Posts tagged Games
Get an inside look at the music, sounds, and voice talent behind The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
The process of composing and directing sound, music and voice for videogames can be very demanding and sophisticated, specially when games are evolving towards a more cinematic experience where every sensation is important to delivering an optimal experience. Audition is no different.
The recent efforts for delivering the best sound possible in some games has been really amazing, of course not with the weight and talent as acclaimed movies but this is a different experience. In games you get to choose when you approach an area with a specific music, you get to choose to swing the axe and play the clashing sound of the blades, you get to choose to talk to the villagers and hear their stories. And all this sounds are crucial to the experience, a game with bad sound is mostly a bad experience, it feels clearly off. This is why we need good sound, and this is why it gets this complex and amazing.
Are Free to Play games really a good Business?
In the recent years there has been a lot of new F2P games in the Online Multiplayer scene. This games require a dev team and a whole process that obviously costs money, so how does the company that made that game get back it’s money along with a profit? Well, in the early years of F2P, a marketplace of items or a membership that gave you a clear advantage over other players were common, and even today they still exist. Clearly that sucks. Anyways, studies and experience show that F2P games can be good even if they don’t sell anything that makes you noticeably better than your non-paying opponents just because you payed some cash. Here are prime examples of how this can be achieved:
Team Fortress 2
The arcadish FPS was recently made Free to Play, and Valve got an enormous rise in Steam accounts when it happened. Just having a Steam account allows you to play this game with nothing to hold you back. Where is the money, then? In the Store. This store sells weapons (that you all get via random drops), hats (that you can get by transforming weapons and other hats into crafting materials) and an assortment of items that range from bottles of paint that change the color of hats to keys to opening crates that you get every now and then while you play.
So anyone would say “why buy when you can just get that hat or weapon eventually?”. Well, if you eventually become one of the many that play this game on an almost daily basis, you will find it hard not to buy at least something from the store. I speak from experience.
League of Legends
The DOTA clone has it’s merit. It is the first game that took the famous Warcraft 3 map and made it into a full game of it’s own. After this one many others followed trying to get some of the success that this specific game garnered. You can download and play this game for free. This game works by you choosing a “hero” character, siding with some pals and destroying the enemy’s nexus while preventing yours being owned. When you play you progressively get points that you can use to buy new heroes in a store. Cool, but where is the cash, then? Well, since the process of gathering this points is somewhat slow, you can speed it up by just buying the points for real cash, and therefore collecting all the heroes you want way faster than if you just wait to gather the points via playing. Also, you can buy alternate skins for every hero.
Let’s imagine that you played a character that was made free to play for this week and you liked it a LOT. What would you do if you had no points because you just got a character that you wanted before and now you’re with 120 points and need another 7000+ to get this one? Will you be able to resist not paying a little cash to speed up that process? Hard question to answer.
As you can see, this games exploit the “collector drive” that is hidden within most people. You can wait to catch em’ all via patient playing or just speed up that process by shoving off some cash. And you can see that there is people willing to do so, otherwise, this games wouldn’t be still up and going. Hell, Lord of the Rings online added a free to play subscription option and it’s revenue went up x3. That’s juicy. And businesses love juicy revenues.
