GarageGames Name Joins Torque Game Engine In Retirement

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Jeff Tunnell

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.
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Torque Game Engine Enters Retirement… Bittersweet For Me

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Jeff Tunnell

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.”

TGE and TimAste Art

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.
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Flashbang Guys Getting It Right

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Jeff Tunnell

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

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PushButton Engine Open Beta Launched

Posted on March 31, 2009 by Jeff Tunnell

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

Nine years ago when we released the Torque Game Engine for $100 at GarageGames (for those who don’t know, two of the founders of PushButton Labs, Jeff Tunnell (me) and Rick Overman, were half of the founders of GG) everybody wondered how we could make a company charging so little for our products. To be honest, we thought we would make up the difference by selling games, and even though that did eventually work out, it took a long time, and in the meantime we made a meager living selling TGE one at a time for $100. However, any way you look at it, GarageGames worked out very well, and, like I always say, if you catch fish in a hole, go back to that hole next time you go fishing. So, here we are making another engine, but this time we are giving it away for free!
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Risk Assesment: Don’t Put All Your Games In One Market

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Jeff Tunnell

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.

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
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Photo by woodleywonderworks

Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes You Nothing

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Jeff Tunnell

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.

All of this elitist non-informed bullshit needs to be debunked. Crap like this, along with developers complaining that they cannot make $80,000 per year just by making iPhone games is so far from the truth that it is laughable. The bottom line is that markets owe you nothing. If you can’t survive in the market, there will be a hundred other guys that want it more and will take your place.

First of all, get used to the crowding. If there are over 25,000 apps today, there will someday be 100,000, then 200,000, etc. It won’t end. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. This is a marketplace, and you either break through or you don’t, but don’t blame other people that want to make games on your problems. Another marketplace, the Internet, has millions of products and games available. It is an open marketplace, and you should be glad for this.

I can tell you with conviction that you don’t want a closed market. If Apple were to close off the market by putting up slotting fees, a big sign off process, etc., only the largest of companies would be able to afford to put games in, effectively cutting off the small guy, probably even the company that gave the interview. This kind of closed distribution system is very similar to the box market, and was what caused the big publishers to evolve to what they are today, i.e. he with the most money wins.

Huge publishers used to kiss Nintendo’s ass to be allowed the honor of paying for development, marketing, cost of goods, plus a big royalty to the NIntendo just to bring their products to market. Today, if you want your game to go on XBLA, you first need to spend the money to make most of the game, then beg Microsoft for a slot, which is worth a lot less than last year due to MS arbitrarily dropping the royalties. Do you want to take your game to the box channel? Then get ready to play the extortion game of paying slotting fees, co-op marketing and selling fees (essentially kick backs), etc. if you can even get an audience with the channel. Again, he with the most money wins.

Making a great game is only part of the process. Marketing is the other part, and developers never really want to acknowledge this fact. We are in a unique period of time right now where new markets are opening up, and some lucky developers have hit the jackpot without giving any thought to how to sell their games. This will not continue. If you only know how to make games, it might be in your best interests to hook up with somebody that understands marketing and sales. That can be in the form of finding a partner that can work on those aspects or even considering finding a publisher that will handle those efforts for you.

I say that open markets are best. Sure a lot of bad games will be made, but they will quickly fall off the new release charts, and they will never be heard from again. If you are counting on the featured lists or the best sellers lists to market your game for you, you might as well pack it up now. That is a naive business model and, while lightning may strike a lucky developer once in a while, you need to have a better plan than relying on pure luck.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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One Way To Divide Your Company Equity At Start Up

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Jeff Tunnell

While I have always advocated offensive goals such as getting better at your craft, finding a team of like minded people, shipping a portfolio of innovative games, and not worrying too much about defensive details such as contracts, NDA’s, company structure, etc. many people are still concerned with these issues. Since Push Button Labs recently went through getting our company set up, I thought I would give you just one example of how to get through some of these issues and explain how we did it.

Dividing Company Equity Is Not As Easy As Cutting Pizza

Before we get started, I have to give the big IANAL (I am not a lawyer) disclaimer, but I have been through a bunch of company start ups, so I have some experience here. Lawyers are going to be a big reach for any unfunded Indie developer. My take on all of this is to make sure you have a great honest relationship with the people you are working with. Once you have that, completely discuss everything as clearly and honestly as you can, then put down your agreements in plain terms (I’ll give some examples below), then once you get some traction, you can make things official later. This is the way Damon Slye and I did it for Dynamix. We didn’t have attorney drawn up papers for years, and once we got bigger we still went back to our original personally written documents if we had questions. In other words, you need to have partners you can trust and if you don’t, no amount of legalese or contracts can make things work. Partners have to want to make things work with each other.
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What Is My Game’s Sales Potential?

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Jeff Tunnell

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

This is a great and basic question that all Indie game developers struggle with. If you are a “professional” game developer working at a big publisher and thinking of making the leap to Indie or a student trying to decide whether to hire on at a publisher or try it on your own, this is a nagging question. Well, I’ll get it over with an tell you right now, there is no simple answer to this question. I have tackled this question before in a 2006 MBG post entitled How Much Money Can Indie Games Make, and even thought the market has changed a lot in the last three years the answer is basically the same. So, click back, brush up on that article, then read the rest of this post. Continue reading →

Fishing Girl Is Fun

Posted on December 21, 2008 by Jeff Tunnell

Normally I don’t refer to specific games on this blog, but I can’t help it on this one because it is fun and it is a great example of how to make money on Flash games. A few months ago Dan Cook, of Lost Garden blog fame, created all of the art and a loose design frame work for the game, and is holding a contest to see what the development community can do with the assets and idea.

Well, Andre, from developer Luna Drift, took up Dan’s challenge and made a fun game that I have spent a lot of time on. I first ran into the game on the Flash Game License site (also a 2008 Biggie Award winner for Best New Business Idea), and watched the sponsorship bids go up to $4,000. Between Mochi Ads, site ads, and sponsorships, a real Flash game monetization process is starting to emerge.

Click on the icon below to go to the Jay Is games review and play the game.

Update: I wrote this post on Friday, and now it is early Sunday morning. Dan posted the contest results last night, and Andre won the Gold Medal! Congratulations!

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

The Art of Backing Off

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Jeff Tunnell

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 →

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