Blogging In A New Gaming World
If any of you still have your RSS readers connected, you know it has been over a year since I have posted anything to this blog. The reasons are myriad as I’ve been under intense product deadlines, tight NDA’s, and entrepreneurial/company pressures. While NDA’s prevent me from giving you all the full story, suffice it say that all of that pressure is now gone, we got a great exit, and it’s time to start firing up the blog again.
While I still stand by my thoughts that all professionals should blog (see The First Day of the Rest of My Life article), in a world filled with Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Google Plus, etc. blogging is starting to feel quaint. I do most of my everyday posting and observations on my Google Plus account because it is just so easy to click on the +1 button, and instantly be connected to a large audience. However, I don’t want to be a Google sharecropper forever, and longer in-depth posts need the attention and depth that only a blog post can provide.
I am bursting at the seams to get started telling you about my take on the wonderful opportunities that are available in the gaming market today. These opportunities have been building for years, and you should count yourself lucky to be making games right now.
Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big in Games
Follow me on Google Plus, Twitter
Sad Day… R.I.P. GarageGames, Instant Action, Torque Powered
This post on the Torque Powered site says it all…
Today, InstantAction informed employees that it will be winding down operations. While we are shutting down the InstantAction.com website and Instant Jam game, Torquepowered.com will continue to operate while InstantAction explores opportunities with potential buyers for Torque. We thank all of our past and current customers for their support.
- Torque Management
I am mostly posting it here for sentimental reasons.
I Think Zynga IS Worth $5 Billion
Traditional game developers are scared to death of what is happening with “social games“, but that is fodder for another post. This post is about the big gasp that went up throughout the game industry when the site Second Shares posted a well through out article that that came up with the $5B valuation.
NOTE: As a corollary to this article about why I think Zynga is worth so much, you should check out why I won’t invest in traditional game publishers.
More…
GarageGames Name Joins Torque Game Engine In Retirement
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.
GarageGames Logo and Motto
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.
More…
PushButton Labs Acquires Rights To The Incredible Machine
As announced today at PushButton Labs, we have acquired the full rights to The Incredible Machine! Although this happened several months ago, we waited on announcing it until the guys at Good Old Games could get it ready for sale, where they have a bundle Mega pack that includes four versions of TIM for $9.99.
Original Incredible Machine in Pixelated Glory
Hit games for their creators are like hit songs for singers, i.e. they stick with you for a long time. When Kevin Ryan, Brian Hahn, and I created TIM at Dynamix back in 1991, I had already been thinking about the game for seven years. Now, here it is 18 years later, and TIM will get an entirely new lease on life. That is 25 years of being involved with TIM, and I have loved every minute of it.
More…
Flashbang Guys Getting It Right
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.
Flashbang's Blurst Game Portal
More…
Risk Assesment: Don’t Put All Your Games In One Market
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.
Don't put all of your eggs in one basket, or your games in one market either.
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.
More…
Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes You Nothing
The success of the iPhone App Store is bringing out a lot of pontification about what is wrong with the market and how to fix it, but I think many of the ideas are dead wrong. Develop Magazine’s interview with developer Nnooo finally pushed me to write this article to debunk some of these ideas before they become dogma.
If you think there are too many games in the iPhone App store now, just wait. There will be many more.
On 3/3/2009, 148Apps announced that the App Store had over 25,000 apps and games in the marketplace, prompting Develop Magazine to interview Nnooo, WiiWare developer of the product Pop. Pop is a nice looking game, and there is some great information in the interview about the juxtaposition of development on the Wii vs. the iPhone, so it is definitely worth reading the article. However, a good portion of the interview was spent with the founder of Nnooo explaining that the ease of development on the iPhone is causing crowding in the market, and that a lot of bad product is making it onto the system thus lowering the sales of the good games. Wow! Yesterday I had a fairly polite response written, but thinking about it last night really pissed me off, so I changed it.
More…
Putting Your Game On OS-X and Linux is Not Enough
Recently, an article about Indie gaming went up on Ars Technica entitled Indie dev suggests peers should support OS X, Linux gaming. While I think Jeff Rosen and the Wolfire Games guys are making a cool game, and Ars Technica meant well, this is not enough in Today’s market.
Windows vs. Mac is no longer the question.
More…
Game Pricing, Look Out Below
I have always thought game prices have been too high, and I have put my money where my mouth is. At Dynamix, I pushed to have an entire line of casual products come out at the then unheard of price point of $19.95 instead of the industry standard of $40-50. When we first started the GarageGames Game download store, I advocated for, and won, a $14.95 price point. For the next six years I constantly advocated that we should blow away pricing friction and come out with some games at $1-3, as it was my belief that these rock bottom prices were inevitable.
Game prices are falling, and they won't go back up.
There is an old saying that being too early is the same as being wrong, and I was way too early in all of these cases. Customers did not appreciate the $19.95 price point in 1997, instead thinking the games were probably not good (although they were great front line casual titles (like RC Racers, Mini Golf Mania, and Cool Pool), although the under $20 price point did eventually become the standard for boxed casual titles. There was not enough traffic to the GG store to justify the $14.95 price point, so we raised the price to $20, and saw increased revenue, if not greater unit sales. And, finally, GG just never got around to the $1 games, but we did set new industry pricing with the $100 Torque Game Engine.
More…