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.
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Two days before Game Developers Conference we opened the PushButton Engine site in Beta form to the general public. The PushButton Engine is a Flash game engine released under the extremely liberal MIT Open Source license. If you are interested in Open Source Flash game development, you should check it out!
PushButton Engine Logo
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.
Instead of debating OSX, Linux, and Windows vs. just Windows, you should be considering all OS’s, Flash, the browser, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Steam, Instant Action, Greenhouse, your own site, iPhone, Android, other smart phones, Nintendo DS, Xbox via XNA, XBLA, Playstation Network, Wii Ware, box distribution, Casual Portals like Big Fish Games and Yahoo Games, Flash Portals like Kongregate and New Grounds, international portals.
Concentrating on how you can make your game and intellectual property accessible for as many of these platforms as possible will greatly increase your chances of success. Look at how Popcap is growing like a weed in an era when most of the big publishers are losing money and market share, selling out, or going bankrupt. Concentrating on smaller IP’s that can exploit every platform imaginable is a much more viable strategy for Indies.
If you are an Indie trying to make the next Fable or Halo or Tribes, this approach probably won’t work, but for nearly every other type of game, I think an iterative approach to the development of the game and IP behind the game will work. If you have a BIG idea, you may want to consider making it smaller by using some of the techniques I described in the article The Art of Backing Off. If you have not read that article yet, please click on over, so we are all on the same page for the rest of this article.
Grunts: Skirmish Flash version runs on all OS's
While you may argue that it is extra work to create light client versions of your game, I think it is the best method I have ever experienced for making a game so far in my career. Work on the light client has not slowed down or stopped our development of the intellectual property behind the game, i.e. the characters, back story, logos, or web site design. Plus, it has given us time to create and design a nice progression of milestones and prototypes that we can test along the way toward the end goal of the entire game. For instance, given the response to our characters already, I think people are going to like the IP, but there will be nothing like putting the game up on Kongregate to find out.
If players do end up hating the characters or back story, we are not too far into the concept or idea to kill it. We are flexible and not too invested. Developers that put their all into a huge concept for years, then find out players don’t like it, are screwed. Again, our idea is “too small to fail” right now. If we misjudged the market, we have dry powder to try something different. The same thing goes for the game play. Since we have only developed the first part of the overall game, we are not so invested that we will die if it does not work out.
Besides the above advantages of light and heavy client development, getting onto all of the platforms starts to get much easier. Check out what happens once we ship the Flash version.
In one step, our game is delivered on over half of the platforms I mentioned above. In addition, we now have a great looking calling card and, hopefully, data to back it up, to allow us to pitch the heavy client platforms. Instead of going to Microsoft with a demo or a pitch, we can go to them with data that says our game was played by 7MM people that loved it and are looking for the next version. If you think about it, that is how Flow, Line Rider, and even the Behemoth guys got onto the heavy client platforms, although I don’t think they were thinking about that when those games were originally created.
To summarize, definitely make your game for more than one OS, but open your mind to where games are really being played in Today’s market.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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As a producer you have to be open to reducing your expectations. Your customers only know what the end result is, not what you were thinking anywhere along the development process. I think it is always best to start with an idea that has a lot of room for expansion, then cut it back as development progresses. To me, iterative development is the fine art of “backing off”, and this article details how we have continued to back off on a concept until it is something that I think we are actually going to get completed soon.
Next week Push Button Labs is calling all hands on deck and attempting to create, Grunts: Skirmish, a “Game In A Week”. Adam is coming down from Washington, and we are going to hole up in our offices and see if we can actually do it. There are many reasons for us to make this game, but almost more interestingly was how ended up with the Grunts concept. Continue reading
I am beginning to think that Flash games are going to be a great place for Indie developers to find a huge audience and make a living. In fact, I have been giving a game design presentation called Games for the Non-Hardcore, in which I outline a lot of facts about Flash and why it is a great platform for gaming and developers. I will be turning that presentation into blog posts in the near future, but in the meantime, I could not resist putting up this comic from xkcd.
What this depicts is just one a many, many reasons Flash could be in your future.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
At the recent Microsoft Gamefest where GarageGames announced the new XNA game engine, Torque X, to complement Game Studio Express, Josh Williams, newly appointed CEO of GG, and myself gave a talk about Casual Game Smarts to a packed out room of game developers. Our discussion was about how to bridge the huge technology gap between downloadable games on the XBox and the PC. I have been, and will continue, going over many of the points in that presentation here in the MBG blog. A quick out take, and a part of the Indie game business that people are most interested in is “how much can my game make?”. I wrote about this subject in another MBG post called How Much Money Can Indie Games Make, Part 1.
I have to be careful in writing about this subject not to break any NDA’s, but since I gave this presentation at a Microsoft conference with MS people all around, and I am still here, I am assuming I’m going to be OK. All of the information that I am giving is currently public or has been in the public in some form.
Cost of Development
Creating an XBLA game is taking most studios 6-12 months. Costs are currently ranging from $100,000 to $300,000. As my MBG article, XBox360 Live Arcade Opportunities Get Competitive In A Hurry! about how fast the bar is raising for XBLA development pointed out, this will inflate rapidly. The industry standard arms race will quickly make the top end $300,000 budget a cheap product. Right now, I wouldn’t consider attempting to make an XBLA game with a $100,000 budget. Development kits and Certification (QA testing) would eat up half of that, not leaving much for the actual game development.
While these budgets may seem high to Indies, these budgets wouldn’t buy coffee on a AAA console title for the retail box channel.
I can’t give the exact figure, but the Marble Blast Ultra budget was at the higher end of the current budget range. I am happy that we took the time to get the game right.
Sales
Marble Blast Ultra has been reported on many sites to be one of the highest grossing XBLA titles. I believe this to be true. While Geometry Wars has sold a lot more units, it sells at half the price of MBU (400 vs. 800 Gamer Points, i.e. $5 vs. $10). Some of the recent games on XBLA are selling through the roof (Street Fighter), they have not been on the market long enough to pass MBU in sales.
A public domain way of ascertaining an approximate number of units MBU has sold is to sign up for an account and get a very low score on the game. That will put your player on the leader boards in the lowest position. You will see that there are 100-120,000 accounts ahead of you. Sure, there can be duplicates, etc., but this is the closest you will come to finding out how many units a game has sold. For educational purposes, we will use the number 120,000 units sold, knowing that we are close. For a more in-depth read about using this method to determine XBLA game sales, check out Doug Walsh’s Randomly Geneterated Blog article The Numbers Behind Live Arcade. (NOTE- Please read the comments below his article because he got some of the methodology wrong, but readers corrected the mistake.) Until we got real numbers for XBLA sales, we were using this method internally at GarageGames, and it was nice to see somebody else come up with this method and put it out in public, so I didn’t have to worry about NDA’s for this article.
So, 120,000 units * $10 per unit = $1.2MM. That is a nice number for an Indie, but that is not the whole story. Remember, Microsoft should make something for making this cool distribution channel available, and they do take a cut. The publicly available information on this is that the distribution fees for bringing a game to XBLA is 35-70% depending upon participation by MS, i.e. the publisher gets 30-65% of the money collected for game sales. This is very much in line with what the casual portals are charging, so I think it is safe to say the numbers are probably close. Let’s say you are a publisher or a developer that is able to fund your own development, so, a $10 game (800 Gamer Points) would net you $6.50, or 120,000 units * $6.50 per unit = $780,000.
Again, if you are a starving Indie developer this sounds like an infinite amount of money. But, in the world of publishers, this is not considered a big hit. Back in the day, when I was in charge of an entire studio for a publicly traded company, we looked to make a 5X return on our investment, so a game with $300,000 in development would be targeted to make at least $1.5MM, or it would not be considered a success. Remember, as the head of a studio you need to take a “venture capital” approach, so not every title will make it’s 5X ROI, and some will do better.
But, I no longer have public shareholders to please. As the co-founder of a small independent game technology provider that makes a few games, I am extremely happy with our returns from XBLA360, and I also know that we are not done yet. Marble Blast Ultra continues to sell extremely well, the conversion rates are astronomical, and MS continues to sell XB360′s at an accelerating rate. We may yet hit the old 5X return that I used to be held to!
Like I explained in my earlier article about the bar raising in the XBLA360 arena, slot approvals are getting hard to get. In fact, I liken XBLA360 slots to the “Golden Ticket” in Willy Wonka. If you get one, you are set!
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker ::: GarageGames ::: Make It Big In Games