 that dogs hate that noise oh we've got enough time good so Scott you offered to moderate I did offer to moderate this because it was my idea so I came up we needed ideas for new panels at other conventions that weren't magfest like packs so I said hey you know lately as in recent history you know well I guess fair for all history right you make video games you had to get paid I guess no one got paid to make space war they're just academics or whatever but you know anyone who made games after that had to make money somehow if they were gonna make their full-time job right so and it started out where all they did was they had our caves you put 25 cents in per play and shortly after that they had by the game you pay one big pile of money you get the whole game you can play it as much as you want and those are pretty much the two ways of paying for games pretty much up into the late 90s when some people started doing subscriptions and more recently you've had the microtransactions and the DLC and the iPhone games and you know so recently it's been like there's a revolution in game-paying you've got like humble indie bundle pay what you want you've got you know free-to-play but pay for upgrades you got all this stuff going on hatch the head based economy right you know there's all these crazy ways to pay for video games that have happened recently and I've noticed and I don't know if anyone else has noticed that the way a game is paid for has a huge effect on the game itself like you know if you're making an arcade game that's gonna be paid for a quarter at a time right well then you're gonna make a different kind of game because of that your game design decisions as a game maker are hugely affected by the way you're making money if you care about how much money you make some people don't so it was originally gonna be like a lecture about this but we needed another like discussing panel so I said hey let's just use that idea and see what comes up and then it'll be easier to write the luxury panel later so so you what how do you want to introduce ourselves so people know who we are I mean yes probably no reason we had we're just three we're just three guys you're like killed the other guys responsible right that's how we got our first panel ever I said anyway I'm Scott I'm one of two hosts of the night's podcast I have saved games older than most of you I'm rim I'm the other half the Geek Nights podcast and we lecture widely on games with more or less academia involved depending on the venue and now we're here yeah I'm Chris hazard I run hazardous software we make the RTS achron if anyone has heard of that time travel RTS I also hold a PhD in computer science specifically game theory with respect to e-commerce and so I do a lot of research in there and I also do a lot of work with serious games with the military and with the commercial market so I wear a lot of different hats translation he's right we're wrong they won't be happy though I have two people in this crowd were in the other panel where every time we were like yeah game theory half the audience like oh not this again so you want to let's go down like you know payment method by payment method right so I guess if you're making a game for free you just giving it away right how is that going to affect how do you think you know the game designer well to begin with what you're giving you a game way for free you have some objective is it for the most number of people to play it or is it for to make some sort of artistic or propaganda impact and so each of those different roles means something different if you're trying to get the maximum number of people to play if you're a new game designer and you want to make a name for yourself you want to entice them as much as you can but you also want to have a have a good replay or good multiplayer or something that people can share and collaborate with to leverage a social network because I'm assuming that you have no capital to invest towards marketing so it's got to be something that has the sort of kind of look at the kind of memes that will flow it almost like it's meme juice is Google juice what's like pirates and zombies and ninjas are things that are popular different times right now if you made like a my little pony platformer or a doctor who a game where you just stole someone else's IP like doctor who just to get it out there but that's more like that's more the sort of like the proper nouns of the game not the design of the game yeah I guess there's also you know some people might just want you know they might as they want to make a name for themselves or you know push a message out but they might just literally just want to bring you know create a feeling in people just you know make give people enjoyment or make people suffer right like you know some people make like those horrible and possible to beat games for free it's like I just want to see people suffer they've shamed for it the hardest game imaginable so I think it does have one pressure in that you don't have a lot of resources generally unless you're a self-made millionaire billionaire or you know flesh-fun kitty and so you have a lot smaller of a game in general I think there's also I guess the possibility you could be one of those like open-source games we're trying to make a technological development on the software side it's like a lot like those open-source FPS is like the cube and things like that because I found games like that tend to have like a really neat concept but they're never they're either not executed well or there's nothing else around it like they lack all the basic polish of a game and even a lot of any games have that problem like Binding of Isaac I just played recently and the only way I can discuss anyone played the Binding of Isaac I thought it was more popular than it was only about after people ever played in a lot of people have never heard of it it's a rogotron shooter set in a Zelda 1 dungeon world but it's actually mechanically more like net hack than anything but yeah but you know the thing is is like you know technologically speaking it's a rogotron shooter where it doesn't support game pads at all like it's lacking all these fundamental like parts of the game before even talk about the design of the game itself like the basic components of a video game we're missing from it but yet it's very popular anyway well I see that mostly a lot of indie games have network play but the network code is all broken and it's like well you fundamentally first thing is to make it work and the game doesn't work and so one interesting thing about that is a net so if you have a router you have maybe five computers with your roommates or things like that and it goes on to down to one IP address now there's a standard called UPNP to allow your router to talk to all these other routers and or to map the incoming connections back to yours however the standard doesn't work all the time yeah in fact most kind of nerds well like I disabled it because I don't want any device in my network tunneling out and doing stuff without my permission so have these games won't work unless I go in and set up port forwarding and that's actually beyond the means of most people I'm not gonna pretend that it's easy I just happen to know what the thing is the thing is Skype does it right there is a way to make it works it works in Skype everyone else can just do the same thing Skype does now Skype is extremely complicated in terms of how I do that though I mean they have a they'll look for super nodes they find route people have routers that can do that and they have this whole topology that routes around these things if you're an indie developer you're gonna spend six months six months to a year developing just that and if the big studio's don't generally use that there's also a lot of latency with that too yeah the big studios do one of two things they either have large software suites that do every possible configuration and store all sorts of routers and all these edge cases or they have servers that they run where they just pay for tons and tons of bandwidth so everybody connects to them as a server and yeah that's the thing is well this one bothers me about the different in a tangent that's okay as consoles and PCs have diverged and come back together and diverged again PCs have always had a huge advantage in that front and that if you want to do a multiplayer game you can let the players run the servers and we found throughout history that they will gladly run servers they'll run more you'll never have to run a single official server in your life and then you have a server client model and you don't care because clients can be behind a net and the server will never care I mean you know just to wrap up this completely off-topic tangent right network play right for all you know you have nets we have routers you have Skype you have all these you know crazy things but quake world still works quake word still works with modern technology it's open source it was a client server model no reason for a modern game not to at least at the bare minimum just use the code from quake world so quake world was it client servers game exactly not a peer-to-peer game so someone just runs the server though it's you know and that person who runs a server needs to make sure that it's configured properly right but only one person has to do that right it's not like every game player needs to manage all this technology just you have to have one smart pc friend but that works for the hardcore I mean I play a counter strike I can run a counter strike but the thing is one guy with some other guy you don't even know you just run the server and have it on his website listed you don't it doesn't need to be the players you know but then your game is critical mass and you need to have you know what is the fan base grows let's get back on topic right so if you have some sort of some sort of networked you know multiplayer game you know depending on how the servers are laid out right then that actually affects how you need to get the game paid for because not only do you need to pay to develop the game you need to pay to run servers or someone else is running them now servers are getting cheaper but the type of game makes a big difference too for example acron we couldn't host because it would be it'd be just so expensive for us to do so you know a lot of games like if you think of mmo's but not a number of transactions that they need to do with the database is very very small I mean you're talking level up we increment a number right exactly a couple messages to go back and forth between the servers very minimal versus if you're talking about an rts or an mmo rts you've got a lot of messages going back and forth that's something that you need to consider both in terms of bandwidth and in terms of the number of servers you have on cloud computing there's also client trust like mmo's players really like the statefulness of the game is what they primarily care about like if if their character wouldn't have an item that they got before our transaction got lost or if some other player cheated and had a whole bunch of money then they wouldn't like that so as a result you have to put most of the logic on the server side and you have to do you know comparisons and check sums to make sure that no clients are cheating maybe a more indie game or a smaller game you don't care as much because if four guys are playing a cheating game who cares people might just play with their friends so whether or not you even care about cheating actually seems to be a part of how your game is funded. Now e-sports that's another monetization technique so now if you want to make sure that people are they can win competitions you want to make sure that the clients are validated they're not cheating that they're not a boss aim boss or things like that that changes the way you design the game a little bit too and it has a lot more cost in terms of and there's different models with that there's the client server models we talked about before there's one server that contains all the data and everyone else is reading off of that but then you have latency because that server needs to communicate with all the different clients and there's round trip for everything another model which is widely used is that every player has a copy of the game and they synchronize each other to make sure they're all on the same page starcraft remember remember it was when it was synchronizing or different first-person shooters especially if you have a lot of lag if you're sitting there playing in australia against a guy and i don't know in sea land you have a lot of latency so well you'll shoot somebody and they might hit but then you'll all of a sudden see the new world update in jostle a bit now some of the old games you know that syncing is not an easy problem to solve especially if you're worried about latency like command and conquer one could get out of sync where i was playing a game over modem with someone and they would see a different thing from what i saw because the game didn't actually update in both sides correctly and then it would crash but you know the point is if you need these central servers right you need some way to pay to keep them running you need you know it staff to manage them constantly right you know if i make a game that's a one-shot game like you know i just sell it and that's it i can fire everyone the day after that game is in stores actually you can't is there a lot of support oh i guess it is support right right you know i've never actually called our developers for the support those are customer service people in my entire life for a game i have purchased i have never sought out or gotten support of any kind so the difference is that you still need those people because nowadays especially console games console games are being patched just like pc games but in the olden days they weren't right now they are because of all the there's a couple things pressures going on you have the the high budgets that we all stuff in the game and then you have the financial pressure where it's not two guys making a game in the early 90s you have an entire team of 500 people or thousands of people even if it's a smaller game because they'll work for several months and they'll compress some of the schedule so now you have some some guys pulling the purse string saying we need this game out now and i'm sorry but because of some investment decisions you need to to retract your schedule a little bit compact it testing is one of the first things that gets cut so now you have to you say okay well we're just not going to test as much we're going to patch it later so now you have to have your development staff stay on board and crunch time used to be up until you release until you went gold now crunch time stays for several months after the game is released yeah well i mean but you look at say nintendo right nintendo still refuses to to cut back right like you know when uh skyward sword took them five years because nintendo you know they don't want to patch anything right they want to put out something and have it be completely i think that's a function primarily of capital yes right but even so they still had a problem right and they had to find some funky way to patch it because they didn't even incorporate patching into their system they were so confident in their extensive also this way you know my my day jobs i'm a product manager for a company we design software and i manage all that and i've decided in my professional career it is impossible to release any complex product of any type be it a physical widget a game software anything without not just you know no bugs no bugs it's like ludicrously impossible without serious bugs of some kind it is pretty much impossible one of my faculty members in undergrad used to take software and inject bugs in it and then measure they put it through the testing process and see what percentage of the bugs they clothed that were injected versus the ones that are in there and that gives you an idea is how many loose bugs are in the system yet oh very interesting yeah and you could it's safe to inject them because you know to remove them because you've got the reverse patch and like another branch but then again i can easily see that going awry instead of structure but i mean you'd also have to take into account like how obscure the bug i could put you know if i'm writing a bug i could make it like the game will crash on a blue moon on the third Tuesday of 2am if you're in this level and you have exactly 642 coins and you hit the rock with your sword from the left well it's like i know no one's gonna find that them that would get caught in code review though because someone's like what's this gigantic adventure i'll have to run through my obfuscator like put it in those comments like if you don't understand this don't touch it so that reminds me one one thing that we have not seen in terms of monetization in games yet is uh is hacking so if you think of all the back doors that happen in different pieces of software uh yeah i remember when i was an undergradist thinking the possibility of downloading an mp3 and playing it on your computer and having that hijacked your computer was ludicrous who could possibly imagine that well there had to be a vulnerability in your mp3 playing software that was before a buffer overflows were really well known now there's all these techniques where you could look at a picture and that can crash your computer that could root it or that could escalate privileges so that does not really happen much with games yet and i think a big reason of that is because games are very large complex pieces of software which are you only run for a few months on average the game is an average game is played about three or four months before it's discarded effectively in the market now now that we have a lot more games are using the same engine are there exploits there and could we start seeing you know oh let's let's go play with this guy this guy has a if you could hit say unity or the unreal engine right you could hit phones and computers and consoles and you know if it's a if it's a bug that goes across the board so now there's a monetization scheme of people hijacking computers through games well there were there is already existing monetization scheme of selling uh like cheats like you know pay me money and i'll give you these counter strike cheats i just wrote that aren't you know that valve has an account not even that there for a long time is when you can make executable flash files there were tons of trojans and executable that run a little flash game and also install malware on your pc that's been going on for 10 years and that's a monetization model yeah all right so um but let's talk about the more recent stuff so more recently obviously right you know people have been you know selling iphone games for a dollar or they've been giving a game for free and selling you levels or actually let me let me interrupt you there by iphone games for a dollar okay that was as a game developer that was one of the things that really angered me about apple was they sorted by number initially on the app store sorted by number of products sold if you want to if you want to appear in the list would be uh have a chance of appearing in there you have to sell a lot how do you do that sell it for 99 cents that's the only way what that did was that dropped the price of games considerably in the casual market um and basically i know a lot of my friends were getting out of the market saying there's you know there's this huge gold rush now there's no money because you have to sell it for 98 cents and if you can't move tons of units it's not worth it apple tried to pull that back a little bit and say well let's maybe start by revenue total revenue which is a much better message i was like top this top free top paid and top grossing right you'll see like infinity blade which is eight bucks is always on top grossing but it's never on top free or top paid or you know top paid ever right but uh they they tried fixing that and it's i think the game market is still recuperating a little bit because there's there's such an exodus of developers for that and it really jostled the market i think in a bad way i think there's a side long problem there that when we talk about games you know the spectrum goes all the way from things that aren't even like i would almost hesitate to call them games by any of the definitions i use usually when we do these kind of panels like some of the stuff zinga puts out all the way up to the you know five star blockbuster 10 million dollar budget games ten and small but i wonder if it's worth to even i mean it's hard to say oh that's a hardcore game that's a casual game because you can't really like that's a judgment call at that point but some like the very cheap games exist in an entirely different ecosystem from the blockbusters because the blockbusters go after a smaller target audience that is dedicated to a genre i mean half-life three everyone who cares about fps is gonna buy that game grandma's not gonna buy that game well you know the thing is they don't compete i guess i'm saying they don't compete with each other i don't think the thing with the dollar games though is it's like it's always weird to see people upset that they can't sell things for a high price anymore well it's like well you can just sell more of them right it's like look at nintendo they you know they put out a $50 game because they want you know and they say because they don't want to like change the the uh like the perceived value of the game right like you you know if you drink two wines you know one is you think one is more expensive it will taste better psychologically right you know just you know based on the label so it's like well if we sell our game for $50 people will like the game better you know so a couple of things but what if they made skyward sword 20 bucks wouldn't they they would sell more than three times would they though i think they were absolutely so one thing with that is look at look at the cost of entertainment per hour you go to a movie you pay $10 $12 whatever your movie theater is you get an hour and a half two hours of entertainment and that's it you spend that same amount in a game you get maybe 30 hours of entertainment well there's a steam calculator we're just looking at and while it was a little inaccurate it would calculate based on what you paid for all your games and the hours you spent in each one what amount of money you were paying per hour for that entertainment i was paying like 0.08 cents an hour for entertainment and i've only played 13 percent of the games i own well i think it was yeah a lot of my games i see many of you are in the same bonus me it said that the game i played the most though was like half life one which is totally untrue because i beat half life two like three times and half life one it said i put in about 700 hours of counter strike which is it didn't track nearly as many of my counter strike hours because i've been playing counter strikes since you know 01 i tried grandpa right 12 years and it was only tracking like three years worth of counter strike and i was like well that's not even close to i think the market is diluted just that there's so many entertainment options that it's not you know when i was a kid i had won any s game i would play that no matter what it is $70 to get zelda 2 and $65 to get mario 3 there is one thing i have noticed though is that when steam started doing the uber discounts i was like finally someone gets it right and they were even saying that they got it straight up they were like yeah look we have this huge piracy in russia we lowered our prices and we put the games out in the same day they came out in the us and look russian piracy dropped off the board and people are buying games like crazy and they had crazy sales and i was buying games like crazy but now they did that for a few years and i was buying games like crazy i was like finally someone gets it five bucks for a real game and now you own 800 games now i own 800 games i'm not even the steam sale i didn't buy almost anything i bought like two games this year for like a couple bucks because i already had a zillion games like was not i don't have time to play them all i'd barely played any so would you agree i'm just curious because i think i think about this a lot and i've made a lot of arguments to this effect that currently game all media but games there's nothing about games talk about games games the problem with piracy is not nearly as bad as the problem with the existing library of games you're competing with the past and the past is such a history of gaming now that there are already more games in existence than i could ever play if i spent every waking hour of the next 80 years of my life playing them so already there's too much for me to possibly consume so already every game that comes out has to not just beat every game this year but every game that has ever been made in the history of games so then on top of that you have to spend all this extra money to build those games to beat those old games which makes them more expensive but i can sell the old game for ten cents because it cost me nothing i it's already been paid for it's just ip that someone else this leaves in price discrimination so as a business owner that what you'd like to do is you'd like the people who want your product the most to pay the most for it the ones who will you know i'm only gonna pay ten cents for this will pay ten cents there's other other guy who's like i want this game no matter what i'll pay a thousand dollars for you want to extract as much as that as you can however if you do that people don't people in general don't like that because they don't like to say well wait i paid ten cents and or i paid a thousand dollars that guy paid ten cents i'm mad so it's it's the way that the businesses usually do this is they drop the price so you start it off at a high price and then the most loyal the most fierce customers will come in and buy it and then you slowly drop it down and i talked earlier today about trust and reputation to how you drop your prices and also include bonus extras with the pre-release right here you can have the you know the underwear that comes in the box and so what you want to do is is in the the time frame that your game is popular you want to hit all the price points that you can such that everyone bites at that point that's how you maximize your revenue but are they not also training us because two examples when Fallout 3 came out i bought it day one yep and i didn't play it for six months and then i played it three months and then i finally played it and it was like half the price day use x came out i looked at it like oh i really want to play that and i waited and i finally bought it when it was 14.99 i still haven't played it they're training me to wait they're saying look wait a few months and the price will go down so that means i'll have to make the curves steeper and then i'll wait i'll always get the game at the same cheap price point now it's less relevant so you're competing with more historical games yep here's another mistake that's really confusing the hell on me right so Fallout 3 when it first came out i paid 50 bucks i didn't play it for a few months i played the whole thing then there were dlcs right which are five bucks each as they came out right and then they had a game of the year edition which included all the dlcs ever and was 20 bucks so it's like well you're supposed to include the bonus goodies for the people who paid the most not for waiting later so it's like not only is it if you buy it later it'll cost less it's buy it later and get more and not have to buy all these dlcs so now new vegas came out and new vegas was on super sale in the steam sale on this holiday season but it wasn't game of the year edition that included all the dlcs i'm like i am not buying that game until like it gets every single dlc is included with it all media has this problem anime back in the day i would spend like a hundred and forty dollars in a vhs box set and then one day like you could buy box sets for like 20 30 40 dollars that was awesome i bought a lot of anime the other day i was looking at amazon i saw a pretty good show that i really had liked it was called it was gankutsu world the kanamani crystal i really like that show it's a solid b anime it was eight dollars for the box set i looked at that i said eight dollars and i didn't buy it i didn't pirate it i just didn't buy it the eight dollars was still too much i think though what they need to do to fix this problem is like look if you pay 50 bucks the day it comes out you get all dlcs ever for free and if then in the future after the price drops then the dlcs cost extra right so it's like the guy who buys it up front should get all the dlcs for free then i would actually maybe pay the 50 bucks if i know there's never going to be a game but here's the subscription model uh the subscribe to half life that's actually a pretty good model except they didn't know everyone's talks about that but who has actually done it right who actually keeps coming out with episodes and never stops because that's what they were thinking when they started dlcs like sam and max but they didn't you have to keep making episodes forever you cannot stop i would like to i think i know why that's the case because a lot of games and comics have the same problem to keep like doing parallel media there's a comic called black bastard and it is this awesome like black exploitation like super cool thing i looked at the cover and i got everything i needed to get out of that comic i didn't actually read it so i found so i found that games are kind of the same way when a game introduces a new mechanic unless the mechanic is really crunchy and really deep like acron has a pretty deep and crunchy mechanic but a lot of games like binding of isaac i know the deal i get less and less enjoyment every time i play it so there's no way i'm going to buy more games in that series because they're not giving me more the demo of the sequel will give me everything i need so i said this before some of my other panels and hate i hate to repeat myself but demos hurt sales oh statistically we were in packs and someone gave a lecture on this they basically said that they didn't see the lecture some yes so this is what the guys second hand it's here say that they studied whether or not you do a trailer a demo or both a trailer and a demo trailer made sales go up demo made sales go way down demo and trailer made sales go way down it's because like it's exactly what we just said if there's a demo for the game you play it and you get everything you need to get out of that demo it's like well i know everything there is to know about this game so i don't need to pay for it unless you're one of those people who seeks out master we were talking about the different types of gamers in that other panel like someone might play the demo super meat boy oh it's a platformer that was cool i'm done or i'll sit there and beat the whole goddamn game because i want that guys be careful talking about this because of ndas but one of the the big game companies uh just something that i've heard is that people who have a ps3 who have xbox 360 whatever sitting in their living room they are more likely now to be playing their handheld game in their kitchen when that game console's sitting right there and they'll spend more time playing those handhelds i'm definitely guilty of that i play my ds and the only game i play on it is advanced wars i try to play more angry birds in the bathroom than nothing is funnier than being in the bathroom at work and hearing the angrierers move music start up and then a shuffling and it suddenly stops blackbird's the best i guess we should because i think the panel we were going to talk a little bit about game design choices so we should talk about actual like design choices in games like world of warcraft well something i've noticed right is that uh you know when you make the subscription game right they purposely make the game in such a way that there is you know like never ending gameplay there is some there's always something to do there's multiple different things to do look at the level inflation in world of warcraft they have to keep raising the level cap to give people more stuff to do yeah and like they have to keep creating more and more content but they try to create as little as possible and they always find new ways like to get more out of it like okay well here's the things that people can pvp if they want and some people can do that and so many different things to do in the game so even if you've maxed out one area there's another area and they reuse as much content as possible like extract every dollar out of every model and map and and thing that they possibly can and you don't want negative feedback because that that annoys players to death too negative feedback is when um you're getting punished for being successful if anyone remembers the first f0 when the the guy behind you would always be right behind you no matter how good you were uh something else i've noticed is that in any games you know a lot of games now they don't want to have any real competition you know like he like bejeweled blitz it's like is the closest you're going to see the real competition and like a modern sort of casual-ish game where you can see your friend scored well look at the evolution old games like the games that were most popular in arcades were actually like they were in bars aimed at adults and they were directly versus games people would sit there and now they're indirectly versus like like pac-man you know verse or whatever you know i played dig dug you played dig dug while we're drinking but like pong and outlaw and all these games and that was when games were marketed at gamers gamers were the ones who were going to go play these games and now they're you know we've widened the market to the point there are a lot of people who just don't like competition a lot of people don't like to play a game where you know they have to level up their skill their actual personal skill not just ours into the game makes them better it's ours of actually getting better makes them better but in conflicting to that everyone wants to be the hero too so how do you have everybody be the hero but have no conflicts that was the problem with the first star wars galaxies everyone wanted to be the jedi they wanted there to only be a few jedi so be more like it was real but that didn't work and then it failed and now the thing is the new one actually looks like the first thing that might beat wow not because it's necessarily better i haven't played it but because wow has just been not updating and it's sort of okay it's old enough that it can't you know go on forever there's a timeline on everything all right i don't know do you really think you know world of warcraft could do something that would sort of bring it back you know to be just as gigantic as it was and it's it's tricky because look at the constraints of the game world of warcraft could not reboot like old mmo's used to reboot they'd every now and then like they'd have a cataclysm they'd say all right everybody's dead everybody's level one let's start over i think like 80 of wow's subscription base would never come back if that happened because i know a lot of people who keep paying for wow they don't play it at all anymore in fact they talk about how much they hate it now but they don't want to give up their character just some numbers in a database it's like really update you know one update sql command but think about it the modernization model has constrained the game you could you can't do like really big changes to this game or you'll anger the player base probably enough to lose so many of them that you wouldn't make money anymore this is an interesting legal question too about intellectual property or digital property ownership that it hasn't really been tested out in court but not at all it's it property is a row in a database right wow um this is so is my bank account yeah like four years ago uh there's paper out they found that wow was um had a larger gdp than many third world countries it's kind of crazy yeah something i've always wanted to see though is like just someone try you know they've so far they tried free to play and subscription because you need to keep the servers up you can't just do the one charge and then free forever like i think the first guild wars did that and it didn't work right i want to see someone do the arcade right every time you die you pay 25 cents to come back right that's what i think it could work i think no one's trying you know no one's experimenting there's sort of you know one person does something that's sort of obvious and everyone just sees that they made a lot of money in copies then so part of that is the risk aversion of the gaming industry when you say something like you have to pay when you die now are you going to have adverse selection where the only people playing your game are going to be the the people who are really good and now you're not going to make much money right but then the thing is you have to do the same things that they did in the arcade in the olden days make the game balls hard you're dying all the time but then again yeah that turns maybe that turns the casual gamers away that turns the medium gamers away it turns away the people who are really hardcore who are hardcore about something that isn't what you're testing because remember a game has a test of skill while you're testing some skill the you can almost say the mechanics of the game is the list of what skills matter in this game and counter strike clicking on heads and strategy matter a lot in halo the clicking on heads doesn't matter as much the aiming is actually a lot more forgiving and other factors matter more so if i make a game that cares about clicking on heads and i make that super hardcore everyone who doesn't care about head clicking is not going to play my game well there's also a strategy with that too so you have a certain measure of skill but then there's a certain measure of skill with respect to other players and the meta game and that can change the game drastically as well very much so so another thing i was thinking is uh i totally forgot oh right so you know how like a lot of mmo's people do like pirated servers and the mmo companies hate that stuff so much they're like oh my god no one's even paying they just got the client an mmo where they sell you for a hundred bucks you can run a server for up to 12 of your friends or here you run an official pirated server we take 50 of the monies of all the people playing on your servers you know it's like no one even tries that or even thinks to try that they're just like pirated server shut them down and it's like what do you mean they're providing you with hardware for nothing and people are playing if you just made it official all the pirated servers here's one reason why a lot of players who play games like world of warcraft games sort of like stateful and massively multiplayer online role-playing game they care a lot about fairness if they feel like look at how much people hate gold farmers especially or not even gold farmers people who actually pay for the gold if i buy a level 70 character and people know that they hate me even though it doesn't affect them in any way so if you let someone play on the pirated server and bless that as being okay then oh those guys don't have to grind they just play whatever level they want that's not fair and you'll anger your existing players who are just paying you a straight up subscription fee and they may be playing a different game too because they have a pirated server they will not get the updates they'll be maybe playing an old version of the game well i mean but if it's a blessed official release you're giving them the software but then you have to trust their admin what if he just doesn't update it he dies and the server's just still running on his credit card for another six months if it's an official thing that you have blessed you could have the backups coming to you automatically from it you could there are lots of technological solutions to that is the moral here just that how come people aren't experimenting with more models in general risk like i said before risk aversion look at inception the movie inception almost didn't happen it was one of the most popular movies in recent history and yet it was kind of a fluke that had happened because a movie like garfield there's a great article about this a few months ago the garfield movie made every dollar it was going to make before the script was written get movies like that are designed to sell based on the name because you know parents will take their kids see the garfield movie people know garfield a certain number of people are going to go see it no matter what execution doesn't matter it could be the worst movie in the world they everyone might hate it and say it was bad but they all went to see it at least once and those same people make another movie it's not garfield too it's some other franchise so people can't say oh garfield was bad i won't go see x yeah there's some guy calculating this you know particular licensed property has this many fans and therefore you know it'll make this many dollars so we're going to set a budgeted x and make a thing in this medium for that licensed property and we will get this much profit almost guaranteed with 90% certainty do it it doesn't matter if it's good it doesn't matter if it's bad it doesn't matter who's in it you know it's so some of the companies if you have a number of criteria or a number of pieces of data about what the game is going to be the ip they can predict within 10 000 sales the number that will be sold for particular ip and they're accurate and they're accurate very accurate what's cool that same stuff is being used for like foreign policy predictions and war outcomes and elections and it's very scary all right so uh let's talk about you know how you know in games right now people are paying for like you know bonuses to their characters right because you look at tf2 and make fun of the hats right but hats don't really do anything they just make you look different so i'm like in legal legends you get a skin or something i'm still doing the research because this industry is really freaking secretive about its numbers this is one of the big problems i have with talking about this stuff like we had a huge email argument where i have a whole bunch of hypotheses and theories as to like how gamers are affected by all these things but there's almost no legitimate research on it so i'm basically guessing and like filling out this list of anecdotal evidence and there's a huge cloud in the middle of well i guess right but then this game's like gun bound which is pretty it's like if you don't know gun bound it's sort of like one of those a it's scorched earth it's scorched earth but it's a korean multiplayer thing and it's literally pay money for a better tank if you pay a bunch of money your tank not only looks cooler but it shoots bigger bombs and you have auto aim and all this stuff as an aside event has anyone heard of the game upgrade complete really fascinating uh uh game where you you you start off playing this game looks like it's from maybe late 1980s or something like that and when you progress through the game and get power-ups it upgrades parts of the game it'll upgrade the graphics it'll upgrade the sound it'll upgrade all of your ancillary experiences it's kind of neat yeah so is there because i is there a material difference do you think and then we can debate this because i between the hats in team fortress 2 which are purely cosmetic they have no impact on gameplay they might cloak you in certain yeah you could argue yeah you could argue there are slight effects like if you play uh what's his name in golden nine oh yeah slightly shorter so if i get a hat that's a bright color i'm actually making myself worse because i stand out but i might like bend a red hat on a blue character and i might be able to fool you into thinking about the other team for like a fraction of a second yep but they so they affect the game mechanically a little bit but they're primarily just style and you couldn't theoretically come up with flavor like in a turn-based game where it literally has zero effect on the game for all intents and purposes yeah if i'm playing advance words and it looks all christmas styling and you're playing advance words and it looks like the desert it doesn't affect for you as players is it materially different to you if you can buy things that actually affect the game even if they're so-called balance like in team fortress 2 you can unlock or buy an item that isn't fundamentally better but it is different it gives a tactical option that you didn't have thus making the game unfair raise your hand if that bothers you more than the skins only so some people so see some people are bothered and some people aren't bothered when you can play a test of skill at first is game where someone can buy better equipment and you can't no but the thing is what if somebody can buy something that is just better right it's like you know and the thing is i think that there's really there is no difference more tactical options even if they are say balanced right so let's say you got the typical thing slow powerful guy and fast weak guy right okay so if you pay money you can have a guy who's a little bit slower and a little bit more powerful than fast you know slow guy well he's not any better it's balanced so there's there's this notion of the cradle frontier is an extra guy so there's a cradle frontier means that um something is better and you can't make something better without making something else worse off so if you have a character a fast but really weak character and a slow really powerful character which do you choose well there's no real there's neither of them is necessarily better but let's say that there's a character that is faster but in always equal to another character well then you're always going to choose the faster one so that slower one is not on the cradle frontier anymore as a as a human being as a person working with a simulation a model whatever you have you always only making decisions on that cradle frontier you want the computer to automate those other decisions and that's why you tend to see characters that fall along there good game designers will choose and make characters that that hit upon there what's interesting is when um in in game mechanics is when you have a cradle frontier of options among different players about the different strategies you can choose here's a strategy that among all three of us is better than another one however individually we can improve our own utility we can improve how well we're doing in the game it's not an actually equilibrium or or um the Nash equilibrium is different than the cradle frontier that's when games get very interesting that's when you put things like the prisoner's dilemma now look at like team fortress 2 there's almost two frontiers depending on whether or not you are leveling up because if you level up you get all these items that are all balanced in relation to each other but if you don't sit there and grind and level up you have this other set of items that are just material work materially worse than what you can get if you level up so now the game is not just testing fps skill and teamwork they added a third test you're now also testing whether or not you are spending the time to grind out items independent of skill i mean but is that really fair if we're playing an rts and i've got two kinds of marines i can build right the fast slow the the slow powerful in the fast week and you've got three kind but they're still all in the same frontier i mean is that a fair fight you have an extra different guide in me well you can advantage for you it can it depends on the game balance itself and that's why you see games like well acron and starcraft that have different factions that feel very differently you can balance the game and it can be perfectly fine now if you've plotted and designed the game such that here's the curves and here's all the types of units we can have now you can start adding the variety of units the only thing it can do is add cognitive load to you as an opponent so you just see here's 30 different types of units now i have to map those and realize that this is the best counter to that this is um or this high this combination of units is a good combo to against some other combination but at least in that case the information is available so you can you know every player has the same load whether or not they have paid for this content in fact if you pay you have a higher load because now you have more options on your side as well to choose when you're balancing based on your impersonal skill well you might know though that the other guy doesn't have that particular unit so you don't have to worry about the possibility of building it right you know or like in uh league of legends we have to pay to get like certain champions and stuff like that right it's like well you might know that guy can't pick those ones so you'll you know you said fair we're now we're assuming fair in terms of gameplay but what about the colloquial definitions of fair fair isn't just i feel bad because he can use more characters it's like we're only looking we we care about games playing and winning right so we look at fair and we're looking at fairness of competition who's going to win like a game of football you know the ref made a bad call now it's not fair but this fair in terms of the world right is it fair that the guy you know bill gates can win imagine the gathering because he can buy 10 black lotuses i mean is that fair sins of a solar empire anyone who's familiar with that game there was a initially they had done a really good job of balancing the game however they didn't do a good job of communicating that balance and so a lot of the players thought that oh this is overpowered and this is this is silly we're all annoyed however they're like well just use this counter so if you're you're you've paid for a new type of unit a new type of option that other people don't have that's rare more people are not going to be used to how to counter that and they'll perceive it as unfair even if it is fair well look at in the early days of counter strike there there was the automatic shotgun and for a long time people decried it as being super overpowered and super unfair but it was really just because people weren't used to dealing with it tactically and actually they haven't changed that gun much over the years because it was actually fair yeah meanwhile they introduced form post they introduced the fnp90 which was materially unfair it was just better people complained the same amount about both and were just as angry about both one was fixed just by players gaining knowledge and one was fixed by them actually changing the game is there there's no difference though from the player's perspective well i sort of like how my friend always complains when he plays solo caliber like anyone using Siegfried is unfair i can't stop you know he's just like he hits me over the head with a sword and i'm dead i don't know what to do well it's like well you just don't know what to do it's not a games problem so there's someone who can beat that it's just not you so game balance is it the model of selling better options to players like what do you think about that well it comes it boils onto an economy i do believe that that it's good to have different ways of achieving the same result so if you spend one spend more time in the game to get those items that's good otherwise you you have this sort of class warfare where people who have lots of money they can buy all these items you distance you disincentivize the players who can't afford that from playing a game to begin with and now you have more of a ritzy game a game for people who can afford it is that a good thing or is a bad thing it depends on your market depends on your target of the game so i think if you're aiming for a larger audience you're also well there's also a problem though of unfairness where these people they don't have to play the game i am sitting here grinding grinding grinding it's not and there's parts of the game that are not fun that i need to do to achieve those look at how many achievement servers there are in team fortress too i in fact engage in reverse griefing where i'll join achievement servers i don't realize their achievement server and i see these people is grinding out achievements and i start capping the flag and people start calling me a troll and a griefer when actually i'm the only one seeking out the utility i'm asked to seek out in the game this is the analogy i always make is like let's say in baseball real mag major league baseball right 10 year veterans are allowed to use metal bats and anyone who pays a million dollars a year is allowed to use a metal bat and no one else is allowed to use one is that would that be fair well right with that now this is the argument we had because we because i was arguing and there's a fine line there's the idea of statefulness which is how much of a previous game state is carried over to the next game for example counter strike is from a mechanical design perspective ignore the players for a second perfectly stateless one match of counter strike is completely unrelated to all of the matches of counter strike but you can't say that anything is stateless in this physical world i mean i as a player and personally getting better at the game so i going into the next game have gained skill that's that part of the game is stateful that's in your body though this it's state that's in your physical biological being exogenous to the game right as well but it still affects the game right and now we're arguing about sports because i was i hated the fact that team fortress 2 went from a stateless competition kind of like hockey to a stateful competition it would be as though if you won the previous game of hockey your goalie got to wear bigger pads in the next game but as dr as we pointed out it's not really that as like that did add more statefulness to the game but it did not make the game stateful from a stateless state because actually player psychology matters more in sports than any physical scale according to tons of studies well i mean yeah you look at you know you just look at you know teams and how they're playing you can see momentum matters so much more how many wild card teams end up winning championships just because they get on a hot streak towards the end of the season and the championship team you know like a green bay are they going to win the whole thing this year well maybe because they're really good but they've been sort of going down a little lazy at the end of the season you know and they're piling on the injuries because they you know they work so hard the whole time or playoffs the giants yeah let's go the regular season of a sport is stateless but then the playoffs are seated based on those results so they carry the state over from the regular season into the playoffs through the season but now the players and all the coaches know that the end game is going to be stateful so now the stateless regular season is stateful so you see players in the regular season for example the redwings whenever they were winning by a lot in the back when they were really good in 96, 97, 98 would pull the Russian five and put the B team out there to not risk injuries toward the end of the regular season or they would fight really hard to win regular season games that didn't actually matter to get a better seed in the playoffs now there's some really bizarre situations if you look at soccer the history of that where people have been incentivized to to lose a goal and to lose a game in order to get a better or to play against different opponents in the tournament at the end they'd like they there have been famous own goals like intentional own goals like just turn around kick it in your own goal because it'll be better off and and there have been teams that have both been trying to score their own goal but they can't because it'll be ejected if they do that and those games are hilarious to watch there's only about maybe five of them out there yeah you can find it on youtube just search for like own goal that's one of the best things is you see all the accidental own goals those are awesome so to bring it back to games this is a personal thing but i really like like i play games for direct competition i want to play a game that is a test of skill with other players i want us both to agree we are going to test these three skills let's go and i'd like team fortress too because while it de-emphasized fpsing skills like clicking on heads and fast movement because it's actually really slow but it added like teamwork like coordinating your team matters a huge deal to whether or not your team can win so it was still fun i filed a bug complaint with steam when they added the hats and the weapons and everything and the bug complaint said you made my relatively stateless game stateful thereby ruining it i want my money back and they never responded but as much as i like team fortress too i can't play it anymore because the whole time i'm playing i'm thinking these guys all have just materially better options than me solely because they have played the game more hours than me even though my skill is independent of those hours because i played all their fps's and it bothers me i don't like that monetization model as a result so one of the things i talked about before anyone who attended my trust talk about looking at reputation systems dynamically is that a dynamical system so you join a game you have no items you have your level one whatever and you start building up where where do you end up and do players keep on ending up indefinitely do they keep on building up is there no level cap or do they end up at a level at which represents their skill level represents their commitment to the game relative to other people now um you know maybe there's weighted grading right like starcraft you end up on some ladder you're never going to get past that ladder that's your limit you're not that actually brings up something else interesting if you remember back to the uh the arcade games where you play a game and you see these three initials that of somebody who played the game 10 years ago who achieved the score that no one else could possibly achieve now you have no incentive to play that however if you're playing against the same group of five people's 10 people some community that you know and you're winning about half the time now you're engaged you want to keep playing you have an incentive to keep playing good game companies have learned this and that's why you tend to see a lot more ladders a lot more matching servers as opposed to one big one as well you play with jewel blitz you see your friend scores on facebook but you don't see anyone else's score well look at the pac-man championship the new pac-man game it has the global leaderboard you can go look at the very top of it but buy 400 something yeah we're actually some of the better players in the world which is scary i'm close to you i'll catch it up anyway what the interesting part is that what they emphasize is they show you your ranking relative to all your friends rather than intimidating you with the top 10 that are all identical perfect cheating scores they were cheating scores they were like 10 bajillion nine nine nine nine nine they cheat but it also you know the air hockey problem we talk about this a lot is the idea that all right air hockey everyone likes air hockey no one plays it that much we play a whole bunch of air hockey let's say and we get good at air hockey fighting games are these guys same thing now we're better than everyone else around us no one else will ever play with us again unless we go to a convention like this so that can affect your that can affect the monetization model of a game where if players are forced to play with highly skilled players they might drop out of the game because they don't want to deal with it and conversely the high skill players might get bored because they're never being challenged yeah so you have to have a good matching system or the entire games breaks apart and it's one of those dead like ruinous fps is you've got a really good guy at the street fighter machine no one's going to put a quarter in the other side they're going to wait for him there's a dude sitting in that initial d machine for like eight hours on Thursday right no one's going to sit in the second seat unless to play single player you know in street fighter you can't play single player while the other guy's playing you know you have to challenge him so it's like that you're not going to make as much money as if you have really crappy players who actually keep cycling and playing you know he is incentivized to do that too in fighting games you get a free play in the arcade if you beat somebody so you want to be better than all your friends because then you go to the arcade and once you reach that skill you can play for free for the rest of your life and this is why you don't see those games in arcades anymore arcades today are filled with why you don't see arcades anymore they're filled with crane games and video poker right things that are random or luck or prize based or or whatever now that's an interesting thing too a poker how many people think poker is a game of chance how many people think that poker is a game of skill so if you play it in there's there's what's known as the there's a startup and there's a steady state in a steady state poker is a game of skill there's a colleague of mine Thomas sandholm at Carnegie Mellon one of his students i'm not sure that the current state of this project but got mathematically can prove that her agent can get within eight percent of optimality for that game meaning that it is impossible mathematically over any time horizon to beat that agent statistically by more than eight percent so there's all these games that that may appear as a combination of randomness or not randomness but as long as it's it's mainly governed by strategy in long run you can win by having a better strategy is a strategy game the thing with poker though is like you know if you take out the whole betting aspect it's just playing the cards to beat the other cards right that it's entirely a game of chance right the whole game is the betting part has nothing to do well you'd have to assume the players understand the complete odds and are keeping perfect track all of the cards that have played through the deck in the course of the game i guess you can play a game ran okay so let's say that you're playing tic-tac-toe and you're a five-year-old i've used this example before um tic-tac-toe can be very complicated for that however let's say that you're playing with a die and that'll tell you i don't know you have a nine-sided die and that tells you the position to roll and if that's already taken you use another one now is uh is tic-tac-toe a game of chance if you're playing against somebody like that or if you're using that as your strategy now if you don't understand the game it can look like you're playing by chance because you don't know what move to make you're playing chess uh i don't know let me can is this a valid move is this a valid move now you're playing it like it's a game of chance all right so uh well that kind of boils down to all games all fundamentally boil down to you know some core mechanics like settlers of gatan is a game of skill up to a point like you as you learn the game you learn optimal strategies the game is actually pretty i think it is possible to play settlers of gatan optimally because the rule set is pretty constrained there's you don't have a lot of options on a given turn the deck is simple the the odds are 2d6 i think everyone at this con knows 2d6 odds by heart at this point so as a result if four perfectly skilled players play the game is perfectly random because it does just come down to the role of the 2d6 now this is something else very interesting where before i was talking about a game that looks random and then when you get skills becomes a strategy game you can have the same thing or the opposite thing where you have a game that starts off a strategy but then once you get to that nash equilibrium you understand the nash equilibrium everyone else does that's your best strategy now it's just rock paper scissors does anyone hear a nash equilibrium to simply is the idea that you can have a game where all of us are playing a game we all have made a move i know that any change to my strategy will be worse than i currently am even if i'm not winning with my current strategy i will do worse if i change my move i will never change my move there are games that as many games can get to a point where every player is at that point and no one will ever make another different decision forever if two of us change our strategy maybe we can mix it up but neither of us but then individually competitive game neither of us is gonna make a move now it also depends whether or not the game is cooperative or not cooperative is whether or not you can make binding deals in a game if i can make a binding deal let's say dr hasard's winning because he probably will be me and rim are losing but we can't do any better but i could say scott let's both go here let's agree to it and there is an outside force either the rules of the game i got with a gun something that will force us to actually do it we both moved together to put ourselves ahead and now we're at a different nash equilibrium that made one of us two is winning but then we really weren't at an equilibrium because we did have a cooperative right exactly and that's part of the game mechanic itself there are there's also a notion of k strong nash equilibrium which means that you cannot um no group of slides less than k can collude together can make these binding agreements and win or disrupt the equilibrium so think about what this does to the design of a game like risk is not a cooperative game there is i if i make a deal like i won't attack you next round there's no rule about that there's nothing to stop me from attacking him next round and but but again like small world if i played the diplomacy thing that is a bind that deal is binding that is a mechanic of the game he cannot attack me the rules break it is the world cooperative or not is government cooperative or not what about politics what about what about our society oh because we sign a contract for all intents and purposes the world is cooperative because there are legal structures there's laws there's police there's all these things that will enforce that contract but really those are only there by force and if i had enough force or i left the country or something i could still get out of the contract theoretically now most games in they're not trivial are some some hybrid between cooperative cooperative and competitive you can only find the extreme in certain situations look at world war one you had these guys who were doing all this trench warfare and the real war not the real war yes there were guys who are firing off mortars at the at certain times every day and they would do it they would schedule when they would fire in the specific locations so they could tell their officers hey we're firing look at all these rounds we fired but they weren't hitting their opponents their opponents could move out of the way they would both do that so they're playing tit for tat and being nice that's the that's the utility structure that's cooperation in war because look at the officers utility win the war soldiers utility don't die so the the soldiers on german side the the non-commissioned officers had a different utility from the grunts the infantry men the infantry men on both sides had the same utility and actually had a lot more in common than everyone else involved in the war this has almost nothing to do with our panel at this point let's go back to money making so so complete complete reversal right so another thing i've noticed that makes a lot of difference in uh we're almost in uh how games make money is like what platform the games are on see a board game versus a handheld game versus the console versus the pc board games are interesting in that they are trivially pirated you can look up the rules and make the game people don't realize that board game piracy is actually kind of big like i met a guy the first time for like modern art i was like oh look at these van go paintings and stuff that guy just made that set of modern art by himself he printed it out of his printer and he bought some poker chips and he's just like here he bought a deck of cards he wrote on the cards and that was you know modern art but yet board games still make money because it's kind of a pain in the ass to do it it's real like it's really trivial to do it if you want to do it but at the same time most people aren't willing to do it the rules to pretty much every board game are free online so if you just buy a big sack of like pieces like you know some plastic spaceship some chips some gems some little wooden cubes and some dice of all different shapes and sizes and a board that you can draw on and a color printer you can make almost any board game and carry them around in just one box like every board game in the world and there are two reasons why consoles have become popular by developers one is you have a unified platform that you don't have to worry about all these bugs from all the different configurations of pcs two is piracy when you're playing a console game the burden of pirating a game is that much higher you have to get a mod chip you have to do all these different sorts of things and all the handheld devices are being locked down you have to root your phone if you want to install other stuff that isn't sanctioned by the companies and on top of that they have an incentive to for these wall gardens as though they're called where apple started and now as a developer I have to pay 30 percent of my revenue there's a little asset there to different companies to charge different amounts to have the blessing of them to sell on their platform so it's 30 percent of my revenue gone in order to sell the game right but are you gonna if you were to say to put it out drm free right would you you know on android which actually has more numbers than apple now right I guess you have to handle all the different android os's and phones out there which is pain in the butt right but even if you didn't would you make more money is not giving up the 30 percent cut even though people are pirating you know so that's that's an issue piracy basically like you know i'm not i'm one of the people who doesn't believe piracy actually cuts into sales except for the fact that piracy basically acts as a demo you know we know a demo cuts into sales right so if you don't put out a demo but there's piracy it's basically like well you lose the sales you would have lost with the demo right it's a complicated answer is before i was talking about price discrimination over time and ideally you want the people to not tire it but just wait a little bit longer to buy it but piracy eats into that and cuts off the tail of your revenue yep especially because if as piracy gets easier people just download and play it play the play the demo they're done i pirated i think what is in polka night of the inventory i pirated that i watched all the cutscenes on youtube you didn't actually download a pirated copy of the game you just watched it and you i did that for a lot of Final Fantasy games and like games with FMVs it's like i don't want to sit there grinding for 10 hours just watch Final Fantasy 8 on youtube i'm done cool did i should i have paid for that i don't actually believe so and i don't feel bad one fascinating thing to me is different game developers takes on youtube some game developers hate any of their FMVs anything being posted on youtube other ones like me like hey sure put it up there it's promoting for our game well here's an interesting example look around on youtube for how many my little pony mashups there are no no then look for how many archer mashups there are or other very very popular shows there's very little because the companies that own those properties take everything down at a moment's notice there aren't just clips of all the funny things that happen in shows like archer on youtube because they get taken down you don't see two they're all on hulu or it's a pain in the ass to watch them because they show you an ad before every 20 second clip you don't see too many seinfeld and simpsons mashups because any seinfeld or simpsons thing on youtube is gonna be taken down immediately i i made a my little pony mashup with seinfeld i zoomed in and reversed the video just to make sure i wouldn't get caught by the filter yeah you can't tell me that you know i mean sure we don't have any statistics on this but you can't tell me my little pony that you know everyone would be selling mlp merchant cosplaying as ponies if youtube wasn't full of a million mashup but at the same time where's the monetization model there because you still have to make money in the end and so far we've poked holes through every possible model of monetization if you want to talk about ponies there's plenty of monetization models they're just not doing it right it's like that's that's something that i really don't understand is not just when okay we have a thing we want to make money off of it trying different things but it's here's an obvious free money and they're just ignoring the it's not even risk taking it's obvious free money not taking it for example old game that is extremely popular popular that's just not available on any market so you have to pirate it for example saturn bomber man you can't buy saturn bomber man except used i would pay like 20 bucks for that right now yeah this is something we haven't really talked about much as ip intellectual property there's trademarks copyrights and patents those are the three somebody somebody does own it that person could be making some amount of money even if they put it out for a penny they would make something on that so the trouble there is a lot of the distribution because if the distributors take a huge amount of cut and here you have to go through all these hoops you have to pay somebody for a hundred hours of their time to figure out all the legal stuff get the licensing set up they may make less money on selling it than a toss for all of that over movies have that problem there are thousands of movies that either never saw the light of day or were screened a couple of times and disappeared because the right structure of who owns what parts of the movie and the soundtrack and all these pieces mean that there is no way anyone would ever spend the money it would take to sort it out to legally release it game mechanics are another interesting thing you can't uh we're up i think we're out it's all right oh we were gonna make a really good point too but i guess we're out of time yeah so game mechanics are not copyrightable but the technology and algorithms underneath them are patentable that's another interesting can of worms yes and then there's the idea for first engineering game mechanics on your own and then making a game that's the same well there's also a thing like the art in a game right like you know i look at dominion right you know i can't just photocopy and dominion and sell it right because i'm using the art that is copyrighted by the people who made that set but if i make a game that's the exact same game as dominion and i just draw all my own art and design my own cards and my own boxes i can get away with that almost so we've got to get out of the room but i think if you enjoyed this at all i guess all of us do stuff outside of these cons so i guess you can buy this game plug what you do and we'll plug it in game.com search for acron it's a time traveling rts send tanks back in time to destroy the things that made the tanks that we're attacking your base i can't even be the dizorio i suck and i'm not even kidding i can't be the dizorio and pretty much all of our other lectures where we argue that world of warcraft is not an mmo rpg and that the communities around games are actually mathematical extensions of the games themselves a shitty community in a game is caused by the game not by the people playing it all of our lectures are on youtube and hopefully all this stuff will be on youtube too.