Do Profit Gain Logics Get into the Way of Fun in Indie Games?
A disturbing thought occurred to me a couple of nights ago as I was slowly but surely falling in the domain of sleep: Could it be true that many indie games are seriously harmed by their designers thinking too much about the profit gain logics?
I’ve played web-based MMO rpgs and strategy games occasionally, usually in streaks. The other night I started a campaign of Imperia Online. The game is very basic turn-based (or time-based) strategy / kingdom management game, with lots of optimizing, number-crunching and prioriting to do. Basically you build resource building facilities to be able to produce your fighting forces and keep the production up as going to war is gonna eat a lot of those forces. So, in a few words, lots of fun for your war-monging geeky engineer type, right?
Despite the appealing (if not so much innovative) concept I gave up the game pretty quickly. The reason was the horrendous UI: In Imperia Online, you cannot queue commands. If you want to build, for example, five iron mines (or upgrade your iron mines to level 5) you just cannot click build five times and leave the game on its own. No, instead, you have to click build once and wait for your builders to complete the build before you can build anything else to that province. This can take up to an hour for advanced buildings (yawn). Of course, you can try to keep yourself occupied with the other features of the game, but for a beginner there isn’t really that much to do.
So, time after time I forgot about my Imperia Online kingdom. The builders were left to build a granary, a farm or whatnot and after they finished, their leader was nowhere to be found. When I discovered this pattern I started to think about what the designer’s intention of this kind of mechanic could be. It could be sheer laziness, but I don’t think so as the game seems pretty polished in other matters. There’s also the notion of rewarding the players for the time they invest in the game, but in a way this notion is flawed as the players waiting on some command to complete aren’t active participants, they are spectators. Then I realised that as the players tune on and off of Imperia Online as they are playing the game in short intervals, they are logging in between every command. And the game opens an another browser window showing an advertisement on logon. After that thought I haven’t even considered logging in to Imperia Online again.
I’m not against advertisements in free online games, no. But to me it seems that the design of the game was ruined to increase advertisement profits. Couldn’t they just have opened a pop-up window every time a player adds an item to the build queue? That would not have made me so irritated as this “usability” feature.
I know that profit gain logics have gone hand in hand with digital gaming throughout its history (just think about Pong or Pac-Man arcade machines), but this is just plain stupid. And does not work (at least on me). A more fluid game would have had me playing for a longer period and (as I said) I would have beared with the in-game ads or pop-ups too. Yes, I probably would have complained a bit, but if the gameplay would have been solid and the experience pleasant I would have rewarded the designers by sticking in the game through all those ads. Now I just quit. In short: If you are a game designer, you don’t want your greed (be it an advertisement scheme, a mechanic to shorten the game session time, selling game items for real money etc.) come in the way of gameplay experience.
Do any of you guys have good examples of this kind of game design flaw in other games?
Another thing about this is the MMO games’ obsession with trying to reward players for the time spent with the game, regardless of “the quality” of the time, but that’s a sermon for another day.
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