The Publishing Industry: An Economic Thought Experiment

Case Study 1: During Presidents Day Weekend, the software company Valve tried out an experiment. Valve, the company behind the successful Half-Life franchise, temporarily halved the price for Left 4 Dead, a cooperative first-person shooter title, from $49.99 to $24.99, over the course of a few days through its centralized Steam client. The results exceeded Valve’s wildest expectations. Sales rose 3,000 percent, and the revenue generated over the weekend dwarfed the game’s sales during its launch. By temporarily offering the game at a price point that was affordable to everybody, and making the game instantly downloadable, not only was Valve able to breathe life into a four month-old game, but they were able to get more people attracted to the product. Valve’s DRM policy is fairly straightforward. If you purchased a game, you can download the game on another computer, should you login as that user. (This was, incidentally, how I was able to redownload Half-Life 2 last year after a move, when I had accidentally deleted my Steam files and couldn’t find the original disc that I had purchased. One overnight download and I was back in action, happily fragging alien creatures.)

There are a number of important points here.

1. Unlike the Kindle or the eReader, there isn’t an expensive entry point here. You don’t have to pay $400 to get started on Steam. You can download the client for free on the hardware you already have and just pay for the games. The cost is minimal and affordable.

2. Unlike the Kindle, the DRM rights aren’t limited to the device or a singular computer (unlike last year’s Spore DRM controversy). If your hard drive goes kaput, then you can download the game again on another computer. Simply identify yourself through your Steam ID, and you can download the game on as many PCs as you want.

3. By offering a variable price point that considered what the general (and probably out-of-work) consumer wanted, Valve was able to generate more interest in the title than they anticipated.

Case Study 2: For seven years, the comic book industry has offered Free Comic Book Day. The idea is this. The general consumer goes into a store, gets a few free comic books, and is reminded why comics are great in the first place. The consumer divagates through a store and purchases more titles. And the whole thing gets considerable media attention.

The smart retailers, like Mike Sterling, spiff up their stores and offer additional in-store sales: 10% off graphic novels, four for the price of three on manga. (And in Sterling’s case, the graphic novel sales alone paid for the cost of the FCBD floppies.) You get the community involved by making celebratory cakes. You get to find out what titles get people excited. You get to form relationships with potential new customers. You move product. (For Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find owner Shelton Drum, FCBD is one of the top three sales days of the year.) You get to demonstrate to people why they need to keep going to a comic book store. And, like the Valve experiment, there’s no expensive entry point. Plus, the consumers will walk away from the store with something.

Case Study 3: Board game manufacturers are now considering something that worked very well during the Great Depression. If you offer an American family a reasonably priced form of entertainment that will last for a long time, they may very well set aside $20 to buy the product during lean times. (According to a Hasbro spokesman, board games and puzzle sales rose 2% in 2008.)

Case Study 4: Soft Skull had a surprisingly profitable year in 2008 because the efforts here were focused on (1) knowing the audience and (2) working hard to connect the audience as intimately and personally as possible. (In other words, if you treat your audience like some dopey general demographic, why on earth would they bother to buy your product?)

* * *

So what do we take away from all this? How did these successes emerge during a recession? In each case, the individual’s daily realities were respected. There probably isn’t a lot of money to go around in the household, but there was just enough cash for a micropayment. The individual wasn’t asked to invest money she didn’t have in some fancy-schmancy technological doodad before purchasing an affordable form of entertainment. The individual received an affordable long-term option that would keep her entertained or occupied for many hours. The individual did not have to deal with invasive DRM that suggested she was a criminal. The individual was listened to and treated with respect by the retailer. And the retailer never assumed that it would make a sale. But the retailer likewise had opportunities to listen to what the audience wanted and to find out what it may be doing wrong.

So if there is a modicum of money to be made in a limping economy, why aren’t today’s publishers and book retailers accounting for these realities?

Most people who are now out of work cannot afford a $30 hardcover, let alone a $400 Kindle. And yet corporate arrogance keeps these units at prices unreasonable to someone unemployed who needs a little entertainment during an economic downturn. And what is the result? Anger boils to the surface. Long-term relationships with potential customers suffer because the corporate overlords remain inflexible on price point.

So if you’re a publisher or a bookseller, consider this. If you know that people can afford a $10 hardcover (as opposed to a $30 hardcover), why in the hell aren’t you learning from these examples? Why aren’t you offering a Valve-like time window where people can walk into a bookstore and purchase a few $10 hardcovers over a weekend? And why aren’t you promoting the hell out of this? Why isn’t there a Free Book Day in which you get to introduce people to the joys of books and you get to know your customers? Why aren’t you forming intimate and personal connections with readers so that they’ll continue to buy your products? And why aren’t you considering that they really don’t have a hell of a lot of cash to throw around right now?

Are you willing to take a hit on the first spate of units, much as Valve did, if there’s the possibility that you may just hit a thundering mother lode after the initial curve? Or do you want to continue to turn off readers?

Can you truly afford to refer to the territory between the coasts as “flyover states” when there are good people there who want to enjoy books right now? If you’re an author or a publicist, can you afford to thumb your nose up at any media opportunity that isn’t the New York Times Book Review? Or are you not really all that interested in establishing relationships? If you’re a newspaper or a magazine, why aren’t you citing the blogs or providing helpful URLs to the blogs that break the stories or make the connections? Why aren’t you hiring bloggers to write the articles? Don’t you realize that online audiences might come your way if they know that a particular voice is attached? And here’s a bold concept to consider. If you took the top 10,000 bloggers on Technorati and paid each of them $40,000 a year — a livable wage that would permit them all to carry out their work, which could also include serious investigations — that’s a cost of $400 million. For $400 million a year, someone could get the top 10,000 bloggers reporting for newspapers and seamlessly integrate their content into the great whole. And the newspapers could offer copy editing and journalistic resources so that their voices might improve. (Of course, you’d have to accept their unadulterated voices. For these voices, differing from the mainstream, are what caused these bloggers to rise up in the first place.)

If today’s publishers, booksellers, and media outlets hope to answer these questions and produce results similar to the above four case studies, then bolder ideas and experiments need to be attempted and shared with transparency in mind. It is not economically feasible to sit back and wait for the magic results of the stimulus package to trickle around. The current Dow Jones declivity has demonstrated the follies of lame ducks. The previous ways of doing things may very well be at an end: possibly with some permanence. But we won’t know this for sure until those in positions of power attempt a little innovation and modify the current formulas that aren’t working. Change, it seems, was something we hoped somebody else would do. But it’s now become quite apparent that today’s real innovators are those with the courage to take hold of their own destinies.

[UPDATE: Since this post, like many of these lengthy ones, originated from thoughts and musings I expressed on Twitter, here are a few related thoughts from others on the subject. @jimmydare observes that Orbit is experimenting with the $1 ebook. @AnnKingman pointed out that Record Store Day was a huge success for her local record store. (More details on what goes on at Record Store Day here.) @thebookmaven suggests that a Free Book Day might be one way that independent bookstores can compete with ebooks, and also suggests a $5 Book of Your Choice Day.]

Bike Hero

99 Bottles of Koopa on the Floor, 99 Bottles of Koopa

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Even Video Games Need a Good Third Act to Work

Rush Knows Changes Aren’t Permanent, But Change Is

Sandkings Indeed

A free trial creature creator from Spore has been released. The creatures here are too cutesy to be considered for practical battle concerns. There is a paucity of dangerous teeth and minatory claws. Is a ruthless and self-serving alien creature who will have some life form for lunch too much to ask from Maxis? Is there no possibility here of a dangerous ecosystem?

I suppose we’ll have to wait for the final game in September before these evil possibilities — a la George R. R. Martin’s “Sandkings” — make their presence known. (That’s the thing about games from Maxis. They tend to turn very nice people into savage sadists.) Nevertheless, this free trial is dangerous. I have created a creature with about twelve limbs and a very large head. I have tried to sully its Disneyification, but to no avail. I am now leaving the house so that I can actually get some work done. But if you’re interested in this, i09 has nabbed Austin Grossman to reveal his thoughts on all this.

The Video Game as Art

In 2005, film critic Roger Ebert ruffled a few feathers when he suggested that because video games require player choices, games are therefore an inferior medium:

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

I can certainly agree with Ebert that video games are, for the most part, showcases for the latest gaming engines, primarily designed so that the individual will drop hundreds of dollars for a next-generation console system or a needlessly expensive video card that will be outdated in a few years (only to be replaced by yet another). We are now in the nickelodeon days, although, as the Wii demonstrates, the game controllers are getting more interesting. But this multi-billion dollar industry is less concerned with the human experience than it should be. It has come close with the Civilization games and the Sims offerings, and may come even closer with Will Wright’s much delayed Spore, an ambitious god game that permits the player to develop a cell and then control the natural development of this cell into a species, and then further manage the species as it plunges into space exploration. I’ve lost many hours feeling an ignoble cathartic thrill when fragging a junior-high schooler who, like me, should probably be reading a book. But I can justify my shameful vicarious pleasure by knowing that this is a medium that has yet to produce a Battleship Potemkin or a Birth of a Nation.

To suggest, however, that the video game will never find the same gravitas as cinema is to fall prey to same prejudicial thinking with which intellectuals once castigated cinema in the early 20th century. Let’s not forget that it took the motion picture around thirty years of technological developments before it was considered more than a gaudy amusement. And we have only just passed the 30th anniversary of the Atari 2600.

This New York Times article from September 7, 1913 suggests that the then primitive motion picture was, like the contemporary video game, very much about delivering spectacle to a mass audience. George Kleine, one of the key people who established the film industry in the United states and who had just made a cinematic adaptation of Quo Vadis? with a cast of 3,000 people (then an unprecedented number), is quoted in an eerily comparable manner about the future of the medium”

“I have plans for the future which make everything I have done so far seem to be mere child’s play. The educational end has not begun. Motion pictures will not supplant books in the public schools, according to my opinion, but they will revolutionize our educational system. Instead of being bored, the child will enjoy learning by object lessons conveyed by the use of moving pictures.”

Replace “motion pictures” with “video games” and you essentially have what’s reflected in this 2002 BBC News article, in which a study reveals that games are not a substitute for books, but a way to help children learn. And if, like me, you grew up playing Fraction Fever (the ROM is here, if you’re an emulator geek) or any of the other Spinnaker titles, perhaps there is some credence to these theories.

There is also this commentary from the 1913 article:

There are many pictures being thrown upon the screen every day which, although not really harmful, possess no merit. Some are positively ridiculous, and portray scenes both unnatural and unreal. It is not to be expected, however, that with the demand for films exceeding the supply every production should be perfect.

It seems to me that Ebert’s Grumpy Old Man routine was published in newspapers a century before. The medium is the only thing that’s different.

Jason Roher’s surprisingly touching game, Passage, freely available for download and released a few months ago, quite easily destroys Ebert’s thesis that the video game is incapable of poetry. Roher achieves a unique poetry both in limiting the player’s perspective to a 100×16 window and through the deceptively simple manner that he has designed this game for the player. Play the game once and you will follow a strapping young man from left to right. He finds a woman along the way. A pixelated heart soon follows. As the man advances further along this horizontal tableau, he (and his sweetheart) begins to age. He goes bald. As he continues to age, his position on the axis shifts further to the right. Near the end of his life, he is hobbling. Then a tombstone crops up. The End.

Or is it?

The game isn’t limited to left-to-right movement. Play the game again, press the down arrow. and you will find yourself exploring a maze below the top, collecting many stars and stumbling for a way out. But with this simple design, Roher has done something very interesting. If you choose to fall in love with your sweetheart, the two of you can only explore certain areas. Because with your partner in tow, you collectively take up a wider space and can only fit into specific territory. If you choose to go through this life solo, then you’ll be able to collect many of the stars denied you and your sweetheart, but you may get lost in the maze and be unable to find your way back to where your sweetheart waits.

If Passage is not quite the video game’s answer to The Waste Land, Roher’s poetic game demonstrates that independent developers can in fact use the form in favor of human experience. Roher’s lo-fi approach is a welcome response to high-end graphical tentpole operations. I found myself thinking of all the choices I had made over the course of my life and wondered how I would have turned up if I had made slightly different decisions. Contra Ebert, I did indeed find the experience to make me more curious and empathetic about the human condition. (And this would appear to have been Mr. Roher’s objective.) This was something that no amount of fragging had inspired.

If all this sounds fishy, well, the game simply has to be played. Like any work of art, it is something better experienced than talked about. And it requires that superannuated naysayers keep open minds.

A Diversion for Writers

If, like me, you’ve written somewhere in the area of 5,000 words to meet various deadlines over the past three days, I highly recommend Alien Arena as a way to stay sane. It’s an open-source first-person shooter that offers pretty solid texture and lightning, a humbling AI (I am still suffering the taunting computer voice repeatedly telling me in hard mode, “The bots have won. You will have to replay the level again.” Or maybe my fragging skills have atrophied.), and it runs quite smoothly on a mid-grade processor.

One thing’s for sure: you can never go wrong with robots and lasers as a diversion.

Half-Life in 60 Seconds

The Case Against World of Warcraft

ADD Test?

This is one sadistic Flash game.

Will Wright: A Danger to Creativity

1Up: “Spore is finished. That’s the first thing I learn as I head in to my play session at the Leipzig Games Convention. Obviously, the game isn’t finished finished (as in ready to ship), but in terms of its content offering, it’s all there — the game is complete. At this point, EA is spending the next several months paying attention to feedback from players to tweak and polish Spore for its release next Spring. But otherwise, it’s done.”

This is, of course, terrible news for those of us who do our damnedest to avoid such fascinating video games that threaten to do away with what little spare time we have. I’d just like to say that Will Wright is a mean man, an intellectual heroin dealer, for doing this and that I will do my best to avoid purchasing this game. Because should I get sucked into yet another Maxis trap, I will likely get nothing in the way of important work done. I’ve observed what went down with Iain Banks and Alex Garland, and I know damn well that it could happen to me if I’m not careful. I am weak and susceptible. If only I had been born ten years earlier. Should I purchase this game, I will become a sad thirtysomething man staring forever into my LCD, permanently tinkering with a horrendously fascinating experiment. Because Will Wright knows how to make games that are the cerebral version of a hard drug. That guy ripping out his video card from his motherboard in a few months to avoid getting hooked on the inevitable? That’s me. And many others. I will do everything in my power to avoid getting sucked in, but I fear the worst. Perhaps a support group is in order.

If You Need to Waste Time…

50 Really Good Indie Games.

A Stanley Kubrick Game

Worst Video Game Ever?

Live Action GoldenEye 007

A More Interesting Million Pixel Project

If By “Save Marriages,” You Mean “Avoid Speaking to Spouse for Long Periods of Time,” Sure!

Arianna Huffington: “Why not experiment? I think Second Life will save marriages.”

Final Academic Fantasy

A Case Against the Wii, A Case FOR Lazy Gamers

Slate: “After a few whacks, I realized that the Wii isn’t asking me to simulate a realistic swing. There’s no reason to assume a batter’s stance, and no reason to bother swinging the controller fast or following through—flicking the controller like a pingpong paddle works just as well. This is the Wii’s biggest letdown—you don’t need to stand up, leap around, or otherwise leave the warm embrace of your couch. The console senses motion, but compared with the full-body workout of a game like Dance Dance Revolution, you’re not getting any kind of exercise at all.”

The Real-Life Leeroy Jenkins

First Jerry Lewis, Now Donkey Kong

New York Times: “France is proud of its contribution to culture in such forms as existentialism, Impressionism and auteur films. Now the French culture minister wants to add Donkey Kong to his country’s pantheon of high art.”

But Will Inept Stick Figures Get the Less Artistically Inclined Through a Side Quest?

Wired: “It works like this: In Okami, you play as a wolf that is the incarnation of an ancient Japanese god — and that has the power to literally draw things into existence. At any point in the game, you can hit a button and the scene freezes, transforming into a piece of parchment. You wield a traditional Japanese brush and ink objects on the parchment. When you unfreeze the scene, presto: Whatever you’ve painted transforms into the real, solid thing.”

Excerpts from Adam Pasick’s Notebook

BBC: “Reuters has opened a virtual news agency in the Second Life online world. The bureau will be staffed by Reuters media correspondent Adam Pasick who will report on the lives and business dealings of Second Life’s residents.”

Excerpts from Adam Pasick’s Notebook

18 October 2006, 3:30 PM

Arrived today, chatting with avatars about getting set up in Second Life. First avatar knew nothing about Iraq situation, but told me he was “really bored!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and that his parents had imposed a curfew. Second avatar, named “gonowhere43,” advised first avatar of intricate method to sneak wi-fi access from neighbor and thus play Second Life on laptop after bedtime. gonowhere43, who is a 34 year old network administrator, steered me to suitable patch of land and conspiracy theory site in answer to my questions.

19 October 2006, 8:40 AM

Well, my house is now set up. gonowhere43 offered to sublet some space, knows a few loopholes with the insurance people. Nice of him. Still worried about first avatar, whose name was a series of unusual ASCII characters I can’t remember. Hope he’s not in trouble with parents.

20 October 2006, 4:42 PM

Went to the Marketplace to see if I could get a sense of the economy. Pitched incessantly to buy many Creations. One avatar followed me out of boredom, asked me to be his friend. Told him a joke. He responded, “LOL,” and then left me alone. Still trying to work out exact exchange rate for Linden Dollars. Seems to be major underworld here. Some people are online as much as thirty hours at a time. What the hell did I sign up for? What does Reuters expect out of me?

21 October 2006, 2:42 AM

Logged in SL and found new home vandalized. Words in living room read “GET OUT NEWBIE!” Crude picture of ass on couch. Asked gonowhere43 for advice. He tells me this is par for the course, the work of a clan fond of victimizing new users. Have sent email to Linden Lab, but have received no response.

23 October 2006, 1:15 PM

Looks like Carrot Top will be performing near the Marketplace in a desperate effort to claim geek credibility. Carrot Top has been offered $10,000 in virtual property, insists on Vegas treatment. Have asked gonowhere43 about this, advises me that journalists don’t stand a chance.

26 October 2006, 7:42 AM

Now finding “first life” to have problems. Girlfriend tells me I spend too much time in SL, doesn’t understand. Was about to sit down and talk with her, but great deal on Edwardian mansion came up that I had to nab. Girlfriend left, won’t return phone calls. But life is pretty good in SL. Think I can live here forever. Thank you, Reuters!

The Most Addictive Game in History?

Steven Johnson has a lengthy profile of Will Wright’s Spore.

Timewasting

VNES: An NES emulator accessible through your browser. (You have been warned. Even worse, they have the Adventure Island games.)

Majority of Online Gamers Female

CNet: “Of the 117 million active gamers in the U.S., 56 percent play games online. Sixty-four percent of those online gamers are female, according to results of the survey, released by Nielsen Entertainment on Thursday.”

How Not to Be Fragged

“How Not to Be Seen” as Halo machinima.

Iain Banks: Posterboy Slacker?

Iain Banks missed a deadline and it was all because of Sid Meier: “It’s all because I became a serial addict of the computer game ‘Civilisation’ [sic]. I played it for three months and then realised I hadn’t done any work. In the end, I had to delete all the saved files and smash the CD. It is very unprofessional of me. I had to ask for an extension for the first time, which made me feel just like I was a student again.”

Hopefully, someone who cares will keep Will Wright’s games out of his hands. I had to smash my Sims CDs about three years ago to get things done.

edrants