E3 2018 - Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

[QualityChimp]

I do think yearly GaaS might be a different experience.

Can I quickly ask what GaaS is, other than trumping, Gallium arsenide (chemical formula GaAs), Generally accepted auditing standards, Genome relative Abundance and Average Size, a commune in the Landes department in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in southwestern France or The German Association for American Studies, which are what Google suggested it stands for?

[Digfox]

Games as a Service. Slight variation on the Software as a Service term that has been doing the rounds for years now. You generally hear GaaS or Live Services to describe most of the western AAA releases now.

In general it means something that is online, continually supported, new content being released for etc. With an ongoing revenue model - whether it be subscription, micro-transaction or regular contents packs.

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

[Neon Ignition]

Games As A Service

Basically this years 'Lootbox', 'Microtransaction', 'Season Pass', 'DLC', 'Cloud Gaming, 'VR', 'Streaming', 'Discless Console', 'Battle Royale', 'Lens Flare', 'HDR', 'Horse Armour' etc

The current thing they're getting hooked on as the future big money earner until it embarrassingly leads to high profile failures that nudge them onto the next faddy concept as a means to avoid the obvious one - Just make your games decent and fairly frequent

[Digfox]

Lol. Yea, well again I would argue some of these releases are only GaaS products through their business models only. And in reality aren't services.

[Asura]

Games as a service is setting up a game to be the online equivalent of what Games Workshop has done since the 90s, i.e. trying to make it something you support long-term, with regular updates, and sold in many small parts rather than just selling one big game.

The problem is that for this to work, a publisher really has to commit to it. They can't just take an existing game and "chop it up", but that seems to be what some have done.

[Digfox]

Actually why did no-one not list list you [MENTION=345]Superman Falls[/MENTION] as the true winner of E3. You did a sterling job on all the updates of the games, release dates etc. Thank you. Although minus one for no updates on Bethesda at 4am

[MENTION=5941]Asura[/MENTION] actually the move towards ongoing revenue is also mirrored in other entertainment industries, sometimes for different reasons. i.e. Netflix, Spotify etc.

[Asura]

@Asura actually the move towards ongoing revenue is also mirrored in other entertainment industries, sometimes for different reasons. i.e. Netflix, Spotify etc.

Well yeah, it's a service-based economy. The reason I focused on Games Workshop is that it's property built around a form of gaming.

[Team Andromeda]

The real winner is 2019. That looks an insane year for games and couldn't have come at a worst time, when one is trying to save up for the PS5 and XBox II, that will no doubt ship in Nov 2020

[Digfox]

Well yeah, it's a service-based economy. The reason I focused on Games Workshop is that it's property built around a form of gaming.

True although it's a relatively new-ish revenue stream for things like music and entertainment at home. There are companies doing Gaas properly. A lot of MMO's, Warframe (Digital Extremes), Path of Exile (GGG), Elite Dangerous (Frontier) amongst others. But as you say there's a lot of Games as a Product will very limited support masquerading as services.

[Dogg Thang]

I find the disctinction a little more insidious. The big difference between games as a product and games as a service is that, with the latter, you don’t walk away with something you can own and the expectation is that you have to keep paying again and again. That’s basically it.

[Asura]

True although it's a relatively new-ish revenue stream for things like music and entertainment at home. There are companies doing Gaas properly. A lot of MMO's, Warframe (Digital Extremes), Path of Exile (GGG), Elite Dangerous (Frontier) amongst others. But as you say there's a lot of Games as a Product will very limited support masquerading as services.

The problem comes from publishers wanting the wrong thing.

What they want is long-term, month-to-month revenue.

But a good game-as-a-service comes out of a deep-seated desire to build one product for years, engaging with players and responding to what they want, blending that with your original product vision.

You have to want to do this, because it changes the nature of the product itself. You put in features that lend themselves to future expansion, that reward long-term play, and that people are happy to pay for in the way that people will pay for successive sequels to a movie, or successive seasons of a tv show.

EA seem to think you just take a progression model, change all the XP gain values to 0.1% of their "normal" ones and charge people to progress, thus making the game theoretically longer.

[MartyG]

I find the disctinction a little more insidious. The big difference between games as a product and games as a service is that, with the latter, you don’t walk away with something you can own and the expectation is that you have to keep paying again and again. That’s basically it.

And with EA and 2K's sports titles, they want that on an annual basis so they can reset the piggy bank and get people to start collecting that same stuff over and over again.

Annual games as a service :/

[Neon Ignition]

Actually why did no-one not list list you @Superman Falls as the true winner of E3. You did a sterling job on all the updates of the games, release dates etc. Thank you. Although minus one for no updates on Bethesda at 4am

Cheers!

It says everything that so many devs and publishers haven't seen how most of the successful examples weren't designed as GAAS, it's why they'll fail

[QualityChimp]

What was your favourite location of the presentations and how the auditorium was laid out?

I really liked the Bethesda one. There was a massive double-sided screen and some footage filled the whole thing up, which other presentations just mimicked like the Nioh 2 one that had the footage on the middle screen and just matching flames on the surrounding ones.



EA had a much better presenter than those previous YouTubers but still felt awkward with phrases like "I'm gonna toss it back to Jeff on the main stage."

It's also worth reminding ourselves how royally awkward E3 presentations can get at times...

[Asura]

What was your favourite location of the presentations and how the auditorium was laid out?

The best was almost certainly Bethesda, in terms of pure staging. The double-sided thing was clever, the audience seemed genuinely enthused, and they knew when to cut away and shift to a fullscreen view of what was onscreen for the stream (some of the conferences really screwed that up in parts). Their presentation was in general pretty slick. They also get bonus points for having some genuine humour, like about the Rage-2 announcement via WalMart.

Ubisoft's was elaborate, but at times felt very amateurish in a bad way. Still, they were second place, in that theirs was fun and quite "dense", without a lot of extraneous time for the links.

Microsoft's was probably third, in that it was a bit sterile. Nothing wrong with it but nothing terribly exciting either. I also didn't like how they had a 24-player setup onstage, but when they "used" it, the demos were super-choreographed, which seemed to defeat the purpose. I assume they used that setup for other stuff throughout the event. That being said, no issues.

Sony were by far the worst. They had an interesting idea, what with the themed auditoriums, but it just doesn't work. The wait in the middle was problematic, and their filler show was amateuris. It also seemed a bit odd to have a whole auditorium just for TLOU2. The show itself was fine, but just a bit rough around the edges.

Square-Enix cheaped out and took Nintendo's approach. That was a shame.

There were no major screw-ups this year though. Sony had one wrong camera angle during their presentation but that was as bad as it got. Usually someone ends their career.