If you want a more traditional ‘per session’ breakdown of what happened at the Future of Gaming 2023 event, please check out my Twitter drop.
What occurs below, however, is a semi-edited brain dump…
What can we learn about the games industry from its past?
From where does change come? Has it only been around business models?
Can anything trigger a change in player sentiment?
Or were previous disruptions just about engaging a new audience?
These were some of the questions asked or implied during #FOG23’s opening talks that have framed my thinking today.
Certainly, games have become less about “playing the game” over the past 35 years. Gameplay is not yet irrelevent but it’s perhaps more irrelevent than most people think because the titles we use to highlight the industry are still those that offer increasingly deep gamic experiences — think Baldur’s Gate 3.
But while these are the games into which the hardcore happily drop their annual allocation of 1,000 hours of playtime, this is not how the vast majority of people are playing. And despite all its financial success — Baldur’s Gate 3 could have done $1 billion in revenue — it’s not what most players are spending on either.
If we want to understand change in the industry, we need to follow the real money, not the headlines.
We also need to appropriately weigh the value of lagging indicators. Many important gears of the games industry find themselves set for the past, not the future. Twenty years since launch, Steam isn’t now a distribution platform for new PC games. It’s a highly policed community attuned to the type of PC games that this community is passionate about — for example Baldur’s Gate 3 — and only for such experiences, plus the odd indie hit like Dave The Diver, (which may or may not be indie).
In this way, it doesn’t matter that you can’t release blockchain games on Steam. Even if you could, the Steam community would not allow them to succeed because success on Steam is generated by the community pulling on the levers Valve has made available. Hence the real reason Valve doesn’t allow blockchain games to be released on Steam isn’t because it thinks blockchain is a scam but because it knows doing so would alienate its core audience.
“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
The situation isn’t quite the same on app stores but once again web3 game companies are competing against embedded interests, in this case monetization flywheel of the big F2P mobile game companies, who can restrict anyone else’s success through UA spending.
That’s why the hitherto success of web3 games has been bottom-up and largely driven by cryptonomics; that is speculation.
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