Gaming Data and Update Treadmills

2020-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

Nintendo recently launched a year-in-review tool on their site that will show you your play statistics in 2019. Some may see this as a cool little feature, but this is exactly what I saw happening when I came home with my Switch on day one and realized it showed my play time over the network.

At the bottom of the page are buttons you can use to get fun little images for your stats. So, I guess badges to feel proud of being a commercial data faucet. Curiously missing from the page are links to download the raw data used to come up with the numbers, options to NOT track play statistics, or options to delete the data they've presented. Even after disabling my adblocking and tracking protection, the download links for the images didn't work.

Nintendo's game save analytics

Nintendo officials have confirmed their use of analytics, especially in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. During its first year, Nintendo released two DLC packs, the first of which enabled what's called "Hero's Path Mode". It allows you to press X on the map to have a complete history of your path through Hyrule, complete with warps and even deaths.

In order for the DLC to have this information to show on launch, it had to be gathered from the very beginning of the game. This means that the DLC was meant to be a base part of the game, players paid extra to receive this, and their data was used to create a heat map of Hyrule so Nintendo could attempt to measure the effectiveness of their game design. There's no way to receive a copy of this data from your Switch, or even via Nintendo. There's no option to turn this off, and with Cloud Saves enabled it ensures Nintendo gets a copy of your save.

On one hand, this can show some neat little numbers and give you a mild dopamine hit. Hero's Path absolutely solves the problem of knowing where you've been and where you haven't -- up to 200 hours or so of gameplay. But is it worth handing over the details of your playing, and the technical dependencies that need to be in place in order to carry such schemes out? Couldn't the game have been a little more explicit in what you've done so the player didn't need assistive technology to poorly solve a technically simple problem? It's technically impressive, sure, but the privacy implications are worrisome.

Why an update treadmill?

Perhaps I'm old-fashioned by modern standards, but I generally don't like these games that launch unfinished and go through many iterations before they become a high quality game. It's a hassle, waiting to get what you paid for.

As a player, it's another piece of software to babysit. If it has any online component, you'll have little choice but to play the latest version. If you haven't played in a while, you'll have to wait for it to download and install the update before you can play. Meanwhile, you pop in a GameBoy Advance cartridge and it boots the ROM immediately. The "time to gameplay" (TTG) is embarrassing on modern platforms.

When you finally do play, the game has probably changed or it has new bugs. Menus are different, strategies that worked before are less effective or removed altogether, there's usually brand new content to chew through, and so on. This design is deliberate.

Rent-seeking and Planned Obsolescence

Throughout the games industry is a collective dislike for the second-hand market. There's been continuous push in the industry to digital distribution and DRM, to snuff out collectors and other second-hand markets where they aren't getting a piece of the pie. Some platforms like Stadia want to eliminate the idea of game ownership entirely. However, in doing so the lasting value of their games diminishes. The game I played on launch day is different a year later.

Sometimes, games that are legitimately paid for will stop working. Disney failed to renew their SecuROM subscription, thereby retroactively bricking Tron: Evolution for PC. These are legitimate copies being disabled long after the transaction has been negotiated. This should be considered fraud.

The goal of industry in doing this is to follow the greater trend going on in markets -- that of rent-seeking. Instead of paying once for a game and bringing it home to play, you now have DLC, micro-transactions, and the Big Fish for them: online subscriptions. They want to put players on a proverbial money treadmill in order to continue playing their games, to get them to think of games as a service instead of a product.

Subscriptions are an effective way to bring in revenue because people tend to leave them on auto-pay or care too much about playing with their friends to let the subscription lapse. However, it devalues the product and turns entertainment into a monthly budgeting decision instead of an a la carte purchase. "Have we paid the monthly Xbox bill? Our Disney+ is due soon and the PSN bill's coming around too." Sure, you can argue that realistically any family dealing with so many bills would do auto-pay, but what happens when one of those companies with a direct line to your bank account takes too much? They and the bank or credit union will both drag their feet in getting that money back to you. Data breaches are a thing, too; what will someone else, attacking your bank or game "service" provider, gets access to your account? This is a marked increase in risk, just to play a game.

I don't want to add another bill to my budget in order to play games. I don't want my playing to be spied on so companies can treat art like science and optimize design for addiction. Video games are interactive art, and they deserve better than the surveillance technology being peddled as innovative game features. As I often say, business corrupts every endeavor it touches and robs it of its humanity and splendor. After gaming hit the mainstream with the rise of the Wii and mobile phones, it was only a matter of time before the market became a shithole. I've been talking about it for years and here it is.

Without ways to opt out of data mining, receive a copy of the data I generated (i.e. the fruit of my labor or activity; as the one who generated the data, I deserve to be the owner of it, as intellectual property), or delete the data that's being kept, I feel that I am treated like a resource to exploit instead of a customer who values their product and is rewarding them for a job well done. I do not want to participate in such a market. The games that are sold are not held to any release standards, the games change and morph as the game's design is democratized, and the update treadmills render physical games moot.

Where are the game makers who care about getting release right? Where are the game makers who hire game testers and focus groups instead of the shameless cash-grab that is Early Access? When a publisher can apply some release standards and show some understanding of the player experience, I might buy more again.

In the mean time, if I want a stable gaming experience I need to wait until a game stops receiving updates before I make a decision on it, or wait for the inevitable DeFiNiTiVe VeRsIoN. I've been burned too many times by updates that prevented me from playing at all, or with my partner, and I have too little time to waste on troubleshooting it. It sucks, but you do what you gotta.

Some Demographic Info from Yours Truly

Here are some facts that Nintendo might find actually relevant:

I am in my 30s, one of your biggest and most spendy audiences.

I grew up playing and more or less stuck with you, and have bought your games for younger family members. I am an influential person in my social circles when it comes to games, and my advice changes purchasing decisions.

I made more money in 2019 than any other year in my adult life.
I spent the least money on games in 2019 than I have since the last time I was unemployed.

Kinda proud of that, actually. :)

From your own stats, I only played 300 hours of games throughout the year. That's down from 2017 and 2018.

Excusing the obvious full-time employment, my play-time has indeed gone down, even compared to past times where I had FTE.

I didn't buy a single digital game full price, and I looked for physical first.

I waited until I received gift cards and then waited on a sale. Digital simply doesn't provide lasting value and I can't trust that it won't be remotely disabled later on. A binary on digital storage is not worth $60. It costs nearly nothing to distribute digitally, and prices should show that.

I was forced to buy some games digitally due to artificial scarcity in the physical market. With over 50 million Switches sold since launch, I'm sure you can negotiate with your cartridge manufacturer on wholesale pricing for publishers. Dark Souls Remastered would have been a good buy if Bandai-Namco hadn't cheaped out on cartridges. Mega Man X Collection 1 and 2 should've been on a single cartridge instead of one cartridge and a download. Same for Resident Evil: Revelations 1 and 2. Same for Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy and Spyro Re-ignited Trilogy. We're looking at over $200 in games by three different companies that I probably would have bought, but I didn't because of the insistence on devaluing my purchase and delivering a poor experience.

And I'm just one person. How many others felt the same way after word got out? How many other games fall into this same trap, when high-profile studios are given free passes on it? It sets an uncomfortable norm.

Deliver a high quality, as-the-developers-intended Day-1 experience on a physical medium that doesn't need patches to be complete and you will get my business. I don't ask for anything except some pride in your work and respect for my resources. I'm tired of babysitting games, phoning home, data aggregation, and so on.

Continual game patching doesn't tell me that you're working on the game. It tells me that you didn't get it right on release due to some shitty decision-making and I, the player, get to deal with the result of the developer-publisher dysfunctional relationship: a cartridge that is worthless and a game that isn't finished. I'm not going to reward that garbage, and you shouldn't, either.

I don't preorder any more since you're allowing publishers to release unfinished games at full price.

I cannot stand games that are not complete without some tag-along digital download for the rest of the game. This has happened since the WiiU days. Because of this, I cannot be sure that the pre-ordered game will be complete with only its cartridge. Digital games, by contrast, are not scarce at all and pre-purchasing increases bandwidth usage near launch, meaning that a pre-ordered digital game might not be usable and playable until after the initial wave of pre-orders and/or downloads. "Pre-loading" is a thing, but it's a band-aid that poses some ethical questions: should it be legal for a company to sell you a piece of software that is locked prior to a certain date? If they can lock it prior to a date, they can lock it after a date, too. Should it be legal for a company to be able to disable access to your legitimate purchases, years after purchase? Should the concept of an invalidated purchase without refund be allowed in society?

I do not think any of those should be legal. They reward behavior that disrespects and insults legitimate transactions, and it damages trust in the market, thereby risking a retread of the Crash of 1983.

Am I out of touch, or is the market and play experience really just worse? People that I've spoken with about the topic in person seem to agree that games used to be released in better shape and it was nicer to not need updates. Let me know what you think.

Z Space Blog - Analytics

Gaming Data and Update Treadmills

Nintendo's game save analytics

Why an update treadmill?

Rent-seeking and Planned Obsolescence

Some Demographic Info from Yours Truly