Steam Charts, Disappearing Games, and Publishers Gambling on Live Service

Almost uniquely, Valve’s Steam video game store on PC will tell you how many people are playing a game now, and have been playing it. So this becomes a point of discussion and contention online. Some say “why do people care how many people are in a game? Don’t other things matter more like getting good matches?”

I think the simple answer is: yes, it does. It doesn’t tell the whole story, no. But the problem is that developers, publishers, platform holders and other stores refuse to tell players — their customers — the rest of the story themselves. So players have to infer, speculate and extrapolate from the limited data they do have.

Players have a lot of questions they want the answer to: How long is a game going to be supported for? How long will I actually be able to play it for? In what form? How many updates, of what size? Will it be guaranteed over that time? How many are contingent on “performance” and what are those performance metrics, and how close is the game to achieving them? What happens when it misses? Will there be content if a game does even better than expected or is that just profit? Do I get my friends to put in money too, or warn them away from this game? Hey and uh… is it actually a fun game to play? Or is it just another shop for digital items?

Honesty and openness. That’s all that is really needed, I think. Two little things. Just a little. C’mon.

Players didn’t create this problem. Publishers and developers did. Games get shut off, modes and content disappear, often with limited or no warning, never to come back again.

So how about:

• The game will be available to play for a minimum of [1 year]
• It will get a minimum of [3] new maps and [3] new modes that will definitely come.

We don’t even get that. Even when plans are shared with us, the conditionality is unstated and the plan is not just left unfulfilled, they remove what they had already built. Highguard for example, had a year long roadmap with new heroes, maps and items, but has already shut down. Just 7 weeks after it launched.

It’s not just money, but also the time and the experience. Players want to come back to things they enjoyed. At their leisure. They might not be able to go to the same concert again, but at least they want to be able to play the studio album.

Publishers don’t care. Cut losses, remove all going expenses, move on. Many of them seem to think they deserve huge, instant success that only a precious few have ever achieved. They cannot commit to their own team plans for even 1 year. Why would players commit their team and money for another ephemeral game?

Publishers treat it like gambling and that’s a problem. They put the money into yet another live service game as if, if they just buy enough tickets they’re sure to win. One of them will come up trumps and they’ll make the billions to justify all their failed bets.

What if it’s not? What if there is more too it than buying enough live service gambling tickets? From new or inappropriate IPs, and from new or inappropriately equipped development teams. What if the very action of being so cutthroat with previous bets scares away the very investors you need the most: the players.

“Well sit this one out” “We’ll wait and see if it survives a few months” “I’ll let them finish the game first”

Publishers have a weird duality in confidence for their own products. They’ll simultaneously sink hundreds of millions, even billions to buying studios, funding expensive development cycles over many years. But will fail to get real feedback from anyone but yes men (and yes women!). Being shocked at poor reactions to generic looking, slightly middling, unfinished games.

“no one is worried that your game will fail” — allegedly, this was said about Highguard, which as I said, is already shut down after launching less than 2 months ago.

I know the sunk cost fallacy is a real thing to be avoided. But wow. I have difficultly comprehending spending that large with so little feedback and so little attention to the details until the crucial moment of release. I still have whiplash from the death of Concord and that was 18 months ago.

Games live for ever decreasing spans of time. No chance to build momentum, for word of mouth to spread. To actually build out the Minimum Viable Products that came with 3 maps and 1 mode into something more substantial.

Games have changed.

Now apparently there is not enough time or budget — apparently — to build something more ever-green like a single player story mode that could make steady sales. To offer something guaranteed and substantial up front, so even if the multiplayer mode doesn’t take off, the customer still got, and still have, something for their money.

Single player is pretty good. No friends needed, no servers, no matchmaking, no online account, no internet. Just you and a curated experience. You enjoyed it and want more? Oh, there is ALSO a whole multi-player mode to try too. That’s all changed do. You need to sign up for this, log into that, check with those servers. More hassle.

Games seem to offer less, want more from you, and might be gone tomorrow.

This modern ephemerality may be predicated on the idea that players will be suckered in by Fear of Missing Out, FOMO. But there is the counter-phenomnon: many players are seeing impermanent games as a bad investment. Of their time and importantly, of their money.

From a player, customer perspective, this is a shrewd decision and is their right. Let other people make the initial investment, or not, in a new game, take the “risk” of it being bad. Of it dying. If it’s good and it sticks around: the option to jump in is still there. Just waiting — that’s all. Inaction is powerful.

Games previously were playable for many years long after any patches or updates were made. Simple server browsers and player hosted servers allowed even tiny communities to exist for years after. Now it is entirely at the publishers whim.

Players don’t need to take a gamble on every new game. The video game business has changed in many ways but one thing is always on the up: competition.

Players still have all the games that have not been deleted to play. There are more games coming out than ever before. It is simply not the case that publishers and developers can buy their way in. Outspend the competition. Launch themselves to the top. There is an art to it.

People don’t care how much you spent on it. They care that you’re asking for loads of money for a kinda ugly, boring game, that isn’t finished, that nobody is playing. You can’t just buy enough studios and guarantee yourselves a hit.

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This has all veered off a bit. So let’s bring it back to the Steam Charts.

Developers and Publishers and other platforms don’t tell us equivalent numbers on Playstation or Xbox, Android or Iphone. Except when they’re occasionally bragging. All they seem to tell us is: buy. Buy now. Buy this other thing too, buy this digital currency to buy that other thing. Money money money.

They offer no alternative metrics that might matter:

If games don’t need huge populations, then tell us the average time to find a match. So players can be confident they can buy now and actually play now.

How about match quality? Average latency, closeness of the games? Play session lengths?

Well sometimes those numbers would make it look bad too. And sometimes surely it would be good too.

Into the void of information, the players must speak to each other. And they will continue to speak. Personally I’d require more disclosure if I was in charge. Tell me how many players played, how long they played at least.

No, devs and publishers probably can’t make another World of Warcraft or another Fortnite or another Minecraft. Players already have and can play those. Tough luck. Too late. How can a game become those if they’re deleted?

All that said and I still didn’t even get around to single player games…

For single player games, how it’s doing right now probably doesn’t matter unless you want other people right now to talk about it. It can be part of the social fun of a game, even if you are experiencing it on your own, to share your experiences with a lot of other people.

If the game was good and popular 10 years ago, it’s still probably good fun today. And you might even get it at a discount. If it was popular then, you might still be able to find people to talk to about it. So if it had a good peak or good run, you can mine a wealth of information, guides, strategies, tips, even mods. Long dead forums can really tell you so much about a game. And those people might still want to talk about a game they no longer actually play.

Humans are social, games are social. Multiplayer games live and die on their community. They look at what other people are doing. It’s not always a good indicator of good quality since people accept middling or poor quality stuff. Simply because it’s easy to go along with whatever was advertised or whatever other people are doing. There is a “good enough” effect and tastes vary hugely.

But if people actively AVOID a game, perhaps there is a reason too. And perhaps that reason is the fault of developers and publishers practices over many, many years at this point. And perhaps it’s not just ‘the internet’ looking for a new punch bag. No matter how much they enjoy those, I’m not convinced they have the absolute power to dissuade people from a game they actually like the look of. Much of the time, they have to tap into an existing feeling, of some degree. Telling the people what they want to hear.

Nobody wants to buy, download and boot up a game that they’re not even going to find someone to play in. It’ll just be a waste of time.

Anyway it’s the publishers money and the developer’s time to spend on more failed projects I guess. In some ways game development is easier than ever, in some ways, so much harder. And it’s the player’s money to choose what they reward in the marketplace of video games. Perhaps everyone involved in games should be more discerning.

Thanks, see you next time.

:)