Cash shops. Every game’s got one now, particularly MMOs. It doesn’t even matter if the game is free-to-play or subscription — cash shops may have once merely been part of a payment model, but now they’ve broken out into being a feature.

I’ve gone into my dislike of cash shops in general before. I think they can be done well, but rarely actually are. Too often a game is hobbled for non-shop players with extraordinary XP grinds or tiny inventory slots, or relies on some of the more skeevy psychological elements to lead people into buying. (Here is a hint: if we all mocked Zynga for it two years ago, don’t do it now.)

Ellyndrial was ranting in IRC last week about cash shops, as he’s wont to do, and it made me wonder how they ended up being so ubiquitous. Why did everyone suddenly decide that games need cash shops and players will love them? Was there some kind of referendum I missed?

After a little reflection I realized that there was a referendum, and I voted in favor.

This is the sparklepony, known formally as the Celestial Steed. It was released in April, 2010 by Blizzard for World of Warcraft. It was one of the first account-wide mounts in the game (if not the first?). The Steed matched your fastest riding speed, and it sparkled. It was sold for a mere $25 on the Blizzard Store.

The pony made $4 million dollars in the first week. That’s over 140,000 purchases. As I recall at the time, most players mocked themselves for buying it — $25 was more than a month of subscription, after all — but we bought one nonetheless. When I logged on after work the day it was announced, Dalaran was a sea of shiny ponies.

In retrospect, I don’t think I would have bought the Celestial Steed if I had known how much it would galvanize the industry to each create cash shops of their own. We thought we were buying a slightly overpriced horse, but instead we were buying an entirely new payment method.

I don’t much have a point, except it’s funny how little purchasing decisions can become huge industry or genre game-changers.

(Pony image from MMO Champion, natch.)

Yesterday I rewatched the totally wackadoo trailer for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon in anticipation of its release tomorrow, and it got me thinking about some of my favorite trailers of the recent past.

Game trailers can come in many forms — cinematic trailers are often the most striking, but also lack the information I want to know before I buy a game. On the other hand, gameplay trailers can better show off the actual features but it’s not easy to make playing a game a spectator sport.

The best trailers, I think, manage to be memorable while doing a great job of representing the aesthetics of the full game. Below are a few of my recent favorites.

Mass Effect 3: launch trailer

This trailer makes me want to play Mass Effect 3 again, which really says something. The combination of Clint Mansell’s haunting score with quick shots of familiar faces and epic battles still gives me goosebumps. This trailer is really most effective for fans of the series — I’m not sure a total newbie will get as much out of it — but for the final battle of a story-driven trilogy, that seems like a great marketing decision. Also I’m irritated by the lack of FemShep, but I realize that’s a personal problem.

 

Dead Island: the “reverse trailer”

This trailer is infamous. It’s gory, it’s gripping, it’s heartbreaking — it’s everything you would expect from a zombie apocalypse. This trailer also demonstrated Deep Silver’s willingness to push boundaries (in this case by showing the death of a child), which in retrospect possibly helped encourage the nonsense that is Torso-gate. Unfortunately, this trailer is much, much, much better than the actual game, and so while it’s a pretty fine example of “cinema in a minute” it’s arguably not a great way to advertise Dead Island.

 

Portal 2: teaser trailer

This is another sequel trailer that was made for fans of the franchise more than new players, but honestly who wasn’t familiar with GlaDOS by 2010? I love this trailer because it’s a great example of Valve’s amazing marketing: in less than a minute they set the scene (a ruined Aperature Science), set the tone (with eerie robotic music), showed a bit of gameplay, and established that GlaDOS is back and still sassy. You monster.

 

Hotline Miami: live action trailer

I love this trailer. First, doing a “live action” game trailer is really unique, but it gives the trailer a visceral tone that it would probably lack from just 90 seconds of retro pixel action. It highlights the awesome Hotline Miami soundtrack, the review snippets are really artfully designed, and the whole thing just leaves you feeling unsettled.

 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: cinematic trailer

Cinematic trailers can encourage terrible marketing practices, but the lengthy one for DE:HR is an example of it done right. This trailer does a great job of establishing the setting and tone of the game world, and introducing us to Adam Jensen, an ex-cop with robot arms and the feeling that things are not as they seem. Like all good trailers, this makes me want to go home and boot up DE:HR, like, right now.

 

Wrath of the Lich King: cinematic trailer

Did you really think I’d make this list without a single Blizzard title? It was tough to settle on just one trailer, since Blizzard arguably makes better cinematic trailers than any other developer of the last 10 years. Wrath was not my favorite expansion (that would be TBC, obvs — OLD SCHOOL RULES), but this trailer is a perfect mix of lore and action, and actually made me tear up a bit the first time I saw it. Poor Arthas and his haunted hat.

 

Special Mention!

Borderlands 2: doomsday trailer

This isn’t a great trailer exactly, and people generally seem to like the Wimoweh one more, but there is a lot about this trailer that I admire. 2k Games / Gearbox / whomever is really really really really good at branding. Seriously. This trailer has lots of action and a lot of guns, it has catchy music, it introduces us to Handsome Jack, and it does a rock solid job of demonstrating the joyous, irreverent violence that Borderlands fans love.

I don’t know how I missed this when it came out, but back in February The Wall Street Journal posted an article that exposed a dark secret of the gaming community: apparently people over 30 play video games. And they sometimes band together in groups or “guilds” that are oriented towards older players! Did I just blow your mind?

Okay okay, so The Wall Street Journal is not exactly a bastion of game reporting, but the article is pretty hilarious for those who actually pay attention to this sort of thing. Older people play games? Sometimes competitively? And they think games were harder in their youth? JOURNALISM.

In honor of this enjoyably silly article, I have compiled a brief list of the best and worst things about being an older gamer. Have a good weekend!

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Great Things About Being a Gamer Over 30

1. More Money!
In college I would pirate games in between drinking crappy no-name vodka from plastic bottles and eating ramen. Aside from the legality, pirating games was always a huge pain in the butt. You had to find the filez (with a z, because we were serious business!), download them at an extremely slow rate, install the games which almost always wouldn’t work with your video card, and then probably find a crack.

Now that I have a steady income, particularly in a creative field, I’m more than happy to pay the people who make entertainment I enjoy. (And thanks to digital distribution I don’t even have to put on pants to do it.)

2. Less Namecalling!
Okay, so this point is kind of debatable, but in general I think older people are more likely to have life experiences and a sense of perspective that reduces the chance of them shouting slurs over XBox Live. Maybe? Hopefully. See this Oatmeal comic on gaming for details.

3. We Witnessed the Birth of Modern Gaming!
The 30+ crowd has been around for a lot of the high water marks in gaming. Do you remember when that kid in your neightborhood got a Nintendo? Or the death of your local arcade? Did your jaw drop when playing Quake for the first time and you realized that enemies could be above you and not just to the left and right? Kids can go back and play the classics, but it’s not the same as living through them. Home gaming is still a young industry, and it’s been pretty neat to see it grow along with us.

Also, clearly everything we loved in our youth is far superior to whatever twaddle you young people like now.

Sad Things About Being a Gamer Over 30

1. Reflexes
Our reflexes generally peak around age 24, and get worse every year after that. In my late 30s, I am probably never going to become a Starcraft champion. (Or a ballerina.)

2. Kids on our Lawns
Get offa there! *shakes broom*

Today’s post is written by Ellyndrial from the Cat Context Podcast and ThatAngryDwarf.
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I’ve written before about my dislike of the current state of monetization in games (and I’m sure there are some F2P rants floating around – if not on my blog, then at least in my friends’ ears, or on the podcast), but today’s topic is something that is a little bit trickier. It’s an area that is a little tricky because it seems like something that is beneficial to us, as gamers. But… is it? Is it really? Let’s start with a story.

Recently, I actually went to an honest-to-god brick-and-mortar store to pick up a copy of Bioshock Infinite (because I decided I wanted to play it that night, and didn’t want to wait for Amazon to deliver it – I’m only human!). While I was at this unnamed Stop on my drive that sells Games, the dude behind the counter tried to sell me the season pass. For only another $20, I could get all this TOTALLY SWEET CONTENT (that nobody knows about or has seen, yet), and by god, that content would be worth ALMOST THIRTY WHOLE DOLLARS. That’s like, a huge savings (note: it’s not)! For content that was almost certainly planned out well in advance of the game’s release, but then not included with the game itself. Or, in some cases – ME3, I’m looking at you SO HARD – it is included, right there on the disc. Just, you know, behind a handy-dandy paywall.

So, DLC. Everyone likes it, right? It takes a game that you like and makes it better! It adds new maps, and new… whatevers… hooray! And all it costs is a few dollars! So it seems like an easy purchase. But is it really making the game better? Or is it just a bunch of bullshit filler that replaces something that we always used to get (complete games and/or sizable expansions) with something that is cheaper to produce, bad for us, and tastes worse? (But is more profitable!) Obviously, I think it’s the latter. At least in the general sense.

And that’s how we generally see high fructose corn syrup as a food additive – an cheap way to sweeten things (that very often shouldn’t be sweetened) so that they “taste good”, but contain as few actual nutrients as required by law. That way, we can all continue to gobble up their delicious, delicious shit while our bodies fail to react to the overwhelming amount of easily digestible sugars and then we get fat and die. Except it’s all good because we saved a few dollars on our grocery bill and some farming megacorps earned a few extra percentage points of profit. I’m sure the good folks over at SweetSurprise.com would have some TOTALLY UNBIASED facts, but I trust their version of the story almost as much as I believe EA when it tells me most people actually totally love freemium games. Which, one can surmise, is not very much.

“But, Mr. Dwarf! What if I like getting new content for games I enjoy?”

Well so do I, honestly. There are a lot of games that I come back to again and again. There are a lot of games that I buy DLC (and even Season Passes) for. And there are other games that I wish had been longer and/or explored additional story points. I don’t even necessarily want this sort of thing to go away. But as it becomes the norm, I find myself asking why it has to exist for every single game.

Because the problem is that DLC is inherently exploitative. The pricing structure leverages what psychologists call the Foot-in-the-door technique – a process by which one person asks another for something small and safe at first, subsequently ratcheting up the level of commitment required. We’ve probably all experienced this in one form or another. “Hey, can you help me out with this quest? … Oh, there’s this other thing I need to do, can you stay for that, too? … How about running an instance or two?” Selling you on the initial game ends up being as much about getting you to commit to all the up-sales and DLCs that come out over the next year as they are about the game itself.

This, then, changes the underlying value proposition of any purchase. When you buy a game that is known to have DLC coming out (and, let’s be honest, most games these days do), it is incredibly hard to actually know what the “real” price of the game is going to be. When I decide that I want to buy Bioshock Infinite, am I going to be spending the $60 on the box? Or am I immediately – possibly before I even finish paying – going to be asked to spend $80? Or warned that – hey, you might miss out and have to pay $90! And what does that Season Pass even cover? In the case of Borderlands 2, the Season Pass doesn’t even cover all of the DLC. It nominally covers the 4 “campaign” DLCs, but then it also included the recent Ultimate Vault Hunter (playthrough 3) DLC – but it excludes both additional characters and a ton of random cosmetic options. How much do I have to pay if I just want the whole game? Is buying the “whole” game even a notion that exists, anymore?

Now, if DLC is attached to a “normal” price-worthy game, but that game is sold at a discount (say, $40 plus a $20 Season Pass), then this tactic would still be tricksy. But at least, once we fell for it, we’d have ended up paying what we expected for the game based on market standards. And, honestly, if publishers really think their game is worth an $80 or $90 or $100 price tag, why not ask me for that much money up-front? At least that way, I can make the decision on whether I agree with that assessment or not.

And that’s really my issue, in the end. When we buy a game, what are we getting? Are we getting the complete game, the way it is intended to be played? Or are we just getting a game-like product, cheapened by the intentional exclusion of nutritional content, created this way just to save some money and/or sell it back to us at an undisclosed date for an undisclosed price?

Also, why the hell does my yogurt have so much corn in it?

Note: For more on pricing strategies and other psychological phenomena as they relate to gaming, I highly recommend following The Psychology of Video Games. See, specifically this post and this post.

Dear Internet,

EA was just voted the Worst Company in America by readers of the Consumerist for the second year in a row, and that sound you hear is me rolling my eyes. I dislike EA to the point where I refuse to buy any of their games even though sometimes I think that if Bioware were a person I would hug them, but this is just painfully stupid.

Always-on DRM is bad, buying great companies and then laying off their talented people is bad, Day 1 DLCs are bad. But damn, people, get some perspective.

You know what’s worse than anything EA has done? How about a huge employer firing people who need expensive medication to fight cancer or refusing to hire full-time employees so they don’t have to give medical benefits, all while your executives have money fights? (Walmart) Or maybe illegally foreclosing on people’s homes, raising interest rates to absurd numbers without reason, and charging people $5 every time they want to access their own money in their own account? (Bank of America)

Oh wait — EA totally ruined SimCity, man.

People, if you don’t like EA, stop buying their games. (I suspect but cannot prove that a good number of the people who voted for them — 78% of the votes overall in fact — have bought an EA title this year.) And don’t ignore stuff that actually matters because stuff that matters (health, home) is scary and stuff that doesn’t actually matter (Day 1 DLC) is easy.

 

Dear EA,

You’re still super terrible about video game stuff. And please stop blaming homophobes every time you get shit from gamers. Way to stand by your decision to … treat LGBT people with basic human dignity, I guess. That doesn’t make Always-on DRM any more palatable.

 

I’ve already talked here about my compulsion to be efficient in games, usually by creating elaborate charts about totally useless things. It probably comes as no surprise, then, that I can also be a litte strange about “min-maxing” in real life, too.

Why just play on the computer when I can play on the computer and watch a movie at the same time? Why walk through the house twice to accomplish chores when I can plan the most efficient single route? I frequently will eat the same food item 5 days in a row because I want to track the optimal cooking time. Basically I’m a colossal nerd, and like most nerds I love data.

I use Raptr to track my games, and Last.fm to track my music, and so on.. but once I step away from the computer, how can I track what I’m doing? Huh? HUH?! And that is how I ended up buying a Fitbit this past weekend.

Fitbit has been producing personal metric trackers since 2008, and mine in particular is a Fitbit One. It will track how many steps I make in a day, how many flights of stairs I walk up, and my sleeping habits. I can also manually add in data like food or complicated exercise. The result is that I can collect a great deal of information about my day, which I find fascinating. (It’s easy to wear, too — I just clip it on in the morning and forget about it.)

How often do I wake up in my sleep? How many steps is it from home to work in the morning? Oh, the datas. My nerdy self is really enjoying getting an informed perspective on my daily routine.

Of course the touted benefit of the Fitbit is not just quantifying information from your life, despite my love of charts, but encouraging you to reach certain milestones. There are achievements, like with everything else that was created in the last five years, and I have to admit that since I got the dang thing I find myself stepping in place and taking the stairs more because I know it’s being “counted”. Yes, it counted before in the general scheme of being healthy, but now it’s for real. Stepping in place when I’m waiting in line somewhere suddenly became quantifiably OPTIMAL.

I’m sure the novelty of the Fitbit will wear off eventually after a few months of collecting data, but if you’re a numbers geek who likes gadgets and is interested in learning more about how your body works, I’d recommend checking it out.