Feature - Why It's Worst to be First

A huge number of gamers now hesitate to buy full-price games, instead holding off for biannual Steam Sale splurges. I certainly fall into that camp, but I caved recently and gave in to a longstanding temptation: Rimworld.

I’ll say up front that I absolutely adore the game, and have done from about the one-hour mark. I’ll write more about why when I’ve sunk some more time in. It did get me thinking, though, about the nature of innovation in the games industry, and why it’s often worst to be first.

Every review of Rimworld, written or spoken, will mention something along the lines of it being a ‘spiritual successor’ to Dwarf Fortress. It’s fair to say, however, that Rimworld has already enjoyed more success than its ancestor ever did.

It made the move onto Steam in 2016. At the time of writing, it’s currently peaking at around 7.8k players per day, placing it firmly in the middle of Steam’s 100 most-played games. For reference, that’s considerably more than DayZ, Crusader Kings II, Elite Dangerous or Tom Clancy’s The Division. Simple statistics aside, I’d argue that, even though Dwarf Fortress has been a cult favourite for years, it was never part of the semi-mainstream conversation as Rimworld has been for at least a year now.

And yet… Dwarf Fortress came first. It was the innovator. In the modern gaming age at least, it birthed the realistic, indirect worker management subgenre. So, why did it never take off in the way Rimworld has?

The answer is simple accessibility. Dwarf Fortress has an impenetrability that goes far beyond its initially baffling, text-based appearance (which is easily modded with graphics packs). It’s basically impossible to play without constantly referring to an online ‘Getting Started’ guide, for a number of hours.

By contrast, after watching a half-hour Let’s Play, and following the half-hour tutorial, I was immediately up and running in Rimworld. After another hour, I was comfortable with the interface and fully understood the main systems. The graphics are simple but clean and clear. The in-game descriptions are basic, but they tell you what you need to know. Just like that, through simple accessibility, I was hooked in a way I never was to Dwarf Fortress (I stuck with it for an hour; give me some credit).

This is part of a wider trend among games. The person or team that comes up with an original idea rarely gets the fame, the glory, the riches. Not for that initial game at least. The most successful games aren’t the ones that are themselves innovative. They’re the games wherein developers take a great idea that someone else came up with, give it a slight twist, refine it into something more user-friendly, then throw it out back out into the world with a bigger and better marketing campaign behind it.

Back to the Steam charts. Take a look at the top 10 most-played games, which between them have well over 2 million concurrent players. What do you see? Dota 2. CS:GO. PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS. H1Z1: King of the Hill. GTA V. Team Fortress 2. Football Manager 2017. What don’t you see? Any innovation whatsoever. They’re all either sequels, or spiritual successors to actual, original titles.

The publishers of some of those games, I’ll admit, have kept the actual original creative minds around. With Dota 2 and TF2, for example, Valve incorporated people who were present either at the beginning, or in the early days, of the predecessor’s development. But these sequels – the games that have actually exploded – came years after the original idea was put into practice.

We’re regularly told that we live in the ‘golden age of gaming’. To an extent, this is true. There are far, far more indie developers out there making and publishing their games than ever before. But it won’t be their original games that will take off. It will be the games – usually from bigger publishers – that take their ideas and recycle them with better graphics and more marketing. All that these creative indie designers can hope for is to be involved in that next stage of their idea.

In games development, when you’re the one that has the idea, and gets the first game of its kind out there, you’re actually taking the biggest risk. The industry, as currently constituted, is far more lucrative for those that hang back, wait for other people to come up with the idea, then swoop down and create their own version of it.

I can yammer on from my pedestal all I like, but I’m just like everyone else. I don’t scour Steam Greenlight for hours on end. I don’t seek out innovative, tiny developers before they even get on Steam and make my donations, my pre-orders. I play Rimworld, not Dwarf Fortress. Still, I can’t help but wish things were different.

There’s the classic Ricky Bobby quote – “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” The gaming industry for creative people right now reflects the opposite: if you are first, there’s a good chance you’ll end up coming last.