Game developers have
families. They should be able to support them solely with their game
development efforts. Hence, games need some way to monetize, that is
to make money. Game developers should not depend on handouts from
family members who do not even like gaming, such as grandma who
doesn’t play games. Instead they should make money from those who
do play games, but who have decided that they would rather do other
things with their time, and find other ways of making money, other
than in the development of games. If game developers are the only
ones who support other game developers, you end up with a situation,
that is much like the sad situation in life coaching, where the so
called big money is in what is known as coach coaching. The people
who could really benefit from the service are ignored, in favor of
people of think they need the service, but probably don’t.
So, now that we
have made the determination that game developers need to make a
decent living, we are left with ways that games can make money. Much
of the time, free software zealots have made software as a service to
be some kind of evil, evil like facebook, twitter and microsoft,
stealing your private data for corporate gain. On the practical side
however, people still use servers, and in some cases some sort of
centralized, or semi-centralized server makes technical sense.
Everyone wants to federate everything, and while that is a laudable
goal, as a practical matter people just visit other people’s web
servers all the time, if only to do some online shopping.
So, first of all,
we need to remind people that this is just game data, your character,
your characters stuff, and statistics stored in some remote location
on the internet. It isn’t all this personal information about you,
the person, but rather some avatar completely abstracted from the
person playing it. Secondly, we need to remind people that online
games do have benefits not achieved in single player games, benefits
of dynamic content and social interactions. This does not mean that
every game can, or should be an online game. Some games are single
player, and should just stay that way, paid for in advance by people
who want it developed, rather than collecting royalties for every
copy sold. But for those multi-player games, server hosting is a
perfectly ethical way to make a living.
Now, just setting
up a server does not make a game developer rich, in fact it cost
money, both in hardware and hosting, so all the more reason to
justify charging users for using it. But users are loath to pay
money for something if they don’t even know if it is any good.
Hence many servers give out something like cheap trial memberships,
with a limited set of features enabled for free accounts, while paid
accounts get more features enabled. This is a great way for game
developers to make money.
Sometimes, this is
not enough, and naturally game developers want to make as much money
as they can make from developing games. So, game developers came up
with the idea of loot boxes. These are random items that may or may
not enhance game play, either by allowing characters to progress
further in the game faster, allowing them to do things they could not
otherwise do, or by changing a characters appearance.
Let us take these
ideas one at a time. First let us discuss the idea of progressing in
a game faster. Some people like to spend money on games to progress
faster because they have a real job and not a lot of time to play
games. They want to keep up with all the kids who have stupid jobs,
and no families and come home and play games for hours on end, not to
mention the no lifers who have some kind of disability and spend
almost all their waking hours on the game. Hence, the need to sell
faster progression in a game to users so they can be competitive with
those who have too much time to waste on the game. The mechanism of
spending real life money to go faster in a game only makes logical
sense, and does not ruin anyone elses game play of spending hours
grinding for in game currency.
The second idea,
adding items that allow characters to do things in game they could
not otherwise, is almost always a terrible idea, especially if it
is a limited time thing that gives people advantages over others who
did not get the item. If the item is always available, it isn’t
much of a problem unless it is insanely expensive. As far as things
they could not otherwise do, this is only acceptable if it is a minor
thing that has little direct effect on game play, say opening a
hidden chest with extra gold in it. If it becomes a major game
changing item, then it amounts to problems. All the not rich players
will quit, and the rich players will quit because the game got boring
since they have no one to play with anymore, and playing on an empty
server got boring.
The third idea is a
purely cosmetic item. This has the least impact on game play, and
even if these are limited time items, it still has limited impact on
game play. In spite of the fact people love to dress up their paper
doll cutouts, pets and houses, cosmetic items are relatively
non-controversial in games. That doesn’t mean it is without
controversy, only that it causes much less issues. Cosmetic items
can also be given out for special supporters of the game, such as
people that did things like testing, bug reporting, or even in the
case of a free software game, actual development.
In addition to the
concern about game unbalance changes, there is a concern that the
randomness of loot boxes promotes gambling, and lures underage kids
into wasting thousands of dollars on a parents credit card, because
they don’t know what they will get on a random loot spin. Many
games made the goodies random because it encourages the spending of
more money in hopes of getting the good item that the player wanted
to get.
While I admit I
haven't made up my mind on whether random loot boxes should be
allowed in games, I will qualify it with the idea that making a game
proprietary software is far worse than loot-boxes. If players don’t
like the loot boxes and think they are unfair in a free software
game, they can take the feature out and run their own servers.
Perhaps they are fine idea for some games, and wildly inappropriate
for others. Personally, I do not think they belong in Wograld
because the game mechanics in Wograld are simplistic enough for a
younger audience to enjoy so, it would probably be better to leave
them out and avoid the controversy.
