Game Geek Speak

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.

I found this article very interesting and relevant to indie game developers, so I thought I would spread the love.

When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times.

We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coordination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment to have the audacity to play it that way.

Read more of How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.

It is possible to make really good money from web games that are not shovelware, but it isn’t trivial. First, let’s look at the “usual” revenue streams for a typical Flash game.

1. Game licensing can be lucrative, but it’s not perpetual, so for the long haul it’s not a great approach. In fact, I think it can harm your income (see below).
2. Ads are certainly not a great approach, either. The earnings are perpetual, though, so ads make a good supplementary income stream. But that’s not going to feed the kids.

For some reason, lots of Flash developers I’ve run into seem to think those are the only ways to make money with web games. *shrugs*

Why would licensing your game harm your income when you an get paid to do it? For one thing, it diminishes your brand’s exposure.

But more importantly, it funnels your players to the wrong place! You want them at your site, not at someone else’s site. Traffic, my friends, is the key to this whole mystery of how to make money. Your traffic is precious. Don’t sell it or give it away.

While getting traffic is pretty easy with Flash because of the decentralized distribution system that evolved, bringing in revenue will always require work and creativity in your products and your business. (I blogged about Flash game distribution in regards to my shift from Flash towards Unity a while back.)

I’m not specifically a Flash supporter. I use the best tech that will allow me to achieve my business goals. For now, that is Flash because it’s got more reach than any other technology. However, if Silverlight or something else overtakes Flash as a web platform in terms of audience, then that’s what I’ll be using. Because getting people to your site is how you make money.

Some people expect to make a game in a couple weeks, slap ads in it, then rake in money. It doesn’t work like that. Ads are supplementary, remember? For some exceptions, yes, you can get rich from ads. For 90% of us, no, you will barely make anything from ads.

Bottom line is that it is possible to make good (or even obscene) money from Flash games. But not from a bubble popping game you made in three days with some Mochi ads in it. Get creative with your game and your business plan.

So, it seems that there’s been a disturbance in the Force.

Amazon (mega online retailer that we all know and love) purchased Reflexive (small casual game publisher/developer), and they repriced all the games to about $10 a pop.

It seems that there are two camps now: one says that casual games should be $10 and remain simple and brief, while the other camp maintains that indie games are worth more because of their uniqueness and craftsmanship. The significance here is that not long ago, casual games were considered to be indie games (mostly). By any standard, if you are making downloadable games, this is news.

But what is really changing is the business models. “Try before you buy” has been the dominant choice for downloadable sales for many years. Clearly, that is not as cut and dried now.

We little people can’t compete with Amazon on price. And I firmly believe that we should not compete on price with anyone, ever. Lowering your prices is rarely the right thing to do when you need more income.

Competing on price only works for commodity goods. If you have to choose between toilet paper from company A and toilet paper from company B, well, usually you are looking at the price difference above all else. It’s folly to use that strategy for selling games–unless you are Amazon so that you can afford to eat the tiny margins and try to make it up on volume. But listen to what I’m saying!! Are we talking about rubber flanges for a sink drain or video games?! It’s suffocating my soul just to write about it.

So the real shift here isn’t about casual or indie games. It’s about sales models.

Luckily, I am not planning to use a single sales model for my future games, and I think that is something that even downloadable developers need to examine: you can’t compete on price if it’s of the “try and buy” model. Find other ways to monetize and give value to your customers that they can’t get from a big shop like Amazon. Sure, it might be cheaper there, but they won’t get one-to-one interaction with the developers or personal service or a “deluxe” version with extra features.

It’s kind of exciting to read about how others are interpreting these changes. What’s your take?

(Yes, the titillating title of this post is meant to incite passion to get your attention. Please continue reading.)

I mentioned a little bit ago that Unity3d is releasing the authoring IDE for Windows with version 2.5. I read in the forums that they would release 2.5 no later than GDC, which is in March.

Unity is tempting me to completely ditch Flash. But there’s one factor making that a bad decision for the moment. Although I think eventually I will make games in Unity exclusively (assuming it all works out as dreamily as it seems like it will), Flash can’t be abandoned yet.

What’s so great about Flash?

Adoption. Everyone and their granny’s dairy goat has Flash installed. Adoption by itself, though, isn’t what makes adoption so great. Its really about…

…distribution. I can get a game in front of hundreds of thousands of eyeballs in a week using Flash. A lot of folks would think, “Gee, maybe you could make a few hundred dollars from ads. That’s not so great. Jason is stupid, and I hate him.” And then they’d go back and continue working on their C++ downloadable game. But I beg to differ.

It’s not about the ad money. It’s the traffic, ya silly persons! Why would I care about a few hundred dollars of ad money when I can get ten thousand visitors to my website each week or month? And I don’t mean putting Google ads on the site and earning from that, either. No, no, no. That’s still small potatoes.

I’m talking about harnessing the traffic machine that is Flash games and then upselling to those visitors with bigger ticket items, like stand alone games or (much more likely in my case) getting them interested in games that utilize microtransactions and/or subscription services. Now you’re talking about significant income.

Make money with ads? Pfft! I use MochiAds because I like their version control, easy encryption and especially their distribution network that sends games out to millions of people for me!

There are some other neat things about Flash, but the real reason I use it is because of distribution and other services that have risen up around it.

There’s this cool idea of sponsorship, where developers are in control, and portals pay us to show their ad to drive traffic back to them. (Did anyone notice these portals are driving traffic back to their sites? See! It’s about traffic, not ad money!)

The thing I like about this sponsorship arrangement is that it is in diametric opposition to how things work with portals that sell downloadable games. There, developers are like slaves who beg for any tiny piece of profit their own work can earn. Portals call the shots, make the money, and generally drive the industry into the ground to the point that now it’s going to be flailing around and coughing up blood for a long time until (hopefully) it finally dies some day. It’s just like the retail games business, where publishers lead developers around by the nose, take all the earnings, and drive the whole industry into the ground in the process.

(I have a lot of friends in the downloadable casual games industry, and I’m not speaking here about anyone in particular. I’m speaking about the industry and the patterns of business that are currently dominant. I certainly don’t mean that I want my casual games friends to lose their jobs! I just think that industry needs to and will evolve away from how it currently operates.)

Wow. Sorry, I was digressing passionately there for a minute.

So now here comes Unity.

Unity lacks that distribution power, and although technically it is a dream come true, the real dream come true is when that technical capability is coupled with distribution and reach on par with Flash. Now that is going to be a sight to see.

I hope that existing portals and services based around Flash will integrate Unity support. Then we can keep the existing structures in place and add Unity games among the Flash games. Oh, let me dream, would ya?!

Now. All that having been said… I am not convinced that adoption itself is a problem for Unity. I think any game that’s good enough will cause players to install the Unity plugin without hesitation. I don’t mean something like a Simon Says clone or some other shovelware game made in three days–it’ll have to be a good game.

Because of Unity’s appeal, which will make convincing players to get the plugin easy, I will start to develop with Unity as soon as I get my shaking-with-excitement hands on a copy. Building more games can only mean more adoption and, eventually, more distribution. Distribution = earnings = I make more games without a day job. Yuussssss!!1!

There are many paths to success as a small development studio. One tried and true is to create games in C++ and offer them as downloads that a user installs and plays. I did that for a long time (well, about three or four years). This turns out to be a really difficult thing to do successfully.

Let me qualify that and say that running a business in any industry is not easy. But trying to get your game noticed, then downloaded to someone’s computer without problems, then installed successfully, then appreciated enough to get that person to your online sales page is really, really, really difficult without some marketing behind it.

You could go guerrilla and try to build a community around the game (but first you have to get some users to start that process), or you could throw money at it (which is what the big companies do). Some folks partner with publishers/distributors (I did that once) for their marketing muscle, but you lose a lot of control and–more importantly–you lose access to your own customers, and the publisher/distributor usually ends up dominating the branding.

Or, you could rethink how you approach things entirely. That’s what I’ve done over the last year or so.

It’s probably fairly obvious that I will be focusing on web games from now on. No more download/install games for me! Here are some major differences from the old way I was doing things:

• No download/install/uninstall barrier – play right in the browser, optionally loading/streaming assets on demand rather than in one up-front, huge download
• Much easier to get exposure – a decentralized network of small/large sites come to me and spread my game all over the place for free and without my involvement
• Plenty of lateral sales channels – ads, sponsorships, licensing, etc
• All games are becoming more web integrated and multi-platform (pc, mobile phone, set top box, console) – Flash is web-ready and is gaining or now has reach across those platforms

There are downsides, but they are minor compared to the gains, so I’m not going to labor that other than to acknowledge that there are some tradeoffs, like with anything.

Something else important to note is that the lateral sales channels either don’t exist or are far less accepted when you have a downloadable game. That’s really important, because having multiple income streams is one way to build resilience into your product and business.

I am also going to experiment with microtransaction sales as a central part of my strategy. You simply can’t make much money on ads alone, and sponsorships don’t always come through, but all of these things combined will begin to add up very quickly.

The key to getting someone to pay for a Flash game, though, is that the quality and value have to be there, just like a downloadable game that people will pay for. It simply won’t work for shovelware. So the next phase of my technology is to integrate my website backend with a game frontend which can facilitate user authentication and even an item mall right in my games.

With all this in mind, I got around to doing a redesign of the Creatrix Games website.

Here’s to a great 2009 and a new business model launch! *clinks champagne glass*

I keep lusting over this amazing looking tool. You can bet that I will be getting my grubby paws on it eventually. There’s simply too much potential there!

Unity3d is one of the many reasons I wonder why big companies are still making boxed retail games at all. For that matter, I often wonder why small indie developers are making downloadable games at all! I will never make another non-browser game in my life, unless there’s a huge incentive or it’s an optional download version. It just doesn’t make sense anymore to put up a barrier to entry like forcing a download and install.

There are two things I don’t like about Unity: 1) the development tools run on Macs only, and 2) I can’t use Java even though the tools use Mono (which supports Java).

First point, I have nothing against Macs (heck, I own one). It’s just not my development platform of choice. I have a bunch of nice tools already that I’m comfy with on my Windows machines. I don’t wanna have to build all that up again. That said, Unity holds enough potential that I would.

Second point, I don’t dislike C#. It’s a lot like Java, maybe even better in some ways. The reason I don’t want to move away from Java is because that’s what all the server code is written in, and it would be really nice to only write the classes etc for one language! Again, though, I think Unity has enough potential that I would bite the bullet and do it anyway.

Oh, point three: it costs $1,500 bucks. Ouch. I know there’s a cheaper version, but it’s too crippled for me–you can’t even publish to Windows! So, really there’s only one price point. Like the other two problems, I think I can overcome this one because I am so enchanted by what I could do with this engine. Lila Dreams in 3d? You never know….

Well, I was just distracted for a few minutes (again) by the tropical demo, so I wanted to get this off my chest.

Update: Sweet goomba! I just learned that Unity 2.5 will be the first Windows release for the authoring tools! *weeps with joy* But also the indie license will allow publishing to Windows now. And the indie version costs $200. *faints* Discovering Unity has blown my mind. It solves so many problems. I must have it!!