Panic indie developers

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Gamewower

Cooperation and competition between big fish and small fish, channels and CPs in the game industry is the norm, and it is reasonable to disagree with different positions. Among them, the acquisition of large enterprises in the past two years has also become a trend of sweeping goods on a global scale, and the objects of mergers and acquisitions have also spread from small teams to larger-scale well-known teams.

After Microsoft's record acquisition of Activision Blizzard screen brush effect, some independent game developers could not sit still. According to the BBC, independent developers who join the Xbox Game Pass camp have doubts, the former is worried that the addition of more AAA masterpieces will squeeze the market space, and the latter believes that small indie games that are not included in XGP will be eliminated.

It is worth noting that, like the share, this panic itself is also a manifestation of the relationship between developers and channels, in the overall market development of PC and host into a bottleneck environment, developers choose to sell separately and compete with the big channel subscription model, around the perception of independent game value.

Doubts about different positions

In the relevant reports of the BBC, the views that have joined XGP and those who have not joined different positions are included.

Tanya Short, who developed the critically acclaimed game Boyfriend Dungeon, said the general strategy for most indie studios is to avoid releasing games near Christmas because they don't want to compete with AAA games, but that may no longer be a useful plan in the future. "The Activision acquisition has caused us to panic because it makes it clear that maybe Microsoft can dominate the rest of the year, so what are we going to do?"

Yura Zhadanovich, founder and game director at Sad Cat Studios, believes that because as more big-name games will land on Game Pass, there are concerns about whether there will be enough players to support their small team's games.

These two views are similar, that is, as a developer who previously joined the XGP camp, he is worried that under the same environment camp, the subsequent addition of more AAA products will affect the market living space of independent works, attract more user attention and affect the original market strategy.

Jake Simpson, a veteran developer from TNB Studios, on the other hand, made the point that one of the reasons for the panic was that XGP put the perceived value of indie games in a race to the bottom. Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at Ampere Analysis, even argues that as more subscribers subscribe to Game Pass, any indie games that aren't included in XGP will be harder to sell.

This statement is tantamount to labeling Microsoft as a disruptor of the indie game market, "If you don't follow me, it will be difficult for you to live." ”

Competitive conspiracy

Perceived value is a subjective evaluation of the utility of a product or service that consumers derive from the cost of acquiring a product or service after they perceive the benefits of the product or service. The objective value that distinguishes the product or service in the general sense is the result of the subjective perception of the customer's transfer value.

Around the game pricing, is a common problem, some domestic scholars have previously discussed from the perspective of online game perception value. Oscar Clark, chief strategy officer at Fundamentally Games, mentioned in the rethinking PC Pricing article that "game pricing is limited by the value of the game's production", which in turn is related to the player's "price expectation" (perceived value), "a game that costs XX dollars must look like XX dollars" and "make them feel worth it". The key to the fact that microtransactions, season passes, and season pass games can still stand in the market is that these games set value expectations early on and reliably meet delivery targets, creating a community-like collective effort and trust for consumers.

Returning to Microsoft's problem, the real concern that some independent developers want to express is that XGP's model is essentially to sell AAA games cheaply to grab and please users, and this kind of bottom-by-bottom competition behavior disguises the user's perceived value perception of other independent games. For an inappropriate analogy, independent developers are small vendors, XGP is a full twenty yuan promotion, 3A this kind of "major appliances" joined the twenty yuan camp like a kind of dimensionality reduction blow, consumers will of course feel that buying these more profitable.

Prior to this, the subscription model model generally provided relatively low-cost game products, such as Apple Arcade and Google's Google Play Pass or epic store such channels to subsidize developers at their own expense, discounting games or free to attract users.

With Microsoft's wealth and cost to add its AAA masterpieces to the XGP camp, once players get used to enjoying high-cost games at low prices, they will have a "not worth the price" cognition for other independent games at similar prices, affecting the normal judgment of product value.

Changes in the environment

It is worth noting that environmental factors are also exacerbating this panic. Previously, we mentioned that the size of the PC and console markets in the past two years has encountered development bottlenecks, according to the 2021 global game market report summarized by GamesIndustry, the PC market is 36.7 billion US dollars, down 0.8% year-on-year; the console market is 50.4 billion US dollars, down 6.6% year-on-year, showing negative growth.

The market ceiling has not been raised, on the other hand, developers are also facing the problem of rising development costs, and there have been a series of related discussions in the industry around the price increase of buy-out games. Standing in the position of consumers, it is natural to hope that the lower the price to play a better game, the strategy of low-cost experience of AAA masterpieces leads to the reduction of players' perceived value of independent games, which further squeezes the living space of independent developers.

In response, Sarah Bond, Microsoft's co-vice president of the game ecosystem, replied to the BBC: "We will continue to invest in indie game developers, and as XGP services grow, we will continue to do so." Game Pass can actually be beneficial to indie game developers, as XGP encourages players to try out new types of games they've never been interested in before, and then look at similar games. The answer to experience new types of games at a lower cost also does not affect players' value judgments about indie games.

To some extent, Microsoft's ability to enhance its own channels through a series of acquisitions is a kind of conspiracy. What the big manufacturers want to see is that under the pressure of competition, more competitors can turn to cooperation and stand in a unified camp. Independent developers are worried about excessive competition to exacerbate the problem of survival, for them to balance the creative ideal and survival is a long-term test, the past two years of frequent investment and mergers and acquisitions for many teams also want to obtain a more stable development environment.

In the past two years, more and more enterprises in China have joined the ranks of helping and supporting independent games, including a series of measures to prevent piracy, in fact, most of the players who are accustomed to the growth of F2P in China are precisely the groups that have vague perception of the value of buy-out games, and under the changes in the general environment, whether the improvement of players' aesthetic quality will lead to the reversal of consumer cognition, which is another problem.