I think people who say that the FPS industry is bland and uninspired fundamentally misunderstand the genre. Do you want to know how to kill a multimillion dollar franchise? Why don't you ask Bungie.
After Halo 2 shipped, Bungie went to the drawing board for its next title and a company that faniced itself as inspired and innovative did the only thing that it knew how to do; innovate.
But by the time Halo 3 was released, Halo 2 had grown into a different beast entirely. While Bungie developers, perhaps naively, thought of their baby in terms of things like 'awesome' and 'badass', H2 had become the flagship competitive title for MLG, the now largest pro gaming curcuit in America, and had fostered the first real breakthrough of competitive console FPS into the American ultra mainstream. The people playing this game now thought of it in terms of 'balance' and 'skill gap' and 'teamwork', topics that require experience on a level of play beyond the grasp of the creators themselves to truly understand.
And there's a huge difference in the way you would develop for those two schools of thought. Bungie was caught up in making a game for themselves still, and they did so at the expense of alienating a fanbase that had become nothing like them. For a game that lives and dies by its online community, this was the kiss of death.
After a game becomes competitive you can't change the recipe, you can only add sugar. No one clamors for drastic changes to be made in baseball or basketball because the attraction to competitive games isn't innovation, it's competition. Bungie desperately wanted to improve the franchise with cool features and new mechanics and powerups and it was all for naught because, at the end of the day, all Halo 2 players wanted to play was Halo 2.
I wasn't aware of the rift Bungie cause with Halo 3—a game which they changed in quite drastic ways with Halo Reach, causing similar uproar (which now 343 Studios, the company now taking on the Halo mantle, is half-reverting with an upcoming update to Halo Reach).
The big question is, of course—are people willing to pay FULL_GAME_PRICE for small updates, like you describe?
MW3 has garnered quite a lot of flack for being entirely derivative and little more than an iterative annual EA sports title-style update.
You're right in that Halo 3 still managed to achieve mainstream success (it sold nearly twice as many copies as its predecessor), but sales are a lagging indicator of support and H3 was released to a very fertile market; the console wars were in full effect and GOW, a non fps, was the 360's only big hitter.
As for your question, this type of thing is far more suited for incremental updates a la modern MMOs. Make the game free on psn/marketplace and charge a cheap annual subscription fee with trials to hook casual users in and you a have a recipe for success. Place a huge emphasis on community and competition so that hardcore players become heavily invested (from all ends of the personality spectrum), be an extremely active presence on your (robust) online community and listen to fans who understand your game. A fact that I think is lost on many developers is that, while catering to the casual crowd over the competitive seems like it should be better business, what casual players put in their disk tray day after day is largely dictated by what they see when they check out their friends list, and if a hardcore player spends eight hours a day online, guess what's going to quickly become every casual player's go to game?
Comments
I think people who say that the FPS industry is bland and uninspired fundamentally misunderstand the genre. Do you want to know how to kill a multimillion dollar franchise? Why don't you ask Bungie.
After Halo 2 shipped, Bungie went to the drawing board for its next title and a company that faniced itself as inspired and innovative did the only thing that it knew how to do; innovate.
But by the time Halo 3 was released, Halo 2 had grown into a different beast entirely. While Bungie developers, perhaps naively, thought of their baby in terms of things like 'awesome' and 'badass', H2 had become the flagship competitive title for MLG, the now largest pro gaming curcuit in America, and had fostered the first real breakthrough of competitive console FPS into the American ultra mainstream. The people playing this game now thought of it in terms of 'balance' and 'skill gap' and 'teamwork', topics that require experience on a level of play beyond the grasp of the creators themselves to truly understand.
And there's a huge difference in the way you would develop for those two schools of thought. Bungie was caught up in making a game for themselves still, and they did so at the expense of alienating a fanbase that had become nothing like them. For a game that lives and dies by its online community, this was the kiss of death.
After a game becomes competitive you can't change the recipe, you can only add sugar. No one clamors for drastic changes to be made in baseball or basketball because the attraction to competitive games isn't innovation, it's competition. Bungie desperately wanted to improve the franchise with cool features and new mechanics and powerups and it was all for naught because, at the end of the day, all Halo 2 players wanted to play was Halo 2.
I wasn't aware of the rift Bungie cause with Halo 3—a game which they changed in quite drastic ways with Halo Reach, causing similar uproar (which now 343 Studios, the company now taking on the Halo mantle, is half-reverting with an upcoming update to Halo Reach).
The big question is, of course—are people willing to pay FULL_GAME_PRICE for small updates, like you describe?
MW3 has garnered quite a lot of flack for being entirely derivative and little more than an iterative annual EA sports title-style update.
You're right in that Halo 3 still managed to achieve mainstream success (it sold nearly twice as many copies as its predecessor), but sales are a lagging indicator of support and H3 was released to a very fertile market; the console wars were in full effect and GOW, a non fps, was the 360's only big hitter.
As for your question, this type of thing is far more suited for incremental updates a la modern MMOs. Make the game free on psn/marketplace and charge a cheap annual subscription fee with trials to hook casual users in and you a have a recipe for success. Place a huge emphasis on community and competition so that hardcore players become heavily invested (from all ends of the personality spectrum), be an extremely active presence on your (robust) online community and listen to fans who understand your game. A fact that I think is lost on many developers is that, while catering to the casual crowd over the competitive seems like it should be better business, what casual players put in their disk tray day after day is largely dictated by what they see when they check out their friends list, and if a hardcore player spends eight hours a day online, guess what's going to quickly become every casual player's go to game?