Category: Marketing/Business

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Game Development Marketing/Business

Advice for IGF Finalists

Dustin Sacks of Sillysoft Games and creator of the amazingly expandable and cross-platform Risk-clone called Lux wrote an article entitled Advice for Independent Games Festival Finalists. Lux made it to the IGF finals last year, and Dustin basically felt unprepared. He’s decided to write up his experiences to help out developers who made it to the finals this year.

It is a quick read and should be helpful for anyone who wants to network with other people involved in game development or to get more publicity.

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Marketing/Business

A Great Game Demo

How to Be a Demo God by Guy Kawasaki gives 11 tips to entrepreneurs looking for venture capital at Demo.

While I don’t plan on being involved in Demo in the near future, I was wondering how his points can apply to a shareware game demo. Some of them don’t seem to fit at all, such as “do it alone” instead of with a partner. Then again, making sure you demo runs on its own instead of requiring the existence of exotic-third party applications might be something that would be desired.

So how can they apply? I’ll try to answer, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts. I don’t have the personal experience of putting together shareware demos myself, so what follows is what I’ve gleaned off of the various shareware marketing and sales articles and posts out there.

  1. Create something worth demoing. It’s generally understood that your game better be able to stand up on its own. Not all good games sell well, but all bad games definitely don’t sell or sell for long. The demo is supposed to be a small part of that awesomeness that is your game. If you are showing a small part of junk, your customers will know. Don’t begrudge this fact; it’s how shareware is supposed to work. The way to compete is to make a good quality product.
  2. Do it alone. I suppose if I stretch I could say that your game shouldn’t require your players to install five different third-party libraries that aren’t included with the demo. Maybe another interpretation is that getting onto a shareware compilation is also bad; being one of the “best 100 Windows games”, for instance, you’ll get lost in the crowd. If someone tries your game demo and likes it enough to pay for the full version, how likely is that person to say, “But let me check the rest of the games to see if I like something better”?
  3. Bring two of everything. Some people lose sales because the demo couldn’t run on certain computers. If DirectX support is not available, OpenGL might work better. Message boxes might pop up and disappear before a person can read them, so use a log file to store the error messages. Having a Windows version AND a Mac OS X version might double your possible sales.
  4. Get organized in advance. Your game’s demo is part of the marketing of your game. Don’t just take the full version and cut out a bunch of features and throw it out there. Really think about what would make it a good demo. How does it fit into the rest of your marketing plan?
  5. Reduce the factors you can’t control. If your demo requires the Internet to function, it should say so. Otherwise, don’t assume an always-on connection because it might not be there. What resolution do you need? Don’t assume that your customers will have a 1920×1200 resolution monitor. If you do need certain factors to be there, you should state so in your system requirements. Those should be easy to find on your website, I think.
  6. Get to it. Do we really need to learn who you are or what libraries you used as soon as I start the demo? Show me the game! I don’t know if showing Buy buttons is a bad thing that early in the demo, but I would imagine that until the person plays the game, having a BUY NOW splash screen before getting to the main menu would be more of an annoyance than anything.
  7. “Do the last thing first.” I read that Daikatana is actually a decent game, and I’ll be playing it this year to learn for myself. I also read that with all the hype surrounding it, people were turned off by the first couple of levels. They were apparently boring. I think it will probably be fine to say, “The full version features even more weapons!” but the demo should at least feature some awesome weapons too. If you have a puzzle game, I think putting only easy puzzles in the demo is a problem as well.
  8. Then show the “how.” I’m not sure how to apply what Kawasaki was saying to the game demo, although I suppose a tutorial would be one way. IGF finalist Flashbang Studios’ Glow Worms is a good example of a game that had a nice tutorial to show you how to play. On the other hand, I know that Darwinia, as great a game as it is, was hard to get into at first. I didn’t know how to get the game to recognize my mouse gestures because I didn’t know I was supposed to be on a specific screen to do them.
  9. Cut the jargon. Your customers want to play the game, not reconfigure their computers. While drivers need to be updated and libraries need to be installed, don’t expect your customers to hunt for files or do anything out of the ordinary.
  10. Don’t take any questions until the end. I’m not sure if this one applies at all. If your customer has a question, answer it! Also, record it and resolve to fix your demo so that those questions are addressed before they ask. Make it so you don’t have to worry about being asked questions until the end.
  11. End with an exclamation point. Your demo should start awesome and it should end awesome. Don’t fizzle out or people will think that with the exception of that first part, which they’ve already played, the entire game is boring.

I suppose there is a challenge applying these tips to shareware games. You can’t depend on the player making it all the way through the demo, so you can’t easily define the “end” of it for that potential customer. Perhaps it shows that there is a flaw in your game demo? Should your demo be so good that people play through it completely, or is it possible to be better even if the person only plays a portion of it? If the person stops part of the way through, will they simply uninstall and forget it or will they actually drop you a line to tell you why? With a shareware demo, your captive audience isn’t forced to sit and watch for six minutes. Your demo better be spectacular and make the potential customer want to see more.

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Game Development Marketing/Business

Freedom and Independence

Freedom and Independence is an essay by Dan McDonald on the Game Tunnel website about the reasons so many people have been going indie.

With so many people becoming independent game developers, the question is, “Why?” What makes it so appealing?

McDonald thinks that being able to create a game the way you want to make it without worrying about appeasing Marketing or some third party investor should be the big reason. Being indie because you want to be indie.

He then argues that the goal of financial independence actually constrains you and makes you less indie. By allowing your game design and creation to be dictated by the bottom line, you necessarily restrict what you might develop. Perhaps, but there is no denying that worrying about the Marketing Department is completely different from worrying about marketing. When you’re indie AND trying to make a living, your customers matter most rather than a checklist provided by a separate group in your company.

On the other hand, maybe the definition of “indie” has been stretched. Is the freeware developer who makes whatever he wants any more indie than the shareware developer who makes what his customers want? It’s one way of looking at it.

McDonald finishes the essay with the following plea:

So to new independent developers, I encourage you to enjoy your freedom and make something you are passionate about. Like most things in life, if you follow your passion you will eventually find financial success. It’s not a valid business plan, but there is enjoyment and significance to be found in creating games with passion. The potential for those kinds of games is why sites like this exist. Do you think they really want to review another game packed full of casual mechanics and themes (or whatever else is the hot selling trend of the day)? No, they exist because they want to support developers who are free to create games that are expressions of their own appreciations and personality instead of what everyone else who’s bound to the almighty dollar is doing.

When I was younger, I wanted to make video games, but I never thought it would be to specifically make clones and derivative works. I’m sure most people wanted to make the “best-RPG-ever!!!!”, or some incredibly involved simulation game. Some people have gone on to make such games. Others might have forgotten to even think about what their dream game would be…

/me adds “Decide on dream game idea” to New Year’s Resolutions.