-- GAMES THEATRE --

Week 1: Essay Topic

On our first week, we had to settle on a topic for an essay we had to write. This would be a comprehensive 1800 word document detailing an issue within the game's industry of our choosing. This essay will be posted here on a later week.For me, it was the increase of game's costs on release, specifically going from 60£ to 70£ for a game's base edition. The problem with this comes with the fact that the grand majority of these games have no justification for having their base cost be higher, especially when games of similar or higher quality and quantity of content are priced at 60£ or even lower than 60£.My essay would discuss the positives and negatives of this practice.

Week 2: Report on an Esport

For this task, i chose a game that is or was once present in the Esports, or Electronic Sports, scene and wrote a short one page report and summary of it's history and influence on Esports.I chose the Colectible Card Game Gwent: The Witcher Card Game. I chose it because I'm confident not many other student will talk about a game whose Esports presence and audience has long since died out.YOU CAN READ THE REPORT HERE

Week 3: livestream thing

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Week 4: Games Media Analysis

For this task I was able to simply pick any video I liked relating to the games industry. News, analysis, gameplay, trivia, etc.I chose to look at a video from a content creator I enjoy, Bricky, where he reviews the recently released Resident Evil 4 Remake by Capcom.(yes the thumbnail looks weird, I am very aware of this fact)

Video reviews on games are pretty common, especially nowadays. They serve to give people a creator's opinion on a game they're thinking of buying, or simply for entertainment and insight. Which reviewer anyone chooses to watch comes down to the reviewer's opinions on games and how they match your own, this way it's easy to know how much to trust a review of a game since you know you and the reviewer have similar tastes and opinions. Or you simply like their presentation, humour, insight, etc.Due to Youtube's copyright guidelines, creators have to be very careful with their content, especially reviewers showcasing a newly released or maybe even unreleased game.This review focuses heavily on entertainment, as hinted at on the thumbnail, while giving casual and very personal opinions on the game. It's not meant to be taken seriously or as a professional and objective analysis of the game's content but as a look at Bricky's experience with the game.Same as the reviewer, the community tends to have more casual gamers, as well as tabletop players since Bricky is one of the biggest Warhammer related content creators. His very subjective and relaxed style of review helps to not view his points and opinions as fact, leaving viewers a lot of room to play the games themselves and form their own opinions.The video starts off strong with a quick montage of both funny an cool highlights of Bricky's stream playing the game. This shows off the game, it's tone, gameplay, bits of story and Bricky's humor in just a few seconds to grab viewer's attention. From then on it has a very traditional structure, though it is presented chaotically. Gameplay, Narrative, Presentation, Content and other aspects of the game are talked about from HIS perspective, while addressing and comparing it's value to other similar games in the modern gaming landscape, giving viewers a push or a pull to buy or not buy the game.

Week 5: Warhammer: Vermintide 2's Monetization

Vermintide 2 is a grimdark and humorous Left4Dead style, hack n' slash, co-op, horde clearing good time of a game made by FatShark. It's only paywall is the initial purchase of the game and from then on can be enjoyed without spending a single extra penny.Optionally, if the player feels like they want to look more fashionable or wants to experience extra maps, on top of the large variety in the base game, they can choose to do so, but there's really no pressure to do so. The extra maps come in DLC that both unlock maps and add extra content like extra weapons and a couple of new modes to enjoy. While this can be seen as content locking, the asking price is low, certainly lower than what most games charge for even a single cosmetic item sometimes. It sells itself with a very good "price to content" ratio and the fact that even without DLC, FatShark consistently adds free content, this can motivate players to outright purchase content for both their own enjoyment and to support the developer.Character customization in Vermintide consists of Costumes, Accessories and Weapon Illusions (basically skins, not the CS:GO kind). The grand majority of these can be unlocked for free with Silver, the in-game currency the player can only obtain through playing and completing daily, weekly, event and achievement challenges. Silver is gained at a surprisingly fast pace, the most expensive accessories can be purchased after only one or two weeks of consistent play, while the cheaper ones can be purchased even faster. Paid cosmetic items are very fairly priced and regularly go on discount, some of them going as low as less than 2£ regularly. This is a very strong motivator for player's to engage in the game mechanics and sink time into the game.Most of the game's monetization is gained through great content, value and the goodwill of the community towards the company, as FatShark is a very positive and community driven company when it comes to how they interact with their players. All of this on top of an overall phenomenal game.I absolutely believe this is an exemplar way to maintain a game community engaged and dedicated to a game.

Week 6: Loot Box Simulation

Loot boxes are very common in multiplayer games nowadays. As part of Games Theatre, we looked a bit into the place loot boxes take in the gaming industry, discussed some controversies and did an exercise relating to them.We used Machinations.io, a web tool specializing in simulating many kinds of game systems, existing or original, including Loot Boxes. I decided to recreate the loot box system seen in Warhammer: Vermintide 2, i picked this example because it doesn't rely on real world currency to work, all loot is earned exclusively through gameplay and that got my attention.

Officially published item drop rates do not exist, so i used a mix of previously done research by fellow players to create this simulation. Said research can be found here.This research does show some flaws and unexpected outcomes, so I changed a very small number of the shown values and percentages to make the simulation resemble my own experiences with the game's system. These changes were exclusively to make lower value items a bit more common than higher value ones.This is what I came up with:

As mentioned above in the video, Vermintide 2 has multiple chest types, and which one the player gets depends on what difficulty they play at:

- Recruit Difficulty gives you Strongboxes, which can't reward items above the Rare rarity;- Veteran Difficulty gives you Coffers, which can't reward items above the Exotic rarity;- Champion Difficulty gives you Chests, which give a small chance at Veteran rarity items;- Legendary and Cataclysm Difficulty give you Vaults, which give the best chance at Exotic and Veteran rarity items.

One major flaw with this simulation is the fact that every loot box gives 3 items to the player, not just one, but i wasn't able to make that detail work with this tool.So in this simulation, when a vault results in a Veteran rarity item, it's technically inaccurate as it can easily give 2 items of lower qualities at the same time, but if only one item was given to the player, this would be mostly accurate.

Week 7 and 8: Game Trailer

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Week 9: Personal Branding

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