泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ What is the key factor of games success?

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌
[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]
 
 
What is the key factor of games success?
 
 
An epic science fiction film Interstellar has surpassed the 10-million-audience mark getting huge popularity since another Hollywood blockbuster Avatar recorded over 10 million viewers in 2009, except animation Frozen in late 2014.

The Christopher Nolan movie shows many fundamental of modern physics to explain the abstract concept of the study and audiences can see signs of the director's effort in it. I'd like to talk about not modern physics itself but chaos theory which has popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. In the chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

This is another story. Recently I've ever had a conversation about key factors of games success with the CEO of a gaming company. What is the most important factor for games success? It's hard to find a unique thing in recent successful games why they are continuing to grow in popularity and making good money compared to other globally existing popular games. Are those successes only caused by external factors?

In conclusion, successful games are definitely fun and their success can be from one of the internal factors of the games or balancing from the element. Of course, making a good concept and tuning game rules are hard work and balancing is not inevitably needed. But we have seen a lot of cases where a game has been succeeded or ruined depending on its balancing. Even the most popular game over the years can let their users leave due to unsuitable patch and slightly wrong balancing and a newly released game can hugely hit around the world in just a few months with its proper variation, which means that balance is one of the most important factors of the game.

It is much easier said than done. The initial value of game design can have a decisive effect on the entire game and its success like the butterfly effect mentioned above. If the male leading role of Interstellar didn't tell his daughter to interpret a message from the ghost, the history of the world wouldn't have been changed. Likewise, a minor detail in balancing can have a huge influence on game success. Of course, there is no perfect formula for games success. If there is a formula for the successful game, nobody wants to invest in game development because it's not much different from saving up by installments. I'd like to tell game developers, who are still looking for the defined success formula, that game development may seem more attractive thanks to its uncertainties.



※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.
   (http://www.khgames.co.kr)

    Translation by Kim Ki-hui


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