Star Wars: Battlefront – Standard Edition – Xbox One

Stuck on the fence?, November 17, 2015

Allow me to introduce you to Stan, Michelle and Zane, three very different gamers. After spending multiple hours playing Battlefront, they have differing opinions about Battlefront for a diverse set of reasons. Which one can you most relate to?

Meet Stan. Stan is a hard-working guy who is totally focused on providing for his wife and two kids. Gaming used to be Stan’s main hobby, but as his career and family has grown his gaming time has dwindled to a few limited hours per week (if he’s lucky). Stan is also a massive Star Wars fan, never passing up the chance to watch one of the movies with his kids (who are also major fans) or to talk about the lore with his co-workers. When he first saw Battlefront’s commercial a few months ago, he immediately became ecstatic about playing in his favorite Star Wars battles like in many of the older Star Wars games he remembers fondly. After picking up an X1 and getting started in Battlefront, Stan can’t stop playing Battlefront when he does get his precious game time. He appreciates how easy it is to pick up the game and play. When Stan tried some of the popular shooters in recent years, he quickly grew overwhelmed at the various weapon perks, progression paths, challenges, etc., and loves that it has all been streamlined in Battlefront to be a simple list of unlockable weapons, in-game Star Cards and basic appearance options. One of his favorite things about Battlefront is that it’s so easy to grasp he can play with his kids — giving him a few extra hours each week to play his favorite mode, Walker Assault. There’s no question in Stan’s mind he made a great and fun investment. He and his family will be enjoying Battlefront for the foreseeable future.

Meet Michelle. Michelle is an unashamed gamer, spending multiple hours each week on her PS4 in addition to other hobbies and her day job. While Michelle’s game library consists of a variety of genres, she is no stranger to Shooters and regularly enjoys a decent KDR in Battlefield and Call of Duty. Being someone who grew up on Star Wars, she instantly remembered her fun early gaming days of Battlefront I&II on PS2 when she first read about DICE developing a Battlefront re-boot. She was excited, yet cautiously reserved, knowing the recent rocky trend of Shooters being Multiplayer-only focused with developers awkwardly balancing a $60 game with Season Passes/DLC. Still, she played the Battlefront Beta and was pleased with the simple gameplay. So pleased, she pre-ordered and continued to enjoy the full game upon release. While Michelle is comfortable with and can get wrapped up in the deep progression and customization of Shooters like Destiny and Call of Duty, 2014-2015’s constant release of Shooters makes her find Battlefront’s barebones approach very refreshing. She appreciates the arcade-like feel, and her past experience with Shooters made her quickly excel among other players online. Still, after a few hours she has a few concerns. Michelle doesn’t like how there are only a few maps in the biggest modes, Supremacy and Walker Assault, despite there being 12 maps advertised and only more accessible on the smaller game modes. In addition, though she found several of the smaller modes like the Domination-esque Drop Zone and Heroes vs. Villains to be a blast, some of the other modes felt like tacked on derivatives with not much depth. Despite her concerns over the content being light compared to other recent Shooter releases, Michelle has no doubt she’ll put 30-40 hours into Battlefront easily, even if it doesn’t end up as her favorite Shooter of 2015.

Meet Zane. Zane’s only hobby is competitive gaming. He owns a PS4, X1 and a gaming PC that he frequently enjoys playing Counter Strike and Battlefield on. He has been in a competitive clan for a number of years that regularly practices multiple days (if not everyday) each week. Zane likes Star Wars, but isn’t a major fan. He remembers loving the original Battlefront games, and upon seeing DICE’s gameplay progress on the game, Zane instantly became skeptical. He felt it looked way too accessible, and he was very angry that DICE would alienate Single Player gamers by not including a complete Single-Player campaign. When the Beta came around, he only played a few hours before writing it off. There wasn’t enough progression. There wasn’t any deep way to customize your loadout, and Zane hated that if your blaster overheats you don’t have a true Secondary to use in tight situations. Have I mentioned he felt he died too easily? Zane admits a skill gap is present, but it’s not as precise or competitive as CoD or CS. When Battlefront released, he borrowed a copy from a friend and felt the same way. Engagements felt the same. Zane felt DICE really screwed the pooch on the amount of maps for the bigger modes. He was very happy to get back to his clanmates and wrecking kids in Black Ops 3, never looking back at Battlefront.

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I…

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How Customers Can Strike Back, November 20, 2015

So, a lot has been said about Star Wars: Battlefront. Mostly the consensus seems to be that it is an initially good experience with superior graphics, great environments, and fun gameplay coupled with a severe lack of depth and replayability. Missions get boring quickly and there is not much fun to be had after about ten hours or so. Ultimately, it seems that most agree that it is not worth the $60 price and a lot of reviewers are casting an angry eye towards EA. So, I think it makes sense to think about what got us here and what as consumers we can do about it. Here are the dynamics I see leading to the quickly evolving catastrophe that is SWB:

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(i) The cost of producing a modern AAA game.

The production of a modern AAA multi-platform game now exceeds greatly the cost of a Hollywood blockbuster. To put it into perspective, Avengers: Age of Ultron had a pre-marketing budget of $279.9mm and an international box office of $1.403 billion. Contrast that to World of Warcraft’s initial four-year budget of $200mm and QUARTERLY revenue of $1.28 billion for a property launched fifteen years ago. This leads to a business model coupled with competitive pressures between the AAA producers raise the ante for any first tier game not just to be competent and fun, but a mega-success. Like Hollywood, it has basically an arms race to see who can throw the most resources at any particular project; the difference between first place and fifth place is a billion dollars.

On the other side, indy crowd competition from below where producers have the operational efficiency and the willingness to create and sell meaningful games for a mere fraction of AAA blockbusters (pretty much dominating the $0.99 to $30 space) puts significant pressure on the big AAA companies not to head downstream or compete on price. Additionally, gamers are expecting more innovative, technically complicated, deeper experiences than ever before with more and more content shoved into the same package. In 1997, Final Fantasy VII broke out of all expectations by producing an experience of about 40 hours (including extended content like the dreaded gold chocobo). Nowadays, a deep experience can be a 200 hour single player slog like Witcher III or an infinite timesink MMRPG like World of Warcraft.

Add to the mix the $60 “commodity pricing” for platform-based core game (the game disk that you buy), so producers need to keep building bigger without increasing the base price. Basically, you are looking at total pricing inelasticity. So, caught between the rock of a do-or-die competition for the biggest blockbuster and hard place of not being able to go down market, the big AAA players are turning to novel revenue streams however they can. This maximizes the revenue on the ones lucky enough to become blockbusters and mitigates the risk of those that miss the mark.

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(ii) New Revenue Streams

So, what are these new revenue streams? They take a lot of different forms, but I think most could be categorized as:

(a) Microtransactions
(b) DLC, and GOTY repackaging
(c) Deluxe additions with exclusive content, silly statuettes and other tschotske
(d) In-game advertisements
(e) Out-of-game and extra-platform tie-ins (like Assassins Creed Unity’s portable companion app, movie tie-ins, and breakfast cereals).

Now, none of these are problematic in-and-of-themselves and you can see successful implementations of all of them in the Apple App Store. (e.g., I am happy to play Candy Crush for free, but have to watch an 30 second video every 10 minutes or so and am happy to try out free-to-play “freemium” games with micro-transactions like Angry Birds).
The problem with this model is this: Producers can choose to either allow these revenue streams to be ADDITIVE or SUBTRACTIVE to the existing products. That is to say, developer can choose to make more money by (A) providing additional value than what was previously expected (think of movie theaters charging more for seat service and 3D IMAX); or (B) taking away value and requiring customers to pay extra to get as much as they had for the original sticker price (think of airlines that now charge you for pillows, boarding passes, carry-on luggage and cans of diet soda).

EA, along with some of the other most loathed producers (ah-ah-ah-Ubisoft-choo), have definitely gone with Plan B here. Instead of delivering a full game for $60, they have decided to cut the essentials out of the game, and offer them later for an additional price tag. No single player, four worlds, six heroes (out of a universe of about a gazillion), few upgrades, about a dozen mission types. All of the things that had come with the base package of other Battlefield…

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