I really enjoyed this panel; Jamil did an absolutely great job moderating it. Worth a watch if you didn’t happen to be there.
Moderated by Jamil Moledina (Director, EA Partners, and fellow board member of the IGDA), Jack Buser (Director, Playstation Home), Bob Meese (New business development, Google), and myself.
Posted in Platforms
I thought some of you might be interested to know how our experience launching Steambirds on iOS and Android worked out. So I’ve written up a little post-mortem of sorts, below. But first, some important notes: the excellent iOS version was developed and published on our behalf by Semi Secret, best known for their wonderful game Canabalt, and the equally-excellent Android version was developed by Flat Red Ball and published by us.
Both the iOS and Android versions of the game were featured by Apple and Google, respectively; the iOS version was featured immediately upon launch, while the Android version was featured a couple weeks later. We did little in the way of traditional marketing to support the game, but we did put a very prominent link in Steambirds: Survival to a page advertising both the iOS and Android version, and given that SB:S has already been played by over two million people, that’s a fair amount of promotion. We were also fortunate enough to get a shout out from Penny Arcade, among other notable sites.
So, enough background information. Here were the pros/cons of each platform we released Steambirds on:
Posted in Platforms
Today we launched Steambirds: Survival (SB:S), the first true sequel to the original Steambirds. It’s essentially “Steambirds meets ‘Horde Mode’ from Gears of War” — your goal is to fight off ever-growing waves of enemies for as long as you can manage. Aside from this central conceit, the key differences between SB:S and the original SB are:
Monetization headaches
Adding microtransactions to SB:S proved to be non-trivial. To understand why, you need to understand our distribution strategy. We’re excited about Flash because it opens up such a huge audience to our games. Part of that huge audience comes from the hundreds of Flash gaming portals who will happily host and promote your game for free, without any negotiation or formal arrangement needed, in exchange for the opportunity to monetize the game via their own site’s advertising system. Normally, all you get in return (aside from exposure) is a prominent link (or links) in the game to other websites of your choosing. But we wanted more than that – we wanted to monetize content inside the game, no matter where it was hosted. That turned out to be a huge pain in the butt.
Posted in Business (in general), Monetization, Platforms
This week is a big milestone for Spry Fox; we released the first independently-developed game for the Kindle, which we called “Triple Town.” Our playtesters have described Triple Town as, among other things, “the Civilization of Match-3 games”, which is both flattering and terrifying. :-)
Danc has written a nice post about the design philosophy behind the game. If you own a Kindle 2, Kindle DX or Kindle 3 you can purchase Triple Town directly from Amazon.com.
As a supplement to Danc’s post, I thought you might like to know our business rationale for creating Triple Town. It shouldn’t surprise long-time readers of this blog that I’m always on the look-out for platforms in the “uncertain beginnings” phase that may soon enter “early glory”. The Kindle seemed like just such a platform. Let’s break that down:
1. Platform prospects
First and most important question: is there a reason to believe the platform has a good chance of becoming a viable ecosystem for its first wave of game developers? Looking at the Kindle, I saw a platform with a reasonable number of users (Amazon will not release ownership statistics, but I’ve been guessing that there are currently at least 2m+ active content-enabled devices out there, based on publicly available information. I could definitely be wrong about that, but hopefully not by too wide a margin on the downside.)
More importantly, I saw a platform with users who are inclined and encouraged to purchase large quantities of digital content at relatively healthy prices. And given Amazon’s merchandising expertise, I hoped that unlike on so many other platforms (Wiiware springs to mind as a sad example), Kindle games would get plenty of visibility and Kindle developers would have reasonable marketing tools made available to them.
2. Content supply
Secondly: what is the supply of high-quality content likely to look like when the platform first launches? Will it be an overwhelming flood or a small trickle? The latter is what creates a supply-demand imbalance during the “early glory” phase, and which ultimately leads to strong returns for early developers. The Kindle was an interesting case in this regard. While I’d imagine that software developer interest in the Kindle is quite high in general, when I personally asked a large number of my friends in the game industry, “are you planning to develop a game for the Kindle,” the answer was always either “no” or “you can make games for the Kindle?” Furthermore, I didn’t see much Kindle-related news in the game industry press or at game industry conferences. To me, that indicated a potentially-unappreciated market opportunity.
3. Investment threshold
Unfortunately, even when both the conditions above hold true, there is no guarantee that the emerging platform will ultimately prove viable. Any number of issues — ranging from mismanagement of the platform, to unanticipated technology problems, to rotten luck — could cause the ecosystem to be less viable than you might hope. Consequently, the third major condition of a good “uncertain beginnings” investment opportunity is simply: can I dip my toe in the water with a project of relatively small scope? If entering the market requires a huge expense, it probably doesn’t make sense for most independent game developers. But Daniel and I were confident that we could create a great game that we were proud of in a reasonable period of time, with a reasonably small team. And so we did.
Conclusion
Of course, it certainly didn’t hurt that both Spry Fox and Amazon are based in the greater Seattle area. Knowing that I could easily meet the platform managers in person if they were interested in our company or our game was a nice bonus. That said, I wouldn’t call location one of our key investment criteria.
Anyway, long story short, we decided to give the Kindle a shot. I am very grateful to the people at Amazon for their decision to release Triple Town as one of the first games on the Kindle, and look forward to seeing how this grand experiment turns out. :-)
Posted in Business (in general), Platforms
“People are willing to pay for magic.”
That’s what my friend Brian replied when I told him that no one in Microsoft’s target audience would purchase an Xbox plus Kinect for a minimum price of $300 when they either A) own a Wii already, or, B) can purchase a Wii (with MotionPlus, Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort) for just $200. Brian, as I frequently must admit, is a perceptive fellow.
People are indeed very willing to pay for magic. They have lined up around the block to pay $500 minimum for a slice of magical iGoodness from Apple. They lined up to watch Avatar in 3D (multiple times.) And they — that is, we — will continue to line up for the products and services that dazzle us, recession or no.
So, if you want to know who “won” E3, perhaps one way to figure that out is to apply a magic test to the products that were unveiled there.
Posted in Design / Production, Platforms
I’ve been casually tracking the daily active user numbers for the top 40 Facebook game developers for the past six weeks. Why the top 40? Because that’s the quantity displayed by Appdata.com on the first of 200 pages. Why daily active users? Because monthly active user numbers are widely considered to be an unreliable statistic for Facebook games, whereas DAU is, if not perfect, at least more directionally accurate.
I was mostly curious to learn how “hit makers” are faring on Facebook. (The 40th developer on the list has just 200k daily active users, so it’s safe to assume that all the heavy hitters are represented in the top 40 list.) Facebook’s total population has supposedly been growing by leaps and bounds over the past several months — it jumped from 350m “active” to 400m in the three months leading up to February 2010) so theoretically daily active users for the top 40 game developers should be growing as well, if for no other reason than there are more potential customers on the platform. However, it turns out the DAU count is down slightly since March.
Posted in Platforms
For a couple weeks now, I’ve been getting calls from friends in the industry bemoaning their lack of inclusion in the upcoming Summer of Arcade promotion on XBLA. The tone of the calls has varied, but they’ve all shared one thing in common — frustration with Microsoft. As I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to the following conclusion: Summer of Arcade will have to change or, at very least, cease to be Microsoft’s ultimate promotion for the XBLA service.
First, a bit of history. Summer of Arcade was the brilliant brainchild of my good friend, Jeremy Wacksman. It was born of the realization that Microsoft desperately needed something that would draw positive attention to XBLA and make consumers, developers and the press take it seriously (bear in mind, this was during XBLA’s “inevitable misery” phase, when no one had anything good to say about the platform.) SoA served that purpose beautifully; it kicked off XBLA’s “triumphant return” and changed the tone of public conversation from “XBLA is full of crap” to “XBLA is the only place you can find games like Castle Crashers and Braid.” It also established the $15 price point on XBLA — an important and under-appreciated feat.
Dealing with rejection
Summer of Arcade still gives consumers and the press something positive to focus on. Unfortunately, SoA seems to be turning into a net negative for the developer/publisher community. Today, many companies will target a summer release in hopes of making it into SoA and may even choose to hold a finished game in their pockets for several months for that purpose. A couple months before SoA is scheduled to begin, ~five lucky development teams find out their games have been blessed; significantly more discover that they’ve been rejected.
Posted in Platforms
Lots of people are talking about the iPhone announcements today. Most relevant to game developers: Apple is putting viral invites, matchmaking, achievements, and leaderboards into the OS; adding the ability to gift apps; introducing a slick in-app ad network called iAds; and (finally!) limited multi-tasking if you possess a 3GS or better. This is an impressive list of features, and as a consumer, I’m pretty excited about it.
As a developer, it doesn’t change my feelings about the platform much. It has been evolving into an ecosystem in which F2P is the most viable business model (as exemplified by Ngmoco) and it will continue to evolve in that direction. In fact, the introduction of iAds will likely accelerate the trend as developers race to compete with one another for a share of ad revenue. When Steve Jobs says of iAds: “This is us helping our developers make money so they can survive and keep the prices of their apps reasonable,” he really means “this will help maintain downward price pressure in the app store, which I love because cheap apps help sell iPhones!” (Btw, was anyone else struck by Jobs’ use of the word “survive?” I think that’s the closest he’ll ever come to admitting that life for developers is rough in the world o’Apple.) And if you’re still not convinced that F2P is the future of Applesville, let me remind you of now-common revelations that anywhere from 60% to 90% of app downloads are pirated.
Posted in Platforms
I was recently interviewed by Matt Martin of GamesIndustry.biz on the subject of publishers making the transition to Facebook. Since my correspondence with Matt was via email, I thought I’d take advantage and share the full transcript, for those of you who are interested in this topic:
Question: Is Facebook a viable format for traditional videogame publishers? Are there opportunities for someone like EA or Take 2 to make a significant profit? Or is Facebook as a platform over for those big publishers that haven’t already established themselves on the service?
Facebook is definitely a viable platform for traditional publishers. The short-term problem, as I’ve noted in the past, is that traditional publishers simply aren’t geared towards making the kinds of games that succeed on Facebook. In general, their game designers are trained (and prefer) to make games that are fun above all else, where a Facebook game designer needs to be as concerned with designing a free-to-play game that is capable of generating real revenue. And in general, their designers are also accustomed to thinking of player acquisition as “marketing’s problem,” whereas viral player acquisition is clearly a core design challenge on Facebook. But I don’t want to make it sound like design is the only challenge; traditional publishers don’t have much experience marketing these kinds of games, in this kind of channel, to this broad an audience. They’re set up to manage the relationship with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, to push discs into retail stores, and to blow a wad of cash on TV and magazine advertising. Obviously this is a generalization, but you get my point.
But as I mentioned earlier, that’s all a short-term problem. There’s no inherent reason why traditional publishers can’t build (or buy) fresh studios to focus on this opportunity. They’ve done it before; mobile games are a good example. The traditional publishers will end up wasting quite a lot of money in the process — you can be certain of that — but some of them will ultimately succeed at entering the market.
Posted in Platforms
When I look at Facebook, I see a games platform that has been thoroughly enjoying the “early glory” phase of maturity. Not too long ago, there was guarded optimism about the potential of Facebook to host profitable games, but few good examples of such games. Less than a blink of an eye later, Facebook has become the apple of our industry’s eye.
While most publishers are laying employees off by the hundreds, Facebook-centric publishers are hiring like mad. Savvy conference organizers are rushing to capitalize on audience demand for business venues to discuss social gaming. The inevitable stories of unbelievable growth have, quite predictably, become common-place. Facebook’s platform managers have finally started embracing our industry and contributing to the hype around their platform. And finally, a remarkable number of developers (and even large publishers) have begun to re-orient themselves towards the development of social games.
Facebook’s “inevitable misery”
All of these are classic signs that Facebook gaming’s “early glory” phase is in full swing. You may therefore conclude, with 99% certainty, that Facebook as a games platform is likely within a single year’s reach of the “inevitable misery” phase of its lifecycle. Probably much less than a year, in fact. As I’ve argued before, this does not necessarily mean that savvy developers should begin to look elsewhere — it simply means that there will soon be a large quantity of blood in Facebook’s waters. The victims of that impending blood-bath are listed here, in no particular order:
Posted in Platforms
Name: David Edery |
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