Game Geek Speak

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.

I’ve taken up the role of Director of Games for an exciting startup called Yawma. It’s an online retailer specifically for digital goods of the indie variety: games, music, applications, etc. The twist is that Yawma has a unique distribution model (which, unfortunately, I cannot say anything about right now). The developer revenue share is generous compared to portal sites like Big Fish Games, Amazon, etc. If I had some downloadable games I thought were worthy of sale, I’d sign up with Yawma myself.

So, if you have a downloadable game you would like to talk about, I can be reached at jason [@] yawma.net.

–Jason

P.S. This doesn’t adversely affect my development progress, because I’m a multitasking madman. *howls at the moon*

The microtransaction bug seems to be going viral these days among the Flash community. There are a growing number of companies offering managed payment services to Flash developers: they handle the dirty backside, and you give them content and share the income.

I personally think that it is worth it to build your own system (and I’m usually the guy saying, “Use the middleware, fool!”). But I think it depends on the scale of what you are planning. In my case, I want total control, and I want to own access to my customers so that I can continue to communicate with them. I also don’t want my games to become advertisements for a payment service.

I don’t view virtual item sales as just a sales channel. It’s also a gesture that means a player cares about and is emotionally invested in the game, and I want to maximize that relationship to make my players happy, long-term customers. Without access to my customers, the payment service is crippling my business. I don’t know that all these systems insulate the developer from his/her customers, but that is a major issue to bear in mind.

These Flash-specific services could be really useful to someone who is making much smaller scale games and wants some add-on sales or someone experimenting with virtual goods in an effort to diminish reliance on ad revenue. I’m not reviewing any of the services, just announcing that they exist. I haven’t investigated them all very deeply, but I will be poking around.

75% – andrograde.com
70% – www.nonoba.com
60% – www.gamersafe.com
60% – www.mochimedia.com
50% – www.heyzap.com

Which is best? It depends on your goals and plans. If you’re just making little quickie games (90% of Flash games), then any of the above would work. If you have a more broadly scoped business plan, you might want to steer clear and look into services that are not Flash-specific and spend the time/money to do the integration yourself.

You can’t really swing a dead cat without hitting somebody’s virtual goods payment platform anymore. I mean, there’s fatfoogoo, Gambit, TwoFish, TrialPay, Mochi Coins, PayByCash, LiveGamer, UKash, Kongregate (in November) and on and on and on. I just scratched the surface there.

It’s really getting crowded! With my new game project in production, I’m starting to wonder which one I can trust to still be around in a couple of years. There are so many, I can’t see the market supporting them all.

Some of them are “big accounts only” type companies, where you can’t find pricing or really any information on their websites without calling them. And they expect you to be a million-dollar funded company. Those types will be servicing EA and UbiSoft and other large companies. Whether they are around or not doesn’t matter to me because I won’t be their client anyway.

The others are scrappy and service small companies. These are the guys I’m likely to do business with, but also the ones most likely to bite the dust when the shakedown happens. They just won’t all have the customer base to make it through a financial storm on top of vicious competition due to overcrowding.

Anyone have experience with these companies? Which ones do you like, and what services make them stand out? Some offer great looking metrics and other perks. I’m in the market and looking right now.