You Wait Years For A Cloud Gaming Platform And Then Three Come Along At Once

I was just thinking about posting an update about how my GeForce Now experience had been going, when this popped up in my rss feed. To save you clicking through, it's a news article at Games Industry.biz about Amazon Luna, which is now included with a Prime Gaming subscription.

Wait? Wasn't it already? Didn't they switch "Prime Gaming" over to Luna months ago, when they stopped handing out free games? I thought I wrote something about that at the time? 

Let me check a mo... Yes, I did. Kinda... I mentioned it in a Grab Bag, which is about all it deserved.

The whole thing seemed pretty chaotic back then. I have another post where I talk about being able to access my Good Old Games catalog through Luna, which meant I was able to play games I'd claimed through Prime, but which I redeemed on GOG, on Amazon's cloud gaming service. It was about as convoluted as that sounds. I did it a few times and then completely forgot about it until now, which is about par for the course for these things with me. Make logging in more than a single step and I'll probably bounce, after the novelty wears off.

So, what have they done this time? And is it an improvement?

Ehhh... kind of? I gave it a quick test this afternoon so I have a basic grasp of how it works and I have to say it's not exactly intuitive. Or user-friendly. Or anything like as easy as they seem to think it is. Not for me, anyway. 

Amazon believes Luna offers a low-effort, non-technical, crowd-pleasing way to play games. They see a huge number of people playing on mobile devices, people who own neither PCs nor consoles, and they'd like some of that business, thank you very much. 

Amazon has noticed Netflix getting plenty of traction with their gaming offer, now they've integrated it into their basic service. Take-up there has increased massively and as we all know, no-one gave a toss about Netflix games until recently. (Pretty sure no-one reading this gives a toss about them now, either, but people who read whacking great walls of text on gaming blogs are hardly their target audience.)

I know this because at the same time that news article appeared on GI.biz, so did this. It's an interview with Jeff Gattis, general manager for Amazon Luna and Amazon Game Studios, and he's keen to explain the rationale behind giving away the farm.

That is what they're doing, isn't it? Although Prime subscribers have had some limited free access to the platform for a while, the full Luna service used to require a subscription. Now it doesn't. Is that right?

Who knows how it used to work? Or cares, frankly. I'm not going to waste my time researching it because whatever it was, it's changed now. All these cloud gaming platforms have a free version of sorts, then one or more levels of paid subscription. I don't imagine Luna was much different.

As it stands today (And don't quote me on this because I'm guessing making it up quoting Gemini here.)  there are two levels: you can either get Luna free as part of your Prime subscription or you can pay $9.99 a month just for Luna. Which would seem like an exceptionally bad deal, considering all the other stuff Prime gets you...

Or it would if Prime got you the whole package but of course it doesn't. It gets you what they call the "Standard" package. Or it does if you live in the USA or the UK, which are the only two regions where it's being bundled in with Prime so far . It doesn't look as though Standard is available separately outside of Prime, either. A lot of caveats and conditions creeping in, aren't there?

If you want the Premium package, that definitely costs extra, even if you are a Prime subber. Why you'd want it, if you're in the UK or the US, beats me. The only difference I can see is that you get more games and I'm not even sure of that, as you'll see further in.

That's all already more confusing than Amazon would like to believe, something that I'm sure will surprise no-one reading this. Amazon does not have a reputation for clarity where gaming is concerned.

The whole interview with Gattis is very interesting, not to say revealing, as he talks about the various games divisions within Amazon historically not having known what each other was doing, some of the decisions they made being "weird" and how Amazon were after a big share of the PC/Console/AAA market until they realized Steam, Playstation, XBox and Epic were fighting over the same gamers like a bunch of dogs in a sack and decided not to bother with that nonsense any more. Casts some light on New World's demise, that perspective, doesn't it?

What they want to do now, apparently, is get their claws into the 2.5 Billion active gamers, who don't use any of those upscale platforms. And they think they can do it by making it easy to get in on a device you already have, through a subscription you're already paying. There are 200 million Prime subscribers already so that'd be a good start.

Except my experience suggests getting to the games on Luna isn't quite as smooth an experience as all that. As soon as I read the news, I logged straight into my Amazon account and looked for the games. There weren't any. 

There are thirteen tabs along the top of the page and none of them says "Games". Neither does any of them say "Luna". None of them even says "Prime" for that matter. The nearest I could get was "Prime Video", which goes exactly where you'd think it would. No games there.

Right up in the top, left corner there's the Amazon smiley logo and underneath it, in small, blue letters, it says "Prime". I clicked on that. No dice. Just a bunch of cut-price offers. So where are the damn games?

Finally, in the absence of anything better to try, I clicked on the three horizontal lines with "All" next to them. That gets you a drop-down menu and halfway down it you'll find "Amazon Luna - Cloud Gaming." Click on that and you get a sub-menu with four choices - All Games, Play With Prime, GameNight With Prime and Learn More. 

I went for All Games because why wouldn't I? That got me a page featuring a game I actually want to play, right at the top, as the splash image. Wow! Wasn't expecting that. That's it, up there in the header.

Scrolling down, there's a layout very similar to what you see on Prime Video or indeed Netflix. There's a top ten, the latest additions to the platform and some "Editor's Picks". And as I found out eventually, once you've played a game, you get a "Continue Playing" shelf, just like "Continue Watching" on regular Prime. 

If you scroll right to the very bottom you will finally see an "All Games" button. You can then filter that by Standard or Premium although honestly I could hardly tell the difference. The list of Premium titles also includes all the Standard ones so good luck figuring out what's been added. It certainly wasn't obvious where the extra $9.99 a month value was.

But the good news! There are games in the Standard offer I might at least want to take a look at. Dispatch, for a start. That's on my Steam wishlist. I've been waiting for a decent sale. Looks like I can save my money now.  There's also Death Stranding and both Alan Wake games and Hogwarts Legacy and Hollow Knight...

I might play any of those but I will play Dispatch so I started there. Things didn't go too well, at first. 

The first problem was my browser. There's an approved list and Firefox isn't on it. I can't really rag on Amazon for that. Firefox is increasingly not on anyone's list of approved browsers. I keep Chrome always ready in the background for all the services that won't have dealings with Mozilla any more. 

I swapped to Chrome and that worked. Kinda. Luna opens a full-screen window and my mouse pointer would only display in the top couple of inches. It worked on the whole screen - I just couldn't see it. I had to move the mouse about and wait 'til I saw a button light up. A mini-game all of its own!

After a little of that, I got the game started. Inside I found the same issue with the mouse but you don't really need the mouse in the introduction. It's all watching cut scenes and making choices with the keyboard. 

I gave it a few minutes just to check it worked, which it did, then the traffic noise through my open window drowned out the dialog so I opened the settings and switched the subtitles back on (I'd turned them off at the start.) and guess what? The mouse pointer magically appeared. Must be some glitch with the full window.

I tried to take a few screenshots for this post but the old reliable, Win+PrtScr didn't exactly work. It looked like it might have but there was nothing there when I checked the folder later. That'll have to be sorted or I won't be playing. Can't play a game and not be able to take screenshots. It's inhuman!

At that point I decided to stop and have a look at Netflix to see what games they had to offer. I've looked before and it's been a whole load of mobile games of little interest to me but that was a while ago. 

It still is, mostly. There are a lot of them, though. Can't argue with the amount of choice. And there are a handful of semi-interesting titles scattered here and there.

More importantly, the games are right there on the first page. No digging through drop-downs to find them. Much easier. If Amazon are hoping for the same kind of take-up Netflix is getting, they'd better get their UI guys on the job. But then, Prime Video is a chaotic shambles compared to Netflix, so I'm not convinced they have any UI guys, or not any that know what they're doing...

I did find one game on Netflix I'd be interested to try: Oxenfree. I remember reading about that one a long time ago on someone's blog, or at least I think I do, if I'm not mixing it up with something else. I thought I'd try it just to test the ease of access and Netflix faltered at the first fence.

Obviously it wouldn't work with Firefox but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that Netflix games only work on a mobile device. You can't play them on a PC. 

Officially, that is. By which I don't mean there's some back-door access you can hack your way into via some shady third party app. There's a beta for playing Netflix games on TVs and PCs running right now, albeit only in certain, selected territories, the UK being one of them. I tried it and it worked fine. 

I played Oxenfree for just long enough to make sure it was playable and then I logged out. It looks like an interesting game. I imagine I'll be back.

So now I have three options for playing games I don't own, on other peoples' computers. By far my preferred option is GeForce Now, for which I'm paying, and which I'm finding to be very much worth the money. I can play a huge range of games there that I actually want to play already, many of which my current hardware won't run, or not reliably. Since I subscribed, I've used it pretty much every day.

Amazon Luna places a fairly distant second. It is free, since I won't be bothering with the dubious benefits of the Premium version and it does have a few genuinely appealing titles. Given a choice between even this iteration of Luna and the "weird" Prime Gaming of a couple of years ago, though, I'd revert in a heartbeat. I liked collecting those games, even if I never played most of them. I guess that was too good to last. 

I'm also very skeptical that this latest attempt by Amazon to forge a presence in the gaming sector is likely to achieve much more than the last several ruses they tried. If they think what they've got here is going to feel natural and accessible to the huge, casual gamer market I suspect they're going to be disappointed. Again.

Last comes Netflix. Not because of any shortcomings in the platform itself but because it's clearly not designed for me. I don't have a great deal of interest in mobile games and if I did I'm not sure I'd need Netflix to curate them for me. Most of them are free anyway and I already have several options installed to play mobile games on my computers. And even if I didn't, I imagine that even when the Play On TV and Computer option comes out of beta, there still won't be many Netflix games I'll want to try.

Still, I'm not complaining about being given more options, even if I'm not likely to use them. Nor am I going to whinge about extra value being added to subscriptions I'm already paying, even if the value to me is limited.

And, what with the continuing issues with availability and pricing for computer components and the concomitant price rises, we might all be glad of some options in the years to come. Of course, it is herding us all into the walled gardens of various multinationals, where no doubt we'll be swiftly fleeced like the sheep we've become but as Mrs. Bhagpuss and I often comment, as we stroll the English countryside with Beryl, of all the farmyard animals, the sheep seem to have by far the best deal.

There are worse things you can be than a sheep.  

We're Gonna Make You An Offer...

 

Sometime yesterday evening, my Timerunning Hunter dinged twenty, bringing the shutters down on her unpaid progress through World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. It took me four hours and forty-three minutes to get there, from which you could conservatively subtract maybe half an hour at the absolute outside for time spent AFK. Probably a good bit less.

For the sake of argument, let's call it four hours straight. That's two and a half levels an hour or roughly a level every twenty-five minutes. 

Is that fast? I'm not sure.

I could run a comparative experiment. I just happen to have another hunter already in regular, unremixed Pandaria. She's Level 14. I could play her to twenty and check the difference. But I'm not going to.

Partly that's because I'm not interested enough in finding out the result but mostly it's because Pandaria Remix is just more fun, so why miss out? And anyway, it turns out XP gain in the Remix isn't a constant, so what would it prove?

The factor I hadn't accounted for at the start is the Cloak of Infinite Potential, an item you get early on in the event, which continuously grows in power as you gain "threads". I'm not going to attempt to explain exactly how this works for the simple reason I don't fully understand it. 

There are plenty of discussions about it on Reddit and elsewhere, suggesting the process is a lot more complex than it first appears. Apparently it has all kinds of implications, particularly for other characters on the account. 

The only part that concerns me at the moment is the basic XP gain function, which for the cloak my Hunter is wearing, has reached 20% at Level 20. I wasn't paying close attention during the leveling process so I'm not sure whether that's a co-incidence or whether the gain keeps step with the level. I think it's a co-incidence...

Whatever it is, so far I haven't really noticed that leveling feels much different to what I'm used to in WoW. It always feels freakishly fast once you get into double figures. The Free Trial ends before the slow-down comes. 

I still don't have a max-level character in the game after all these years and that's down to the grind that sets in towards the upper reaches of the level range. Either that or I've never stayed subscribed long enough to get there. Actually that's probably the more likely explanation.

XP gain aside, the Remix does feel very different, mostly because there seems to be so much going on all the time. The constant drip-feed of rewards in the form of chests to open make it seem like something's always happening, even when it probably isn't. Then there are the talents to set, the gems to slot and the new appearances to goggle at. It's all designed to make you think you're having fun all the time - and it works!

It's a while since I last capped a character out in the Free Trial so I'm not sure if this next observation applies only to the Remix or whether the whole thing has been revamped, but I'm all but certain you used to be able to carry on gaining experience to the end of Level 20. After that your character would be locked and you wouldn't be able to play them again unless you subscribed.

Now, if you're a Timerunner, it looks as though you can carry on playing as long as you want, at least until the event ends. You'll just stay at Level 20 and won't gain any more xp. I did a quest just to check and it completed normally but I didn't get either XP or a chest.

Surprisingly, though, you can still get loot from mobs. I ran around Jade Forest for a few minutes this morning, popping porcupines and cranes with my bow, and all of them dropped Bronze, the Event currency. I thought at first it was only going to be coin but on about the seventh or eight kill one dropped a gem and a consumable, so I'm guessing they keep the same loot table.

That does mean you could farm the currency and improve your gear indefinitely on the Free Trial. Since you'd never level up, you'd never outlevel the mobs. I'm not quite sure where that would get you but I'm sure someone's already doing it.

What Blizzard want you to do, of course, is subscribe. They'd really like that. A window pops up right across the middle of the screen every time you log in, suggesting it. When you hit twenty, up it pops again,as illustrated, this time with added PvP value. 

The real hard sell comes after you log out. Within seconds I received a long email congratulating me on hitting the dizzying heights of level 20 and extolling the benefits of a subscription. Apparently, "Countless epic adventures and incredible rewards await" should I care to continue on my journey and should I choose to commit to a monthly subscription I'd be able to "collect companion pets, mounts, and transmogs; face the realm’s deadliest enemies; and take your place among the world's most legendary heroes!"

So far, so expected. The paragraph that really stuck out for me, though, was this:

"Your subscription is the key to endless adventure across Azeroth with access to four legendary games—including World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King Classic™, WoW® Classic: Season of Discovery, and WoW Classic: Hardcore realms. Each month of your subscription you’ll also get a complimentary 500 Trader’s Tender to spend on eye-catching collectibles offered at the Trading Post in World of Warcraft.!

Does that sound at all familiar to anyone? Because it certainly reminds me of something... four games for one sub... 500 in cash shop coin every month...

All they need to do is bang a 10% discount to cash shop purchases on the end and I think we have a viable clone!

I am a little less than convinced by the "four legendary games" part. I'm not going to get into their legendariness, which is mostly a subjective judgment. I'm more concerned about whether they really count as four separate games. Aren't they more like four different modes of the same game? 

Also, should they really still be plugging WotlK Classic? I mean, okay, technically that was the status quo when the email arrived and still is now for almost another eight hours but maybe they might have gone ahead and pre-empted the inevitable by inviting me to subscribe for Cataclysm Classic, since that's almost entirely what I'd be getting. I wonder if the message will change? I'm almost curious enough to level another character to 20 to find out.

That would mean I couldn't carry on leveling up my Gnome Hunter later today, though, and I really would like to do that. I was having a great time. I'm quite keen on taking her all the way to 70. I'm pretty sure it'll be quicker, easier and more fun than getting that last level-and-a-half on my Berserker in EverQuest II, which was otherwise going to be my plan for the next few weeks.

I'm going to have another think about it but I'm very much minded to sub for a month. That'll give me time to enjoy the Remix and also dabble in Cataclysm Classic. I'd be quite surprised if I need more than a month to do either but only time will tell. In the meantime, I have a couple more characters to take through the Free Trial before I have to decide.

All things considered, I think you'd have to call Pandaria Remix a success, both in terms of the entertainment value it provides and in its main purpose of increasing interest and raising revenue. WoW is looking surprisingly spry these days. I have to say the unexpected flexibility suits the old warhorse a lot better than I would have expected.

Resurrection Shuffle

Happy Easter! Have you noticed how people seem to celebrate it like it's a bona fide holiday, now? With cards and everything. Until about ten years ago, I never knew anyone to send a card for Easter unless they were Roman Catholic. If you weren't full-bore Christian, Easter was chocolate eggs and that was it. 

Now we have as many Easter cards at work as we do for Mother's Day, which in the UK was less than a month ago. Remember a decade or so ago, when we were all expecting physical greeting cards to wither away and die? With everyone online and carrying smart phones, who'd be uncool enough to send cardboard through the mail?

Yeah, well, that didn't happen. Greetings cards are a growth area right now. People quite literally buy them by the handful. We can't keep the shelves stocked. 

Anyhoo... I didn't come here to talk shop. I'm not really supposed to do that anyway, at least not while I'm still working, so I'll leave that until I retire, at which time I might just have some stories to tell, although not as many as Wilhelm, that's for sure.

Retirement could be this year, too. I'll be entitled. More likely, it'll be the next or even the one after that because I quite like my job, especially now I only have to do it two days a week. It gives me plenty of exercise and almost all of my face-to-face socializing so I'm not quite as keen to give it up at the first opportunity, like I always thought I would be. It'll be nice to have the option, though.

So, anyway, what was it I was going to talk about if it wasn't work? Oh, yes, I remember. I originally meant to include this next part in yesterday's post. I had some loose framework for stitching the two together somehow. Then my thoughts on the Noah's Heart sunset ran a little longer and more philosophical than I was expecting and I decided to include the other news would unbalance things so I cut it.

Oh, wait, I haven't said what it is yet, have I? Listen to me, rambling on...

Monsters & Memories Early Access 

There! Nothing like a sub-heading to bring things to clarity.

So, I was reading my news feeds a couple of days ago and this popped up. Monsters & Memories, in case you haven't been taking notes, is yet another of the would-be "spiritual successors" to EverQuest and/or your Golden Age MMORPG of choice. Mostly EverQuest, though, and especially this one. 

Tipa, who's been paying close attention, pointed out the tight correlation between the games in a post archly entitled "Monsters and Memories is not EverQuest", while my own snarky comment, after I tried the game out in a stress test last year, was "It's like EQ and Vanguard had a (Very inbred.) baby".

Both of us had a pretty good time with the game in those tests but in my case whatever fun I had there clearly left no lasting impression. By the time I read Tipa's post about another stress test, which took place months after the one I took part in, I'd completely forgotten I'd ever played the game. 

It's hardly surprising. I wasn't planning on pursuing the project further. As Tipa said, the game "takes twenty five years of MMO advances and tosses them in the bin" and I'm not particularly looking for that kind of experience. EQ was amazing for its day but unlike a lot of people, apparently, I can very clearly remember the endless, unceasing demands from many of those who were playing it back when it was the market leader, asking for all the kinds of quality of life changes and gameplay tweaks the current wave of retro-developers seem determined to roll back.

Okay, maybe some of those "improvements" did go a little too far but most of them, had they been offered back in 1999-2004, would have been wildly popular. That's not speculation on my part. It's just World of Warcraft. 

As I suspect we can all now see, if not openly agree, Blizzard pretty much got the balance right, about a year or so from launch. That snapshot iteration of WoW, sold back to us a few years ago, rebranded as Classic, sands off all the right rough edges from the EQ template, while leaving the basic structure untouched. It's just gritty enough to give traction without being so rough as to feel abrasive.

Of course, even WoW took a while to get there. The problem was, when it did, it didn't stop; it just kept right on going until the wheels fell off. The various owners of EQ have been more cautious and circumspect in their modifications of the chassis, meaning the game still feels more like its old self after twenty-five years than Retail WoW feels like Classic after twenty. 

Even so, modern EverQuest is still way, way more forgiving than the game I played a quarter of a century ago. If you doubt it, once again I'm not speculating based off a few frayed memories. Something virtually identical to the original EQ is available, right now, for free, over at Project 99. And EQ is free-to-play, too. Go check them both out for yourself and see how much more relaxed the official version feels.

P99 isn't some under-the-counter, grey market renegade, either. As the official announcement back in 2015 explained, the team behind the emulator have a written agreement with Daybreak Games allowing them to run it legally. As with the now legally sanctioned City of Heroes emulator, it does make me wonder why anyone who wants to play these old games "like they were meant to be played" doesn't just go and play those exact, actual games.

We're still supposedly getting several "spiritual successors" to CoH, even though the game itself is back in business, and apparently we also need a number of "New EverQuests", too, even though both the original and a Classic version are up and running still. The team behind Monsters & Memories seems to be banking on there being a niche audience out there who want something almost exactly the same as EQ that just isn't called EQ. 

In doing so, they're looking to please that demographic who never wanted the games to get any easier in the first place or - more likely, in my opinion - no longer remember how much they once wanted precisely that more than anything. If those people actually played the games that are still available, they might remember why they stopped. Much safer to pin their hopes on something as yet untried. 

Also better graphics, of course. Never forget the "We just want EQ but with better graphics" crowd.

It's understandable. There's evidence that we tend to remember good experiences for longer than we remember bad ones (Although for the sake of balance I should point out there's evidence for the opposite, too...), which may explain why so many people seem to think they had a much better time playing MMORPGs when it was uphill in the snow both ways. 

I try to keep it in perspective but now that I'm able to look at it from a more nuanced position, that kind of gameplay, often described at the time as "addictive", doesn't look healthy. A lot of incidents that get reported, anecdotally, as "satisfying" or "memorable" seem to relate more closely to that rush of endorphins that comes with relief at the resolution of a really bad experience. All those late night corpse recoveries, raid wipes and the times you *almost* rage-quit, until finally it all turned around, leaving you drained but elated. Sure. I remember those. I could write a list.

There's no arguing. Those kinds of experiences do make memories. Only yesterday I was saying it was the memories that matter. Would I want to do all that again to make more, though? Nope. I would not. To burn memories as deep as that risks leaving a scar.

And I value my time more now than perhaps I did then. As I've said about my recent stint with Nightingale, these days I find myself more concerned than delighted when a game grabs me and won't let go. Twenty years ago I was defensively dismissive of those clickbait game addiction headlines. Now, I'm not so sure there wasn't something more to them than I was ready to acknowledge. 

Those games had exceptional access to the part of the brain that likes to be stroked. I've read so much about Skinner Boxes and dopamine hits and training by reward that I could write a blog post about it. 

I'm not going to because I'd just be telling you something you know already. What I don't know and I suspect no-one else does, either, is whether those same autonomic responses can or will be triggered by an obvious copy, when applied to an audience that's deeply familiar with the process and has experienced those same stimuli many times before. 

Even if it works, will that audience pay to keep stroking those neurons - and keep on paying? Experience suggests the effect wears off, sometimes leaving a residue of anger, betrayal and self-loathing. Can that burn-out be avoided or managed effectively to maintain a stable player-base in the absence of a continual inflow of new blood? 

I guess we'll find out, if and when one of these games finally launches. And now we have something like a date for that.

Here's the reason I wanted to write this post in the first place. I quite liked what I saw of Monsters & Memories. I'd definitely have paid the usual $30 for the "box", with free access thereafter in the familiar Buy-to-Play model most such games have gone with in recent times. Unfortunately for me, that's not what's on offer.

Instead, the developers, who go by the extremely appropriate, if presumably also ironic name of Niche Worlds Cult, have opted for giving the game away free, then charging a monthly fee of $15 to play it. 

That's not news. They've always said it would be a subscription title.

What is new, as far as I can remember, is that the sub cuts in the moment the game goes to Early Access. Then, it'll cost $180 to play M&M for a year (There's actually a reduced rate for six or twelve months up front but I haven't been able to find an exact figure for that.) 

It's a good deal cheaper than Pantheon's convoluted Pledge/Season system, which in any case is for a game still in alpha and not even close to "Early Access".  It also has the merit of being much more straightforward but it's still a very bold ask for an unfinished game being developed by an unpaid team of volunteers.

At least, given the recent firestorm over Singularity 6's obfuscatory take on what does or does not constitute Open Beta, there's a very refreshing openness about the whole procedure. The game's website and FAQ are unequivocal about both the methodology and the reasons behind it. Early Access, according to NWC, is not a time for testing. 

"... we aim to have all core gameplay systems complete and tested prior to Early Access... Our goal of Early Access is to expand our game world and its content, not to use the time as an extended testing phase."

That does make it clear that EA is a launch, not a test. It's a distinction we don't always see made when developers start asking for money. Perhaps it's because M&M is being developed not by a for-profit company but a volunteer team that they're able to be so open about the reasons for taking the route they've chosen:

"We have a volunteer team working on Monsters & Memories. MMOs are large, expensive, and difficult to make. By supporting us through Early Access, the hope is we can scale our art and environment production capability, allowing us to accelerate development to where we can have a more fully fleshed out game world. As our subscriber base grows, we can also begin to pay some of our team members."

I applaud their forthrightness but I fear won't be paying $15 a month for the pleasure of losing my corpse in the desert, although I'm not ruling out the occasional, one-off down-payment to satisfy my curiosity. I'm not too proud to buy a few posts for the blog now and again, especially if the game has a bit of a buzz going.

I won't have to think about it for a while, though, because none of this is happening for a couple of years. The proposed EA launch isn't scheduled until January 2026, which is certainly giving plenty of notice.

 Until then there will be more opportunities to kick the tires. As the website says

 "We will continue to run Free Playtests & Stress Tests prior to going Live with our Early Access Launch, to ensure the game runs and plays as well as possible. This will also allow anyone the chance to try the game before paying any subscription fees." 

I'll see if I can't remember to give some of those a try but I would lay odds that almost no matter how well or badly the game fares after it starts charging an entry fee, there will eventually be some form of free trial as well. I'm not sure I know of a single subscription MMORPG that doesn't have one now, including several that didn't have one when they began.

What I would say, from the little personal experience I have with the game and from what others with more have written, is that this seems like one of the more organized, focused and realistic teams currently at work on a project like this. I'd give them more of a chance of bringing it home than
many.

I guess we'll find out how well they've done come January 2026. Mark your calendars now. 

Cheap At Twice The Price?

Time for a very quick Friday Grab-Bag. It's almost becoming a thing here. Maybe I should try to think of a fancy name for it. 

Going to be slim pickings on the blog for a couple of days but I'll give notice now; it could get worse. This is my working weekend but I have dog-minding duty Fridays as well, that being one of Mrs Bhagpuss's main work days, so every other week is going to be a three-day drought. I probably should think seriously about giving up the post-a-day routine.

As I explained in yesterday's post, though, there are some unexpected benefits of having a puppy in the house. I am finally starting to get to grips with writing shorter, faster posts, something I've complained about wanting yet not being able to do for years. All I have do is work out how to make them worth reading and I'll be home free! 

On to to the meat, such as it is. (I've been a vegetarian of sorts since the late 'eighties so what would I know about meat?)

Everything So Expensive These Days, Isn't It?

I guess the big news of the day is the announcement from CCP that the basic monthly subscription for EVE Online is jumping a massive 33% from $14.99 to $19.99. Wilhelm has a post up about it, including the wide range of pricing options avaiable, depending on how long you want to commit to the game. It drops as low as $12.49 if you're willing to buy in for a couple of years.

Back when subscriptions were the norm, I almost always paid by the month. In retrospect I can't imagine why I was so unwilling to go for the six-month or annual options. I could certainly have afforded it back then and it would have saved me a significant amount of money.

These days, the only mmorpg subscription I hold is Daybreak All Access, which I pay for annually at a very considerable discount. According to DBG's website, the annual rate is currently $119.88, a weird-sounding number that actually works out at a neat $9.99 a month. 

That's a good deal for four mmorpgs, EverQuest, EverQuest II, DCUO and Planetside 2. Even more so since I actually play three of them, on and off. It would be an even better deal if Daybreak's owners, EG7, decided to turn it into EG7 All Access and threw in the rest of their games, including Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. I'd pay a discounted annual fee based on a regular $20 monthly sub for that. 

Wilhelm speculates on which other subscription games might follow CCP's lead but there aren't really all that many left, are there? Almost every game has some kind of optional sub these days but hardly any make it mandatory. I imagine the few that do will be watching carefully to see if EVE players complain then pay or complain and leave. If the price rise is deemed a success, though, it will set a new baseline. 

Get Your Filthy NFTs Off My Nice, Clean Metaverse!

There's been some suggestion that the hike is either a passive-aggressive or a desperate response to the company having been forced to backtrack on the potential introduction of NFTs to EVE. If that's caused a potential shortfall in income, maybe it has to be made up some other way.

There was a very good opinion piece at Gamesindustry.biz about NFT's and the metaverse that I'd like to bring to the attention of anyone still capable of caring. The fundemental argument is handily summed up by the title: "Metaverse concepts should distance themselves from NFTs". They really should.

I particularly liked the author's take on NFTs: "which can most charitably be described as a solution in desperate search for a problem, and perhaps more realistically as a home-brewing kit for wannabe Ponzi scheme orchestrators". The metaverse, or more probably metaverses, is going to happen whether we like it or not, in the form of "some blend of virtual world technology with location-based augmented reality, delivered over high-speed wireless networks to a whole spectrum of access modes ranging from immersive headsets to discreet wearables" but NFTs absolutely don't have to be any part of it.

At least Raph Koster, all in on the metaverse as he seems to be, isn't showing the least interest in adding NFTs to his mix. Venturebeat has an interview with him about Playable Worlds, the "sandbox mmo" he's working on and for which he's just received $25m in outside investment, partly from Korean publisher Kakao, formerly home of Black Desert, now of Elyon and ArcheAge.

We still don't know what Raph's game actually is. As the interview rather coyly puts it, "The founders still aren’t quite ready to reveal their intellectual property and setting behind the game". We do learn that it's been "in the works for about two years, and now it is in full production", which I guess means we might get an alpha sometime around 2024.

Skim-reading the interview, it sounds about like you'd expect a Raph Koster project to sound, all economy, interdependency and socialisation. He's been banging the same drum for over thirty years now. I don't imagine metaverses are going to shake his rhythm.

I did have a couple of other things I was going to mention but certain puppy-related incidents have bitten into the time available so I'm going to leave it at that. That way, I still have a couple of items in reserve for tomorrow evening, when time's going to be even tighter still.

Also, in case anyone's trying to find any significance in the screenshots, you can stop now. There is none. I just don't like posts with no pictures and any excuse to use some of my Secret World poses.

The Perks Of The Game - EverQuest Style

I woke up this morning to an email from Wilhelm of The Ancient Gaming Noob advising me of a curious development over at Darkpaw Towers. I like to think of the EverQuest devs there, all safely ensconced in their monk-like cells, draped in hessian robes, cowls pushed back, hammering away at the keys by the flickering light of tallow candles.

What might they have come up with this time, I wondered. I clicked through the link to find a list of "New EverQuest Perks", three new ways for loyal customers to give the company more money. There was even a joking explanation in the language of lore to frame the pitch:

"The Nameless created these Perks during the time of the Dragons and we just found them! (We've been busy . . . really, really busy!)"

Aw, cute!

So, just what are these "perks", anyway?

It seems there are three to be had, one for Adventurers, one for Challengers and one for Merchants. Let's run through them, one by one:

A 5% permanent xp bonus is not a trivial thing in Norrath, even nowadays. When it says it "multiplies with other experience bonuses" I wonder if that's really what they mean? Do they mean it stacks? Anyone who knows math care to explain what would happen if you multiplied cumulative xp bonuses by a fixed percentage?

10% more "coin" is nice but I wouldn't have thought most people make bank on coin drops these days. I make my millions in the Bazaar as I imagine do most people. 

"Alternate currency from modern raids" is a
little outside my realm of experience. Okay, a
lot. I imagine it's important to raiders but how
important is anyone's guess.

I have a vast amount of the "Loyalty" currency, Crowns, which piles up all the time just from having a sub. I have yet to find anything I want to spend it on so a 10% discount is no incentive at all.

Levelling up my mercenaries is something I've never even begun to work on. I probably should. I can wait for a bonus for that, probably forever.

The last perk puzzles me. I was under the impression the possibility of losing a level when you died was removed from the game about a decade and a half ago. Did they put it back?

This is the perk that most appeals to me. Twelve-slot trader's satchels means an additional 20% sales space on your Bazaar trader, although I note it only gives "access" to the bigger bags. How you get the bags themselves is another question.

An additional inventory slot is a huge deal in most games. People buy expensive collector's editions just to get those.

It's a long time since I crafted in EQ but I seem to remember it being very rng-based. Could be useful.

 

At this point I should mention that none of these perks come free. They don't even come as part of the current All Access Membership. In a very important way, a way that speaks directly to the use of language as we know it, these are not "perks" at all. 

Here's the definition of "perk" from the Collins dictionary website:

"Perks are special benefits that are given to people who have a particular job or belong to a particular group."

Note the word "given". The whole point of a "perk" is that it's incuded, for free, as a side-benefit of something else. If you have to pay for it separately it is not a perk.

These "perks", if that's what we have to call them, you do have to pay for. Here's what they'll cost you:

 

I don't have a problem with the pricing. It seems reasonable for the services on offer. I certainly don't have any issues over any so-called "pay to win" elements that could, arguably, be involved. Firstly, all mmorpgs are inherently "pay to win" to some degree. People just like to draw their personal lines in different places so they can fight over them and claim some spurious moral high ground. 

Secondly you can't "win" at EverQuest. Good luck trying.

What this seems to me to be is a very clever way of getting around a problem that's been much discussed in this part of the blogosphere, namely how to increase subscription charges to reflect growing costs in a market that's been trained to be extremely resistant to paying for anything much at all.

Had Darkpaw chosen to hike the All Access Membership by $4.99 there would have been outrage. Even if it had been grudgingly accepted by most Members, the PR hit would have been severe and at the end of it Darkpaw would presumably only have received a percentage of the increase, since it would have been split three ways between them, Dimensional Ink and Rogue Planet.

You might think that it wouldn't matter all that much. It would be splitting hairs, since all three are owned by Daybreak Games and Daybreak Games is owned by EG7 (let's go with that for now). I can attest from decades of working for companies who've chosen to set divisions and branches against each other in competition for resources as individual "profit centers", for the people running each of those divisions it most definitely will matter. A lot.

By doing it this way, Darkpaw stand to up the cost of a monthly subscription for a good proportion of their core customers while being able to claim with good reason that the price of the sub hasn't changed at all. It's a conjuring trick and it's a good one.

My All Access subscription, which I pay annually, renews later this month. Even though I'm not currently playing any of Daybreak's games regularly (blame Bless Unleashed for that) I know I will be soon enough so I'll gladly take another year. I won't be adding any of these EverQuest-specific perks but I'll be watching to see whether the other games and studios follow suit. 

I'll be quite interested to see what Darkpaw comes up with for EverQuest II. I would say it's all but certain the perk system will cross to the younger game; virtually every similar innovation added to one EQ title has eventually made it into the other.

Whether I'll want to pay money for anything the EQII team come up with is a lot less certain. I'd guess not but we'll see. It would certainly have to be some quite different "perks" to most of those on offer here, few of which would make much difference to my gameplay in new Norrath. 

Whatever they come up with, I hope it does well for them. These games have to be paid for somehow, by someone, and this seems like a pretty harmless way of bringing in a few more dollars to me.

This Day's Portion

Among the many fine points made in the lengthy comments on yesterday's posts was this from Yeebo: 

"In terms of whether I consider the ongoing support from developers of a MMO adequate, it comes down to how much of the revenue seems to be getting folded back into the development of more content for the players vs. siphoned off for shareholders or to support projects that few players of the game could reasonably bet expected to care about"

Later, I read this post from Azuriel at In An Age, in which he talks about non-service games ("aka regular-ass games") and the shock he feels on realizing a game he's bought has reached a point of equilibrium from which it will receive no further amendments of any kind: 

"The thought that nothing will happen with the game anymore though? It feels like I was duped."

It seems the whole idea of "games as a service" has fostered a sense of expectation that affects not only the way we pay but the way we think. We want value for money, of course, but in a some strange way we also want to be valued ourselves. We don't just want a game, we want a relationship.

Players often claim to have a clear idea of what's fair when it comes to value for money but what is fair, really? Back in the days when a video game was a once-and-done purchase it used to be easy to tell. You bought the game, you played it, you knew. These days it's a lot harder to be sure. 

Take Guild Wars 2 for example. In theory it operates somewhere in the "games as a service" model but as a buy-to-play game it's less than clear what that means. And the more you think about it, the less clear it gets.

Whatever the service is, it's certainly not an ongoing arrangement between you and the company. As a service-user no commitment is required from you. That one-time payment is all you'll ever be asked for. GW2 has no subscription, optional or otherwise. If you want to give the developers any more money you'll have to buy something from the cash shop.  

Oh, except for the expansions. Those you'll have to buy. Another one-off payment. Twice in nine years that's happened. And even then you can just not do it. You can just carry on playing the content you originally bought. That's service for you!

It gets more complicated because ANet also pride themselves on keeping all the content relevant all the time. Most of the new stuff added within an expansion cycle requires that expansion but not all of it. So even if you just stick with your original purchase you'll get some new content, now and then.

Of course, if you're new to the game, you get everything for that one payment because now you get the expansions thrown in. At heart, GW2 remains a buy-to-play game. It's just that these days what you're expected to buy is the latest expansion. Buy that and you get everything. Until the next one, of course.

Only, there weren't supposed to be any expansions. Ever. ANet claimed on multiple occasions they weren't going to make any. They kept trying various ways to add content without going the full box route. 

They couldn't do it but what if they had? Then they'd have been giving all the new content away for free, forever. That single box purchase I made back in the summer of 2012? It would still be giving me two or three hours of entertainment every day of the week, nine years later. Even as it is, I've only had to buy two more boxes in nine years to make sure I don't miss out on any content at all. It certainly sounds like a good deal.

Not everyone would agree. Last night, as I was happily fighting holograms in the arena, I listened to someone in map chat complain at length about how worthless the whole Dragon Bash event was because ArenaNet have done nothing with it since it was first introduced. 

Which is kind of true in a way. Dragon Bash was on hiatus for years and when it came back it was much the same. They certainly haven't added an awful lot of new events to any of the holidays over the years, but then again, why should they? That guy aside, most people seem happy enough already.

GW2's holiday events aren't particularly imaginative and they rarely get updates or additions of much significance year on year, but they remain fabulously well-attended. Dragon Bash has been running for a week now and it's still heaving. There are been multiple instances of Hoelbrak and the Arena instance running every time I'm on. Several times the map's been so laggy from all the people crammed into it I could barely steer my beetle round the sharp turns. There are so many people clustered around the guy who takes the bets for the moa races you can't see him at all, sometimes. Granted he's an asura but even so....

It does make me wonder just what this "games as a service" idea hopes to achieve, when it's a service no-one has to pay for. If a company is going to keep servers up and encourage players to log in to them, it is, presumably, in the hope of somehow making some money out of the whole affair. If the players aren't paying for access (no subscription) and only paying a one-time fee for the game (buy-to-play) that only leaves the cash shop.

No wonder most players don't like cash shops. Or say they don't, anyway. It follows that cash shops must be more profitable than selling games and content for games, at least in those games that don't also charge a sub. 

Those are the games that are either being given away (free to play) or sold as loss-leaders (buy-to-play) after which they exist solely as reasons for players to spend money in the cash shop. That becomes the game's entire raison d'etre. There has to be a game to hang the cash shop on because otherwise there's no reason to buy anything. You have to have a game. But the game itself is secondary. It's not why you're running the service. The cash shop is.

I never really realized that before. It explains a lot although not why the games are still so frequently entertaining. That's because you catch more flies with sugar, I guess. (Actually, you catch more flies with rotting meat but that's a whole different metaphor...). There doesn't just have to be a game. There has to be a game people want to play, and keep playing, otherwise they won't be around to buy things in your cash shop.

All of which brings me back to the question I began with: just what kind of a "service" is it these games are offering? I'm not exactly clear on how there's even a service at all.  

I work in a bookshop. It has to be staffed and stocked and lit and heated, all so we can sell people books. Lockdowns notwithstanding, you can count on the store being open seven days a week, all year round. We don't call that "shopping as a service". We just call it running a shop.

In a game that funds itself by cash shop sales, isn't keeping the servers up and the game stocked with events and "content" just "running the shop"? The cash shop, in this case. Where, exactly, does the "service" part come in?

Mmorpgs with subscriptions and cash shops are in an even more dubious position. Does the sub pay for most of the costs and provide most of the profit, with the cash shop being a minor add-on? That seems fair enough, but how would we know? Are there still any games like that? WoW? FFXIV?

Usually, a subscription is really just another purchase, a way to rent items and functions that could be (and possibly are) sold piecemeal through the store. That also seems fair in principle. It's up to the player to decide if the perks represent good value or not. It's still not a "service", though. It's just more shopping.

Years ago, when Free to Play was something new and scary, we talked about this sort of thing a lot. We don't so much, any more. We're used to it now. And we've changed, many of us. We don't think like players so much as customers. 

Back then, there was one choice. Which game to play. Make that decision then all you had to do was buy the box and input your credit card details for the monthly subscription. That was "gaming as a service", the service in question being guaranteed access to the game 24/7/365, patch day excepted.

It's no wonder people hanker after the good old days. I'm not at all sure it was better value back then but it sure as heck was easier to understand. Now games are just another contract with costs that need constant monitoring to make sure they're not running out of control.

According to the Inflation Calculator, the standard $14.99 monthly sub from the turn of the millennium would now cost a shade over $27. Not quite double. Would you pay that for an mmorpg with no cash shop today? 

I might... until I think about my nine years in Guild Wars 2. Nine years in which I've used the cash shop exactly once, about seven years ago. Nine years that have cost me around $150 for one account, expansions included. Six months' subscription at the 2021 mark-up, in other words.

I think my real question here is how the hell do ArenaNet stay in business?

Truth In Advertising

Four years ago to this very day, the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter campaign began. Within twenty-four hours it had fully funded. A month later it came to a highly successful conclusion. Having asked for three-quarters of a million dollars to "expand our scope and give our team flexibility and room to breathe" (they already had "private backing that will allow us to produce a core viable product"), Intrepid Studios pulled in more than $3m from nearly twenty thousand backers.

I was one of them. I paid $40 each for two Settler packages, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss. I know I paid forty dollars because I still have the email with the virtual receipt. 

I must have been the earliest of birds because the historic Kickstarter page shows the actual "Early Bird" Settler pack going for $45. When the first thousand of those were gone, the price went up to $50, whereupon more than two and half thousand people piled on before the shutters came down.

You have to be fast with these things, apparently. You can't afford to hang around. Well, I guess you could. There are always those catch-up promotions some Kickstarted projects run, repeatedly, after the official campaign closes. Just don't rely on getting the same value for money. ("Value for money" does not imply actual value. Although it does imply actual money.)

Both my decision to back the game and my choice of pledge were pragmatic. I don't regret either. Based on the people involved and the game they proposed to make, I knew I'd certainly want to play it when it launched. I also like to play games in mid-to-late beta, when there's a game there to play but things are still in some state of flux, so it made sense to buy in when that was an option.

Kickstarter called it a pledge but in my mind it was a pre-order. For slightly less than the anticipated cost of the full game on release I'd get a copy of the game itself, an extra months' subscription time (two months altogether) and a few in-game perks. It seemed a reasonable deal.

 

Had I been both wildly optimistic about the game and desperate to play it at the earliest possible opportunity, I could have gone for the $500 "Braver of Worlds" package (only $485 if I'd snatched the Early Bird deal). That came with not only a guaranteed invite to Alpha 1 ("Earliest Access to Ashes!") and a ton of in-game exclusives but most importantly a Lifetime Subscription.

Lifetime Subs have acquired something of a mixed reputation over the years. If the stars align they can be very worthwhile. So long as you remain interested in playing a game for long enough and the servers stay up and the company behind it doesn't decide to change the payment model, you could end up saving (or at least not spending) hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

On the other hand, if you lose interest after a few months or it converts to free-to-play or even sunsets after a year or two, you could end up out of pocket and out of sorts, angry with the bastards who ripped you off or, worse, angry with yourself for being such a dingus.

Still, $500 for a lifetime subscription to a game that's presumably going to charge at least a hundred dollars a year for the cheapest membership package isn't crazy. I pay around a hundred dollars a year for my Daybreak All Access sub and I've been doing it for easily a decade and a half. A five hundred dollar lump sum in 2004 would have saved me a small fortune.

Would you still pay that $500 for something like the Braver of Worlds package if it didn't include a lifetime sub, though? That's not a rhetorical question. If you feel you'd like to stump up half a grand to see Ashes of Creation in its earliest publicly-available build, well you can.

The full details of the buy-in are due to be released tomorrow but if you want to hear the basics, Community Marketing Lead Margaret Krohn and head honcho (okay, "Creative Director") Steven Sharif talk about it briefly from around 4.35 in this YouTube edit of the Twitch livestream:

Sharif  goes out of his way to make the point that "this is a true developmental alpha". He doubles down on that, saying "Do not purchase this package if you are looking to play a game. If you are looking to play Ashes of Creation you should not be purchasing an alpha one package". He then goes on to explain, in some detail, the expected role of a volunteer tester. And he's quite strict about it. He actually calls it a "stern warning" and it kind of is.

What's even more surprising is the interruption from Margaret Krohn, who cuts Sharif off at one point to embark on a mini-rant about how people shouldn't even buy the regular cosmetic packages "if you're not sure and you're not interested". She explains at some length that the cosmetic items people are paying for are the same ones already being developed as part of the normal process of making the game and that they'll be used on NPCs all over the world.

"Don't buy the packages!" she says, with some animation, waving her hand in a way that clearly indicates forbiddance. It's strange to watch. At one point Sharif laughs out loud, saying "I know it's weird. You've probably never heard a company tell you not to do this." It's as though he's just realised what he's saying and can hardly believe it himself.

He's right. It is weird. But then, the whole thing's weird, the whole bizarre development and funding process we've all come to expect and accept, however grudgingly, these last few years. Sharif is as clear as he can be that all of this is what companies have to do to raise money to make games. Not the only thing, but one of the significant and important ones.

The MassivelyOP thread is typically conflicted. Some commenters think people should be allowed to spend their money however they like. Some think the whole thing stinks. I dropped in to comment that I can't see what's new about any of it. And I can't. Which isn't to say I'm comfortable with it. I just know I've seen it all before.

I remember back in the eighties sitting in pubs chatting to friends who were thinking of paying significant sums to go on "holiday" to farms where they'd do all the regular chores for a couple of weeks. They'd effectively live the life of a farm laborer and pay the owner of the farm for the privilege. I've also known people sign on to act as crew on sailing yachts in the Mediterranean - not as paid employees but as paying guests... guests who do most of the work.

I've always found this sort of thing a peculiar choice. It wouldn't be mine. Even so, I don't have any trouble seeing why and how these kinds of activities can be something that both sides find acceptable. 

There are plenty of socio-political arguments to be had concerning the implications and effects of such arrangements, how they affect the economic viability of third parties who might otherwise rely on the work now being done by affluent volunteers, how it changes the understanding of the concept of paid labor within society, all that fun stuff. Those, by and large, aren't the arguments I'm seeing on forums when this kind of thing crops up.

Mostly it's a stand off between those who feel they have the right to spend their money how they damn well please and those who have their hackles up because someone's getting scammed. Who, exactly, is getting scammed is never quite clear. Certainly, the people complaining about it aren't. They're the last ones likely to be paying anyone anything.

The big fish in this pond is Star Citizen, of course. My not-so-very considered take on SC is that the pre-game there is the game. People are effectively buying and collecting virtual toys. Whether there's ever a virtual playground to play with them in doesn't really come into it.

In the case of Ashes of Creation, it's pretty plain that no-one's getting conned. When the guy selling you snake oil says "Don't buy this jar of snake oil unless you want some snake oil" you can hardly come back later and complain "Hey! You sold me snake oil!". At this point in development everyone on both sides seems determined to make it all absolutely clear. The terms and conditions are laid out for everyone to see.

It's a pity the same didn't apply to  the original Kickstarter campaign. Or, indeed, any Kickstarter campaign.

My credit card was charged $40 for my pledge in June 2017. My virtual receipt clearly states: "Estimated Delivery: Dec 2018". Soon, maybe tomorrow, for $500 you'll be able to buy in to the first public alpha of the game that was estimated to launch (or at least go into late beta) more than two years ago . Maybe you'll even get an estimated delivery date. I wouldn't book any time off work.

I still don't regret backing Ashes of Creation. I'm still interested in playing it, just not as interested as I was four years ago when I thought I'd be playing it in a year and half. Not that I really thought that. I know how long AAA mmorpgs take to build and it's not any eighteen months.

What I don't get is why developers can't just say that. If my pledge had come with an Estimated Delivery of December 2021 or even December 2022, I'd still have signed up. I can wait. I can deal with deferred gratification. I'm not a child.

So why treat me like one?