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OldSpend vs NewSpend
A couple weeks back, the blogging theme of the week was looking at how much money you’ve spent on Steam over the years. I was not entirely interested at the time, but after navigating my way to the result, what I did find interesting were two distinct numbers:
“OMG I spent $2,846.65 over the course of… like 21 years!” Sure. I don’t consider $11.30/month over more than two decades a particularly noteworthy entertainment budget. Especially considering I played WoW for more than half that time. Certainly cheaper than (now) Netflix.
No, the interesting number is the OldSpend of $1,853.89. That number (already in the total) is defined as money spent before 2015, when there was presumably some updates to the backend systems. Which means I spent 66% of the total amount on Steam games in the first 10 years as compared to the last 11. That tracks with the rise of Humble Bundles, the decline of Steam sales, and so on.
Steam is still getting their cut of sales from these middlemen, but I did find it interesting nonetheless.
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
GameStop.
The minute you hear that name, chances are you had some kind of visceral reaction. Was it happiness or elation? Probably not. I don’t actually know if there is a positive “visceral” reaction to anything.
For me in particular, GameStop is like OG Pawn Stars. It’s a place where you took your old games and got $7 in-store credit and watched them slap a $45 price tag when they placed it back up on the shelf. And the staff would shadow your footsteps trying to upsell you on subscriptions or preorders when you were really just killing time near the movie theater (remember those?) or before getting a haircut (remember those?). That pushy behavior makes a bit more sense when you realized the insane quota requirements management levied on the near-minimum wage workers. And who can forget the time when that same management asserted that its stores were “essential retail” and thus should remain open in the middle of a pandemic. Suffice it to say, this is not a chain with a particularly great reputation. Even amongst its target audience.
Why bring this up now? Well, there are two things going on. Technically three, but I’ll get to that.
The first is that the stock price has rocketed up in the last week. Back in March, GameStop stock was trading at $2.80. Nearly everyone, myself included, felt like it was really going to be the next Blockbuster: a former retail giant in its niche who chose hubris over innovation, and let the world pass it by. If you have been in a GameStop lately, you can see that they’re trying – nearly 50% of the store is now gaming merchandise, like Minecraft T-shirts and various tchotchkes that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hot Topic. Which, okay, good for them and whomever is out there buying those sort of things. But as both Microsoft and Sony release flagship consoles with digital-only editions at a lower price-point, surely the days of physical media and those who focus on selling it are numbered?
Remember when I said GameStop was at $2.80/share in March? Friday it closed down 11% to… $35.50. It was really at about $20 on Tuesday (1/12) before it rocketed up to a high of $41 mid-Thursday, and now here we are.
What happened? Last Monday, Ryan Cohen from Chewy.com fame and two of his executive buddies landed seats on the GameStop board of directors, after owning 13% of all the shares. What’s Chewy.com? It’s a place to order online pet food. Which… yeah. If you’re older than 35, that may remind you of Pets.com back in the heady 2000 internet-bubble days. The difference here is Ryan founded Chewy in 2011 and sold it to PetSmart in 2017 for $3.35 billion. It’s now worth $44+ billion. And all this was done despite Amazon being a thing. Apparently their relentless focus on customer service is what puts them over the top with most people.
In that regard, the speculation here is that Ryan can pull the same magic with GameStop. And I can see it. The current retail experience cannot possibly be worse, so any meaningful improvements would do wonders. Plus the online shopping experience… well, it’s not that bad, when there are things actually in stock. Can’t really blame GameStop for that specifically though; just try finding a non-scalped Switch anywhere for MSRP. Point being, there is room for improvement.
One the biggest advantages and reasons I care about this at all though, is the simple reality of resale. If not GameStop, then where? Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay? People do it, I guess, but I prefer to not have to rehearse hostage negotiations strategies before heading to a parking lot to acquire luxury goods. “OK, I’ll hold the envelope in my left hand and take the Vita in my right.” Places like eBay might be good for buying things – there are some customer-focused policies to cover situations where you open the box to find a literal brick inside – but from a seller-standpoint, it’s nerve-wracking. Those same customer-focused policies make it easy for buyers to scam you by claiming it broke in transit or claim you sent a brick. That gets us back to hostage negotiation wherein the correct move is to film yourself putting the console in a box, which probably wouldn’t hold up in court anyway. Maybe you can get UPS to vouch for you, or pack it themselves?
So, yeah. I like the possibility of rolling in somewhere with this unused PS3 and get $5 for it or whatever. The local Pawn Shop sure as shit won’t take it (I asked), and my only other option would be to throw it away via Good Will. Just kidding, I still hold out hope that one day I will turn it on.
Anyway, there’s all that. Back in 2019 I had some schadenfreude over GameStop’s then-collapsing stock price ($3-$5) but pointed out how I wish them to stick around for resale purposes. And at that time, I also mentioned resale of digital goods. Even if they somehow pulled digital resale off, it probably won’t be the bounty that it may have been back then: Steam and the Epic Store would directly compete (if forced), and the Game Pass reality we live in means less people are buying licenses to games to begin with. There is some speculation that GameStop could instead start leveraging themselves into being a physical meeting space for gamers, or start selling PC parts like a mini-Microcenter (one of the best retail stores for that, but only 25 in the whole US). That’s probably the better avenue to take, IMO, as they already have stores everywhere and I’d love to have a place to go to see if a mechanical keyboard is any good or to see the difference between a VA, TN, and IPS computer monitor in-person. Price-match Amazon in-store with something I can take home that minute? Now we’re talking.
We shall see where things go.
[Edit] In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been selling puts on GameStop stock since November. Selling puts is not the same thing as buying puts – selling means I’ve been betting that its stock will go up and not back down. I am not recommending any financial advice here.
Factoids from Smed
In the midst of phat beats the Smedster was laying down yesterday, there were a few random facts I didn’t want to let slip through the cracks.
In practice, our primary job is making fun games. That always comes first. PS2 was a $25M investment. (source)
It is pretty rare that we get to see how much a game costs directly from a knowledgeable source.
Player Studio items – let me make this simple. We excluded them because we didn’t like the idea of giving away someone else’s item. The player who made it would get no revenue in that case because it’s a free item. We are considering just eating the cost of this. Either way we are likely going to allow Player Studio items. (source)
In case you were wondering about the “eating the cost” comment for Player Studio items. Here is a bigger drop though:
We’re in the middle of developing Everquest Next Landmark (on schedule right now for end of this month). We rebooted the game 3 times. It was a massive delay and it hurt us financially. But it was the right thing to do for us, and for the industry. Most importantly you all are going to get to play something we’re very proud of and we think is a whole lot of fun. (source)
Emphasis added. So… the weird sort of “marketing” surrounding EQN:L is starting to make sense. Namely, SOE didn’t know what the hell they were doing either. That’s almost comforting. But a little scary too, considering it appears as though SOE is going to be leaning on EQN:L for financial stability.
We’ll have to see how it plays out, but for my part, I am liable to start my SOE subscription back up once I can start playing EQN:L given how I’ll likely be getting PlanetSide 2 bonuses as well.
There And Back Again?
I came across a thread on Reddit which was a pining for the “old days” of MMOs when you either grouped up or didn’t get to actually play the game. Which, now that I think about it, is a scenario not all that different from empty FPS servers. Anyway, the top-rated comment concluded with this:
The truth of the matter is, those of us that grew up on the hardcore MMOs, we’ve already done it. Most of us just don’t want to do it again. I don’t want to play a MMO that takes over a year to hit the level cap. I don’t want to play a MMO where I have to stand around for hours before I get to play. I don’t want to play a MMO where I can permanently lose everything I’ve done in the last few hours. I’ve already done that; I don’t want to do it again. The novelty of the MMO is gone. There are better ways to enjoy my time.
There is a nuance to this argument that I don’t see all that often, and I’d be interested in what other veteran MMO players have to say about it. It’s one thing to say that once some auto-grouping functions are released, like LFD or LFR, that there is no removing them. But put those aside for a moment and ask yourself: how many times do I feel like I could start over in a “pure” MMO (whatever you define that as)?
Maybe the question is nonsensical, considering we technically “start over” each time we play a new game. On the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced another MMO could bribe me enough to get back into raiding as a full-time job again. Even if your game of choice was EVE, how willing would you be to starting over in a completely new game with similar time-investment requirements? Still willing to spend 1-2 years of real-time building up a skill set? Or do these sort of investment mechanics have diminishing returns regardless of “dumbing down” or other streamlining that might go on?
Wirehead
I have obviously been posting a lot about Guild Wars 2, mainly because that is what I have been doing for the last few weeks. There are some additional such posts in the pipeline. But behind all this seeming enthusiasm lies the similar feeling of… offness that Spinks talked about.
While playing, I feel an irrational need to hit every resource node I come across. It feels good. Which is… good. Fine. But when I think about the game as a whole, I see no future in it for me. So many people online and in-game mention that the lack of endgame progression is not an issue because you are not paying a subscription. “Just stop playing.”
…but this is an MMO.
An MMO, to me, makes no sense to play sporadically. If you are not committed to the idea of playing often (or everyday), what are you doing? Why am I hitting resource nodes and selling things and hoarding gems if I will be uninstalling in a few months? Doing something only tangentially fun for weeks (e.g. dailies) makes sense to me if your final reward is something you can reasonably use for X amount of time. If you immediately stop after achieving the goal, my time retroactively feels wasted.
Nevermind how the “community” aspect is supposed to develop without player continuity.
Think about Tiny Tower, or 10000000, or any number of “time-management” iOS games. I bought 10000000 off of a Penny Arcade recommendation, and it is basically Bejeweled with RPG elements. I got really into it, maximizing resource gains, plotting out upgrades, “grinding,” and so on. Then I won. And felt empty.
I get post-game depression fairly often, a vague feeling of loss. Even if I had fun along the way, the post-game mood usually makes me question why I bothered in the first place. What mitigates such feelings is usually the sense that I still accumulated something, be it twitch-skills from FPS games (pro skills from Counter-Strike carry over into Battlefield 3, etc) or the experience of a story in the case of many RPGs or proper books. I played Xenogears over a decade ago for 80 hours one time, and I still think about it occasionally.
I will not think about Tiny Tower or 10000000 a decade from now. Nor, potentially, Guild Wars 2. Those games were/have been/are fun to play, respectively. But I am not looking for opportunities to kill time with amusing diversions. I do not have enough time, in fact. What I am looking for are opportunities to “invest” my time, or at least a simulation thereof, while having fun too.
Scott Adams once quipped that the last invention humanity will ever make is a Holodeck. As soon as that was built and marketed, humanity would collectively starve to death inside a Holodeck two weeks later. The future is actually much simpler than Holodecks or realistic VR headsets and such – the future is a wire in your brain that stimulates your nucleus accumbens directly. Watching college sports or playing MMOs or contemplating the vastness of the universe are all primitive methods of manually fondling your glands. The dark secret of The Matrix is that the overlay was completely unnecessary – a little bit of electricity in the right spot removes the inefficient middleman of reality.
The above may seem a non sequitur, but here is the connection: I feel Guild Wars 2 is simply a wire in my head. It generates good feelings, but doesn’t mean anything. It is a personal problem, of course. But all problems are ultimately personal problems. And I grow increasingly weary of doing fun things while simultaneously waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Playing Guild Wars 2 feels like going to Disneyland ahead of the apocalypse.
“So stop playing.” I’m sorry, I cannot hear you over the humming of this wire in my head.
In An Age 
Reinvestment
Mar 1
Posted by Azuriel
Palworld, as we’ve established, is having a moment. A sensation, if you will. The latest figures is it selling 25 million copies across Steam and Xbox in a single month. It also breached the 2.1 million concurrent players milestone on Steam, which puts it at #2 of all time, above even Counter-Strike. Palworld has not sustained that concurrency, but it’s nevertheless in exclusive company.
That’s not really what I wanted to talk about today though.
I want to talk about the Japanese blog post by the Palworld game director that was released three days before the official launch. It details the 5+ miracles that he credits with even being able to get Palworld released at all. For example, the gunplay was all designed by a 20-year old convenience store clerk they found on Twitter, who created 3D renders of weapon reload animations in his free time. There are other bits of interesting serendipity, so let Google auto-translate for you and take the ride.
One element that struck me in particular though: funding.
So that was Miracle #5, in that they basically built Palworld without setting a budget at all. It’s actually a bit more interesting than even that, because they didn’t originally want to spend a lot of time making the game at all. But, due to the positive feedback from the initial trailers, they decided to go for broke.
What really gets me though is this last part:
In case you were unaware, before Palworld this company released Craftopia. Which is also still in Early Access. The game isn’t bad, actually, and shows a lot of promise under the jank. Or showed. Because although it is clear that Craftopia’s measured success bankrolled Palworld, it’s not so clear whether any of those millions of Palworld dollars will make their way back back to Craftopia. And that’s just sad.
I get it – this is how most things work pretty much everywhere, especially in the game industry. Release game, collect revenue, use money to continue employing people to create new game, repeat. Indeed, if a particular release falls flat on its face, not only is that series’ future imperiled, sometimes the company itself is at risk. But in this case, the original game (Craftopia) isn’t even done yet. The creators of ARK infamously released a DLC to their Early Access game, but it was arguably necessary because they were running out of cash ($40 million lawsuit settlement will do that to you). I get no sense that Pocket Pair were in similar straits. Rather, it was likely a cold calculation that the Craftopia well was drying up and it was time to move on to other milkshakes, to mix metaphors.
Obviously, the move worked out for Pocket Pair. And, yeah, for millions of players too. I am happy for these devs’ success, as their willingness to try random shit and just go for it is (hopefully) an inspiration to other studios. I just hope some of that Palworld money comes back to Craftopia in a meaningful way, and not just a “we’ll keep these five original dudes employed in a broom closet” way. They don’t have to and economically it would probably be a mistake. But I think they owe it to themselves.
And that’s because without Craftopia there literally wouldn’t be a Palworld. Not just in the funding aspect either. Craftopia actually has capture spheres, riding creatures, and even the ability to capture human NPCs. This is a “Yo dawg, I put Early Access in your Early Access” situation – Palworld is probably 25% of what Craftopia already delivered years ago. Is it the best 25%? Well, it’s hard to argue against a literal pile of
free speechcash.I suppose we’ll have to see how Pocket Pair proceeds. There is technically still a roadmap for Craftopia (circa December 2023) and there have been a few bug patches released since then. I seriously doubt that any amount of reinvestment will have Craftopia achieve a comparable level of success as Palworld – clearly even AAA games have been blown aside – but I do hope that they at least replenish the coffers and allow Craftopia to reach release with the vision and funds it originally earned.
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Tags: Bait & Switch, Craftopia, Early Access, Investment, Palworld, Pocket Pair