Reading 5

Trends of Payment Within Video Games

Over the past couple of years we've seen a deviation of payment models within video games. 

Games have abandoned expensive large scale expansion packs in favour of micro-transactions. As an example look at one of the most popular game franchises of all time, Call Of Duty (COD). COD used to be feature the aforementioned expansion packs in some of its games such as COD: Black ops, but more recently the franchise has transitioned into the use of micro-transactions and the freemium payment model, most notably in its game COD: Warzone.

 The reason for this is due to the rise in demand for such models. After a wave of Battle Royale games such as PUBG, Apex Legends and most notably Fortnite have set the trend it's been proven that there is massive success and profit to be made in these kinds of games, games that can achieve a mass amount of players by playing to trends and offering itself to players as free of charge before enticing them with relatively cheap content that allows them to stand out and express themselves within the game (be it a cosmetic item / a piece of clothing) , due to this kind of content being near infinite there are near infinite profits to be made. As such, game developers are leaning towards this monetarily superior model of game and are enjoying huge success and profit because of it.

Reading 4

In this post i'll be looking at analysing certain trends that are common within the sector of direct payment models in video games. The primary trend I've identified is the correlation between the type of game and the type of payment model, as well as how the presence of certain payment models have changed over time.

In recent years we've seen a shift of focus from DLC based payment models to micro-transaction based models, mainly within the time frame of the past 10 years. The most prominent games back then used large scale expansion packs as a form of DLC, games such as COD: Black Ops, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim all used this kind of DLC. Looking at the most popular games of today however we can see a clear deviation, Fortnite, COD: Warzone and League of Legends for example are among the most popular games in the world today, they all use transactions as extended content instead of expansion packs. Another thing these games have in common is that they're all free to play. Indicating further that there's a strong trend here.

Based on this information it appears that game developers have decided to give the bulk of their game away for free while locking certain in-game content off behind a pay wall. The reason for this is likely and simply that this method of payment model is far more profitable. Players buy non-existent cosmetic items within games for real-life money and it costs the game developers nothing to produce. In most cases these micro-transactions are not finite, eventually a DLC expanding on the games story will end and after it is complete the player can not buy it again. Micro-transactions can be bought an infinite number of times so the profits gained from a single player of the game are in theory limitless. Plus the development of these expansions cost a lot of money, it's as if you were making another game entirely. While micro-transactions take minimal effort to put into a game. In summary the movement towards micro-transactions and  freemium games is simply the evolution of video games, a natural selection of sorts. Those who move towards it will profit while those who shun it risk losing out on otherwise very easy money.

An example of a micro-transaction in a 

Call Of Duty game.

Reading 3

So today i'll be looking at some secondary sources for further research into my chosen chapters, direct payment models and dimensions of a game world. In my last post I made an introduction to these topics and in this one we'll be going more in depth into them and how they effect the users experience of the game.

Firstly I found an article relating to the dimensions within a games world

Fundamentals of Game Design: Game Worlds

This article goes into detail on all of the different types of dimensions that are utilised within a game. Usually the only dimension that people think of when relating to games is the scale of the map and in some cases the characters within it however, there's actually more ways that space is utilised in a game, in both an in-game way and in a meta way. For instance there's how big a map looks then there is how big a map really is. To illustrate the difference let me make a comparison, take a look at the video below from Atari game "E.T the Extra-Terrestrial".

Click here for the video

Looks like shit right? This is mutually agreed to be one of the worst games of all time, largely because of its map design. It makes the player feel claustrophobic, as if they're trapped in this box of a level. However this is actually the exact same map layout used in the classic Pokemon games for Nintendo and Gameboy, you control a character that moves in 4 directions around a small level and when you reach the border of the level you enter a new level of identical nature. Why are the Pokemon maps hailed as being some of the greatest of all time with an age defining open world feeling? (achieved without even using 3D by the way) Because it feels a lot bigger then it really is, this can be achieved by using higher quality graphics, depth, time, real world sound effects and unique level design, all of which differentiate the maps of Pokemon and old E.T. The point is, there's more to dimensions then just how big the map is, there's a lot of factors that alter a lot of different things and although I touched on them in my tangent on Pokemon I look forward to going more in-depth on some of the dimension types I named. 

For my research on direct payment models I've looked at this article

The 5 Different Payment Models for Video Games

This article breaks down the different types of payment models in games and goes into detail on what each model means and how it makes profit for the game its implemented into. The five types are as follows Single payment, DLC, Free, Subscription, Kickstarter. Now in my first post I talked about how some of these models implement eachother into the same game, for example single payment games will usually have a small number of large DLC packages that expand the games story and gameplay while free games will lock a part of the game away and will require small payments for small quantities of DLC, usually in-game currency and resources. The relationship between these models is interesting but one thing I am really looking forward to researching is how the popularity of these models have changed over time, usually depending on what model is implemented in the top games of the time (e.g Fortnite spawning a million free battle royale games with microtransactions) and how certain payment models are unsuited and insufficient but strive for alternative reasons (e.g World of Warcraft and its ripoff subscription based model). All of which I want to research even further into in future posts. It is now 1am and I am sleepy so until next time.

Source

 

Reading 2

Hello, for some reason i'm about 8 weeks behind on readings so here's my attempt to catch up and pass the module, enjoy. Anyway, for our CA this year we're gradually adding towards making a book throughout the entirety of the module. We each chose our own chapters to cover and by the end of the year we'll combine our work to produce the aforementioned books. The two chapters I've selected are as follows,

Direct Payment Models

and 

Dimensions of a Game World

Now, honestly these are pretty vague phrases, you wont even find anything related to gaming should you look up "direct payment models" but these two chapters are centered around topics that I find very interesting in gaming, payment and environment. That being said my research will be based on my interpretation of these phrases. 

Direct payment models, the way I see this is that this is the way games extract money from you, be it with upfront charges (ex. paying 70 euro for the new Fifa game) or via micro-transactions (paying 4.99 for an in game resource). The pricing can vary for a multitude of reasons depending on the type of content, Free games may be free but tend to push players towards paying small amounts of money for in-game currency and resources, while games with larger upfront charges tend to have downloadable content that will add more gameplay to the game and expand on the games story (effectively known as expansions).

My understanding of the dimensions of a game world is that it explores the size of a games map and how the maps height and width can determine how the game is played, for example battle royale games such as Fortnite require a huge 3D map by nature of its gameplay while a game like Mortal Kombat could easily be played on a small 2D platform. 

I'm excited to talk about and research these topics in later posts, thanks for reading.

Mortal Kombat 2

Source

Unity Tutorial 6

So for this week of our Unity tutorials we looked at emulating a classic side scrolling game. For this tutorial we focused on creating a bigger sense of detail and quality by using things like sound, particle effects and additional animation.

After importing the template of the project the first thing we needed to do was to make a character jump (3.1). To do this we first imported a character into the game and positioned him so that he was facing the right way. Then we added a player controller script to the model for the next step. From there we use script to make the character jump whenever the space button is pressed. Then we messed around with the gravity in the scene to alter the height of the jump. To prevent the player from being able to win 100% of the time by spamming the spacebar we use "if" values to insure the player can only jump once. From there we added in our objects for the player to jump over and made it so that they spawn at intervals to make them endless.

In (3.2) we addressed an issue with the game, the background would just disappear if the player went far enough. To fix this made the background repeat itself and used script to make the transition more fluid looking. After that we wanted to add a game over trigger for when the player hits an object and loses, we did something very similar in our previous tutorials. We also made sure that when the player triggers a game over the rest of the game stops as well, including the objects spawning and the background continuing to move. To tidy things up we also used the "destroy" value that we used in previous games to delete the object once they move out of the scene.

Finally, in (3.3) we looked at adding animations to our character model, we messed around with the models animations before selecting the run animation and setting a speed for it, now he isn't just hovering along the map. Next we added the jump animation and adjusted it to make it smoother looking. Finally, we added the animation for when the player hits an object and "dies", there was a bug that made it so the player was able to jump from this position which looked funny but we got rid of it by adjusting the jump conditions. 

Source Unity

Unity Tutorial 5

Last week in our unity tutorials we made a kind of space invader-esque game using pizza and farm animals, which is great but this week we're looking to improve upon that. So lesson 2.4 focuses on making a couple of improvements, first of all we make the animals spawn completely randomly instead of on command to make the game somewhat challenging. We do this by writing a function in the code to mark the spawn range as random before we throw in some additional code so they spawn on a timer.

Next we needed to fix the problem of projectiles flying through the animals when they connect with eachother. Using colliders and checking the "Is Trigger" button we created an interaction between the animals and the projectiles, in the next step we added code to turn that interaction into the deletion of the animal. Finally we use code to trigger a pop-up game over screen should an animal make it past the player, and with that our space invader/farm animal game is functional.

We also had bit of  challenger to do for this weeks tutorials, this was pretty much to make with the same concept as the one we've been working on, but with a different arrangement, this mainly consisted of reusing what we had just learned but it was cool to see how we can make different looking games using the same mechanics.

"Fetch Game"

Source Unity

Unity Tutorial 4

So for this Unity tutorial we took a look at a couple of different things, in the first tutorial (2.1) we looked at some basic movement functions as well as how to prohibit the player from moving to a certain area, such as the end of the map. This is done with something called an "if" factor, that for example tells the game to move a character to the right "if" they step too far to the left. I found this pretty cool since this kind of concept is used all the times in games, so learning about it was pretty interesting.

In tutorial (2.2) we looked at how to launch projectiles, in this case food, at animals. This is done by writing script that makes the object go forwards, by using prefabs we can make that motion occur whenever the player presses a certain button, in this case the spacebar, a pretty cool mechanic with plenty of uses. We also looked at how to create boundaries on the edge of the map, which deletes/removes any objects that go past them and leave the map.

In the final tutorial (2.3) we pretty much spawned animals by pressing a button and made them walk around. All of this was done with random values so the animals spawned randomly at different points in the map. This was done similarly to what we did in the previous tutorial. We also messed with the camera a bit and flipped between isometric view and perspective view. When complete the final version is pretty much space invaders but you have random animals trying to kill you, unique stuff.

Source Unity