Make It Big In Games

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.

I posted the following thought on Twitter and Buzz yesterday, but could not get any traction. If you want to discuss this issue, let’s use my Buzz post (I have been getting so many comment spams, that I had to turn off comments on this blog).

Activision =$15B, Electronic Arts = $6B, Ubisoft = $1.3B. Zynga = $5B? Can this be true? Check out my thoughts. #twitter

As hard as it is for hard core gamers and developers to accept it, Zynga and other “social” game publishers are coming on strong. I believe there is good reason for this. EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do not have direct relationships with their customers, let alone have their email, demographic info, and credit card info, and precise analytic data about how players are using their games.

Also, at the end of the day, the old school, hard core gamer, console specific game publishers are addressing a niche market, i.e. 14-25 year old males. I admit it is a great market, and it has proven to be willing to buy a lot of games over the years, but when compared to all males and females in the world, it is a niche market.

All games will be social so that will not continue to be a unique selling point. However, getting off the console onto social nets, the net at large, and mobile markets with a willingness to address different demographics (older men and women) with different types of games and using a metrics drive development approach is a unique selling point. I think will be easier to address this type of change from a clean slate than it is to turn a hard core console game publisher.

It is already too late for the old school publishers to react. Zynga is worth too much to be bought by any of them. At some point, they will realize that it is easier for them to stick to their hard core knitting than it is to address this new demographic.

On the other hand, the guys at Venturebeat feel the valuation is way too high. At some point we will see, and this blog post will keep me honest.

Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

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:

But, ready for this? The Dip is much closer in niche areas, new areas, unexplored areas. You can get through the Dip in an online network or with a new kind of music because being seen as the best in that area is easier (at least for now). You can get through the Dip as a real estate broker in a new, growing town a lot quicker than someone in midtown Manhattan. The competition is thinner and probably less motivated.

So, even though there may be some niches in games that you can break into because they are over looked or just emerging, my take is that you don’t want to count on luck. Just buckle down and become really great at what you do. If you don’t want to work hard, there is somebody out there that is working hard at becoming great, and they will take your place. I have written a basic outline of how to spend those fives year in my Five Realistic Steps To Becoming A Game Developer article. If you love what you are doing, the time will fly by.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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I am proud to present the first annual Biggie Awards (BA for short), a list of products, in categories that I made up, that I think were the best of 2008. The methodology behind the awards was very scientific, if I got excited about a product, it was nominated. Now, the envelope please…

Best Indie Game: Tie- World of Goo, Castle Crashers
Congratulations to 2D Boy and The Behemoth for sticking to their guns and making the games they wanted to make and being financially rewarded for it. In case you haven’t been paying attention to my blog, this is the future of game development. Small, focused, creative teams making fun, inventive games. The key word is fun, not pandering to Marketing, not selling out, not shaders, Direct X 11, or HDR.

Best Product to Hide Massive Complexity: Wii Fit
There is more engineering in the Wii fit than in most consoles, yet it comes off polished, fun, and useful. I love the way it “talks” to you when you step on it or when you gain a little weight. Nintendo keeps hitting home runs. They know what is fun and they are not afraid to break out of the box to find it.

Best Editor: Spore
Contrary to many people I enjoyed the game, but what impressed me most was the editors and technology behind the game. I think the future of game development for big titles was shown in Spore. Editors and procedurally generated content are the only way we will be able to make large content games due to cost constraints. This kind of procedural content creation is what will allow the small “rock band sized” teams I advocate to make big games.

Best Single Button Game: Tower Blocks
Digital Chocolate made this fun tower stacking game that can be played anywhere, i.e. on a cell phone, in Facebook, etc. Integration with your true friends is an extremely important feature and is what drives you to keep playing.

Best Distillation of an old Game Mechanic: Eleven Blood
This Facebook game has many old game developers crying fowl. Why would people want to play a game that has so little interaction? Well, I think games like EB, Mafia Wars, etc. are really bringing a fun new approachability to role playing games.

Best Graphics: Little Big Planet
This is my idea of of how to use powerful shaders and high end graphics. No uncanny valley, no crap lip synching. Just cool little characters running around in a world that looks real, yet you know it can’t be. Honorable mention for the awesome UI on the level editor. There are so many interface breakthroughs on that editor that a book could be written about it.

Best Flash Game Site: Kongregate
These guys have risen from start up to the best Flash game site in less than two years. Clean, developer friendly site that has really brought Flash games to a new level of respectability. I could do without the chat window next to all of the games, so the game window itself had the option of being bigger, but other than that, these guys are on fire. Impressive!

Best Future Way to Play Games: Instant Action
Even though I was involved in the early days of IA, I have to mention this service. The more I get used to web based “cloud computing”, the more I refuse to download and install a game to play it. Too much hassle, and most of the time, it requires updates to drivers and other things I don’t have the patience to do. Instant Action is not getting the attention it deserves.

Quickies

Best Developer to Change the World: Harmonix
Best New Business Idea: Flash Game License
Best Business I Wish I Had Started: Mochi Ads
Favorite Game Review Site: Jay Is Games
Best Facebook Publisher: Playfish
Top Big Games I Don’t Care About Left4Dead, Fallout 3, Farcry 2, GoW 2 - shows how out of touch I am with the core gamer market.
Best New gaming Platform iPhone
Best Video Site That I Thought Was Going to be Crappy HULU
Best Old Internet Service That I Never Used Until Now Pandora
Best Web App FriendFeed

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

I was getting ready to write a different post about how I think a lot of money could be saved on big production games, and I was going to use last year’s Beowulf movie for a certain example, when I reminded myself of just how HORRIBLE that movie was. For a budget of $150,000,000, Robert Zemeckis, one of my favorite directors of all time with movies like Forest Gump, Roger Rabbit, and Back to the Future to his credit, managed to direct a movie that makes one of the most beautiful women in the world, Angelina Jolie, look terrible (see image below). Through out the movie, I kept getting thrown out of my suspension of disbelief because the motion captured actors continually went so far into the “uncanny valley“.

Zemeckis, now with two of these expensive mo-cap, animated films under his belt, Beowulf and Polar Express, is set to release another one before the end of 2009, A Christmas Carol. Somebody must believe in the process. Read the rest of this entry »

What got me started on this article was a conversation with Ben Garney last week about how he was going through all of the old Nintendo games with an emulator. He noticed that playing with the tools to not have to go back to the start of the level after dieing actually made the games much more fun.

McMorbid - Game Frustration by *Rimfrost on deviantART
Last night my kids were at the house for dinner, and I asked Jon to bring Rock Band 2 so we could have a little social gaming interaction. After setting up the game, the first thing we had to do was go to the Internet to find and enter a cheat code to unlock all of the songs. It didn’t work at first, and for a while we thought we would have to play the game’s entry level songs. That kind of pissed us all off, and was the tipping point to make me write this article.

Why, after all of these years of game design evolution do we, as an industry, still rely on cheap design tricks like “unlocking” songs, starting over levels, only allowing saves at certain points in the game, etc.? Especially in a social game like Rock Band, what is the point of not allowing the owner to play all of the songs? Jon just paid $170 for the game. Isn’t that enough “earning”?

When a player gets killed in a platformer or FPS, why does he have to go back three levels or to the beginning of the level/chapter? Why can’t players save anywhere in a game? I know the answer that will be given, i.e. to give the player a feeling of anxiety and tension. I call bullshit on that answer. That kind of tension is not the kind of tension that a designer should want to create. External tension that the player simply does not want to waste more time traversing a part of the game already explored has nothing to do with the real design/game tension that should come from the game’s internals.

Playing LucasArts adventure games was more fun to me than Sierra adventure games because I knew I could not die. Even in the adventure games I designed and directed, I succumbed to the “player character must die” design mechanic. I remember distinctly caving in to pressure from Sierra, but mostly I remember it being easier from a design standpoint.

It seems to me that this pseudo role play, leveling up mechanic is industry design dogma, i.e. it has been done for so long that people in the industry don’t even question it. I know most people in the industry will be against my opinion here, but I have to speak up (again). The first time I raised this point was in 1989 when we were finally releasing our first Affiliated Label games, A-10 Tankkiller and David Wolf: Secret Agent. We put in a feature called the VCR Interface, that allowed players to move to the next level or fast forward past the part they could not conquer.

This post could be incredibly long, and I will continue to address this point as I start writing posts for my Games for the Non-Hardcore series. I look forward to seeing how all of you feel about this subject.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games