During the Stadia Keynote at Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 earlier this week, Careen Yapp of Stadia’s strategic business development segment announced a new revenue share program for dev⛦elopers. Starting this month, any new games added to the Stadia Pro library will earn monthly revenue based on engagement. The new revenue model, which the company describes as “industry leading,” will as🦩sess engagement based on how many days a game is played.
“To make this as easy as possible, engagement will be measured by session days,” Yapp explained during her keynote. “One user playing one Stadia Pro game twice on day one equals one session day. A user that plays a Stadia Pro game once on day one and once on day two equals two session days.” Put another way, the more days that someone plays the same game, the more money the developer of that game makes. Stadia believes this is the fairest way to measure engagement. According to a Stadia representative we spoke to, if engagement were instead measured by total time played, then narrati🐻ve-focused RPGs might see drastically more revenue than pick-up-and-play games like roguelikes, for example.
For some devs, any amount of additional revenue is a good thing. Eddie Lee, founder of Funktronic Labs, whose game 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wave Break debuted on Stadia last year, says that he’s always in favor 🌼of these “pro-developer revenue-sharing models.”
“In such a highly competitive industry, the struggle to surviv🧜e is real,” Lee says. “Any extra revenue is always nice.” He hopes that the model will drive more developers towards Stadia, though he can’t say for certain if the incentive will be enough. “The ultimate calculus is if the revenue that the platform brings in is greater than the cost of porting it onto the platform. I don’t know what th🅰e data is, but I’m sure it all depends on the type of game you are making and the Stadia gamer demographic, alongside a slew of other factors.”
Whether or not this model is beneficial to developers depends largely on the type of experience the🅘 game offers. While live-service games like Destiny 2 are bound to see a lot of daily sessions, a lot of games simply aren’t designed to be played this way.
This ‘pay-for-play’ model has some developers and industry analysts concerned. Mike Futter, founder and business analyst at F-Squared, says that this model heavily favors a limited selection of games. 🥃“If your title is linear, narrative, and short, you have very little incentive to participate on that platform,” Futter says. “This is going to cause many small indie devs to abandon the platform entirely.”
By incentivizing only one type of game — games meant to be played day after day — Stadia is pushing away developers that specialize in shorter experiences. Without a substantial variety of games to play, Futter believes that consumer interest in the platform will inevitably shrink. “When you compare this to something like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game Pass, which has seen titles of all types and sizes flourish, it’s easy to understand why pa🐼y-for-play is a rocky path to tread,” he explains.
Last November, Xbox head Phil Spencer spoke a bit about how developers earn money through Game Pass. On aওn episode of The Verge’s Decode with Nilay Patel, Spencer explained that Microsoft doesn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to Game Pass. “Our deals are, I’ll say, all over the place,” Spencer said. “That sounds unmanaged, but it’s really based on the developer’s need.”
Spencer went on to explain how Microsoft handles every game on a case-by-case basis. Some developers are looking for X amount of money upfront to put their game on Game Pass, while others are looking for agreements based on usage. “We’re open ജ[to] experimenting with many different partners, because we don’t think we have it figured out,” Spencer said. “When we started, we had a model that was all based on usage. Most of the partners said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we understand that, but we don’t believe it, so just give us the money upfront.’𓆏”
That flexibility has led Game Pass to amass the most eclectic library of any game subscription service on the market. When we analyzed each service mathematically, we also found that Game Pass offered t🌃he best value to players. Had Microsoft stuck with the pay-for-play model, as Stadia intends to, it likely would have had a negative impact on the player experience, and in turn, the industry as a whole. In a recent Axios Gaming newsletter, Johan Toresson, a talent scout for Raw Fury, explained that pay-for-play models incentivize developers t🌳o make games that push players to “put every waking hour into the game.”
"Whi✱le there is usually an upfront paycheck, which is great, the people curating these platforms clearly signal that they are more into these types of retention-heavy projects,” Toresson said. “Which in turn likely leads to projects being bloated with unnecessary padding content just to keep you in there."
As Axios points out, business models have always had an effect on the way games are made, going all the way back to arcade days when creators were rewarded for making games hard. Similarly, in the era of Blockbuster rentals, games𒀰 like The Lion King on Super Nintendo were designed with extreme difficulty spikes so that players wouldn’t be able to complete the game during the rental period. A model like the one Stadia has just introduced could also have an impact on the wa🃏y games are designed, and not necessarily in the best interest of the player.
“For Stadia, the most profitable way to make money would be to create big, grindy games with lots of addiction mechanics,” Doc Burford, game director at Mischওief, tells me. “The thing is, while a lot of game designers look at the short-term benefits of player conditioning, longer-term studies have shown that those kinds of addiction mechanics reduce overall enjoym⛎ent.”
Burford’s latest game, Adios, is a short, narrative experience that likely wouldn’t benefit much from Stadia’s new model. If he wanted to make a really suc🧔cessful game for Stadia, he and his team would need to design a game that keeps people coming back for more every day. To Burford, that kinꦯd of design just isn’t worth it in the long run.
&ldquo๊;You can’t just condition players forever,” he says. “And people who try make worse games as a result. There is no benefit; it captures a small percent of whales early on, but it also drives away more players than it keeps. So it’s a horrible long-term strategy.”