Graphics? Storyline? Or Price?

What is it that makes people choose the games they choose? As someone going into the industry I would hope the answer would be something that can be easily controlled by the designers. Be it a compelling story line, deep characters or, as much as I disagree, shiny, realistic, graphics. The news delivered from the Human-Computer Interaction conference in Cambridge last week, however, suggests otherwise.

Russell Beale and Matthew Bond of the University of Birmingham delivered their findings from a paper titled “What makes a good game? Using reviews to inform
design” at the conference, and what came out may surprise us all, or maybe not. The days where you can judge a games success based on the innovation it provides or the gameplay, even just on how shiny and high-res the graphics are has gone. Here’s the abstract of the paper, the (slightly unfinished) text of which can be found here (PDF).

The characteristics that identify a good game are hard to define
and reproduce, as demonstrated by the catalogues of both
successes and failures from most games companies. We have
started to address this by undertaking a grounded theoretical
analysis of reviews garnered from games, both good and bad, to
distil from these common features that characterize good and bad games. A good game is cohesive, varied, has good user
interaction and offers some form of social interaction. The most
important factor to avoid is a bad pricing – if your game fails at
everything else, an accordingly low price might just save it.

Now the need for “good user interaction” is hardly a surprise. If you can’t use the controls to do what you want, when you want, in an intuitive way, well, you won’t enjoy the gaming experience. Ever since the introduction of online gaming 10 years ago with the Dreamcast (Yes, I still love it) it has become a staple of many games on consoles, and, of course, there are PCs. You often see games with online play, it comes in all shapes and forms, and sometimes as a late addition to simply try and shift more copies. Then you see the big one. “If your game fails at everything else, an accordingly low price might save it.”

Bad games get a low price point. That is how it has always been, and how it always shall be. Good games, after a certain time, get a lower price, and some extra sales may be had, but price does not, at least as far as I am concerned save a game, and it never should.

The paper does state, in the body, that factors such as gameplay and storytelling matter, but they appear to be secondary factors when compared to the other factors. The fact a “franchise” matters isn’t that surprising, based mainly on the fact that we see copies of the new Halo or RockBand or Grand Theft Auto, even when we know that Halo was always over-hyped and the last real GTA was Vice City. The fact that price is a major factor just doesn’t sit right with me.

Now I know that it says “priced accordingly” and that if there is a truly wonderful game then a price tag will be expected to be high, but does a £5 game that has no story, no character development and no re-play value really sell as well as a £35/40 game that has everything you want?

We all know the cries that have come from the industry, and not just gaming, but also film and music, about the problem of piracy. We all know it happens, but the thing is, if a pirate pirates a game and likes it, thinks that actually he wants to support the developers, then he will buy the game, or most will. Yes piracy, and people wanting something for nothing, comes in to this, but there is another one.

I know what I am about to say will come out as me bashing the standard company I love to hate, but hear me out. The Apple App Store offers people games. A stupidly high amount of games, many of which are not that great. If your game costs 99 cents, or 99p, or some equally low price point, the game is going to get high in the charts. Games high in these charts sell more, and keep in the top zone. People are becoming accustomed to games costing a small amount, and they expect this to spread from their “gaming” phone/iPod to everything. It won’t, and it shouldn’t.

It is a shame we live at a time when price makes up for poor quality, because as well all know, if you buy something bad and the creators see this they will keep turning out rubbish. Look what all those ticket sales for Transformers have done.

MTFBWY

————————————————————————————

All original content of this post is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License, as stated in the left sidebar. The content from “What makes a good game? Using reviews to inform design” by Russell Beale and Matthew Bond is used under license and may be used for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage. Permission for scope outside of this requires permission and/or fee.