II2 said:
What baffles me is why they thought this game was FOR. Surely anyone unfamiliar or disinterested in the DKeeper franchise wouldn't want to spent increments of time and wads of money there, while anyone who WAS into the kooky Strategy / Management PC titles... well, their complaints echoed before the game even was available.
I suppose while I'm not surprised, it's puzzling and depressing all the same. The larger EA apparatus may be made of baby tears and blood money, but there must be enough smart creative people within the company to point out how things like this might be prone to failure, or is that 20 lashes at the lawn logo at this point?
Maybe it's worse than that. Maybe EA are right, the voices of sanity are wrong and the many heads of the hydra are making mad bank.
I've been putting some thought into that myself. I think the target audience is middle aged nerds with both lots of money and lots of nostalgia. The thing is that Dungeon Keeper isn't the first game like this. Another infamous one that got a lot of attention recently was "Star Trek: Trexels" which generated a lot of the same furor and raised the question of "who is this game for". It also garnered a lot of the same defenses in that it's locking of content behind huge timers that could only be overcome with real money (in Trexel's case it has to do with accumulating resources to unlock missions), and the same defense that people complaining about this were "playing it wrong" since the game was intended to be checked in on a couple of times a day like a virtual pet or whatever, rather than actually played seriously.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_AgjWkNGew
That right there pretty much covers it. I think it's also been mentioned on The Escapist a couple of times before (heck this is probably where I heard about it).
At any rate the bottom line is that this whole "popular nerd IP turned into a low-grade mobile game that requires scads of cash constantly pumped into it to be played anything like the game it's supposed to be, but defended as some kind of virtual pet/management sim hybrid" is not new, as I get the impression "Trexels" wasn't even the first. EA even seems to be kind of late in jumping into this.
If I had to guess the idea here is that the target audience are people who can afford to play these games, and do so in part simply because they can. There is a lot of elitism among nerds, and the idea is that the guy who say plays "Trexels" is better than you because he can do it and you can't. It would not be the first product of it's kind, yet it would be the first time we've seen this on mobile gaming platforms. Basically your nerd who raves about things like Dungeon Keeper, can feel more "elite" because he can pay a dollar a block or whatever to build a dungeon on his mobile phone, where other nerds who have not succeeded as well cannot do so, and can only QQ about it... sort of like little orphan boys looking sadly at toy stores and what kids with parents can have in a Charles Dickens novel.
To be honest I do not do a lot of mobile gaming, simply put all the ones I'm interested in trying aren't out for the Kindle, and a Smartphone/iPhone is something I have chosen to do without. However from what I have on the Kindle (which cannot play that bloody Ultima game I've been drooling over) it seems that these heavily microtransaction oriented "freemium" games seem to be on the high end of the spectrum for mobile games, which seems to be part of the lure and presumably why they would be a status symbol.
Mostly in thinking about it I've tried to put it into the context of things that have come before. While it was longer ago than most Escapist users have been following games (and probably long before they were born) we indeed DID see something vaguely like this before. Back when personal telecommunications was in it's infancy and people were being nerds with their 300 - 1200 baud modems (I remember when I was all excited to upgrade to 2400 baud), most online gaming took place on BBS systems with games like "Yankee Trader", "Land Of Devestation", "Arena", "Sinbaud", and of course the ever present and popular "Trade Wars" which was the spiritual predecessor to EVE. Most of these games could only be played by one person at a time but the program would save the moves of each player who had so many turns per day, so potentially dozens of people could be playing and competing with each other in the same game, especially on a BBS that might have more than one phone line hooked into it.... at least that is what most nerds did online for gaming and kicks (including me). Along with that you of course had premium services, which were much more advanced than BBS systems, and required their own special clients just to login to. AoL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Q-Link, PC-Link and others, and these sites all had their own special games that were far more advanced than anything BBSes could run, ranging from professional grade text MUDs, to things like the forgotten "Club Cairbe" which ran over Q-link and could quite possibly be considered the first actual graphical MMO. The thing is the services that ran these games didn't charge you monthy fees, or even by the hour (usually), they charged by the minute for premium time. This means someone could basically be paying like $1.00 per minute to run around Club Cairbe and chat with people while engaging in scavenger hunts, which was even more money back then than it is now. The thing is people actually DID this, and enough did it in order for there to be multiple services of this type all fighting with each other for a while. I was a kid at the time so all I could do is sit there and boggle at how cool some of these games were when I actually heard about them or ran into someone who spent the money to play them for a bit. Understanding how crazy this was, I did indeed ask why someone would pay $1 a minute to run around Club Cairbe, swap heads around from vending machines, and do gender reversals to themselves in "The Swedish Room" while "adventuring" with the so called "Adventurers guild" and maybe occasionally harassing someone with a Jump Wand the answer was pretty much "because I can, and not many other people can either". That was kind of the thing, if you were there you were sort of nerd elite, either someone who was a rich nerd, or so dedicated to things nerds like that you were literally willing to break yourself financially to be at the peak.
The point of my rambling is that the only thing that these games could possibly be, given their success, is some kind of crazy status symbol like that which EA and similar companies are more than willing to cater to, much like the old premium services did with a lot of their stuff. That's why you keep seeing it happening, despite the backlash from regular gamers, the gaming media, and everyone else, and why people are still buying it. The only way I could think to justify Dungeon Keeper in this form would be if the point of it is so two rich nerds who happen to be doctors or whatever could both show off their respective dungeons and "how nerdy they are" by how much money they spent and how much time they put into it doing so. The complaints of someone like Jim Sterling going "70 bloody pounds for 14000 Gems, and that's a "best value"?!?!?!?" is sort of the point, the people paying that do so specifically because someone like Jim Sterling can't afford to pay that just to show off how trivial such an expense is to his friends. Sort of like how if you hung out in Club Cairbe for a couple of hours, you just blew $120 (or whatever it was) you achieved nothing really except to show that you can do it, and are nerdy enough to do it there.
