Game Geek Speak

This is a fantastic, heartfelt indie tale. Helps keep you grounded in the experience and the product–not the business plan, monetization, or demographics. Those things are important (critical!), but if you lose your vision tending to them, they don’t matter anymore. A unique game is nothing without its soul.

Please allow me to tell you – merely from my humble perspective – the unbelievable but true story about us, Avaloop, the team that created Papermint. It’s a story about friendship and independence, about how to lose a multi-million lottery ticket, about the really unique thing we created and about hope.

When I came back from the countryside to that cinema in Vienna I was welcomed with so much warmth and enthusiasm. It was just wonderful. I knew that nothing could ever blow us off our little indie feet… whatever the future will bring. With or without Mister Big.

Suddenly we felt this spirit of freedom again! The spirit we were lacking while being drunk of that strange hope for money or fame or security… whatever it was… it had tamed us. Papermint had not grown the natural way during the “PowerPoint”-times… it was endangered to be squeezed into a shape that was not its true shape… it was a marketing/PR/get more users/blah blah/demographic needs-shape we had not consciously cared for in our original plan.

But somehow we were able to stop that deformation in our minds and went back to the original plan.

Inspiring stuff! Read more, and check out the game.

Virtual Goods News reports that:

Over the weekend Tapulous head of business development Tim O’ Brien announced that the company was successfully monetizing pirated copies of its iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge 3 by selling the pirates virtual goods as in-app purchases. Tapulous estimates that Tap Tap Revenge 3 has been downloaded 2.5 million times, but that 1 million of those downloads are pirated copies.

Ok, first of all, if you’re pirating a $.99 game, that’s pathetic and you are a loser. Full stop.

But, it’s nice to see that you can upsell pirates with virtual goods.

Pirated copies can still communicate with the Tapulous network and their in-game virtual item shops still work. According to O’Brien, this has lead to some pirate users spending far more than the app’s initial cost on virtual items like additional songs and avatar customization pieces.

So, what if–for non-pirates–you offer the app/game for $.99 (or more, if it’s not on iPhone), and then if the potential customer balks and decides not to buy, you could then offer to give them the game for free?

At least then you have a chance to monetize them later in the cycle. Pirates would have nothing to pirate, and chances are you would end up making more money in the long run even if you give away a majority of copies. (I’m assuming, too, that there’s no physical COGs and it’s exclusively digital delivery.) It sounds like a decent idea and a great experiment to try.

(P.S. My time is being consumed with a non-game business venture right now, but I want to try to blog short little ones like this to keep myself in touch with my most beloved game development universe.)