Make It Big In Games

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

A fair question that anybody should ask is how our company will survive giving away our efforts for free. I think that is going to be the main question nearly all online products and companies are going to have to answer over time. Our answer is that we are going to give away the game engine foundation for free, then sell premium components, starter kits, and content. In addition, we are opening up our e-commerce and store to anybody that wants to sell technology to our community. You can think of it as an “app store” for game technology.

We did a mini version of this model at GarageGames, but it was a closed system where we were open to submissions or we recruited certain developers to make technology that GG would sell in its developer store. Many developers made nice side income or even enough to make a living selling Torque add ons and tools. Like I always say, don’t quit your day job, and having a nice income stream from selling some technology can really help offset your game development efforts.

Flash has huge momentum and we think there is a great opening to supply Flash developers with even easier and more modular methods of making their games. We envision thousands of free and premium components, starter kits, and content packs all rated, ranked, and easily distributed through our store bringing in great money for the developers creating them.

When we launch our component store (hopefully next week), we will be giving a lot more info, but for now the enticing bits are that our entire infrastructure is built upon Amazon’s amazing EC2 and S3 cloud computing services, and we are using Amazon’s ex-commerce service for the payment system, which allows us to essentially allow micro-payments.

The first premium component created by PushButton Labs will be a real time networking component that is based upon the ideas behind the great open sourced OpenTNL, Torque Networking Library, we released from GarageGames six years ago. PB Networking should be the best real time networking the Flash game world has seen with bit packing, ghosting, and the ability to use Java, C++, or Flash based back end servers. Our test results show it performing better than anything we have seen in the Flash space (but, it is a big space, and we could have missed something). PBN will be released under an Indie and Commercial license that is compatible with the MIT license of the base engine. We have not yet decided on a price, but it will be low as we want to make sure this technology is very accessible.

If you decide to try out the PushButton Engine, please remember it is still in Beta. We have a long way to go to make everything more noobie friendly, and of course, the docs still have a long way to go. Even though we didn’t really try to make a big splash at GDC, we graciously got picked up for an article by Wagner James Au from the GigaOM technology blog, which resulted in coverage by the New Work Times and many other blogs. I hope all those visitors stick with us while we get the training wheels bolted on

-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. Read the rest of this entry »

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