In the online games industry, if we keep quiet about the causes, the hopes, the fears, the successes, and the failures of the best part of $100million burnt on a single project, then what hope is there for us to avoid making the same mistakes again?
Category: games design
Thomas and Diane have posted a short guide to Pitching to Game Publishers over at the blog for their game consultancy. Apart from giving them some link love (they’re not even on Technorati yet), it’s an excuse for me to tack-on some quick thoughts of my own.
(NB: my experience on the publisher side is pretty short, just a year spent working with Thomas and Diane as one of the people doing due-diligence for them on the incoming pitches, and doing milestone-reviews on the signed projects that were in-development.)
Here’s a question about increasing the profitability and decreasing the development cost of any MMO, although probably no-one except the web-people will recognise it as such (and even some of them won’t get it):
How do you improve the customer support for an existing MMO?
[where do you start, and what do you target?]
Dan’s put up the slides from his talk at the Let’s Change the Game Conference – but more importantly he’s done a long writeup with the slides embedded in the text, so you can get the flavour of the talk he gave even though you missed it.
He set out to be mean and nasty and ranty, but I think Dan is far too nice and friendly a person with too little viciousness in him to be like that in person. IMHO, on the day he was much more genteel, and so in some ways I think the written version of the talk is even better than the talk itself.
Anyway, well worth reading if you have any interest in making better ARGs. Don’t expect to get any concrete advice, this is a talk aimed at prodding you to re-think objectively just how often you give in to temptation and use weak devices and shortcuts that if you saw someone else doing you’d berate them for. Although it may not seem like it, I think Dan’s talk is an excellent intro for beginners to ARGs, since it will likely warn you off the big temptations that experienced ARG makers avoid or use with care, but newbies these days may find it easy to go overboard on. Don’t take it too literally, if you know all about ARGs already.
(a.k.a. “How to invest in MMO development … profitably”)
The world is full of games companies that blow stupid amounts of money on making online games (typically “massively multiplayer online games” (MMO)). It’s time to put a stop to this madness; honestly, I thought everyone learnt their lesson about 5 years ago when we had the last wave of “everyone’s making an MMO … oh god, these things are TEN TIMES as expensive and ONE HUNDRED TIMES as difficult as we thought … Run away!”. Apparently not.
I think there’s two ways you can learn for yourself how to make a profit from developing online games:
As part of our super top secret new startup we’ve been making some educational games, and for fun (in my spare time) I tried porting one to my iPhone. It’s a simple maths game which I thought would work well with a touch-interface. If you have an iPhone, you can get it here:
(this is a bit of an experiment – if enough people like the game, I’ll take the time to plug it in to some serverside stuff we’re doing which will add a bunch of feedback/stats/scores features for anyone who’s got the game)
On this site I have a rather subtly-hidden Blog Roll. When I started blogging, the site had less on it, and the roll was easy to find – and short. Now it’s not. And it’s long. And each link on there has been carefully considered. There’s some gems in there (although a lot of them are updated so infrequently few people track them).
So it’s time to call-out some of the interesting things to be found in the blogging world of MMO people.
By the way … you can tell who’s working on uber-secret or personally exciting projects these days because they’ve suspiciously stopped blogging for months at a time. Lazy slackers, the lot of them. The more you do, the more you should blog! :P
There are some that should be on the blogroll but aren’t (yet), and some other bloggers I should mention (but I’m sticking to the blogroll only for this post – I’ll go through others next time). Feel free to add your own recommended reading in the comments.
Blogs to read:
Brinking (Nabeel Hyatt)
* Who? serial entrepreneur, raised funding and sold companies
* What? currently running a funk-tastic social / music / games company with a bunch of Harmonix guys
* Why? big commentator on the games/apps/making money/predictions parts of All Things Facebook
Broken Toys (Scott Jennings / LTM)
* Who? became infamous in the early days of MMOs as a player of Ultima Online who ranted publically, amusingly, and sometimes even insightfully
* What? ex-NCsoft, now doing intriguing web games at John Galt Games
* Why? In his heart Scott’s still a player, and more than anyone else I’ve seen he interprets the world of MMO design, development, and playing through the players’ eyes. Interesting point: he’s mostly concerned with life-after-launch. Funny that. Players kind of find that bit the most interesting. Also keeps a close eye on community-management screw-ups, and WoW generally
Bruce Everiss
* Who? ex-head of marketing for Codemasters
* What? um, I’m not sure what he’s doing these days, apart from becoming a “professional blogger”
* Why? he aims to comment on every single interesting piece of news in the mainstream games industry. That’s a lot of commentary. Always something to read! IMHO he is often completely wrong about anything online-games, and a lot of business and “future of industry” stuff – Bruce is from an older age of the industry. But … he says a lot of interesting things and sparks a lot of interesting debates in the process. Worth reading. Just remember he is extremely (deliberately, I’m sure) provocative, and don’t take it too seriously.
Coke and Code (Kevin Glass)
* Who? A programmer working in mainstream IT
* What? An insanely prolific author of casual games “in his free time, as a hobby”
* Why? Because he’s better at making games than many professionals I’ve met, and he is very very prolific, making new libraries, toolsets, editors, games, game engines – and commenting on it all as he goes, and throwing up new games for you to play all the time
Erik Bethke
* Who? ex-Producer for Interplay
* What? CEO of GoPets, an online casual virtual world that’s especially big in Asia (and based in South Korea)
* Why? A hardcore WoW player who analyses the game-design as he goes, and relates very honestly a stream of both emotional experiences and seminal events in the game that should give you lots of things to be thinking about, especially if you’re a designer, business person, or product manager.
Extenuating Circumstances (Dan Hon)
* Who? ex-MindCandy, current CEO of SixToStart
* What? one of the first Bloggers (on the whole of the internet!) in the UK, and an awe-inspiring assimilator of “everything happening on the internet, with technology, with media, with entertainment and the future of the world” for all of the ten years I’ve known him.
* Why? He’s still an excellent tracker of all those things, and finds memes very quickly. Nowadays he just auto-posts links (lots of them, every day) with a few words of commentary scattered here and there (del.icio.us descriptions) – making his blog a ready-made news filter for you :)
Fishpool (Osma Ahvenlampi)
* Who? CTO of Sulake (makers of Habbo Hotel)
* What? a very technical commentator, often in great detail, on the issues of running a 100-million user virtual world, with observations about Habbo’s community, business, and culture thrown in
* Why? He posts very rarely, but when he does, they’re usually full of yummy detail
Futuristic Play (Andrew Chen)
* Who? ex-VC (Mohr-Davidow Ventures)
* What? entrepreneur with a web-background who’s come into the games industry and bringing lots of useful stuff with him
* Why? blogs a LOT on advertising (and how to make money out of it in games and web and casual), and on metrics, and how you can use them to run you games or web business better. Also has a long fascination with what are the best parts of the games industry, and the best of the web industry, and how we can each put those best bits together to be even better
Off the Record – Scott Hartsman
* Who? ex-Everquest, ex-Simutronics
* What? Senior Producer for MMOs – but previously an MMO lead developer, and once (apparently) a Game Designer.
* Why? he’s funny, he knows his stuff, and he’s worked on some of the most important MMO projects outside Asia, so he’s got an interesting perspective going there.
Orbus Gameworks (Darius Kazemi)
* Who? ex-Turbine, now CEO of Orbus (a games-metrics middleware company)
* What? Likes the colour orange *a lot*, infamous for networking his ass off at games conferences (*everyone* knows Darius), very friendly, generous – and mildly obssessed with the use of metrics and stats to improve the creativity and success of game design (in a good way)
* Why? If you liked the Halo heatmaps when they came out, you’ll love some of the stuff they post on the Orbus company blog. A year ago they were posting heatmaps-on-steroids. If you thought “metrics” equalled “spreadsheets of data” then prepare to have your view changed pretty thoroughly.
Prospect Magazine/First Drafts (Tom Chatfield)
* Who? section-editor of the highly respected socio-political print magaine Prospect
* What? a highly-accomplished English Literature post-grad (bear with me here) … who also happens to have been a lifelong hardcore game player, I think the only person I know who got a hardcore character to level 99 on Diablo2, and now plays WoW a lot.
* Why? although Prospect only very rarely (like, only a few times ever) covers games, it’s very interesting to see what the rest of the world – especially the highly educated and highly intelligent but non-technical, older generations – thinks of us. And a bit of culture in your blog reading is probably good for you, too.
Psychochild (Brian Green)
* Who? ex-3DO/M-59, now the owner and designer of the revamped, relaunched, more modern Meridian-59
* What? an MMO game designer who disingenuously describes himself as an indie MMO designer but like most of the others has probably spent too long doing this and knows too much (compared to many of the modern “mainstream” MMO designers) for that to be true any more
* Why? lots and lots of great design ideas and commentary here for anyone wanting to do MMO design
Scott Bilas
* Who? programmer on Duneon Siege
* What? …in particular, responsible for the Entity System (one of my main areas of interest)
* Why? Scott’s phased in and out of blogging, but when he does blog he tends to do good meaty programming posts that contain lots of source code and some useful lesson or algorithm.
Sulka’s Game (Sulka Haro)
* Who? lead designer for Sulake (Habbo Hotel)
* What? more of a Creative Director than game designer, more of a web background than games, but above all a community/product/creative person who knows his stuff. Also a big player of MMORPGs
* Why? are you cloning Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel and want some pointers about revenue models, community management, and how to be successful with virtual-item sales? You might want to read his posts ;)
The Creation Engine No.2 (Jim Purbrick)
* Who? ex-Codemasters, ex-Climax (both times working on MMO projects)
* What? originally a network / MMO academic researcher, then a network coder, and now the person who runs Linden Lab (Second Life) in the UK. Very big proponent of all things open-source, always doing interesting and innovative things with technology
* Why? Keep an eye on the more innovative technology things that are done with Second Life (stuff you don’t tend to read about in the news but – to a tech or games person – is a heck of a lot more interesting by a long long way), and get some insight into the life of serious open-source programmers who succeed in living and breathing this stuff inside commercial environments
The Forge (Matt Mihaly)
* Who? developer of one of the earliest commercially successful text MUDs, now CEO of Sparkplay Media
* What? spent many years running Achaea, a text-only MUD that made a healthy profit from pioneering the use of itemsales (virtual goods) – and the things weren’t even graphical – and has now finally (finally!) moved into graphical games with the MMO he’s developing
* Why? one of the few MMO professionals who talks a lot about his experiences playing on consoles (especially Xbox), which makes for a refreshing alternate view – especially from the perspective of an MMO person talking about social and community issues in those games. Just like Brian Green, claims to be an indie MMO designer, but probably knows far far too much for that to be even vaguely justifiable
Vex Appeal (Guy Parsons)
* Who? ex-MindCandy
* What? Guy is an extremely creative … guy … who had a small job title but a big part in inventing and rolling out a lot of the viral marketing stuff we did for Perplex City (online game / ARG from a couple of years ago)
* Why? Awesome place to go for ideas and info on the cutting edge of doing games stuff with social networks. Usually. Also … just makes for a fun blog to read
We Can Fix That with Data (Sara Jensen Schubert)
* Who? ex-Spacetime, currently SOE
* What? MMO designer, but like Lum / Scott Jennings, comes from a long background as player and commentator, and shorter background as actually in the industry. Like Darius Kazemi, spent a lot of time in doing metrics / data-mining for MMOs
* Why? Take Darius’s insight into metrics for MMOs, and Scott’s knowledge of what players like, don’t like, and ARE like, and you get a whole bunch of interesting posts wandering around the world of metrics-supported-game-design-and-community-management. Good stuff.
Zen of Design (Damion Schubert)
* Who? ex-EA (Ultima Online), currently at Bioware (MMO)
* What? MMO designer who’s been around for a long time (c.f. UO)
* Why? Damion writes long detailed posts about MMO design, what works, what doesn’t, practicalities of geting MMO development teams to work together, how the playerbase will react to things, etc. He also rather likes raiding in MMORPGs – which is fascinating to see (given his heavy background as a pro MMO *designer*)
[NC] Anson (Matthew Wiegel)
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? Dungeon Runners team
* Why? was doing lots of interesting and exciting things with data-mining/metrics in the free-to-play low-budget NCsoft casual MMO. Watch this space…
People with nothing to do with games, but you might want to watch just because they’re interesting:
Bard’s World (Joshua Slack)
* ex-NCsoft
* Josh is one of the key people behind Java’s free, hardware-accelearted, game engine (JME)
Janus Anderson
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? um, he’s been taking a lot of photos recently
* Why? watch this space
Mark Grant
* Who? non-Games industry
* What? an entrepreneur, web-developer, and Cambridge Engineer
* Why? very smart guy, and interesting posts on web development (no games tie-in)
A new startup has appeared that essentially charges people a per-second subscription to play games that is added to their electricity bill.
On the one hand, I am personally against this kind of “invisible” charging because it can be – and indeed is being – mis-represented as “free”, when in fact every single user is being charged. I also feel it sets a set of very bad incentives for the lower-end game developers – essentially encouraging them to make lower-quality games. But that isn’t really a problem for me, it’s a problem for them, so … shrug.
So bear in mind my latent antipathy :) which I’ll try to keep quiet about – but for me the really interesting part is the use of this as an alternative payment system.
The Premise
On the face of it, they started with some assumptions like this:
Computer games don’t use much processing power, and yet game-players have really powerful PCs – just go look at the market for buying new PC’s: those marketed at video games players are the only part of the PC hardware market to have preserved and grown some decent profit margins on hardware, and very high prices.
Meanwhile, game developers have large amounts of extra content for their games that they don’t charge for and which they don’t allow the players to experience – it’s all there, but they can’t be bothered to let people play it. I mean, why would you? You’ve paid to create it, therefore you want to keep it secret.
Also, casual game developers, those making all those Flash and Java games you see on Miniclip, are all awesome experts when it comes to hardcore programming optimization. They might be a bit lazy, not bothering to do it a lot of the time, but despite this total lack of practice, they are all latent geniuses if you give them enough incentive.
…although actually I think they didn’t really think any of that, they just came from a compute-farm background and jumped on Games as an easy first target market.
Plura Processing is embedding an app in browser-based games that uses local CPU to run remote processor-intensive tasks – and then they charge the remote task-owner for the “rented CPU time”, and give a percentage of that back to the game developer in whose game the app was embedded. You can see a bit more on it on GigaOM, including a brief response from the company. Their VC backer, Creeris Ventures, appears to have an exec on the board who came up with this in defence of the product:
“At the end of the play session, the game sees how much compute time the player provided and rewards him with an in-game item (e.g., +1 longsword).
So what you get is something that the user loves (because he’s being directly rewarded) and a model for computing power that does work (because it’s using the PC as efficiently as possible). Both sides win. :)”
Yep. They are actually encouraging you to reward people for leaving their computers logged-in and churning up electricity by gifting them in-game items. I’m all in favour of making computer-games unfair, but I don’t see this as a sensible way to do it (from a design perspective).
A quick perusal of my LinkedIn network suggests that the company founders aren’t from a games industry background, so I guess that they thought of charging people for CPU time (an old business model from the late 1990’s that never took off, despite many tries), and then spotted games as just a good market they could take advantage of.
Something fishy
Plura is lightweight and secure
Plura applets use minimal resources on most computers. Our system is secure and each application’s integrity is verified before it can use Plura.
If you’d like to see Plura first-hand, just click here. We think you’ll see how harmless Plura really is.
…given that your business model is to use as much resources as possible, the above statement is surely only true via sophistry? (they’ll be going for “minimial resources” when it comes to RAM usage, clearly, but maximal *CPU* usage, which is what most people care about given how cheap and abundant RAM is today). Am I missing something here?
Anyway, that’s not what this is really about, IMHO, because:
Business Analysis
Finally, because Plura is an enabling technology, it allows other people to create new sites and web applications that previously could not be financially supported. Plura does this in two ways. First, it offers a completely new revenue stream to new and existing sites.
How much money?
Well, according to their website, they’ll give the developer $2.60 for each computer that spends a month devoting all its CPU power to their processing. Is that a lot?
Let’s put this into perspective.
The ratio between “users online” and “users” is around 1:100 for a free game, 1:20 for a free MMO, and around 1:6 for a subscription MMO.
So, with Plura, in a subs MMO you would be earning at the rate of around 40 cents per month per user.
At the opposite end of the scale, in a free web game, you’d be earning at the rate of around 2.6 cents per month per user.
That’s assuming 100% CPU usage devoted to Plura. In practice, an MMO would be sparing around 1% CPU (assuming this app is correctly configured), and even for a free web game, you’d have IM running, probably Outlook, etc, and you’d expect with a *well-written* flash game on a Single-Core sysem to be seeing at most 30% of the CPU going to Plura, probably more like 5% realistically (pure guess, based on the CPU usages I’ve typically seen of Flash apps on the few occasions they’ve been tuned for minimal CPU). NB: this WILL change as adoption of Flash 10/11 increases, assuming that the rendering engine efficiencies come in as expected (flash prior to 10 uses the CPU for graphics).
What about dual-core systems? So long as flash games are single-threaded, Plura could get 50% CPU to itself (well … fighting off Outlook, IM, etc – so perhaps more like 40% to itself). I’m not about to try it on my Core2Duo here, though, since this is on a laptop and anything that maxes both cores will usually overheat and crash the laptop (a problem with the Macbook Air and it’s Intel CPU. Sigh)
So, my guess is that a typical casual game developer will see around $1-$5 per thousand users, whilst taking away their users’ CPU power. At the bottom end, that really does NOT compare favourably with advertising revenues. At the top end, it starts to look worthwhile; all depends how much CPU power you give up, I guess.
Risks
As a developer, you are merely replacing one agency-based fluctuating-value revenue model (advertising) for another (compute-farming).
Even with the many agencies and advertisers and healthy industry behind advertising, rates soar and plummet unpredictably, which is enough to put game developers out of business all on its own.
It’s going to be a lot worse working within what is by comparison a tiny niche marketplace, and where you are so heavily disengaged from the purchasers.
I’m sure plenty of people will try it out since it’s simple to attempt, but it doesn’t currently appear viable as a source of revenue for any game studio that wants to remain in business long-term.
Cost of Goods Sold … to the user
How much is this costing in electricity? Interesting question…
For a modern PC, with an Intel Core Duo, the difference between 0% CPU and 100% CPU is around 60 watts, which works out to a little over 40kWh per month.
At the moment you pay around $0.2-$0.5 per kWh for electricity. So, the electricity used by each home user will cost them from 80 cents (cheap power, efficient CPU) up to $4 (expensive power, inefficient CPU – e.g. the Pentium 4 uses almost twice the watts!).
i.e. as a game developer, you are being paid at just around the cost of the electricity used. That’s how this could be seen as a somewhat odd (but nevertheless interesting) indirect form of payment-system for users without credit-cards etc.
Growth potential?
But it’s capped at very very very low ARPU. Ridiculously low. This is a poor business model for anything except lowest-common-denominator games. Strangely, the company advertises it on their own website as a “replacement” for advertising, although they also run testimonials from a game developer who tried it and said the opposite.
(that developer, by the way, was Paul Preece, famous for making just one game (Desktop Tower Defence), and I suspect he’s getting a much better rate than $2.60 per month given the huge marketing value to Plura of having DTD as a “client”).
Market: gamers with powerful computers?
- Generally, gamers who have spent vast amounts of cash on powerful computers are playing powerful games – not casual web games
- All games, everywhere, use 100% CPU. The basic, fundamental model of game development mandates this: it is far too expensive to faff about on optimization that is not absolutely necessary
- A game that does NOT use 100% CPU does poorly in the market, because the players will condemn the noticeably poorer graphics, framerate, AI, sound quality, reactiveness (of controls), etc.
Market: casual gamers?
- Typically have weak and crappy PCs
- If you’re playing games in a browser, that almost always means you have other apps open at once
- Generally speaking, you don’t want the rest of your PC slowing down because a low-quality game is killing it
- Flash is already phenomenonally bad on some platforms, and will steal 100% CPU at the drop of a hat; this causes lots of problems in the game-playing community of casual gamers who don’t understand it, but condemn games for it and refuse to play them. If you played much on popular casual games sites, you’d notice this uncommon but not rare problem
- Flash game programmers generally know little about how to write good code (this is why Flash is great – it opens up the market to more programmers, rather than requiring everyone to be a highly experienced, highly trained expert), they certainly don’t write efficient code; if you want them to start learning how, expect a long long uphill struggle to re-educate the entire worldwide base of Flash programmers
So, I don’t think this is particularly exciting as a revenue model itself.
But I do like this idea of the consumer’s electricity bill being converted into per-millisecond subscription to the game they are playing; in a world where you are not able to get direct payment from your consumers, or are somehow prevented, this could *in theory* (I think the lack of established marketplace invalidates this in practice) be a good poor-man’s replacement for micropayments
I was looking through presentation slides the other day, and saw this:
“As children develop, they make greater and greater efforts to adapt to reality, rather than distorting reality, as in make-believe play.”
The implication, contextually, was that ultimately as a child becomes an adult, their reality becomes fully adapted, and no longer distorted. That might not be the intended implication, but it’s interesting: I’ve been fighting against this since, well, since forever, really. And spending your life constantly distorting reality it seems to me is neither a bad thing nor a limiting thing.
Because it trains you to be good at two things: seeing how you might change reality, and believing that you CAN change it.
At one end of the spectrum, distorted realities make it much easier for you to visualize what is “possible” instead of what is merely “probable”, and that’s the essence of spotting opportunities.
Entrepreneurship and Seeing Change
(good) Entrepreneurs are constantly seeing new ways to “change the world” in ways both small and large. Often the change is small, but the effects are large, or vice versa. It’s often said that “you cannot teach Entrepreneurship”, and while I beg to differ, I have experience of actually trying it, and huge experience of arguing the concept with people. Mostly, the argument against the teachability of entrepreneurship is rooted in the inability to “make” people “become able to” see Opportunities.
I think one of the primary differentiators for having/not having that ability (irrespective of whether it can be taught) is the extent to which you see:
The world as it is
as opposed to
The world as it could be
and even
The world as I would like it
Looking at the Entrepreneurs themselves:
- Good entrepreneurs, in my personal experience, see the world always as It Could Be.
- Bad ones usually see it as They Would Like It To Be.
- Great ones ALSO see it as They Would Like It To Be
- Non-entrepreneurs see it As It Is
…with the difference between Great Entrepeneurs and Bad Entrepreneurs being mainly that the former *also* see the world As It Is, and hold the two visions in their head at all times, simultaneously.
Because the Great Entrepeneurs, while constantly (many times a week) spotting things that They Would Like It To Be, also – constantly – imagine how they might transform the world As It Is, usually by a series of steps, into that target. The Bad ones simply employ the tried-and-tested Hope plan:
- Have Idea
- ?
- Profit
…which – let’s be honest here – occasionally works (usually if you simply get massively lucky with timing / outside events).
Entrepreneurship and Effecting Change
Why are some people better able to see how to make their desired changes come true?
I believe it’s largely driven by two skills. Firstly, the obvious one highlighted above – that the more practice you have of thinking about how you might change reality to fit what you want it to be, the better you will be at that process.
“Better” here means that you will
- have more ideas for each transform in the chain
- be better at recognising “good” and “bad” transforms
- process suggested transforms – and transform-chains – more rapidly (quick accept/reject)
The second skill is believing in yourself and your ability to change the world. Often, the successful changes that Entrepeneurs effect are surprising to most people – they question how that could even be possible – while *in practice* not being so difficult to achieve. Usually, this is because normal people see only the beginning and end of a sequence of changes.
To take a simple example that illustrates the kind of “impossible” being “possible” given some clever changes that I’m talking about, look at Freeserve. (NB: this is based on my memory of events more than 10 years ago, much of which I found out 2nd or 3rd hand, when trying to understand how Freeserve had achieved something that had eluded all the other ISPs – so take this as an example in theory, it may not be accurate in practice! Incidentally, there seems to be VERY little public history on Freeserve, how it started, and how massively it changed ISP / internet access in the UK – I’d be interested if any readers have seen any articles / interviews about the details of its inception?)
Freeserve … the first “free” ISP in the UK
When Freeserve was created in the UK providing “free internet access” in the 1990’s, it seemed impossible. They even provided a cheap local phone number that could be used anywhere in the country – so it was cheaper on your phone bills than calls to your subscription ISP!
Ahem. Except, it wasn’t the cheapEST kind of local phone call, it was partway between an “ultra-local” call (very cheap) and a “national” call (expensive).
And, in an unprecedented move, Freeserve had managed to get the telephone company to give them a share of the revenue from that particular phone number. For reference, at the time, if you wanted to get revenue from the telco for running a phone number, you had to get a number on the “very expensive” plan, where the telco would charge the consumer as much as 10 times the cost of an already expensive national-call.
Of course, given the huge volume of calls that then went through to that number, the telco made a huge profit out of the scheme – so it worked out in their best interests, and everyone profited. (although I have no idea how this was negotiated, or whose idea it was – and “persuading a telco to change their revenue model” is itself a problem I’d usually classify as “impossible”, so I’m guessing there was another, similar, chain of small changes that lead to this being acheived).
About two years before this all happened, I was working on a project to create a new ISP, and I’d got as far in breaking down the steps as to see that you HAD, somehow, to find a way to remove the “dual-billing” model from consumers (pay once for internet access, pay twice for the per-minute, uncapped (!) phone call too). I didn’t have the confidence to believe it was possible, and after running through some fairly crazy ideas (including looking into internet access via broadcast radio for downstream, and home modem for upstream), I gave up and moved on. With hindsight, at the time, I realised that I’d have hit upon the change-the-telco idea within another couple of months, and that I’d have had a clear year to find a way to ACTUALLY get a telco to change, and still be able to launch before Freeserve.
(for the record, that event finally kicked me into realising that the world-changing ideas I had all the time, and thought through as often as multiple times a day, were actually all realisable (potentially). Many people I know, potentially good entrepreneurs both older and younger than me, still don’t believe the world can be changed to their tune, they can only see the world As It Is)
How to … Influence People
This is a big topic; whole books have been written on it! (OMG!!1!!!!0).
But just to select ONE of the most powerful weapons: imposing a personal view of reality onto the reality you find, and living and acting as though your view of reality is the real one, and keeping at it until everyone else gives in. The real beauty of this being that if the only differences between your reality and the real reality are the beliefs of people, then it becomes a self-fulfilling dream.
This is basic sales-technique: it’s usually more effective to sell people on a shared belief than it is to sell them merely on a bunch of facts and leave them to guess for themselves whether those facts are real or not. But it takes a particular kind of personality to be good at imposing their desired reality (if that’s all you do, it tends to come across as mere bullying), and also at making it stick.
IMHO, people who spend more of their time adapting reality are much better at the “making it stick” part.
Conclusion
So, ultimately, one of the things that makes a great Entrepreneur is huge practice with very much NOT adapting to reality, but instead adapting reality to their own ends. And it helps in ways beyond the obvious (spotting new opportunities).
If you want to be a great entrepreneur, I’d recommend you start dreaming more, and make your dreams more vivid and concrete, and try to change the world to fit them, rather than the other way around.
PS: from reading this post, all of which has been written between going from that slide of the presentation to the next, you may come to think that it can take me a long time to read a presentation. You’d be right. This is partly why I’ve taken to transcripting in real time every conference talk I attend (and usually publishing them on this blog) – the smallest comment can spark off so many thoughts that I miss the rest of the talk, and it’s a way of giving me a chance to hear the whole talk.
Andrew Chen has just written a post comparing the cultural differences between Web industry people and Games industry people. They’re all very interesting, and on the whole I’d say they’re on the money – definitely worth reading (and see if you can spot yourself in some of the either/or’s ;)). At the start of the post, I stopped reading and paused to list my own observed differences, so that I could then compare them to what Andrew had written. There was no overlap, so I thought I’d write them up here.
Cultural differences: game people vs web people
- concrete revenues vs “future monetizable” growth
- team-as-blob vs sliding scale of headcount
- obsessive search for fun vs time-wasting activities
- surprise and delight audience with something we liked and think they want vs randomly guess and test on live audience; iterate until done
- very high minimum quality bar vs dont worry, be crappy
- high, strict specialization vs almost no specialization
- money happens elsewhere, far down the chain vs show ME the money
concrete revenues vs “future monetizable” growth
Largely driven by the “money happens elsewhere” part, game people are obsessive about “what’s the actual revenue this will make (what’s my percentage of the revenue this will make)?”.
In particular, if you cannot *prove* the expected revenue (and in many cases not even that: instead you have to prove the *profit*), they won’t even carry on the conversation. This happens everywhere from small startups to massive publishers. I’ve seen meetings on “social networking” get shutdown by a senior executive simply saying “how much profit will this make at minimum, even if it’s not successful? Remember that these resources would instead bring in an extra $5million if we deployed them on [one of our existing MMOs]”, and refusing to carry on the meeting unless someone could prove that the opportunity cost to SN didn’t exceed its income.
surprise and delight audience with something we liked and think they want vs randomly guess and test on live audience; iterate until done
A team of game people sets out to make something fun. They like to get some input from experts on analysing and predicting the market (market researchers, marketing departments, retail executives, industry analysts, etc) – and then use that merely as “inspiration” and “guidelines” to making something awesome and new. They assume that “the customer doesn’t know what they want, but will recognize it when they see it, and fall in love” (which is largely true!), and so they go off and build something beautiful largely in isolation.
This beautiful thing then surprises and delights the consumer when it finally comes to market.
Web people do the first thing that comes to mind, care not whether it’s objectively good or bad, and test it in the market. Then they try again. And again. And again. And look for patterns in what is popular or not.
As a result, game people tend to think of web people as “skill-less” (partly true) and “puppets of the market” (largely true). Meanwhile, web people tend to think of game people as “perfectionist” (largely true) and “monolithic / unagile” (largely true) and “non market-lead” (partly true).
obsessive search for fun vs time-wasting activities
Game people don’t make stuff unless it’s fun. If it’s not fun, it’s a failure, and only a stereotypically bad EA Producer (or a second-rate clone) would OK the ongoing funding and/or production of a project that wasn’t fun any more.
Web people generally couldn’t care less. They generally think they want stuff to be fun, in a “well, it’s better if it’s fun, isn’t it?” kind of way – but they usually only really care that there is some activity going on, and that the users come back to do more of it. They are less judgemental about the type and motivation of activity going on. They will slave away to try to understand this activity, to extrapolate better ways of motivation people to do more of it, and to monetize people for doing it, but the activity could be selling used cars or real estate and they would not be greatly affected.
This one even shows up subtly in Andrew’s own writeup – he casually uses the word fun. To game developers, the word is Fun, and they would never write:
Now, I think that the productivity-inclined have their claim to the world, as does the fun/entertainment games people. But the intersection of this, in web media, is where the fun happens.
…because you don’t use the word “fun” casually like that where someone might hear it as “Fun”. You are sensitized to all uses of the F word :). Fun would never come from an intersection like that; that intersection could give rise to a number of side-effects and new content areas, and those content areas – with appropriate rulesets imposed – could merge, and react with some of the side-effects, to give rise, finally, to something “Fun”. Fun is not a simple concept.
very high minimum quality bar vs dont worry, be crappy
Game companies have QA departments that are larger in headcount than the entire development team, often by a substantial margin. They don’t ship stuff that is half-arsed, partially complete, partially working, etc. Hence, when they do, there is huge press and consumer attention around it. This is one of the thigns that the games industry has been doing more and more web like over the past 10 years – ever since they realised they could drop some launch-quality and end up with the same level of quality as standard by shipping a “patch” 1-3 months after launch (and probably getting an uptick in sales as a result, re-box the patched version as an “improved” version).
But, on the whole, games companies still consider quality the one unassailable pillar of the development triangle (“quality, short development time, cheap development cost – you can only have two at most”).
In fact, most game people turn “Quality” into 3 separate sub-pillars: core fun, longevity, and polish. And consider all three inalienable, but occasionally flirt with sacrificing one of those three instead of sacrificing either of the two other full pillars.
If it strikes you that the games industry is thereby trying to cheat and get “2 and 2/3 pillars out of 3” then … you’d be right. Understanding this can help explain a lot both about individual games and the industry in general over the past 15 years.
high, strict specialization vs almost no specialization
A game team is (typically) made up of distinct people doing:
- Art
- Code
- Design
- Production (project management)
You need at least one person devoted to each. For teams of size less than 5, it’s acceptable to have some people do two of those roles rather than just one, but it’s often considered “hard”
(by default – although in practice many teams flourish with people moonlighting/two-hatting these roles).
It is an onrunning joke that various non-design people in games companies have the unofficial job title of “Frustrated Designer” (most usually Producers and Programmers get labelled with this). i.e. someone who secretly wants to be a designer, but lacks the skill and experience – despite potentially many many years working in their person discipline, developing and launching games. Nowadays you also see people labelled as Frustrated Artist, and occasionally even Frustrated Programmer (although anyone brave enough to do that in the face of the programmers, who tend to be quite bullish about welcoming such people to try their hand at fixing a code bug (snigger, snigger, watch-him-fail) generally is quickly disabused of their frustration).
There’s good reason for this, too – the expected level of skill from anyone non-junior in a game team is sufficiently high that it can be very difficult for people to cross skills. It’s easy if they’re willing to drop to “junior” status (the level of incoming recent-graduate – very low-paid, and with very little creative or project input/control), but few are willing to take the massive drop in status and (usually) pay to do that.
money happens elsewhere, far down the chain vs show ME the money
Interestingly, perversely, this means that game people obssess about the money, despite never seeing it themselves, and worry about how their actions will affect the ability of later people in the value chain to make money, and how much the total pot will be.
Whereas the web people generally are much more blase about the money side, because they know it’s going to come almost directly to them, and they have a much more direct relationship with it (understand the ups and downs).
Game people’s approach to money is generally characterized by Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt – plagued by rumour. Web people all know for themselves how much money can be made, and how, and don’t peddle in rumours.
Comments on Andrew’s observations
Andrew’s observations were all good, except for one thing which I think he misunderstood: “By withholding levels, powerups, weapons, trophies, etc., it creates motivation from the user to keep on playing. They say, “just… one… more… game…!!””.
…and then he makes a conclusion that makes sense given what he and wikipedia have said, but which is almost the precise opposite of the truth.
As a result of this treadmill, there is a constant pressure for players to stay engaged and retained as customers. But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product – instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!
The truth is that content-gating was introduced and/or stuck around as a technique because the cost of creating content is exponentially higher than the cost of consuming it without gating. If you have decided to operate a content-centric game, you are doomed to be unable to run a service product based on it – no matter how many years you spend developing content before launch, your playerbase will soon catch up to your level designers etc and overtake them. Content-gating, levelling especially, forceably slow players down in their content consumption rates, even forcing them to re-play set pieces of content many many times (if you can get them to replay it enough, you can lower their rate of consumption to the point that a sufficiently large team of content-creators can keep ahead of them. Just).
Various other experiments have been tried over the years – most notably, User-Generated Content, but none have achieved the same level of efficiency (or yet been as well understood) as level-based content-gating.
(because that was yesterday, you know)
Richard Bartle concludes that, in the great scheme of things (and much as it might nice to think otherwise), it’s not actually that important.
So standing back and looking at it, the answer as to why there is not a lot of fuss over this 30th anniversary is that in the great scheme of things, it isn’t actually important. The mainstream isn’t interested because virtual worlds haven’t had much impact; developers aren’t interested because the paradigm is obvious; players aren’t interested because knowing doesn’t add anything to their play experience; academics might be interested in the historical facts, but anniversaries don’t figure in their analyses.
I disagree :). And not just because it’s a chance to celebrate some UK-based breakthrough in computer games (what else do we have – GTA? When you google for “history of uk games industry” the first hit you get is “Japanese games industry | Technology | guardian.co.uk”. Sigh; thanks, Guardian). I think it doesn’t get much fuss simply because it doesn’t have a community that is enmeshed in modern culture in the ways that would get a fuss caused; its community isn’t highly sought-after by advertisers and journalists, for example. Its community isn’t a major user of the web-games-newssites. Etc.
On the flip side, I think it should have some fuss, certainly in the games press. It’s particularly important to understand how many years of history exists here, just as a number. Because that implies certain things about how much prior art probably exists, and the level of detail you should expect to have been researched and/or tried out and improved upon – all of which is very helpful when designing, building, or operating new games.
For the same reason, I think it’s particularly important for people to know the game design of MUD1 in detail, either to read a detailed review, or to have played it for themselves. Because that tells you what the starting point was for those 30 years of prior art. It gives you even more info on what you can expect. For instance, looking at MUD1 and looking at a typical modern MMORPG, you can see certain things haven’t changed that much, which suggests there is a lot of (old) documentation on side-effects of those aspects. Likewise, certain things have changed a heck of a lot, which suggests strongly that there’s a lot of (old and new) documentation on what else has been tried in those areas and why it didn’t work. In particular, it suggests that there’s possibly as much as THIRTY YEARS of “weird shit” that people tried in those areas – and your new wacky idea has probably been tried before. So you can go look up what happened; can use someone else’s (possibly “failed”) game as a prototype for your “new” ideas without even having to wait for your team to build the prototype.
If you don’t know that MUD1 is 30 years old, if you think perhaps that it’s 15 years old, or that it looked more like tunnels-n-trolls, then those things all lack the same implicit value to you – and you might not bother to go look them up. So, yes, IMHO it does matter how old it is.
Which reminds me; when was the last time someone did a major review of MUD2 (how modern was it?), seeing as so many people rely on reviews these days to understand games they don’t have time to play themselves…
Thord Hedengren (TDH) posted for GigaOM a list of things you should and shouldn’t do immediately after launching an MMO. They are mostly specious – I’m afraid I have no idea who Thord is or what he’s done, but from reading the article I get the impression he doesn’t know much about MMOs. Now, I’m sure TDH is a nice person, probably very smart, but these dos/donts are naive and ill-thought-out to anyone who’s been working in the MMO field for long. Some of TDH’s advice will probably cause you more harm than good if you follow it as-written.
What’s wrong with TDH’s list:
“Make sure the game is stable” – the games that launch “prematurely” (TDH’s description) ARE stable. Perhaps he meant something about “works on the majority of machines of your target market” or “has no economy-breaking bugs” or “all the quests work out of the box”, or … or … or etc. Depending on what he meant, my response would go in different ways.
If I were him, I’d have said “make sure the game is READY”, but whilst I know what that means, and most people in NCsoft seemingly had mostly congruent opinions, that’s not something I’m sure I can quantify off the top of my head. Hey, it’s part of what good publishers do as their value add, it’s not supposed to be obvious! More on this later, maybe.
Include significant content for all levels – you cannot possibly afford to do this, and it’s NOT ENOUGH even if you could. Rather, you need to provide masses of highly polished content for two particular levels: level 1, and level 20. Levels 10 through 19 need increasingly polished levels of content. Here I’m assuming that level 10 is the end of the newbie experience, and level 20 is the highest level 95% of the playerbase will reach within 1 month of starting play EVEN USING THOTTBOT et al to cheat their way through content faster.
Why? Because you lose subscribers at two points:
1. When they start playing.
2. when their first month subscription comes up for renewal.
All players should have completed the newbie experience (level 10) before their first subscrption renewal. From the moment they complete that, you want them to be more and more surprised, in a positive way, by how much “better” the game gets the longer they play. You also want to offset the decreased sense of wonder they have as individuals as they get to know the game and the world, so that they perceive a linear, constant, level of content quality (when in fact the content quality + volume is increasing, but their expectations are also increasing).
“Add new content on a regular basis” – like the outcome of a negotiated sales price (which can never go further in the vendors favour on future re-negotiations), whatever rate of content release you provide, you can NEVER reduce that rate in future, your players won’t let you. So DEFINITELY do not go around adding the “frequent” chunks at first that TDH recommends. That may well be suicidal.
“Make it easy for players to network, form guilds” – don’t bother. They will do it anyway. No MMO in existence has bothered to make this easy, and so the players have become adept at doing it themelves. This feature is therefore a complete waste of money – UNLESS you decide to make it a major competitive feature/advantage which becomes part of your sales strategy. Given how few MMOs do it even at a mediocre level or above, you could easily get great sales out of doing it well.
“Let players move characters between servers” – except that this destroys server-level community – something that all the big MMOs make heavy use of today. IMHO, the benefits to character-transfer outweigh the losses, ASSUMING you know what you’re doing and make use of those benefits, but TDH’s explanation (by omitting these) is probably going to lead many into weakening their game instead of strengthening it.
“Keep an open dialogue with the players” – Yes! This I agree with. Good recommendation.
So, just one of TDH’s points actually works without large amounts of hedging. Hmm. What about the “don’ts”?
What’s wrong with TDH’s list part 2: “Donts”
A general observation here: these have almost nothing to do with the realities of launching or post-launching an MMO; rather, they read like TDH’s personal bugbears of what he wishes that his MMO of choice did differently. I would humbly suggest that GigaOM is not the place to be airing a random selection of your personal criticisms of minor elements of someone else’s game-design (my personal blog, on the other hand, is an AWESOME place for me to be ranting about the quality of articles on other people’s sites. HA!). I’m only going to go through them for the sake of completeness, but mostly I’m not going to bother analysing them, they’re too trivial.
“Don’t promise features that are months away” – what TDH should have said was “in the management of online communities, Expectation Management is one of your core activities. This is also try of all mainstream AAA game development, just do what you would normally (not) do with a mainstream game”.
“Avoid having portals to future places” – this is just the same as the previous point. Nevermind.
“Don’t rebalance the game too much, too fast” – Hmm. Apart from directly contravening one of TDH’s “Do” points (“frequent updates and changes”) – what does TDH think updates are? Every update rebalances the game, de facto – “breaking [players] characters” is probably a good thing rather than a bad thing, as it extends the content for them (rebalancings can be the impetus for players to create an alt (second character) for the first time ever, and thereby increase attachment / stickiness for mass-market (non hardcore) players). Just don’t do an SWG NWE (if you don’t know what that is, google it – it was an extinction-level event in the Star Wars MMO that has masses and masses of commentary and post mortems all over the web).
“Publicly acknowledging problems” – Yes! Again, TDH’s final point actually has merit. Do it. It helps. But then again, this is nothing surprising – this is, in fact, part of that basic community management I referenced above.
Fine. “So, Adam”, I hear you ask, “if you’re so damn clever, what ARE the do’s and don’ts of launching an MMO, especially with respect to the post-launch period?”
Since I am currently technically unemployed – doing a Super Sekrit Stealthy Startup – I should really just put a PayPal donation link >HERE< and/or my cell number and an offer to answer your question (and any others you may have) at a discounted $100 an hour.
Launch Period: What Really Counts
For a subscription-based MMO (the target that GigaOM chose), two things count above all else:
- Absolute number of registered active accounts
- Conversion rate of registered accounts to subscribers who make one monthly payment IN ARREARS (i.e. one payment at end of month, or two payments at starts of months)
There’s some extra things that matter, because you NEVER launch an MMO in isolation – there has always been months or years of development leading up to this, and at least an alpha, if not two or even three betas, before launch:
- Retention of final beta (usually “free”) accounts that convert to paid subscriptions
I’ll come back to all three of these in a later post – I’ve been meaning to write something up about this stuff for ages now, but I don’t have the time this instant to do it justice.
As a parting shot, though…
Big Background Question Number 1
Ask yourself (and your team) this:
Do you even know what an MMO launch is? A pre-launch? A post-launch? A live team?
…and think about it; a lot of people these days don’t stop to think about the knock-on effects of that question, and there’s really no excuse now – there’s so much evidence staring you in the face, in the form of many many MMO launches that have happened. If you can’t answer those questions – and understand the menaning behind them – go do some research ASAP before you get even close to launching.
It’s easy to gloss over the launch, think it’s a one-off special event you plan for, just like alpha, or beta. It’s easy to forget some of the complexity that is peculiar to launch. We had people at NCsoft (both external developers and internal staff) who failed to include the live team as part of the budget for their games. Live team is going to be anywhere from 50% to 150% of the size of the develoment team. Since dev team staff are the majority of the project cost, failing to budget for live team is a MASSIVE hole in your budget. There are games that have launched with live teams as low as 30% (I think there’s some that were even like 10% but I can’t remember any off the top of my head) of the dev team; they failed.
Damion Schubert came up with the term “AO Purgatory” (AO = Anarchy Online) to describe live teams with just enough income to pay for upkeep, bug fixing, etc, and a few bits of content upgrade – but not quite enough to add enough content, fix enough bugs, to cause the overall subscriber base to grow significantly month-on-month. Rule of thumb: I would never launch a game without a live team that was the same size as the dev team if I could avoid it. If I had someone else’s cash to burn, I’d budget for live being 125% size of dev.
This is getting ridiculous. I just tried to post a comment on someone’s blogger.com blog, and I was forced to use either my gmail account or an OpenID account to post. When I tried to NOT use my gmail account, it force-logged-me-out of gmail in the other window! This is pretty incompetent.
Note to web companies: the days when normal people only had one online identity died ten years ago. We all have multiple identities today. Leave us alone, let us get on with our lives, and stop interfering with who we are and who we express ourselves as being.
This week, I was at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco (my session writeups should appear on http://freetoplay.biz over the coming days). A couple of things struck me during the conference, including the large number of “payment providers” (companies that specialized in extracting cash out of your users via credit card, paypal, pre-pay cards, etc and crediting direct to you) and the large number of white-label “virtual goods system providers” (companies that were providing a turnkey (or near-turnkey) solution to “adding virtual goods to your existing facebook app” etc).
Which brings be to a recurring problem I’ve seen for a long time with the online games and MMO industry, which I suspect is going to cause a lot of damage to a lot of social games and virtual worlds companies in the coming years: online service providers are – in general – shockingly bad (lazy or plain stupid, usually) at handling their customers’ money.
And the result? Ultimately, it could drive increasing numbers of consumers back to preferring to purchase their games and other online content via retail, where the companies and transactions are more trustworthy. OH, THE IRONY!
Categories
How much ISK is that?
…was my first thought on hearing that the Iceland economy was running out of money:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081009/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_iceland_meltdown
If you conveniently ignore that the figures are about 100 times too big, it’s a nice thought to imagine CCP might step in to bail out the banks, or at least offer to prop them up using ISK. It’s legal tender over much of the known universe, after all.
And it would give the world’s press something to REALLY say about “virtual worlds, virtual countries, and vritual economies” :).
(this is part 2 of “Flashback to 2006: How Kongregate Started”, and looks at the features Kong was supposed to have but hasn’t brought to market yet, and makes some wild guesses at why not)
Microtransactions
What were these going to be? Are they still coming?
In his explanation above, Jim said:
“We’re also opening up the microtransaction API so developers can charge for premium content in their own games (extra levels, gameplay modes, etc) — we’ll take a much smaller cut of that revenue.”
The API has long been rumoured to be a bit flakey, which is no surprise for a startup (and the people in the community saying this mostly weren’t professional developers, so their expectations need to be taken with a pinch of salt). I’ve not tried it myself (I joined during closed beta, fully intending to get back into Flash and make some stuff for it, but never quite got around to it. Having to re-purchase all my now-out-of-date Flash dev tools for stupid amounts of money from Macromedia/Adobe just proved one barrier too many), but a couple of friends have, and they’ve all said good things about it’s simplicity and how it “just works”.
(for another view on this, a while back I spotted this great article by someone who decided to take a flash game made in a single weekend and see how easily + well they could make money from it by putting it on various portals including Kongregate. It’s an interesting read, and goes into detail on the time it took to get the API stuff working, and what it was like to work with from cold)
But on the whole, the API has been up and running and working fine for over a year now (from my experience as a player on the site). So, I’d expect that adding new features to the API is well within Kong’s abilities as a company / dev team.
In the list of features, it reads as though Kong intended to make this thing work themselves, but Jim’s expansion suggests instead that they wanted it to be driven by developers. I think they expected game makers to be frustrated at the low per-game monetization possible from ad revenue, and to push Kong to support micropayments for more content. It hasn’t quite happened that way, I think – Flash + Kong makes it so easy to knock up a game and publish it that I think few developers on the site really think about putting in the kind of time and effort needed to chop and slice their content. Combine that with the large revenues that Desktop Tower Defence was widely quoted as making from Kong alone, and you can see that many are probably happy with just releasing “extra games” rather than “extra content for a single game”.
This is despite the fact that with Kong’s current revenue-sharing model *that* is a sub-optimal setup for developers. The way Kong’s rev-sharing works, you get ad-rev-share, but also the top-rated games each week/month get cash lump-sums from Kong. But there’s a big drop-off in amount between “1st”, “2nd”, etc – so if you, as a developer, have three awesome games, you’re much better off having them win 1st place three months in sequence, rather than launch them all at once and only get 1st + 2nd + 3rd. So, yes, you really would be better off making one game stay top of the pile every month (and I’m sure this was very deliberately done this way to try and encourage game quality and discourage game quantity; I just don’t think it’s working all that well yet).
Here’s a wild guess as to why: even the more advanced and experienced of developers on Kong are still in the mindsets that the crappy portals over the years have forced upon them, e.g. “for better revenue, embed an advert from a portal and get a better rate; for REALLY good revenue, embed an extra-long advert and the portal will give you a single cash lump-sum”. This is unsurprising when you consider that making a living out of independent, single-person casual games development still requires you to put your product out on as many portals as possible.
Until that changes, most developers will probably continue to use whichever lowest-common-denominator approaches they can deploy across ALL the portals. In that sense, Kong has a hard struggle ahead of it if it wants to change attitudes. But that’s part of why Kong is great for developers – if it DOES change those attitudes, it makes the world a better place for developers, and for players. Unless, of course, Kong gives up and fades into being “just like all the other portals”. I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen.
Leagues
I used to like them, I used to sing their praises, but I can’t continue to deceive myself (or anyone else) any longer:
Kong’s features for communication between players suck horrendously.
They promised so much, and then delivered so little. They started off doing some really awesome stuff, inspired things like the AJAX-powered mini-forums for each game, that allowed you to post to the forum WHILE PLAYING without your web browser navigating away from the page (which, because of the nature of Flash, would lose all your progress in most games).
But those mini-forums, which worked “OK” for when the site was smaller, say a year ago, and had only 5-10 pages per forum, or 40 for a popular game, quickly became chaotic (mildly popular games now regularly have 50+ pages of comments, and top games have many HUNDREDS of pages … all with NO NAVIGATIONAL STRUCTURE AT ALL. Ugh).
And what about chat? Right from the early beta launches (probably from alpha too, although I never saw that, so I don’t know), people talked about Kong as “game + chat”, glued together “without the game developer doing anything” (Kong provides the chat system and it automatically attaches itself to the side of the game on the page). So … where’s the contextual chat? How come, when you’re in chat, there’s NOTHING that relates the chat you’re in, or the people you’re talking to, to the game you’re in?
(this is a particularly interesting question given IIRC Pogo.com – Jim Greer’s previous job before he founded Kongregate – made a big thing of showing profile information about other people in the chat window. IIRC you could choose a handful of your Pogo badges that would be displayed with your avatar whenever you chatted (in fact, IIRC it was Jim who originally explained all this to me years ago when I cheekily applied for a job with the Pogo team and he gave me a phone interview*)).
How does this have anything to do with Leagues?
Well, leagues for casual games are a classic example of how three things in gaming crossover and make something much bigger than the sum of their parts. It is a bit of a poster-child for “Game 2.0” (a stupid concept IMHO, but nevermind), and it IS a good idea, but most people miss the point:
- Competitiveness (…in front of an audience)
- Community (…around a shared experience)
- Communication (…of shared struggle)
The beautiful thing about leagues as opposed to other Web 2.0 + Game / Social Games features is that they are technologically VERY easy to implement. That’s also the ugly thing: it means most people who implement them don’t actually know why they’re doing it, and screw them up.
I could believe that the only reason leagues haven’t been implemented yet is that Jim and the Kong team *do* understand them, and know that they “could” throw them up almost at a moment’s notice – but that getting a complete process and system that fulfils all three of the core elements is a much much bigger design challenge, and needs them to fix a whole bunch of things at once.
i.e. you’ll see Leagues appear on Kongregate ONLY at the same time as they “fix” the chat and the mini-forums, and start providing proper Profile pages instead of the quickly-hacked-together ones they’ve got now that look like a beautified output of an SQL command:
SELECT * FROM PROFILES WHERE USERNAME="playerX"
…because without doing those other things too (which we know they’re working on, according to previous commenters on this blog) the Leagues would fall far short of their potential.
(*) – about that interview (although I’m sure Jim’s forgotten completely), it’s an interesting illustration of how my attitudes to software development have undergone a sea-change, so I’m going to bore you with a description here ;)…
A recruiter put me forwards for it, but I had very little expectation of getting the job, or of taking it if it was offered. But I *did* want to know more about what EA’s “casual gaming” group looked like internally, and how they worked. I dismally (no, really: dismally) failed the programming test, I think – they wanted me to write a java game, as an applet, from scratch in under an hour. At the time, I’d just come from writing big server-side systems – also in java – and was still wedded to using rigorous software engineering approaches. They needed someone who would just churn out crap, see what was good, throw away the rest, and iterate on it. Which was right of them. But with a timed test and no run-up practices I couldn’t overcome the habits I’d been using as recently as the week before.
(I say this now as someone who is firmly in that camp too, who strongly advocates Guy Kawasaki’s “don’t worry; be crappy!” mantra – but back then, I understood the concepts, but was in the wrong frame of mind to put them into practice. Certainly I wasn’t mentally prepared at the drop of a hat to unlearn everything I knew and re-educate myself, AND write a game, in under an hour).
From the latest newsletter, at the bottom (after the big graphics and announcement about “moshlings” – aka mini-moshi-monsters (my – this is getting a bit infinitely recursive, isn’t it? Now your child’s pet has a pet :). I’m still trying to attract an interesting Moshling (the minigame to get them is Animal Crossing crossed with a Fruit Machine / One-arm bandit – makes me think of ZT Online’s chests, although without the Real Money part), but already I find myself wanting the next hit: a moshi-mini-moshling-ling. Ling. Mini. *ahem*)).
ANYWAY … here’s the news bit – changes to the parental controls:
This is a quick review of free tools for web analytics / stats-analysis / weblog analysis. I’ll follow up with some more detailed posts about non-web tracking. Follow-up posts will extend this into game development, but this post is purely about web stuff.
Believers are wonderful people. I hire less talented believers over talented heretics every time. Three-star ability with five-star drive is how you want it. The other way around leads you to hell.
I missed the talk, but Sulka told me about it afterwards. I’ve just seen that Scott’s commented on this too, and a lot of people are complaining that this is a Bad Thing. The thing is, how many people have actually tried it?
Question someone asked on LinkedIn recently. I thought it was an interesting question, so cross-posting my answer here.
Question: What are the key traits, skills, and level of experience do you look for when hiring a Design Director, Creative Director, or Executive Creative Officer for your video game studio or media development firm?
My Answer:
The first thing to do is to look through their portfolio of past work.
The second thing to do is ask them to explain it.
The good ones will be able to at least say something interesting about each project.
The great ones will be able to explain precisely why they chose the particular style that was used in each case, and what that style bought them in terms of fitting the project, or emphasizing the core content, or appealing to the target market, etc.
Generally, you also look for their knowledge of best practices in key areas. For instance, do they know the standard info about dramatic tension and story arcs from hollywood and TV dramas? Do they know about art pipelines and production methodologies – can they work with modern methods like Scrum?
But, at the end of the day, the biggest single question is: how many games have you played, and what did you like?
If you haven’t played major examples of each of the 10 most popular/valuable game genres, or aren’t able to EXTREMELY coherently explain what was good and what was bad about each and every one, then you’re probably not much good, and a long way short of being great.
To put this into perspective, I’m a CTO / Dev Director / Tech Director, and I’ve personally played in the region of several thousand computer games, and for every one of them I could tell you what was good and what was bad and make recommendations for improvements, or tell you what I’d love to plagiarise for other games. I know I’m a bit strange (in many ways), and it helps that I have a near photographic memory, but I expect a good Design Director / Creative Officer to have a similar level of experience as that. If I can do it, and also found the time to learn and become reasonably good at programming, then why didn’t they manage it too?