I’m standing in my local video game store. At the counter is a young kid who’s standing on his tiptoes, game in hand, stretching to hand over the game to the guy behind the till. Next in line is a grandmother with her family around her. She’s buying the grandkids two Wii games and they’re all engaged in conversation as the games are paid for and put in bags.
Both of these purchases were simple transactions, no fuss, each taking only a few minutes to complete. With the predicted demise of retail stores and the rising popularity of online digital distribution, will these effortless retail buying experiences translate to online?
To find out, we’re going on two journeys, to the Xbox Live Marketplace and PSN Store. I enlisted the help of a keen young gamer. Dan is 16 years old and plays mostly PC shooters and action games. Although he doesn’t own any consoles himself, he plays his friends’ PS3s and 360s and has never before purchased from PSN or Xbox Live.
We installed Dan in Vertical Slice's playroom and tell him that he can buy whatever games he wants, and from the observation room I settled in to watch how he gets on.
Marketplace forces
First up is the Xbox Live Marketplace. I gave Dan a 2100 points card and I encouraged him to start with an Xbox Live Indie Game title before moving to one that’s also available from retail stores.
How long do you think it took him to choose and buy a game? What would you consider an ideal time? What about an upper limit? Would 44 minutes exceed your upper limit? I thought so. Dan took 20 minutes to browse the menus to find a game he liked, then a further 24 minutes to figure out how to pay for it. Would it be reasonable to stand at a till in a shop for 24 minutes?
What’s just as worrying is how difficult it was to actually hand over money. If I hadn’t have been there, Dan wouldn’t have bought anything at all. It’s not that he didn’t want the games - he did - but there were simply too many times at which he was either confused or completely stuck and I had to help him out. He had significant difficulty at least six times, ranging from adding Microsoft Points, filling out information and not being able to find the game once he’d managed to download it. As a final insult, on first launch the console reported that a new version of the game was available and asked whether he would like to download it. He screamed, “How has a new version become available, I just downloaded it a few minutes ago!” and waited while the new version downloaded.
Each of these steps has the potential to confuse the player or lose them as a paying customer. There were other negative issues which Dan experienced from the Marketplace, such as not knowing how much a point was worth - was 80 Points worth £80? - and being confused as to why some games were priced in pounds and some in Points.
Too. Much. Friction.
Trouble in Store
Dan then visited PSN. I had already registered my credit card, sparing him that pain, so all he had to do was find and buy a game which caught his interest.
He found Lost Planet 2, liked the look of it and decided to buy it. However, he hadn’t actually bought the full game, he’d bought an add-on with the title "Lost Planet 2 Rush Arena (Game Pack)". Talking to him afterwards, he expected this to be the full game, the language used in the title and lack of any clear warning that you needed the full game did not suggest that it was an add-on.
Although he was disappointed, I told him that he could buy another game and he decided on Alien Breed 2. There are two options available for download: a free trial, and a paid-for option with the title “Alien Breed 2 (Full Game Upgrade)”. Knowing that he wants the full game, he opts for the version with “Full” in the title.
There are not enough funds in his wallet, however, so he had to add some from my credit card. It asks him how much he wants to add, but because it doesn't remind him of the value of his purchase, he was forced to attempt to remember it himself and then do the maths in his head.
Once he added the funds, he’s finally brought back to the download screen, where he thinks the orange ‘download’ button means it had already been downloaded. It hadn’t. He goes off looking for the game, and I have to tell him that it hasn’t been downloaded. In fact, it turns out that he had to download the trial version first, then unlock. After waiting 30 minutes for the 1.3Gb download to complete, the install of Alien Breed 2 failed (error code 80029563, in case you were asking), and he had to do it again. Total time to buy and launch Alien Breed 2 from PSN: 1 hour 45 minutes and much support from myself.
If Dan had been trying to purchase this game on his own, it’s highly unlikely a sale would ever have been made.
The value of bricks and mortar
Buying a game today in a bricks and mortar store is not only easy, but can also be completed by young kids, core gamers, parents or grandparents. Anyone, really.
It’s not just Dan who has failed to purchase games from Xbox Live or PSN. We’ve heard many stories from parents and gamers who have told us that they wanted to purchase a game, but they simply couldn’t figure out how to use their marketplaces. And this goes for Steam, too.
I’m concerned, then, that developers are losing sales at all stages of the buying process. Buyers may already overcome their greatest purchase decision - "Should I hand over my cash for this game?" - but they are then getting defeated by the usability of the online digital store.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Both the Mac and iOS App Stores make it incredibly easy for buyers to pay for content; 15 billion iOS downloads would not have happened if there was an Marketplace or PSN Store level of friction.
Online digital stores will almost certainly be the future of buying games, and already play a pivotal role in the success of indie game developers. After all the hard work of creating a game, it seems incredible that the complexity of these online stores means that only the most persistent buyer will make it through to downloading and playing. As such, it’s just not enough to say that a game is available on a digital store, it should be as easy to buy as possible. The success of your game may depend on it.
Graham McAllister is director of game usability lab Vertical Slice. Read and follow Graham's other columns on his topic page.
Comments
17The difficulty of adding points/money on both stores is quite a downfall. However, I appreciate being able to search around and see all the games that are out, similar to what I do in a brick and mortar store. I'll spend at least 20 minutes in a physical store just looking at everything they have and seeing if there's anything I like. I do understand though, that this isn't the norm, and I think online stores would be much improved by adding "Top Rated" or "Top Downloaded" sections, much in the way of Steam or the App Store.
I fail to see how that experiment is representative of anything at all.
To produce valid results, a research of that type would have to repeat this process with a much wider variety of participants, representing the whole of the gaming population (from casual to hardcore, PC owners only like Dan to gamers who have all the hardware, and more). Doing it with one person proves or demonstrates nothing.
Furthermore, the average gamer nowadays is not a 16 year old teenager but a working adult in the 25-35 age group. These individuals are a lot more likely to possess a credit card, be familiar with the concepts of direct debit and online purchasing. No problems for them.
Online PSN or XBLA successes like Trials HD (which has sales of over a million) seem to indicate that when there's a will, and a quality game, there's a way.
I agree with all of these points except where there's a will there's a way. There's no doubt that with these interface problems there will be attrition. The only question is how much, and that's what a more representative study would tell us.
@ Fluffy
Part of why bricks-and-mortar stores succeed is down to impulse purchases. Making online stores hard to navigate means that impulse buying is harder generally, and whilst your argument of "where there's a will, and a quality game, there's a way" is true for serious gamers, for casual players who have (as a rough example) won a tenner on the lottery, ease of use and a guiding hand makes all the difference in buying a game or not. Add to this that your concept of an average gamer is... strange, I would say. How many teens or 40 year olds have come into gaming through the Wii, for example?
More generally, as a serious gamer with a PS3, I have to say the PSN/PS Store is atrocious. Unless there's a special offer on, I have to know exactly what I'm buying, since everything is catagorised so rigidly that I just give up browsing. Contrast this with Steam, where I can just mill about either the client-based store or the website-store, and it's easy to see why so many indie games sell on Steam. I chance upon a game selling for £4, I add it to my cart, I enter CC details, I'm done. I have tried the PSN, and I just find it confusing... As though Sony doesn't want to make shopping a easy and pleasurable experience.
I've bought MW2 map packs which don't work with my version of the game : (
It's incredibly hard for me to judge the ease of use of the 360 marketplace as I've been using since launch. I'm used to it, and know my way around it.
I admit to having struggled with trying to find XBLIG titles of quality (though they're there, if you take the time).
'Top Rated' and 'Most Purchased' filters are there, but can still lead to titles being overlooked. I feel this is the same on the iOS app store, with many great games failing to make the top lists.
The challenges of payment types is a separate matter, and complex systems are unforgivable. When people have made their decision, it's increadibly frustrating for them to have to wait so long before they can pay for it....
@Pixieking
My concept of an average gamer is not strange, it's based on official industry figures like this one, or that one for example.
As you can see from the second example, the survey was conducted using data collected amongst 19,000 people, not just one person like here. Taking one individual that has never used either PSN or the Games Marketplace, watching him or her struggle to get to grips with how the system works and concluding that said system has "too much friction" is a wrong deduction. The guy has never used it before, of course he's going to wonder how to do things. Put someone who has never used an IOS platform before and ask them to purchase a game on that platform. I bet they will experience some "friction" as well. Still, it's not rocket science, isn't it? Once you've done it once or twice, you're pretty much set forever.
Between us, casual gamers are more likely to get Angry Birds for their mobile with that tenner and spend the rest on booze rather than browse PSN or Xbox Marketplace in search of a killer indie game. Isn't that one of the reasons they are called "casual"?
Hi all, thanks all for the comments so far.
@Fluffy
You're absolutely right that if this had have been a research study then we would have used many more participants across a wide range of demographics.
What the opinion piece was trying to point out however was that while the averge gamer is indeed around 35 years old, digitally literate and will have no trouble purchasing, there are also millions of other poeple out there will definitely not be able to use these online stores.
As we move from retail to online to buy our content, I was trying to highlight the difficulty that, not the digitally literate will have, but those who are more used to the ease of a retail experience.
If I were a developer and had my game on any of these online stores, I'd be genuinly concerned that I'd be losing money due to the difficulty in purchasing. Sure, many may be buying my game, but many more might have tried and failed. I don't want that to happen. Ever.
Darwinism at its finest...move over, get out of my way Dan!
*suppressing a giggle* Hey, he chose Lost planet 2, that's a bloody fun game. He may not be able to ask his PS3/Xbox owning friends how they download games and how the whole thing works, but at least he gets one point for intuition.
Accessibility can be an issue, that is true, one that could be adressed, for example, by a small "how to" video automatically playing when switching on the machine for the first time and left on the dashboard / Xmedia bar as a reminder.
If I were a developper, especially a small one, I would be more concerned by lack of exposure. For one Bastion that gets lots of media attention, how many other quality games get ignored or just simply overlooked due to lack of PR or marketing power ?
"...one that could be adressed, for example, by a small "how to" video automatically playing when switching on the machine for the first time and left on the dashboard / Xmedia bar as a reminder"
You'd need to provide this info at the right time, i.e. when it's relevant to the user. Even then you'd probably be surprised at how resitant users are to explicitly seeking help (especially men, in my experience). I think that your suggestion would be largely overlooked.
I'm amazed that a "gamer" in this day and age hadn't run into some form of digital purchasing before. Does he not have an iPhone? You said he was a PC gamer, aren't most PC games bought through Steam et al.? Do modern game shops even have a PC section anymore? Wait...16 year old PC gamer... No wonder *buying* a game caused such confusion.
I don't have an Xbox 360, so I can't comment on that, but I've always found the PSN store very simple to use. If you actually READ what's presented, it's all quite clear. And adding funds couldn't be easier. If you're using a credit card, you don't have to necessarily choose a specific amount of funds to add, because the system will allow you to make a purchse of exactly the amount needed to make up the difference. This was not mentioned in the article.
Some people just like to do things as important as making purchases with their brains in low gear, which sadly is their own fault if things go wrong. That's life, I guess.Just like you have to make sure the person at the store is ringing everything up correctly, you need to make sure you're paying full attention every step of the way when making a purchase.
I just hate this idea that everything has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Nobody wants to take responsibility for their own actions. PSN is quite functional, and I've never had an issue with transactions. The network speed is at times atrocious, but that's not what's being discussed here. The way it's designed is just fine by me.
Users should never have to have something like purchasing on PSN or XBL explained when they have so many mental models on which to hang this sort of transaction: we haven't reached the stage where a 16 year old has never had to go to the actual shops (yet). So there's clearly scope for the process to be more intuitive and that will directly translate into less attrition and more sales.
The world is full of people with their brains in low gear but it makes no commercial sense for the interface to be anything other than lowest common denominator. That is the literal definition of an interface optimised for revenue. And anyway, if it's easy for them it should be easy for everyone.
Of course, this is great news for Graham as it makes demonstrating ROI for his services straightforward.
Hmmm, I wonder if they track analytics on XBLA? It would be interesting to see the conversion funnel stats.
Both stores suffer from shocking usability in places. The real issue though isn't one time tasks like adding funds but finding, browsing and trying games. Something this "study" barely touches on. Simply selecting a game to try isn't that hard on either system. On 360 links to new games are right there in front of you when you turn it on. The "20 minutes" seems to have been taken up with indecisiveness.
One thing that amazes me is that you can't see a short demo video clip of each game. Instead you have to download and install a demo, then figure out how to play it. On a side scrolling platformer this isn't too hard, but on Assasins Creed 2 I almost gave up before finally figuring out the controls. Playstations and Xboxes now have streaming video via Netflix, how hard can it be to set up some demo videos?
Also the PSN trick of requiring you to remember how much the game cost when you add credit is a pretty basic flaw that should have been sorted out by now. Can you imagine trying to buy a book on Amazon and getting to the checkout and finding that you needed to remember and enter the price of the book! Also when I bought Mass Effect 2 nowhere did it say that it was a 10GB+ download, I was expecting 5GB, and so busted my monthly download cap.
Not having a most downloaded or favourites list is pretty silly also.
They should have a weekly streaming 10 minute show where some attractive young people review the games that have come out over the last month. This doesn't have to be high budget or anything.
The adding funds and points thing is what gets me most. The iOS app store has shown that you can just price things in terms of real money and charge per purchase. Pricing things in "points" and making you buy these in impractical bundles adds an unnecessary abstract layer to the whole purchasing experience.
@jim - it's a very good point about the videos. I know on XBLA you can download video demos of the games, but they don't stream, and they are tucked away on a seperate page to the game downloads. You have to find it, then add it to your downloads, wait for it to download, then go to your videos and find it to play. I've seen streaming videos elsewhere on XBL so I don't see why they can't stream these too.