Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to present to you a new business model for video games. There has been much talk of ‘new business models’ lately. This one is quite amazing, I assure you. No one is mentioning it. No one has suggested it. But I will suggest it. Yes, I, The Most Interesting Gamer in the World ™, do suggest what will eventually become known in all industry circles as ‘The Malstrom Business Model’.
This business model is using the old business model that built video games and focusing on fighting disinterest in video games. For translation to the hardcore gamer, this means ‘making-good-games-instead-of-soulless-garbage’. The business model that built video games works. The only reason why it doesn’t work is if the game sucks. So the solution is for games to stop sucking. It is time to stop lowering standards and time to return to the standards games had back in their zenith. No more excuses. No more Industry bullcrap. This is the Malstrom Business Model.
“But Malstrom,” asks an Industry bigwig, “how does that help the average game?”
The Malstrom Business Model has the answer to that. It is this: don’t be average. It is time for video games to stop being average. It is time to meet and surpass the expectations of the audience. It is time to stop focusing on making money and to start focusing on making customers. Instead of making new business models, it is time to make new excitement. It is time to be interesting. This is The Malstrom Way.
An industry bigwig asks, “But has anyone used the Malstrom Business Model to success?”
As you know, I have many clients in many different time periods.
My first client was Atari. Things were going well until they decided that the Malstrom Business Model wasn’t good enough and decided that attacking disinterest wasn’t enough. They focused on production that if they produced enough games, they would all sell. They were wrong and crashed.
My next big client was Nintendo. They did very good with the NES. But like Atari, they thought attacking disinterest was no longer good enough. They decided to attack Sega instead of disinterest. And look where that got them. It was only after all that time that they returned to the Malstrom Business Model with the DS and Wii. Perhaps you heard of those consoles?
Anyone who follows the Malstrom Business Model will meet with unprecedented success. Here is my ‘typical corporate video’ of a montage showing off my awesome clients:
Above: All these games used the Malstrom Business Model. You should too! There is enough crappy games out there. Making good games makes you stand out , gives you immense brand recognition, and an immediate monopoly. No other business model can compare.
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The Game Industry likes to talk about new business models. But there can only be one alternative to the Malstrom Business Model. It shall be declared The Crappy Game Model. The only games that fit the Malstrom Business Model are good games. Crappy games cannot sell with the Malstrom Business Model so they need a new model in which they can sell.
There have been many business models suggested, yet they are all the same. They are all about one thing: trying to make crappy games sell. These include…
-Pre-selling the game through massive avalanche of hype and bought game reviews.
-Sending viral marketers through gaming message forums and webpage comment sections to seed and corral people to a ‘narrative’ of how the game should be received and how competing games should be dissed.
-Episodic content.
-Advertising funded games.
The list is endless. They are all variations on the same old theme: modifying the existing business model in order to get a crappy game to sell.
The Game Industry replies, “We must find new business models, over and over, until we can make bad games sell.”
Wouldn’t it just be easier to make good games? Why are you doing this the hard way? There is a much EASIER way to sell games. It is by making games good. Then, they sell.
“That is not easy,” replies the Game Industry. “Making good games is hard.” If it was so hard, then why did so many people do it in the past? And they did it when there was much less known about the medium we call gaming. “We must focus on the business model, not the product.” You sound like Atari in 1983. Gaming doesn’t have to crash to be thought of as trash for landfills.
The current Industry ‘craze’ for the latest business model in order to make crappy games sell is the ‘freeium’. It is to make a game free, attract a massive audience, and gain money through microtransactions. This is a failed business model. It hasn’t worked, and it will not work now.
But the Game Industry interrupts, “You reveal your vast ignorance. Have you not seen the Korean MMO games? The model works. Our crappy games must adopt it immediately.”
But it doesn’t work. The purpose of a business is not to make money but to make customers. You may make more game players by giving away your product for free, but you will not be gaining more customers. Under a freeium model, someone playing your game is not a customer. Only once the player pays for microtransactions does the person become a customer. And what is that customer getting? What becomes of this new consumer experience? It becomes the new definition of gaming? What is the result of that?
Far from being ‘massively successful’, the freeium model has been unsuccessful. Instead of gaming becoming more mainstream, gaining more value, it is becoming more niche, gaining less value. It is harming the value of the game, because the game is given away for free. And it is also harming the value of games that do not use the freemium model because people will expect every game to be free.
Those Korean MMOs you industry dorks keep having orgasms over are held in very low esteem in Korea (and everywhere else for that matter). Such a freemium model requires a huge amount of players in order to hoodwink the few for microtransactions.
This freemium model is the exact same model used by newspapers for the Internet. They thought if they gave their news away for free, they could get microtransactions and sell separate services. This did not occur except for very, very few websites.
The point is that the Game Industry has become a broken record. With every new generation, a new ‘business model’ is declared to be The Way. What happened five years ago with the last ‘business model’? You said that one would work too and that anyone who spoke against it was an ‘idiot’. Yet, each generation you are at the same exact place.
I don’t think it is possible to do worse than the freemium business model. For it not only devalues your game, it devalues video games in general. What this will degenerate into are desperate developers putting out donation jars. “Please donate money to our game so I don’t have to get a real job.” The Industry will have come full circle and sound like the greenest indie game.
I want to give an example of the extent of the current madness on this subject. Here is Fahey drinking to kool-aid on ‘freemium’:
There’s an inevitable temptation, when a company makes a move like this, to interpret it as a sign of failure. Age of Conan is a game which has unquestionably underperformed expectations, its commercial prospects damaged immensely by an underwhelming and very buggy experience at launch, which the company took far too long to repair. Dogged by the resulting negative perceptions and criticism, recovery has been slow and halting despite vast quality improvements in subsequent years. As such, the game’s detractors will no doubt be quick to characterise the shift to freemium as a final, desperate throw of the dice.
He admits it is a crappy game. And crappy games cannot sell the normal way. So it needs a new business model.
Their argument is strengthened by a simple reality – if Age of Conan were doing very well from subscription revenue, this move wouldn’t even be considered. The game’s not in good company in this regard – the other high-profile freemium move that’s ongoing right now is APB, the game whose disastrous commercial and critical failure sank developer RealTime Worlds.
This is what I do not understand. Fahey will admit these two games are very crappy and disastrous but then deny the move to freemium is a desperate attempt to get crappy games to sell.
Successful games don’t make this kind of transition.There’s no evidence of Blizzard moving World of Warcraft to a freemium model any time soon. When a goose is laying golden eggs, you certainly don’t kill it, but you’re also pretty unlikely to start feeding it something different or put it into a new shed – it might lay more eggs, but what if it stops entirely?
I am greatly confused. There must be two Rob Faheys. A few months ago, Rob Fahey said World of Warcraft was making great risk and fundamentally transforming the game. In fact, he said…
What makes Cataclysm more interesting than any of this is that it’s not, at heart, really an expansion. Rather, it’s a ground-up revamp of the original game – a reworking of the six year-old content which defined the experience at the outset, along with a fundamental re-imagining of the stats and mathematics which are the beating heart of WoW’s gameplay.
-Rob Fahey, “Rewriting the Rules” talking about World of Warcraft taking massive risk in rewriting itself.
Either WoW took great risks or it did not. This is why I say there are two Rob Faheys which are taking two positions that contradict one another.
The reason why my mockery is so intense is because Fahey acknowledges the freemium model is being adopted by crappy games no one wants to pay for but then tells us that doesn’t matter. Huh? And when WoW shows that people are willing to pay for a game, he dismisses that by saying WoW is just risk averse. Yet, in another column he says Cataclysm was very risky because it fundamentally transformed the game. Which is it?
Yet they both beg an essential question; if this is, as seems likely, the ultimate destiny of a great many MMOs, why don’t developers grasp the nettle and build their games to a freemium business model from the outset?
Perhaps because it is not the ultimate destiny of gaming?
Why the reluctance to embrace this model, the determination to stick with the boxed game and monthly subscription business model which has worked wonderfully for World of Warcraft but crippled most other games that have followed in its footsteps?
Perhaps the reluctance is that the freemium model doesn’t work and WoW’s model does work? Perhaps it is because they live in reality and do not live in the latest fad business model the Game Industry hypes?
Indeed, it’s WoW’s very success that should be driving other developers to recognise freemium as a sensible option for their games from the word go…
WoW is a very successful so that means people should use an entirely different model? Fahey makes no sense. This is a fantastic example of circular reasoning.
- and rather than simply accepting that success, it’s also an interesting mental exercise to wonder how much money Blizzard could be making if they, too, used freemium. They won’t; WoW has too much to lose, and Blizzard’s willingness to take creative risks with the game is unlikely to be matched by an appetite for fundamental changes to the commercial structure behind its success. But considering the number of potential “whales” in the WoW playerbase, it’s highly possible that WoW could be an even more profitable game if it left behind the subscription model.
Since Fahey has no argument against WoW’s business model, he invents an imaginary universe where WoW is more successful using the freemium model. If we are going to be using imaginary universes as arguments, I, too, am capable of inventing imaginary universes. I am sure the reader is also capable of inventing imaginary universes.
Can the editors get Fahey to argue fact instead of fiction? If you are going to choose fiction for your argument, then there is no ‘real fact universe’ in which there can be any discussion. I can imagine that 2 + 2 = 5. And no one can argue against that.
This is so ridiculous, it deserves little asian girls to laugh at it.
