#table stakes

Generally speaking, people will buy games for the gameplay, the story, or the graphics and visuals. They'll buy games for the license or for the franchise (which usually means expected gameplay). They'll spend on a game for strong multiplayer and/or social features. .

Things people will not buy a game for usually entail the smaller elements of a game that are nice to have, but not sufficient to provide enough value for a player to spend full price on. These are features that engender good will to the players if these features are included, but is highly unlikely that many players will actively spend for. This includes features like:

UI

Voice acting

Music

Mini-games

Game/Video/Tuning Options

Photo Mode

Customizable/Mappable Controls

Accessibility Options

Cross Play

Cloud Saves

Subtitles

New Game+ or Replayability Features

Mod Support

Achievements

In-game collectibles

DLC

This is is by no means comprehensive - I'm sure you could think of additional features if you tried. This also doesn't apply to every game - mod support, for example, is a bigger deal in "maker" games where players make and distribute their own content.

If these features are present and "good enough", they will effectively be invisible to players. If they are wonderful, they might get special mention from happy players. If they are not present, players may complain a bit but their presence or lack thereof generally won't be the deciding factor in whether the spending decision is made.

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I lean against his shoulder, looking down at my tea, attempting to appear casual. “It could always be like this.”

“I don’t think so,” Snow says. “This is ‘I nearly lost my head and then I didn’t’ euphoria.”

“Nah.” I brush the outside of my knuckles against his. “I can promise you ‘this’ on a regular basis. A hot shower and lukewarm tea? Ham sandwiches in bed? This is table stakes, Snow.” -@rainbowrowell

Sometimes certain features are expected by the general player population. Mark Darrah, former Bioware general manager, calls them "table stakes", as in they are stakes required to play at the table. These kind of features might not actually be popular or particularly good for the kind of game we're building, but the expectations are there among players, and the game's reception will take a hit if we don't include them so leadership decrees that we must spend the resources to build them.

This is often why we'll spend a lot of resources on a particular feature or mini game even if it doesn't really add a lot to the intended game experience. One of the most common complaints about Street Fighter 5 at launch was the lack of story mode, even though fighting games like SF5 live and die by the long-term multiplayer, rather than the single-player content. We also see this phenomena manifest in expensive minigame features like driving or stealth subsections of games that aren't primarily about driving or stealth. The fiction of the game suggests that there should be driving or stealth segments, so they're table stakes even if they aren't very good.

It's a little odd because it's these sorts of invisible pressures tend to be invisible with hindsight. Darrah's example of a table stakes feature was adding mounted movement to Dragon Age Inquisition. They really only added mounts in DAI because it was expected of their contemporaries and players expected them. However, the feature didn't really work well in DAI - the player lost out on the follower banter, they didn't actually move all that much faster than when on foot, the player would constantly stop to pick up loot and gather resources while exploring, and so on. The DAI player experience without mounts would likely have been totally fine, except for missing the expectations of the time period. Were the game to be released today, we'd probably be fine with it not having mounts in it. But back then, mounts were considered table stakes, so they did it.

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