How far can you get by cynically cloning and heavily marketing a successful Facebook game? FarmVille, Zynga’s FarmTown knockoff, now has 30m monthly active users. Zynga itself has 93m monthly players across all its games.

Some clever cross-promotion: Microsoft is devoting two whole episodes of 1 vs 100 to Beatles trivia in preparation for the release of The Beatles: Rock Band.

Check out Pierre: Insanity Inspired, an interesting GAMBIT game designed to explore your response to being taunted and cheered on during gameplay. Added bonus: the game itself is pretty cool! One minor gripe: the game has minor playability issues which may exaggerate a player’s negative reaction to being taunted. I’d be curious to know if players are more willing to suffer insults when they truly have no one to blame but themselves for their failures.

Konami has launched Konami Play, which features web-enabled versions of classic Konami titles and which uses Facebook to encourage social interaction.

Henry has posted a really nice article about the marketing of District 9. Quote: “The film… has been the focus of a transmedia marketing campaign for well over a year in advance of the film’s release. Signs prohibiting nonhuman use of restrooms surfaced at Comic-Con a year ago. By the start of the summer, such signs were appearing on park benches, the sides of buses, and in a variety of other contexts around major cities.”

Out of nowhere, 2K Games bursts onto the scene as a publisher of quirky, stylish indie XBLA projects. Interesting!

Seth Godin on how to interview potential new employees (the right way and the wrong way.) Wrong way: pretty much the way every company does it. Right way: dating before marriage (aka contract vs. full-time) or alternatively, a vastly greater number of candidates interviewed for shorter periods of time (call it speed-dating, perhaps?) I’m not sure about the speed dating, but I couldn’t agree more with the contract approach.

Simple but useful marketing checklist for indie games.

There’s more to life than games:

Random fact: the Apple Store on 5th Avenue in NYC reportedly earns over $350m a year, or about $35k per square foot (possibly more than any other retailer in history, including jewelry store Tiffany & Co.) How’s that for a strong brand?

Research suggests that changing circumstances in your life increase your willingness to make other, unrelated changes to products/services you consume.

This was a great week for the always-funny XKCD. First: are you tech support for your parents or grandparents? Send them this. Second: I fully intend to try this stunt on someone who doesn’t read XKCD… *grin*

California: where you can be sent to jail for life for stealing a two-buck pair of socks. (Also notable: California spends $216k annually on each inmate in its juvenile justice system, but only $8k on each child in the Oakland public school system. Ever heard the expression “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?”)

Wonderful Wired article about Craigslist.

Another excellent article by Kristof on health care reform.

Gamasutra estimates that July was the biggest month in XBLA history (and August seems likely to match or even exceed July, thanks to Summer of Arcade.) Some notables: Secret of Monkey Island: SE is estimated to have sold more units than Telltale’s Wallace & Gromit Episode 1 and Sam & Max Season 1 combined. N+ picked up approximately 30k players when it was deal of the week. Castle Crashers added another 80k players despite being a year old and despite heavy competition (another case of the hits get bigger.) And as mentioned in my previous AoI, Battlefield 1943 destroyed every record, putting a big fat smile on EA’s face.

Neat prototype: strap a Wiimote to an exercise ball (the giant kind you sit on) and get a whole new way to interact with a game.

Microsoft’s getting questioned about Games on Demand pricing, as game prices vary dramatically from region to region. Microsoft’s response: “No one retailer has the lowest pricing for every product, and our program is about giving people 24 x 7 convenience and selection…” That’s Microsoft’s tortured way of saying: “we are deathly afraid of offending our retail partners by undercutting them. So, for example, if retailers in Australia are selling a game for $60, we will offer that game to Australian LIVE users for $60 even if the same game sells for $40 in the US.” It really is that simple, folks.

Nice game design article about “the perfectly executed mini-mechanic.” Summary: reinforces the main character; is brief and infrequent, but not unique; is optional; is tightly integrated into the main game; should never be a “game-ender” but rather a pleasant diversion.

Nice summary of the issues facing companies in (and entering) the booming social gaming space.

This site supposedly describes every game in use or in development by the US military. Unfortunately, it feels out of date to me, but there’s some interesting stuff in there.

The DSi has sold almost 7m units worldwide, and is thus far outpacing early sales of the original DS, the DS Lite, and the Wii. Not bad…

Redbox, the DVD-rental juggernaut, is pilot-testing game rentals in two US markets. Games cost $2 a day; no word on whether there’s a “rent to own” option (which would be brilliant for Redbox). When a distribution system with over 15,000 locations turns its eye towards games, it merits attention.

Nice article about positive and negative reinforcement in MMOGs.

Danc’s latest article on making money with Flash is excellent, as always. Don’t be scared by the length — it’s good stuff, especially if you’re a small indie developer.

The DS functionality in the Wii version of Band Hero sounds very cool; lots of modes that broaden what spectators can do while watching friends play (in fact, they’re no longer spectators.) It almost makes me sorry that I’m married to Rock Band on the 360. Almost, but not quite. ;-)

Over 2.5m users have downloaded 1 vs. 100 on Xbox LIVE, and “as many as” 200k users tune in daily. Not bad at all. (Note that 1 vs. 100 is free *and* benefits from constant and tremendous visibility in the LIVE dash.)

There’s more to life than games:

Another lament about the pace of modern digital life, but I liked this line: “Bumped and jostled, queasy from the constant ocular and muscular adjust­ments our body must make to keep up, we will live in a constant state of digital jet lag.” True.

This will make you want to change your Facebook password immediately. :P

Neat suggestion by Seth Godin for improving the effectiveness of presentations to very small, private audiences (i.e. a couple people). Summary: strip some of the info from your slides, print the presentation, then sit next to the person you’re meeting with and go through the booklet page by page, writing directly on each page (taking advantage of the space you cleared earlier.) Leave the booklet as a takeaway.

A truly fantastic presentation on Netflix’s management culture. 128 slides, every one of them worth reading. Check it out.

I’ve been meaning to post a followup to my Develop keynote on digital distribution, and was reminded to do so by Raph, who lately has been speaking his mind about the realities of the Long Tail (good stuff — worth a read.) Raph also highlighted a report that Zynga is spending millions of dollars advertising its games and wisely predicted that new digital ecosystems will eventually be “much more hit-driven” as marketing and development budgets escalate. Raph’s right, as he frequently is, but I have one minor correction to make: the new digital ecosystems already are remarkably hit-driven! Put more bluntly: the people who thought the Long Tail would promise the end of hit-driven market dynamics were completely wrong (both about the nature of digital distribution and about the companies that digital distribution benefits.)

With rare exception (see my comments on niche markets at the end of this article) the Long Tail primarily benefits platform holders and the creators of hit content, not the broader creative community. Of course, I’m talking about financial benefit here; one could easily argue that the social benefits of digital distribution touch a far greater number of creators and consumers, and the social benefits are what make digital distribution truly wonderful. But that’s a story for another blog post.

It turns out that the hits get *bigger*

As many prominent journalists, analysts and scholars have recently argued, it turns out that hits are no less important in the new Long Tail world. Lee Gomes noted in the Wall Street Journal that in 2006, Amazon.com still derived 75% of its book sales from just 2.7% of its titles. True, 2.7% of 3.7 million books is nearly 100 thousand books — a great deal more than the total offered by any brick and mortar store — but that doesn’t change the financial situation for the authors of the other 3.6 million! Gomes also noted that, wherever he looked, hits remained vitally important to a given ecosystem (or in his words, “iTunes looks like Billboard, not some paradise of niches.”) And research by Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School, has shown that in some “Long Tail markets,” success has begun to concentrate in progressively fewer best-selling titles, and worse, that independent artists have actually lost share to major labels. And via Raph, another recent research study with similar findings: of the 13m songs for sale online last year, 10m never found a single buyer, and 80% of all revenue was generated by less than half of one percent (.004) of all songs.

Read the rest of this post >>>

Partial explanation for my recent blog downtime: Eve and I rescued “Keiko,” a lovely half-fox terrier, half-Italian greyhound pup! If you’ve ever had a puppy, you know how incredibly engaging they can be. :-)

We suspect Keiko’s first few months of life were hard; he was picked up off the streets and is scared of strangers, especially large men. For the first few days we had him in our home, when I approached him at a normal pace he would either run away or drop to his belly and crawl piteously towards me. I had to drop to my knees to make him feel safe enough to approach. He still does the “don’t hurt me!” belly crawl on a regular basis, but at least he doesn’t run away from me anymore. Better still, he loves to snuggle once I’ve comforted him for a few seconds.

Keiko also likes to lick your face (if you’ll let him), bounce around like a kangaroo (he’s got an impressive vertical!) and tussle with our other dog, Pooka, who outweighs him by almost 200%. Fortunately, she’s gracious enough to frequently let him feel like he’s winning the battle. And as of today, she has started allowing him to nap next to her on the same bed.

Keiko also enjoys pooping in the house. That part is a bit less endearing, I’ll admit. But we’ll break him of the habit soon, I hope. Either way, it’s a good thing we were planning on replacing the carpets soon. :P

I can’t believe it’s been a month since I’ve had time to post anything of substance!! Get ready for a big heaping pile of articles-of-interest, some fresh, some not-so-fresh:

Some statistics about F2P game Domain of Heroes. Interesting to see that traditional ad revenue is just ~4% of total, and that the game is having success with really high microtransaction price points (I’ve frequently argued more F2P games need to explore adding higher priced options/items to their menus.)

More rumors about Apple’s 10 inch touch-screen device (like a big iPod Touch) — this article claims the price will be $800 and that it will double as a game console. It sure *better* be a whole lot more than just another cool console at a price of $800…

Quote: “Human memory is not an accurate, faithful image of the past. It is an active reconstruction subject to many possible distortions. As a result, anything that reminds one of the positive aspects of the experience, such as mementos and other reminders, can modify the memory. Photographs, for example, remind us of the positive moments. With each viewing of the pictures, positive memories are enhanced without reawakening negative ones.” Games clearly take advantage of this with Achievements and screen captures of key victories in games. Can they do more?

Innovation alert: Treasure World for the DS compels you to collect “star dust” which you exchange for 2500+ treasures. You collect dust by hunting for stars — aka Wi-Fi signals! — in the real world. You then decorate a virtual garden with your treasure. The kicker? Each treasure piece is a distinct musical note, and your garden is a 32-note music tracker — so the act of decorating your garden is also the act of creating your own songs. Man, I need to play this game…

Battlefield 1943 has sold over 600k units at $15 on XBLA and PSN since its launch on July 8th. You really can’t understate the significance of this event. Battlefield will be the game that finally convinces EA (and other major publishers not already onboard) to take XBLA and PSN seriously — or at least, much more seriously — this console generation (as opposed to the next generation, when digital is a given.)

According to NPD, Apple controls 91% of the revenue market for computers costing $1,000 and up. So much for the Windows gaming PC?

Lots of buzz around Booyah Society, which essentially lets you win achievements for a wide variety of real-life activities. I wonder to what extent, if any, the lack of a central authority for progress (i.e. a game system that dictates exactly when you do/don’t win an Achievement) might hamper player enthusiasm for Booyah? There are certainly more than enough people who already quite happily measure their own progress in a variety of activities… it will be interesting to see if they embrace this.

Combined game industry hardware and software revenues are down 31% year-over-year. On the other hand, online games are doing great. The article notes that online gaming is growing at “ten times the rate of the total US internet population and reaching nearly one out of every two internet users.” Of the traditional portals, Yahoo! Games is still top dog.

One iPhone developer claims that for every copy of his game that was sold, 24 were pirated. Quote: “Very quickly after the release of ‘the little tank that could’ the game got cracked, and distributed via torrents. Those crackers are a weird bunch, even taking pride in their work. Proudly tagging my game with ‘cracked by Hexhammer’. Well screw you Hexhammer.” I didn’t realize the iPhone was so similar to the PC…

This rough transcript of the Casual Connect session “Designing, Balancing and Managing Virtual Economies” is full of interesting quotes. I was particularly interested in the comments on inflation control, multiple currencies, “barrier pricing”, and chargeback avoidance.

A friend of mine is a co-founder of TrialPay, so I’m very excited to see them finally making a splash in the video game industry. (For those of you who aren’t aware, TrialPay enables consumers to receive a product or service for free in exchange for accepting an offer from advertisers such as magazine and credit card companies. Non-game companies such as Netflix and McAfee have been using TrialPay for a long time.) IMO, TrialPay is a great way to squeeze some extra revenue out of an online game.

Mark Pincus revealed that Zynga regularly spends large sums on advertising when launching new titles, like a “couple million dollars” promoting the launch of Farmville. The article speculates that Zynga is likely one of Facebook’s largest advertising customers. If Facebook ever creates a “featured games” page, I wonder to what extent (if at all) those ad dollars will influence the curators of that page…

Via Kim, Rock Band will enable users to author playable tracks, submit them for review to the community, and ultimately to sell approved tracks via the Rock Band Store and Xbox LIVE. Pure awesome.

James Gwertzman’s presentation, Lessons learned from SNS games at PopCap“, is full of interesting notes on the evolution of social features within Bejeweled Blitz (such as team scores for prize competition), on dealing with cheaters, etc.

There’s more to life than games:

Quote of the week: “There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they ‘oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.’ Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.”