Saturday Morning Quarterbacking: First-Person Shooter Games
Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He’s high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it’s always somebody else’s money he’s adding up.
Raymond Chandler
Lots of people can tell you what you should have done after the fact.
You should have anticipated the cornerback jumping the route. Didn’t the situation call for an extra blocker on the strongside tackle when you ran a sweep his way? Why didn’t you expect they would run a blitz when they tended to do that on every fourth down? That’s what Monday Morning Quarterbacking is.
What about Saturday Morning Quarterbacking? Wait. What? What is that? Well, that’s a series of studies one puts into place to anticipate what will happen Sunday, based on the distant past, near past, and present. And for that, we’ll need data.
As any researcher knows, when it comes to data, Mick Jagger warned us, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you might find you get what you need.”
Sometimes, large, important pieces of a picture help to envision the whole.
In (A), I wanted to get some idea of the Demand for video games, specifically the ones of “First Person Shooter” ilk. I chose that group because it is one of the most popular video game categories, with scores of titles from which to choose. I didn’t have the time to study all of them. So, I picked 26 leading titles and made some exciting discoveries.
Most surprising to me was the Outer Demand Frontier. With a slope of -1.33, more money is at the top of this line than at the bottom. Note Call of Duty—Modern Warfare 3 (COD—MW3). It helps form that Frontier, and with $2.22B in revenue, it exceeds the revenues of all but a handful of films. Apex Legends was at the low end of that line and commanded revenues of $1.21B, and, at the same time, also helped form part of the Inner Demand Frontier, which has a very flat slope (-0.404).
Figure B shows us that in fantasy, as in reality, those who play the games must make some tradeoffs. My son showed me some of the dials one can set in these games. You can have extremely high resolution or ultra-fast frame rates, but you can’t have both. Depth of field is crucial, too, and you may want to set it to the farthest reaches possible, which we might call “X.” There, you will find that your frame rate and resolution limits are lower than if you were to set the depth of field to 0.5X.
Players in the game, either the people with the controllers or the game developers, need to see how all features work in concert.
And they need to do that on Saturday morning.
#hypernomics #markets
