Early Access in the Video Game Industry...

This is a blog entry in response to a video that Markee Dragon uploaded on his personal YouTube channel. Here is the video to bring things into perceptive for everyone else that reads this.

If funding is one of the primary reasons for Early Access, then that's a bad business decision on the company. Gathering the funds should be only done before the game goes into early project stages and have a budget that can cover a lot of the costs involved. Those costs, for the most part, can be calculated to some degree. So if they can't cover what I would consider a reasonable amount of the game's development costs (roughly 80%), then they shouldn't have even started the project in the first place. Poor financial and budget planning is a sign of poor business management.

Anyone can start a company, get some people together with the skills necessary to make a video game, get their garbage Greenlit on Steam, and then start raking in funds that they should have had in the beginning anyways.

Another issue with Early Access is it kills the hype of a game. People buy into the game, Interstellar Marines and Star Drive are examples of this, and then the game loses a lot of traction because the people that fronted money for incomplete games (Star Drive is still incomplete even if it's officially released) start spreading negative reviews. Those negative reviews detract potential sales, which lowers the amount of funding the game gets, and then that means more game features and longer development processes it takes to finish the product. So having the funding already ahead of time eliminates that entire process.

Early Access shouldn't be a tool that game developers use in order to fund their products. It should be a tool in which the developers identify game breaking issues with the product, such as multiplayer features. It should be a testing phase for an extremely polished game but also be part of the hype and discovery phase of the product.

All of these Early Access issues stem from Minecraft. It was the first game that anyone can really think of that did this on a massive commercial scale. Although the game has historically influenced the game design of video games of all kinds, it has historically and literately fucked over a career field (why pay someone to test your game when you can charge someone, right?). It is the singular game that has been side-swiping the money from consumer bank accounts by the fact it was such a successful Early Access game and even was the first to coin the phrase Early Access.

None of these things are necessarily illegal in any country that I am aware of but is it ethical or moral? Not from my perceptive. It completely tricks consumers into purchasing incomplete products. I don't think anyone would be purchasing incomplete non-video game products, such as a freezer, a vehicle, a house, or piece of furniture. The reason for this is because we expect to get a finished product with what we see in a store.

A solution that I could recommend is getting these game developers to attend conferences and discuss the matter every year. Another solution is starting your own business that makes video games and join those kinds of conferences and speak out against Early Access. Consumers aren't stupid people no matter how we each individually want to think they are. They are powerful individuals that can make or break any business in the world. They want value for whatever their country's currency can provide for them and want to see that currency stretch to get as much value as possible. They aren't hard to satisfy, are hard to keep happy at all times, but most importantly not hard to satisfy if you give them exactly what they are looking for in whatever the product they are trying to purchase.

I am not completely against Early Access. I am just a consumer, aspiring business owner, and content creator that doesn't like purchasing incomplete products that still feel very incomplete long after the product's initial release date.

RMT, Microeconomics, & Archeage

RMT (Real Money Trading)

I don’t claim to be very knowledgeable or an expert on the subject matter of RMT, however, I have explored potential entrepreneurship ventures in specific games that I have figured to be whether or not worth the time and effort to enter the industry and create a business around RMT. Typically the transactions with RMT are centered around gold selling in MMOs and are against the Terms of Service of the game.

The history I have with my pursuits in this field of work first started with a game called Rift and later with Ragnarok Online 2. The facilitation of being able to gain gold quickly in those games was only possible with a bot program. I could never find any for Rift so manual farming was the only way to acquire gold while in Ragnarok Online 2 there were a couple bot programs to select from. The only one most notable was RO2 Walker because of the vast amount of configuration settings and options that it had for the price tag of $0 a month. It simply was better than competition botting programs for it’s accuracy, price, and customizable settings. In the first month of playing RO2, I acquired roughly 12,000 gold in the first week of botting of that month. What ultimately forced the decision to abandon the gold selling venture in the game and acquisition of some quick cash was the lack of hardware (mainly computers since I only had a desktop and laptop at the time; which I still have today).

In order for me to compete with the other businesses that were already established, I would require $5000 in additional computer equipment in order to start building up enough RO2 accounts with bots to acquire thousands of gold every day. At the end, I calculated that the gold generation would need to be roughly around 250,000 gold a day in order to beat my competitors and quickly realized that this wasn’t logistically and financially possible for me as a business major at a community college.

Microeconomics & Short-Run Total Costs in MMOs

Having a grasp on economics can help in many situations outside of real world financial situations. In many traditional MMOs today you see players making decisions to acquire items to craft other items with their crafting professions. The majority of those players that decide to pick crafting professions which manufacture a consumable item, typically a potion or flask that gives a short duration buff, recovers a class skill resource, or even restores health can be some of the highest profitable professions to pick as the individuals who purchase those types of items will typically come back later and continue to purchase those same items.

The amount of resources a crafter has is limited while the demand for the crafted goods is unlimited in any given MMO. It’s the same in the real world just on a much more very complex way since there are millions of different unique goods and services out there to pick from. It is because of this that makes a MMO very functional in the practice of applying basic economic principles to the production of crafted items in the game.

Looking at the Alchemy profession in the MMO Archeage, we can look at a few things at the basic healing potion in the game that you can create to determine a few things, such as how many potions you should produce for gold acquisition.

For easy reference I’ll provide the information needed to complete one crafting of the basic healing potion in Archeage called Love Potion #9.

Healing Potion

5 glass bottle

1 ember catalyst

2 mushroom

2 clover

Results in spending 5 labor points and creating 5 healing potions.

Considering that a player will not be farming up every single crafting material for every single crafting of the item, it will introduce variable costs to help determine the maximum number of healing potions or whatever is being crafted. For the sake of this blog entry and post, we’re going to assume ember catalysts are being purchased from other players at a variable cost of 75 copper, 90 copper, and 163 copper. Also, all currency figures will be listed in copper values to make it easy for conversation.

Also, let’s assume that the individual that is crafting healing potions has only enough potions to craft for 20 craftings.

Since I don’t have access to in game auction house prices of the crafting materials, we have to make a lot of false assumptions and that’s okay. The actual values can be changed as many times as someone wants but the principles remain the same. So in this we will assume that only the ember catalyst is being purchased from other players, like mentioned above, and that all the other materials are farmed but since they still have value they will have a fixed cost of 430 copper.

For completing 5 craftings of healing potions, the variable cost is brought to 375 with the above mentioned ember catalyst rate of 75 copper. It brings the total cost to 805, average fixed cost to 86, average variable cost to 75, average total cost to 161 with the marginal cost of 375.

If the individual does 12 craftings of healing potions it changes the figures to a variable cost of 1080, total cost to 1510, average fixed cost 36, average variable cost 90, average total cost 126, and marginal cost of 101.

The last pieces of information are if the person was to craft all 20 attempts if healing potions. Variable cost of 3260, fixed cost of 3680, average fixed cost 22, average variable cost 163, average total cost 185, and marginal cost of 273.

There’s a lot of interesting data just from this simple mock up of the price and cost of producing healing potions within Archeage. The purpose of this is to look at the information and look where marginal cost and average total cost is the lowest at the highest possible output of healing potions being crafted. In this example we find out that it’s 12 crafts of healing potions.

Another thing to consider when crafting items in MMOs is actively looking for and identifying the opportunity costs of producing more or less than the optimal amount. The reason for this is because you are typically earning gold from auction house sales between a couple hours to possibly a day or two. The costs associated with posting items in the auction house would also skew the above numbers a little bit as it would either add to the fixed or variable cost, however, in the above example 12 crafts of healing potions probably still would be optimal for microeconomical short-run total cost.

The correlation I am trying to make with the previous topic of RMT and my entrepreneurship ideas around it is still a looming and weaving idea in how I can make the service possible for others in a game like Archeage. Fundamentally the service of selling my time to farm gold for the purpose of exchanging it for real cash is probably okay on a very small individual case by case basis rather than a full industry production of gold farming with bot programs, multiple computers running the bot programs,a skeleton crew for maintenance on the bot programs (to help make sure they are doing their job), and to have the skeleton crew also deliver gold that is sold to the customer between maintenance checks.

Selling gold in Archeage is a valid possibility on a very small microeconomic approach by selling to guild mates and allied guilds. The prices might higher but that also ultimately means the security of the transaction would be more sound as the source where the gold would be coming from is a lot more legitimate than from under a corporate name. People usually don’t understand the amount of fraud involved with RMT companies.

Archeage

Fundamentally a sandbox game opens the doors of many possibilities as long as the game supports those possibilities. Keep in mind that this doesn't mean the Terms of Service supports whatever those possibilities are, just that the game mechanically does, such as the facilitation of mass acquisition of gold.

I have no problem expressing a deep desire to make a few bucks on the side while playing Archeage by providing a fraud free, at least on my end, method of purchasing Archeage gold at a competitive nominal service charge. Basically the prices, value, and security of the transactions would compete against a more risky alternative that offers lower prices and maybe even different gold amounts for those prices.

Aside from business ventures within the game, the YouTube content capabilities that the game has to offer is pretty huge. Creating content programming strategies for the channel is huge to maintain consistency with upload days and times and the content from the games that are being covered. Maintaining the annotation style of a video flow chart where gameplay footage links to tutorial footage and back to gameplay to maximize click through retention. Also to help convince a passive viewer to become more engaged to increase the chance of transforming them into a subscriber and active viewer.

Entrepreneurship Dreams & Design Projects

Synopsis About Me

A few things about me should probably be addressed first before moving towards the ‘meat and potatoes’ of the first blog entry post. During my years of growing up I grew up in a technological age where video games were growing rapidly in the market. I grew up with video games and have learned how to solve problems from a unique approach because of them. The first gaming platform I played on was the original Nintendo with the original Mario and first Megaman games being the first that I remember playing on them. After that, when my family got our first PC, the first PC game I ever played was the very first Command & Conquer that ran through MS-DOS (I am aware that many who read this might not even know what that is, so Google it).

After that I played mainly PC games with Pokemon being the main focus because of how challenging it was to play online against other players. Other notable games that I played were Total Annihilation, Quake 1, Duke Nukem 3D, Starcraft: Broodwars, Diablo 2, and ARC. Roughly around 2004 I seriously got into my first Trading Card Game called Yu-Gi-Oh and it was a glorious time of fun for around 3.5 years. The amount of information I soaked up in that game was rather impressive when I reflect back on those days. Ultimately I quit the game because I wanted to move onto other games that were more affordable and less demanding on travel time to get to destinations to play with other people. There wasn’t any online simulation sites like there are today for the game.

About around 2006 or ‘07 I got into World of Warcraft and played that for a number of years like the other games mentioned above. After that it has been a difficult time to find games that really captivate my attention. Currently my eyes are on a MMORPG sandbox called Archeage. Needless to say, I am a pretty avid gamer and consider myself more on the hardcore of things as I always try to maximize the best possible result in the games I play.

Entrepreneurship Dreams

Everyone has dreams in their lives that they want to accomplish. I am certainly no exception to this fact either. With that said a lot of my dreams, goals, and aspirations in life are related to games. I love card games, I love video games, and have grown increasingly more disappointed in the stagnate quality of video games over the years. Things just simply don’t feel like they are pushed well enough to make each individual game as unique from the previous and next as possible. Because of that the strong desire to create a means to solve the issue in the industry has plaguing me. The only solution to the problem I see is creating a business of my own and manufacturing products that articulate the solution to the problem, speak in front of other developers, encourage consumers to make more intelligent purchasing decisions, and make product quality the number one concern as the bottomline will take care of itself if the product is amazing.

Since that is all said, it’s simple to say what one thinks the solution to the product quality stagnation is but something entirely when trying to fix the issue. Perhaps it’s just me being overly critical and ‘picky’ about the quality games. I can admit that my knowledge of game development is very limited and is also one of many reasons I want to be in the industry. However, I think with the current technological innovations in the industry does merit a lot more unique approaches towards gameplay. Even graphics and story need to be innovative and unique just as much as the gameplay. We live in a technological era for video games where gameplay, graphics, and story need to have just as much attention towards one another as the next.

Design Projects

As I’ve illustrated above, I’ve been trying to find a solution to some of the problems that exist in the industry about the quality of games. The first thing I identified was the lack of complicated but easy to enter type of games. Imagine EVE Online but is newbie friendly to get deeply engaged in for a game. That would be amazing. Now to achieve another solution that is being starved in the industry for browser games was a game that could continuously release content, is free to play with a non-pay to win cash shop model, and rivaled the complexity of EVE Online, Archeage, and the upcoming MMO Star Citizen. It would be a truly gigantic game to lose yourself into.

Now such a game is possible but has never been done in the browser game realm of the industry. Why? This is such an important question to answer and the answer could be many things. There could be a funding issue, there could be an unnecessary deadline to meet, it could just be a business decision to create cash grab games repeatedly and the only thing that matters would be the bottom line, or the developers simply don’t have the non-monetary resources to make such a product.

Looking a little away from the idea of a browser game but still in the video game realm are card games. Digital card games are increasingly growing in popularity. With that fact maturing more and more with all sorts of games coming out, such as Shadow Era, Duel of Champions, Hearthstone, Infinity Wars, Scrolls, and Hex: Shards of Fate, it has become an open battlefield to see who can reign supreme on top of everyone else. Now this competition is healthy and I am all for supporting healthy competition between businesses and that raised the idea of creating my own card game. The project already has two years of work on it and is moving slowly but strongly. Certain things regarding the game I’ve had to make changes about because of the recent lawsuit between Wizards of the Coast vs Cryptozoic Entertainment regarding the similarities between Hex: Shards of Fate and Magic: The Gathering.

Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/224144304/Wizards-of-the-Coast-v-Cryptozoic-Entertainment-et-al

Although these two game design projects, of mine, will require funding to see publication, this is already being worked out.