![]() ![]() Now imagine if shooters continued with the Zynga formula and offered optional purchases to long-term players, but rather than dealing with small items for chump change, the purchases were larger blocks of content that shooter fans are already acclimated to like campaigns and map packs. You can still find full 12 on 12 games of Battlefield 1943 every night closing on three years since it was released. The end result is that FPS junkies are an easy target for bringing in large groups to new games simultaneously, much in the same way a social game operates. And unlike social games which come under fire for weak mechanics, first person shooter mechanics are a proven pedigree. Shooter Clans on PC were some of the earliest online social networks in videogaming, preceded by the face-to-face social networks of LAN parties. It seems like such an obvious step to replicate this formula in the shooter market considering first person shooters had already demonstrated the proclivity of video games specfically for creating communities long before Facebook was born. Mechanics can always be tweaked later if the social connections take root first, and we’re communally a sucker for social connections. Social games are profitable because they operate on the basis of human proclivity for social connection before they rely upon mechanics, which makes rapid prototyping and iteration possible. When Facebook was born, Zynga was a twinkle in its eye. The social game genre was inevitable once the right online tools were popularized. The success of games in general, from a historical perspective, has always been predicated on the inherently gregarious nature of human beings. ![]() Multiplayer is a much better entry point than a campaign especially in a crowded FPS market, and we can look to social games for the rationale behind that position. If mechanics like these are what differentiate shooter games when we get right down to it, that’s an argument for questioning the antiquated notion that single-player is what draws in an audience and multiplayer is what keeps them around. ![]() Otherwise they’re all pretty much cut from the same cloth outside of visual aesthetics and world design, both of which rank much lower than mechanics on many gamers’ lists of what’s important. Brink had the AI Squad Commander and parkour movement, Bulletstorm had the whip/kick and Skill Point mechanics, Crysis 2 had its nanosuit, The Darkness II has occult powers and Syndicate has chip breaching. The first person shooter genre in particular gets frustrating because developers tend to iterate mechanically on only one or two things. Or perhaps publishers will simply learn that if they’re sitting on a shooter whose multiplayer mode is the stronger half of the package that dropping the price might not be a bad idea in order to entice more players into building a community that will give the game legs. The lesson I hope publishers learn, if standalone Killzone 3 multiplayer is successful, is that decoupling single-player shooter campaigns from multiplayer modes and selling them both separately a la carte could be a viable model. Blacklight Tango Down and more recently Gotham City Impostors have tried to capitalize on the promise of 1943, but the polish of a game like Killzone 3 ought to make a difference and allow Sony to replicate DICE’s success. DICE’s Battlefield 1943 was a game changer for downloadable titles as a whole, but also demonstrated the potential for multiplayer-only shooters on consoles. I’m shocked it took a publisher this long to offer only the multiplayer mode of a console triple-A shooter as a standalone product. On February 28 th, Killzone 3‘s multiplayer mode went free-to-play on Sony Entertainment Network. ![]()
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