The auto business has been on my mind lately as I recently purchased a late model used car. As I buy a car once every ten years, I do a lot of research and prep work. Meanwhile, the news has been inundated with the latest gyration in GM and Chrysler’s decades long death throes, this time ensnaring US taxpayers. At first glance there doesn’t seem anything similar about making games and making cars; a look under the hood tells a different story.
Detroit
One way to categorize personalities is to use the product life-cycle. There are individuals who have a preference for creation, those who prefer to maintain, and those who prefer to repair. US Secretary of Defense Roberts Gates recently articulated this approach when he said that President Obama didn’t keep him on from the Bush Administration to maintain the status quo but to continue fixing what Rumsfeld had broken. As he bluntly stated, “I don’t do maintenance.”
For 50 years the American auto industry has been based on a league between people who like to create (design autos) and people who like to repair (auto mechanics). This agreement between creators and repairers has a name in economics; it’s called planned obsolescence. If a car wears out and begins breaking down after three years/60000 miles (whichever comes first) it effectively amounts to a periodic redistribution of wealth from those who buy a car to those who produce it or repair it.
Since the fundamental purpose of a car is to get one from point A to point B, worn out or broken cars become nothing but expensive lawn ornaments. For most of the 20th century the average consumer in America’s interstate highway culture had the option to either pay a mechanic to fix the car or buy a new one once the warranty ran out. This was a great-set up if you had to have the latest hot wheel or if you enjoyed tinkering with the tappets, but it stunk for everyone else.
Tokyo
Japan killed Detroit by breaking up this conspiracy between creators and repairers. Producing reliable cars at competitive prices that lasted for 300,000 miles did exactly what Tokyo hoped: maintainers fell deeply in love. Truth is most Americans prefer never to see a mechanic and have no interest in buying a car every three years. They want to put oil and petrol in their car and the drive down the road safely. As soon as they were given a choice, these sad pandas abandoned American made cars and never looked back.
Japanese cars were derided as boring econoboxes by Detroit. Yet those cars sold and sold profitably. For both the 1980s and the 1990s Japanese cars accounted for every single car on the top ten lists of those decades most reliable vehicles. Apparently hassle free is something people want to buy. It’s a testament to the reputation that Japan has built that a Toyota or a Honda compact car sells on average for $2000 more per car than the exact same American model with the exact same features. In fact, there is this hilarious story from Russia where an eastern province is threatening to secede from the Federation because Putin banned the import of their beloved Japanese cars.
Irvine
The MMO world inherited the business model of planned obsolescence from the single-player game. A publisher would create a game and then post a few patches to fix it on a bulletin board. As a technological fact there was no practical way to maintain a persistent game. Occasionally a publisher attempted to maintain a particular game franchise (e.g, Baldur’s Gate) but there was little that was persistent from game to game. This model of produce and patch is analogous to the effort between creators and repairers that ran the American auto industry for 50 years. The only significant difference is that with games the creators and repairers are one and the same group.
The explosion of the internet and the development of the MMO changed gaming in ways that have yet to be fully grasped. For the first time it became possible to create a persistent world. The key attribute of a persistent world is that it is a world that doesn’t needed to be expanded or fixed, only maintained. Most of the server down time in Warcraft comes not from expansions or from hotfixes but from Tuesday’s regularly scheduled maintenance. The same way that a Honda Fit will spend more time out of commission getting its oil changed and its tires rotated than it will because its broken down by the side of the road.
The sad part is that while Blizzard understands the technical need for maintenance it still doesn’t understand that maintainers are a market it can sell too. It’s still caught up in maintaining the Warcraft franchise instead of the Warcraft world. Biobreak hits the nail on the head when it says, “Blizzard has all but come out and told everyone that the 1-60 content — classic or “Vanilla” WoW — is an obsolete abomination to them, and they simply don’t want you to experience it…Now, as an ex-player, why should I care? It’s because nobody likes it when a cherished memory is cheapened, especially by the creator.” (emphasis added). In other words, Blizzard’s planned obsolescence is running straight into Biobreak’s desire to maintain his experiences and he don’t like it. Shocking. Now he knows how GM owners felt in 1980.
The Next Detroit?
Needless to say, the arguments against the maintainers are the same as they always were. Green Armadillo writes, “In a very real sense, constant progression for everyone - not merely players who got into the raiding circuit years ago - is the price we pay for the ability to experience the game worlds we get to play with.” In other words, if Detroit doesn’t make its cars obsolete every three years how on earth is it going to fund the creation of new cars that are necessary to develop new features and new styles. That logic was untrue in the 1980s and it’s untrue now.
The argument that planned obsolescence is necessary for continued progress is fallacious because it assumes that there is a never ending desire for novelty. My computer screen can only get so big and then it begins to hurt my neck. I do not want or need constant progression. I do not need it in my car and I don’t want it in my MMO. I have never even played a single Horde character, which is half the content of the game, because I can’t even keep up with the expansion cycle on Alliance. The early adaptors, the hard core players, may love each expansion or major patch because just like Pontiac it builds excitement. Pontiac is also defunct.
Produce then patch is a business model that failed Detroit and it is going to fail MMOs. Planned obsolescence is not the price I choose to pay, it’s the price I have to pay to be in a persistent game. Give me an MMO Honda and I will gladly take it. Give me a game where the effort I put in to get Ambassador is not flushed down the toilet six months later and I’ll buy it. If Honda can figure out how to make a car… and make a car profitably… that can persist for 20 years and 300,000 miles with only basic maintenance then game developers can do the same. There are no valid excuses.
I want to make clear that I am not predicting the death of Warcaft today, next year, five years from now. I believe those concerns are over-hyped. But the clear lesson from Detroit is that when given a realistic alternative, consumers reject the constant progression used to justify planned obsolescence. They did it with cars and they are going to do it with MMOs. If I were a young computer geek in college I wouldn’t bank on the planned obsolescence model funding my retirement, not unless I expected the government to bailout MMOs thirty years from now. Instead, I’d be busy building the gaming version of the Honda Accord.
2 hours ago