Ships of the Line

Recently Eve Online experienced a conflict, which, to my mind, is best represented metaphorically by mousetrap fission. In the linked video, a person drops a ping pong ball into a contained space filled with 138 additional ping pong balls on primed mouse-traps. The resulting cacophony is best enjoyed in slow motion. The cascade of released potential energy becomes a ballet of furious activity. If you think of each of those mousetraps as an exploding space ship, probably one that someone spent a lot of time or effort acquiring, then you begin to get the gist of the Eve-nt that happened in the game.

By the way, Eve Online developer CCP, that "Eve-nt" thing is a freebie. It’s all yours. You’re welcome.

The fallout from this battle is hard to measure, because there’s not exactly a bank that will exchange your Eve currency of ISK into actual money that can be traded for goods and services in the global marketplace. Still, even as the battle was still in the thick of its angry bee-hive tempest of laser beams and wreckage, news sites across the web reported hundreds of thousands of real-dollar equivalents being burned away in the cold night of this virtual space. CCP’s own final report suggests that a rough equivalent of $300,000 to $330,000 worth of virtual property had been obliterated in the onslaught (source: PCGamer).

It wasn’t so long ago that any game-related transaction resulted in a physical thing owned, a cartridge or a disk or something that you physically manipulated to trigger the experience contained on the data within. You walked into a store, handed over money and walked out with a box that often contained an instruction booklet and maybe a little trinket or two along with your game. Looking back, I have to admit those kinds of buyer-seller relationships just feel fundamentally more comfortable to me.

Things are very different now. In one obvious sense, the idea of buying and owning games in a strictly digital format is almost commonplace, which makes the purchase more like that of a service transaction. Just as you might pay for a concert or a movie, where you walk away not with a tangible product in hand but instead the experience of the service provided, games are ultimately just some virtual life briefly lived in exchange for your dollars.

If we're being honest, expectations in consumer relationships have been being recalibrated since even before digital delivery services. EULAs since disk-based programs back in the '90s have tried to insist that we never owned anything more than access licenses to the content we thought we'd just bought. According to the lawyers, that 3.5" floppy was just your access card to a world that the publisher still fully owned.

The line has moved further and further back on what we will actually receive for what we pay for. Beyond redefining what "ownership" is, the overall trend has been to deliver less for the initial investment and save the difference as a commodity to sell later. Even to the point where, now, we pay for our own time. You could arguably look at a game like EA’s recent mobile Dungeon Keeper abomination, where the idea seems to be you have a choice to either give away unreasonable volumes of your time for free to an overbearing and greedy game model, or you can buy your own time back at a substantial and apparently unpredictable price. The fact that there are monetization models for a recreational product based on the premise of being slightly less annoying if you shove money into its cavernous maw is, honestly, a trend I don’t fully grok.

I realize that I am casting it in a way that is not, shall we say, "impartial," but it is a very different way of thinking about what you receive as a gamer for the money you spend. And it seems hard to argue against the idea that game companies are getting better and better at parting you from dollars with increasingly fewer tangible results.

I think, by extension, of vanity-item micro-transactions, and I don’t honestly know how I feel about them. Arguably the identity and life lived within a virtual community is a real and motivating thing. After all, GWJ is in its own way a virtual community and some people clearly feel connected to that community. We exist on people’s willingness to support this arbitrary thing through our annual donation drive, and what is delivered in response aren’t tangible or corporeal benefits. So, why should it seem so odd if someone in a virtual community wants to spend $50 for a cool hat or pet? Like any community, there is a desire to be an individual within that environment. It makes sense.

It just seems like the more we delve into these models, the more illusory the benefit and result of an ever-increasing investment. To wrap back to the beginning of this story, and those hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of spaceships that were lost: What resonates with me is not that those are now virtual assets that are gone, but that they were real dollars that were essentially gone the moment they were bought. The fact that there is an exchange rate in place at all, and that it can be used to describe what occurred, says to me that we have adopted a level of comfort with exchanging dollars for artificial gain that I just don’t feel comfortable with.

It would be fair to accuse me of simply not recognizing that, like any active market, the dynamics of the relationships at play here are in a constant state of change. Arguably, a steady reinvention of the customer/publisher relationship is a healthy thing that ensures companies are constantly trying to innovate their models to adjust for the ever-changing realities they face. Recent trends around Kickstarter and paid early-release games arguably fit under this heading, and while I see arguments out there that it just represents greed or an abuse of the historical transactional relationship of paying money and receiving a finished good in return, I do also see the other side.

People want to support the things they believe in, and until now that kind of community feedback and level of collaboration between developer and gamers simply hadn’t been explored. In this PC Gamer article Everquest Landmark Director of Development David Georgeson puts it like this:

"It cracks me up," says Georgeson, "Because, sure, that’s one way to look at it. But the other way to look at it is—let’s say you were a huge BMW fan, and you had the opportunity to buy a pass that let you actually go in and sit with the car designers and make suggestions on the next car line. Would you pay for that? It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing."

I realize it’s all just different points across a wide spectrum, and that my comfort with owning a digital copy of Civilization V or my comfort with “selling” the website as a service to contributors who want to support what we do is only a matter of degrees from buying (and losing) a spaceship in an online game. But, in any practical analysis of a spectrum where there is a point that feels clearly within the realm that feels acceptable and another that does not, the question really is just about where in the gray space between one feels the line should be drawn.

For me, I guess I’m reaching a point where the line must be drawn here.

[[This week's Maximum Verbosity topic comes to us from forum member Garrcia and his support during our 2013 donation drive. Along with providing the topic, he also gave me some great ideas in working through a first draft. Thanks Garrcia!]]

Comments

I was always a fan of the original spirit of copyright - a relatively short monopoly grant, and your copy was yours to do with as you pleased, barring copying the content for sale. That deal has been altered by numerous Darth Vaders in copyright industry, fleecing creators of their content for peanuts while milking consumers for every penny possible. I increasingly don't feel like bending over anymore.

I'm not against the concept of providing content as a service. After all, that's what cable TV is; but that deal also implicitly includes the unwritten right to record programs for home use when the cable is down or the program isn't on. TiVo isn't illegal.

I think this is a good benchmark for gauging whether any such service is worth it. If I'm ready to play the content I bought, then you need to be ready to deliver it. Any mismatch on the service side of that equation merits an instant vote of no-confidence. It's why I didn't buy either Diablo 3 or SimCity.

For many, the point at which they'd buy a Spaceship for $100 of real money will probably be close to the point where they feel like the game they're playing has already delivered near that amount of service and enjoyment already. I'd say that's a fair deal.

Elysium wrote:

Just as you might pay for a concert or a movie, where you walk away not with a tangible product in hand but instead the experience of the service provided, games are ultimately just some virtual life briefly lived in exchange for your dollars.
...
And it seems hard to argue against the idea that game companies are getting better and better at parting you from dollars with increasingly fewer tangible results.

Isn't all entertainment, at its root, intangible and experiential? I have shelves full of board games, DVDs, books, and comics, in addition to my video game collection (both physical and downloaded). While I may find the wooden pieces for Settlers of Catan enjoyable to handle, or be awed by the illustrations in Miyazaki's Nausicaä books, those are minor when compared to my glee at offering my friend the one sheep he so desperately needs in exchange for not one, but two stone -- or to the raw emotions I experience as Kushana directs Nausicaä's attention to the casualties of war, both military and civilian, and then vows revenge.

If someone decides to blow $100 on an in-game item, I can't see how it's really any different than blowing my entire allowance as a child on a roll of caps or a bottle of bubble solution. In the end, all of them are ephemeral. To paraphrase/agree with LarryC, if that experience is worth that amount to the player, it's a fair deal.

I'm more offended than bewildered, though, by the callous manner in which free-to-play game developers intentionally introduce artificial obstacles simply to manipulate their players into spending real money to bypass them.

LarryC wrote:

I'm not against the concept of providing content as a service. After all, that's what cable TV is; but that deal also implicitly includes the unwritten right to record programs for home use when the cable is down or the program isn't on. TiVo isn't illegal.

For what it's worth, that right is, in fact, written.

If someone decides to blow $100 on an in-game item, I can't see how it's really any different than blowing my entire allowance as a child on a roll of caps or a bottle of bubble solution. In the end, all of them are ephemeral.

At this point I was sure you were going to launch into a fit of ennui and existentialism to rival Ecclesiastes.

From my time in EVE, I always assumed that the $ equivalancy of the ISK was really just time. You can buy time cards for a certain about of real money or for a certain (larger) amount of in-game ISK. If that is true, it means that a sh*t ton of man-hours were just lost but for the massive corps and alliances invovled this could be acceptable losses. It is different than buying a vanity item in MWO or a booster pack in B4 where money translates directly into a virtual good.

So, why should it seem so odd if someone in a virtual community wants to spend $50 for a cool hat or pet?

Pets and hats CONFIRMED for the next donation drive.

I have become quite partial to the idea of the value of my free time. I agree with Nevin73. The isk to dollars is basically a cost in man hours. This is the only real way you can give consequences in video games. (in my opinion) Losing a ship, or a well built character in a rogue like, or dying in Dark Souls all only really cost you time. This is the penalty for screwing up. It is highly motivating, but can be dangerous if reinvesting your time becomes not "worth it" in terms of enjoyment. That is the transition point for playing versus no longer playing a game for me.

Grok.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

Grok.

You know, you're right.

manta173 wrote:
So, why should it seem so odd if someone in a virtual community wants to spend $50 for a cool hat or pet?

Pets and hats CONFIRMED for the next donation drive.

I have become quite partial to the idea of the value of my free time. I agree with Nevin73. The isk to dollars is basically a cost in man hours. This is the only real way you can give consequences in video games. (in my opinion) Losing a ship, or a well built character in a rogue like, or dying in Dark Souls all only really cost you time. This is the penalty for screwing up. It is highly motivating, but can be dangerous if reinvesting your time becomes not "worth it" in terms of enjoyment. That is the transition point for playing versus no longer playing a game for me.

Sure the example from EVE is more about time and the less tangible what is ones time worth.

However, to the point of the abuse of "cash shops" what if CCP offered a token for $500 that let someone insta-finish a Titan.

More generally, what is to stop CCP from looking at this last major conflict and then refocus that in the lens of cash shop trends in general and decide they can cash in with direct, give us cash and we'll save you time schemes.

As an on again off again EVE player I agree the primary commodity is time. That's reflected best in the skill queue and the insane training times. Anyone can buy PLEX and get a battleship but to fly it well and make the purchase worth your while you need a few months of dedicated training. That why you see so many players offline periodically. It just becomes a grind. For the big Titans that ate it in that battle, you're talking billions of isk each, but also months of build time, months of training to be able to fly it. While I think CCP can be accused of a lot of mismanagement, I don't think they farm players for cash beyond the whole multiple account thing which you can bypass with in game PLEX anyway

I installed the new DK mobile. I played it for about one day -- maybe two. Then it was uninstalled.

The day I uninstalled it, I purchased the originals from GOG. I had owned them back in the day, and remembered them fondly.

I finished DK2 this morning for the first time. I never actually completed all 20 levels before. I put a considerable amount of time into it, given my old fart obligations.

And yet, that time spent, that time I enjoyed -- that is what I spent money on. I cannot grok spending money simply to not be annoyed, or to avoid significant time investment. I believe the phrase is "time is money". I'll give up some money to enjoy my time, not to skip it.

Garrcia wrote:

More generally, what is to stop CCP from looking at this last major conflict and then refocus that in the lens of cash shop trends in general and decide they can cash in with direct, give us cash and we'll save you time schemes.

I think this is generally bad business for any MMO developer- bypassing time sinks for money (which you currently CAN'T do in EVE- you can buy PLEX with ISK which just allows you to extend your subscription time). The whole $300k loss number being thrown about also ignores the idea that the EVE economy would simply collapse if someone tried to carry out transactions of this magnitude.

I don't really disagree with what CCP is doing with their business model- if someone wants to spend their in-game credits to buy themselves more in-game time, more power to them. I don't see how this hurts anyone in the end. The beneficiaries of the ISK, as stated several posts above, still need to put in the necessary time in-game to make that currency useful to them.