Game Geek Speak

Wow. People are going crazy with prognostications of the death of every sector of the games industry (downloadable, social games, mobile games, retail) and how unless you are Zynga, it is impossible to make a game and survive.

This is just pure hogwash. (And, please note, I’m going to use some sarcasm and exaggeration in this post because I can’t help it.)

First of all, saying something like, “If you make a Facebook game, you can get rich because Zynga is projected to earn $700 million this year” is totally irrational. Zynga is the #1 game developer on Facebook. Never, ever compare your company with that, unless you have nine-figure venture capital funding–in which case, you are not indie, and you have different problems entirely.

The other half of that is, “If you are not Zynga or making at least $100 million per year, you can’t be successful with a social game.” This is equally as ridiculous.

Now this leads to the “If I can just make 1% of what Zynga makes, I’ll still make $7 million per year!” But that’s the wrong end of the stick when you are doing financial planning. (And that’s another post itself.)

My beef is with setting up very false expectations. This is what makes a “gold rush” insane (read The Madness of Crowds sometime), even when there’s not nearly as much gold as you think because the only company ever being talked about is the #1 company. Pandemonium ensues.

There’s a huge gap between Zynga’s revenue and the #2 company. And that’s the #2 fricken company on all of Facebook! There’s only room for one #1 and one #2. Unless you have the VC funding, why are you even thinking about what they are doing, much less talking about it as if it matters to anyone with less than $100 million in the war chest? Does. Not. Apply.

Hey, I’m just asking for some common sense when talking about the realities of commercial success on Facebook.

The fact is that there are a lot of small and mid-sized game developers making some sweet money on Facebook (and elsewhere). You don’t need a team of 700, like Zynga. Try a team of 30 or 10 or 3. You might find that you can cover costs with a much smaller player base. You won’t have 80 million monthly players, but–like Neo in The Matrix–you won’t need to. (Sorry, possibly obscure reference there in the service of “humor.”)

All I’m saying is that there is more than one way to skin this cat, so everyone stop talking in absolutes about how if you are not Zynga, you can’t be successful, and, therefore, the fad is over, Facebook sucks now, and let’s all go eat worms. If you’re indie, you’re probably small. There’s a big chance you can succeed on Facebook (and elsewhere) because you are nimble and your overhead is low. Yes, you might need to spend money on ads. So does everyone who sells anything. It’s called marketing.

Second of all, no, virality is not dead on Facebook. Spamming is dead, but not virality (aka “word of mouth”). Make a game people want to talk about, and you won’t be impacted by these “draconian” changes. On top of that, Facebook isn’t the only fricken social networking site out there, people! Diversify or die.

Thirdly, you don’t need to host your game on a fricken social networking site at all. There are plenty of games “in the wild” (that big, scary place!) that have millions of monthly active users and rake in money. No, you won’t be able to spam a million people and get 7 figure MAU numbers in a week. Most people, at this point, say, “Oh no! Then you can’t survive! Just quit instead. I’m not Zynga–” *sound of self-inflicted gunshot to the head*

Cheer up. You can survive–and thrive. Just ignore the news about companies that are nothing like yours, and you might find your way.

Lastly, this kind of alarmist hyperbole is just feeding back on itself and creating more hysteria. Please stop, and think!

The economy sucks, and will get worse, but you don’t have to make $700 million a year to be commercially successful. What are your costs of living? Now double that, and make that your goal instead. Gee, that seems to change all the parameters.

Interesting.

There is a really interesting article on Inside Social Games that cautions against using Facebook Credits as a payment method. This is something that I’m trying to reason through in regards to my game.

An example is Amazon gift certificates — you could buy them but there’s always a large amount of remnant value on the card that isn’t used. In an economy like [the Facebook] platform, that will lead to developers never seeing the value even though they created it.

…we all know at this point that Facebook is not that straightforward for distribution — we all have to spend money on distribution. So you’re not just paying 30 percent for payments, you have to spend on top of that for advertising.

Apart from some of the things mentioned in the article, there is one big issue that bothers me: I don’t want to be controlled by outside forces. That’s the reason I don’t work at a company, and I don’t want outside funding. I’m freakin’ independent, ya know?! I want to reap the full benefits of my potential, not give it away after all this hard work.

If I exclusively use Credits for my game and Facebook makes policy changes to either pricing, their fees, or how Credits can be used within an app, my business and livelihood becomes subject to their whims. In my game, the currency is integral to the game design, not just a slapped-on form of payment like a PayPal button. Can I risk that being controlled by a third party who doesn’t have my best interests in mind?

There is a counterpoint article which supports the idea of Facebook Credits as a universal app currency, and the main gist is that, overall, this will increase the market size by way more than the 30% fee. I see the logic there, and that sounds great. But my biggest beef is that I lose so much control over my own product by using Credits.

This feels a lot like the argument in the downloadable games world between relying on portals for profit versus staking out your own chunk of territory on your own website for the long term. I’m really tempted to host my game off of Facebook but use Connect for logins and social features to get the benefits of Facebook’s reach.

One solution might be to accept Credits in exchange for hard currency in-game (a separate currency from Credits). Essentially, this would abstract Credits away and still allow me to control the in-game economy. Then, players would not spend Credits directly in the game, but would only use Credits to fund their in-game account. Would that work? I don’t know.

But it’s a tough call. What would you do?

Update: Tangential, perhaps, but with features such as the new behaviors of the Like button that can be used off of Facebook, it seems more and more compelling to host a game on its own site, because you can still leverage a lot of what makes Facebook such a “viral” platform without being hosted on Facebook.

Trip Hawkins made some great observations about the evolution of technology as it relates to the user experience. His conclusion is that simple and easy will win, and of course nobody can disagree with that.

YouTube simplified the online video world by keeping everything in the browser and not requiring anyone to install or remember anything. Everything users needed was already online waiting for them. When they emailed a video clip, their friend only had to click on it to play and bookmarks made it a snap to use the service again and again.

Simple: check. Convenient: check. Viral: check. Cha-ching: check and check.

Replace “YouTube” with your company and “video” with “games.”

The fact is that the number of people that choose to play games in their browsers will be far greater than the number of people who are willing to download, install, and then fiddle with configurations for an equivalent experience. Maybe this is deployment Darwinism at work?

This won’t happen right away, but the path is clear and things like Google’s Native Client will make the rate of moving everything to the browser even faster.

For you nit-pickers, I do acknowledge that even browser games “download” data, but it’s not the same for the user experience, and that’s what I am referring to here. The user doesn’t need to download, find, and then install the game. There are always exceptions, but that process is a huge barrier for a lot of people.

Creating passionate users is NOT about finding ways to make everyone like you. It’s about finding ways to use your own passion to inspire passion in others.
via The Creating Passionate Users blog

Applies just as much with games as anything else.

Zynga has some massive MAU and DAU numbers, but I think you have to be pretty “middle ground” to be that main stream. I also think that’s why social games have a lower ARPU than “core” MMOs and the like.

It’s the hardcore players that will pay. You can certainly get some revenue out of the rest with ads, but I think it would be interesting to try to aim squarely at a specific audience and ignore the allure of being able to state that you have a zillion monthly active users. I’d love to know the ARPPU on that “mediocre” audience versus a passionate audience of 500,000.

“$40 for lips couch, selling like hotcakes.”
–Sebastien de Halleux, PlayFish, speaking about Pet Society

Whoa. I would *never* have priced a virtual couch at $40. Not because I think virtual goods are not worth money, but because my personal sense of value tells me that it’s not worth that price. But there are a lot of factors in play on that decision: my sense of what is fun, my desire to “show off” to other players, my personal income, and so on.

The big lesson here is, as someone famous said, “Value is what it’s worth to a customer; price is what you charge for it.”

We simply can’t comprehend what our players might be willing to pay or do based on our own judgment. I think, especially as indie developers who might not have as much business experience, it’s really hard for us to imagine the value of our products and then price accordingly. I see this a lot in downloadable games with prices like $3 or $5 or $9. If players love your game enough to pay even $1 for it, they probably will pay a lot more (price wars not withstanding).

Online games such as MMOs and social games implementing a virtual goods business model have a similar obstacle. When pricing virtual goods, pick a price that you think nobody would ever pay, then double it. Heck, I’d probably have to quadruple it! I would find it hard to image someone paying $10 for a couch in Pet Society. But to hear that it sells like hotcakes for $40 shows that I could be losing a lot of revenue.

So, start with a high price. You can always come down. Nobody complains about a price drop. You can also test price points with analytics to find the sweet spot.

A company has to sell products or it can’t continue to create more. To sell, you have to be able to reach people so that they know you exist. I’d rather interact in a useful way with a company about its products than endure more traditional “talk at me” marketing. So I think social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is a pretty cool way to achieve that because it’s very consumer friendly. If you don’t like what you hear, you just stop the interactions (unless it’s an email list you can’t get off of–grrr).

Particularly, I like Facebook’s way of doing things, where you can fan something easily and remove yourself just as easily if it gets spammy. I feel like I am in control, not the marketer, and that makes me more open to hear what’s being offered.

Interesting to those of us who make games and market them, I came across a great post about framing just what a “social media” strategy is and some thoughts on how such a beast ideally works. There was a list of questions to consider when planning, but also some good additions in the comments. So, I’ve gathered them here and integrated them (hopefully!) logically.

• Do you have something to sell in the end that you can deliver or communicate about? This is the starting point.
• What types of people do we want to talk to?
• Where do we find them?
• What are they talking about already?
• Is it appropriate for us to join that conversation and, if so, when? (Focus on the conversations that matter and that are relevant and impactful to your brand.)
• When is it not appropriate to join the conversation. What are the criteria?
• Who do we empower within the organization to serve as our conversationalists?
• How do we inject usefulness into the conversation without being overly promotional?
• What value can we provide in terms of knowledge, opinion or content?
• How can we earn their trust?
• When we do earn their trust, how can we best ask for their input into our product or service?
• Under what circumstances can we point the conversation toward considering our product?
• Can we say or do something that invites someone else to point the conversation toward considering our product?
• How do we leverage this vehicle of social media to create brand evangelists?
• How shall we apologize and regroup if we overstep their comfort level or accuse us of violating their trust?
• What do we do if people “call us out” and react adversely to our social media presence in a given network?
• If those unfortunate interactions take place, what can we do to offset said negative interaction from ranking well in search results?
• What are you learning from their adverse reactions to your product or service?
• Are you OK with social networks not being OK with everything you do?
• What is our strategy for true brand opposition?
• Continue traditional marketing and sales. Social media enhances it, it doesn’t replace it.
• Don’t expect a sudden influx in orders. It takes about 6 months of hard work and time to get the results coming through.

Very entertaining video about how drab following formulas can make things.

Now, there is something to be said about conventions. In games, specifically, many conventions are necessary and good: control schemes, for example, should be common between games because it’s less for a new player to learn (and thus less reasons to be frustrated and quit). Visual interface elements are often useful when shared across games (or computer applications, generally), such as X for “close this window” or a musical note icon for audio options.

The types of conventions I’m thinking of, though, are more along the lines of gameplay mechanics (shoot everything that moves for points) or story lines (save the princess) or visual style (photo-realism). These conventions really can make your game less than great if used carelessly.

The solution? Pick one thing, one feature or one facet of your game, and push it so far over the top that it grabs people right away. The key is balance: don’t overdo it. Too much change, and people will be left confused–and quit your game.

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.)

Everyone wants to know how to be successful at what they do. Some people get angry when others succeed (because it isn’t them), and some people get inspired. Lots of people fail, and that’s normal (especially in business). Wasn’t it Edison that said he didn’t fail 1000 times, but rather found 1000 ways not to make a light bulb?

Are there principles that can help you succeed? Maybe understanding what it takes would help you finish.

This video from TED talks describes what Richard St. John believes are the ingredients necessary to brew your own batch of success. I found it inspiring, and I hope that you might, too.