Originally published November 2017

Welcome back to my three-part rambling series about the recent closure of Visceral Games. We've talked about Electronic Arts and their reputation for forming, absorbing, and shutting down studios. We've also talked about the legacy of Visceral Games and how their products were on the path to extinction, despite their quality. Today, I want to get to the real meat of the conversation. The closure of Visceral Games is more than a sad state of affairs for one studio. In the current market of video games, I see it as the end of an era, and the beginning of the end for certain types of games that I enjoy.

What the Future Holds

Studios form and close all the time in the games industry, certainly under EA's umbrella. So why then is it so significant that Visceral Games was shuttered? It actually has a lot to do with what EA's press release said as to why they closed down the studio. Most often, when a big publisher closes down a studio, the press release is brief, vague, and doesn't give much of a reason as to why other than "it simply wasn't meeting our financial expectations" yada yada yada. But here, they've provided more reason to speculate on why Visceral was closed and what's happening with their game. To me, it sounds like a mixture of the usual issues of a game's development that has taken too long with the fact that the "market's tastes" are changing.

I've already briefly touched on how the project was likely becoming a financial burden to EA, which is usually enough to cancel a game rather than close a studio. And since I started writing this piece, EA has purchased yet another studio, Respawn Entertainment, for a hefty sum of money—this may have been a significant motivator to cut Visceral as well, for all I know. Regardless of the true reasons for EA's execution, Visceral's last game was a big Star Wars-branded project with some big names involved in the development, so perhaps no one wanted to completely abandon it. Still, this game has been in the works for longer than most, and the longer development takes, the more expensive and damning it becomes, especially in the eyes of shareholders. From the sound of things, the game still was going to take a while to wrap up, too. Now, with all the red tape cut, EA may either push the project back further or just put out whatever Visceral got done within the next year or so to recoup some of the costs.

Whenever the game is released, it sounds like EA is still going to overall some significant portions of the project to match what they believe is what the market wants. The need to "pivot" a game's format to better suit the shifting market is likely the main catalyst for these events. The fact that this new Star Wars game wasn't looking enough like modern games is probably what led to EA seeing the costs of the project and inevitably shutting down Visceral. When I say modern, however, I don't mean graphically.

If you haven't been paying attention to the games industry for the past decade or so, you might be unaware of micro-transactions and the monsters they've created. After the smartphone market exploded and became a new platform for video games, the most financially successful games proved to be some of the most tedious and boring ones. Rather than simply charging you money to play the game, they would let you play it for free, but charge money for consumable items that would "improve" or speed up the experience of the game. That's a very reductive way to look at it, and it certainly varied from game to game, but regardless, many game publishers like EA saw this as an opportunity to integrate new systems into their games. Why charge you only $60 for a game when you can charge that and then work a system into the game itself to make more money after the fact?

Most of the big publishers have kept a close eye on these new methods of making money off their projects, but EA has always been very quick to try out new strategies. Some have failed miserably, while others have stuck. They were responsible for the online pass thing that came and went because people didn't want to shell out more money than they already did to play online. They were also one of the first publishers to jump on board with putting extra micro-transactions in games you've already purchased, like Dead Space 3. That, unfortunately, stuck and has slowly become normal in the modern market. Now, with how Overwatch has done so well with its not-quite-gambling loot box system in the game, and how Destiny 2 has flourished with similar systems in place, it's safe to say that they wanted this somewhere in the Visceral product.

Loot boxes are one of the latest monsters to come out of the micro-transaction epidemic. To explain it simply, you can be rewarded in the game, or pay, to get a digital box of goodies. What is contained within each box is "random." Most of the time, items that are contained in these loot boxes are cosmetic, but there is still a distinct rarity to certain items. Essentially, every time you open one, you spin a roulette wheel hoping to get a prize. Injustice 2 had loot boxes and it really screwed up the user interface in the process. I wasn't a huge fan of how it was implemented, but I will say it was one of the most benign systems I've seen. They give you loot boxes with such frequency that there's hardly a reason to feel ripped off when you don't get what you want because you didn't have to buy anything. However, it still feels a little sleazy, because the odds are not tipped in your favor of getting something you want.

Note the examples I've used so far. Big multiplayer titles. The Visceral game was a single-player, story-based experience. While other games, like Shadow of War, can certainly try to add an in-game marketplace to it, online multiplayer games have a tendency to do better with loot box systems. Part of this has to do with the game logic of showing off your stuff and trading items with other players, etc. I'd say "Who cares?" but a lot of people like the feeling of having better loot and gear in a game. Regardless of the reason why loot boxes work, it sounds like they weren't really being considered for the Visceral title.

In fact, Visceral's Star Wars game sounded old-fashioned, like it was an Uncharted game, or Zelda, or Horizon: Zero Dawn. Oh wait, those came out this year and didn't have loot boxes or microtransactions... Here's my point. The game probably still would have done well if it had come out this year. It's a Star Wars-branded game, after all. It just wouldn't have done as well as a Destiny or something else to that effect. And that's the problem. Now that companies have seen how much more they can get out of their audience by having these unfortunate systems in place, there's not much reason to keep making games without them. And if the market trends show that those systems work better in multiplayer games, there's no reason to suspect that publishers will pivot their titles in that direction too, as they've been doing.

Why does this matter to me? I like single-player experiences. I'm anti-social. I don't really want to play massive online games and interact with other people. I want my experiences with people online to be brief or occasionally competitive, like fighting games or Dark Souls. However, my preference does not match the format that the big publishers of the industry prefer to make, due to the lack of profitable monetization. Big companies like EA, Activision, and Sony are the ones I would expect to deliver those massive, graphically impressive spectacles of single-player games. Visceral was a developer known for making those types of games. Their closure stands as an example of how that particular type of game is not likely to be made the same way it used to be. I say this, of course, while still acknowledging how big companies like Bethesda are still making single-player experiences of quality, like Wolfenstein, Prey, Dishonored, and Evil Within, none of which have loot box systems or Destiny shaders. One question is: how long will companies like Bethesda continue? They already have an MMO. When will they start to shift away from the single-player experience?

Let us not also forget that Nintendo has had a good year with two of its biggest releases being (mostly) single-player experiences with Mario and Zelda. There were some indie projects that did well this year, as well, like Dream Daddy. Also, don't forget about Hellblade, a smaller project by Ninja Theory that looked as good as a game made by one of those big publishers but on a budget. None of those games had loot box systems or fake gambling algorithms to try to suck more money out of you.

So what does that say bout the industry? To me, it means it's time to look at the dark horses for the new experiences out there. With each year that goes by, I start to think, more and more, about how I may stop buying new games and just stick to the ones I have for entertainment. I don't like where the industry is going. I don't like these loot box systems and the constant pestering advertisements demanding more money from me after I've already purchased their product. I don't like this push to be constantly connected to everything. I just want to play a game, experience a story if there is one, and put it down. Now, more than ever, the smaller indie titles can give me that experience better than the big-name publishers can, because I'm not in the primary audience anymore.

The speed at which all this change has occurred, however, makes me wonder if it will be too long before more people get fed up and the audience shrinks so quickly that the industry implodes on itself. It's a pessimistic viewpoint, yet I can't help but feel like big companies are going to get hit hard by the oversaturation of certain types of games and their money-grabbing systems. But before they are truly destroyed by this blowback, more studios like Visceral will likely get the ax.

Thanks for reading!

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