The Negative Impact of Games as a Service on the Video Game Industry
From video game developers to dopamine-pushers.
When a prolific name in the video game industry asked me to find out what was really destroying the video game industry, I had no idea that some of the biggest problems were being passed off and codified as best practices. What youâre about to read is distilled from sections of my original report on whatâs really destroying the video game industry.
In our last article, âWhatâs Really Destroying the Video Game Industry Revealedâ, we covered how the video game industry became more accessible than ever in the early 2010s, leading to cheap start-up costs and slush fund journalism. With few barriers to entry remaining, the following years were punctuated by attempts to streamline and monetize the industryâs entire software development cycle.
By 2017 the video game industry had cultivated the perfect environment to ensure the dominance of Games as a Service (GaaS) as the development and delivery model desired most by developers. To start, early access was a provable business model. Then, Agile development became the norm. Finally, Games as a Service pulled it all together into a coherent business strategy.
Key takeaways
Games as a Service encourages developers to release unfinished products while deflecting criticism by claiming that the games are still in development.
Some developers use Games as a Service to exploit human psychology and trigger dopamine spikes in consumers, leading to addictive and compulsive spending behaviors.
Many gamers see Games as a Service as a way of destroying the video game industry and devaluing the gaming experience.
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Early access meant easier access to your wallet
Early access is a video game development and funding model that lets customers buy and play a video game early in the software development cycle. Funds generated from early sales can then be used to continue development, typically at a more consistent or even accelerated pace. Paying customers are often offered the chance to help bug-test, provide feedback, and suggest features or feature changes. These customers are also typically provided with in-game rewards, titles, items, or other special and often unique materials. Early access games differ from pre-ordered games in that the former provides a version of an unfinished product thatâs immediately playable.
Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, was one of the earliest known examples of a video game developer granting customers paid early access to a game. Persson gave customers the ability to purchase permanent privileged access to the alpha. Opening this avenue of funding allowed Persson to quit his day job, found Mojang Studios, and continue with the full-time development of his game.
The founding of Mojang Studios proved early access was a viable way to raise startup capital. By the end of 2013, Valve launched Steam Early Access, a complementary service to the Steam marketplace intended to help video game developers and their studios include their communities in the development process by giving customers access to a game before itâs actually released. Where Mojang proved the concept, Steam made the practice accessible to game developers and studios of all levels.
Now, all the industry needed was a way to sustain funding. Unfortunately, the financial transaction systems that support paid DLC, loot boxes, and in-game currencies arenât conducive to video game development at such an early stage. And thatâs how early access set the stage for the video game industryâs mass adoption of Agile development methodologies.
Agility issues
Early access set the stage for the video game industry to complete its shift to Agile development. Agile development is a set of methodologies for project management and rapid application development that share a common philosophy. It emphasizes an iterative approach thatâs supposed to help teams deliver value to customers faster and with fewer obstacles. Accordingly, Agile excelled in an environment where video game studios were expected to continue delivering updated and new content for the same game over an extended period.
In theory, what this meant was that a video game developer would update their game with new iterations over time. These iterations would bring the video game closer and closer to its intended âfullâ version by expanding gameplay, adding promised features, polishing art assets, streamlining the graphical user interface (GUI), and refining story elements. But in reality, developers found they could leverage iterative releases of the product with marginal improvements to drive sales.
EA is often seen as one of the most notorious abusers of Agile methodologies, especially when it comes to games published by their EA Sports division. The company is often accused of releasing the same game year after year with only minor improvements and incremental feature additions across multiple video game franchisesâincluding Madden NFL.
Hosts from video game show Xplay recently set out to answer whether or not the claim by gamers that âall Madden games are the sameâ was true. They tested their hypothesis against playthroughs of every EA Sportsâ Madden NFL game from Madden NFL 15 (released in 2014) to Madden NFL 22 (released in 2021).
âIt feels like every three years itâs just the same,â Xplay producer Jake Bennett said in a summary of EA Sportsâ Madden franchise, âIt just kind of recycles, and then [the developers] try to innovate a little bit to fool everybody.â1
In a video from 2018, video game documentary channel GVMERS detailed the rise and fall of Skate, a popular skateboarding video game franchise. While discussing the market reception of Skate 3, commentator Steve Petitt summarized, â[âŚ] where Skate 2 felt like a substantial enough evolution of the seriesâ first entry, Skate 3 just felt like another iteration of what had come before.â2
Up until the early 2000s, many of the most criticized franchises were heavily weighted toward console releases. In these cases, customers primarily purchased a physical productâthe disc, which held the game data. Therefore, it was easy for customers to compare previous iterations to new ones in cost, features, and value. The adoption of all-digital releases and a further shift into the concept of âlive serviceâ muddied these waters. All-digital releases gave developers unprecedented control over product accessibility, and as a result older versions of games often became less readily available.
It was no wonder then that in the years following Mojangâs success with early access, Agile development was adopted by more and more game studios.
Continuous delivery of the bare minimum
By the early 2010s, Agile was maturing into what is now called âContinuous Deliveryâ. Where Agile at least tried to maintain some semblance of a proper product launch phase, Continuous Delivery depended on an infinite loop of iterations and âdeploymentsâ. Digital delivery systems had made the idea of launching a finalized productâthe âfull versionâ of a video gameâcompletely obsolete.
Naturally, the most innovative video game developers had already begun to milk this new evolution of the software development cycle. In some cases, the implementation of Continuous Delivery allowed developers to charge new customers full price for what in some cases amounted to a barely playable demoâironically, Valve has an entire page dedicated to why Steam Early Access should not be used in this way.3 Meanwhile, criticism of software integrity, design, and even questionable business practices could be deflected by pointing out that the software is âjust an alphaâ and âstill in developmentâ.
However, developers and their publishers still needed a way to normalize this trend of getting customers to continuously pay for a product that was forever being built. Thus, Games as a Service was born.
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Games as a Service by any other nameâŚ
Continuous Delivery. DevOps. Live Service. It goes by many names and misnomers, but at the end of the day, theyâre all just ways to obfuscate the video game industryâs uniquely atypical flavor of Software as a Service, âGames as a Serviceâ.
Games as a Service (GaaS) is a model for generating continuous revenue during and after a video gameâs release. GaaS seeks to monetize as many steps in the video game development and publishing process as possible. Typically, this is done by empowering developers to provide long-running games with new content.
In its most benign form, GaaS can present itself as a reasonably-priced monthly MMORPG subscription, single-player campaign DLC, or something like Microsoftâs Xbox Game Pass. It may also include things like loot box mechanics or a paid subscription to weekly developer newsletters. But the dark side of Games as a Service sees some developers weaponizing video games to take advantage of their customers. By using video games to alter human neurochemistry, monetization mechanics can be used to psychologically weaken impulse control in consumers. This isnât science fiction or a conspiracy theory; this is a fact.
A well-known neurochemical associated with weakened impulse control is dopamine. The higher the dopamine levels in the human brain, the happier, more motivated, alert, and focused that human is likely to be. For a long time, we have known that dopamine spikes can be triggered by shopping, the anticipation of reward, and uncertainty of reward.4 Not coincidentally, these are also three crucial ingredients for nurturing a gambling addiction.5
At a 2016 global mobile games conference in Helsinki, former Tribeflame CEO Torulf Jernstrom mapped out how developers could trigger dopamine spikes in consumers.6 In a controversial lecture, Jernstrom stated that âthe socially acceptable way of behaving in your game should be payingâ and went on to push the idea of how in-game notifications could be used to trigger consumer spending by advising, âYou want the whole clan to know [when a fellow clan member spends money] because that then becomes the socially acceptable way of behaving.â
According to Jernstrom, âwhalesââthe highest-spending customersâtook an average of about 18 days to commit to an in-game purchase. That lengthy period between consideration and commitment to purchase is why itâs so important for these types of developers to continuously supply new content, and subsequently why the Games as a Service model is increasingly being implemented by video game developers and aggressively encouraged by their publishers.
So early access allowed developers to monetize video game development at its earliest stage. Agile streamlined software production, while Continuous Delivery made it possible to keep the game in perpetual production while still selling it to customers. Finally, Games as a Service tied all of these practices together into a coherent, easily-implemented business model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE3mV7WyuO0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cX7wisSiWI
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/earlyaccess
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/brain-wise/201510/shopping-dopamine-and-anticipation
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4