Accessories!

So I’ve been thinking about cross-promotion, pre-order, Day 1 DLC and its attendant issues, and the various vaguely seedy things that game publishers are doing in order to cross-promote titles and open new revenue streams.

Kingdom of Amalur has a demo where you get free armor for Mass Effect 3 for doing something as simple as downloading the demo and opening it, and running the demo until the time runs out gives you a Mass Effect 3 weapon. Kingdoms of Amalur, apparently, will include a single-use code for Free Day 1 DLC (thus requiring the folks who buy the game on the used market to pay 10 or 15 bucks if they want the additional 7 quests). I remember, before I got Dragon Age: Origins, getting a pre-order download code for a ring. This ring wasn’t the best ring in the game. Heck, by the time you got to 10th level or so, you were weighing whether you still wanted to wear it and by the time you got to 15th, you were trading it down to your secondary characters after checking to see if any of them were still ringless. (Sweet ring for 1st level, though. Lemme tell ya.)

The companies themselves talk about how this is important for, say, maintaining revenue streams and attempting to figure out a way to “monetize” used game sales (to be perfectly honest, I think that game companies ought not see a used game selling for $20 as $50 out of their pocket) but I can’t help but feel like one of the folks in Minority Report (the system is set up to recognize *EVERYBODY* and so advertisements address the individual by name and make reference to past purchases… “Hello, Mr. Smith. Are you enjoying the khakis you purchased three months ago?”) when I log into play one game and get told about how I’ve won a free rocket launcher in another game coming out in March.

Now, I know that this sounds like someone who is getting old and every time someone in the past has said “surely they’re reaching the point of saturation” that something like twitter is invented and, suddenly, we’re being spammed with 50 times more info than we’ve ever had to put up with before.

With that said, it seems to me that if we’re reaching the point where game companies are saying “to get the full effect of this game, you’ll want to play this other game we publish!” (I understand that when the Mass Effect 3 demo comes out, you’ll get some sweet armor and awesome knives for Kingdom of Amalur.) If I have to use the Wikipedia to figure out how to best enjoy any given game I purchase, I have to assume that I’m not the only one who has to do that… which tells me that, surely, we’re reaching some point of saturation here.

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

13 Comments

  1. I downloaded the demo, haven’t run it yet.

    I know if I pre-order it I get some TF2 stuff. That seems to be the norm for big-release games on Steam these days – pay for the game pre-release and get hats/weapons in TF2!
    I don’t mind the idea in theory, but it can get out of hand – firstly by mucking up the game – a meticulously balanced FPS is not the best place to introduce new weapons all the time; secondly they’ve put in so many new models that the actual game performance has been getting worse over time for most people – an odd outcome given most servers and players probably have better hardware than in 2007 and still they see worse game performance!

  2. I’m a curmudgeon.

    Release everything at the same time and let the market decide if Shepherd needs a hat and a Fallout New Vegas branded ion rifle. Modding a game doesn’t take much time or skill which makes it popular with fans. A game programmer can probably do five an hour if he’s good and has a southeast asian work ethic. The extra cruft isn’t going to take up warehouse space nor cause companies resorting to landfills when a delete key does the job.

  3. Offhand I can think of three categories:

    1) different skin for something or other. These I don’t give a flying fish about.

    2) extra ability/weapon/etc. These I tend to avoid, because they seem a bit like cheating — the game is obviously beatable without it, so why reduce the challenge by even a smidge? (If it’s functionally equivalent to something already easily accessible in the standard game, then it’s in the previous category.)

    3) extra levels. This is the only “extra” I’d potentially care about, although the amount of required effort would still need to be pretty low. The Catwoman stuff with Arkham City was a nice free-with-purchase thing, but even then it was a while before I even bothered to punch in the code that was handed to me. I can’t imagine actually downloading a demo just to get one.

    • In the same vein as #3, I’d put in extra characters/quests.

      Day 1 DLC for Dragon Age: Origins included “The Stone Prisoner”. This gave you access to a golem that could join your party a couple of areas to explore, and a really interesting conversation tree at the end of one of the quests.

      It’s not essential to the game and it’s a nice incentive to buy the game new instead of used (and, if you buy it used, it’s nice enough content that you won’t mind spending the 15 bucks).

      It’s just difficult to see it as “hey, since I bought it new, I *ALSO* get this!” rather than “eh, they’re just trying to squeeze people”.

      • It’s just difficult to see it as “hey, since I bought it new, I *ALSO* get this!” rather than “eh, they’re just trying to squeeze people”.

        Right, I see your point. I guess I’m not too bothered by that, as long as it really is an extra and not something required for the game. I can understand them wanting to incentivize new game purchases, and I prefer this to them trying something like the old InfoCom strategy of including some not-easily-reproducible device in the box that you need to use somewhere in the game in order to continue at all.

  4. but I can’t help but feel like one of the folks in Minority Report (the system is set up to recognize *EVERYBODY* and so advertisements address the individual by name and make reference to past purchases… “Hello, Mr. Smith. Are you enjoying the khakis you purchased three months ago?”)

    Or for that matter like the ads in the Citadel in Mass Effect 2 where the ads seem to know who you are, as well as your income and job history.

    • The funny part was the fact that you were considered dead by all of the advertisements’ databases.

      So they kept calling ‘-1’ kinda values.

      (I admit to being disappointed with the Elcor version of Hamlet. I would have preferred hearing Elcor for Elcor (with the subtle facial expressions and pheromones being assumed) rather than the adverbs before each line… as if it were Elcor for Asari!

      • Yeah, I guess the ad writers need to sort out their error trapping a bit.

        I wonder if there’s a difference between Elcor for Elcor and Elcor for Aliens. I assumed the emotional tags were machine translation for their emotional subtext, in much the same way as the Hanar translate their bio-luminescence into words.

  5. Comic book companies went through this in the 80s.

    It’s a hard habit to break. The first time, it works *SO WELL*. The next N times, it still works REALLY WELL. Then the next M times it starts to fall off, until suddenly you hit X and half your readers/players say, “Oh, fish this noise” and stop playing altogether.

    Right now I’d pay real money to have access to Zynga’s historical player database, there’s some fascinating research to be done there. How they’ve kept it going as long as they have has been largely by the network effect… it’s one thing to have to buy game #5 in order to unlock something for game #4 for yourself… it’s another thing to have to *play* game #8 in order to have that good friend of yours with whom you’ve been playing game #1 for, like, ever… to get to level 10 in game #8.

    Any way you slice it, though, you’re mining your players (or in the case of comic books, your readers). You can drop a shaft here or there and try to do it without interrupting the surrounding environment and you can make it work for a little while, or you can blow the whole top off the fishing mountain and strip it bare.

    People have limited amounts of leisure time. As long as you’re careful to make sure that your offering (whatever it is) stays stuck in their head as a leisure time activity, you can expand your presence in their leisure time. The minute you impact their other leisure time activities, you start to edge over the line from “fun” to “fun that requires you to trade off other fun”… and that line is awfully close to “this is work and I don’t wanna do it any more”.

    • I’ve heard stories about people who set their alarms for 3AM so that they can go to Farmville and harvest their crops.

      That’s hardcore.

        • Zynga does seem heavily into the strip-mining philosophy.

          They also seem to have figured out how to keep that social guilt going to keep their player population up, much longer than I expected them to be able to do so.

  6. You know what I remember? Feelies. Free toys with your software. Bags full of microscopic space fleets. Lint. Sometimes they’d give you a whistle.

    On the other hand, folks are downloading stuff that’s insubstantial and paying extra for it when they could easily wait for the GOTY version (like me [thank you Jaybird]) and snag it all at a discount rather than being nickel and dimed which I strongly dislike. Like Nick Sagan’s Idlewild series which was clearly serialized for some obscure reason.

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