Quitting the game - quickly?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

“Would you like to quit? No or Yes?”
Yes
“Are you sure you want to quit? No or Yes?”
Yes
“Click yes to return to the game. Yes or no”

You know what I’m talking about.

What’s the point of all that, boosting the “play time” stat?

The player’s not really playing the game though, they’re trying to quit; so it’s a false measurement if it’s being included in that stat.

My theory is that the easier it is to quit the game, the sooner the player will come back and play more and the happier they will be with the game experience overall.

I expect this has been tested, somewhat, only far enough to see that initial boost, but not long enough to see the long term decline as the player’s enjoyment of the game diminishes.

It’s not just in games of course, we can see this exploitative model being employed pretty much everywhere - just try to find a working class job that doesn’t have a fancy title like “Technician” or “Specialist” - that’s not really what those words mean, but it’s probably saves the companies $0.50 an hour the workers would be paid if they were given less glamorous sounding titles.

In the long-term they’d be happier, and have better lives, with the extra $0.50/hour, but they don’t get the chance to think about it, nor any choice in the matter.

Better morale means more productivity, less turn over, better quality, etc.
But, it’s that initial boost that gets the attention, not the long-term decline.

Our society as a whole has so much wealth, but morale is very low and diminishing all the time.

Why?

Short-term thinking.

Loads of psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists are being employed to find exploits that will produce “stat bumps” as the stats across the board steadily decline.

It’s the “heroin” of our economy.

2

It’s a confirmation that they wish to perform an action that will result in the loss of information (the game state). You’ll notice that usually this only happens from in-game and rarely quitting from the main menu because the main menu has no information to lose.

The goal is to prevent players from accidentally quitting the game and losing playtime that they haven’t saved. It’s the same reason Word, or Notepad or whatever other desktop application you want to name does the same thing when you try to close the app. Now they usually have the benefit of knowing if you have unsaved changes and not prompting you. Game’s a usually too complicated or have changes happening in the background, so we’ll always prompt.

On consoles, one of the certification requirements is/was called “Confirmation of destructive action” and if the player could accidentally do anything that couldn’t be undone (and wasn’t part of a gameplay action) you had to have a confirmation or else you would/could get denied and have to certify again (which you really didn’t want to do). Things like quitting the game, deleting saves and even loading a game while already in a session.

So no, it’s not about boosting stats. But short of a joke implementation, there should only ever be one prompt to confirm the action.

3

With the project I have going I have the game saving on quit, to give that ease of exit while not jeopardizing progress

4

That’s great and can work for a lot of titles. But it’s not a solution that can work for all titles or all platforms. In fact sometimes the player may be exiting specifically to not their progress (which may or may not be something that is important to your game, ie save scumming).

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5

Understandable, maybe I’m not quite understanding the question of the original post, the unreal blueprint and widget system though makes it pretty easy to give the option to players to save and quit or just quit, games that have players answering “are you sure” must have that system in place for some reason, though it is annoying imo