#24: Big Dumb Game Theory

In which I use very cool mathematics to explain Concord's demise.

Two weeks after release, Firewalk Studios pulled Concord — a team shooter that spent eight labored years in development — from digital store shelves, and promised to refund those that had taken a chance on it. As it turns out, very few people had taken a chance on it: at least on Steam, it struggled to reach even a few hundred concurrent players.

If you don’t play a ton of games, this might seem bizarre and a little unprecedented. That’s because it is. As far as I know, it’s the new high water mark for failed game releases. And it might go down as the only distinction of Concord, a game sentenced to summary execution for the crime of being mid. It failed to stand out amongst the sea of games that already demand overwhelming attention.

Ironically, only after its death did all eyes turn to Concord. I worry that we’ll all gawk at this disasterpiece, and forget that it’s just the fieriest crash in the pile-up.

(Link)

Failures like Concord are only becoming more frequent. To understand why, I busted out some very cool mathematics. Please stick with me. It starts with what I call the Big Dumb Game.

Big Dumb Games are, very broadly, games that require heavy player investment. This can be a time investment, as with slow-progression games like RuneScape. It can also be a skill investment. Getting good at one MOBA, for example, gives you a set of transferable strategies for other games in the genre, but only if you’re willing to relearn all of the new game’s item trees and character skills — at which point, why bother? The deeper you dive into a Big Dumb Game, the harder it is to switch to another.

Big Dumb Games are often live service — games that tempt players with infinite Content for the low low price of infinite Money — but they don’t have to be. Still, as game production costs balloon to outrageous proportions, a successful live service game is the Holy Grail of any enterprising game studio. Thus, financial investment is the strongest lure of the Big Dumb Game. I didn’t play Concord, in large part because I would rather play Fortnite, where I’ve paid to play as First Form Cell in a jug band.

I leave this definition intentionally vague, because I think it’s important to scrutinize every game in terms of the player investment it demands. All games exist somewhere on the spectrum of Big Dumb Games.¹ But when every game wants me to link a proprietary account, put in my credit card, tune in for season updates, and complete daily challenges for exclusive cosmetics — that’s a future we should all be very suspicious of.

If the current games industry is defined by a single trend, it’s the increase of this kind of investment across the board. And I’m just one man. I have limited time and limited money. There are already too many good games.

I submit that to every gamer, on the event of their birth, there is granted one Big Dumb Game, parceled out on the basis of free time and disposable income. (Mine, regrettably, is Elden Ring.) If that’s too draconian, we can at least say that there’s some finite number of Big Dumb Games that a single player can effectively patronize. No game, company, or player is above this limit, because it’s set by factors “hours in the day” and “gross domestic product per capita,” not ooey-gooey ideals like review scores and gamefeel. Let’s call this limit n.

With that, I present a formal statement of Big Dumb Game Theory. It consists of two premises:

1. There exists a small, finite limit n on the number of Big Dumb Games a single player can support.

2. The number of Big Dumb Games that can exist at all is proportional to n.

Proportional how? I suggest the following model:

Wait where are you going oh god pls come back i beg you.

We will not be plugging any numbers into this model. Surely you could, as an exercise in economics — at which point you would probably find that some variables are weighted more than others, that there are factors not represented in the model, etc. — but what I’m proposing is more like social science. The goal is to describe how these factors relate to each other.

In natural language: the survival rate of Big Dumb Games increases when more players spend more money on more games, and decreases as games become more expensive to produce.

Stated that way, it seems pretty obvious! But I like my model because it outlines two very clear paths a game like Concord must navigate.

1. Increase BDG

The simplest path to survival is to increase the number of Big Dumb Games that exist by adding yours. Just join the party! But for the number of Big Dumb Games to increase, something on the righthand side of the equation must change as well. You could…

Increase n. By far the most difficult number to increase — but it has happened. HoYoverse snuck their Big Dumb Games onto mobile devices, effectively giving players more time in the day to play video games. This is the biggest innovation in Big Dumb Game Theory to date, and likely can’t be replicated outside of Hypnospace.

Increase total players. Most studios aren’t actively courting non-players to build their market base, since “guy who likes anime avatars” is the most lucrative demographic. But the Sims games, which subsist off the now-quaint DLC model, demonstrate how a Big Dumb Game can succeed by appealing to underserved genres.

Increase revenue per player. Seemingly, this is the direction Sony took with Concord, charging $40 in a marketplace where live service games are typically free. It’s easy to see why: the only way to say for certain that you’ll make any money at all is to charge at the door. It’s uncreative, but safe. Provided people show up. (For a game that succeeds at this strategy, look no further than Fortnite, which is just so goddamn good at dance choreography that it’s gotten me to spend way more than I’m comfortable admitting.)

Decrease cost. The forbidden option. Throwing money at a game seems to be the only tool in the toolbox for big studios who want their game to succeed. And as game production timelines become longer and more expensive, revenue has to increase doubly quickly. Still, nothing says indies can’t also be Big Dumb Games, and a game like Slay the Spire succeeds by being cheaply made (relatively) and good enough to attract thousands of hours of attention on its own merits.

But if you can’t add your Big Dumb Game to the pile, you can always…

2. Keep BDG constant

… by killing an existing Big Dumb Game and feeding on its player base. You could go about this in a million different ways, all of which rely on your game being better than other games. Not only that, but it has to be better in new and interesting ways: to play games at all is to acknowledge that there are dozens of generational masterpieces that I will just never have the time to break into. Did you know people are still playing Warframe??? Ergo, a middling game like Concord won’t make the cut.

Having outlined all this, I feel compelled to offer some kind of way forward for Big Dumb Games. But I don’t think this problem has a solution. I’m not even sure it’s a problem. The ceaseless accumulation of Big Dumb Games benefits major publishers, sure, but it doesn’t necessarily benefit players. Games need to be allowed to slip away when their time is past. We need more The Sopranos, not necessarily more HGTV.

None of this is meant to exult over the failure of Concord. I feel basically nothing for the game, other than a human-level empathy for the people whose eight years have been wasted on what was almost certainly a corporate directive. I do hope it gets to see the light of day again in some form, and when it does, I hope that it finds a unique place in Big Dumb Gaming by reflecting the individual artists who helped make it.

Or by selling me very good dance moves. That works too, I guess.

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Thanks for reading!

To those of you who recently joined Supernormal from Goldsberry, I’m absolutely mortified that my niche math post is the first you’re seeing lol. But we sort of go all over the place here, so stop in again next week! I’m sure I’ll have more to yap about.

DR

1. Plus, different players will interact with different games differently. I dabble in Valorant, but not as much as some of you flick shot freaks (complimentary).