Unlikely Inspiration

Yesterday morning I struggled to get my motor started, and when I finally did I latched onto the awesomeness that is Playstation plus.  Unexpectedly it lead my brain through a series of hoops and ultimately inspired this mornings diatribe.  It got me thinking about how my own patterns of game consumption or frankly media consumption in general.  I have not watched television in going on two months when I really think about it.  The very last show that I watched was the premiere of Doctor Who… and I watched that on the computer from a download.  I am rapidly becoming less and less of a consumer of broadcast media and I think it might in part be connected to this as well.  Ultimately I find television shows and movies less valuable today than I did a decade ago.

The real question is why exactly do I value it less, and the only answer I could reach is that it is so readily available.  With broadcast media, I know that if I wait long enough a series will eventually show up on either Netflix of Amazon Prime and I can stream it for free.  I also know that if I care enough about it I could always go find it through other means, but the reality is… that I simply don’t.  I am happy to simply wait back for whatever it was that I wanted to watch to show up on Netflix.  There are a number of shows that I have yet to even watch… that I likely would have devoured like mad during a different phase in my life.  I’ve not watched any of Breaking Bad, only a smattering of Mad-Men and I have watched half of a season of Dexter.  All three of these shows interest me…  but for whatever reason I cannot be bothered to actually go through the process of watching them over doing something more interactive each night.

Commoditization of Content

I think the problem is that all of these shows are entirely too readily available.  I know that at any point, on any evening… I could make a choice to sit down and watch them.  So in theory I am putting it off because there is no risk involved in the decision.  They are always there and available, so why should I prioritize watching them over doing something else.  The only show that I really watch religiously is the Walking Dead, and in part I only do that because there will be Monday morning conversation at work over it.  I prioritized watching the Doctor Who premiere because I knew it would similarly be the talk of my little group, but after watching the first show I can’t seem to be bothered to sit down and watch through the rest of them.  The availability of these resources have made them less valuable in my mind… and essentially a commodity.

So you are thinking… “Bel why are you going down this line of thinking”.  So I guess I am finding this is happening to my gaming as well.  Right now games are readily available, and more so than they have ever been at any other time in my personal history.  I can reach out and download a game in a matter of minutes or at worse case hours, and be playing it moments later.  The problem is that because I am literally deluged in good games…  I find myself valuing each individual one less.  I have reached a point where I am almost entirely unwilling to pay the $60 new release price tag for almost all games.  They tend to fall into one of two categories either I am waiting anxiously to play it and have already preordered (might I add preordered generally at a discount), or I am only interested in passing  and I will wait until it is upwards to 75% off the initial sticker price before purchasing.

The Bundle and Steam Problem

Part of the problem and what has lead me to this point…  are two things.  Firstly the prevalence of various “Bundle” sites…  Humble Bundle, Indie Royale and Indie Gala to name a few of the better ones.  If it is new and edgy and independent… I know sooner or later it will end up in one of these bundles.  As such I have simply stopped picking up any of these titles unless it DOES appear in a bundle, because I know if I simply wait long enough I can get it and a bunch of other games for the $5-$10 minimum price to get all of the content.  Additionally Steam is constantly having some sort of weekly sale, and at least twice yearly they have these insane store wide sales where you can get games for up to 80% off.  Sites like Good Ole Games are also complicit as well as Origin and any number of online retailers, all offering deep discounted sales in an attempt to keep up with the steam powered juggernaut.

All of this is teaching us to never pay retail price for anything gaming related.  If we wait long enough and look hard enough we can find it for the price we want to pay, whatever that price point is.  The problem is this has invaded all aspects of my gaming life.  I didn’t want to pay full price for a PS4 or a Vita, even though I have gotten massive amounts of use out of both of them… nor did I my PS3.  I shopped Craigslist for weeks looking for a PS4 or a Vita in the price range I was willing to pay, and ended up getting the PS4 for $250 and the Vita for $100.  Similarly years ago I purchase a generation 1 “fat” PS3 off a friend who was no longer using it for $150.  There would have been a time where I would have simply gone to the store and plunked down my $400 to walk out with a brand new console, but years of living in this new climate has caused me to question ALL retail prices.

Playstation Plus and Games with Gold

Playstation Plus takes things to a whole new level.  There are so many games I would have at least purchased at a deeply discounted price, that I don’t now.  Expecting that one day or another Sony will give the title away for free with my yearly Playstation Plus subscription.  I held off purchasing the new Strider game exactly for this reason.  I knew that they had a limited library of titles available to give away, and a commitment of giving away at least two new games for the PS4 each month… and I figured my chances were relatively likely that sooner or later they would be handing me a free copy of strider and they did.  Similarly I did the same consideration with Dragon’s Crown and Rogue Legacy.  On the later I figured it would have shown up in one of my Indie Bundles first, but the fact it showed up on consoles made me happy enough in any case.  So as much as I love the current climate of giving me lots of content for very little money is a bit broken.

While there was a time at which I stood by the notion that Steam was helping things, by offering a place to sell games in bulk and allow the “economy of scale” to work for publishers…  I seriously question that now.  What I see instead is game companies struggling to move their content, and game studios closing as a result.  While the $60 new game price point has not decreased… it certainly has not raised either…  and is no longer adequately representing the cost of developing the type of game we expect.  What I am seeing is a race to the bottom to see just how low the sale prices for digital content can go.  Granted there are significantly fewer of the distribution headaches that go into pressing physical media, but there are still all of the real world expenses of running a games studio and paying anything closely resembling a living wage.  What scares me is I think at this point the snowball is already careening towards the village, and there is nothing we can really do to stop it.

Is it Really a Problem?

I know I personally am extremely addicted to free or at least deeply discounted content, and I think most of the world is right there along with me.  Even after everything I said… I question is there really a problem at all.  Remember early on I said there were two buckets I divide games into… the ones I am willing to preorder and the ones I am willing to try if they become super cheap?  There was a time where I would only be consuming the games from Bucket A and completely ignoring the games from Bucket B.  I find myself more than willing to preorder the games I am really into, and even willing to pony up for the extra special happy deluxe velvet edition of them to make sure I am not missing out on any good bits.  So the game company is almost always getting more than their $60 from me when a game exists in Bucket A.

What is different is they are also getting a small bit of money from me when a game lands in Bucket B.  These are games I likely would not have played, or at least would not have purchased for myself.  There are so many games I ignored completely until a friend handed me the game and told me to play it.  As such when a Humble Bundle comes up I often times see it worth the risk to pay a little bit of money and get a ton of new games for me to sift through and see what I like and dislike.  Admittedly there are so many bundle games out there that a good number of them I never actually play… but there are still a significant number that I do and end up loving.  Then I end up blogging about them, and often times inspire more people to purchase them.  So I guess the question is…  are the games studios really missing money at all?

No Conclusions, Just Discussion

I mean I can see the real loss from games studios from the used game trade, especially when it is a store like Game Stop.  They push those used copies super hard on customers, and when you are the Average Joe that $5-$10 off a game seems like a really good deal, or at least it does until they realize that they are going to have to pay that amount at least to buy a fresh clean network play code, or restore the DLC that only shipped with the disc.  In any case that is taking someone who would have purchased the game for full price and converting them to re-buying a game that someone rushed through just to get the maximum resale value.  I question however if the folks who are tossing games into Bucket B could really be considered a true loss.  They are getting some money where they likely wouldn’t have before.

This reminds me a bit of the whole concept of “piracy” numbers.  As a reformed pirate myself, there was a time in my life where when a game came out I turned to making a copy of someone else’s, or downloading it from my neighborhood warez distribution site.  I  think in part I am so willing to give money for games I will likely never play, because I am in a sense trying to pay back for all the times I couldn’t.  I downloaded for lots of reasons… mostly because it was there, and I played a lot of games that I never would have purchased in a million years.  I would say a good 90% of the games I downloaded should not have been considered lost profit from those companies.  The games that I did care about… I still purchased by saving up my limited pennies and going to the store and getting a pretty boxed copy during the era when there were still interesting things like cloth maps to be found inside those games.  So I feel like maybe the Bucket B games are a similar situation.  I am giving them money, not a lot of it… but it is way more than they would have gotten out of me otherwise.  Like the title of this section suggests… I don’t really have a firm conclusion… just a bunch of conversation I wanted to start.  Hopefully folks will comment and add their thoughts to it.  I know the industry is struggling, and I guess in part I am trying to wrap my head around it… and why I find myself valuing content in general less.