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"I do wonder whether the future of gaming will eventually move towards a model like DF, ADOM, WoW, DOTA 2, EVE etc, whereby instead of completely new games every year that generally just feature updated graphics, we will instead see a few games in each genre becoming more and more fleshed out over the course of years or even decades."

You're assuming people want more complex games, but (note my complete lack of sources) history has shown that people move towards less complex games over time. Dwarf Fortress will never go mainstream, because not everyone wants a complex game. A lot of people like games that they can wind down with, that don't need thinking for.

Just because the implementation of a game is complex, doesn't mean the gameplay has to be. Having a richer world to interact with means there's more stuff you can do, but not necessarily more stuff you have to do. In fact, it could be quite relaxing to just explore the world, and have conversations with interesting NPCs.

That takes time, effort, skill, and dedication to craft. You do get games like that... Witcher 3 springs to mind in fact. It's not something EA or Ubisoft can crank out twice a year and monetize to the tune of $120-$200 per unit.

No, but they might be able to crank out expansion packs twice a year, to add some more depth. Anyway, I'm not suggesting that everything will move to that type of game. Just that "complex simulation" doesn't have to map to "complicated to play".

I agree, but I think "complex simulation" is the opposite kind of product most AAA houses are designed to produce. Most games are far far from complex, to the point of adding on arbitrary mechanics to add a feel of complexity.

After all, complexity requires thought, balance, testing... and again it's just easier to crank out a turd that people will thank you for offering them.

Then again, you're assuming that "people" are a amorphous mass that only wants one thing. There's space for wide variety of genres and game types, complex ones to simple ones. It's a market in which more than billion people participate after all.

Right, but how many of those billion play DF? How many play CoD? How many play "Fee2PlayRobbery#8816732" on their phones?

Valve has made more money catering to traditional video game types than Fee2PlayRobbery#8816732 ever has or will.

This is the same Valve with the "hat" empire, and CS:GO gambling scandals, right?

Claiming those to be equivalent to default mobile f2p business strategies of "selling rounds of play like in arcade machines, but hiding it" is either highly ignorant of the gaming market at large, or malicious. Which do you want it to be?

I don't know, which was Valve in those cases? Besides, you're the one arbitrarily deciding that f2p = pay for rounds only.

Alright, thanks for making it clear that you're on the side of lack of knowledge. I'll give you a quick summary:

Whether you are aware of it or not ""Fee2PlayRobbery#8816732" on their phones" is for the vast majority of entries "pay for round". This occurs so overwhelmingly often that it's fair to ignore any other kinds of entries as lone outliers. And if you can't tell that it's "pay for round", then that is exactly what they want and an explicit design goal of hiding the price behind multiple layers of redundant currency and keeping the price invisible for the first few tens of hours and then slowly ratcheting it up over time.

Valve has done nothing that is even remotely similar to this.

Your argument amounts to, "Murder is stabbing, only stabbing. Valve shot people, never stabbed!"

I remain bemused, and unimpressed both by your argument, and your tone.

Valve is providing parts of the game that as far as i know are 100% and unequivocally optional and provide the user no benefit whatsoever.

How does this hurt people? How does it compare to the hurt caused by F2P strategies i described?

In the same way that a casino does. This is really not complicated.

Is your complaint that Valve is just as evil because they entice people to throw money at them to buy random loot that has a chance of being converted into a big pay day by way of being sold on to other players?

If so, then that would be a very strong, but quite accurate complaint that i actually agree with. It would be good if you stated it directly and clearly in the future instead of throwing it out as implications of something that "everyone knows".

It is not complicated once stated explicitly, but if you aren't fully aware of it already, it is not obvious in the least.

It's simple... I was responding to: "Valve has made more money catering to traditional video game types than Fee2PlayRobbery#8816732 ever has or will."

I disagreed with that statement, and still do... it's that simple. Valve has not been a force for "traditional video game types" as much as they've been a forerunner of F2P models. You're welcome to split hairs between "Abusive" and merely "Scummy"... I'm utterly disinterested in that.

There are two factors at play here. First, if you track an individual gamer over time, I think they generally will gradually prefer increasingly complex games. Not necessarily "complex" in the sense of difficulty, but in the sense of depth; as sibling suggests, deeper worlds with more things to explore, etc, even if that exploration is not thinking-intensive.

But at the same time, the market for games has expanded greatly due to in-browser games, smartphone games, etc. Those people are "introductory/casual gamers". Some of them will remain casual, some of them will stop gaming entirely, but I think of those who continue gaming, many of them will come to want something more.

So, in short, the existence of lots of really shallow games largely reflects an expanded market IMO rather than some inherent shallowness of humanity. I share your cynicism in the sense that there are some who will never move beyond FarmVille, and that is sad, but I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would support, the average individual gamer preferring less complex games over time.

I was thinking that OP is wrong and ignoring the existence of multiple types of gamers, but your analysis is much better thought-out and very insightful.

It can sometimes be difficult to remind that the games market is still strongly growing and that it'll be a generation or two more until it settles into more clear shape.

> but I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would support, the average individual gamer preferring less complex games over time.

Lack of time is a strong driver for some gamers opting towards simpler games, or at least games whose complexity does not translate into requiring additional time for mastery/understanding. In my circle of gaming friends, as our available time is under greater pressure we've purposely moved away from games that require significant investment of time to those that perhaps retain some complexity but reward a casual time investment.

Another factor I've seen that affects is the demand of contiguous blocks of time to game properly. Some games do not permit breaking up game sessions arbitrarily, so while one might have ample leisure time, there might be multiple interruptions in between which make playing certain games impossible or a burden.

> In my circle of gaming friends, as our available time is under greater pressure we've purposely moved away from games that require significant investment of time

The last game I seriously played was EVE. I remember I moved to that and stuck with it for a while because I made a decision that I would only play games where I enjoyed playing the game (as opposed to not enjoying play but what the designers rewarded me with as a result).

How do you play eve in a relaxing way without putting much time into learning and developing complex excel sheets?

Exactly my problem. I love complex games, but I have short batches of time, mostly without full energy, and undetermined amounts of breaks between them. A full fortress mode DF is too much for that. Even if the learning itself is considered fun, it's just not possible due to the long breaks between sessions.

And it's not true that it is impossible to deliver content in that way. Even stuff like language learning is possible to put into waiting-5-minutes-for-bus sessions on the mobile phone.

Last but not least, there are games that can deliver on that. CK2 is somewhat playable, droppable, and still fun. You also _can_ choose to put additional hours and energy in it to make it more complex and more fun. But simple is possible as well. E.g., only now, after maybe 4 years of owning the game, and about 116 hours logged in Steam, I _start_ to learn about the Papacy and using religion to my advantage. Until now it was just like a random event, something that happened on the side but I didn't have to bother with too much.

> I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would support, the average individual gamer preferring less complex games over time.

What mechanism? Maturity, expansion of interests and hobbies beyond video games, other responsibilities.

When I was a teenager, I was perfectly happy to spend many hours playing absurdly complex war strategy games and epic RPGs. Nowadays, if I'm actually going to play a video game, I better be able to pick it up and play and get some enjoyment out of it immediately without a lot of effort or thought. Dwarf Fortress looks neat and all, but I'd rather just play with my dog than spend any time on DF.

Yes, that's possible. I don't think the evidence supports it, though. I agree that likely on average, as people get older, they have less time per week to devote to gaming. Although it will be interesting to see how the first generation of gamers who retire (if they're able to...) will behave.

But the question of their tastes is separate. It is not necessarily true that less time available => preference for simpler games. You can, after all, just play a complex game over a longer time period if you have less time available.

One could get a rough idea about which hypothesis is true by making a sort of plot of game complexity vs average player age for each game. My impression is that the slope would be positive: complex games like EVE, X-series, DF, etc, do I think have very high average player ages.

Another data point is that if you look at the competitive types of games favored by people in their teens & early 20s, they are FPS games, whereas MOBAs are more popular w/ mid-late 20s people, and I think we can say MOBAs are more complex (not necessarily saying they require more or less skill, though).

I think if the data were examined it would support my thesis, but it is an open question and I was being a little hyperbolic with "I cannot imagine what mechanism..."

We already have this. Madden stile games continue using the same engine for a decade while putting out 'new' games. Just look at everything using the Unreal Engine etc.

Unreal Engine doesn't support your point. Street Fighter V and Kingdom Hearts III and Gears of War IV don't really have any similarities beyond their sequelriffic naming and that they all use Unreal Engine 4.

I mean look at the actual titles released under each version of unreal engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Unreal Engine 2 - Warfare Build 927

  Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 (2004)
  ... (14 titles across pc and consoles)
  Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist (2013)

Now, going from unreal engine 2 to 4 is the kind of jump that suggests your dumping most of the old code. However by sticking with version 2 that long they where clearly reusing their code between games.

Seems like there's two angles to that - games being treated more like sports, and that (I assume) continuing development on a profitable game carries less expense and risk than launching a new title.

I have to disagree pretty heartily. Looking at Steam numbers and information from Valve directly, there is no indication that people are suddenly or even slowly abandoning new game sales in preference to games with extended content lifecycles.

Perhaps what you are seeing is that with an increased number of gamers (this is supported by data), these types of games have an even bigger audience than before.

There has always been classes of gamers who prefer mastery of a small number of games versus preferring new experiences. Some people have played Counter Strike for fifteen years and WoW for almost as long. On the other hand there are gamers like me who prefer a constant stream of new experiences.

There are two possible ways to measure trends in gaming. One is to look at sales, the other is to look at where the hours are being spent.

So, I agree that sales of new games are extremely robust now, likely because Steam has made it easier than ever for indie devs to sell, gamers to buy, and studios to push patches. And all this has driven down cost. $50 for a new game used to be par for the course. Now I wouldn't even consider paying that unless I was certain the game would be good. So all this has driven up demand and sales.

And yet if you look at where the hours are going on Steam, it supports my thesis at least to some extent. There is a scale-free distribution of player-hours, and it appears to me that the high player-hour games appear to be extended-lifecycle games. A commenter pointed out in another HN thread earlier this week that 1B player-hours per week for DOTA 2 alone.

The thing is, money is what drives what content will be produced. So I think what you really want to look at is not the number of sales, or the number of hours, but the amount of money spent.

To some extent, yes. But DF and ADOM are direct counterexamples to this. They have been developed for decades certainly far beyond the point where the marginal value of a dev-hour has ceased to be worthwhile. Yet development continues.

On top of that, there are quite a lot of very detailed community mods for games that are developed for free. The thing about games that causes them to diverge from regular economics is that it only costs time and expertise to enhance them. And obviously there are lots of people quite willing to donate that.

Yes, but that's because the author's are interested in it directly. I don't think measuring how many hours people play these games necessarily directly affects the developers' motivation to keep making them.

Are you looking at total hours or per-player hours? Competitive games like DOTA, LoL, et-al tend to attract players who sink a lot of time into mastery.

Hours are also not a good metric for estimating the health and trends of the industry. I spend thousands of dollars a year for both AAA and indie games, and at most I game ~10 hours a week. The most time I've sunk into any single game this year is 80 hours and the average is closer to 10.

Mostly total hours, but both. Per-player hours also follow a scale-free distribution within any given game. You are right that some games encourage more time spent than others (I don't know about whether they "attract" a certain type of player). I mean, to even do half the quests in Skyrim would take many hundreds of hours. Another example of a noncompetitive game with high per-player and high total hours is KSP. Also RimWorld and Factorio to a lesser extent.

I still think it is a meaningful observation if we see an increasing "centralization" in total hours in a few games. I'm not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing. If we wanted to measure whether certain games attracted "obsessive" gamers, I guess we would want to look at hours/player/week or something, which I know nothing about.

> Hours are also not a good metric for estimating the health and trends of the industry.

That is quite true insofar as a player who spends an extra hour without paying extra is not contributing to the economics of the industry. If the gaming industry had their way, I'm sure they would prefer very low per-player-per-game hours, which would encourage more sales. You seem like an ideal customer from their perspective :)

But my primary focus is the trends in gamer behavior, not the industry per se, although they drive each other.

I would be very happy with this model, but, I would like to have more community authorship/control. Kind of like how forums are moderated. I always felt that monsters and dungeons were WoW's weak point. There just want enough new/complex after a certain point. I'd have loved to hit the kind of world where community contribution kept more of it fresh.

Paradox games. They do exactly that with the Europa Universalis game series and many others as well.

It would only work for a certain type of game. Something story heavy couldn't work for example.

I'm not sure that's true. In a big open world, each "expansion pack" that comes out could be a new storyline that lives in the same world.