Author: adam

Categories
computer games games industry marketing massively multiplayer

What’s wrong with EA: EA Mythic, and the FAIL of WAR

I’ll do a follow-up post in a minute with the anecdote that lead me to this. But here’s the general opinion/analysis first.

Project history (skip if you know all about Warhammer Online and Mythic already)

Huge project (cost in excess of $50 million to develop), based on a 20-year-old IP that is known and loved around the world, the game launched last year to a big marketing campaign.

Initial sales figures were excellent.

First-month renewals were dire, the company lost large amounts of money, they laid off large numbers of staff, and the CEO quit/resigned. They are now (late 2009) into the key point in such a product’s lifecycle where it has one last chance to succeed.

The parent company has recently laid off 1500 staff across different countries and products, but also just bought a small studio for $400 million.

The problem with Mythic/WAR today

Here’s what’s going on right now (based on observation, guesswork, and personal experience of similar situations at other companies):

They are spending large amounts of money to acquire new customers, while simultaneously erecting artificial barriers to turn away those new customers.

They are running loud marketing campaigns to attract those who’ve already rejected the product, while simultaneously creating powerful negative publicity for their own product.

In other words, this is a company that has a failing product AND has a non-unified product strategy, and yet is continuing to spend heavily. This strategy is known as “pure, blind, Hope”. It looks extremely similar to what happened with TR towards the end of it’s (brief, painful) lifetime:

“let’s work harder, do more, spend more! Cross your fingers, chant the secret mantra, and hope it all turns out for the best!”

Hope is not a strategy. All that can happen is that they might get lucky despite all the mistakes; there might be enough good left that they can survive this foolishness long enough to ditch the deadweight and pull themeslves out of the mire.

The inevitable PlayFish comment…

Maybe this would be a good project for the new hires from PlayFish to start work on? The essentials are there – and if the product could be made to succeed, it is a huge cash-cow. It could single-handedly pay-off a lot of the debt on that $400 million…

Categories
conferences databases massively multiplayer network programming system architecture

Speaker Evaluations – GDC Austin 2009

Conferences don’t make these public.

But they should.

So … here are the evaluations (from the audience) for our panel session at AGDC 09.

Judge for yourself whether you want to attend any future sessions featuring us again (Adam Martin, Bill Dalton, Rick Lambright, Joe Ludwig, Marty Poulin).

Head Count: 74; Evaluations: 32 (43% response rate)

  • Overall rating of the presentation – 88% (AVG: 86%)
  • How relevant was the topic to you? – 86% (AVG: 84%)
  • How well did this class meet your expectations? – 94% (AVG: 84%)
  • Would you recommend this session to a colleague? – 90% (AVG: 84%)
  • Evaluate the speakers’ ability to communicate – 94% (AVG: 86%)
  • If there were visual aids (slides) how were they? – 74% (AVG: 60%)

All of those are above average, and I’m glad that a particularly high number would recommend the session to their colleagues.

It seems that we did particularly well on fulfilling the remit (very high number for “met expectations”), and that our speakers had an awesome ability to communicate (almost 10% higher than average for the other speakers at the conference).

Audience Comments

  1. The most entertaining session I attended, but didn’t sacrifice information value.
  2. Interesting format, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this, but it is time consuming
  3. Good stuff
  4. Slow, confused start lost valuable time for Q&A
  5. Should have done middleware
  6. Only 3 topics covered. Expected others

Comment 4 – yeah, something I’m unhappy about too, (it wasn’t our fault, it was the people running the conference), but there was nothing for it but to grin and carry on. Someone screwed-up the radio microphones, and we lost a lot of time at the start waiting for them to fix it. There was nothing we could do – they had connected the mics from a different room to *our* speakers. We didn’t find out until the person in the other room started talking, and it all came out through our speakers :(.

Comment 6 – we covered 4 topics (oops, audience can’t count :P). We all wanted to do more, but at GDC conferences, the organizers only give us 1-hour slots. With 4 speakers + moderator, I think that was pretty good, especially considering the time we lost at the start.

Perhaps someone will clone this format for a future conference (seems a good idea), and try to get a 2-hour slot for it?

Categories
advocacy games industry startup advice

Focussed work-hours, and the Studio Manifesto

David Sirlin’s just done a writeup of Flashbang studios recent experiment with work hours:

“The first part of their theory is that we really only get about 2 hours of seriously focused, amazing-quality work per day–if we’re lucky. Maybe you can get 2.5 or 3 sometimes, but that’s pushing it. There are so many distractions and blockers, so many times when you’re too tired or hungry or upset about something, or whatever. Flashbang is saying just be real here: accept that you’re only going to be able to do amazing work for a short time each day. Knowledge work as it’s called, is the type of thing where you could spend 20 hours on a problem and not solve it, but just *one* hour of your fully charged genius-time could solve it.”

Unfortunately (tragically!), David’s set his blog to be “no comments”, so there’s no public followup discussion (you can try registering in the forums. On a different page. Not even linked. Have fun with that!)

There are serious flaws with taking general conclusions from this experiment – as someone from TCE pointed out, there’s probably some Hawthorne Effect going on – but I think it’s an interesting data point to add to the game studio manifesto. Specifically because it’s from a games company, and the particular set of changes they experimented with is different from most of those we’ve seen tried before.

Categories
entrepreneurship games industry iphone jussi vc deals europe social networking startup advice web 2.0

So, who’s going to buy Zynga?

(for the three people who haven’t heard yet, EA just bought PlayFish, for circa $400 million)

Three things I have to say on this:

  1. Mainstream games industry people question it’s value
  2. Yes, of course it was worth it
  3. What Would Zynga Do?

Mainstream games industry people question it’s value

I’ve seen a lot of people from the mainstream industry (i.e. consoles, PC games, handheld etc – eerything EXCEPT iPhone and Facebook) incredulous, unconvinced it was worth it. This was the case even with the rumoured $250 million valuation from a month ago (c.f. Nicholas Lovell’s post on that).

There’s also some discussion over at TheChaosEngine (private forum for professionals in the games industry) on the same topic, with similar levels of scepticism about the value.

The main reference points are traditional games companies and their sale prices. That’s where this goes wrong – and it’s symptomatic of something that hampers the games industry: a lack of understanding of the business side of games. For most people in the industry, this doesn’t matter – they’re making games, not selling or funding them. But for the people managing games companies, far too many of them need to get an MBA and learn the essentials of sales, marketing, revenue, and shareholder-value – and how that applies to their own day-jobs.

Yes, of course it was worth it

Reproducing some of what I’ve already written on TCE, since it’s non-public:

There’s three things driving the valuation of PF:

  1. A solid business, in business-terms (c.f. Nicholas Lovell’s “6 reasons why Playfish is a steal at $400m”)
  2. Quality content-producer, in games / media terms
  3. Consistent success, in comparitive terms

Playfish is in the top 3 companies dominating the Social Games sector. They are the ONLY one of those companies that set out to dominate the SG sector – the other two happened purely by accident. PF was architected to take over this sector, and is succeeding at it.

From a game-design perspective, the entire business model for Zynga and SGN has been “keep bailing!”, and they’ve so far bailed faster than they were sinking (where “bailing” means “using marketing and sales ability to make up for severe product deficiency”). That might sound like I’m being derogatory – but compare it to all the “worthy” games companies who bailed *slower* than they were sinking; at the end of the day, who’s the smart one?

But good sales/marketing strategies are easy to dissect and clone, in a way that good content is not.

Part of the demand for PF is that a lot of people look at it and say: this is SGN/Zynga, except they make good games. Yes, they’re not 1st – but any idiot could take PF’s current position, throw $50m of marketing budget at it, and easily surpass Zynga. They will own this market, sooner or later – PF is fundamentally strong where Z is fundamentally fragile. (although Z’s “fragile” is still an order of magnitude stronger than most traditional games companies).

Just to be clear: I have a lot of respect for Zynga and SGN, they’ve achieved a heck of a lot. But they’re sharks. They’ve always been sharks. Comparing to modern standards of game-design, they’ve never had great product. Instead, they’ve been extremely canny, aggressive, vicious, and cash-driven – and they’ve shown how successful and profitable you can be with those things. If someone had asked “how well can you do with a weak content company if you’re exceptional on the business-side?” then these companies boldly step forth and demonstrate that the answer is: “very well indeed”.

But this is a new, novel market. Maybe there’s nothing special about PlayFish?

Well, apart from thriving in a new market against some of the toughest competition in the world, look at the comparitives. Compare PF with – say – Kongregate. That was founded by the ex TD of Pogo after years at Pogo/EA, and was expected to recreate the success of Pogo and expand on it (hundreds of millions of dollars revenue). They’ve fallen a long, long way short. PF was founded years later and is now doing perhaps 20 times the revenue (just guessing based on Kong’s last funding round and how long ago it was).

PF’s success *looks like* it’s “probably” no accident. IIRC (and I haven’t checked, I’m going from memory here, so I might be very wrong) this is the same management team that built and later floated GluMobile. Putting that into perspective:

  1. these guys have ridden the wave of an emerging market to create on of the big successes
  2. these guys started from nothing and ended up with an IPO
  3. these guys then started all over again, from scratch, in a new market … and succeeded AGAIN.
  4. …and they did it very quickly

What Would Zynga Do?

This, then, is the million-dollar question: who’s going to buy Zynga?

Zynga have followed a strategy of buying-or-burying every small competitor who came along. As I noted above, despite being rich, hugely successful, and growing fast, they have some internal fragility that PF has never had. Where PF *could*, in theory, get more aggressive, Zynga is already barrelling along flat-out on that front. Where PF has a good reptuation they can trade on, Zynga has a poor one that’s not worth much now PF is part of EA.

If it had been a smaller company that bought PF, maybe – maybe – Zynga could have afforded to try a reverse-takeover to hoist themselves up, and hold on to their top spot in Social Games.

But EA/PF is too complementary a pairing; together, they’re too effective for Zynga to get away with that. Zynga *might* have hoped, with a different competitor, that acquisition by EA would lead to a breaking-up of the company’s value. EA has done this many a time to other acquisitions: small companies vanish when eaten by big ones. But as I noted above (and as Nicholas referred to when claiming that PF’s team could “turn around the tanker” that is EA), PF’s team have enough experience and personal wealth that it is very unlikely they’d disappear inside EA. They *might* retire (despite the golden handcuffs, many EA acquisitions have lead to de-facto retirement of their founders) – but PF is so young as a company that I doubt they’re tired of it just yet.

Looking back at Zynga, this seems to be a company that sees itself as the Alpha Male. I can’t believe they’d settle for second place. So, Zynga needs to be bought. And, unlike PF, Zynga may actually benefit from being dominated by their acquirer (try and wipe out some of that bad reputation; perhaps fundamentally alter the internals of the business, make it into a good content-generator? Where PF is adding Zynga-esque marketing and sales ability, could Zynga add PF-esque content-creation/content-quality ability?).

Who?

I’ve no idea :).

But, looking around, Zynga has greatly underperformed on iPhone. There are a lot of media and consumer giants around that expect to have no problems making lots of money on iPhone. Maybe that would make a good deal, someone already exploring, or set to explore, iPhone, who doesn’t need Zynga, but who could expand Zynga on to iPhone in a huge way. That could even let Zynga save some face in the deal (“there’s nothing about our business approach we wanted to change, it’s just that this was an opportunity to dominate TWO platforms instead of ONE”).

Categories
iphone

Twitter: redglassesapps

A new twitter account you can use to keep up with all the iPhone stuff I’m doing:

http://twitter.com/redglassesapps

We’ll be posting app releases and iphone-dev links.

Categories
games industry massively multiplayer web 2.0

Online Games as a Billion-Dollar Business

Autumn 2012: NCsoft just cancelled City of Heroes – a game that back in 2009 (when this post was written) was doing fine (although nothing stellar; it was a mid-tier MMO). If you’re interested in my thoughts on that, I’ve written a 2012 followup on the CoH situation in particular. NB: I no longer work in the MMO industry, although I still work in games dev

I spotted some good commentary on NCWest’s City of Heroes/Villains in 2009 today – modulo one or two quirks (umm … does Cryptic have anything to do with CoX any more? I thought this is now NCsoft’s game; as the publisher, they bought out Cryptic’s ownership last year, no?).

But one theme in particular came up that I want to hilight: why is NCsoft Korea so callous / vicious / greedy / demanding / single-minded / stupid when it comes to the profitability of their games? (NB: those aren’t my terms, as you’ll see by the end of this post – but that’s how I’ve heard people describe them, while trying and failing to understand what’s going on)

Continue reading “Online Games as a Billion-Dollar Business”
Categories
agile dev-process MMOG development programming startup advice web 2.0

How to FAIL, from the world of Open Source: Eclipse

The problem

It’s a great piece of openness to put your bug lists in the public domain. It makes it easier for your customers and partners to make decisions that save you time because they can see what’s coming and when (and save you money in reduced support requests). It saves you money in that you get free QA / testing from your users.

The downside is that it exposes to the world the places where you are especially incompetent, lazy, or just plain self-centred.

This is a recurring theme I’ve seen with corporates looking at both Open Source and also Web 2.0:

We say we’re the best, but secretly I believe we’re the worst; if we expose ourselves to the public, people will ridicule our mediocrity, and refuse to do business with us.

Also … I will probably get fired because my colleagues and my boss will finally realise what a clusterfuck I preside over on a daily basis

Eclipse, and a tale of two bugs

I was going to log two high-impact bugs that Eclipse has had for several years. Then I did a search on that area of Eclipse, and realised that the current Eclipse maintainers don’t give a **** about this whole section of the IDE – some of the core bugs we see every day were logged in 2001, and are still open:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=&content=syntax+coloring

What you find when you do some basic research

If you go looking through the bug history for some of the more “obvious” bugs there, you often find little gems of passive-aggressiveness from maintainers. That’s an exceptionally effective way of making sure people stop helping and supporting any Open-Source project…

You’ll also find endless re-logging of the same old bugs from 10 years ago, revolving around the basic problem that Eclipse lets you set everything you could possibly imagine … EXCEPT the colours that it prints text in.

(all IDEs let you set the colours; most dont give you enough control over the other parts; Eclipse fails on the basic challenge, and succeeds on the advanced challenge)

This wouldn’t be so bad, except that its default is very bright with low-contrast – i.e. very hard to read on laptops when outside, and bad to read for long periods of time. As of about 5 years ago, you are finally “allowed” to set the colours yourself – except that the app breaks if you do, because they “didn’t bother” to allow you to change the colours on 20% or so of things.

Final thoughts

The next time someone – especially at a corporate – resists openness and transparency … in any form … ask yourself this:

What have they got to hide?

Often, once you ask yourself that question of the right person at the right time, it very quickly becomes obvious what they’re hiding (if not why). A little more digging, and you can pry open the can of worms, and see what trouble they’ve been up to…

(Incidentally (and unsurprisingly), in the face of the point-blank refusal of Eclipse developers to make basic usability concessions across the board, I didn’t bother logging either of the two bugs I’d found)

Categories
fixing your desktop

Firefox bug: Who deleted my cache?

There’s a major bug in Firefox (allthough I left at “normal” severity, leave it to the maintainers to judge) that’s been around since Version 2.0 (maybe earlier). I’m *pretty* sure that Mozilla (i.e. precursor to Firefox) did not have this bug. It’s been bugging me for years, and I’ve seen lots of people complain about it, but the latest release still hasn’t fixed it, so I went hunting. No bugs found.

Not any more:

Bug 525266: Disk cache is deleted when browser restarts

Continue reading “Firefox bug: Who deleted my cache?”
Categories
fixing your desktop

Eclipse v3.5 / OS X: Breaking the fonts is “non optional”

EDIT: the fix that worked for most (not all) people on the internet … doesn’t work for me. Even with reboot. I have no idea how to fix this now :(.

Look what they’ve done to the latest release of Eclipse: (old version at top – rendering CORRECTLY on high-res monitor; new version below – rendering BLURRY on high-res monitor)
Eclipse aliasing 3.5
(note the side-by-side compare with the old version – in the same screenshot – so presumably Eclipse 3.5 is using a different font-rendering call than Eclipse 3.4).

i.e. it’s now unusable on OS X. Unless you enjoy headaches and probable permanent damage to your eyesight (oh, you like that? OK. Good for you. Leave the rest of us – with decent LCD monitors – alone, please).

Continue reading “Eclipse v3.5 / OS X: Breaking the fonts is “non optional””
Categories
design entity systems games design massively multiplayer programming

Entity Systems are the Future of MMOs Part 5

(Start by reading Entity Systems are the Future of MMOs Part 1)

It’s been a long time since my last post on this topic. Last year, I stopped working for a big MMO publisher, and since then I’ve been having fun doing MMO Consultancy (helping other teams write their games), and iPhone development (learning how to design and write great iPhone apps).

Previously, I posed some questions and said I’d answer them later:

  • how do you define the archetypes for your entities?
  • how do you instantiate multiple new entities from a single archetype?
  • how do you STORE in-memory entities so that they can be re-instantiated later on?

Let’s answer those first.

Continue reading “Entity Systems are the Future of MMOs Part 5”
Categories
iphone programming

How to sort an NSDictionary on iPhone

(because I googled it, and on the first page of hits I couldn’t find any copy/pasteable source for this common problem, here’s an answer with (poor) public domain source code)

Continue reading “How to sort an NSDictionary on iPhone”
Categories
iphone

How to make an iPhone static library – part 2

UPDATE: Apple changed everything (again) without telling developers (again) and broke everything (again).

Current versions of Xcode (the minimum that Apple allows you to use) will *not* work with the architecture-link part of this blog post.

Instead, see this StackOverflow question I asked (and answered) with an updated technique: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3520977/build-fat-static-library-device-simulator-using-xcode-and-sdk-4

Intro

This is NOT a perfect way of doing static libs on iPhone; however, it does work – I’ve used it in iPhone apps that are on the App Store right now – and I’ve been sitting on this post for over a month, improving it, tweaking it. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s better to put it out onto Google than to keep it quiet any longer.

NB: I’m not a Mac developer; the iPhone is relatively new to me. I apologize in advance for any stupid mistakes I make here where I should have known better!

PS: If you don’t read this blog normally, you might be dismayed at the amount of whinging about Apple’s less-than-perfect code and documentation in this post. Sorry. Let me just say that I am *trying* to be even-handed – and that that requires not only praising Apple, but also calling out their bad acts where relevant. I and many of my friends and ex-colleagues have suffered hours and days of wasted time – ON THIS TOPIC ALONE – because of tiny things that Apple staff “forgot to mention” or “didn’t bother testing”. It’s understandable, but it’s also painful.

Continue reading “How to make an iPhone static library – part 2”
Categories
iphone programming

How to make an iPhone static library – part 1

I’ve now deployed iPhone static libraries in two (live) applications, and numerous updates.

This is a process that is seemingly (*) 90% undocumented by Apple, despite being (IMHO) absolutely essential for any professional iPhone developer.

UPDATE: Apple changed everything (again) without telling developers (again) and broke everything (again).

Current versions of Xcode (the minimum that Apple allows you to use) will *not* work with the architecture-link part of this blog post.

Instead, see this StackOverflow question I asked (and answered) with an updated technique: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3520977/build-fat-static-library-device-simulator-using-xcode-and-sdk-4

[(*) – if there’s docs, then I’ve not found it in over 6 months of googling, searching Xcode doc libraries, and asking everyone I know. I will feel stupid if it’s there and I haven’t found it, but I have honestly tried very hard to find it!]

I have sought help in numerous expert forums and mailing lists – and generally discovered that no-one else is quite sure how to do it either, although I’ve seen some funky ideas and methods that others have come up with.

Through trial and error I’m pretty sure I know how to do it now – but I still have no idea what the “correct” approach is – so I’m writing up my best knowledge here, and I’m going to spread it to as many people as possible to get feedback from the 30,000+ other iPhone developers around the world.

Continue reading “How to make an iPhone static library – part 1”
Categories
bitching computer games games design

Will Wright is … lazy?

Let’s get this straight: if we judge him solely by output (games), then he is not a genius – he’s lazy. Everyone knows the 1% inspiration/99% perspiration quote, and – looking at the last shipped title – IMHO it’s inexcusable to ship crap and pretend it’s OK. You can’t just abrogate responsibility once you stick your name on Spore…

(disclaimer: when I say “lazy” I don’t mean universally; I mean that in at least one crucial aspect, he failed to apply simple due diligence to his own named project; arguably, it’s a kind of laziness in itself not to have checked this stuff, or a kind of cowardice not to have insisted it be done “correctly”; but this post is really about the overall impact of the game, and the way that an individual, if they were to stamp their persona on a project – and expect us to read their persona from interacting with the product – comes across. I have no idea what Will Wright is like as an individual; this is a post about Will Wright as the PR entity…)

Continue reading “Will Wright is … lazy?”
Categories
games design games industry recruiting

Getting a job in the games industry: its all about skill

Tim Schafer recently posted scans of his rejection letters over the years from various tech and games companies he applied to. There’s one from Atari, one from Hewlett Packard – and, eventually, his acceptance letter from Lucasfilm / Lucasarts.

But far, far more important to this post is the cover-letter that Tim sent to Lucasfilm (it’s a truly special cover letter (go have a look now, before you read on)).

There’s also a rich array of comments at the end of Tim’s post. The HR manager (now head of HR at Pixar) who handled his job application all those years ago even chimes in to say hi. But, again, that’s not what I found interesting; what I liked was the large number of comments from wannabe game developers trying to get into the industry right now.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Reading those comments, here’s a couple of things I noticed:

  • They feel “inspired” and full of “renewed hope” / “confidence” that they have a chance of getting into the industry at all
  • Lots of wishful comments fishing for a confirmation that this technique would “still work today”, while declaring that they’re sure it doesn’t (supposedly demonstrating their realism)
  • The realization that lack of experience is no barrier to becoming an industry legend; coincidentally, most of the people saying this have no experience of their own

…and here’s the conclusions that leapt to my mind:

  • New entrants to the industry are convinced it’s very hard to “break in”; they sound by turns cynical and hopeless. This is merely to get a *job*, not to actually achieve anything. Ouch
  • No-one seems to have told them how easy it can be (how straight-forward it often is)
  • They’re guessing at the reasons this was successful, and are picking the wrong ones (hint: what worked for Tim still works today, if anything *even more* than it did 20 years ago)
  • Their understanding of what it takes to become a major industry figure is back-to-front

Why was Tim successful? How can you re-create that today?

OK, so Tim was: funny, dedicated, and inventive.

But we’ve all heard (I hope) of many occasions when any or all three of those have not only failed to win people jobs but have got them ridiculed (sometimes even had their desperate exploits broadcast at the company or industry level). I’m not thinking simply of the games industry here – although I noticed one the other week where a hopeful Quest Designer tried it on with Blizzard (they spent a thousand dollars on fancy-printed design docs for their proposed Raid Dungeon, drove to Blizzard’s offices, and spent a couple of days sitting on the sidewalk handing copies to staff as they arrived / left the office each day).

Rather, I was thinking of all the stories of people doing everything from sending in their Resume/CV wrapped in shiny metallic paper, to sending gifts (including alcohol) to the hiring managers, to stuff that comes dangerously close to stalking.

Reading the comments on Tim’s post, in at least a couple of cases, I’m not convinced that the posters see the difference between those disasters and what Tim did. I don’t know any of the people involved, but I do know there are positions we’ve recruited for in the past 5 years where a cover letter akin to Tim’s would have gone a very long way (possibly even “all the way”) towards single-handedly getting us to hire someone.

IMHO, it’s all about skill and enthusiasm (although few companies hire on enthusiasm, so we’ll just stick to the “skill” part)

What Tim shows is skill for the *underlying* things that his (potential) employers would love to see him employ in his day job. That requires showing ALL of the following:

  • Personal interest (he plays games. He plays them enough for the next part to be possible)
  • Understanding of a genre (he understands a genre well enough to pastiche it effectively; you can’t do that if all you’ve done is dabble in it (unless you’re particularly skilled at literary/experience analysis – which is great, we want that too! ))
  • Ability to polish (look at the images; notice how he sends up each of LA and Silicon Valley in panels 2a and 2b, and makes out San Rafael to be the land of Nature and Sunshine and happiness)
  • Knowing when to stop (again, look at the images. The “volume” of detail is actually very small; apart from the final image, they are very simple, and quick to execute)

One thing we don’t know, that I’d love to know, is the timing: how long after the phone call did he send this in? I’ve known candidates to take *more than a month* to complete something that was offered (by them!) in a job interview. WTF? If you say you have something, we assume you either have it, or will complete it imminently. i.e. days – a week at the most.

TO GET A JOB IN THE GAMES INDUSTRY, ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS …

Let’s see how simple I can make this…

Make a game.

3 words. Not bad. I think that’s pretty clear.

Sadly, most people misunderstand it *completely*.

Look back at the rest of this blog post; it all lead up to this. When college students ask senior people, and hiring managers, what to do to get their first job, and we say “make a game; make several games”, our reasons for saying that are all encapsulated in what I’ve already said.

Even if you’re in a discipline that has read-made degrees (Programming: Computer Science; Art: Fine Art, etc), what you’re usually showing with your degree is a small amount of education and a large amount of skill / aptitude. University/College rarely teaches the things you’ll need every day to do your job, but it prepares you in a more general way to be/become skilled more quickly.

Imagining a game is easy; if you like games, you should be able to imagine games you’d like to play, or make.

Making a game is easy, if you only ever make a game that fits within your abilities and resources. I’ve made games in under a day. Some of them were even fun! ;). I have a friend who *frequently* writes entire games in a single evening. He’s a programmer, with no art or game-design skills – but some of what he makes looks gorgeous and is great fun; he cheats; so should you. So … never tell me that making a game is “beyond” you; just shrink your ambition to fit.

(incidentally, “I can’t program” is not a valid excuse; pre-teen children regularly learn to program – (IIRC it’s still in the national curriculum in most western countries, although it’s not labelled “computer programming”) – and if they can handle it, what’s wrong with you that you’re too stupid/lazy to do it too? No-one’s asking you to learn highly optimized C++, that would be insane. But … all you need is Basic, PHP, Javascript, or something similar)

Finishing making a game – removing all the “doesn’t actually work” parts – is hard. But everyone who’s been there should understand: it’s *hard* to include all the bits that weren’t fun for you to make. It’s hard to force yourself to check all the buttons still work every time you change something. It’s hard to force yourself to write in-game instructions *and keep them up-to-date* each time you change the game-design, or add/remove a feature.

And that’s a big part of why we judge you on it. Because if you can do that – more than anything else – all the other problems are smaller, more tractable.

Categories
conferences games industry GDC 2009

GDC 2010: I (probably) won’t see you there

Last month, I ran a novel panel session at Austin GDC, which was well-attended and (apparently) well-liked.

I came up with the format myself, very different from normal panels, and spent a couple of months fleshing it out with the panellists, discussing different ways we could improve on it, different approaches, etc. I made a lot of mistakes with it, but I was pleased with how it went for a first attempt.

We filled about 1/2 of the room, I think the capacity was around 200. I’d hoped for more – but … we were scheduled on the second-to-last slot, on the last day of the conference, when lots of people had already gone home.

We were also scheduled at the same time as Nicole Lazzaro, and Damion Schubert. They are both exceptional – and exceptionally popular – speakers.

So … I was pretty happy we got the crowd that we did :).

It all went so well that I thought the organizers of the “main” GDC – the one in San Francisco – might like something similar. So, I contacted them (not exact email, some details snipped):

I just ran a really good session at Austin GDC, and thought that something similar might work really well for GDC 2010. And several people who want something like this at GDC have asked me to at least try :).

It was a novel format that I came up with originally, and then hammered out the details with the panellists over a couple of months until we were happy with it. Now we’ve live-tested it, I could do it even better next time :).

Is it worth me taking this further? I’d have to find a new set of panellists, and work out a new topic appropriate to GDC (as opposed to AustinGDC).

Here’s the salient part of the response I got:

Thank you for your email. If you’ve already done this session I would advise against a repeat at GDC, especially if it’s a panel proposal because panels are very hard to advance to Phase 2 and get accepted.

(NB: the wording is “I would advise”, but the email itself didn’t provide any of the details or info I’d need on how to submit this panel, so I read this as a polite but fairly strong: “no”).

My first reaction was that I’m quite relieved NOT to spend all the time and effort it takes finding another 4 top-class speakers, persuading them to speak, working with them on format and content, and organizing everything in the months leading up to the conference.

(for which – unlike most industries – GDC speakers get nothing in return. Oh, you do get an invite to a party. But it’s just like the 15 other parties that all the non-speakers get to go to. So … not a huge benefit, really)

I’m not going to hassle them to try to change their minds.

But then I thought a bit more, and wondered why it was that the conference organizers aren’t biting my arm off, demanding that we do this again? (assuming the session was as well-received as I thought it was). They’re always deflecting criticisms of “poor” sessions with “we’re dependent on the quality of what gets submitted”. In the past year, I’ve also seen a couple of friends get some of the highest-rated feedback from past GDC’s and yet seemingly the organizers don’t want them back again.

So, I’m left wondering what the strategy is here. There must – surely – be *some* strategy for a money making machine like GDC (this thing is making 6-figure profits each year). I’m just confused as to what it is.

Also, as an aside, since I rarely go to conferences these days unless I’m speaking at them, I probably won’t be at GDC next year. This year, surprisingly many people asked me why I was bothering to go to GDC at all (despite the fact I was a speaker :)). By the tenth time of being asked, I’d realised that my justifications owed as much to nostalgia and socialisation as to a useful use of my time. I was already feeling dubious about turning up next year, even before I heard my proposals had been rejected. So, just to be clear: I’m not skipping it because of this response from the organizers, although if they’d been keen for me to give the talk, it would have forced my hand into going.

Categories
computer games conferences dev-process massively multiplayer MMOG development network programming

AGDC-2009: Killing the Sacred Cows of MMO Technology

Slides for our panel arehere: “Killing mmo tech sacred cows.pdf”.

Final panel was myself (moderating) and speakers: Bill Dalton (Bioware), Rick Lambright (Gazillion), Joe Ludwig (Valve), Marty Poulin (Shady Logic).

PLEASE NOTE: WE DON’T REALLY ADVOCATE EXTREMIST RESPONSES TO TECHNICAL QUESTIONS; THIS WAS JUST A BIT OF FUN. (Mostly).

Categories
iphone programming

How much do iPhone developers cost (contract)?

(this is off the top of my head, probably some glaring errors; it’s intended to give a general idea rather than be authoritative. How do YOU calculate your hourly rate for contracts?)

It seems there’s an increasing number of people around who have no prior experience of this, and are taking their first steps into freelance/contracting while doing iPhone dev in particular.

There are also an increasing number of clients offering impossibly low daily rates. I’m sure some of these are sharks taking advantage of first-time contractors, BUT … I know from personal experience that some are merely naive. Sometimes, it’s just that they are themselves ignorant of the realities of contracting.

So, to help first-time contractors, and to help clients trying to work out why they’re having trouble getting decent people on their seemingly “sensible” budget, here’s some quick thoughts on the standard practice on contract pricing.

By the way, to answer the titular question: Bad ones – about £250 / $350 a day; good ones – about £750-£1250 / (guess, but I haven’t asked any USA guys recently: circa $1200-$1500?) a day; Really really bad ones who have no idea what they’re doing and are probably teaching themselves programming as they go, on *your* budget – about £200 / $200 a day.

(note: the weak (disappointing, but bearable) and the worst (total waste of your time and money) are duking it out on price at the bottom end of the scale, that’s no coincidence. That’s all they can sell themselves on)

1. Salary is not remuneration

By law, in the UK and throughout Europe, companies *must* provide employees with cash and benefits above and beyond their salary. Whatever your official salary, the govt mandates that your employer pays you X% more than that (X varies from place to place and situation to situation).

X is made up of, among other things: “employer” tax, “employer” pension payments, sick pay, holiday pay (typically around 10% of base salary!), local govt taxes, various kinds of mandatory insurance, etc.

Some people get company bonuses as well, often from 1% to 20%.

Of course, at most companies, you also get a whole load of stuff “for free”. The rule of thumb at many companies is that *every* employee costs approx 10% on top of their base salary – and that any bonuses, benefits, etc, are extra on top.

TOTAL: 120%-150%

Finding work is an unpaid activity

Contractors are required to spend some number of hours every month looking for their next contract. This can start simple – trawling websites – but even when a good match is found, the contractor has to take UNPAID time off work to speak to recruiters/hiring managers, attend interviews, etc.

Assuming everything goes perfectly and it takes you 2-3 days of preparation, search, interviewing, bidding, viewing specs, etc, and you work 2-3 month contracts on average, this is 5% of your working time.

If just one project gets cancelled / doesnt come through, that is immediately doubled. Any slowness on the part of recruiters again increases the cost to the contractor.

TOTAL: 110%-125%

The numbers above are off the top of my head, and are far from complete. When you add it all up, and average over time, the rule of thumb for experienced contractors is that your hourly contract-rate should be at minimum 2 times your hourly employee salary, and as much as 3 times.

This is getting pretty long for an LI post, and I’m sure there’s a lot wrong with it, but hopefully it’s enough to give people an idea of the realities of the situation.

Categories
dev-process games design iphone

New free iPhone game…

Last night, I had another game approved for the App Store…

ss1

iTunes: click here to open iTunes download page

I started writing this as a real-life demo on how to use the tech for my new company (if any of our early access licensees are reading this, a project ZIP with full source code should appear on your dashboard imminently), but I gave it to a few friends to test, and they liked it so much I thought I’d put it up on the App Store too.

I’ll be updating it over time to add more of the features from our tech. If enough people download it, I might even make a paid version (which would be pretty handy as an example, too :)) with some more features, more powerups, etc.

Categories
amusing recruiting

Games Industry Recruitment: Intel

Things are getting interesting in Recruitment land again…

Received today:

Adam, greetings from the Visual Computing Group at Intel Corporation. We received your contact information from the Siggraph Job Fair.

Please let me know how much discrete or integrated graphics driver development, media software, or debug experience you have and what you are interested in doing. Also let me know about your video codec and debug experience.

Please complete this pre-screen document and return it to me along with your current resume. You can also create a career profile at http://www.intel.com/jobs .

Intel is changing the way the world sees 3D graphics, visualization and games. Our Larrabee architecture will deliver teraflops of performance for high-throughput applications, including scientific computing, gaming and visualization. In addition, our Software and Solutions Group is working to enhance all levels of software that executes on Intel based platforms.

We invite you to consider opportunities with Intel by completing and returning the attached Graphics pre-screen as soon as possible which will let us know if you are available, your area of expertise, where you want to work and salary expectations. As soon as we receive this information, we will be reviewing with the hiring managers. If there is interest, the next contact will be from the hiring manager to conduct a phone screen Additionally, I have attached a copy of a flyer on the work this group is doing and information about Intel.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,
Larry Gonzales
Sr. Recruiting Consultant
Intel Corporation/VCG

My reply:

Hi, Larry!

2009/8/18 Gonzales, Larry Z :
>
> Adam, greetings from the Visual Computing Group at Intel Corporation. We
> received your contact information from the Siggraph Job Fair.

No. You didn’t. You really didn’t. I wasn’t at Siggraph this year.

I’m a serial CTO of online games and MMO companies. My last job involved leading internal PS3 and PC MMO development, and founding a new internal studio, for one of the world’s largest online games publishers.

> Please complete this pre-screen document and return it to me along with your
> current resume. You can also create a career profile at
> http://www.intel.com/jobs .

If you want me to apply to a position, feel free to send me the details.

> We invite you to consider opportunities with Intel by completing and
> returning the attached Graphics pre-screen as soon as possible which will
> let us know if you are available, your area of expertise, where you want to
> work and salary expectations. As soon as we receive this information, we

I’m not interested in anything less than [ommitted] USD per annum (which is slightly below the last round of job offers I turned down).

Apart from that requirement, I’m happy to consider anything you send me.

Regards,
Adam Martin

(working at Intel could be interesting. But I certainly don’t feel in the mood to do all the work of a “pre-screen document”, and to make apologies for the lack of “your video codec and debug experience” for a job I know nothing about, never asked for, and which – a moment’s glance at my public LinkedIn profile would show – I am hopelessly inappropriately qualified for :))