Category: Marketing/Business

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Marketing/Business

Startups Shouldn’t Worry About Copycats

Paul Graham’s Being Copied argues that startups shouldn’t worry too much about cloned competition in the market so much as making something worth copying.

On the Indie Gamer Forums and the ASP newsgroups, it isn’t uncommon for people to worry about competitors creating copies of their works and selling them. I’m not talking about large-scale copyright infringement in which people illegally sell your product. I’m talking about the difference between games like Luxor and Zuma. Legally, nothing is wrong as they are two different games as far as copyrighted materials are concerned.

Of course, if you’re an indie coming up with something new, you don’t want to work for months or years, prototyping the whole time to figure out what works and what doesn’t, only to have your best-selling product mimicked within weeks by multiple competitors. There are people who chase after money by going after where it already went. It’s demoralizing to know that you can’t do much to prevent someone from copying the good parts of your game. Essentially you went through a lot of research and hard work to make a great product, but once you actually release it, competitors will see it and copy it with little to no effort.

For someone just starting, however, Graham claims that copycats are not your prime concern. Until you create a product that is worth copying, you don’t have anything to speak of. When you do have a product worth copying, you’ll be ahead of the game. Your competitors will not only have to realize that you have a good idea and that it is possibly lucrative, but they then have to build their own versions and market them. Think about it. If you have a Space Invaders, Tetris, or Pac-man clone, you’d have a hard time marketing it. For one, you have all of the other clones competing. For another, the original is going to be more famous and well-known. So what’s the difference between those names and your game? Are Bejeweled clones doing better than Bejeweled? I doubt it.

You’ll have time to make initial sales and build up mindshare. Even though it is relatively quick and easy for competitors to create software, worry about the copycats later. For now, you need to build up a business to merit the worry.

Categories
Games General Marketing/Business

Casual Game Stats

Here is a Wired article from 2004 that talked about the “new” and popular casual game market.

The news this year:
Games industry revenues will double over the next five years: Study
Video Game Business to Double by 2011, Driven by Online and Mobile Gaming
Study: Women Gamers Outnumber Men in 25-34 Age Group

It’s interesting how much more information we have now. Of course, it really only helps MSN Games, Real Arcade, and the developers who rely on them. It doesn’t say much about what a company like Introversion Software or Positech Games can do.

Categories
Geek / Technical Marketing/Business

Tech Support for Games

It was posted a long while ago, but I liked Gamasutra’s Customer Support Confidential: Customer Support Orientation Guide: An Introduction.

It reminds me of my days at the help desk. While it focuses on the horror story side of tech support, I think that there is a missing component here. Maybe it is because it is geared towards a large casual portal, but I think indie game developers need to look at the upside of customer service.

After all, isn’t tech support just another opportunity to deal with your customers? And isn’t dealing personally with customers one of the benefits of being an indie? You won’t see any of the mainstream publishers getting awards for great customer service anytime soon. In my personal experience, I’ve been ignored, but only after I had to repeat my story to three different people. It was one company, but it was also supposed to be one with a great reputation of doing right by customers. This company made one of the biggest games of the past few years, and I refuse to purchase a copy to this day. Maybe they’re not hurting, and maybe I’m the one who suffers by not being able to play a great game, but I was not satisfied with how they handled my issue.

Anyway, as an indie, you should love it whenever a customer contacts you. If there is a problem, own it. Fix it. Make your game better. You not only help this customer but also the next player. And give credit to customers for enhancements and fixes. People like seeing their names in lights. My girlfriend had her name printed on a website when she emailed to ask a question, and she was pretty excited. Heck, my parents made copies of the newspaper when my letter to the editor was printed.

If you do tech support for a large company, you will probably not care. You’re putting in your hours and getting paid for it. But as an indie, it’s your company. You know you care about your customers, so show some of that care when you interact with them.

Categories
Game Development Games Marketing/Business Politics/Government

You’re Playing CPG

Why We Need a Corporation for Public Gaming argues that we need a publicly funded organization dedicated to making high-quality, educational games for the public good.

The author, David Rejeski, made comparisons with the television industry, noting that noncommercial programming did not do very well without government involvement. A Corporation for Public Gaming would fund the educational games that aren’t as commercially viable as another FPS.

…The interactive nature of games, their ability to present complex and dynamic information, and, increasingly, to allow thousands of people to meet in sophisticated virtual environments means games can accomplish what TV never could in terms of addressing educational and social challenges.

However, serious games, like serious TV, are likely to remain a sidebar in the history of mass media. Non-commercial television floundered, despite millions of dollars of investment by the Ford Foundation, until the government stepped in and created a viable and long-lasting alternative. With similar vision and foresight, and a relatively small amount of funding, this could happen with video and computer games.

Some people complain that public television holds a political agenda, and so people might worry that games will be made that also express certain political viewpoints. “Not with my tax dollars!” is the cry. I haven’t really looked too much into public television’s supposed problems, but I believe that unpopular viewpoints need to be expressed. Unpopular pretty much means that it wouldn’t have funding from anyone.

If the industry is going to go where the money goes, then it isn’t likely that many serious games will get the funding they need. The CPG would also be an interesting development because it would also raise awareness in the general public about the nature of video games. Most people still believe that video games are just for kids, for example.

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Marketing/Business

GBGames LLC Officially Formed

As of March 22nd, 2006, the articles of organization for GBGames LLC were officially filed by the Illinois Secretary of State.

I know that for months I have been talking about how easy it is to submit the paperwork, but somehow I still managed to put it off until a few weeks ago. I was surprised at how quickly it was filed since I didn’t pay extra to expedite it.

In any case, it was a great feeling to open the envelope and see the letter informing me that my company is real and official. I have officially joined the ranks of Americans who can say that they owned a company. w00t!

Now I only have to do something with it.

Categories
Game Development Games Marketing/Business Personal Development

Independence, Money, and Great Games

Joe Indie referred to Dan McDonald’s Sustaining Independence at Game Tunnel. Previously, McDonald had written on the topic of independence, stating that financial pursuits necessarily makes a developer less independent. His latest article continues this line of thinking:

An independent developer that wishes to sustain their independence must pursue their own interests in game design and development and give them preeminence over their interests in business and profit.

At first I was inclined to disagree. How can you expect all people to starve for their art? Can’t people be considered indie while simultaneously earning an income from their work?

Of course, how you define an indie is important. Many would argue that indie simply means you are not financially dependent on a publisher or other entity. If you extrapolate this definition, technically most people who call themselves “indie” are in fact financially dependent on their customers.

What is your goal? Are you simply trying to make money? If so, game development is just one of many activities to achieve those goals. “The pursuit of money is inherently an ambition devoid of any value or meaning. If the only value one derives from an activity is monetary, then the activity itself is of very little consequence.” You could replace game development with database programming or bartending or painting or blogging, and in the end you’ll still have your money. What’s game development to you other than a job? Whether it is for someone else or for yourself, its a job, and creative control is in some way not completely yours. Change something about your game for the sake of pleasing the customer, and you’ve given up some control over the direction of your game development.

McDonald’s indie, on the other hand, would have a goal of perfecting his/her craft. Game development for the sake of game development. Making games to learn how to make better games.

A lot of business gurus will tell you that to be successful, you have to realize that making money is not only good, but it is the main goal. It makes sense. How can you hope to make a living from your business if you don’t accept the idea that you should be making a living from it? You can’t make a million dollars until you accept that it is a possibility. Most people don’t think they can. Some people do. Who is more likely to actually make the money? The purpose of a business is to make money.

The purpose of an indie, on the other hand, is to be independent. An indie experiments with making great games. An indie can make money, of course, but making money was never the main goal. His/Her overriding goal was never about making more money so much as making better games.

Are the business and the indie in perpetual conflict? How can an indie survive? If trying to make money taints the notion of independence, are all indies doomed to working odd jobs or doing other things to make a living? Are most indie’s forced to relegate game development to a hobby? I’d like to say no. Making better games, you will undoubtedly hit upon something that other people also like. Making better games, you will create a world that other people believe in enough to pay money for the right to participate in it.

Is it wrong to try to make money from your game? No. I also don’t think that the general definition of “indie” will change to exclude those developers who make games on their own for the purposes of making a living. Is it possible that a game created for the purpose of making money can also be a great game? Perhaps, but if your main goal is to make great games, wouldn’t you be more likely to actually make one? And if the game is truly great, won’t a lot of other people want to play it?

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical Marketing/Business Politics/Government

Draconian Copy Protection Not Necessary for Games

Stardock, creator of Galactic Civilizations 2, released a news item recently about the reasoning behind the lack of copy protection on its latest game. In it, Avatar Frogboy writes about better ways to combat piracy, namely by making it more attractive to be a paying customer than to download a copy illegally. It’s a refreshing viewpoint since most developers these days seem to believe that copy protection is a “vital” part of game development.

We realize that some people or companies might feel threatened at any evidence that implies that draconian DRM schemes or CD copy protection may not make that big of a difference in sales.

For example, we were quite disturbed to discover that the company that makes Starforce provided a working URL to a list of pirated GalCiv II torrents. I’m not sure whether what they did was illegal or not, but it’s troubling nevertheless and was totally unnecessary

Way to go, Starforce. Not only do you have a bad reputation for leaving behind junk on PCs when a person installs a game, but you go ahead and make yourself into quite a nuisance for companies that don’t fall for your marketing. Good job! You will continue to earn the scorn of gamers. Stardock should be commended for doing right by its customers and for keeping the moral high ground on this issue.

And look at the responses on that news item!

I bought the game for the sole reason you dont treat me like a criminal.

If anything knowing you can easily create a working backup of your games is what made me become a devout follower of Stardock in the first place.

Well Stardock I can tell you that ‘not’ putting DRM on your product is the reason I bought this game. I didnt buy ‘just’ because there is no copy protection, I also enjoy 4x games and GC2 is a good game. There are alot of games to choose from and I can only buy a few, so when it came time to decide what my next game was going to be I saw no copy protection for GC2 and my decisoin was made.

looks like I have to take might and magic 5 off my list too, I didn’t buy silent hunter 3 and X3 either just because
of that dreaded starforce

In some cases, the lack of draconian copy protection on a game made the purchasing decision easier for people. If you have a choice between buying two great games, one with DRM and one without, which would you choose? And isn’t it eye-opening that people are refusing to completely buy some games because of the type of DRM being used? If you want to increase sales, you make your product more valuable than a competitor’s offering. I haven never bought much music, but I have bought music at Audio Lunch Box because they promise me .ogg or .mp3 files without DRM. I don’t have to worry about copying my music to a second machine and having my music player accuse me of piracy. Why would I use anything with the misnamed FairPlay on it?

One poster referenced Rip Rowan of ProRec.com who wrote about the frustrations of so-called Digital Rights Management in Waves Native Gold Bundle 3.2 Featuring PACE Interlok. It’s sad how common a practice it is to purchase licenses and then use cracked versions for convenience.

In the best case, copy protection can be a mild annoyance for the customer. He also documents some worst case issues with PACE Interlok, including instances where uninstalling one “protected” package on a machine can invalidate the authorization to use another unrelated package, or installation reboots the system spontaneously, or the inability to use software due to downtime with the company you need to “phone home” to.

But the very worst part:

Within weeks of the commercial release of Native Gold Bundle 3.0, pirated versions of the software were available everywhere!

So all of my pain and suffering was for NOTHING! NOTHING! That’s what makes me so unbelievably ANGRY! It was all for NOTHING!

Now, why would you want your paying customers to feel this way? Why force them to jump through hoops, making cracked copies of your game all the more attractive? When you release your second game, or your fifth, what could you possibly offer to your customer to make him/her deal with your DRM crap rather than download a copy that can be played without effort? Why should I buy a music CD and risk having it ruin my computer when I can download the MP3s and know that they will just play?

I don’t like this sentiment, however:

Finally, I implore everyone who reads this article: do not steal software. That is why we are in this mess in the first place.

I’ve already written about how copyright infringement isn’t stealing, but that last sentence is what bothers me the most. Are you really supposed to believe that it isn’t the company putting you through painful copy protection? You’re supposed to just assume that it is the person who infringes the copyright that is at fault? Let’s take some responsibility here. Stardock isn’t forcing draconian copy protection on its customers. It’s game is not always legally acquired. If those darn pirates are the reason we’re “in this mess”, how does Stardock manage to take the high road?

Let’s put the blame for overbearing copy protection where it belongs. Yes, someone “stole” your game. That person shouldn’t do it, but he/she did it. At the same time, we already know that two wrongs don’t make a right, so don’t tell me that copy protection that punishes the paying customer is out of your hands. You have a choice, so when your customers complain, you can’t just say, “Well, if it weren’t for those pirates, we would make it easier for you, but we can’t.” Aren’t you supposed to please your customer? You know, the person who actually buys your projects? Increases your sales numbers? Improves your cash flow situation? If not, then who are you trying to please?

Categories
Marketing/Business

Why Most Businesses Fail

Oh, hey! MarkTaw.com updated! Why Most Businesses Fail (A Theoretical Model) was an interesting article analyzing the reasons for the high failure rate of new businesses.

Business owners can find that income fails to cover expenses. New owners might not realize that profits come many years down the road, and I believe most of them are in the high percentage of first-year failures. For those owners that do appreciate how difficult it can be to meet expenses and start saving, it is possible that the expenses accumulate much too quickly compared to revenues. Mark suggests that there are only three options: reduce expenses, increase income, or quit your business. Reducing expenses might results in less debt, but it is still debt. Increasing your income is obviously important, but it can be frustrating when your margins are terrible. Quitting the business adds another notch to the statistics about failed businesses. What he says about each is insightful about the thought processes new business owners need.

He ends the article with 12 tips for people who still want to go through the trials of starting and running their own businesses. #8 and #9 go well together. #8 says to try multiple things. Get multiple streams of income. Don’t depend on one product or service. You need a backup in case one aspect of your business fails.

#9, however, says that you need to start somewhere. You can’t always jump into multiple endeavors. Start somewhere, take action, and get something out there. You need to make one product before you make your second. If I had stuck with my deadlines for game development, Oracle’s Eye development would have slowed down incredibly, and if you have been reading for the past month, you know I can’t afford to lose the few hours I do get to work on it. According to my old deadlines list, I am supposed to have a prototype for IGF 2007 by the end of March. I am also thinking about topics for a book or newspaper article series. I haven’t finished my first game yet, and there is a temptation to work on a different project to give myself a break. I need to ignore everything else and focus on my game project. I need to take as much action as I can to finish it.

Otherwise, I’m just another wannabe game developer who couldn’t finish what he started. So long as I am making progress, no one can say that I didn’t finish. I just haven’t crossed the finish line yet. I’ve been floundering because there were a handful of finish lines, which caused me to lose my focus. Once I made the conscious choice to concentrate on one goal and ignore the rest, it was easier to breathe. Taking action was a choice between doing something productive or not doing something productive, which is a lot easier than trying to decide which of a handful of productive actions to take.

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Marketing/Business

Casual Game State of the Industry Summary

In So…Did You Read It?, David “RM” Michael asks a few questions. Did anyone read State of the Industry: Casual Games in the latest Game Developer magazine, and if so, could you provide a summary?

Sure! James Gwertzman, director of business development at PopCap says that he expects the casual game market to grow very rapidly. Some research predicts that downloadable games will have $1.7 billion in revenue by 2009 compared to $241 million in 2005. It talks about how PopCap works. It talks about PlayFirst, the supposed-first publisher for casual games. Budgets for casual games have apparently gone from $50,000 to $150,000 due to high quality games raising standards. Then there was talk about how important portals are since they have such a high volume of potential customers. Microsoft’s MSN Games and XBox Live Arcade also are supposed to usher in diversity in casual games.

Nothing, however, about going it alone. Nothing about being an indie. Just Big Money going after big money. Not that there is anything wrong with big money, of course. I think that it is good news that casual games are shown to be more than a passing fad. I just think that it would be terrible if it became a subset of hit-driven, big-production, mainstream game development.

The second question was about the relevancy of Game Developer magazine. I don’t have enough information to be able to try to answer that question, but I will say that I think I get more quality information from blogs and websites, and such information comes to me much quicker.

Categories
Marketing/Business

Free Ebook: Go It Alone!

David “RM” Michael of Joe Indie wrote about a free Ebook available from Bruce Judson in Free EBook about Starting a Solo Business

I’m a bit disappointed that it isn’t available in an easily-downloadable PDF, but you can read Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own in standard HTML format. With chapter titles like “Principles of Success”, “When to Quit Your Day Job”, and “Conclusion: Fear is the Enemy”, it seems like a great read.