a fondness for breaking established rules and principles of game design, often for no apparent reason other than to be, essentially, “counter-culture”.

It’s not unexpected for there to be questioning of these rules, given the relative youth of our medium. And looking at the histories of other media, we see ample evidence of experimentation with contemporary rules leading to major creative movements with enduring significance (e.g. the Renaissance). However, when the rules of a medium are broken, it should be done for a well-considered reason.

Too often, art games shatter established conventions simply to be “different”. Any break with convention runs the risk of alienating the audience, and with art games already having willful obscurity and an inappropriate focus on empathy stacked against them, they can’t afford to jettison conventions the purpose of which are to anchor players in something, anything, familiar.

To be blunt: breaking the rules of game design without a damn good reason doesn’t make you “arty”, it just makes you suck. And if you’re thinking your game isn’t “arty” enough and you’re considering breaking a few rules to address that, then what you really need to do is go back to your fundamental concept and ask yourself if you had something of significance to express in the first place; odds are good that you didn’t.

Art Is Passion, Not Engineering

You can’t engineer art. The intangibles that make an experience satisfying, fulfilling, and significant are not quantifiable; you can’t dispassionately engineer them, and you’re not likely to stumble into them by accident. They come from the creator’s irrepressible passion for the work, and the audience can sense that passion, even if only subconsciously.

Creators should have passion for their concept, something to say or express that must come out, no matter what. They should also have passion for their medium: their idea must be expressed interactively, because no fixed medium can do it justice. And finally, they should have passion for their audience: it’s not just about creating an experience, it’s about sharing that experience, and if nobody can understand what you’re saying, then you’re not really expressing anything at all.

[Monday Musings] Shrink to Success

[This week's Monday Musings article is a repost of my submission for Game Design Aspect of the Month for April 2009. All-new Monday Musings content will resume next week.]

Shortly after the success of Portal, a movement for shorter games began to form. It hasn’t gained much momentum in the mainstream, but game designers are beginning to recognize the advantages of “short-form” games, and I predict that producers and publishers will join the chorus within the next few years.

When I say “short-form” games, I’m speaking comparatively. A short-form game, for purposes of this discussion, is one which is significantly shorter than a mainstream AAA title; specifically, a game of roughly 2-4 hours in length, regardless of genre. The establishment of specific duration criteria implies that the game is at least somewhat driven by narrative, if not largely so; for example, it would be difficult — if not impossible — to quantify the duration of Tetris, so such non-narrative games are omitted from this discussion.

Short-form games can be uniquely compelling in ways their longer cousins can’t. For starters, their shorter duration necessarily eliminates “filler” gameplay, resulting in a more-or-less uninterrupted state of player education. This is compelling because, at their core, games are learning machines. The process of play is a cycle of learning, then applying:

When new concepts are being learned — whether they’re mechanics, environments, characters, or plot situations — player engagement rises. When known concepts are subsequently applied, or “tested”, engagement may begin high, but quickly falls as the application of the concept becomes repetitive; this is “filler” gameplay. The education of new concepts introduces novelty into the game flow and helps maintain player interest over time, but filler — too-long periods of application without learning — breaks the game flow and ultimately bores players.

Short-form games don’t have room for filler; thus, short-form games need not break the flow of education. New concepts can be educated to the degree necessary to ensure mastery, then applied for just long enough to provide validation of the new skill (and no longer!) The learn-apply cycle is compressed, resulting in greater overall player engagement:

Short-form games also tend to be more focused, in terms of both gameplay and story. Less overall content means room for fewer mechanics and fewer plot points, so short-form designers have to make the most of what they have. Portal, for example, has very few mechanics:

• Fire blue portal
• Fire orange portal
• Pick up (and drop) objects (e.g. Weighted Companion Cube)
• Turrets
• Crushing pistons
• Jump pads
• Bouncing energy balls (with matching conduits)

By contrast, Grand Theft Auto IV:

• Driving (cars)
• Driving (motorcycles)
• Helicopter piloting
• Melee combat
• Gun combat
• Cover system
• Cell phone
• Bowling
• Darts
• Pool
• Drunk-driving (and drunk-walking)
• “Wanted” system
• Vigilante missions
• Internet cafes
• Clothing customization
• Safehouse customization

That GTA4 has a longer list of mechanics than Portal is neither surprising nor disturbing. But try ticking off, for both lists, the mechanics which were implemented poorly, and a very different picture quickly emerges. A major strength of short-form games’ necessary focus is that while they contain fewer mechanics, those mechanics are generally of a more uniform, and higher, quality.

The same goes for game stories. The stories in Braid, Knytt Stories, and World of Goo are simple, digestible, and most importantly, thematically and ludo-narratively coherent. By contrast, the stories of games like Metal Gear Solid 4 are sprawling, often incomprehensible, and packed with useless information and a low proportion of memorable moments. Not that I support games uncritically aping film, but there’s a useful maxim in screenwriting that applies to writing scenes: “Get in late, get out early.” The idea is that by presenting only the most irreducible core of a scene you increase audience comprehension of that scene, and by extension its impact and memorability. Put another way: distracting the audience with irrelevant or redundant content not only makes that content suck; it also drags down the perception of the “good stuff”.

So far, it all boils down to focus: short-form games are necessarily more focused than long-form ones, and therefore less likely to break the flow of player education or distract the player with meaningless content, leading to an ultimately more engaging experience. But there are several financial benefits to short-form games as well, and these are arguably more likely to make allies of producers and publishers.

First, the average gamer is 35 years old. That means he or she is likely to be employed full-time and to have a family, or at least a spouse. This is not a person with a lot of free time. Films are an enduring entertainment medium because they run about two hours, which isn’t difficult at all to fit into an otherwise busy schedule. 60-hour gaming extravaganzas are a whole different story, but a quality 2-4 hour game can be completed in a sitting or two and not feel like an endless slog. A ubiquity of 2-4 hour games would place games firmly in the same “impulse buy” space as movies and music, for the simple reason that consumers would no longer see games as a significantly greater time investment than those mediums.

However, even if such a ubiquity came to pass, games are still seen as a financial investment, due to the unconscionable $59.99 standard price point. The most common argument given by publishers at the beginning of the 360/PS3 generation for the price increase was that “next-generation” games were more difficult and, critically, more expensive to develop. While it is true that game development budgets increased significantly from the PS2/Xbox generation to the 360/PS3 generation, they are still, with the exception of a very few outliers, far below the average budget of a feature film. The key difference, as I have argued previously, is the difference in audience size. $10 DVDs sell to tens of millions of consumers and make a handy profit on $100 million dollar films. If a game sold to tens of millions of consumers, it wouldn’t need to be priced at $60 to make a profit on its measly (by comparison) $20 million development budget. And if you’re wondering where we find those extra customers, all you have to do is lower your price point.

But for the sake of argument, let’s indulge these publishers’ assertion that higher prices are necessitated specifically by higher development costs. Short-form games have dramatically lower development costs than long-form ones; notable short-form indie titles like Braid and World of Goo were done in their entirety for under $200,000. Such lower development costs should make reduced game pricing a non-issue, and as Valve’s data shows, reduced game pricing is highly likely to result in dramatic increases in net revenue… and that’s before we even factor in the short-form game’s superior focus, consistency, and ludo-narrative coherence, and the subsequent word-of-mouth and goodwill boost it’s all but guaranteed to receive!

It’s no coincidence that games whose duration is nearer that of films are likely to prove more compelling in many respects than 60-hour epics. Short-form games necessarily hold sacred the all-important flow of player education, keeping engagement high by avoiding filler and redundancy. They are more tightly focused, presenting a better-integrated set of mechanics and superior ludo-narrative coherence. They are cheaper to produce, which means they can be sold at a price point that supports impulse purchases, and good data suggests that price-point will actually increase net revenue. They fit sensibly into the average gamer’s schedule, all but eliminating the negative perception that games must be a significant time investment. And perhaps most importantly, they are small enough to be memorable in their entirety, rather than recalled in disparate pieces tainted by a plurality of poor experiences.

Presented with such a win-win package, why would producers and publishers not jump on board?

(This article was originally published at Game Design Aspect of the Month.)