Another Year of the TGA: The Revolution Is Gentle, and Gaming Has Dodged the Worst

Ongoing games brought no disaster. They brought a few new solutions instead.

If the game industry left the outside world with any new impression this year, it is that it has far more in common with old-line industries than anyone assumed — and the overlap keeps growing. That may have reset how outsiders see this supposedly inventive line of work.

The collapse of Telltale Games told the story of how a bloated, autocratic management can wreck a creative process. The studio had adapted the hottest American comics and TV shows, then, after turning itself into a big company overnight, lost to the stalled creativity and staff exodus its management problems produced.

Quantic Dream, known to many non-gamers through Detroit: Become Human, faced complaints of workplace discrimination and harassment. The company called the accusations slander, but they made people see that game companies may be no cleaner than anyone else.

Rockstar, maker of GTA and Red Dead Redemption 2, was exposed for working its staff to the bone; the 100-hour weeks startled Western outlets unused to an overtime culture, and opened up a wider argument about crunch — the frantic stretch before a release date.

Even the companies with the warmest ties to their player communities turned out to be no longer "loyal." They went looking for new ways to widen their audience and lift profits, and some unspoken promises broke along the way. When Blizzard announced a Diablo mobile game at its grandest fan festival, core fans realized the brand they loved had quietly changed.

It is as if the rebellious gamer you knew had entered the working world and started dressing like a business executive. An industry that once presented itself as passionate, inventive, singular and anti-establishment is gradually "growing up" — turning into mainstream entertainment, gaining a bigger say in the culture, and smoothing over the sharp quarrels once drawn along business models and audience lines. The game world kept changing this year, only in steadier and cleverer ways. The year-end summing-up it finally produced became a near-uncontested, Oscars-style love-in — the very thing it used to mock.

The change cannot be undone. Nearly every big event this year traced back to ongoing games, the category that had sent core players into a panic two years ago. The good news: the worst did not happen. It even opened a few doors, and offered answers to problems already on the table.

The most successful example

"The world is changing. Players used to finish one game and move straight on to the next; now they're happy to keep it around."

Geoff Keighley's opening line at the TGA set the tone for the year. The three games everyone talked about in 2018 — God of War, Detroit and Red Dead Redemption 2 — could stand for the peak of game design, storytelling craft and artistic value. But the game that made the most noise, and made the ongoing shift most convincing, was still a textbook service game: Fortnite.

Ongoing games, or games as a service, have been under discussion for years. It is not a new idea, yet in the past two or three years it has seeped into every platform, because game companies want lower costs, longer-lived revenue and a settled player community. This year it kept reshaping how people play and pay, and began to press deeper on storytelling, mechanics and monetization.

Fortnite is the model case: it hit its targets, and the path it took never offended core players. When Overwatch won Game of the Year in 2016 and PUBG was nominated in 2017, many core players saw the TGA's embrace of online multiplayer as a disgrace. This year, people who have grown used to the category softened, all but conceding its place — a kind of social entertainment product. So long as it stays content in its own lane and doesn't crowd out "worthier" games at the awards, the resentment it collects stays fairly modest.

Fortnite has no need to chase the "best" trophy either. Years of successful operation, real reach beyond core players and a near-perfect way of making money leave it wanting nothing. The revolution in monetization especially has almost cleared the category of its reputation for greed.

An honest business model was once tied to one thing only: the single-player game you pay for once, long a byword for transparency and restraint. Every long-running model risked player resistance and eventual abandonment. DLC read as coasting, and made players suspect the base game had shipped incomplete. Free-to-play hid traps, often pushing players into unreasonable spending for a jolt of satisfaction. Pay-to-win attacked the fairness and balance of multiplayer at the root. Loot boxes bolted onto microtransactions were the most hated method of all: gambling-style card pulls had almost no chance in the mature markets of Europe and the US, and angry players could overturn an EA decision without much trouble. None of these did well among core players, and so people came to believe that the only way a long-running game could charge without giving offense was to sell outfits and skins. Yet when cosmetics change nothing about the numbers in a game, it is hard to guarantee a steady base of paying users.

Fortnite sidestepped all of it. Starting with Season 2 in December 2017, it added a "Battle Pass" that leaves the core experience alone. Players can reach every piece of content with the Free Pass, or pick up the Battle Pass in the store at any time for a marked price of US$10, payable in in-game currency. The rewards at each tier are plain to see and are unlocked by finishing timed challenges: skins, sprays, emotes, cosmetics, and enough in-game currency to nearly earn the money back. The haul is generous enough to be genuinely tempting. Nor are the challenges necessarily tied to how well you play. Like an achievement system in any game, some tasks are playful and easy, which gives newcomers who aren't good at games something to finish, while others nudge players to try different weapons or explore the map.

In theory, the more time you put in and the more XP you bank, the more you want the Pass: once you have cleared the Free Pass challenges, paying is what unlocks the real rewards. Unlike the old model, where money buys access to a game's full content, Fortnite opened its core experience for free from day one, so the Pass a player buys is really a prize for their own skill and the hours they have spent. No wonder 70% of its players pay.

The industry has started to see how neat this design is. Inspired by Fortnite, PUBG — which got there first — brought a similar Royale Pass to mobile, to striking effect: its mobile revenue jumped 365% at once. Rocket League launched a US$10 Rocket Pass over the summer, catching the same ride.

Seven seasons of updates, a steady run of challenges, maps and themes, a light all-ages tone, entertainment value that suits streamers, an active community and celebrity players, plus the user-made content of the "creator community" announced at the TGA itself, have kept Fortnite at a constant high. As of November, 200 million people had registered; a peak of 8.3 million concurrent players meant that at one moment more people were playing Fortnite than Steam had players in total. Monthly revenue passed US$300 million, and mobile alone took in US$2 million a day. Almost single-handedly, it proved that a service game can win both a good name and money — as long as its designers find the right place for it and the right way to charge.

With the Pass as the model, game companies saying the word "ongoing" no longer sound resigned, braced for a boycott by the "stubborn" pay-once camp. Next to the new model, paid DLC, loot boxes and daily skin sales do look dated. Shutting down loot boxes, promising free DLC and rolling out more variations on the Pass may be where everything is heading.

Some object that the Pass is the same medicine in a new bottle: it still asks for your money and your time over the long haul, and the timed challenges in particular put people under pressure. But ongoing games are here for good, and a way of charging this modest already counts as the bright side.

Breaking down the console walls

It should not be missed that this same ongoing game forced the "big three" — Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo — to knock down the walls between consoles and join several communities into one. The rumored future in which consoles no longer matter now looks a good deal more believable.

"As an industry, we are strongest when we come together," Spencer said. "We are united by our love of games as an art form."

Anyone who watched the six-month fight over cross-platform play knows how hard that "unity" was to reach.

At E3, Sony was attacked from all sides of the industry for refusing to let PS4 Fortnite players connect with those on Xbox and Switch. The game could already link PS4 with PC and mobile, but Sony had no wish to open the gate and share its community of tens of millions with the other two console makers. Microsoft did exactly the same thing when the Xbox 360 was on top, which did not stop it from standing beside Nintendo this year in a cross-play video ad mocking Sony for holding out.

The future of the console is in doubt, and exclusives will eventually be history. By the account of quite a few giants, Microsoft included, the next generation of consoles could be the last, with cloud gaming becoming the main way people play. The game runs on a remote server; the person at the other end downloads nothing, installs nothing and need not think about hardware, so long as there is a connection. This year the Japanese version of the Switch already ran Resident Evil 7 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey from the cloud. That arrangement also strips platform exclusivity of much of its meaning: a console's own horsepower stops mattering, because the cloud makes a wide range of games easier to reach. It also sits naturally alongside online play, monthly subscriptions, long-lived communities and continuous operation — it is practically built for service games. When the prize is a huge audience that hardware neither limits nor divides, the two want the same thing.

Sony gave in at last. The platform walls came down piece by piece, and player worlds that had been kept apart joined up. Players in the three camps, who normally concede nothing to each other, could now play together freely once the restrictions lifted — Nintendo and Microsoft assume that is what everyone wants. In technology and in strategy, the two brands trailing Sony this generation have every reason to press the point: naturally they would rather play down exclusivity where they are behind, and deny a rival the chance to raise a loyal following. It amounts to getting used, early, to a "cloud" future with no console divisions.

An unexpected shift in power

Ongoing games belong only to the biggest players. Running servers, updating content every few days, serving tens of thousands or millions of people, building a community, listening to it, keeping it, competing with an endless supply of new games — only mid-sized and large companies can carry that load, and what they get in return is lower development costs and fatter margins over the same period. For countless small studios, an inventive cost-saving way to make money is beside the point; simply surviving under Steam's plain arithmetic is hard enough.

That looks like a widening gap between the top of the pyramid and the bottom, and yet it produced one unexpected good thing.

The game market is already bursting. 1,772; 2,964; 4,207; 7,672; 8,573 — those are the numbers of games put on the Steam store each year from 2014 through this year so far, and most of them never sold more than 500 copies. When the Nintendo Switch eShop opened in the summer of 2017, it released only five or six games a week; that figure is now four or five times higher, and studios pushed to look elsewhere as Steam loosened its listing rules are all hunting for the next storefront, everyone fighting for a weekly slot. The cuts taken by Android and the App Store leave publishers with little recourse, and even so, Google Play keeps adding new games at 17% growth a year, while hundreds of games surface on the App Store every day.

Beyond the fact that a developer's game may draw no attention at all, Steam takes 30% of every copy sold, leaving almost nothing in hand. A game may need to sell at least 100,000 copies to break even, which is close to impossible without a marketing budget.

The one breaking Steam's grip is Epic Games. The day after Steam announced a tiered revenue-share policy, Epic openly declared war: the online store it opened on the night of the TGA gives developers an 88/12 split in their favor and charges no license fee at all to developers using Epic's Unreal Engine.

It was Epic that built everything around Fortnite, and in shipping the game around Steam and Google Play it learned how to run a sales platform of its own. Fortnite's enormous revenue also gave the 88/12 split its nerve, letting Epic actually help developers earn money while pushing its own engine.

More choices, and better ones, protect creators in a real way, and this break with the 70/30 split that digital storefronts have long taken may reach deeper into the whole medium — every comparable platform can feel the danger.

This is something the critics of ongoing games never saw coming. The category used to stand for ugly monetization and creativity at a standstill, yet someone has used it to win an enormous say in the industry and is spending that on supporting developers. That really is unexpected good news.

Holding the line

With the year's major announcements over, players can already name the counterexamples to "holding the line." Certain IP turns really did feel like a betrayal: in the first half of the year, Fallout 76 was announced as pure multiplayer; in the second, Blizzard unveiled a Diablo mobile game with a "Do you guys not have phones?" attached.

Chasing the Chinese market, working with NetEase and its long list of mobile successes, using a mobile game to widen the audience and raise revenue, breathing life back into a community built out of PC players, letting people use the odd spare minutes — Blizzard's move to mobile is no surprise. It simply badly overestimated how the die-hards in the room would take it. To some observers, Blizzard had in fact produced its most convincing business plan in years, and its one mistake was announcing it in the least suitable place: the crowd inside the hall and the crowd outside it were almost certainly two different audiences, and in the end this became a matter of stage management. When your audience comes in layers, you have to think about what to emphasize to each of them. That is a problem every large studio hoping to grow its player base will have to solve.

Blizzard wants players' trust; it wants to remain, in their eyes, a maker of carefully polished things. Perhaps players should give developers that chance, especially before the actual game arrives.

The only "line" a good developer needs to hold is making the game with care, and that has little to do with category or company strategy. No Man's Sky shipped as an ongoing game and was savaged, but after a year of conscientious revision, that same model brought it back as a work several levels above the one that launched. People lay out Rockstar's development timeline to show how online modes, constant updates and the endless upkeep of old games leave a company stuck and its output thin — and yet Red Dead Redemption 2, which Rockstar spent more than five years polishing, proved worth the wait.

What players may need to worry about is sameness. Open-world games look more and more alike. Whether it is Assassin's Creed Odyssey or the Far Cry New Dawn trailer shown at the TGA, they seem to carry signature elements borrowed from several different studios, and it is hard not to regret the character they have given up.

Finally, on the categories said to need cherishing: the single-player game, pronounced "endangered" every year, is doing perfectly well, and there seems little need to keep dressing it in the tragedy of obsolescence. Of the five Game of the Year nominees, the winner God of War, along with Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Spider-Man, are pure single-player experiences; Monster Hunter and Red Dead Redemption 2 have multiplayer parts, but the single-player half weighs more. Before long we will probably see Obsidian's The Outer Worlds at the TGA, and The Last of Us Part II from Naughty Dog, which is sticking to single-player storytelling. In the near term the single-player game is certainly not going to die.

Worth noting too: away from the big labels, two independent works beat a field of strong rivals. The puzzle game Return of the Obra Dinn took Best Art Direction over Red Dead Redemption 2, and the platformer Celeste made the Game of the Year shortlist and won Games for Impact. One came from the solo developer Lucas Pope, the other from the pair of Matt Thorson and Noel Berry. In mechanics, story, art and depth, neither falls short of a AAA production — and they may say more about what this industry is creatively capable of.

A girl named Madeline sets out to climb a mountain in Celeste, and that journey of anxiety, self-doubt and failure may hold something for developers and for the industry alike: for the first, perhaps, persistence; for the second, probably, making peace with the darker version of yourself.

Cover image from Red Dead Redemption 2 and Celeste