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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One Way To Divide Your Company Equity At Start Up
Dividing your company equity at start up can be a difficult problem. Here is a method that takes a lot of the emotion out of the process.
Motivation
I stumbled across this YouTube video of Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library TV giving a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. At first I just thought the guy was a dick, and he even calls himself that at one point in the presentation, but it turned out to be a fascinating 15 minutes of video. Gary essentially says what I have been saying, i.e. make sure you love what you do, work hard, and things will work out, but he says it in a much more succinct, hard edged way than I do. Check it out, and I think you will see what I mean:
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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How Much Work Does It Take To Become A Great Game Developer?
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:
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Woohoo, Grunts: Skirmish Has A Logo
Tim Aste, Push Button Labs‘ resident genius artist finished the logo for our upcoming Flash game, Grunts Skirmish. He created a nice blog post about the process he used to create this awesome logo in one day.
Grunts Skirmish Logo
BTW, this is the same game that I blogged about in the article The Art Of Backing Off. We did do the Game In A Week push to get it started, and now two plus months later, the game is starting to have some magic moments. At the end of the week, we did prove to ourselves that it was worth moving forward with the game.
Flash and the Push Button Engine (more info soon) are a dream to work with. It is so much fun going back to the simplicity of creating a 2D game. We are really happy with the way the game is turning out, and hope it will be a candidate for a lot of different platforms. Check out Tim’s blog if you would like to see some in-game screen shots and animations.
Making a game like this is kind of like making pizza. Using pizza ingredients will almost always taste good, but sometimes it can taste like heaven. I’m hoping for heaven:)
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
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What Is My Game’s Sales Potential?
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
Hard To Believe: Three Years Of Blogging
Wow, where did the time go? On January 11, 2006, I started this Make It Big In Games blog. In case you can’t tell, the title is a tongue in cheek reference to the cheesy real estate and self help ads that try to sell you on getting rich by following their methods. In contrast, just making a living in the games business is anything but easy, and I have done my best to get that point across in this blog.
Sim City As Blog Metaphor
In spite of my focus on the difficulties of making a living making games, my most popular posts have been related to how much money you can make by making games. In fact, my most popular post, How Much Money Can Your XBox 360 Game Make, was one of my first posts, getting picked up by Major Nelson’s, Kotaku, etc. It was one of my first posts causing my traffic to go through the roof. I thought this blogging thing was gong to be easy.
Well, blogging is not easy. Even with a small blog like this, thinking of article ideas is always in the back of your mind, and getting around to writing the articles is hard work. Because of that, I have had long periods where I didn’t write articles, and my Alexa traffic rating went down to around 800,000. However, since the middle of 2008, I have tried to write at least one article per week, and my Alexa rating has dropped (which is good) to 282,050. In addition my Feedburner stats say that over 1,200 people read my articles through an RSS reader.
While it sometimes seems kind of like a waste of time, I always like to think what it would be like if all of those readers were in a room at one time. I’m not a great public speaker, and crowds make me nervous, so I know that I would be absolutely nervous speaking in front of the MBG crowd. That is very cool.
Having a blog reminds me a little bit of playing Sim City, i.e. you write a post, which is like zoning land, and see if you get comments and good feedback which is like the Sims moving in. Just like Sim City, when it works, it makes you feel good. For 2009 and beyond, I’ll continue “zoning and building” with new articles, additional features like my newly added community forums, hopefully bringing back the MBG Wiki, etc.
Lastly, make sure to visit the new forum section of MBG and let me know what you would like me to blog about in the future. Having the forum section is going to be a great community builder.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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