Archive for January, 2009
One Way To Divide Your Company Equity At Start Up
Dividing your company equity at start up can be a difficult problem. Here is a method that takes a lot of the emotion out of the process.
Motivation
I stumbled across this YouTube video of Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library TV giving a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. At first I just thought the guy was a dick, and he even calls himself that at one point in the presentation, but it turned out to be a fascinating 15 minutes of video. Gary essentially says what I have been saying, i.e. make sure you love what you do, work hard, and things will work out, but he says it in a much more succinct, hard edged way than I do. Check it out, and I think you will see what I mean:
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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How Much Work Does It Take To Become A Great Game Developer?
Malcolm Gladwell, the author of best selling books such as Blink and The Tipping Point, recently released a book entitled Outliers. Gladwell’s books sell incredibly well, and I own two of them, but I have found that the premise and promise of his books is always better than the writing and delivery, which I find kind of dry and long winded. My personal opinion aside, a meme that came out of the Outliers book is the proposition that to get truly great at something takes 10,000 hours of hard work and practice, which at the full time rate of 2,080 working hours per year is five years.
I agree with Gladwell’s take on this. What? You mean it is going to take me FIVE YEARS to get good at making games? No, I’m saying it is going to take you five years to get good at what you do, but it may take much longer to really make it.
Of course, you can point to some products like iShoot, where the developer had never made a game before and is now quitting his day job due to his game’s success on the iPhone. Sure, there will be some lucky developers that break out and get a hit before they have put in their time, but those will not be the norm. Seth Godin has a good take on this, and argues that the 10,000 hours can vary depending upon the market, and smaller, newer markets are more likely to have lucky break out hits. He puts it really well with this statement:
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Woohoo, Grunts: Skirmish Has A Logo
Tim Aste, Push Button Labs‘ resident genius artist finished the logo for our upcoming Flash game, Grunts Skirmish. He created a nice blog post about the process he used to create this awesome logo in one day.
Grunts Skirmish Logo
BTW, this is the same game that I blogged about in the article The Art Of Backing Off. We did do the Game In A Week push to get it started, and now two plus months later, the game is starting to have some magic moments. At the end of the week, we did prove to ourselves that it was worth moving forward with the game.
Flash and the Push Button Engine (more info soon) are a dream to work with. It is so much fun going back to the simplicity of creating a 2D game. We are really happy with the way the game is turning out, and hope it will be a candidate for a lot of different platforms. Check out Tim’s blog if you would like to see some in-game screen shots and animations.
Making a game like this is kind of like making pizza. Using pizza ingredients will almost always taste good, but sometimes it can taste like heaven. I’m hoping for heaven:)
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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What Is My Game’s Sales Potential?
Make It Big In Games community member, JefferE, posted the following question in the MBG forums:
What I’ve always struggled with that I’d like to hear your slant on is how to judge if a game is worth producing. That is, you’ve got an idea, you think its a good one, but how do you go about judging the sales potential? There are very few resources that I’ve found that publish stats on game sales. For a very simple example, you’ve got a Match 3 or Hidden Object game (ala Big Fish Games style). How do you find out how much potential that has? What’s the ‘average” return on a game like that if it sells bad, good, or is a hit? Is it $1K – obviously no one would produce them, is it $10k, $50K, $100K? Basically, how do you go about figuring out if its worth even starting a project – beyond dreaming, right sizing, and just going for it?
How Much Money Your Successful Game Makes
Hard To Believe: Three Years Of Blogging
Wow, where did the time go? On January 11, 2006, I started this Make It Big In Games blog. In case you can’t tell, the title is a tongue in cheek reference to the cheesy real estate and self help ads that try to sell you on getting rich by following their methods. In contrast, just making a living in the games business is anything but easy, and I have done my best to get that point across in this blog.
Sim City As Blog Metaphor
In spite of my focus on the difficulties of making a living making games, my most popular posts have been related to how much money you can make by making games. In fact, my most popular post, How Much Money Can Your XBox 360 Game Make, was one of my first posts, getting picked up by Major Nelson’s, Kotaku, etc. It was one of my first posts causing my traffic to go through the roof. I thought this blogging thing was gong to be easy.
Well, blogging is not easy. Even with a small blog like this, thinking of article ideas is always in the back of your mind, and getting around to writing the articles is hard work. Because of that, I have had long periods where I didn’t write articles, and my Alexa traffic rating went down to around 800,000. However, since the middle of 2008, I have tried to write at least one article per week, and my Alexa rating has dropped (which is good) to 282,050. In addition my Feedburner stats say that over 1,200 people read my articles through an RSS reader.
While it sometimes seems kind of like a waste of time, I always like to think what it would be like if all of those readers were in a room at one time. I’m not a great public speaker, and crowds make me nervous, so I know that I would be absolutely nervous speaking in front of the MBG crowd. That is very cool.
Having a blog reminds me a little bit of playing Sim City, i.e. you write a post, which is like zoning land, and see if you get comments and good feedback which is like the Sims moving in. Just like Sim City, when it works, it makes you feel good. For 2009 and beyond, I’ll continue “zoning and building” with new articles, additional features like my newly added community forums, hopefully bringing back the MBG Wiki, etc.
Lastly, make sure to visit the new forum section of MBG and let me know what you would like me to blog about in the future. Having the forum section is going to be a great community builder.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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Odds and Ends
Before getting down to business here in 2009, I have a few small items to catch up on.
Congratulations to GarageGames’ Torque Game Engine Advanced for winning the 2008 Game Developer Magazine Frontline Award for Best Engine. Matt, JoshE, Ken, Deborah, et.al. in the TnT group have been working their butts off bringing Torque to a new level of professionalism, and it is great to see their efforts recognized.
Ryan Wiancko over at Industry Broadcast has been taking blog post from developers like myself, Dan Cook, and Troy Gilbert and turning them into podcasts. So, load up your iPod for your next road trip and catch up on your neglected reading. Maybe now that I have mentioned Ryan, he will spell my name right on my articles. 
Jeremy Alessi, of Alessi Games, just put up a nice article on Gamasutra about his experiences creating a game for the iPhone. I have worked with Jeremy since the early days of GarageGames where I encouraged him to finish Aerial Antics so we could publish it. Nobody works harder at game development, and it is nice to see him getting some recognition and success.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
Make It Big In Games Forums
I just turned on the fancy new forums courtesy of the Push Button Labs OnePress Community framework. Click the link to check it out, and write some quick posts to test out the system.
I have always wanted a way to interact more with the readers of this blog, but didn’t like the disconnected feeling of forum systems. So, one of the first projects at Push Button Labs was to connect WordPress to phpBB. The first step was a simple skinning, common log in, and a set of widgets to display hot threads, etc. on the WordPress side. We will continue to add features to OnePress to facilitate creating communities.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games