Game Economist Cast
What does the new wave of open economies mean for monetization? Will negative externalities overcome cosmetics economies in the long run? What exactly does a game economist do?
Game Economist Cast is a roundtable discussion of the latest developments in mobile, HD, and crypto games through a bunch of people figuring it out using the economic tool kit.
Game Economist Cast
E14: Hayekian Emergent Gameplay & Reddit Gone Wild
Chris beguiles us with tales of Disc Golf, while Eric describes, in detail, the "fully modeled genitalia" of Baldur's Gate 3. Phil is too busy brushing up his Redditor voice which will surely get him canceled. The crew laments the declining utility of cosmetic economies but doubles down on the mechanics of emergent gameplay.
The best coverage of disc golf tournaments is a private third party studio that does the tournament coverage all by themselves. It's not like the professional disc golf association, the PDGA. They have a Patreon model. You can donate to support the cause. They have a huge amount of support. The professional content or I guess the like the sanctioned content, if you want to call it that. Everybody hates their content and their coverage. It's like always bad and poorly run and poor coverage.
Speaker 2:Is this like just a side gig for them?
Speaker 1:I think it used to be like disc golf used to be a side gig for everybody and then all of a sudden, a couple of companies started to put some serious money towards it. I think these guys probably make a pretty good profit. I don't know, it's at this point it's a big operation because they've got editors, they've got like a film crew. It is cheaper to get into than regular golf, that's for sure.
Speaker 3:Wait. So how does it connect to pickleball? I don't know.
Speaker 2:How big is the gaming industry? I was like, oh, does pickleball count?
Speaker 1:I saw the New Zoo report of 180 billion for the market size of I guess the revenue games industry 2023. And I was like I thought it was like 200 billion a couple of months ago and now it's one lesson to us. It depends on what you include. You include pickleball. I don't think you do. Is that the key debate?
Speaker 2:No, I was slippery sloping. I was like do you include chess? Do you include pickleball, Disc golf?
Speaker 3:Let's start with utility and what it even means.
Speaker 1:Everybody has some kind of utils in their head that they're calibrated.
Speaker 3:There's hardly anything that hasn't been used for money, in fact, there may be a fundamental problem in modeling, when we want to model. Game Economist cast episode 14. Hey, I'm Phil from Game Economist Consulting. I am a join today, but my usual two wonderful co-hosts, chris from Star Atlas, head of economy, game economy, game economy how are you Doing well we are?
Speaker 1:we're edging closer and closer to the release of what I believe is a pretty big product. It's been really fun to play test sets, See how it works. So my life is about to get very hectic.
Speaker 3:Have you ever seen a dust bowl out there, where you are in the Midwest?
Speaker 1:We've been. We've actually been having a lot of rain lately, but it was dry for a while. No dust bowl. Can't tell if this is a joke, Phil is trouble.
Speaker 2:That was Oklahoma, Phil. Oh, that is Oklahoma. I know everything in middle America is one homogenous blob to you.
Speaker 1:This dude's never lived like outside of a 10 mile radius from the ocean. He has no idea what it feels like to be inland. Biggest body of water I have near me is three hours away Lake Michigan.
Speaker 3:I don't like feeling too landlocked. It feels very claustrophobic. That's fair. And then we're also joined today by Eric Eric how are you head of economy at SuperLin? Is that both of your titles, Head of economy?
Speaker 2:Head of economy design.
Speaker 3:I'm going to write this down on the show notes yeah, doing all right.
Speaker 2:We're trying to launch a token, trying to get it on CoinGecko. It's a super opaque process, so a lot of submitting support tickets and getting no information back, but such it is. Working with third parties, we have two topics to talk about today.
Speaker 3:One of them is a conversation around the crisis of monetization. Question mark Chris, can you tell us a little bit more?
Speaker 1:I think Malthus Gate presents a really interesting examination into just how is monetization developed over the last 20 years, and they obviously took a very strong stance against microtransactions, and the game community seems to be revolting against non-premium games.
Speaker 3:I will be talking about emergent gameplay. It's something that's been on my mind. How do you actually design institutions that foster emergent gameplay? Let's check out an example from Rocket League. That's pretty interesting. But before we do, let's talk about what we've been playing. Got a?
Speaker 2:selection of good things on sale. Stranger, Great job.
Speaker 3:Chris, what are you been?
Speaker 1:playing. So I have tried. I've downloaded three different mobile games. I've downloaded two different PC games and an Xbox game off of Xbox game passing, and I literally have not spent more than five minutes in each one of them, because I'm just playing Brawl Stars and Fortnite. And what I think is interesting about this is that Fortnite somehow monetized on I know how they monetize me but Brawl Stars has not.
Speaker 1:I have skins, characters, leveled up characters, hard currency, soft currency, everything I really want. In Brawl Stars I haven't had to spend a penny and in Fortnite I could never. It would have taken me a long time to get a skin without investing in, without buying the battle pass for the first time. I don't know what a supercell's actual books look like, but I'm just really curious if they are too nice to their players and I wonder how much more they could make by making things just a little bit harsher for the marginal player, because I'm definitely the marginals.
Speaker 1:I am willing to spend money on that game, but I literally have not had the reason to, and I think I said this within the first five hours of gameplay. I was like, honestly, I've unlocked characters, I've gotten even a skin, my characters are leveling up and I haven't had to spend a penny. I haven't even had a reason to go into their hard currency store. So I'm a little frustrated at their monetization. But I'm super stoked about the game because I'm just I'm getting better and better and starting to rank up, starting to have some actual interesting matches where people are. The matches are pretty well evenly matched in terms of skill levels.
Speaker 3:So why not buy their cosmetics? If you're going to buy Fortnite's cosmetics, why not Brawl Stars?
Speaker 1:Because I, okay here's. I think there's two reasons. The first one I'm satisfied with the cosmetics. So they're hero games, so there's different cosmetics. I don't feel like I'm a no skin. For example, in Fortnite, everybody looks the same if you don't have a skin and that's super boring. So there's no heroes, there's no uniqueness across different character classes like in Fortnite. And then the second thing is the probably just graphics, like it is a very small little character on your screen. I don't know if I would notice that actual skin being applied in the game environment, which is perhaps just a complication with the medium. I'm sure it's a different story if you play on tablet, but I play on my iPhone.
Speaker 2:So I added that do you play with your friends. You play Fortnite with your friends.
Speaker 1:I play Fortnite with my friends and that's probably a big reason why I monetized, or they monetized me because I don't play with my friends on Brawl Stars. I'm trying to get them to play, but they're a hardcore crowd where games consoles, PC, that's where you game. I don't think they're super into mobile, which is hard on me, but I've made the plunge and it was all Phil's fault.
Speaker 3:Are you?
Speaker 2:just also, this is a good one to pick.
Speaker 3:Are you just peacocking in front of your friends? Is that what the moral of the story is?
Speaker 1:I don't think they listen to my. I think they they hate my voice too much to listen to a podcast where I talk for a third of the time.
Speaker 2:I think the value of cosmetics is like 80, 90% social Like. I think there was a great during COVID, the fashion industry. Their revenue went way down. Except for anything on the face, neck ears, like neckline tops, those things are fine, but everything below the waist, below the nipples or so whatever you don't see on Webcam went down Interesting.
Speaker 1:I bought three pairs of glasses while I was during COVID three different, but I don't think I bought a pair of pants.
Speaker 3:So does this mean, the less you've invested, eric, the more you tilt your camera upward, though, so you could reduce your coverage?
Speaker 2:Yeah, potentially. I'm sure there's a-. Chris, you're pretty close to the camera right now, let me lower my chair a little bit, I'm gonna green T-shirt today.
Speaker 2:But I think so when people talk about cosmetics like sometimes, you hear, oh, it's playing dress up, it's customizing my character, making them look prettier. I think you look at the parallel. In the real world, people only care about dressing up when other people see them. They don't just play dress up in front of a mirror for themselves or they do a little bit and that's maybe the 20% of the value, but the majority of it is dressing up for other people to see you. And I think that's one big weakness of cosmetics on mobile is that you tend not to be playing socially.
Speaker 1:Another big part of their monetization strategy is pay for progression, or I guess you can also earn that progression in-game. But you can also buy hard you can buy the currency that allows you to level your character up, and I think it probably I haven't done the actual calculation, but I would guess it cost anywhere from $20 to $30 to take a character from nothing, from not owning it all the way, to level it up. You think it's more, Phil?
Speaker 3:I think it's way more than that. I would imagine that it's way more than that. The other thing that they've started to introduce is more sandboxing mechanics. So one of the things that you have is not only your core character progression, but if you get high enough, you have a secondary layer of classes that you can equip. It's this particular ability consumables that each character has. It's a new layer that they added which does a lot more for the sandbox.
Speaker 1:Is that like the equipment?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the equipment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's so much. There are parts of the game that have probably played, I would say, well over 50 hours, and I still haven't unlocked certain parts of the game, certain special leagues and stuff like this. But they've got this. So one thing I would comment about the pay for progression. That's tough, is you? Don't know?
Speaker 1:It's really hard to tell that your opponents are leveled up, so you could be playing against somebody and just get absolutely squashed. It's not obvious that you got squashed because they're all leveled up. You think my team sucked and we died a lot. That's why we lost.
Speaker 1:But really they're like using level 10 characters and you're using a level one character which I think I want to say my character has 75% more health than she did when I first started level one, she's level 10. So that's I just feel like they're so successful. So I'm obviously wrong here. But it's really interesting to me because if I were to look at this from purely like on paper, I would say, oh, wow, it's going to be really hard to monetize people because cosmetics aren't as important in this economy, which or they're too easy to get. Maybe I'm wrong there. But also it's hard to monetize people on pay for progression because they can't really tell that they're not leveled up. Or maybe the thing is you lose a bunch of matches and you say I'm going to go spend 20 bucks and level this character up.
Speaker 3:So one thing I just wanted to talk about with regards to what Eric said and I think it validates what you're saying, eric, about peacocking being proportionally related or I guess I wouldn't even say proportionally I think that's a question mark we should also talk about but cosmetics being related to other people seeing you and you seeing those other people seeing you so that's the other thing that happens on video cameras, which I think is interesting is that you're reflected back to yourself and so in some sense you can see other people seeing you is that you rarely see cosmetics in single player games. They almost always are in multiplayer games. And not only that some of the most popular skins, even in first person shooters, tend to be the character skins, like operator skins in Call of Duty are very powerful. They sell a lot of units. The same thing for Rainbow Six Siege, even more so for Rainbow Six Siege, because I think they really lean into the character elements, and that was certainly the case in Battlefield.
Speaker 3:And everyone says well, you can't see your gun or, excuse me, if you can't see your character, it might not be worth it, but there are what you might call stages. So, like they will go, they'll put you in the main menu and they reflect you back to yourself as though we're a mirror or stage. There's like kill cams, which are interesting. There's like the end of round and apex legends, and I think that's something that Brawl Stars could do a little bit better. It's like giving you more stages, but to your point, just having a stage at all, like, does wonders for monetization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in DL4, the character models are really small and they intentionally, during loading screens, show all of you and your party members character models really big. So just put it in your face oh look, this person wearing a cool outfit. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. As a counterpoint, dota, for example, sold map skins which always perform poorly because they're not attached to your avatar and ego pets stuff like that. Like the more distance it is between the cosmetic and your avatar, the less compelling it is for peacocking purposes.
Speaker 3:So if you had a map, cosmetic, I imagine that change to the terrain for everyone or just for the player yourself.
Speaker 2:And Dota, you could opt it. Yeah, it enables it for everyone in the game to turn on or off.
Speaker 3:Okay, so be here.
Speaker 1:It basically presents a checkbox Interesting so that's like a club, club good or public good, like one person has to pay for it and then every tickets to use it. That's really interesting.
Speaker 3:Huh. So there's this thing I've been wanting to pitch for a long time and I'm surprised Riot hasn't done it which is like squad skins, so like why can't I buy one skin and then everyone else, if I'm wearing that skin, has the ability to use that skin? That's what you're describing with maps, but I've always wanted to be coordinated as a team and I'm willing to take on an additional cost To do that, because what you do is you'd sell however many Team members you have you could use for guilds.
Speaker 3:Everyone has the same guild suit, but you gotta keep buying them and one person will eat that cost for all the members.
Speaker 2:Like permanently or as a temporary rental or.
Speaker 3:I think you would the feature. It gets fuzzy. But I think you would set it such that once I bought the durable, when I entered a match, everyone would get an invitation to wear what I want or it would magically show up in their inventory If there was a place for that during the pre-round.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I suppose it's an option. I mean, the question is how many more marge with units would get sold, and how much does that cannibalize your party members buying their own skins? Yeah, oh, like rich daddy Phil always has the guild skin, so I never need to buy anything. I mean, there is skin gifting, though that's, but that's just buying stuff all I can't that that's true, but you could technically.
Speaker 3:There might be behavior that we're not seeing, or at least not Obscursly tracking, where people buy a bunch of the same cosmetic and then they gift it to someone else. So they could be, they could. If you have gifting, you could technically do this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the other thing is you can't play the same care do. People can't play the same character in the same game, so you couldn't have everyone decked out. Same out kind of breaks this. People do like matching themes. I said, do do like everyone wearing the same star guardian, which is like a sailor moon themed skin and like your whole team is sailor moon. People do stuff like that.
Speaker 2:But mm-hmm, yeah, there is and they're all random mode interesting Modestation tidbit. You want to buy a skin for your character if you're like, oh, my favorite character is Annie, I'm gonna buy an Annie skin. But there's an all random mode, a ram all random on mid. That's pretty popular and because your character is random, you don't. You can't preemptively buy a skin and then say I want to use it in this mode. So they made this thing called skin boost where basically Everyone in your team gets a random skin. Someone pays like a dollar fifty and everyone get in your team gets a random skin unlocked for their character For the match. As an attempt to solve that problem didn't work. It barely earns any money. But I think it's an interesting design space where, like, how do you do social Cosmetics? How do you do cosmetics where you don't have agency over your character?
Speaker 1:Do you guys, do you think that the like marginal benefit of skins is quite like Flat? Or if you were to take like the marginal benefit curve of every additional skin, I think it's quite flat. I don't think that it like declines over time. I think that, like, my 10th skin is just as exciting as my second skin.
Speaker 3:Maybe, maybe not exactly that behavior, though. People don't make purchases like that. So that's just this no zix utilitarian monster like why you just keep consuming. What's changing that would make you consume less Prices. Hold this held constant, so the only thing that's changing is your marginal benefit curve.
Speaker 1:There's not the marginal cost associated with like consumption. I feel worse after my 10th hamburger. I don't necessarily face any costs with obtaining a 10th skin, and then I can randomly cycle before between them.
Speaker 3:So you could just say that was boosters, though like boosters don't have storage costs. I mean I yeah, I guess that's a different good, but that isn't a lot of cost and a lot of other goods as well like that doesn't eat up a lot of other goods. It's not always like storage costs and stomach, if that makes sense. I. I think they they decline, other I actually rather rapidly. Oh yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 2:Think about your fornet experience. The difference from no skin to skin is much bigger than the difference from one skin to two skin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fair, I'm just trying. I'm thinking about like over. If you spread it out over time, I guess this is more of an intertemporal discounting problem as opposed to an actual like, single, like pointed time.
Speaker 3:But, eric, I don't see why that's a problem. Wouldn't the idea that there's this randomized mode and means that everyone needs to play a different character actually just gradually increase the sales by each character by proportionally increasing or the time played between all the different characters, like in battle royales? That, to me, is one of the Most powerful things about its monetization model for cosmetics is that I don't know which weapon I'm gonna use. It's randomized and it is updating to its content funnel, like what goes in and out of the meta changes. That to me seems like a really powerful way to get me to Upgrade and invest cosmetically and like a bunch of different things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does force people across the slots. But how many different weapon skins are slots are there?
Speaker 3:in a battle royale Maybe 10 you mean in terms of free just for weapons? Yeah, that's how many ever. However many weapons there.
Speaker 2:How many is that? Like five, ten in battle royales way more than that, yeah, and you're buying cosmetics for the individual weapons yeah do you like when I have like pistol, shotgun, rifle SMG.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's interesting they do less on the weapons front.
Speaker 2:Let's see, here there is Five ten, fifteen, twenty twenty five, thirty types, thirty weapons and apex legends Thirty and so if you buy, and you buy weapons skins for so let's say you buy weapons skin they do not have universal skins.
Speaker 3:Now they do have universal skins in some other games. Rainbow Six Siege has this. So if you buy like one, one sort of camo almost it wraps around different guns but it's less physical changes on the model.
Speaker 2:So let's say an apex. So I know the guy who designed that system and he purposely added a shield of his slots.
Speaker 1:But more honestly horn.
Speaker 2:But so let's say you buy a shotgun skin. What are the odds that you're gonna get to use that skin during the match? I'll tell you specifically are searching out for a shotgun, I think it's a pretty, at least maybe 50 50%.
Speaker 3:Maybe right? Oh, I think it's a lot less than that you would really. I don't know. I don't want to stand by that.
Speaker 2:Okay, but it in any case it's probably above 5% the drop rate.
Speaker 3:It's proportional to drop rate and I would say it's probably some measure of power. So let's say you get there's 30 weapons.
Speaker 2:You drop a shotguns one in 30 and you get five weapons around. Yeah, so that's 16%. We're just low. But in League of Legends there's a hundred characters plus like 150 or so, so you have a one in a hundred chance of getting the skin you wanted, like that you've just bought in the next A-Ram game.
Speaker 3:So the odds are just a astronomically low, yeah, for any one particular skin, but this doesn't just mean you need to diversify more. You need to diversify, sure, but it would not buy like a bunch of rares you can think of the value of the skin when you purchase it.
Speaker 2:In a All-pick mode where you get to pick your character, it's like you get a hundred percent of that value and in the all-random mode it's one percent of the value and therefore, like your purchase decision is largely being driven by the your all-pick no that makes sense to me.
Speaker 3:But I guess, if let's imagine this, let's change the model and assume that a player spends a hundred percent of their time in the randomized mode, what would be their behavior? And so if they don't know which character are gonna be and they spend a hundred percent of their time, they don't want to look like a no-skin, they don't want to be stupid, they still want to do some signaling. And wouldn't the optimal strategy be to buy, like lower level, rarity skins for a wide variety of characters and in that way reach my average expected cosmetic level, almost like? Why would the diversification hurt here, rather the marginal?
Speaker 2:benefit is much lower because of the effect we described Like, the spend cap is much higher. If someone only plays 10 characters, they max out all those 10 characters and they're done and all random. You play every character. You could spend on every character, but the marginal benefit of that first skin purchase is so much lower that you see a lot less Monetization in those modes. It's like where are that willingness to spend, curve and how does that overlap with the utility? And yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:To me it's a big part of it's like the actual cost to the player. Like you can have a high marginal benefit, but if you're giving the player everything for free it doesn't necessarily translate to purchasing decisions. Like my marginal benefit to Skins and in brawl stars is pretty, pretty high for every single one that I've gotten so far, but I haven't had to buy any of them, so it didn't translate into purchasing decisions, which I think is where, like my argument is confusing me. I've enjoyed all of those purchases but you wouldn't see that as the business, like you, your bi team wouldn't be like oh, it looks like people stop purchasing after the first one. They wouldn't really be able to determine my, my preferences from my decisions. I guess the weak axiom of revealed preferences.
Speaker 2:Eric, what are you been playing? Yeah, I've been playing some Baldur's Gate 3 mostly. My wife, keg, has been playing a ton of it and I've been tagging along. The game is truly an accomplishment in gaming. There's fully modeled 3d genitalia and Every race has its own five set of gen models you can pick from. So you have five different penises and five Different vulvas, fully modeled, that you can select in your character select screen. And they have fully animated sex scenes between your main character and every single party member, so to give you an idea of the level of attention to detail. And you can also just take off all your clothes and run around the whole world naked. So you're just walking around this totally nude guy and you're just having a conversation with a shopkeeper and your dicks just hanging out.
Speaker 2:Talking about cosmetics, yeah super high degree of customization. No, no, but jokes aside, it's like a super in-depth RPG and it I feel like it's the best translation of Dungeons and Dragons mechanics to a video game, in that you can go around the whole world and it's a classic RPG, except that you can also rob anybody, kill anybody, steal anything you can find. There's like many branching stories, and a lot of these are hidden behind Charisma checks or dexterity checks. If you're gonna try to steal from somebody in a way that makes your play feel feel super unique and personalized. It's almost like an open-world game, but on the social and story side as opposed to the exploration side is the way I think about it, and that's definitely the strength of the game. Yeah, honestly, the tactical combat is fine. It's not amazing or anything, but the fact that you can romance or kill anybody is adds a big layer to how engaging the game is.
Speaker 3:So what is the actual gameplay of this? Because I've heard it's turn-based and it's interesting, by the way, that they don't use the Dungeons and Dragons Label at all around this, like it's not Dungeons and Dragons presents bouldersgate 3. It's just bouldersgate?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not sure what the legal IP is around that. But the combat's all turn-based. But if you've, I'm sure you've played tactics game before. It's like that, hmm. But there's also a lot of environmental stuff, like you can pick up objects and throw them or you can like do D&D stuff in the combat. It's not just the combat system is pure combat. If you're the bar, you can just start playing a song. What are you doing? We're in a fight, but exploring and stuff is real time, just because they didn't want that to be turn-based. But yeah, it's a. The combat is turn-based is the simplest way to describe it.
Speaker 1:It's if you were to make a digital implementation of a tabletop RPG. I so I played a lot of like more structured tabletop RPGs, like board game versions of B, and it feels a lot like those where you have this set map, set kind of storyline that you have to. It's not quite as free as a dungeon master making up. I guess it's like if somebody, if a dungeon master, had made a video game for you. It's like you roll the dice, you make decisions every single time. So it's really intuitive. I haven't played it. I've watched a lot of in-depth playthrough videos. It looks really intuitive to tabletop player. I think it's. I don't remember where I was listening to this, but the the D&D IP is relatively forgiving. So obviously you have a bunch of people who are Role-playing and they're taking your IP and they're doing stuff with it and they're changing it and they're applying it. So they have to be the opposite of Disney and a couple of years ago or a couple of I don't remember when it was there was like a huge revolt in the D community because they were gonna make a change to Watsi, was gonna make a change to the IP rules, and then they ended up. Obviously they ended up taking it back because the community was so pissed off about it making, essentially making it harder to produce Content. So I don't know what the IP situation is between Baldur's Gate and Watsi or I guess what like the licensing agreement is there, but I would guess it's.
Speaker 1:I don't think they paid. I Would guess they didn't pay anything for it, not if you were to make like a Marvel game. But they also didn't, like you said, filled it in, market it as a D&D game. Let's just set in the D universe. But that's a lot of D products are like that so you could play. For example, there's a board game called Lords of Waterdeep that is set in the D&D universe but it's not. There's nothing about it. Would be you wouldn't know is a D game unless you were a D player and then you played Lords of Waterdeep.
Speaker 2:They don't have to call it D&D, but all the D&D influencers. So I love the game and they get a ton of free marketing that way and I think a lot of the positive Reception it's got is from those like old-school D&D folks who are like, hey, this is a game for me.
Speaker 3:There's no live service. Though this is just a single-player game. There's a linear story. You have to consume.
Speaker 2:That's right. The story is very nonlinear. You can fashion, say that there's like acts, that you have to do the acts one by one, but the way you handle situations is very open-ended. I got to this Village of Druids that's being attacked by goblins and they've got all these like tiefling. Tieflings are like basically demon people, refugees there, and you have a whole bunch of options. You can help them fight off the goblins. You can rescue their missing druid leader. You can help the goblins attack the camp.
Speaker 2:What I did was I assassinated. There was like this militant leader who was trying to kick all the tieflings out and I assassinated her and Then it caused a race riot inside the town where everybody killed each other and now the whole town's dead and I was like, okay, I guess this is a story branch they made. So it very open-ended that way. But so it's mostly single-player. You can play multiplayer and I see people playing multiplayer, but honestly I think the multiplayer experience is really bad because people get bored and wander off in different directions and one person is listening to a dialogue tree and other persons trying to like scour for loot and systems that build up well to handle multiplayer.
Speaker 1:So it's not handled in like a traditional D&D sense of multiplayer, where you have your party and you're all going on a mission. You're like wandering around with two different parties.
Speaker 2:You. I think if your group sticks together like they should in a party, it works fine. But gamers are gamers and they want to run around and press buttons, and one person is way more interested in hearing this Orphans backstory and someone else. I just want to fight something and starts picking fights.
Speaker 3:So what is the studio? Hey money, what's wrong with them? What? First of all. First complaint why did fuck they only have a $10 DLC package? They should be upgrading that DLC package. They should be doing $100, use $120.
Speaker 2:I don't know how to do it. Oh, what's the DLC for?
Speaker 3:DLC digital deluxe editions. First of all, it's not an actual edition of the game in the steam store page, by the way. That's. Another thing developers need to fix is they should have had a separate Buy boulders gate deluxe edition button here, and instead it's listed in a separate item called Content for this game, so it shows up as DLC, not a deluxe edition rather so that already is hurting their impressions. But when you get the Lux edition that's 10 bucks you get an item pack which looks like it has some music that you can download as an MP3. I don't know who's doing that anymore. That was classic. It also has digital character sheets as a digital art book Deluxe dice skin. It has an adventurer's pouch Not sure what that is. The Bard song pack You're gonna want to see that after seeing the Witcher season 3, and it also is gonna have paintings from River lawn. Is that similar to Riverdale?
Speaker 2:You just get paintings in the game. I guess they don't do anything.
Speaker 3:Maybe it's just like a digital printout and I guess you get a sword. It's called the needle of that, la rogue, yeah so I'm not no like we were talking about.
Speaker 2:These cosmetics are pretty low priced. This is a lot of stuff for $10 compared to most games. But on the flip side, I think a large part of that is for the reasons we described where, because it's a largely single player Experience, the, the peacocking ability of oh, I've got the shiny dice is a lot lower, whereas if you talk to people who play tabletop D&D, they all want their own cool cut them dice and it's a $60 skew.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I thought we were in the world of 70. It's interesting, some people are in the world of 70, other people's are in the world of 50, but at least for this PC audience, I don't see why you wouldn't get to. You wouldn't get to 100.
Speaker 1:So if they don't decide to go live service, how do they monetize this into the future? Like it seems like it's been a smashing success and in 2023 you don't just let the smashing success fade away into nothing, with no additional content, with no DLC, with no Microtransaction, with no live service. What do you think, eric? Is there like long-term plan or do they have a long-term plan?
Speaker 2:So I think the studio is a bunch of like super old school, like hardcore RPG, like traditionalist types and that's part of why, to Phil's point, they under monetize the game and I don't think they're gonna do anything. I think what they will do is they'll parlay this into Promoting their future games or maybe selling more copies of their old games like Divinity 2. Yeah, yeah, my worst take was like they're doing a disservice to the company. If they could have earned 10 million more dollars by selling some stupid hats and that money all goes, because I'm pretty sure it's a private studio, they're not publicly owned. That money goes to their employees and to fund future game development. Like that's a huge disservice that they're doing. But I think the types of comments you see where people like I hate DLC and I hate all my trots and seconds, my guess is that culture is infused within their studio and that's part of why they did it this way.
Speaker 3:Let me do you mind if I read one steam review just to enrich this story. This is from, but you gotta use a voice. What should I do? I don't know this bill.
Speaker 1:This is your review, so you can workshop with me.
Speaker 3:I'm just trying to think of what I got that.
Speaker 2:Going nasally. That always gets the people going.
Speaker 3:This is from vocals.
Speaker 3:You sound like golem vocal size for all the devs that have micro transactions, etc. You know you're doing something right when other developers like Yibby soft, blizzard and EA come out saying Baldur's Gate 3 should not be the new standard. Editor's note I believe that's an exact quote from the executives at EA, ubisoft and Blizzard. To simply put, they are just mad Because Larry in studios will not have a battle pass, microtransactions or expensive DLCs, which, after all, is all us gamers want, just a polished game experience, unlimited hours of fun. When I speak up DLCs, I'm referring to things that should have already been included in the base game for free. Total war warhammer great game, by the way should, in my opinion, already included the cast race in the base game. I shouldn't have to pay an extra $30 for this particular race because, once again, and just my opinion I'd happily pay for an expensive DLC add-on, whenever you want to call it for BG3 Especially, it is the same quality as blood and wine. And there's another 500 words to complete this essay. Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of feelings. Great, was this review helpful?
Speaker 1:Yes. So here's I love, here's my favorite sentence in that review we should be able to buy a single game for a small $60 price and get Unlimited time out of it unlimited fun, which is obviously a sentence that breaks all of economics. Like you can't get unlimited fun for a single price, like you can't buy anything in the world and it will last forever. There's depreciation, there's decreasing marginal benefit, there's all sorts of laws of nature and of economics that keep that from happening. And this is, I think, the disconnect with these gamers.
Speaker 1:And in my view, why would you not? Let's suppose we take Balder's Gate and we just add in better stuff that people may buy. They don't have to buy. What's wrong with that? And I think that you would get this community and they would revolt and you would say actually the counterfactual is that we Just take all those micro transactions off and it's still an amazing game that you love. What's wrong with that? Like, I think Diablo 3 was a huge success. They have micro transactions, obviously not the best monetization on Diablo 3 Post, post, the premium purchase. But the key is they have a premium game, so they're they don't necessarily need to monetize as well, especially in early days posts the initial purchase, but yeah it just frustrates you.
Speaker 3:Here's the other thing and I think this is the key to Vaughan's review is he says when I speak of DLC, I'm referring to things that should have already be included in the base game, for example, total Warhammer's chaos race.
Speaker 3:So gamers who write on the internet have an imaginary sense of just in which they are judge, jury and executor of whatever ruling they choose to pass themselves or whatever their fellow cohorts on Reddit choose to pass, and so they come up with these imaginary Norms and they draw the lines in the sand and they're constantly frustrated that gaming companies step over these imaginary lines that they've Drawn and they want to punish people.
Speaker 3:I think that's the one important thing I really realized working in games and at dice is that the internet wants to punish you when you feel like they've. You've crossed their line in some way, and they always think that the worlds that they live in are bigger than themselves. They always think like they, they take up a majority of your time and your air and your existence and they overrate. They overrate their importance because you can just look at a Steam's or a subreddit's PSU as a share of a game's DAU and it just is not a number that comes out in a favorable way, like we're talking. Like under 5% of a community is usually on the social media channels and it's hard to take these people seriously. This studio.
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna do any live-servicen anions of this game or any mtx because they're morally in that camp, but I think it's worth asking, like, how could this game and monetize more, what could they have done? And, and let's just go down the list. So what are some classic gay ways these games monetized as a live-series? One is power progression, cosmetics, characters and More like game content or levels. I guess I would say so. Power progression doesn't works very well in most RPGs, but in this game it actually does not work well at all because all of the comment encounters are scripted and Everything is very finely tuned for, like the level it's at and you know what level you're at. Is this enemy supposed to be stronger week? And also there's a lot of social writing that goes on into every single encounter. It's not like a game where you can just shove out random encounters or make people run the same dungeon over and over to grind up levels. That's not the kind of game this is so power crush and gonna be hard to sell, as well as immersion breaking because enemies are supposed to be stronger or weaker based on the situation. Cosmetics probably weak for the reasons we listed. They did sell cosmetics for $10. Day 1 DLC boo, but like it turns out, it doesn't matter because nobody really cares and I'm sure they're not selling very much of that because it again. Cosmetics aren't very compelling and a mostly single-player experience. Maybe they could have leaned into the social play, made the multiplayer play better. They only had so much dev time.
Speaker 2:I think characters are actually a very viable way for them to monetize this. Add more classes, add the chaos race or whatever in George $10, like that review was complaining about Warhammer on. The tricky thing, though, is the Combinatorial design of it makes it very difficult. For example, in every dialogue sequence there's special actions you get to take. If you're a elf or an orc or a no like, you might have special things and as you, every race you add, you have to rewrite a whole bunch of stuff, like add parallel dialogue lines for every single thing and Figure out their special interactions. And, oh, like, maybe the half orc can't romance this character because they're like racist or something.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of content. It's not as simple as, say, league of Legends creates a character and just make sure the character works, and now they have 150, and adding the 160 at 50 first doesn't, isn't like Multiplicatively more expensive to make, or it is, but not as dramatically. And so I think that leaves us with levels and more game content. Like, maybe you add another act, you add another quest line, you add a new area world to explore, and I think that's a very viable way for that. They're clearly able to churn out this content very efficiently.
Speaker 2:You ask why other but Diablo doesn't have the same quality story. It's probably because these guys at Larry and are super good at writing this story content. I. But I think actually levels make way more sense to release as a separate game than as an extension. Because, let's say, you tack it onto the end. There's the game has three acts and you sell a DLC, act 4. You're now limiting your audience to anyone who's gotten to the very end. Or let's say, okay, we don't want to have that problem, so we'll make Act 4 dynamic difficulty. You can access it no matter how far you are. You can instantly jump into Act 4. Now, all of a sudden, it's like story breaking and it's in their whole system where they're tuning the levels based on where you are. It doesn't work very well. So this all goes to say I think that Parley's best into a sequel or other follow-up games of the same type, and that's really what a new box game is. It's just more content if you're building it in the same engine.
Speaker 1:That's very similar to a tabletop RPGs model. They have a whole bunch of different stories and typically DLC will be an extra few missions, but mostly you're talking about completely new games. Same characters you love, same gameplay mechanics. They don't change the game much at all. They just release a book too. So it's really interesting that it's so similar to the strategy they could employ here.
Speaker 3:They guys need to be monetizing their game for a lot longer, you'd even think XP Boosts would be precluded by just how finely tuned the progression system or the combat system is. I think you could sell it.
Speaker 2:But so the power progression is very important to the narrative and if this game is going to win by being the best narrative RPG, you don't want to weaken that edge by selling XP Boosts. If the power curve in your game isn't really that important, there's a standout feature of your game, then yeah, go ahead and sell it.
Speaker 3:But isn't that exactly what you want to sell, though? Because it's the standout feature, because it's so important.
Speaker 2:I think it breaks immersion for a lot of players to win To use an XP Boost. Yeah To say oh, my character is getting stronger because I spent US dollars as opposed to I fought monsters and learned things.
Speaker 3:You don't think you could obfuscate that?
Speaker 2:I think you could but it still weakens the unique strength of the game. And if you're going to say this is the thing we're better than every other game at, this is how we're going to sell people Like, maybe that's not the thing you dampen.
Speaker 1:So does this game prove that the premium model still works? That free to play is just a fad?
Speaker 2:I think the premium will always be better for certain types of games Like we talked about, like single player narrative games generally.
Speaker 2:But there's one actually interesting thing on the D&D note is they've got a very sophisticated engine to build this and they're talked about potentially making those DevTools public. They could go UGC with this. They could let people make their own story campaigns and feature them on the Larian page and maybe take a cut. I think that's actually a totally interesting possibility for them is that they basically become D&D for digital and license third party developers using their engine.
Speaker 3:I'm on board with that. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of having like even just like presets I can go out and play like just different rule sets to your point Like this is the good.
Speaker 1:Parlay this into a true digital D&D UGC via storytelling, so the players come in and tell a story, and the like software. We think about the Epic Games. What's Epic's new? Like UGC tool called Fortnite.
Speaker 2:Creative.
Speaker 3:Unreal for.
Speaker 1:Fortnite, so engine, you think about this and it's like there's a whole bunch of procedural stuff going on. Do you think the same thing could be done? You combine AI, combine procedural.
Speaker 2:I don't think procedural, I think Larian's all that's all handwritten.
Speaker 1:No, I know what I'm saying is like this UGC thing, how would you? How, from a technical point of view, you write the script and then like the game, like kind of acts out the script by creating the visuals. Oh yeah, the Dungeon.
Speaker 2:Master the writer would write the whole thing. They'd write all the characters and the dialogue trees and, like the encounters, it'd be a pretty hefty amount of writing. But rather than trying to launch their own game on the seamstor that's never going to get any attention they launch it through Larian's Baldur's Gate. 3, custom Packs.
Speaker 1:I see, but that's a very different company, that's a very different studio than they're producing this highly polished, highly specific, probably not very generalizable structure. I assume something like that is a completely different play and would require different tech.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, they've got the engine and the dev tools. It's the marketplace part that they'd have to build.
Speaker 3:That's no small lift.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's really cool. I think it requires like a third party to step in and say, fortnite comes in and they say, hey, here's your procedural game engine that that reads a script and pub and creates and generates the set, which is, I think it's totally doable, but especially with AI and stuff, but just trying to throw in AI as much as possible to get our podcast recognized by the algorithm. So here's my, here's my counterfactual. I'm going to launch this into the, into this discussion about Baldur's Gate, destroying Frickin free to play. To jump us into this, I would like to have start with a thought experiment. Baldur's Gate everybody loves it. It's amazing. People have spent $60 on it.
Speaker 1:What if, in two months, they released a microtransaction store? Does that automatically make the quality go down? Does that automatically make it a worse product? And I think most people, even the proponents of this model, would argue no, that doesn't make it worse, that's perfectly fine. The problem is, when you don't have the counterfactual of what would the game have been without microtransactions, it's very difficult to quantify that.
Speaker 1:So a lot of people see these games and they assume the games that come out with a whole bunch of fancy monetization strategy strategies employed and they think, oh, the counterfactual is that this game would have been if it weren't for these microtransactions. It would have been so much better. They take like a Duolingo approach. Duolingo gives you a worse experience if you're not premium. That's not how most video games monetize. In my experience, most free to play games except for maybe hypercasual give you a pretty polished. Take a Supercell game, for example. Give you a pretty polished, awesome experience and then add monetization layers on top of that so you can take it to the next level if you would like to. And that's my thesis is that I think people are being a bit too sensitive. But yeah, phil, to your point. I linked this IGN article. It's not an article, it's a YouTube video, a review. See what the title is.
Speaker 3:Baldur's Gate 3 is causing some developers to panic.
Speaker 1:Baldur's Gate 3 is causing some yeah.
Speaker 2:This is clickbait journalism. That is worst.
Speaker 1:Oh, but look at the comments People are. They're like this is the best work to have come out of IGN in six years. That's always been the hyperpublic of this community.
Speaker 3:That's always been what they've done. It's like there have been plenty of other single player RPGs that have not succeeded, that don't have any monetization. That community has not rallied around. They've chosen this one in particular. It's Once in a Blue Moon. They always do this, like Reddit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is for Elden Ring they will rally around something to push their agenda when it catches fire. But does that mean it's the right strategy? I have doubts, but I would argue somewhat in agreeance with you, chris. When you introduce micro transactions, it always depends on what the counterfactual is. And if you just micro transactions were controlling for, then of course micro transactions don't make the game worse. Like you don't have to go to the store page, it's really not that hard to avoid. Not only that, but I would say, like the other piece here, that's really important is that there is an audience.
Speaker 3:There is a group here of vocal gamers who have complained when micro transactions have been introduced, because it's not true that everything has held constant. When you introduce micro transactions, like, you do have to make changes in resources and to your point, we have this note Like some people think it's really fucked up that you would take away something. When you think about a free to play game, to give it away to a premium users and of course, like that's always true it's always true in any game Like progression is something that you're rationing. Not everyone has everything immediately and so we need to figure out, like what is the appropriate wage rate for a free player and someone who chooses to monetize and ultimately like how much do we pay, how much do we also charge for goods and services? Like those are things we need to consider, and I do think there's a scenario in which free to play has raised prices for a group of gamers who would have gotten a better deal or would have had more good and services at a lower price when we lived in a fixed price world.
Speaker 3:Now I think, by and large, that ends up being bullshit, because the amount of money that goes into live service games means that, like, your purchases are amortized over such like a long period of time that, even if something's expensive up front, because you have it for so long, because these games retain you for so long, that you end up paying I would say even lower per unit of entertainment that's provided to you. But I do see how there could be some small minority that, hey, I was paying $60 beforehand, I was getting 200, 200 hour experience. That same experience, if we hold content constant, could be higher. That is potentially the situation, like people could be less generous when it comes to wages because the game is free to play or because there's micro transactions, if any of that makes sense.
Speaker 1:I think it makes sense. I've got like this. The only model that I can conceive of that would explain that would say that micro transactions or really just like free to play monetization is bad for games, is one in which you on purpose produce a worst game to make people pay for that game. Now the problem with this model is that I guess I should back up In a premium model. You have pretty much and you guys can definitely jump in if you can think of anything else but you pretty much have two modes to revenue, two routes to revenue game quality how good is the game? If it's a good game, it's going to monetize. People are going to pay for it, they're going to pay the premium price for that game. And marketing you have the ability to market that to more people.
Speaker 1:To try and drive, to drive those downloads, those users to be acquired In free to play. There are a bunch of different ways to drive the value of the game. You can employ micro transactions, you can have DLC, you can do all sorts. You can have a battle pass, you can do loot, loot chests. I suppose you could argue okay. In the free to play model there's no longer this direct incentive to drive up game quality. You might have game quality held constant, and then you're driving up other things like micro transaction purchases, now that micro transaction purchases are your secondary optimization lever.
Speaker 3:You're like performer lever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you basically are now optimizing micro transaction spend as opposed to game spend, the idea being, like the premium model, there's only quality is driving the price of the game. There's really not any that could be wrong there, but I think the only thing driving premium purchases is game quality. And perhaps there's some social stuff there as well social benefits of playing the game community. But this model says okay, if you're optimizing micro transaction spend, maybe that comes at the expense of quality. The problem with this model, in my opinion, is that you take two firms that are competitive and they both got the same parameterization, they're optimizing the same way and then they have the same game quality. All this game over here has to do is drive quality just a little bit higher and they're going to get everybody. So, even in this bad, this duolingo model where I call it the duolingo model because they give you a pretty annoying product to use unless you monetize.
Speaker 1:Spotify is an excellent example of this. It's premium Ads. You just have this. You get a worse experience with Spotify unless you pay for premium. So they have this excellent experience for Spotify premium and then they just say you can't select the song you want to listen to. If you want to listen to a playlist, we're going to add in shit that you don't want to listen to into that playlist. We're going to insert stuff to make your life worse if you're not buying premium. That's like the Spotify model. I don't see that as much for games.
Speaker 3:This is what redditors do when they frame issues like this, and I do think it's a lot about framing is how you also win the public conversation on this.
Speaker 3:But you're framing this as Spotify is making you worse off. Like they started with this pure product and then they realized they needed to make it shittier for you, and I don't always think about that as being the production process for this, but I do think the end result you're getting at is that, ultimately, what you're monetizing is the difference between the free experience and the premium experience. Like you're monetizing the marginal benefit relative to the marginal cost or those two things. Like you're trying to make that gap as wide as possible and then you're trying to figure out your monetization method that effectively captures that gap, and so I don't think that's they're taking away something necessarily so much as, like they knew me, need to maintain that gap and they also have really they have marginal costs. Spotify has marginal costs as a payout per stream, so they have to make sure, like their ad, cpms exceed their marginal costs per song stream.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So my thesis is that, like, microtransactions do not necessarily make a game worse. Even if you have a different, even if you're optimizing for something else, you can still gain an edge by increasing quality of the game. So you have this environment where quality of game is still up. I don't think anybody would say that gaming is worse than it was 20 years ago. I think that's insane. There are more people gaming. There are more people spending more time on our variety.
Speaker 3:There is probably games, platforms, genres, there's probably even single player stuff.
Speaker 1:You know, there's probably a, like you've said, phil you've pointed this out many times and I totally I love the point like there is a minority group that is very loud and they are they're the old school, old guard, I don't know whatever you want to call them and they have this idea of what games should be, and they've taken it's their prerogative to make sure that they're. They're trying to To create a just society for gamers, but that's not necessarily what people want. We all believe that people Spend with their beliefs. If I like a game, I will pay money for it, and the games industry wouldn't be exploding if it was producing worse content. So I don't think we really need to debate whether this is true.
Speaker 1:I don't think anybody really truly thinks that gaming is getting worse, but I am curious what are you guys's thoughts in terms of monetization? Do you think that this will shake the industry a little bit? And maybe a game that was really story-driven premium? Who was considering Monetization micro transaction skins, for example and they're gonna say, maybe we won't. How does it hurt them, though?
Speaker 2:I don't think anyone changes course. I think for the last decade there's been successful free-to-play games and there's been successful box games and People know what lane they're in.
Speaker 3:I think they're experimenting more in one area, like it's not like premium is growing by this dramatic amount every single year, like it's pretty obvious the direction that people are going. Eric and Cress and I debate from Deegan structure fund, that other podcast, to beat this all the time. But the question I always press them against is first of all, in the last five years, where has there been more growth, free to play or premium? And then the second question I'll ask in the next five years, where do you expect there to be more growth, premium or free to play? And it could be that from free to play is starting from a lower base, which I think definitely is the case, and so those early gains tend to be higher percentages. So it's a little bit of a trick in the math, or at least where the growth curve is, if there is some sort of Convergence or leveling off. But even if that were the case, it's still important to know that this area is growing and continues to consume more and more of games, like it already consumed a mobile. Like that, to me, is the most important story is why is there no premium experience on Mobile? Why did that never take off?
Speaker 3:And to me, if we see that as the future, because they had strong platform payments and we've seen that the physicality of shipping discs has also decreased. Like nearly 50% of sales For premium games or physical the 20, I think was like during 2015, like it's only recently, like post COVID, that the digital sales have shot up and it you Can't distribute a free to play game physically, or at least it's extremely difficult and it's cost prohibitive. Like those cards are three dollars to get a card into Target or to Walmart. It's not cheap at all. And not only that, like maintaining stock is pretty hard to do too. So I think that's the other piece here is that there's a digital physical divide that if you live in the digital world, you just assume that everyone else is living in the digital world and it turns out like there are 13 million people who go see Transformers every single year. It's who the fuck are these people? I've never met them, but like they exist in mass.
Speaker 2:I also think this is bifurcation, is a false one, or I think. More and more we're seeing games with box prices have Microtransactions or like within the free to play category. There's a whole bunch of ways they monetize. They're not monetizing the same way and, yeah, people fixate a lot on whether there's a sticker price or not. There's a lot more going on under the hood.
Speaker 1:I think probably the most, like the most Devil at the biggest devil here are premium games that also have Further monetization, because with a free to play game you have the option to not spend any money. You can't go and complain that it's not of high quality if you didn't have to freakin spend anything on it. I think the people if there's anyone in trouble which the consensus here is that nobody's in troubles it's that it's those premium With additional why?
Speaker 2:why can't you monetize both points?
Speaker 1:because I now, like you, can't, but I guess from this person's point of view, they see that counter, they can't see that counterfactual, or if they do, they see it as. This would have been a much better experience If you didn't have these stupid microcharts, and that's why I use the thought experiment of what happens when you add in those monetization layers after a bunch of people have have purchased into the premium and the game's been out for six months and everybody agrees that it's amazing.
Speaker 3:And you use gone off the cliff your day. You can't like. The most important time to monetize is at the point of sale, because you have a hundred percent of your impressions. What you're suggesting is monetizing whatever. Their attention curve is at six months. So what is that 2%? So you're looking at, I can either take 2% or you take a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:But my, exactly that's my point. Like you can't, these people don't see that. They'll never see that, that Counterfactual. They'll never see the world where their game that they love introduces monetization after the fact, unless it's some sort of live service game. I think a game. An example of this is.
Speaker 3:Call duty. Did this call duty locked out monetization for the first three months? Or sometimes does this. They usually wait three months to launch the store.
Speaker 1:It might even be a month at this point and who knows, maybe that's because they have a huge audience already and they can do that. They know the retention is gonna be there.
Speaker 2:So, phil, you mentioned on, maybe there's some players who actually worse off using this Like in the ship from him to free to play, like the person who buys the $60 box game and then plays it for 200 hours, and those players that play exists. But I think a lot of the and rose tin glasses of make people forget the opposite experience where there's some fucking SpongeBob game and some dumb kid buys it because they like SpongeBob and the game turns out to be garbage and they pay $60 free and hours worth of gameplay and there used to be so much of this IP branded shovelware that people remember the game that they played for 200 hours. Oh, it's Vinny. Or Super Smash Brothers. Melee was such an amazing game. I played it for so long.
Speaker 2:I love the box price model and they forget about the shooting games where they just lost immediately. And that is the part where box prices are exploitative of Consumers is because you have to pay all the way up front. So if they dump all their money in marketing and ignore game development, you make a shit product that people buy anyway.
Speaker 3:You free to play games, need to keep fighting for your dollar every time you spend. They need to have fought for that dollar, so you have check-in points to see whether or not they're worth it. It's a renewal opportunity rather than all up front. I have been thinking a lot about emergent gameplay recently, and even trying to define what it is, and I came across this topic while researching a topic called flip resets. This is something that happened in Rocket League, and to me, rocket League is one of those really interesting examples when the content that they pump into the game has no effect on gameplay. So if you're thinking about cosmetics in the game, they don't even seem to change much of the hitbox. Now there's very small changes that streamers sometimes find out about in terms of hitbox, but that's almost always a mistake. They're trying to keep things as flat as possible. And you think about size of the Rocket League audience, which has persisted for over 10 years and has grown in many respects, and now I've got bought out by Epic for an undisclosed amount. It must have been around 500 million dollars. It's this one studio, and so the question is like how are they able to retain so many people when they aren't changing their core gameplay at all, and I think the story here is really about the productivity of content and kind of the initial institution that they developed when they developed Rocket League. So, to talk about like the flip reset story, flip resets was a new way to master Rocket League and it was discovered in a February 2016 patch. This was version of 1.11 of the game and it was discovered within one day of the patch going live, and the developers, of course, didn't think anything of the change, so it wasn't even included in the patch notes.
Speaker 3:And to explain what a flip reset is, when you play Rocket League, which is a game in which you are a car and you drive around the car and you try to hit these giant soccer balls into the goal. If you left a service without jumping off it, a player did not have the ability to jump in midair, but the developer thought it'd be cool to jump after going up walls, and so they allowed players to save their flip and then use it in the midair, so you would drive all the way up the wall with your car, you you'd lift off and then you could use your jump once you're in the air, and so you could do really cool flips when you're in there, and now that players could jump in the midair, they could position themselves and they could rotate, and when they were able to rotate, they would rotate all four of their wheels to touch the ball that was in the middle of the air. The ball was recognized as a surface and when it made contact with the ball, it was as though it was resetting, it was reaching that surface again and so they could do another flip. And so now players could do two flips and they can almost create like a swing With these flips, as if they created this kind of this swinging motion after they were doing these resets and they were able to knock the ball around almost as if it were a kick. And the interesting part of this is that this was a spread To these exact communities we were just taking a shit on. The community sentiment was really positive when this mechanic was discovered and it was almost entirely Spread through YouTube clips and reddit posts. The interesting part of this is that it took over a year for this to be integrated into high-level play and yet today it's even standard for amateurs. Very interesting story about how a gameplay system was able to emerge. In this case, they did have to change the institution and it was discovered, but the amount of hours that Mechanic must have provided to the audience is Incredible, and I'm sure we could sit down with the developers and think about what the tail of their LTV curve was. So if they were to add, let's say, a hundred thousand or even like a million extra hours of Total gameplay to Rocket League by having players have to master this mechanic, what would that be in terms of LTV? And that's how I think we could really quantify this. But again, this happened From a game that has relatively few Relationships between the content they put in the game and the things that end up happening.
Speaker 3:A lot of the things that are Discovered in Rocket League are from its natural rule set, and I think the thing that keeps coming up when you discover their natural rule set is this word physics. We've seen in other game, other games and, of course, like physics could mean anything, like every game has some sense of motion, some sense of physics, like a set of rules that govern the universe, or the rule set that governs how objects are created or how objects move through space, or what the laws of motion might be. All games are defined by physics, but we can think of a game that that is physics based or has a lot of rules around physics. As For you to be able to win, you need to master the physics engine or a lot of how Objects have that cause and effect motion for you to be able to be successful in the game. And so, if you play Rocket League, you care a lot about motion. You care a lot about the way in which the ball falls, you care a lot about how your car rotates, you care a lot about how your car might have the very particular types of motion.
Speaker 3:If you look at YouTube, there's a ton of videos of developers and engineers that worked at psionics Going through the physics of the rocket League engine. They talk a lot about motion, and a lot of how you think about motion is Intuitively how these players play. They play as though they have an understanding of things like gravity, friction, weight, elasticity and drag, and, not to mention, you have to think about things like object collision. I'm going at a certain rate with my car, I'm gonna hit this ball, I'm gonna get into a the goal, and so this is something that you have to master, and because these Rules are so vast, there's so many different situations you can find yourself in where you have to master these different rule sets, and so we think about the other Games that have had physics. And then we think about, like human fall flat. Maybe we'll debate this a little bit about whether or not it's a physics-based game, but the motion seems to matter a lot in human fall flat that did 40 million copies.
Speaker 3:We think about fall guys. There's a lot of Motion that I feel like I need to master and fall guys and that may be true for all platformers, but I think there's a very particular type of motion of fall guys that's consistent with how we think about physics. We're talking about portal. Portal was incredibly important to this and it's really how they play with physics engine, how they play with motion, how they play with Location that I think really matters in that. But we've seen a lot of these UGC based games, or not only not UGC, but we see a lot of games that have this sort of physics, this physics Component, to their game, and they have a lot of this emerging gameplay in which Designers didn't intend the game to be played in this particular way and yet players discovered an intuitive way to do it just based on the natural ways of trying to master all the forces of motion, which are so vast so you have this yeah, physics definition, which I really like.
Speaker 1:I think it gets us into the universe, like, of what is emergent gameplay. I think there are a million ways we could argue it. Oh, what about? What about a different gameplay mechanics? We talked in our chat about magic gathering and how there are billions of different combinations of cards. Not necessarily physics there and was that emerging game?
Speaker 3:It's not a necessary condition, by the way, to have physics, for emergent gameplay to come from physics. All I would argue is that physics is a convenient mechanic to deliver the institution that fosters emergent gameplay. It's a good place to start. If you're like wow I, if you almost intend to have unintended gameplay, start with physics. Start with a strong emphasis on physics.
Speaker 2:It's very like kinetically intuitive too. Like you see the ball go up, it'll go down. The big ball hits the little ball, little boy goes flying. Like that. It makes it a lot easier than having an arcane set of rules that are interacting.
Speaker 1:So you taught I think, eric, you had maybe touched this, or maybe it was Phil the idea that, like an emergent gameplay mechanic that does maybe this, this flip that you're talking about, phil, it bring new life to a game. You may have been done with that game and then you discover some new way to play and it brings another 20 hours. A really fun example of this is not the actual Physics in the game, but the physics of playing the game with Tetris. So there's like a flick that you can do with your finger in Tetris to make the. You can do like a 360 degree shift or flip of the piece Faster than it had ever been, ever been done before. And I forget who came up with it, when they came up with it, all this stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm not like a Tetris master, but it was this new way of playing that just changed the game. All the world records before that that Technique was discovered and this is a physical technique. With the controller, you're actually like flicking the controller. You're like using physics, you're hitting, almost hitting the controller to make it to be able to double tap a button faster than your finger can actually move, and it changed everything. Everybody, all the sun, comes in and says oh, now that there's a new way to Play the game, the records need to be reset. Maybe it's more exciting because I have this additional gameplay mechanic where, instead of just pressing the buttons, I'm like actually shaking my freaking hands, I so I really like this idea of physics and like just the Infinite dimensionality of putting something in physical space. You add in dimension or you add in direction and you add in any sort of gameplay or physics principle, like velocity, speed.
Speaker 3:I think that the other thing I'd point out that I think is interesting about rocket league in the example that you just gave is that for a lot of this to emerge, it is most convenient for it to emerge under PvP systems in which mastery of the physics Gives you some sort of return on investment and I think, almost counter intuitively, the games that don't have strong wind conditions, even if they have physics, tend to see a lot less emerge out of them like that. Competitive pressure has things like you just mentioned. It basically forces people to explore a lot of different strategies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one thing I love about competitive games is that, like I said, the objective keeps rising and the new Development and skill and technology keeps improving to try to reach that goal. Competitive pressure is an amazing thing. On the physics note, I think, if you contrast Rocket League, which is very physical, to say Omega Strikers, which is soccer like game made by Odyssey Interactive shoutouts to Dax I love that guy, but the game has very weak on the physics. It's like very simple, it's like even simpler than air hockey and I think it just doesn't have the same level of like kinetic Depth that Rocket League does. Yeah, physics engine is adding a lot of nuance to the gameplay in Rocket League.
Speaker 1:Now there's other ways to Incorporate emergent or, I guess, to have emergent gameplay and it doesn't necessarily have physics so like when you first mentioned emergent gameplay fill. The first game that came to my mind was Eve Online and how their entire political system is pretty much all Player made their books, huge books written about the politics and history of Eve Online, and so I think to me, eve get so physics, having a very robust physics engine, gives you a ton of liberty and a ton of space to experiment. Eve was similar in an economic capacity, in that it was really just like a free market, a marketplace and some professions and some stuff to do, and just the Amount of dynamism that came out of that game was incredible. People created professions that didn't exist, that the game developers didn't originally intend, and I think that's really interesting. And, eric, you posted a YouTube video of that CEO, eve Online CEO guy who took over the corporation and then stole all their money and left.
Speaker 2:Yes, I've got ran a Ponzi scheme and Eve.
Speaker 1:The greatest heist of all time. I think that's amazing, and to me that's emergent gameplay.
Speaker 2:The guy tried to fake his own death in real life. He tried to Said he got hit by a bus and then yeah. So it's bleeding into the real world talk about a merchants emerging from the digital into the physical.
Speaker 3:I think the story that I end up telling these days is really thinking about productivity of content. So that was a very simple and cheap rule change that psionics made to introduce these flip resets and again, it was unintentional that when they made this change they didn't know was gonna provide thousands of hours of gameplay mastery. But there is something I think interesting about Okay, when I have a piece of content, ultimately that's gonna be at some usually fixed costs, because we are dealing with software. You build a hat or you're gonna build a cosmetic hat as a fixed cost to it good.
Speaker 2:No, I think you nailed it there where it's like that. If you build robust infrastructure, then it's much cheaper for things on top of that instructor to get built. If you have a robust physics system, it's much easier. I wouldn't call it.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't call it infrastructure, because infrastructure to me like implies almost like a platform, like it's easy to employ employee systems. I think this is really about the institution that you've created, like when I think about the core gameplay, like, that is the institution so we think about, like a magic, the gathering magic. The gathering has a set of rules and we introduce new content in that it interacts in particular ways and each piece of content has some sort of productivity, and I think one of the things that determines its productivity is the strategic number of options that you can get out of it, and there are so many, there's so much, there's so much experimentation, there's so much discovery. Equilibrium has reached fairly quickly, and then a lot of it is about mastering those said mechanics, being able to pull off that, that special move, and I think what physics does is that it makes a lot of content productive that wouldn't otherwise be productive.
Speaker 3:I don't think people have figured out how to monetize that directly, like when I think about fall guys. What you're really monetizing is the additional retention that physics gives, and you can do that through cosmetics. But no one's thinking about a closer relationship of what that monetization looks like. But again, the thing that's really powerful here is that I can have this really powerful set of rules that everyone wants to master and their win condition is dependent on them mastering these laws of motion and then building things around that seem to be cheap, like fall guys can just build more levels. There's different. It's still simple. You can only go up and down. It's a very it's a very limited set of kind of motion, but a lot of the things they still introduce, like they hit you in different ways or they have different things. They have to time and Rockin leagues the same way, super smash.
Speaker 2:Brothers, melee, dude. That game, all of the depth of that game, comes from the physics engine. There's so many other smash games, but this is the one people think of merch cause the physics engine creates. Yeah, no, there's tons of insane emergent gameplay. I could talk for hours about this, but I don't want to chew your ears off. But like, people are still discovering new tech technology in this game 20 years out, where if you.
Speaker 2:For example, the wave dash is probably the famous one where, in that game, you can dodge in the air and, like you, can instantaneously move in a certain direction, and if you do this into the ground, you'll retain your momentum. So, if you slide down to the left into the ground, you'll slide to the left, you'll retain your momentum and While moving along the ground. So this allows you to be sliding forward while doing an attack or sliding backwards while doing an action, for starters. But on top of that, it creates situations where, like you can slide off a ledge and now you're sliding off a platform with momentum in Moving in a unique way you couldn't, covering angles that you couldn't before.
Speaker 2:There's things where you know ordinarily, when you're holding your shield, you're very limited options. Out of shield, you can do defensive dodges, but you can also jump, and then, if you jump, you can also do a wave dash, sliding along the ground, which allows you to act out of shield in different ways. Anyway, the whole point is this is all emergent from the physics engine. It was unintended, like they, the developers, knew it existed, but they were like oh, like, this is a weird Momentum trick, no one's gonna do anything with this, and now it's a staple of competitive play and there's more of these discoveries getting made, like every few years in this very old game, and To your point. This greatly extends the engagement of the game. If the physics engine was more simple, if it wasn't able to allow for these Emergent properties, people wouldn't be practicing to this game so many years out.
Speaker 1:So mainly used a very different physics engine than the than any other game. That's it.
Speaker 2:That's why this is. Yeah, it's custom for the game and after that it was such so hard to build that the director soccer I was like fuck it, we're outsourcing it. And then the next several games had very bad physics engines.
Speaker 3:It's strange to me that a lot of games don't let you play with the physics engine more like. I can think of very few games that expose that at the user level. We think about UGC. It mostly is about geometry. Even if it's a more limited builder like halo infinite being an example, they usually don't let you play with the physics a bit and I wonder if you're reaching too far up into the engine stack. But if this is really where a lot of emergent gameplay can come from, I do wonder if we should let. We should let designers or like game Players play, tweak, tweak it a little bit more.
Speaker 2:Thanks, cs. Go surf maps, fame, tweaking the or like rocket jump maps. But I think one reason they don't mess with it too much is because it affects your like kinesthetic, like your muscle memory, if you're used to like. Okay, if I'm bunny hopping, I have to press the buttons.
Speaker 3:At this rate, any of you change the physics a little bit, it's good to we were talking about earlier, like a lot of this is emerged under PvP systems, like when we think about the Hayaki and story here about what emerges. How does order come from? No order at all. There is an order at the beginning, which is the institution, which the institution is about winning and whatever winning means, and I think, intuitively, that that has a notion to it. Like just, I want to win the rocket league match, even if it's not connected to rank or account level progression. There's just something intuitive about winning.
Speaker 3:But once you set up an institution, like people also self-organized. It's interesting ways, like you were just talking about, like people self-organizing for pickleball, like, I imagine, almond of competitiveness there like people will self-organize and then like dominant strategies emerge, like it's. It's very similar to biology is that when you have a mutation or you have some sort of like genetic advantage, they end up like eating the ecosystem and, over time, capturing a larger and larger share. And this is exactly we saw with the flip resets. Rocket League is a really competitive game had it had the physics that are directly connected to you being able to win the match.
Speaker 3:Someone discovered a new mechanic that let them win the match and it took over a year, but now it's a normal gameplay, like I think that's. The thing that's interesting is that this is now the new standard. Like that, to me, has always been the unique part and the same thing within chess. If someone were that someone were to take someone who 100 years ago Play chess and we're we were to bring them to now, they get racked. Isn't that the common consensus?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, definitely. If top players versus top players, I'm sure they'd be. But the game hasn't changed, it's just new things have emerged from that.
Speaker 3:That same set of rules like the productivity it's not even the productivity of content, because there's almost no content going to it, it's just the productivity of the core rule set is so strong.
Speaker 1:It's pure information. They have more information now and that's what it was. Phil, do you think that you need more to system complexity? So you've talked about the institution. We need competition, we need this sense of urgency to master and to to become the dominant strain, like this evolutionary Principle. Do you need to have complexity in order to do that best? The fog light guys has a very simple game mechanic, but their physics is pretty robust, say I would argue same with with Rocket League. If you explain that in game mechanics terms, like to a game designer, it sounds really simple. But from a physics point of view, so where does the what's the return to physics Complexity and what's the return to gameplay complexity?
Speaker 3:I think you'd want to tie the physics engine or mastery of the physics engine to your wind probability and I think that's where the disconnect and fall guys happens, because fall guys didn't have great initial retention Is that you stomp. Some guys does, and that was mostly because they put more cosmetics into it. But again, I think that tells us that not a whole lot was emerging from that gameplay. And I think a whole lot was not emerging from that gameplay because there wasn't a strong enough relationship between me Understanding their physics engine and understanding cause and effect and all of those things like my knowledge was not tested. Because of that. It wasn't conditional on me winning, like it still is still pretty much a platformer, whereas as Rocket League, the connection could not be more stronger. The entire game is about motion, and so I think it really comes down to Figuring out how close that relationship should be for physics in particular and for high productivity.
Speaker 2:It's like the skill curve if I put an hour into practice, how much better do I get directly?
Speaker 3:related to master the physics engine. This is why disc golf is so it. It is some some way like how you have that initial throw, like mastering that motion is incredibly satisfying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely true, and that's why whenever I have somebody who's new who I'm introducing this golf, I tell them to throw the putter, which is like the short-range disc, but it's because it's more stable, not because it doesn't go far, and so initially they're bummed because it's this slow disc that doesn't go very far. But they have really good throws, much better throws, and it's much more satisfying. They get to see cause and effect. If you hit a tree within 10 feet. You're not getting to see that cause and effect. You're not getting to experiment, and it sounds like we've concluded that experimentation and Consequences are very important. I work on the fundamentals.
Speaker 2:Phil, I really like what you said about productivity of content. I think magic is a great example where so magic uses a stack and a ton of emergent gameplay comes from that stack. Imagine if they'd used a cue instead, like their productivity of content would be much lower. The amount of interactions and like surprise Combinations or complex scenarios would be way fewer. So that early fundamental design decision to use a cue and a stack instead of a cue.
Speaker 3:It's like that's a fucking great example. Can you fucking talk about the difference between a cue and a stack?
Speaker 1:What is it? The design decision Okay your Garfield made.
Speaker 3:That makes magic. The gathering stack, not a cue. Why is that? An interesting mechanic or what it? Whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Chris, you probably know this better than I happen to talk about it. I imagine you're bubbling with energy.
Speaker 1:Well, I like I don't. I think the stack is really hard for people to understand because they think of it as a cue, and so their natural inclination is to think of a cue, and then, when you try to explain the stack to them, they're initially confused but you take it sure, and these come the concept come from computer science.
Speaker 2:Richard Garfield was a compsci professor, which is probably why you thought about this. But so there's two systems for processing sequential events. One is a cue first in, first out. So let's say I play a lightning bolt to try to kill your creature. And or let's say I, I play a giant growth to make my Creature stronger, my of a 1-1 creature, I give it plus three, so now it is for toughness. And then so my opponent plays a lightning bolt that does three damage to it. What happens in a cue system? First the giant growth triggers, so the creature gets stronger, then the lightning bolt hits it, so it does for a three damage, but it still has one toughness and it survived.
Speaker 2:First in, first out. A stack is the opposite. First stack is first in, last out. You can imagine a stack of dishes where, as you're stacking it up, like the last thing you put on top is the first thing you need to process. So in this situation I attack with my 1-1, I play giant growth to make it bigger into a 4-4. But then my opponent puts, so that's the bottom plate, and then my opponent plays a lightning bolt, so that's the second plate on top. Now the lightning bolt does three damage. It resolves first, which means the three damage gets dealt to my creature before giant growth can trigger, which causes my creature to die. And then giant growth attempts to be cast, but the creatures already dead from the lightning bolt. So that's the key, that's the step first in last out.
Speaker 1:It's simultaneously one of the most frustrating and exciting things that you learn. When you first start playing magic, when you first Experience the stack, you're angry because you're like I already used my giant growth, why isn't my creature big? I did it before you, and so it's. You get frustrated. But then you realize the beauty of this interplay and the instance and you're like holy shit, but I can also lightning bolt somebody after they've made the decisions, and it's why information is so Incredible. I have seen people win tournaments because they Pretended that they were gonna do something and there's a big debate on whether that's like skill or grift. They, you, you don't know what's in the other person's hand and the stack. If it weren't for the stack, it wouldn't matter what other people have in their hands. I can play my giant growth without worrying about the consequences.
Speaker 2:It's beautiful, yeah because the stack allows the lightning bolt player to react. It allows the lightning bolt player to respond oh, you pumped your creature. No, you can't, I'm gonna stop you. And the ability to react. It creates all sorts of interplay, because now you're thinking okay, I want to hold on to this lightning bolt so I can play it in case I need to react. So now it creates prediction and anticipation, whereas in the world where the guide both triggers immediately, it's big. Okay, nothing you can do.
Speaker 3:Here comes the 4-4 now I will say, oh, I actually think we're getting. I think we're getting somewhere very interesting with this, which is that what you just described is an element of theory crafting, and I think what that rule set did is it introduced a Larger space for me to theory craft like. To me, a cue is clearly. It clearly presents a smaller decision space for the player to consider when they're thinking about all these different cards and the stack introduces a much larger strategic space for both players to interact with, and and when we think about the success of roguelike genre like that's, one of the things that's really interesting is like being able to theory craft.
Speaker 3:I think where I draw the line here is that You're able to do things that the game designer didn't intend. That, to me, is the key piece of immersion. Gameplay is that they didn't intend for this to happen. It just emerges naturally out of this rule set and the strategic space that people start experimenting with, and I think physics engines present a Lot of that. The big serving Sorry, go ahead. There's a lot of theory crafting.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to remember what I was gonna say, eric, what had you had said last, the last thing you had?
Speaker 2:said, the stack allows you to like lighting multiplayer, to like anticipate and predict and like more layers of gameplay.
Speaker 1:Here's a really so it all comes down to information asymmetry. A lot of the reason that the strategy space is more interesting and deep for a Stack as opposed to a cue is because of information asymmetry. With a cue, you don't have to worry as much about a information asymmetry, because it basically cuts off a whole bunch of different options. If I use my giant growth, I don't have to worry. If it's a cue, I don't have to worry about lightning bolt. I have to worry about scorch or something that's gonna deal six damage but I don't have to worry about. So it basically cuts in half your strategy. The possible Counter to your player could do when was I going with that shit? Oh, this is. This is why Digital implementation is really interesting.
Speaker 1:One of the very frustrating things about playing physical magic is you need to in my opinion, it's polite to make sure that the person has passed Priority. So if I play my giant growth, I need to make sure that my opponent has passed priority back to me and they have nothing to react with, and so you have to. That sometimes can lead to revealed information. That isn't really fair. It's not symmetric, where you I personally have in the past said would you like to react to this, because I know I'm about to fuck them up with a secret and if they don't react, then it gives me priority and I can basically put a big giant attack through. So what I've had and physical magic in the past Is someone say, after I've, after I declare attackers, I declare attackers.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, in a sanction tournament this would not fly. I declare attackers and then I say okay, and then I immediately use a, I use some sort of trick and oh man, I'm now. I'm forgetting what the order of operations is here. But basically they decide that they want to react after the fact, after the moment is passed. In digital magic that can't happen. You have to physically, you have to like digitally, pass priority. But in physical magic it's a little awkward and you can give away too much information by asking people questions. Just a plus one for digital magic, not a magic gathering, but it can pick.
Speaker 2:But yeah, you know that the decision to use the stack has made magic cards way more valuable as content, way more Explosive, multiplicative in terms of how engaging they are to players, and I'm sure it's increased their long-term value of the franchise. I.
Speaker 3:Think maybe there's one other thing I want to just finish up with is that there's also a place in which Emerging gameplay can can be difficult to control as a designer, especially if you're trying to balance something like magic gathering. There's a lot of uncertainty when there's a merchant gameplay because you're not sure what's going to emerge, and so it's hard to do very explicit design, which is sometimes purposeful, and sometimes, when you look at Marvel snap, for example, I actually think a lot of the things that they did were very interesting was actually shrinking the strategic space and actually shrinking a lot of the emerging gameplay, or at least transitioning how the emerging gameplay emerges. So they don't have a notion of the stack, they don't have instance, they just have a lot of these card flips and a lot of these ways these lanes interact and again they're able to get that theory crafting, which I think is really key for this working gameplay thing to happen. But yeah, I don't know where I was gonna go with this, but yeah, I guess there's.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of different. It's very important to consider, like, where you want to inject the emergence, what are the things that you want to have control over and which are the things that you're happy to give control over as a game developer, because you can also create problems from yourself. Bad things can emerge. There's no guarantee that it's all. It's always gonna be good For anybody who played magic gathering about two years.
Speaker 1:No, oh Jesus, probably three or four years now. You'll remember Oco that absolutely took over the meta for standard and kind ruin the game for a lot of people. That's the ugly side of this emerging gameplay that you get cool beans, episode 14.
Speaker 3:In the can game, economists cast.
Speaker 2:See you guys. We should teach this to our children economics.
Speaker 1:Everyone has to major in economics. Number one for personal survival economics.
