Do We Need Annual Sequels to Games?

It seems to be a growing trend in the industry for games to release sequels every year as oppose to the every 2-4 years we expect from most sequels. Most recently appears to the Assassins Creed franchise, Ubisoft appears to be releasing Assassins Creed: Black Flag (the next in the franchise) later this year when Assassins Creed III only came out last year. On top of that they also have Assassins Creed: Rising Phoenix coming out on PS Vita. Assassins Creed is now arguable Ubisoft’s biggest franchise and it seems the big franchises can get a game every year, following in the footsteps of Call of Duty and FIFA, or any EA Sports game for that matter. More recent iterations of the Call of Duty franchise have added very little to the franchise and FIFA 13 did not improve nearly as much on its predecessor than FIFA 12 did. With very similar games coming out year upon year, is it worth paying full price retail for a few new bells and whistles?

To be fair, Infinity Ward and EA Sports aren’t nearly as guilty of releasing (arguably) worthless sequels as Capcom is. Much of Capcom’s history is based on releasing sequels that don’t exactly inspire innovation, probably at most fault is the Street Fighter franchise. In the early 90s it was the release of Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, Super Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter II: Turbo. Each version added minimal changes, arguably not enough to warrant a whole new game. With so many versions, it’s no wonder Street Fighter II is Capcom’s best selling game to date (although being an incredible game in itself did help). Even today, in a world of DLC, Capcom still insisted on releasing Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, a sequel to Marvel vs Capcom 3 with refined gameplay, balancing and a few new characters. Ultimate MvC 3 released less than a year after the original, packaged as a new retail game and rightly so had people furious.

Hulk, it's not Spidey's fault Ultimate MvC 3 wasn't released as DLC

Capcom though is more the exception rather than the rule but it does beg to differ, in a world of DLC, is there a need to bring out sequels this often? £40 is a lot to be paying for a game and you’d hope that in about 9 months it doesn’t become outdated as talks of the sequel begin to murmur. After which, you don’t really want to spend another £40. DLC on the other hand can cost from £5-£12, roughly a quarter of the original price. At the moment DLC is often used to add a few new missions to games, but it could be used for much more. Instead of paying £40 for FIFA 13 imagine if you could pay £15 and get all the updates, tweaks and new modes (essentially everything FIFA 13 has over 12). I’m no programmer, but I know that small tweaks can be put in as an update, this regularly occurs as bugs are fixed so in theory it is possible. Or, imagine buying Call of Duty and then the next year getting a bunch of new maps, guns, missions and modes, all for a cut down price. Halo has been doing this for years already, adding new modes and playlists, for free!

Obviously, this sounds like a fairy tale world where big corporations actually care about their consumers. No developer is going to sell an update for £15 when they can sell a ‘new’ game for £40. However, in the world of PC games, something similar already happens. This is most apparent with The Sims franchise. The first Sims game launched in 2000 and now is currently on The Sims 3, that’s roughly a game every four years. Maxis, the developer has released many more Sims titles than just the three you would expect. The series releases countless expansion packs for its games, usually and half the price of the original. These expansion packs often add huge new content to the game, adding a totally new dynamic that other games would put into an outright sequel. For those of you who don’t know The Sims is a game where you control people living in a house and dictate their lives as if they were real. Each expansion pack gives you new items for your characters (known as Sims) as well as new places, actions, opportunities and more. Since its release in 2009 The Sims 3 has released 9 expansion packs! Each and every one adding a whole new dynamic to the game, and Maxis don’t seem to be slowing down with the release of another later this year. If you bought the game as well as all 9 expansion packs you would have spent £165 in almost four years, on one game! If Maxis released a Sims game annually at £30 each, they would have made £120. So, expansion packs actually have the potential to generate more revenue than standalone titles. Also, gamers get choice as to which packs they want to buy and so pick and choose the features they will utilise, a win, win?

Even in a rich man's world money isn't funny

The problem with expansion packs is that they change the game to such an extent that it often requires the games to be installed and hence possibly why it has not caught on within console games. However this could change, there are rumours the new Xbox will require you to install games and will not allow you to run the games off the disc. This seems like a great opportunity, if implemented correctly, to allow expansion packs into the console market.

The games industry is ever changing, particularly the way we buy games. In the past few years Steam has taken off, Free-to-Play seems to be the next big thing, while mobile devices have shown how you can sell a game at a tiny price and still make it profitable. The next generation of consoles could see a huge change in the way we buy and play games. Gamers love a bargain, developers love to make money, with the right infrastructure we could see annual sequels replaced by big DLC packages similar to Expansion Packs. It seems like a win for everyone, but what really decides if a change like this will occur, is if developers and publisher make more money from it that the current model. Money makes the world go round, the real and the virtual.

Should all Games Require an Internet Connection?

SimCity comes out today in the UK and came out earlier this week elsewhere (damn you rest of the world!). It’s the first proper SimCity game by developer Maxis since 2003 and there’s a huge focus on multiplayer play. Different players take control of different cities and develop alongside each other, potentially in real time. This is EA’s excuse for making the game require a constant internet connection, you can’t play the game without one, that coupled with a server issues has led to the standard trashing of SimCity on Metacritic user reviews, as I’m writing this there are 1,180 negative reviews with an average of 1.5 (out of 10). This is clearly an issue that has riled much of the SimCity community, but with piracy being such a huge issue, is it right for developers to require an internet connection?

Let’s not kid ourselves, EA has clearly implemented this scheme on SimCity as DRM (Digital Rights Management), in other words to stop piracy. Piracy is a huge problem for all media industries, film and TV suffer just as badly as games and music suffers worse. Beside the point that it is criminal, piracy gives developers a hard time. They lose money because of it because fewer people buy their games. You may think that someone like EA or another gaming behemoth may not be affected, you’d be wrong. These companies are still profitable despite piracy, but the situation could be very different. Video games are one of the lesser affected industries by piracy so that with the fact that most people never see or hear about developers means the effects are often a little less evident. EA may not be crashing down because of piracy, even Maxis will probably survive despite it, but its smaller developers, those without huge financial backing and with whose livelihoods depend on one game, they are the biggest losers from piracy.

The kind of video game pirate publishers don't hate

I mentioned in a previous article that developers can invest lots of money into a game and often rely on one game at a time, particularly the smaller ones. By putting all their eggs into one basket, there is a huge risk involved and if that game fails, then the company may also go bust. Smaller developers need all the money they can get, they do not make millions, many struggle to simply stay afloat, so the loss of a tens or hundreds of copies can be detrimental potentially. Every year, countless games companies are shut down, earlier this year we had THQ, a huge games publisher, close down, no doubt piracy played a part in that.

These small developers are often independent and so not only do they get less funding, less of their games get bought, pirating an indie game means you are denying a larger percentage of potential profit than if you pirated a blockbuster game. The indie game development scene is trying to find a way of reaching out to a wider community, if that wider community is not buying their games, indie developers may have a very limited future.

Almost everyone will agree (most hypocritically) that piracy is wrong, most people however don’t care. They do not see the effects of it and are stuck in their own individual world. Even those who don’t pirate may have a problem with anti-piracy measures. These measures, like requiring a constant internet connection can be frustrating and problematic and they punish the good, the bad and the ugly.

Though not as big a problem in the Western world, not all gamers have access to an internet connection. By implementing such a scheme means you have already alienated a proportion of your market, hence you are already losing money. The number of people cut out must be less than the number who would have pirated the game but have instead bought it, otherwise it makes no financial sense.

The internet is not a universal amenity, it may seems so in the West but go to slightly poorer countries where gamers still do exist and you’ll find people who are left out by such schemes totally. Even in the West, though most people may have internet, not everyone has a connection that is fast or reliable enough to handle a game, so that’s even more people cut out, unnecessarily you could argue. Playing an online game and seeing lag and frame-rate drops will show you how many people still don’t have an internet connection that is good enough for pristine gaming. Not only is there the speed of the whole service but the reliability of it too. Cheap ISPs often have poor service and games will require a constant uninterrupted connection. You would have seen your FIFA match destroyed by poor connection as if a certain Turkish referee had come and refereed the game. In SimCity you might see hours of hard work destroyed by an intermittent connection as if you’d unleashed a disaster in your city.

"EA Servers are down, we apologise for fu***ing up your game"

It is not necessarily on your side either. EA has been having server issues all week with SimCity (and for a considerable amount of time longer for other games), thus stopping people playing a game which they have paid £35 for. You've done nothing wrong, and yet you can’t play your game because EA have screwed up (again).

With the internet always comes the idea of safety. Though unlikely, having your game constantly connected means that it is more vulnerable than if it wasn't  SimCity for many will still be a single player game and running the risk of losing something in game or having your account hacked is not worth it simply to play multiplayer with others.

Piracy is a huge problem for the gaming industry and it is only gaining momentum. Already developers are going bust and this will only continue unless piracy rates decrease. But no one likes being forced to do something, particularly when you feel like you’re being punished for the wrong-doing of others. In order to stop piracy developers, publishers and distributors will have to find a more ingenious method. At the end of the day, can you really prevent piracy? The only way to stop it is to change people’s mind sets. Gamers need to be persuaded to part with their cash, not be forced to. Publishers need to take a more softly softly approach. They need to deal with the situation like Gandhi and not like Stalin, after all, India is a rising superpower and Russia, well isn't.