4. Pokemon Go!
Niantic, 2016. Mobile. Augmented Reality, Location-based Game
In retrospect, the success of Pokemon Go! now seems obvious. Take a ubiquitous platform like the smart phone, licence the highest-grossing media franchise in the history of the planet (Pokemon), and release a game that is so novel in nature that it will generate massive amounts of free press and promotion. But perhaps to the developers of the game, US-based Niantic, success did not seem so assured.
Having already made a couple of location-based augmented reality games, they received avid attention from those that played their games. In the case of Ingress, a game that provides the framework for Pokemon Go!, they had also received negative attention for some of the unforseen consequences of combining real locations with fictional augmentation – including tragically the death of at least two players.
Ingress, however provided much needed user experience stats (telemetrics – sigh) and location trend information that made Pokemon Go! Successful. In the game you must traverse actual locations with your GPS-enabled smart phone to locate Pokemon and capture them, though a fairly simple flicking motion. You can play the mode in augmented reality (AR) mode where by using the forward facing camera on your smart phone you can see the Pokemon in the environment before you. Not developing this game first for Hideo Kojima, famous for Metal Gear Solid but also the maker of Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hands - -a game that made you play in the Sun, as well as Death Stranding, a game that used telemetrics as a influence on world design seems like one of the top ten lost opportunities of the 21st Century. But I’m not his agent, nor his business manger. Thank God.
Pokemon Go!, incredibly, was first conceived as an April Fool’s Joke from the President of Nintendo, Saturo Iwata, and went on to be one of the best selling games of all time, and continues to support millions of users across the globe giving it place on our Top 10.
- Phil Fogg
3. FIFA Ultimate Team - First Featured in FIFA 10
EA Canada, 2010. PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360. Sports Game.
There are two words to validate this game on this top ten list, let alone how high it is, and those words are not Tom Towers, they are Loot Box. The concept of buying something “blind” is not new — look no further than baseball cards sealed in foil wrapping, or gatcha machines in Japan. Putting up money first to get a guaranteed — albeit random — payoff has been a longstanding recreational pastime. There is a certain gambling quality to Loot Boxes, that no doubt provides a dopamine drop to the brain. Risking a known quantity for an unknown reward is stimulating and unlike stock trading, or other forms of gambling, Loot Boxes in video games have a low point of entry, and with digital payments there is no friction detected from giving it “just one more try”.
What is likely the most lucrative asset in EA’s current gaming lineup is their FIFA Ultimate Team, (which has the useful initialism of FUT, as in FUTball, which enables players to buy blind-packs of player cards which can be used to staff their team rosters. This feature was a logical progression of collectible sports cards (or Trading Cards) which have been sold in sealed packages, including cigarette packs, since the late 1800’s. Adding to this is the concept of opening an unknown gift, something that has kept Christmas and birthdays going for quite a while as a cultural phenomenon, not to mention the several highly successful YouTube channels devoted to opening presents and toys.
EA, observing how lucrative gambling can be for their bottom line, soon added the mode to all of their sport franchises, and then almost all of their offerings, including the staid RPG Dragon Age. Other publishers soon caught on and Loot Boxes could be found in everything from mobile games to Halo 6. For years the practice was only slightly marginalized, and obviously still very profitable for game publishers.
Predictably, it was EA itself that killed (or at least winged) the proverbial golden goose with their release of Star Wars Battlefields 2, which took the concept too far in it’s beta release and the reaction was so intense that they removed it abruptly before the game was released. Their mistake was causing a media distraction just before Disney was about to release Star Wars: The Last Jedi. No one messes with the House of Mouse. Governments and legislators around the world woke up to the concept and finally someone was thinking of the children, those poor impressionable minds exposed to gambling. FIFA Ultimate Team deserves this high place on our list for creating the latest monetisation scheme to gaming, a trend that began with Pong.
-Phil Fog
2. Fortnite
Epic Games, 2017. Most Platforms. Battle Royale
For those who avidly follow gaming news the development of Epic Games’ Fortnite had become an inside joke. It was a game that had been in development for several years, and had gone through many iterations and challenges -- including a change in ownership and a departure of key developers like Cliff Blesinsky. For a studio that had developed popular and well -regarded games like Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, as well as a game development engine that a majority of the industry had adopted, Fortnite seemed like the company’s first failure on an epic scale.
Then, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, a 100-player deathmatch with no re-spawning, became a phenomenon. Seeing the success of Battlegrounds, Epic re-focused their roughly six years of development into a similar “Battle Royale” mode in reportedly two weeks. Releasing the mode as free-to-play, while the more-established Battlegrounds was still asking full-price, Fortnite soon eclipsed it’s influence. Epic’s rapid deployment across almost all available platforms, while Battlegrounds was just in the starting stages of expanding beyond the personal computer.
Beyond removing barriers to entry like price and access, Fortnite also enjoyed its success due to the still fresh appeal of the Battle Royale, which was an evolution of many aspects of the online shooter genre Epic had so much success with almost twenty-years earlier with Unreal Tournament. Fortnite’s colourful and cartoony visuals, compared to realistic military shooters, are presumably less threatening to new players (and more importantly for younger players less threatening to their parents).
The immediate influence of the game was to spawn a countless number of games seeking to capture the same following of gamers, almost all of which have failed completely. Epic has been able to adopt the good creative components of those failed games, keeping Fortnite fresh for long-time players.
In many ways, Fortnite has followed the same path as World Of Warcraft. First they popularized and already existing format, they used an accessible style of art to draw in new kinds of players, their successful formula was copied repeatedly and unsuccessfully, and finally both games provide a stage for social interaction. It’s fairly predictable that Fortnite will follow another trait of World of Warcraft and still enjoy success for years to come.
- Phil Fogg