For those of you who are either not terminally online and/or occasionally caught in the social media bubbles that surround gaming conversations, screenshots of not-yet released FF7: Rebirth kicked up a new round of an old debate. Specifically, the utilization of “yellow paint” as a means to clearly show players what areas of the game are traversable, can be interacted with, or otherwise.
Yellow paint as a design choice has been litigated in other character action series such as The Last of Us, Horizon, and Resident Evil. The yellow paint is there to help identify areas that require interaction against richly detailed 3D setpieces that otherwise cannot be manipulated in a meaningful way. In other words, when everything looks extremely realistic but is largely just a backdrop, it can be difficult to differentiate between (say) a ladder in a shed that is present because people tend to store ladders in sheds vs. one that allows the player to move forward in the game. In the case of the latter ladder (no apologies), there is a tendency to slap an obvious cue, such as yellow paint on the rungs, to establish differentiation.
To game players, the yellow paint is woefully unneeded hand-holding that serves little purpose aside from breaking immersion. Game designers typically reply in kind with a litany of experiences, examples, and permutations of UX or market testing that demonstrate just how stupid people can be when playing a game necessitating some degree of hand-holding. The reality is much more banal: Cues like yellow paint are present for game accessibility in addition to the fact that being uncertain where/how to proceed in a game is deeply unfun most of the time.
As an allegory for overarching conversations around the game industry, yellow paint couldn't be much more perfect: Polaric debates about complicated issues without much in the way of nuance or (in many cases) accuracy, occasionally pitting fans and developers at odds.
We’re entering 2024 with fundamental questions at play regarding the underlying business of the gaming industry. These questions are against the backdrop of industry-wide layoffs, staggering game development costs reaching the hundreds of millions, an increasingly crowded marketplace (PC gaming portal Steam reported a record 14,000 games released in 2023), and competition from traditional media who see the necessity of finding purchase within interactive entertainment (recently and spectacularly via Disney’s $1.5B investment in Epic…groundbreaking and savvy only if we ignore that this is the same Disney which had previously either shuttered or outsourced its efforts in this space).
At a high level of generalization, these pressures on the business of gaming tend to create an inherent rift between players and game devs. Game devs would like more job security and freedom to work outside of demanding crunch cycles on projects that are meaningful and fulfilling to them - factors which often require a healthy flow of revenue into the business. Meanwhile, gaming fans want more content, quicker, and within a very narrow band of ways they deem acceptable to pay for this content (upfront, at fixed cost at or below $60). Publishers leaning into live service games (and quickly retreating), downloadable content, in-game or in-app purchases, and recurrent sources of revenue such as subscriptions or advertising have become popular means to bolster revenue, yet occasionally met with derision by players.
However, meeting players on these points does not guarantee success. EA (a studio somewhat notorious for incremental monetization strategies) invested $125M in it’s new IP, Immortals of Aveum, which was single player, modest in length, and did not include microtransactions - seemingly everything players wanted (and in line with an oft-cited meme to this point). And yet the game was met with lukewarm response culminating in about half of the development studio joining the thousands of layoffs in the gaming industry. There were, of course, a number of factors at play (most notably that the game received good to middling reviews in a year otherwise packed with mega-hits), yet demonstrative of the difficult gambles developers and publishers must make in a complicated ecosystem against the shifting tastes and opinions of their consumers.
In the same way that the yellow paint is a “help us help you” moment from devs to players, so too are many of the emerging revenue models in gaming, and you will be hard pressed to find someone on either side who is completely happy about the current state of affairs.
Savvy industry vets will note that the scenario I’m painting (admittedly in broad strokes) is only really applicable to AAA gaming (and maybe AAAA gaming as another designation that means “games which are expensive to make”), with recent hits like Palworld proving that a modest-sized studio charging a modest price can find success. While Palworld has indeed been a commercial success, it has already shed the majority of its user base like so many viral survival game hits before (for example, Valheim). One might also argue that skating the razor's edge between being derivative vs. a rip-off is a risky gamble.
The reality is that a relatively small number of titles represents an outsized share of revenue within gaming, which disincentivizes innovation among both the producers of AAA titles who are reluctant to expend resources towards unknown payoffs (I doubt EA will be making another title like Immortals of Aveum for quite some time), and potential change-agents in the form of indie devs who are confronted with higher barriers of entry.
Ultimately, we’re in the thick of many soul-searching conversations within the game industry, between one of the biggest years in gaming (as reviewed for my recent piece in Campaign) and one representing a potential new normal for gaming (as discussed in my recent piece for AdWeek). The framing of both pieces, as a review of 2023 and look-forward for 2024, is for marketers - not just because it falls within the remit of my day-to-day job, but because there is a need to address this audience for the benefit of both the gaming and broader marketing industries.
This is because the intersection of marketing and gaming centers on the power of access - marketers get access to a hard to reach consumers in uniquely attention-grabbing content, developers are empowered to access players that might otherwise never pay for a gaming experience, and players are able to access an even larger library of game experiences. As noted above, recurring revenue from advertising and subscriptions (potentially empowered by advertising, similar to how CTV services have expanded their user base via ad-subsidized subscription tiers) are not necessarily a new tactics, but are increasingly important ones that carries benefits to all parties involved (when implemented in a player-first manner). Reliable revenue streams create a buffer against the otherwise volatile hit-based nature of the business of gaming, potentially allowing for breathing room to focus on innovation. On a more pragmatic basis, in order to reach every consumer on the planet, gaming needs to have flexible means of monetization that can fit the entertainment needs vs. financial constraints of every consumer.
Like the yellow paint debate, the potential for marketing or advertising in games will have heated opinions from players and developers without an abundance of nuance. It also is certainly not a fix-all, but as gaming becomes as ubiquitous as mainstream entertainment such as movies, film, or music, so too should gaming look to its sister industries to evolve business practices that conform with consumer expectations. Few folks love ads in the absolute sense, but they love the otherwise “free” content which ads broker, and gaming represents some of the best content available to consumers today.