Mass Effect 3 Editorials
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Using internet/web services to extend games is not a particularly new idea. Halo 2 on Xbox was an early pioneer of web stats, and Call of Duty Elite extends this to allowing player to customise their classes online. Such services are built to appeal to hardcore multiplayer gamers rather than the wider casual audience and often do not have a tangible profit and loss contribution. Rightly or wrongly, from a purely business perspective, this can make them difficult to justify.
Mass Effect 3 uses the same technology to make contextually interesting experiences that affect the outcome of the single player game in a genuinely meaningful way. These additional games are built to allow players to continue to interact with the game universe away from their console, and continue spending money if they are enjoying themselves.
As clever and interesting as this all is, the ultimate goal of developing the co-op mode and ancillary apps was to provide interesting experiences outside of the main campaign in order to extend the life and appeal of the game beyond its traditional audience to generate more revenue. It's going to be very difficult for anyone outside of EA to understand exactly how effective all this trailblazing work has been without seeing the project profit an loss, sales figures and DAU/MAU numbers across the various platforms and modes. The clearest indication of Mass Effect 3's success will be if any further EA games use the same model - I suspect they will.
The biggest lesson to take from Mass Effect 3 is that AAA games and consoles aren't going anywhere, but their position in players' lives is changing so the games we make need to change in response. Consoles now exist in players' lives as just another platform to play games on in an expanding ecosystem of internet-enabled devices. Free and social games are changing players' perception of value. To stay relevant, the traditional console game experience is going to have to spread itself across many devices and use multiple business models and monetisation methods, because players are not going to spend as much time in front of their console as they used to.
While Yannick LeJacq talks about why the ending of the game sparked a furor on Speakeasy, Wall Street Journal's online media magazine:
But there's a deeper story here than whether or not BioWare did the right thing. What the Mass Effect 3 furor shows more than anything is the growing tension between two distinct forces within gaming that is finally erupting. Choice, whether or not it's genuine, empowers people. And empower them is exactly what BioWare told its fans it would do.
The internet recently flexed its political muscles in the battle over the SOPA/PIPA legislation. And by most accounts, it won. Gamers are particularly adept at using these new tools to their advantage. Last November, fans of Uncharted successfully petitioned the game's developer to change the gunplay mechanics they didn't like. The crowd-sourcing platform Kickstarter, meanwhile, is giving communities of fans and followers power to directly shape the success of their favorite projects independently of the usual financial strife and internal politics of the game industry. Gamers, essentially, have taken the lesson of (player agency) to heart in more ways than the game industry probably wanted.
All of this is met with excited predictions that online movements will finally turn the AAA game space away from the geezerly, profoundly risk-averse behemoth many fear it has become. It's certainly going to do something. But it's hard to say what that will be.
(Game designers need stronger identities,) Kill Screen Founder Jamin Warren argued in a recent essay. These recent protests (if we can truly call them that) show that gamers do too. Rather than seeing the creation of art as a zero-sum game, a contest fought between these two ill-defined forces, the furor over Mass Effect needs to be understood like any form of popular culture. That is to say, it should be seen as a vibrant piece of that very culture. And for videogames, this is still very much a culture groping for its own boundaries.
What stopped Kushner from spilling the beans on NPR wasn't just some vindictive urge to tease his fans. He even admitted during the talk that he briefly had a fantasy of continuing to write episodic content for (Angels.) What he was ultimately saying was this: the play ended. He had a time when he thought it would be his only defining work. But he realized an important part of his evolution as an artist: he needed to move on. I can't say whether the new ending of Mass Effect 3 is good or bad, but I can guarantee that it will make someone very angry. Like Kushner, BioWare needs to move on. Even more so, its fans do.
