Make It Big In Games

Dear Google,

This week’s announcement of Open Graph by Facebook, and the privacy concerns it raises, is too much. Even though I am making my living by making Facebook games right now, Google needs to respond to what is happening in FB land, and start your own “real” social network. It is obvious that the world needs a social network, yet there is no real alternative to Facebook. You have been farting around with social network ideas for years, with Orkut, Buzz, and Profiles, but your implementations to date have pretty much sucked. Just bite the bullet, and make a network as easy to use and obvious as Facebook. Please, no more back door attempts like Buzz or Profiles or the gawd awful sharing that is on Reader (it is getting better, but still sucks). My team uses and loves Buzz for one small use case, but it is not something I can ask my non-techie friends or family to use.

I admit, I am a huge Google fan boy, using all of your services such as GMail, Docs, Search, and, recently a Nexus One (because I am tired of Apple’s evil, but that is a different story). I love the way Google thinks big, and solves huge problems that I didn’t even know could be solved. But, if you don’t solve this social networking problem, I am afraid that Facebook is going to become the “white listed” Internet, and Google is going to become much less relevant. I want Google to remain the default benevolent dictator of the Web.

If you don’t fix the social networking hole in your product offerings, you will be moved to the sidelines. You cannot continue to cede control of hundreds of millions of people to Facebook, and not lose in the end. Most of the non technical people that I know “live” on Facebook. All of their messages, chat, photos, videos, news links, game playing, and personal communication with friends and family is taking place on Facebook. They never leave the site. There is little need for them to even search, i.e. what they want to know is delivered to their news feed.

Extending these social tentacles into the Web at large via Open Graph is going to be a huge problem for Google. In fact, I can tell you it is a huge problem for you now even without this new FB service. I recently helped my daughter with her little local catering business set up ads on both Facebook and Google. Due to the more local and social nature of Facebook and incredibly greater ease of use for FB ads, the ROI for Facebook ads were at least 10X that of the Google ad experience. Having a Facebook Page is working for her local business MUCH better than her web page. If you are not scared of Facebook OWNING local ads, you should be. And, it seems to me, that once they own the local ads, it is only a matter of time before they “own” all of the bigger ads as well.

Another place that Facebook is kicking your ass is in the platform business. Where is the Google platform? I make games for a living, and I can tell you that we have not seen such opportunity for reaching customers as the FB platform provides in my entire career, and I have been here since the start of the gaming industry. Google has nothing. As an industry, we need an alternative to the 400MM people that Facebook has under their control, or we are going to have huge problems.

So, here is my simple plan for Google. Make an obvious Social Network with real friends and the industry standard ways of following, etc. Hook it into GMail, Buzz, etc., but put the network in front of these services and tie them together with the network. Don’t do stupid stuff like you did with Buzz and expose private data. Make a platform, ala Facebook, that allows apps and games to be integrated into the network. I guarantee we will make games for it.

Or, to expedite the process, just get it over with and buy Twitter, then turn it into Buzz and add the rest of the needed social networking features. It would not matter if you had to pay $5BB, it would be worth it.

I know you have $26BB in the bank, and are still growing, so maybe you don’t see Facebook as a threat. I don’t have a phd, I’m not the smartest guy in the room, and I don’t own a million servers. I’m just a guy that makes games, but because of that I have a good idea of what people like, not from an algorithm, but from simple observation. My observation is that you guys are going to be in trouble if you don’t do something. Soon. Like yesterday.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
Comments for this article are on Buzz

OK, I get to be all sentimental again. A month or so ago, GarageGames pulled the original Torque Game Engine off the market. Now, they are pulling the name GarageGames itself off the market, and replacing it with Torque Technologies. I can’t disagree with the decision Brett Seylor, TT VP of Tech and Tools, made to change the name. Torque is a shiny new modern 3D game engine, and they have decided that the idea of programming in a garage is not quite the image they want to project. Even though I understand, it still tugs at my heart strings.

When Jay Moore and I used to head out on the road to evangelize our idea, we loved every minute of it. It was exciting times doing everything we could to help indies. Having a mission that fills your heart as well as your brain makes you do things you would not normally do, like working for little to no money for a long time, or getting up in front of big crowds to do public speaking (which I hate), or cold calling hardware companies to have them help out at IndieGamesCon.

We got paid back in so many ways though. Like our first booth at GDC, a wooden concoction I had a friend make for us. Our little 10 X 10 booth was the busiest per square foot of any booth at the conference, with people lined up 10 deep just to get in to talk to us. Or like seeing employees at big companies like EA walk by and thrust their clenched fist in the air and shout, “GarageGames!” with us knowing that they were using Torque in their off hours trying to escape the Man. Or having and incredibly talented and dedicated developer drive across the country to work for us for peanuts and sleep in his cars for days until they he was paid enough to get a room (we didn’t know this until years later, and that guy is now one of my partners in PushButton Labs).

I don’t think that kind of magic can ever happen twice in a row. But, after Dynamix, I never thought I could start and work at a place that would have its magic, yet GarageGames surpassed it. You never quite know the magic is happening when you are in the middle of it. There are time pressures, the stress of development, paying the bills and worrying about money. You need to look inward and make sure you feel the magic. This time around I am actively looking for the magic. My senses are a lot more tuned to it. I can tell you that the past two weeks have been nothing but magic, and some day I’ll blog about it when I can bring it public.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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Yesterday Brett Seyler of GarageGames posted a blog announcing the release of version 1.0 of Torque 3D, which is a $1000 updated version of Torque, with new rendering, tools, art pipeline, COLLADA support, etc. It looks awesome, and I know their world-wide team worked incredibly hard on the product. I congratulate them on this release, and wish them great commercial success.

However, buried in a single sentence of the blog was the following statement:

“No matter what the results, there will be other changes to the Torque product line up as well. Biggest of all, as of November 1st, 2009, past versions of Torque (TGEA, TGE) will no longer be available for purchase.”

Before I get back to this, allow me a little history lesson. Torque Game Engine started life in 1997 as the 3D engine behind Dynamix titles such as Starsiege and Tribes. For those that don’t know it, I was the founder of Dynamix and the Executive Producer of those titles. In 1999, myself, Rick Overman, Tim Gift, and Mark Frohnmayer made an agreement with Sierra/Vivendi/Universal, the parent company of Dynamix, to license this technology, leave Dynamix, and start a company called GarageGames. Open Source was the hottest thing going in those days, and our original intention was to give away the engine, and help people sell the games made with it. A couple of months into our company, we realized we would need some revenue, so we decided to charge $100 for the Torque Game Engine (TGE) and all of the source code. We joked that it was as close to Open Source as we could get it, or it was “Open Source with a business model”. At the time, game engines like id’s Quake engine were selling for $500,000 or more, so our price was something of a shot heard around the world.

People thought we were crazy, but with the semi-serious motto of “world domination through collaboration“, we absolutely believed in our mission of standing up for Indie game developers. As an aside, people did not use the word Indie for independent game developers back then. Mostly, they were called Shareware developers because that was the business model they used to monetize their efforts. We identified “Indies” as a market, and went after something most people did not think existed. I would always say, “Do more kids want to be rock stars or game developers? I think game developers. This is a huge market. We just need to hang in there, keep making our stuff better and easier to use.” Hang in there we did, and our sales of TGE steadily rose. None of us made much money, but everybody that came to GarageGames came out of the community, and were willing to work for less than normal to further the vision. It was an incredibly challenging, fun, creative environment and mission.

One constant in this world is change. Game engines get old, companies sell, and people move around. There are hundreds of engines available for all sorts of platforms. Indie game makers are a huge news makers. And, after an incredibly long 10 year life span, TGE is going to the big bit bucket in the sky.

On a brighter note, on Twitter I speculated that it would be very cool if TGE was Open Sourced. Not five minutes after I tweeted, Brett Seyler responded with:

“relyes @jefftunn I think that’s a very likely outcome in 2010.”

That would be awesome! Let’s hope that a little bit of game development history gets to live on forever.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
PushButton Labs
Follow me on Twitter

Flashbang Studios, creators of the portal Blurst, which is filled with their own games such as Off Road Velociraptor, Blush, and Minotaur in a China Shop are really doing things right. They have now self funded five titles and try to come out with a new game every eight weeks (six per year total). All of their games use the Unity web plug in for a nice, high fidelity game experience in the browser on both Macs and Windows machines.

These guys have no idea that I am posting about them. While I met Mathew Wegner a few years back at a Casual Connect, we have not stayed in touch. At the time, I was extremely impressed with his creativity and the types of games they were creating. Since then, their company has really hit its stride. In this article, Gamasutra - News - Interview: Flashbang Studios, Blursting Through?, Gamasutra interviewed the founders.

Here are some of the things that I think they are doing right:

• They have a”day jobs” doing contract work.
• They are creating new Intellectual Property at the rate of six games per year.
• They abandoned their old plan of making casual games to make money to concentrate on games they really believed in.
• They chose a game engine and work within its bounds. They don’t complain about what it does not have, they just crank out great games.
• They are aggregating their efforts in a rapidly evolving portal, Blurst, that is gaining traffic at a nice rate.

In summary, Flashbang is following all of the steps that I advocate in my Foundational Five article about surviving as a game developer. They have a small team of creative, like minded people, they have day jobs, they are creating innovative games, they are building a portfolio of company owned IP. In my mind, these guys, along with companies like Thatgamecompany, Behemoth, and 2D Boy are a new generation of rising stars that will be making the hits of the future. A couple of years from now, I think Blurst will have huge traffic, and these guys will be extremely successful.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
Follow me on Twitter

Owen Goss, the owner of Streaming Colour Studios released a great article about his iPhone App Store experience that has been sweeping the Indie blogosphere. If you have not read the post, you really need to do it right now, but the gist is that Owen invested $32,000 in Dapple, a color matching game, that has returned only a couple hundred dollars in the first few weeks of release. Owen’s post was awesome. He was not whining. He was just putting out a data point for the community to digest, and I, for one, appreciate his honesty.

A day after the release, the article was picked up by Slashdot, and Owen wrote a follow up article describing the responses he has gotten. Here is an excerpt:

Perception of whining or quitting

Many people perceived my post as whining about my sales, or that I was giving up on the game. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The post was meant purely as informational. I thought it would help people to see that selling an app on the App Store is just like selling any other product: it takes a lot of work and you shouldn’t expect to be an overnight success. I am also not giving up on Dapple; far from it. I’m only just getting started with it. That post was only a single data point on what I hope is a long upward trend for the game. Every game, every company starts somewhere, and I wanted to document where that was for me.

The observation that I would like to make is that it would be great if Owen’s work could be leveraged across multiple platforms. I think Dapple looks like a game that would work in the casual portals, on Facebook, and in the Flash market. Adding all of those revenue streams together may not have made the game profitable, but it could lessen the blow, and who knows, maybe activity in one market will lead to recognition in another market.

This is the strategy we are taking with our Push Button Labs game, Grunts: Skirmish, and a strategy that I am seeing a lot of developers talk about. We will be counting on a lot of activity in the Flash market to drive sales in the other markets. If hundreds of thousands or even millions of people play our game on the Flash version, it will drive traffic to our site so we can potentially upsell them on our High Definition or heavy client versions, or eventually on microtransactions or even subscriptions. Imagine what you would have to pay in advertising dollars to get that kind of exposure, but the cool thing is, we will get PAID to release the Flash version.

Some developers only want to focus on a single platform. As an example, Jeremy Alessi, a frequent commenter on MBG, is just about to release his third game on the iPhone. He is happy with this strategy, and does not want to take the time to develop tools or processes to put the game anywhere else. As always, the best thing about being an Indie is that you have the freedom to do what you want. However, it is my firm belief, as an Indie, that spreading risk around is the best path to success.

I don’t want to turn this blog into a big advertisement, but I do need to mention that our open source Flash based Push Button Engine is the basis of how we are going to be bringing our games to multiple markets. It is currently in closed Beta, but we hope to announce the Open Beta before GDC.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
Follow me on Twitter
Photo by woodleywonderworks