A small Steam game, consumers and patrons

$5? Really?

This particular ramble will eventually circle back to the ongoing dialogue between the consumer economy and the patronage economy that I describe here, but it starts with Lock ‘n Load Tactical showing up in my Steam recommendations. I’m always sort of interested in board wargame ports to the digital environment, so I decided that it was worth $4.99 to give it a spin.

I’m not sure that I have much to say about it. It’s fine. It looks nice and even though it’s still in early access, it seems to be perfectly functional and bug-free. It’s basically a VASSAL module with a more polished look and feel and a creditable AI opponent (you can also play online against another human). Which is all right; it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than that. For that reason, though, there’s also not a whole lot about it to hype. It’s just… fine.

The Germans, they are coming. A screen grab from the Vierville scenario. The Germans have 6 turns to capture 4 of the 6 hexes that currently have American stars in them. They didn’t make it.

It strives to be no more and no less than a faithful translation of a tabletop game that is itself… fine. Lock ‘n Load Tactical is the next generation of Mark Walker’s Lock ‘n Load: Company of Heroes. I’ve played Company of Heroes and I know people who have enjoyed it. It’s a playable, reasonably engaging WWII squad/fireteam-level game that inhabits a middle ground between the complexity and mechanical orderliness of Advanced Squad Leader and the uncertainty and relative chaos of Combat Commander.

The only real problem with Company of Heroes-cum-L’nL Tactical is that it isn’t terribly distinguishable from a bunch of other equally fine games that occupy the same space that have been published in the last 20 years: Academy Games’ Conflict of Heroes (notice a theme here?), the War Storm series published in the U.S. by MMP and Walker’s second venture into designing a tactical-level system, Old School Tactical, among them. I have nothing to say against any of them (except that Old School Tactical is insanely overproduced, but that’s another discussion to be had), but they all run together in my mind.

Because of that, I normally wouldn't find much to write about in Lock ‘n Load Tactical on Steam. However, I did note among the Steam reviews (which are mostly positive) one that downvoted the game for a reason that jumped out at me. Everything about it was good, the reviewer said — the programming, the interface, the game itself — except that Lock ‘n Load Publishing charges $4.99 for what is basically a gateway product. You get the game engine, tutorials, and four simple introductory scenarios. For more scenarios, you have to pay $9.99 each for the various scenario packs (although user-developed scenarios can be downloaded for free). For that, and that alone, he gave it the red thumbs-down; in his estimation a package of introductory, appetizer-like content should have been distributed for free.

Now, I’m not trying to delegitimate his disappointment that he didn't get more for his money. To be fair to him, the product description doesn’t really make it clear that you’re just getting a gateway package for purchasing that particular product. I don’t disagree with him in that it might have been a better idea for LnL to distribute it for free. But it strikes me as awfully harsh to downvote it solely on that basis. Really? Because they wanted you to pay them five bucks after they programmed it, commissioned the graphics and did the QA to make sure it works? That alone was enough for you to give it a negative rating? Was it really such a rip-off? You take that $5 to your local McDonald’s and they won’t even sell you a Filet-o-Fish for that these days.

Personally, I have no regrets about paying Lock ‘n Load $4.99 for their efforts even though I am, to use the technical term, piss-poor at the moment and I can’t always be sure that I can afford the $7 necessary to buy a Filet-o-Fish at my local McDonald’s. But then, I approach it as a patron more than as a consumer. Even though I’m not terribly excited by the results, I consider that Lock ‘n Load put in the time and effort and they contributed something positive to this niche hobby that I happen to enjoy. Let them have that modest sum from me, and I’ll skip lunch if I have to. I certainly would not give the game a negative rating based on the pricing of the starter package alone.

For someone who thinks purely as a consumer, however, supporting a particular publisher or designer, or even the hobby as a whole, is not the point. The point is to get what you consider to be proper value for your money, and everything else is irrelevant. It’s not an unreasonable point of view. In fact, it’s the best way to hold publishers accountable. It’s the most effective warning against getting greedy, lazy or otherwise abusive to their audience. But taken to extremes, it can also create an antagonistic relationship between creators and their audience — especially small, niche creators who can easily suffocate because they can’t get the resources that they need to keep going.

Does it count as antagonistic if you begrudge a small publisher that little bit even though they have made a positive, if modest, contribution to your hobby? Yes, I think so.