South Park's demonisation of F2P: let's blame Dungeon Keeper

hello and welcome to pocket gamer doctors weekly news digest this is for the week ending the 14th of november hi i'm john jordan so this week um it's kind of been for a pocket game it's been quite an event heavy week so um we tend to have these weeks where we have kind of clusters of people traveling around the world to different events um so one event didn't involve that much travelling but there was apps world europe which is um held in london um that we were at this week so part of that we had a big indie pitch so that's when we have loads of indie developers coming along pitching their games to developers um and equally that's just part of the absolute show so i was actually running the games track for the first day on the tuesday so i was comparing the uh the overall days of kind of talks and panel talks and snacks and stuff and something that's actually quite interesting to kind of step out from behind the website of being a journalist and tapping away and actually kind of like trying to meet people who have to kind of stand in front of them and kind of um

work out what your views are about about certain things and it was interesting for me so i always try to kind of um do a little presentation at least um and i was thinking of about um kind of what trends i was was kind of had seen happening this year and what i expected to have uh to see next year really and it was kind of funny because i'd also done similar thing apps world last year completed one of the days and i went back to look at my presentation from from last year and found actually a lot of what i'd not necessarily predicted to happen but kind of what i had hoped maybe would happen that hadn't really happened so i was interested in controllers with control has become a big uh a big part of mobile gaming clearly that hasn't happened at all in italy i kind of was thinking about kind of in-app purchases and but they become much more i'd assume that become much more sophisticated and the games would become kind of uh deeper experiences and more immersive and perhaps a bit more kind of emotional uh i don't really think that's happened and it's kind of interesting that during the kind of same week um or roughly the same period time or last week i guess we had the um the i guess is it now infamous i don't know but we had the um south park having its kind of skit on free to play games and freemium with the with the

imam being latin for not really not really free obviously um so actually it's not really been um that's not really been ed in the uk yet i think just the north americans have been able to see that one dolphins various kind of uh views have been shown on about what they've been saying and from what i can can see it's not really um uh it's kind of it's i mean since it's kind of the same old free to play versus paid kind of debate which has kind of gone on since free to play kind of kind of kind of came into into existence um not to say there aren't some criticisms of particularly free to play games or even the free to play game kind of philosophy and particularly how that impacts gameplay i mean i think that's for most people probably the the biggest kind of sticking point if the game's just about um kind of tapping or tapping and waiting for something to happen and then speeding that that time weight up with spending money is that really creating good games i mean personally i mean i guess i would count as a free to play game advocate the only games i play pretty much now are free to play games so in any games i play with any duration of free to play games and it's kind of funny um so one

of the speakers probably the keynote speaker at apps world um who i introduced was peter molyneux who um of course is kind of renowned for his uh kind of console games things like fable and has now been sticking his um kind of awe into the free-to-play kind of era with his game goddess um but then the first question he was asked was someone from the audience saying what do you think about uh dungeon keeper which is obviously the game he originally created um back back in the day as a as a paid game and and since he's been kind of um resurrected he's that's the right word by ea as a free-to-play game it's interesting where i think uh you know it seems to be that uh we got our mavens to to debate this kind of like south south park kind of view on free play games some of them make free play games some of them don't but it is interesting how a lot of the argument now revolves around um dungeon keeper a lot of people have played dungeons keeper like dunk keeper is now some sort of lightning rod to beat up the free-to-play um industry and it's kind of i find that funny because because um dungeon keeper is a game i've been playing now pretty much for six months i'm not not spending a lot of money it's been like five dollars but i pretty much play it every day i quite in some

obscure way really enjoyed building my kind of a crazy dungeon it's not quite finished yet but it's pretty strong it's quite hard to beat my dungeon um so i kind of find great joy when i come back to the game and find people who have failed to destroy my dungeon um and yeah it's so i think people would say his free to play games some of them are i mean bad the wrong word i mean was it was that game unbalanced when it first came out i think probably most people would agree that some of the time timers you had to wait for things were on the long side but equally if you didn't want to play the game you didn't have to play the game it wasn't an obligation you weren't it wasn't the law you had to play that game so it's kind of interesting where you're kind of having particularly i think games where people have potentially played one version of them and that's seen as the classic version which is definitely the case in dungeon keeper which had two versions um and the second version of actually done keeper two was not seen as as good as dungeon keeper one so there was kind of already some sort of tension within that franchise before um the free-to-play game came out um so um yeah so that's kind of some some interesting kind of debate and i kind of also my predictions kind of had suggested that i hope this whole kind of

free-to-play demonization stuff would have ended but it seems like it will never end there will always be some sort of uh kind of um advocates or enthusiasts that's the right word um just to say it's a terrible thing and you can't have any good free to play games um which again i i don't really know if that's i think that's that's not particularly involved in gamergate which is something that kind of bubbled up for us a little bit um this week um again but i think there was this kind of we were talking about it in the in the office and there was a it's got a feeling of obligation now and i think partly that's to do with um things particularly like twitch i think people are interacting very differently on twitter as they would do from other social um networks where you don't really know the people you're interacting with or it's not really an it's not really a real name no name identity driven um kind of uh interaction it's very much more kind of like a shouty uh whatever you kind of however you wanna deal with it's much more of a it's almost like a game within itself is it's not in the real world in the way that kind of interacting on facebook is um and um and yes and actually what someone was saying to one of our um finish our

insider writer was looking at how fit how kind of gamergate has kind of worked in finland um and i mean feeling obviously kind of interesting example so um like many of the nordic countries it's very um when it comes to kind of gender inequalities it's very uh neutral i don't know very balanced basically between between a male and female in terms of kind of law and how people can take potential paternity and maternity kind of rights and employment rights all that kind of stuff is is pretty equal um he was saying in general um people kind of wouldn't they wouldn't be this particularly the whole kind of misogynistic aspect of gamergate it hasn't really been um been seen particularly in the um at the kind of the mainstream level where perhaps it has been in in the us um but then there still has been some there was some one researcher who kind of had felt she'd been kind of a kind of trolled online as well so so while kind of i guess you say finland's not even immune from the kind of trauma of gamergate and then obviously nowhere is but um clearly the game gate thing is there are underlying kind of issues in terms of

the medium it's debated upon and the wider parts of the um kind of society in which in which it's being debated that kind of drive those kind of debates and particularly how i guess how gentle or how intellectual or how um judgmental those debates can be so what else is going on um another thing i was kind of uh debating about which kind of again came to the fore um so the two kind of things i was interested in um talking about at apps world one of which is um we have to talk about before us is the rise of german um kind of free to play mobile publishers so germans have always been pretty strong on free to play games so you had company particularly big point that were massive when it came to browser games browser pc games obviously gemini's always very been strong on pc games they took to browser games pretty quickly actually um and built up some pretty big solid companies so i guess kind of big point is the most famous one but also um game forge most of the ones are um anno games but some pretty big kind of user user bases just on free to play games and but the interesting thing was that pretty much all those three companies i've mentioned

kind of struggled pretty much to um to make the transition to mobile which you would have thought was fairly easy because they were doing free to play games potentially just a smaller screen obviously you know better than that and they know about that now because it's taken them kind of many years and it's interesting that the ceo of big point people have gone through a lot of trans and like transitional changes they kind of had this whole kind of expansion policy in the u.s that went horribly wrong for them they had um they even had the the founding brothers had a big falling out about whether to do mobile or not um one of them left and they've got a new ceo now and he was on one of the panels that i'm kellyed and he was um yeah very uh i mean kind of i mean humbles probably the right word but very kind of cautious about they're going for how they're going forward with mobile they are making mobile games now they have acquired a french studio to help them kind of make that transition um so i guess it'll be interesting to see how how they particularly kind of come up with it um particularly we've kind of seen there are some shining stars of the german mobile game scene at the moment i mean flare games company we've talked about before um they just announced last week they um had now they've um hired their 100th um kind of a

kind of a staff member and it's actually some pretty impressive people within the industry that they've been acquiring and hiring and appointing to to positions and they're still hiring and i guess good old uh good game studios are kind of well named um the german studio uh and they're the biggest studio now in germany a thousand staff they're still hiring um so it's kind of interesting the rise of the germans was kind of i think that's an interesting frame for the whole year and actually in our panel we had quite a lot of german so equally there was um uh yeah anyway so lots of lots of germans were there in england which you don't always see i'm talking about um games free to play games and the other kind of interesting one was i kind of had this um view on this kind of publish those publishers i guess we always had when the absolute app store came in we assumed we didn't need publishers anymore because we were all gonna just be go direct didn't the developers need publishers and the publishers kind of fought back in some ways and they've not really made a good stab of it i don't think but we've kind of had this rise of companies like um tilting point and scopely who kind of

they don't really want to be called publishers they call themselves maybe kind of service providers or publishing service providers they're maybe not even publishing the games in the sense that the games are being released under their names but they're working on a on a kind of a revenue share or a kind of co-development kind of basis with some of these developers and i kind of thought you know i kind of kept quite a tight eye on these kind of guys and spoken to these companies and they're full of very smart people who have very kind of interesting views on how on how the process should run but i kind of thought they were not necessarily dying off but they kind of hadn't had any obvious hits but um and then of course scope lead this week have announced they've done a 35 million funding round which takes their total to think about something like 44 million dollars in total so that's a big chunk of money obviously they haven't really had they've had so you know some hits but not like not like a supercell it's kind of tight bits but with 35 million that'd be interesting to see how those guys um kind of step it up in the next couple of months um so that's pretty much it this week i mean next week we talk about events um pocket gamer we're off again so we're going to be in finland for slush um so i'm sure there'll be some interesting news in fact we know there's going to be some interesting news and some new games are going to be announced there so um come

back next week and hear all about it