My GDC lecture, MBA Lessons, Applied, has been scheduled for Thursday, March 26 from 9:00am till 10. This lecture will be nearly identical to the one I gave at the IGDA Leadership Forum, so if you attended that talk, it is safe to skip this one. Otherwise, please come! The IGDA talk received high marks so I’m feeling extra-confident this year. :-)

Session Description: This lecture will summarize, and make relevant for the game industry, the key lessons that I learned when getting my MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. This includes takeaways from classes on marketing, strategy, finance, and organizational processes. This session will not be a thinly-veiled attempt to glorify business school. There won’t be any spreadsheets or equations — just frameworks for thinking about very real challenges. For example: how you should think about potential game development projects; are they worth starting or continuing? What is the best way to motivate employees and customers? Etc.

Takeaways: MBA marketing and strategy lessons, applied to the game industry (for example, how anchoring and the compromise effect can be used to drive higher price points for games and virtual items.) MBA finance lessons, applied to the game industry (for example: examining the concept of sunk cost, and how failure to understand it can cause companies to over-invest in dying projects, or mistakenly kill good projects.) MBA organizational processes lessons, applied to the game industry (for example: what are the best ways to compensate employees in creative, white collar industries? To motivate and hold them accountable?)

Via Jeremy Liew: Popular Science has published an article that describes how the 2010 Honda Insight (a hybrid vehicle) uses some principles of video games to encourage more fuel efficient driving behavior. The car’s multi-information display includes a progress meter — a (leafless) virtual plant. The plant’s empty branches grow leaves over time, as a result of efficient driving behavior recorded by the car’s onboard computer. The multi-information display helps teach the driver how to drive more efficiently (and thus, gain leaves) by signaling the impact of excessive stopping and starting, inefficient acceleration, etc.

This isn’t a short-term game, either. Over the car’s entire lifetime, a thrifty driver can earn a second tier of leaves, then a flower on each branch. The screen will eventually display a trophy if a driver performs well enough for a long enough period of time.

What I like about this idea is not just that it makes fuel-efficient driving more interesting. If Honda is smart, they could turn this into an incentive to purchase more Honda vehicles in the future. After all, when the time comes to purchase another car, you wouldn’t want to lose the virtual trophy that you had worked so hard to earn, would you? Well, why should you have to lose it? Just purchase another vehicle from Honda, and all the trophies you earned in your previous vehicle can be transferred over to the new one! Of course, this would work much better if you could earn trophies for other activities in addition to efficient driving, and it would work much better still if the accumulation of trophies led to concrete real-world benefits, like an “exclusive” t-shirt with the Honda logo on it, an entry into an exciting prize sweepstakes, a 5% discount on your next vehicle…

Lots of buzz today about Gabe Newell’s DICE Summit keynote. Gabe noted that price promotions on certain games on Steam have dramatically lifted sales. He emphasized that when Left 4 Dead was recently discounted by 50% (to $25), the discount increased sales by 3,000%. He added, “We sold more in revenue this last weekend than we did when we launched the product” and claimed that brick-and-mortar sales were unaffected by the Steam promotion. Gabe concluded that video games are probably too expensive, in general. (There was more to the presentation, including some comments about the evils of DRM, but I’m more interested in focusing on the pricing stuff right now.)

A couple of caveats, before I write anything further. #1: Gabe is one of the smartest people in this industry, and he has much more experience than I do. I’m not questioning his intelligence or judgment in any way, but I’m also not foolish enough to believe that his keynote statements encompass the sum total of his thoughts on this matter. More importantly, I’m not foolish enough to believe that Gabe is without agenda. He clearly wants to sell games for a lower price (for one very obvious reason related to the retail ecosystem, in particular.) This keynote presentation was an opportunity for Gabe to advance his agenda, not to share the full scope of his thoughts on pricing strategy or on Valve’s unique position in the industry.

Caveat #2: In my gut, I’ve long suspected that many console video games may in fact be over-priced (at their launch and later on in the life-cycle.) But I don’t know for sure, partially because the data that is needed to prove this assertion simply does not exist in sufficient quantity yet, at least to my knowledge. More on that… now.

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Advice from Seth Godin: Call your customers. Or write to them. “I know that times might be tough for you. Is there anything I can do to pitch in and help?” Perhaps more practical for some companies than others, but I bet the spirit of this idea can be applied in many thoughtful ways.

PlayMesh, an iPhone game developer, has found an ingenious way to integrate microtransactions into its iMafia game. Since Apple doesn’t support or allow in-game microtransactions, PlayMesh has cleverly linked iMafia currency to the purchase of other PlayMesh games, like Chess Puzzles and Speed Shapes. In other words, if you purchase Speed Shapes, you get not only that game, but currency that can be spent within iMafia. Brilliant.

I just discovered this New Yorker article written by Malcolm Gladwell in 2006, about companies that can supposedly predict, with far greater success than experts, the likelihood that a song or movie will be successful. Unfortunately, the article is so breezy that it’s hard to evaluate the claims within it; but still, interesting!

Soren has written an excellent article about in-game economies… the kind of article that begs for a follow-up or two. (Hint, hint…)

Given the level of passion that our customers have for our games, I’ve always wondered why more developers don’t invite fans (via a competition) to create compelling and unusual print/online advertisements for upcoming releases. Here’s some decent stuff that Street Fighter 4 fans created voluntarily. Now imagine if Capcom had explicitly requested submissions and offered a decent prize. Maybe give every entrant some purely-aesthetic but really cool-looking free DLC in SF4, on top of that. I bet that the top results would put to shame more than a few professional design firms.

Lots of interesting iPhone related stats: iPhone users made up 14 percent of mobile downloaders in November. Thirty-two percent of iPhone users said they downloaded a game during the month, considerably higher than the market average of 3.8 percent. Overall, the audience for downloaded mobile games grew 17 percent. For the same period, 20.5 million users said they played a downloaded game on a mobile device, or 8.9 percent of all mobile subscribers.

Amazon has announced the launch of their casual game download service, as expected ever since they acquired Reflexive. The most notable part of the announcement: games will be priced at $9.95 or less, instead of the more common max of $19.95. Also, Amazon won’t be offering any free games (advertisement or microtransaction supported) for now. My thoughts: it would be foolish to discount the potential impact of Amazon’s entrance into the market — they understand online merchandising better than anyone, and have a huge, loyal customer base that they can leverage. That said, I bet Amazon will be surprised by the resilience and effectiveness of its competitors in this space, most of which have been toughened by years of intense competition, and many of which have developed effective tools for retaining customers (i.e. Pogo’s tokens, badges and avatars; Kongregate’s “Kongai” game; the many forms of free-to-play content, in general.) One sign that Amazon’s new service isn’t having an explosive start: Totem Tribe, Amazon’s #1 Editor’s Pick, is currently ranked an abysmal 38,175th out of all video game-related products in Amazon’s catalogue. Kim has shared more thoughts of his own here.

There’s more to life than games:

For the democrats and geeks among you, a really funny patch log for the presidency. For example: “Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.” Oh, and “Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.” :-)

Coraline is now one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s a 3D, stop-motion animated film based on Neil Gaiman’s work. This is the kind of movie that will literally have you muttering out loud, in amazement, on more than one occasion. The 3D effects are incredible (we’ve come a long way from the cheesy blue/red lens films), the story is wonderful and the pacing is perfect. It’s safe for kids but perfectly entertaining for adults. Go see it in the best (preferably high-def, digital) theatre that you have access to!

More work and personal life productivity tips from Gummi.