Author: adam

One Hundred MEELLEON Dollar! (…wasted, on RTW/APB)

Post author By adam
Post date August 18, 2010
9 Comments on One Hundred MEELLEON Dollar! (…wasted, on RTW/APB)

18 months ago, Scott and I described our perspectives on the fall of Tabula Rasa. I said that if you’re going to spend $100m on an MMO, you’d better be aware of MMO history and not repeat those mistakes.

It would seem that Real Time Worlds wasn’t listening – coincidentally, $100m is how much *publically announced* money just went down the pan, now they’ve gone into administration.

No-one in this industry likes to talk openly about their enormous fuck-ups – and the few that do tend to become pariahs, sued by their employers or shunned by future investors. No major company openly documents – or “allows to be documented” – anything of import. It’s a system that punishes progress in the professional field.

There’s a single public analysis on RTW/APB right now. It’s an anonymous source (oh, for god’s sake! When will we stop shooting the messengers?), but some non-anonymous sources have backed it up. So, let’s take a look…

Anonymous: ExRTW on RPS

(source is here)

APB:

“lead you to think it’s going to come right by release … You end up in this situation where you’re heads down working your ass off”

Me, 18 months ago:

“The implication being that they didn’t do anything wrong, perhaps, but that they stood by and watched the train rolling slowly towards the brick wall and didn’t try (hard enough) to stop the collision.”

APB:

“APB … came together… relatively late in its development cycle … leaving too little time for content production and polish … lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics”

Me, 18 months ago:

It wasn’t ready for beta. I said so. Many others said so.

APB:

“it was pretty clear to me that the game was going to get a kicking at review – the gap between expectation and the reality was huge.”

Me, 18 months ago:

A survey was taken, internally, asking what people thought. The results were never published – so no-one (apart from the survey takers) knows exactly what the results were, but we were told that the *company* knew.

Incidentally … I was afraid to come clean at the time (and upset individuals), but that survey of all staff was EXTREMELY negative about the project, and I have been told (but you’ll have to take this as unsubstantiated rumour) that the reaction of the top-level execs on seeing the results was simple:

“Bury it”

APB:

“I wasn’t on the APB team, so I played it infrequently, during internal test days etc. I was genuinely shocked when I played the release candidate – I couldn’t believe Dave J would be willing to release this.”

Me, 18 months ago:

[I wasn’t on the TR dev team, but] given my position I had the luxury of a lot of insights that other people wouldn’t have had.
…
I played TR in the alpha, and I actually enjoyed it
…
it was a good pre-production prototype [but – at best – YEARS away from being a finished project – and they went to beta only 6 months later]

APB:

“The real purpose of beta is publicity, not bug fixing. We never took that lesson on board.”

[I didn’t cover this, but Scott’s post did, IIRC]

And, finally…

“MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. ”

…which sounds an awful lot like Scott’s team and Steve Nichols team (the former very basic playable but unreleased, the latter Dungeon Runners)

Major differences

EDIT: it’s 100k sales, not 10k.

APB:

“the real killer, IMO, is the business model. This was out of the team’s hands. The game has issues, but I think if you separate the business model from the game itself, it holds up at least a little better.”

I originally (mis-)understood
the figures that Nicholas Lovell has dug out, but apparently sales were over 100k (presumably that means practically zero sales in USA?).

By comparison, the previous big-failure MMO which went down because of the “bad business model” was Hellgate: London.

Hellgate sold 500,000 units, and estimated that even if they’d made their subscription compulsory, they’d still have sold 250,000.

So, not as strongly as I originally put it, but I’m still dubious about the business model being the cause. This stinks to me of a marketing/sales failure (unless those 100k sales are spread equally across territories)

APB:

“we should have kept our powder dry. Our PR felt tired and dragged on and on, rather than building a short, sharp crescendo of excitement pre-release.”

IMHO this is a really bad idea – unless you remove the entire “MMO” part of the game. Big Bang Marketing doesn’t work for MMOs; this is the old-school of game-marketing.

Although, given how ineffective RTW’s marketing seems to have been, I doubt a big-bank-marketing-campaign could have done any worse.

Conclusions … and “moving forwards from here”

Two parts of this industry need to talk, one part doesn’t. As I said in 2009: “We need to talk [about failure]; when will we talk [about failure]?”

The professionals: you’re getting burned out, chewed up, and spat out. Your lives are being wasted.

The investors: you’re getting screwed. You write it off as random failure, and you can afford it, but you’re shying away from “games” as a result, leaving good profits behind on the table.

The inexperienced, the mediocre, and all those people who don’t actually MAKE the game, but do get to ruin the process (rockstar-designers, producers, marketers, directors, managers, etc) : you’re doing great. Your lack of skill hasn’t held you back, and the company will often go bankrupt before anyone gets around to firing you for incompetence.

…Can we actually move forwards, though?

When I left NCsoft, I was cold-contacted with some new job offers.

A typical example: “make a success of” a project that had already spent several years and many millions of dollars and was about to launch. But I wasn’t allowed to move said launch, and they had “infinite” funding (I kid you not).

There was a fat salary for anyone willing to shepherd that disaster (and, I suspect, become the public fall-guy). The game itself launched as they insisted, and was a laughable failure. I doubted it could have been fixed without another 12-18 months of development.

And me, personally? Nowadays, I run a freeform studio developing mobile apps and games for corporate clients. Each employee is responsible for themself and for their own decisions. If you need a project-manager to mollycoddle you every day, you can’t work here.

Personal responsibility, and personal authority; so far, it’s working pretty well…

games industry programming recruiting

Tech Director in Games industry: what do they do?

Post author By adam
Post date August 17, 2010

Came up recently on TCE. I finally figured out a concise definition of the job role being filled by the “good/great” Tech Directors – someone who’s worth every penny of the $150k salaries they command:

“Figure out the worst things that go wrong which nobody is specifically to blame for, and make sure they don’t happen”

The point with TD is that 9 times in 10 you have a hierachical company structure:

Owners
…
Company Directors
…
Senior Management
…
Exec Producer
…
Project Management
…
Leads
…
Teams

…with the setup that responsibility flows DOWNWARDS (companies where responsibility flows UP are very rare in games industry, IME. Nice idea but very few companies have the culture to obey that ideal!).

So … e.g. … anything that the PM’s don’t think of, and don’t delegate to one or more leads … gets completely ignored/forgotten.

This is a gross generalization – in practice, people lower down tend to notice if something’s missing, and apply pressure up the chain until someone takes it on, or take it on themselves.

That works for small stuff. But the big stuff – especially something that needs two disciplines to fix, or that is too much workload for one person to “absorb”, you need someone with management power (i.e. the authority to take people away from pre-existing tasks).

That’s where the [X] Director comes in. (X = Technical, Art, Design, etc)

TD, AD, etc have the sweeping power to get different departments to collaborate, or to persuade a Producer to relinquish some of their team for a week to get a “more important but so subtle you didn’t see it yet” problem fixed.

alternate reality games computer games games design

Graduate/intern games job, London (SixToStart)

Post author By adam
Post date August 13, 2010
2 Comments on Graduate/intern games job, London (SixToStart)

Details here…

a six-week paid internship, beginning in October. We’re looking for smart people who are interested in making social and story-based online games. You must be able to demonstrate experience of having worked on games in the past, whether you helped make a big game, or worked on your own in your spare time, and we’re particularly interested in:

* Front and back-end web developers
* Game designers
* Artists and graphic designers (aimed at games)

This is one of those “exceptional” opportunities – SixToStart is a tiny tiny company, but they have a habit of winning awards for their unique mix of modern games, at the cutting-edge of game-design, using computers as only a part of the overall game. Google if you don’t know them…

games industry

The Escapist talks crap … again

Post author By adam
Post date August 10, 2010

Typical Escapist. The very first page of their article on “Videogame mths debunked” waxes eloquently (and contemptuously) about supposed “facts” without much apparent fact-checking.

And then the following pages go off on a personal journey of ignorance and attitude. Nuanced opinion, researched journalism, or even useful commentary … this is not.

(The only scientificly valid studies I’ve seen for the brain-training game showed that it DOES have a positive effect. They also suggested that people who otherwise claimed to play it every day were apparently lieing, or blurring their memories of how often they played … which might explain the failures of some of the other “studies”, including the pop-science one that The Escapist bothers to cite)

Apart from Zero Punctuation (a canny acquisition on the editors’ part), TheEscapist seems to continue to be happy as mostly a waste of (internet) space. Sigh. I think EDGE has a lot to answer for…

community web 2.0

Someone at LinkedIn needs to be fired

Post author By adam
Post date August 10, 2010

LinkedIn has unofficially officially removed their “updates” system – you can no longer find out what’s changed in your contacts’ roles, busines, lives, etc.

Some idiot at LI corp – who apparently is unaware of the normal consequences of becoming the lowest-common-denominator (i.e. unless you are the market leader on size, and *force* your competitors out of business, you price yourself out of existence. Well, you’re nowhere near Facebook, so you’re most likely to just put LI bankrupt) – has replaced it with a massive, 5-page long aggregation of twitter feeds.

(currently 5 pages on my account, but who knows how long it will get if more people add their twitter accounts?)

There’s a website for that – it’s called Twitter.com. Funnily enough, I already have 5 different Twitter clients, and they do an AWESOME job of subscribing to the twitter feeds I want to read.

None of that is applied to LI, of course – LI simply *forces* me to view everything that is tweeted by anyone. It’s as if the LI management team HAVE NEVER USED TWITTER IN THEIR LIVES, and have no idea how it works. Amazing!

The (hypothetical) idiot at LinkedIn has clearly achieved something – they’ve given a very short-term boost to the “Activity” on the site. At the cost of removing functionality that used to be there.

I suspect this is the beginning of the end for LinkedIn. At this rate, it will get more and more useless.

I wonder, is there a community anywhere for maintaining business contacts, viewing resumes, while preventing spam and leaving you in full control of who sees what and who can contact whom?

computer games games design marketing

How not to market an MMO: EA/Mythic Entertainment

Post author By adam
Post date August 1, 2010
2 Comments on How not to market an MMO: EA/Mythic Entertainment

Mythic Entertainment – End of Subscription

(subtitle: EA/Mythic forces themselves into commercial failure)

8 months ago, I tried to play Warhammer Online.

Tried, and failed, because EA Mythic told me – in no uncertain terms – that it was completely impossible for me to play.

This was after releasing press announcements and running a big campaign trying to get people like me to play. They’d been too lazy / stupid to remove the “you cannot play this game” message from their own website, even several days after the marketing campaign started.

Net result: I never got around to playing. They made it such a pain in the ass that even when offered this *for free*, I never got that far.

So, I got this message today. And this just double-underlines my previous point. Read this message, and ask yourself: does it entice me into the game?

Throwing away money, one customer at a time

End of Subscription Notification

Your subscription for Mythic Entertainment Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning for Game Account [username] has ended for the following reason:

* Subscription is not set to renew

If you did not authorize this, please contact support at (650) 628-1001. Phone support hours are 10:00 am – 10:00 pm eastern time, Monday through Friday. You can find further information on account security at http://help.warhammeronline.com.

Thank you!

This is an automated email from the Account Management site for Mythic Entertainment.

Games Workshop, Warhammer, Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning, and all associated marks, names, races, race insignia, characters, vehicles, locations, units, illustrations and images from the Warhammer world are either ®, ™ and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2000-2009. Used under license by Electronic Arts Inc

Let’s do a quick analysis. Here you have a DIRECT contact with the consumer – moreover a consumer who isn’t yet paying you any money, and who you know has NEVER logged-in to the game.

36% of the message is an IRRELEVANT copyright notice that shouldn’t be there
30% of the message is an INCORRECT security advisory
12% of the message is “this is an automated email”
…leaving a mere 22% of actual content

Let’s look at the content, as any good marketing person would.

What’s the Call To Action? (we’re talking to a customer; what are we asking them to do?)
How easy do we make it to respond to the CTA? (the easier we make it, the more people will do it)
Where’s the Appeal – a.k.a. what do we do to make the CTA attractive? (the more attractive it is, NOT ONLY will more people do it, but a great percentage will follow-through by paying money / engaging after the CTA)

Hmm. Respectively:

None
Make a international phone call – at cost! – to an unrelated department
Technical language with no hint of “game”, or welcome. Wording is both appallingly bad English ( “is not set to renew”), and also fundamentally negative (implies that I *shouldn’t* want to renew, even if I do want to)

As I said 8 months ago, someone ought to deploy the PlayFish folks onto the smoking remains of Mythic. I very much doubt they’d allow such terrible excuse for marketing to go on…

advocacy

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by APRA.

Post author By adam
Post date July 20, 2010

Someone makes a highly controversial amateur YouTube video, showing an Auschwitz survivor and his children and grandchildren dancing at Auschwitz, to the song “I Will Survive”.

And, in the middle of the debate *that* stirs up, someone hits them with a copyright violation, forcing YouTube to remove the video. There’s no option to read why – although my best guess is that they “didn’t pay to license the music”. Ha! Can lawyers silence debate where the Third Reich failed?

There’s no link to who ARPA actually is, although it seems to be an Australian music-copyright org that specialises in “collecting money”.

I think this situation neatly sums up quite how much loathing I have for some of the selfish, greedy, petty-minded scum that fight for the preservation *and infinite extension* of Copyright law, and who seek to criminalise everyone in the world who won’t feed them money.

(and, incidentally, if this *is* over money – I’m surprised the challenge went ahead, given that Copyright law has specific terms exempting “commentary” (i.e. exactly this kind of situation). Actually, I’m not. It’s the kind of thing you expect of the “guilty-until-you-bribe-a-lawyer-to-prove-you-innocent” laws that the USA (especially) has put in place in recent years (and other govts to a lesser extent))

bitching community web 2.0

HMRC disdains Internet standards

Post author By adam
Post date July 19, 2010

Is there a place to complain that UK government departments are breaking the internet standards and refuse to fix their websites?

Occasionally, you find sites that do this. Usually, when you tell the organization, they’re a little embarassed, and rush to fix them.

From HMRC, I got a polite, pedantic, *but entirely incorrect* response telling me that the “standard” was X, when I know that to be false (as does anyone who has read the offiicial standards, as documented by the Internet RFCs).

They apparently can’t be bothered to read the standards, and don’t care that they’re wrong.

No wonder so many people hate civil servants: holier-than-thou attitude coupled with being clearly, inarguably, wrong. Sigh.

fixing your desktop

Un-format your SD card (Android)

Post author By adam
Post date July 18, 2010
2 Comments on Un-format your SD card (Android)

Android 2.2 has a nasty bug where it disables the SD Card on Google Nexus One phones.

Fine, I found a workaround. But there’s a down-side – what happens when you only AFTERWARDS remember that it’s got the ONLY copy of several hundred photos, including plenty of uniques that can never be re-captured?

No way I was getting the photos back – after all, it *formatted* the card.

But … saved by Google’s poor OS … a couple of days after I’d formatted the card, I had the thought:

Hmm. This Android OS has a lot of design flaws and bugs. I wonder if … “formatting” the SD card doesn’t actually format it, but simply marks all the files as deleted?

After all, it’s flash memory – older Flash cards could only be formatted a set number of times before they’d stop working. Maybe, just maybe, Google’s OS doesn’t do what it says it does…

Yep, turns out that’s what it did: mark all the files as deleted, without actually deleting them. So I was able to get back about 95% of my photos. I could probably have got all of them if I’d known in advance that the format … doesn’t format.

Time for … CardRecovery

http://www.cardrecovery.com/

Card Recovery is awesome. It’s an excellent example of one of the best sales techniques:

Free (no barrier to trying it)
Very easy to use (idiot-proof)
Shows you exactly what you’ll get for your money (it does all the work FIRST, and shows you the photos it’s recovered – all of them!)
Offers a one-click, in-app purchase of the “full” app, that will actually *save* all those photos it’s recovered
Reasonably priced

I got to the end, and was expecting something vicious – $500-$1000 price (after all, they have you in a vice at this point). Their software proved it was possible – the data was still there – so I prepared myself to manually recover the files, even if it took many hours. I’ve been using computers so long that I’ve had to do data-recovery by hand more than once, in the days before data-recovery firms existed.

Most “data-recovery” firms do this: get the customer in, get the physical media off them, show a tiny piece of data to give the customer hope (oftenn deliberately NOT mentioning how much data is missing), then charge outrageously high prices for their services, because at this point it’s hard for the customer to back out of the deal.

CardRecovery was barely $50.

No hesitation, I bought it on the spot. Especially since I’ve now got this handy utility should I ever need it again in the future…

fixing your desktop

Nexus One / Android 2.2: If your SD card stops working

Post author By adam
Post date July 15, 2010
6 Comments on Nexus One / Android 2.2: If your SD card stops working

Google’s Nexus One auto-upgraded a few weeks ago, to Android 2.2

It immediately broke itself. It was no longer able to use the SD card.

As a side-effect, it was impossible to install any applications. Making this a very expensive, very heavy, very slow excuse for a mobile phone.

The error was that the SD card permanently unmounted itself, with a message in status bar “SD card can now be safely removed”, accompanied by an error if you tried to install anything: “your SD card is unavailable or missing” (or words to that effect.

Factory-reset of the phone? Still broken.

By fiddling around, I eventually found the solution (and you’re probably not going to like this): Format the SD card.

Yep. It seems that Google changed something between Android 2.1 and 2.2 that – in some cases – makes it unable to read the SD card any more.

For the record, other things I tried include: remove the card physically and reseat; dismiss the error messages and try again; install apps from private sources (e.g. our own apps we wrote).

amusing web 2.0

3 things a News Website should NOT do

Post author By adam
Post date July 14, 2010
3 Comments on 3 things a News Website should NOT do

There’s a conference in Brighton this week, and one of the industry media – GamesIndustry.biz – has a base here, so they’ve been cropping up a lot in the reporting. In passing, I noticed some glaring howlers in their web-design. The 1990’s called, they want their web-design templates back…

Three glaring errors I noticed in particular. One of these they’re in good company – it’s the same thing Rupert Murdoch has done, along with sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming “NA, NA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! GO AWAY AND TAKE YOUR STUPID INTERNET-THINGY WITH YOU, YOU FREELOADING BASTARDS!” (not a literal quote, of course). Although a lot of people seem to think that’s a weak strategy even for the mighty news empire…

1. Sell a large number of Flash ads, and put them ALL in the same place. At the same time

What do you see when you view a page on this site?

If you have a laptop, and you surf their site, does the battery last noticeably less than normal? (hint: yes, it should – I’ve seen this happen on a wide variety of PC and Mac laptops)

Why?

Because they put not 1, not 2, not even 5 … not even TEN … but up to FIFTEEN SEPARATE FLASH ADS all animated SIMULTANEOUSLY on every page.

Flash wasn’t designed for this – the flash runtime can overhwelm a modern computer with just 1 rogue flash app; 15 is begging for trouble.

I suspect (because some of my former employers used to purchase them, regularly) that these “mini-ads” are a decent source of revenue for GI.biz. It’s a pity then that they’re mostly Flash, because that means an awful lot of people in the target audience (game developers), see something like this:

Incidentally, I offer a tip-of-the-hat to Relentless, whose animated-GIF has so many frames of animation that it smoothly animates some stuff that looks straight out of a Flash ad. Smart move on their behalf – they DIDN’T use a Flash movie.

OMGWTFBBQ! That must take TONNES of animating frames! Why, yes – it uses an *unholy* 50 kilobytes, just to display one ickle GIF. Shocking. And yet … in 2010 … such a tiny tiny file in the scheme of things that it suffers nothing for not being Flash. (Flash was originally needed because internet bandwidth was poor; it only gradually grew into the all-singing, all-dancing beast we love today)

2. Hide all your content. Keep your news … secret

Try viewing any article on the site.

Follow any link that a friend sends you via email

Click on a link in any blog post or forum post.

Actually … you’ll have some trouble there. Lots of blogs and forums no longer link to GI.biz. Why?

Because anyone who follows the link only gets to see ONE SENTENCE of the article:

Hmm.

3. Block anyone who uses Gmail

If you try to sign-up on their site for an account using Gmail, the site refuses to “allow” you to create an account. It seems they have hard-coded a list of email domains that they consider “unacceptable” for game-developers to use.

Funny. I’ve been using gmail for my professional email for many years now. It seems a fairly common practice. Google’s … well … Google is a pretty well-known company these days. Their products are … well … kind-of popular. No?

I tried emailing the site admins to ask if there was a way I could create my account anyway – it’s fairly easy to check that my gmail account is bona fide. A funny thing happened.

Their website has no email addresses. Instead, it has a javascript that creates email-addresses on the fly. It’s a neat little javascript, and used differently would be pretty cool. But the way they chose to use it has two obvious effects:

It is impossible to use a web-mail client to email anyone at GamesIndustry.biz direct from the site (the right-click, “copy email address” won’t work because of the javascript)
Spammers have to look at the source-code to find the email address, and be a very very little creative with their bots (well within their capabilities these days)

Internet: 0, Newspaper/Web newsite: 1

O RLLY?

No, not really. I’ve got nothing against the news-site, and I’m well aware that this is only an echo of a bigger, louder noise: mainstream newspapers are in their dieing throes, lashing out at anyone and everyone in their panic.

But I’m suprised that a tech-industry focussed site chooses to fight so hard against the medium that so much of its own industry relies upon and worships. The first and third items above I would normally attribute to ignorance and just spending too little money for their web design team. But the middle one reflects an active decision to block the internet at large – even though the workaround is to create a “free” account, it’s an artificial barrier entirely of their own making.

I’ve spent a lot of time this year working with or around mainstream journalists, magazine staff, and authors. I’ve noticed a lot of this stuff going on. This is just a personal opinion, but … I humbly suggest that whenever ANY news/journalism site acts as though it’s at war with the very medium that the world + dog uses for spreading said news … that whatever else happens, it’s probably not going to end well.

amusing computer games games industry web 2.0

Tim Langdell sells a game on Amazon

Post author By adam
Post date July 8, 2010

…and Amazon’s intelligent recommendation engine leaps into action:

(if you don’t know who Tim Langdell is, and you work in the games industry, just Google him.

advocacy

A successful, smart, dumb person fails to defend the sale of sheet music

Post author By adam
Post date July 6, 2010
1 Comment on A successful, smart, dumb person fails to defend the sale of sheet music

There are many examples, every day, of people saying stupid things on the internet. But rarely do you see smart people write long reasoned arguments that they appear to wholeheartedly believe, yet are fundamentally untrue.

Jason Robert Brown has written a great post, and comes across as highly literate, reasonable, fair, etc. I was rooting for him from the start. Sounds like a nice guy.

But it’s long. So … it’s quite far down that you get to the tiny tiny key step in the exchange. This is the point where the author’s whole argument – a beautifully written argument – crumbles to dust:

“And I say to you that just because technology makes doing a bad thing easier doesn’t mean it’s suddenly not a bad thing.”

Funny. They said that of the Printing Press too. This is precisely what technology DOES do: it changes us. It changes society. Nothing is sacrosanct; our definitions of “good” and “bad” fluctuate. Not even the law is static. Ask any senior lawyer – the law is a fluid concept, defined by the society of its day.

There’s a fascinating exercise: to examine a period and place in history simply by looking at the prevailing laws of the day…

IMHO … at his core, Jason is in that group of people that still haven’t come to terms with the unavoidable side-effects of the “copy” button that exists on all digital-data devices. This is a storm that brewed for decades, and burst with music piracy. Everyone *ought* to be aware of it by now, even if in practice a lot of old-guard media and authors seem to be jamming their fingers in their ears and screaming “I CANT HEAR YOU! GO AWAY!”.

How much longer before posts such as his cease to become anything more than “fascinating historical record … of a time now passed”? Not much, I think…

(PS: I’m ignoring the very much NOT smart – and rather offensive – attempts to re-define words such as “theft” in support of a specious argument. I believe the author did that purely accidentally)

Uncategorized

Fixing Xcode’s Default Project templates (write iPhone apps more easily)

Post author By adam
Post date June 25, 2010
2 Comments on Fixing Xcode’s Default Project templates (write iPhone apps more easily)

This post shows how to fix one of the biggest time-wasting aspects of Xcode: the default project. Every time you start writing a new app, you first typically waste 15-30 minutes “un-****ing” Apple’s defaults. The defaults are terrible.

e.g. they are effectively unusable with Apple’s own SVN integration (Apple clearly doesn’t use SVN internally), unless you are the only person working on your project (“no teams allowed”). But the good news is … most of this can be fixed!

agile dev-process entrepreneurship programming startup advice

Startups: how NOT to write your website sales pages

Post author By adam
Post date June 15, 2010
2 Comments on Startups: how NOT to write your website sales pages

If your startup sells stuff via the internet (you have an online product, service, web-app, etc), this may be the single most important thing to get right (assuming your core idea, team, etc has inherent merit). And yet so many companies spend so much money doing it so wrong.

Why are modern software companies so bad at selling software? Today I was looking at Scrum tools (or Agile if you prefer), and I was struck by how hopeless some of their websites are. With some of these sites, I am sure that I could increase the sales of most of these companies by hundreds or thousands a year, just through basic principles of sales.

(and, obviously, HOWEVER you design your sales page, you should be using A/B testing to increase sales, conversion, etc. But A/B testing is no panacea: you still need the creativity and understanding to make the “big leaps” yourself)

Example: VersionOne

I’m going to pull out one example (by accident, the first I came across). Many others are much the same.
VersionOne.com

Before we go further, let me be clear what “kind” of customer I am. I’m currently looking for solutions for two commercial setups. One is for tiny projects on a case-by-case basis. This would be 5-seat licenses (worth up to $3000 at VersionOne’s current prices). The other is for a company-wide purchase of up to 30 licenses per annum (worth up to $15,000).

But, at the same time, my last full time job was running development for a large development studio. I was the primary reviewer and purchase-maker for software tools that were 50-person per annum immediately, and meant a commitment of up to 150 within 3 years. I’ve done a *lot* of this purchase-review process, on a lot of software.

My negative reactions to VersionOne’s sales are fairly consistent across the 3 profiles (although the reasons behind that are complex)

Landing page, from Google: the “don’t ask questions, you’re too stupid, just buy instead”, and “we love ourselves, we’re awesome” page

Page: http://pm.versionone.com/Trial_ScrumProjects.html?c-aws=trs&gr-tss&v-029abt&gclid=CNGTgsrEoaICFUcA4wod82WOwg

This has a *concealed* URL, so it pretends to be the front page, but actually lies, and redirects you to this page instead:

Ont this page, your website states it’s a commercial product, yet REFUSES to answer the single most important question: how much does this cost?

There aren’t even any LINKS to finding out about the product. It’s just “buy our product, or piss off”.

This page serves one purpose: lock the customer into a product they don’t want. You are “not allowed” to know the cost, you are only “allowed” to “signup now for a 30-day trial” – you have to commit yourself, and they’ll sting you with a price later, when you have no choice.

Word of advice: merely making something “free, for a few minutes, then I charge you” does NOT lower the customer’s barriers to purchase. For an ultra-long-term product like Project Management tools, it often has the *reverse* effect. The MINIMUM trial for a PM tool is “one project”. Most projects – using new tools – will need several months; 2 week to learn the tool, 10 weeks to run + launch + finish the project. The customer knows this; they know that a “30 day trial” is completely dishonest.

So, we use the navbar, and head to the “Product” page:

Product page: the “Want more info? Oh no you don’t! You’re too stupid, you’re just a customer!”

Page: http://www.versionone.com/Product/

I’ll sum up the stupidity and smug self-satisfied attitude of the person who wrote this page with just one quote, their final bullet point in the top-section:

“Accelerate agile adoption”

[hey! Look at that! I’m so clever – three words all beginning with “a”! They’re guaranteed to buy now! I’m so sharp, sometimes I cut myself]

Sigh. Ignoring the “infographic” which has been screen-captured with a font-size of 2pts (i.e. literally physically impossible to read), we try to do something useful with this page: review the product (we’ve given up on pricing, for now – they obviously don’t wany anyone to buy the product, but maybe the product is so good we can force our way past that?)

Product page, part 2: the “we don’t trust you, we’ll spam you with marketing crap”

Page: http://www.versionone.com/Product/

(below the infographic)

Just look at that page. It has literally zero information about the product, yet it’s the “product” page.

Instead, it has paragraphs of marketing crap. There’s no other term for it; let’s look at the first example.

Bullet-point: “Product Planning”

What does this mean? Absolutely nothing. BY DEFINITION, this is a whole website devoted to project-management-planning software used on projects that create products. Why do you repeat this, in such a childish gross genealization, as if it’s a “feature”?

Ah, but … actually, that’s not necessarily true. Scrum is often used on projects that are NOT generating a Product.

So, in fact, this lazy marketing title has already told some of the target-customers: “Don’t use our product. Go away”.

Let’s look at the text underneath the bullet:

“Plan and manage your requirements, epics, stories, and goals across multiple projects, products and teams.”

What is this – Dictionary.com? Why are you patronising me by telling me what you think “Product Planning” means, as an abstract concept? What kind of project manager – or engineer – is so stupid as to not know what it is they do on a day to day basis, and to feel happy that you’re telling them?

I WANT TO BUY YOUR SOFTWARE, NOT LISTEN TO YOUR PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE.

I suspect that the weak marketing person who wrote this copy thought it “looked nicer” to put features into a long sentence. Let’s look at that sentence, from a copy-writing perspective. It has eight separate phrases. EIGHT. The average sentence has 2-4. Concise sentences have 1-2. Waffle has 5 or more. This is a sales page; every sentence should be no more than 3 phrases. EIGHT! NO-ONE is going to pull useful information from that sentence.

Onto another problem with this page, for the customer who comes here: No screenshots. Anywhere.

OK. Take a deep breath. This is a company that, so far:
– wants to deceive us into locking-in to their product
– patronises us intensely
– works hard to hide features (check that “unreadable” infographic)

…but let’s put all that to one side, and drill down into the links from the Product page.

Features (1 of 8): “You can look, but don’t touch AND DON’T LOOK CLOSELY!”

Page: http://www.versionone.com/Product/Product_Planning.asp

Finally, if you follow one of the links from this page, you get to a page that contains some actual, concrete, info about the product. There’s even some screenshots!

Oh. BUT. You are “not allowed” to actually see the screenshots. They’ve been deliberately blurred-out a low-resolution, so that text is literally unreadable and there is NO WAY to judge the product. (NB: this is *after* you’ve clicked on the almost-full-size thumbnails in the page). They are then further blurred (to no purpose except to fit the Web Designer’s fetish for popup images) and embedded in the page.

Overall impression: this company knows it’s own product is not fit for purpose, and will do anything to stop the customer from finding that out until AFTER they’ve paid their money. Whatever you do DO NOT BUY VersionOne’s project-management software.

Final thoughts: First one is free

A decent usability person – or a really good web designer – would make huge sweeping changes to that site.

A flippant starter, something I’d personally try immediately (today): move the “see it; drive it; try it” buttons that hide in top-right of the site to CENTER STAGE, both on the Product page and the Google Landing page.

AND … I’d add a fourth button: “Buy it”.

What? There’s no “buy” link on this site? Yep. I think that eloquently sums up what a poor job this site does of MAKING MONEY FOR THE COMPANY.

(NB: and I *absolutely* would instigate A/B tests to prove – day by day, hour by hour – that my changes were having a noticeable effect on increasing sales to the site. If you don’t do that, then you’re just pissing into the wind. You have no idea, afterwards, whether your changes “worked”. See Sergio Zyman‘s book for more…)

Where do these terrible sites come from?

I believe that these often-amateurish websites come from one of two sources (possibly both):

1. Expensive “Web Design” agency that only cared about making it “beautiful” without understanding a single thing about the reality of sales. In the example I run through below, dead giveaways include: Popup images that are only 15% larger than the thumbnails that trigger them; grey-on-white text; very small font-sizes. All those are characteristic of visual designers who know nothing about product sales.

2. A marketing team that’s worked for big corporates (multinational, public companies) and thinks that the most important thing in their job is to “clone” the website of “a real company – you know, like Microsoft”, and pretend to “be like the big boys”. They have no idea why those websites look the way they do, and don’t bother to ask themselves; they just blindly clone it. In the example below, dead giveaways include: 12 pages to describe a simple product where 3 would have been more than sufficient; hiding information at all costs; never committing to a list of features; using “freeform text” instead of simple “bullet points” to describe the product.

entrepreneurship web 2.0

You just answered your own question…

Post author By adam
Post date June 13, 2010

From one of those strange wending web-browsing sessions that started as innocent “work-related research” and ended up following the history of CDC…

IBM, 1964:

How is it that this tiny company of 34 people —including the janitor — can be beating us when we have thousands of people?

…to which Cray reportedly quipped:

You just answered your own question.

(and, incidentally, FUD – a phrase I associated with the 1990’s and linux – apparently dates back to the early 20th century. It puts in an appearance here, in the 1960’s, and lead to CDC winning a lawsuit for $600 million. Nice. Can you imagine someone pulling that one off against Microsoft in the 1995-2005 era? Or Apple, today? I doubt it…)

amusing bitching

“Some people are telling me I should just let it go”

Post author By adam
Post date June 11, 2010
2 Comments on “Some people are telling me I should just let it go”

Some people are telling me I should just let it go, but honestly I just can’t do that. I’d rather quit.

(As they say: It’s funny, becaus it’s true. If you develop for Apple platforms, that eloquently sums up how Apple (currently) appears to everyone they partner with: a childish, passive-aggressive approach to everything)

fixing your desktop

OS X: A burst of mouse-y awesomeness

Post author By adam
Post date June 7, 2010

Apple added some of the earliest, best *hardware* support for mouse and trackpad gestures (2-finger swipes, pinch/zoom, etc), but has been very slow to add support for gestures to their *software*. Out of the box, OS X can do almost nothing with them. Previously, I’d used the quick-n-dirty-but-it-works “MultiClutch” app to make OS X much more usable.

But I broke my laptop, bought a new desktop, and had to re-install everything. Today, I found this awesome app:

http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=1619

Why’s it so awesome? Well, plug in an apple mighty mouse, hit “Show Live View” and start touching your mouse. You can visually track all 4 touch points, and try out a variety of funky custom gestures.

NB: this isn’t old-fashioned “move the mouse in circles” gestures. Oh no. This is the new-style “glide your fingers over the surface of the mouse” gestures (treat the top of your mouse like an iPhone).

Great little app. Even has a decent UI, and options for exporting/importing settings, so you can setup some very complex setups on a per-app basis, share them with colleagues, etc.

fixing your desktop

“but Gmail said I don’t have to do anything”

Post author By adam
Post date May 26, 2010
2 Comments on “but Gmail said I don’t have to do anything”

(Google just made a major change to Gmail accounts in the UK, now that they’ve settled a trademark case brought against them. This is great – it will simplify mailing list management for a lot of people, and everyone in the world can (legally) be “@gmail.com”)

However … I’ve now had two friends write the above (“it said I didn’t have to do anything”) when asking for help with the changeover. Hmm. When the message came up for me first time, I got that impression too, but looking at it more closely, it doesn’t explicitly say that:

Anway, two friends in quick succession is a suggestion that I’m going to have to answer this question a few times. Instead, from now on I’ll just send them a link to this blog post :). Copy/paste of my original response:

Sorry, Google’s instructions aren’t very clear. You need to click the “more info/FAQ” link to get the “true” instructions, which include this gem:

“Mailing Lists: If you have signed up to send mail to mailing lists on behalf of your @googlemail.com address, you might need to re-register for the group using your @gmail.com address. Google Groups will automatically accept your new address.”

…although Google is being disingenuous when they say “might need to” – they know that *most* mailing lists will require you to manually change address, re-signup, or ask the admins to change your address :).

I like the visual approach that Google took here – the page is simple, clearly formatted, etc – but it’s tragic that it fails to include the critical information. “Breaking every mailing list you are on” should not be relegated to “Have questions? Not sure you want to switch?” – it should be right there on the main screen with a big red warning sign. I’m intrigued as to how the page was designed: it’s hard to believe that the usability people missed something as obvious as this. Are mailing lists not used that much by Gmail users? Even harder to believe. Have mailing lists fixed the gmail/googlemail problem? Possibly, but none of the ones I administer have (mostly for orgs that are using mainstream “free” list managers).