This is New York City's Brighton Beach neighborhood, an oceanside community of primarily Russian folks on which GTA IV's Hove Beach (y'know, where Niko starts out) was modeled, as you can probably recognize just at a glance.
I decided to take these snaps even though I haven't played the game in a few months. We're coming up on about four months from the release of GTA IV, and while nobody has yet formulated a scientific algorithm for the exact period of time before post-release luster-loss sets in, I think GTA IV has hit it -- actually, I think it's been in the post-release slump for some time now.
Here's how it works -- starting at about six months prior to release, the hype machine builds, reaching a fever pitch during the magical week. And in the week that follows, said highly-anticipated title is the greatest thing since sliced bread; reviewers use hyperbolic superlative adjectives, the top five Digg stories pertain to said game, it makes mainstream media headlines in spots like the New York Times or Slate (Newsweek doesn't count, because we cheat by having N'Gai).
Fast forward a month later, and the backlash begins with a strongly worded post from the blog community, perhaps one single acerbic writer who doesn't get what the fuss is all about. This, too, draws massive internet traffic, as seas of enamored fans flock to the dispute. And then, well, wait, wait, says someone else, Dissenter Zero might have a point -- and then before you know it, we're not talking "most breathtaking open-world experience EVER," but we're talking more like "ludonarrative dissonance," and things like that (these are not actual quotes about GTA IV, as far as I'm aware, but might as well be -- "ludonarrative dissonance" refers to BioShock, actually).
Now here we are four months out of the magic date and we're not even talking about it anymore, except to say, "hey, that was a pretty good game."
This is generally the career arc of major releases in our hit-driven business, isn't it? I mean, it's the anatomy of a fad in any medium -- in four months, Michael Phelps' Olympic performance will no longer be a water-cooler topic, and no one will mention The Dark Knight anymore. Part of this behavior pattern seems to have to do with buzz -- when your friends and neighbors are excited about something, anything, it tends to raise your own level of positive sentiments around it.
In other words, perhaps some of us were more excited that our friends were excited about GTA IV than we were about the game itself; we weren't so much impressed with the title as we were so glad to be joining in the experience. Anyone who wasn't playing GTA IV in its release week just "wasn't a real gamer," and probably felt a touch resentful and left out, no? These are emotional responses that have nothing to do with the quality of the game or how people felt about playing it.
Just recently, some SVGL readers cited Braid's lack of replayability as one of its design flaws. GTA IV is a game that needs not even be replayable, really -- it's so huge that you could conceivably get hundreds of hours out of it and never do the same thing twice. And yet, less than half a year later, a great many of us have just moved on to the next big thing. My impression of my friends' GTA IV habits is that they match my own -- we took a quick blow through the title and set down the controller, and stated, "okay, I've seen everything there is to see here."
BioShock went through the same fever-backlash-bottom-out, and while it's still getting mentioned nearly daily in posts and articles all over the Web (as is GTA IV, mind), is anyone still playing it? Does it still matter?
Despite games' interactive nature and their tendency to encourage the player to invent new experiences with each sit-down, are hundred-hour magnum opus titles really of value for just a couple of months, before becoming precious museum pieces, part of our cultural lexicon but no longer really playable? Do we mine from it our most favorite moments, our top tens and our design lessons largely to convey them onto the next hitmaker, for reflexive comparisons?
Is that okay?
I dunno, man. While I was snapping these Hove Beach photos, I felt a little stir of delight once again at how well GTA IV had managed to capture its New York vibe -- and realized it'd been a long time since I felt much of anything toward the title.
And that's a little bit humbling, especially since back in the day I could play Hudson's Bomberman on TG-16 for years. I'm not even kidding; years. I could play the original Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy over and over, I must have played some 16-bit platformers to completion a hundred times (Altered Beast, Legendary Axe, et al).
Why is it that the more complex games get, the less time we spend playing them?
26 comments:
Call me a loser, but I just started Bioshock last night. I needed the hype machine and the post-glow to figure out if it was really worth my time. It seems to have held up, so now I'm playing it. I'm a gamer, but I'm also a busy adult, and it takes me awhile to make time for the goods ones, and I can only make time for the best. So I'm still excited after the bell-curve, and will probably play GTAIV in another 5 months.
Also, I played through the original Contra, Legend of Zelda, LOZ: A link to the past, and Super Mario World (to name a few) a gazillion times each. I think it was because I had more time and had less money to buy new games with.
Well, sometimes the problem is that the game changes.
With GTAIV, there are three phases to the city. To begin with, you have the shock-of-the-new: a whole world you're washed up in, lost, just like Niko. You empathise with how lost Niko is, and you slowly learn to love Liberty City.
The second phase is feeling like you fit in - you know the shortcuts, you don't always need the GPS, and you take pride in every minute you shave off journey time. This is what it felt like a while after moving to London - I felt native, rather than fumbling around like a tourist.
And then you hit this final phase, where you're no longer even thinking about the neat shortcuts; you're just picking up the mission, going where you gotta go.
That's just commuting. And GTAIV turns into commuting about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through, really. I still love the city, but man, it feels like work.
I've recently started WoW, and bits of that game turn into commuting very, very fast - even though I'm still going "wow" at all the new locations my friends charge through.
I don't know; I think there's something about the higher fidelity that makes me concentrate on the artifice to begin with, and only when I tire of the artifice is the game stripped back to raw mechanics.
To use your Sonic example - the distance between the raw mechanic and the artifice is much smaller than say, in GTAIV or Bioshock - and so the "commuting" phase never really kicks in. The game is so focused on making you enjoy the act of being in it, stripping away unnecessary walking between Acts or menu interfaces... it's an easy game not to tire of. By contrast, I find I tire of games more easily than I used to.
But there's still joy to be had going back. I went back to Bioshock a few weeks ago and have ploughed through the final 75% of the game - and am about to finish it. I'm really enjoying it, and I think being a way from the hype cycle has helped that. I'm looking forward to doing the same to GTA in the near future.
And, in the meantime, I've found staying out of the bellcurve - the hype cycle, if you like - has helped me enjoy games like never before. It's lovely to be surprised by a new game - something we miss out on a lot now.
Hooo... that's a lot of questions!
First up, your analysis seems mostly spot-on: older game titles quickly fall by the wayside. However, the gaming habits of people like us, the experts, are of course different from those of less habitual players. If you look at, for instance, Sony's Platinum range (Greatest Hits in the US), you'll see that some titles keep selling in large numbers even a year after release.
It's the same as in any other industry: of course public discussion concentrates on the most recent titles, because that's what the largest concentration of people want to discuss. You could try to start a discussion about The Matrix, or even No Country For Old Men now, but most of the people who'd be interested have already had that conversation. That doesn't mean no one's watching those flms anymore, however!
About replayability: who cares? Your mileage may vary, but I don't re-read the same books over and over again, either. That we used to spend much more time on one game doesn't have anything to do with complexity, but with context: I didn't have the money to buy many games, good games were fewer in number (no matter what the nostalgia brigade might try to tell you), and I had much, much more time to waste than I do now. Another factor: there was no Internet, so you had to figure everything out yourself.
The fact that we're not actually playing Bioshock or GTAIV anymore doesn't invalidate all the nice thing we had (and still have) to say about them. They made an impact on our lives, maybe even on our way of thinking, and we internalised those experiences and insights and moved on.
Just like any other medium, really.
I agree with what Kevin says, but only half way. I played the stuffing out of the games I had when I was young. I'm married now and I have a baby girl and I still play games into the ground. Back then I didn't have money, nowadays I don't have time. As it is, I'm already dividing up my attention between 4 games, 2 of which I've beaten already, with a bunch from the last generation that I promise I'll go back and finish. I'm not constantly thirsting for the next big release. I'm totally satiated right now.
I don't consume as much as someone who writes about the games industry. That's the difference between you and me that I understand completely. That's the difference between you and the girl that ran through Altered Beast and Sonic repeatedly. Now you have to stay current, you have to constantly be at the cusp of whats new. This is why I don't take offense with a lot of the cynicism and snark from other gaming media (cough IGN cough) because I understand the job and the push that comes with it and I don't envy it. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm glad that I get the opportunity to cherish my games and get lost in them for years on end.
"Why is it that the more complex games get, the less time we spend playing them?"
I think it's because different games offer different things. The big, AAA titles offer spectacle: they offer you things you haven't seen before, to wow you. I think that, to a degree, the "game" takes a backseat to the spectacle. I'm talking about the core game, here, the little nugget of "what you do" at the game's core. Killing things to level up in WoW, knocking the ball past the other guy in Pong, timing your jumps right in Mario.
But what's the game in GTA? Drive around and hit things? The draw, I think, is the discovery: the finding out of how deep the rabbit hole goes, of exactly how much detail they put in. The most compelling moments are those right in the beginning, when the world seems almost real, because unexpected things are happening. Once you've hit the bottom, though, that's really it.
Fable is a good example for how the opposite works. I bought it because it was supposed to be this immense open-world game, which it wasn't. At all. I hit the bottom pretty quickly. But I still go back and play it every once in a while, because even when all of that is wiped away the game is actually a half-decent action RPG. The world is shallow and disappointing, but the parts where you hit people with swords are fun enough that I find myself drawn back every so often.
But when the meat and potatoes is the world, once you've stopped being wowed, and have become a little bored and a little jaded, you return to the game and don't find anything there. Bioshock becomes just a kind of really easy corridor shooter. GTA4 becomes a physics sandbox. Unless you can create a world that can keep surprising you - a world that can, upon your return to the game, present another layer of the rabbit hole that you didn't even know was there - then once you've played the game there's nothing left. And the dichotomy between the hype and the praise and that kind of hollow feeling when you go through the motions of playing the game and realize that it's not offering anything new is where backlash comes from.
The truly interesting part about this is that the wrapping, the graphics and the world and the AI, are the most difficult and expensive parts. They're the bits that chew up development resources, and the reason AAA titles cost as much as they do.
The reason they keep making them, though, is because a shiny wrapper appeals to everyone. I'm not calling these games shallow and superficial; I'm as much of a sucker for a deep and detailed game world as anyone, but the world and the AI and the characters are all wrapping around the little nugget of gameplay at the center. And, as I said, a shiny wrapper appeals to everyone, and looks really good in trailers and screenshots; the "game" is much harder to publicize. Games focused on that core "game" tend to become niche; they attract small, devoted followings that last long after interest has faded in AAA titles. Spore might be good, but people will still be playing Dwarf Fortress once we've all gotten bored of it.
. . .
I think what this means for us is that we need to start looking for games in different places. At least, the important games; the ones that will stick with you, and years later you'll still think of yourself as the sort of person who played Knytt Stories or EVE or Dwarf Fortress or Stalker. The ones that you'll keep coming back to.
I kinda agree with Tom Armitage about GTA. Games that are that big and complex just become a grind. But I also want to say that the Arcade-y notion of points and perfectability is what keeps me going back to Sonic and shmups. Maybe that's just me. I loved speed runs through the first 3 sonic games, both with and without all the emeralds. It was somehow comforting going through it and knowing exactly where everything is at all times.
We were all just more easily pleased and had less to do back then - it's fun to go back and play the classics but we'll never be as addicted to them now as when we were 8.
The video game hype machine of today is better calibrated to get us to forget what we have and look forward to the next big thing.
I'd perhaps argue that the big 100-hour epics are less like games than giant interactive movies. They just happen to be more interactive than those in the past. For me the best games could do away with all of the fancy window dressing and still be brilliant, even were they mere blocks moving around the screen. (Sometimes they're already stripped down to their most abstract, like Geometry Wars.) They generally offer endless variation on a small ruleset, are simple to understand but take years to master, and don't depend on simply having the user press a button to be rewarded with spectacle. That one-armed-bandit sort of game doesn't stay exciting for long, no matter how flashy the lights.
The GTA games seem to me to be like a big fun toy box. The problem starts when you've played with quite a few similar toy boxes - at that point I don't think the toys can compete for your attention for long, no matter how nice they are.
I rarely buy games as soon as they come out, so it's seldom I get to join the hype wave. I played Portal the day it was released, and it was lovely to feel part of the in-crowd. Generally, though, I get to play things months or years later and without too much peer pressure to enjoy it. Sometimes I find myself baffled as to why everyone was excited. I played Gears of War a week or two ago for the first time, and it didn't do a thing for me. I don't want to suggest that everyone who liked it was wrong or had been unduly influenced by hype, as it won't be so in many cases. Still, you see a whole lot of frothing over nowt much.
Sorry - this has been the most haphazardly constructed comment I've ever written. Erk.
If a game is too complicated to finish you don't want to start over from scratch. I just finished GTA San Andreas(don't laugh) i had a helluva time with the radio controlled plane and flight school. after you complete a game it is like after sex ,you are drained.(at least that is me) The side missions in gta are sometimes not enough to sustain playing the game anymore.
I almost never purchase games at full price, mainly because I don't have much money. GTAIV was an exception. I was caught up in the hype and generally enjoyed Vice City, so I decided I have to have it. After playing it for about six hours I really regretted this decision. It was exactly like Vice City but with a slicker exterior... the mission format was the same, the combat was still broken, and the story was just as generic. I don't understand why it was worshipped by critics. Maybe because GTAIV was the sequel to GTA3, which they all adored seven years ago? It seems especially like the game was favored just due to 'Grand Theft Auto' being in the title. While I was frustrated and disappointed, every other person seemed to be hailing it as the most important game ever made.
Four months later and everyone's moved on. It's a strange sensation.
Because current/next/whatever-gen blockbuster titles are (largely) more intense, strongly narrative, linear experiences. GTA IV, Bioshock et al. are much more akin to sitting through Return of the King, except that you have to fight all of the battles. Awesome that first time you do it, but once you've heard the story, do you really want to go through the effort to hear it again?
Bomberman, on the other hand, is more structurally a _game_ in the classic sense; its very nature is to push the player to become better at a particular mechanic. Its demands are far more casual, and not tied to a slog from point A to B.
Since I've beaten Portal, I still play through the game once every few weeks. I can quote all the dialogue, and I can run through the game in about an hour, but I still want to play it all the time. I think when it comes to replay value, we like simple mechanics. It has to come down to good gameplay if we're going to play something again. If a game has a great story, that's good--I'll play it once and really enjoy it, but then I know the story and I don't have the compulsion to go through it again. I like those experiences, but they're easy to move on from. It's the simple gameplay mechanics that make us gamers in the first place and that we still come back too, IMO.
Waxdart, I agree - but something you said also reminded me of something that's been bothering me for ages. The following isn't getting at you at all, just at the crazy hardcore/casual labelling system. It was prompted by:
Bomberman, on the other hand, is more structurally a _game_ in the classic sense; its very nature is to push the player to become better at a particular mechanic. Its demands are far more casual, and not tied to a slog from point A to B.
Shouldn't it be the case that the more "game-like" a game is, the more it suits the label hardcore? It seems to me that many games labelled as "hardcore" are not only easier (generally providing infinite lives and testing perseverance over skill), but they're also less like games than many so-called "casual" games (in that they often have shallow, repetitive mechanics, and their main draw is expensive and spectacular presentation).
Surely the very essence of a computer game is that you're working with its mechanics. That's where the lion's share of the fun comes from. So-called hardcore games almost always have a very narrow range of mechanics - is there really that much core difference between one big-budget FPS and the next? On the other hand, outwith the hardcore label pretty much anything goes.
It's daft that many games that aren't particularly difficult, innovative, or "game-like" are labelled hardcore. It seems to me that hardcore and casual generally used to mean high-budget and low-budget instead of what they should mean: hardcore for games with complex, deep mechanics; and casual for simplistic mini-game collections and most linear, story-heavy games.
Overall, I'd favour getting rid of the hardcore/casual labels altogether.
I think people are hitting the nail on the head when they compare the experience of playing a game like GTA IV or BioShock to that of watching a movie or reading a book. Not in the usual sense that the games compared with movies discussion occurs, but just in the sense that once we have experienced the story and/or world of the game, gotten to know the ins and outs and don't have anything new to discover, get to know or enjoy, we have no reason to keep playing and therefore move onto the next big thing. Obviously media plays into this as it is mostly focusing on what is upcoming rather than what has been, but with or without the media once we have experienced it we don't need to again.
That said, I think GTA IV and BioShock are great examples of games that aren't neglected as much as we may think now. Sure, at the moment it seems like no one is playing the games anymore and dare I say it, that no one cares about them anymore either but with these two examples I think we will care again and be quite happy to return to their worlds in the future. It just won't be a return to the game in their original state, but rather through new content. In BioShock's case, we will be revisiting (and perhaps discovering new areas in) Rapture via the sequel. As players who have already visited once, we will want to go back to see Rapture in its beauty again while also perhaps seeing another aspect of it. We of course may also be continuing the story of certain characters and like any good movie or book, that's another thing we will be happy to do. Even if we don't continue the story of particular characters, the continuation of Rapture as a character will be enough to bring us back for more.
As for GTA IV, well the upcoming DLC will bring us back to it no doubt. We might not know just exactly what will be in these 'chapters' just yet, but it is clearly a more significant chunk of gameplay than a typical map pack or whatever. Whether it continues in Liberty City (perhaps focusing on a different aspect), takes us to another city like Vice City or whether it continues Niko's story or not, whatever it ends up being will probably be reason enough to return for more just like BioShock.
Of course that brings us to sequels and which games should have them, which games shouldn't and etc, but generally speaking these more story based games are ones that we may have left for now, but given the right incentive we would be willing to return to again in the future. So I guess it really just boils down to the game in question at the time and the situations surrounding it.
Of course, I could also be wrong and just speaking on a personal level, but that's not up for me to decide.
David --
I don't mean at all to imply a casual/hardcore dichotomy. I think specifically with regards to the examples I've cited, you could effectively argue that any of them exist on both sides of the spectrum.
My point chiefly is just about the core of a game itself -- can you strip away the narrative (where it exists) and still have a compelling game? Then that's one that's easier to return to time and time again.
But yeah, I agree. Casual/Hardcore is arguably a really nebulous (and increasingly so) concept.
i felt this way about Oblivion. The game was just too big and open ended. I think that I may go back to it someday, but i don't think i'll ever have the time. There are games that will live on forever as favorites and maybe will be played through again, but especially long titles are harder to replay. there is a much bigger commitment in playing through Lost Odyssey a 2nd time, which I got to the 4th disc and just stopped due to the wear of traditional rpg on my soul, than to play through gears of war for the 3rd or 4th time.
A short fun game will get just as much if not more gameplay than a long game.
I don't think I would have enjoyed "IV" quite as much if I wasn't an NYC resident.
Most of the fun of the game was yelling out to my neighbor things like "Ooh, look! Flushing Meadows!" If I weren't ending the life of a yoga enthusiast with a shotgun, I was sightseeing.
I got about 1.5 times through the game before putting it away. I concentrated on being bad Niko the first time through. For some reason, behaving just wasn't quite as fun on the second time through.
Do you ever run out of things to do? I'd say yes, but that set of things is endlessly entertaining if you're "doing it right".
Jesus. Excuse my grammar.
"in four months, Michael Phelps' Olympic performance will no longer be a water-cooler topic, and no one will mention The Dark Knight anymore"
There was an interesting Wall Street Journal piece yesterday about turning Phelps's Olympic momentum into a sustainable marketing machine a la Woods or Jordan. The opportunities opening up for him (and potentially the sport) are exclusively due to his Olympic performance; so, if he breaks the threshold, expect his success to be re-iterated again and again. No different from when the controversy and success of previous GTAs seeps to the forefront of gaming's water-cooler when a new iteration sees release.
Likewise, the DVD release of The Dark Knight will likely come in December timed with or without a possible Golden Globe nomination for Heath Ledger will rekindle the buzz that propelled the film to break records. Same as what the gaming water-cooler will be on about at the release of the GTA DLC. But enough quibbling.
@noc: I find it interesting you cite Spore as exemplary of transience; Wright has made his name on titles that not only never end, but are scorned or heralded as exemplary of addiction and massive replayability.
To those that are speaking that casual and hardcore typically mean the opposite of what they are meant to describe, I'd tend to agree - casual should reference transient experiences, whilst hardcore should refer to immensely replayable experiences. Better yet, as others have said, those terms should be eschewed, and I think it might be possible that they are holding back the medium.
I think the issue with the casual/hardcore labeling system isn't that it exists, but that it's often not being used properly.
It's an important descriptor, and not one we should do away with. It has to do with three things, I think: the barrier to entry, the upper limit of the success possible, and the degree upon which the game hinges upon this ladder of achievement.
WoW is a good example of this: it's designed to be tremendously accessible to new players, but there's two different ways to play it: you can explore the world do quests and leisurely progress through the levels, or you can build as fast as you can to the level cap, build the most optimized character you can, and begin grinding out the endgame in search of ultra-high-end gear. There are "Casual" WoW players and "Hardcore" WoW players, and the difference between them is pretty stark. The reason there's this difference is because the "hardcore" portion of the game is 1) difficult to enter (because it involves an uncomfortable amount of repetition, grinding, and organization), 2) laced with goals which can be reached with this style of play, and 3) almost completely concerned with this level of meta-advancement. When monsters start becoming nothing more than loot drop tables, and you start going after fights not for the challenge but because you can kill these folks more efficiently, you've pretty much abandoned the exploration part of the game in favor of a game of stat-grinding and optimization.
In FPSs: CounterStrike is pretty "hardcore." Especially the original; as someone who doesn't play FPSs competitively, dropping into a CS server means volunteering for a half hour of being slaughtered. Is this because CS is a particularly "difficult" game? No. You point and shoot. But the ladder of advancement, the difference between a leet player and a newb, is pretty long. Those players themselves, who've already climbed that latter, form the barrier to entry, the alacrity and precision with which I get headshotted speaks as to the heights of achievement possible, and, well, there's not much else to the game.
TF2, on the other hand, is pretty "casual." It's designed so that a lot of the mechanics (class roles and weapon functionality, for instance) are pretty apparent to the newcomer. It's balanced so that, while better players will still be better at killing worse players, the difference between skill levels isn't impassable. And playing the game is fun enough, even when you're losing, that it doesn't become simply a grind to perfect twitch reflexes.
Base difficulty doesn't determine whether something is "hardcore." Innovation certainly doesn't. Neither does depth, though depth is a much different thing from complexity, and complexity can play a big role, depending on how its handled.
"Casual" games are games that are possible to play casually and still have fun with, even if you haven't already perfected the relevant set of skills. "Hardcore" games that are built around rewarding those skills, and are significantly less rewarding when those skills are found lacking.
It's a pretty important division. We, gamers that we are, tend to forget it sometimes, because we've often been immersed in the "hardcore" for so long that we can't really see what the big deal about it is. And we forget that we've, by virtue of playing all the games we have, built up a pretty unique set of skills that are hard to acquire without those years of immersion.
So the label's important. Is it always applied intelligently? No, but we need to keep it around nonetheless.
And Alex, I dunno about Spore. Ambivalence of that is a whole other discussion, and one we can better carry out once we've played the damn thing . . . but what I suspect is that it'll become like the Sims. It seems built for the same sort of incremental expansion-through Expansion Packs model.
And that has to do with the same "rabbit hole" thing I talked about. You hit the bottom pretty quickly, and though each subsequent expansions adds another layer to explore, I don't know how much room there is to dig sideways. I don't know, in Spore, how different civilizations will be. I don't know how much difference there will be between a very successful one and one that's just getting by.
It's like . . . there are two kinds of sandbox games. One gives you a box full of little particles that obey certain laws, then gives you a shovel, a couple of rocks, and a bucket and lets you noodle around.
The other gives you a pail and says "If you put this upside down on the sand, it'll leave a column. Go build a castle." And you can get some pretty impressive castles, but in the end they're just things built out of cylinders, and once you've built a few you start seeing the cylinders everywhere and suddenly the castles don't look nearly as impressive anymore. Maybe an expansion gives you a bucket in a different shape, and you have fun with that for a little.
But there are a lot of things you can do with a sandbox full of little particles. And you can almost always figure out something new and interesting to do.
Again, we won't know until it comes out. But I'm expecting the former, at least for now. Simulations aren't very accessible, after all.
I will chime in on this by saying that GTA is most certainly an interactive story or movie. Having only played through III and Vice City, where I think it really shines is when the larger abstraction of the realistic city gets broken up with great elements of gameplay. I'm talking about the taxi driving, or RC car portions of the game. You leave the city behind in a way and a new set of rules suddenly takes over.
Exploration is also a major draw for me, but these more confined experiences had me banging away at them for hours. I think GTA is great in that way because if I am in the mood for a twitchy game experience, I can have it. If I want to move the story along and look at the larger picture, I can do that too.
I think Kevin nailed it in both of his comments. Between the modern day hype machine for the AAA game of the month and the lack of time most of us have, its hard to play Twilight Princess in the same way we did the original LoZ. Plus I think game design now almost seems centered around building up to fun moments instead of making sure each moment is fun.
Maybach
How does this 4-month bell curve work when a game features online content? Or if the main appeal of the game is user-created content?
What happens when, in four months, no one really cares about Little Big Planet and there just isn't that much user created content anymore? Is there backlash? Is there a feeling of being ripped off? Do you think people will get REALLY sour on games that they paid for, but just can't play anymore when there's nothing to download?
Does the game industry adapt? Will reviewers take into account that the really cool game with the awesome online stuff just won't be playable in a couple of months? Will there be anything to adapt to?
I'm just curious.
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