Category: Marketing/Business

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General Marketing/Business

A Business Practice I’m Not Liking

I was on a student health insurance plan up until July. Since I am no longer in school, I can’t take advantage of it anymore. I started to look for a new insurance plan earlier that month, and I figured I would cancel my plan once I knew I had a replacement. Unfortunately the search and application process took a bit longer than I expected and so I was forced to cancel it before I had anything.

No big deal. I just sent an email to eHealthInsurance.com, my “agent”, and asked them to cancel my Fortis Health Insurance plan. Simple.

I did end up sending it a bit later than the expiration date, but I made an assumption that I had a grace period. You know, because good companies don’t terminate your plans without saying, “Hey, we haven’t received your payment, so we’re letting you know that your plan is danger of being terminated.” In fact, they did send me such letters.

So I was surprised to find a letter yesterday telling me that they cancelled my plan on July 27th, 2005. Um, it’s frickin’ September, and you are telling me this fact NOW?!? A whole month later you decide to inform me of this decision? The letter’s purpose was to inform me that they cancelled it because of non-payment. Huh?! I CANCELLED it, and obviously they should have received the cancellation since they didn’t send this letter until a couple of days ago. I cancelled weeks ago.

The best part? The letter informs me that this reason can be used when I finally do apply for new insurance from any company.

Why not inform me that the plan was cancelled, oh, I don’t know, when you cancelled it?

Recently I had a similar problem with my cell phone bills not getting paid. I received a bill that didn’t mention that my last month’s payment was received, but I assumed this bill might have been sent a bit earlier. After all, my payments were handled by the phone company since I had a payment plan that allowed them to take what I owed them out of my account every month. Up until the situation I describe below, I was very happy with their customer service.

I forgot that I received a new debit card from my bank and didn’t think to update the expiration date on record with the company. When I noticed that my bank statement didn’t match what I thought I should have paid out, I called them and found out about this situation.

You know what would have been frickin’ useful? Getting notice in some form saying, “We tried to collect payment, but your expiration date on your card is not correct.” Or if they don’t have that information, how about just, “There was a problem trying to get payment. Please call us.”

But no. I had to find out myself. I didn’t get charged a late fee, but I was wondering if I would have been if I had waited longer to call them.

Both of these situations are my fault in the end. I made bad assumptions. I forgot to update my information. I admit that these were my problems.

But what kind of a business forgets that its customers might be human and make mistakes? These two companies aren’t the only ones either. In the past few months, I’ve been getting the feeling that companies don’t WANT to do business with me. Seriously, why do I have be the one who finds out what the situation is? Why can’t the business be proactive and inform me about what I need to do if I need to do anything?

Imagine if I would have been sent a letter the day that they cancelled the plan. I would have been better prepared to do something about it, especially if it potentially has such a huge effect on my application to other insurance providers. Imagine if T-Mobile would have told me that they had a problem collecting payment THE DAY THEY TRIED TO DO SO. The problem would have been resolved then and there. Instead a month went by before I knew about it.

I’m 24 and haven’t been working with services and businesses for too long. Up until a number of years ago, I wasn’t in charge of my finances. I’m disgusted with the level of service I receive at some places. Has this been the status quo, or is it a new trend with businesses? Why do businesses think that they are better for upsetting me about completely preventable things? After all, wouldn’t they get paid sooner? Wouldn’t they keep business from going to their competitors?

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Marketing/Business

Steps to Online Business Success

10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company has some of the same points I’ve read in many different places distilled into a single list. It touches on topics that have been covered in greater detail on blogs like Creating Passionate Users, such as the idea that people like to tell friends about cool things to show that they are in the know.

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Marketing/Business

Software Piracy Is Not Theft

In The Escapist’s Casual Friday came the article So What’s It Worth To You. I agree with the main point. Voting with your dollars is important. When you pirate a good game, you basically send the message that the game wasn’t worth paying for and so more good games won’t get made. I appreciate Blancato pointing out that major piracy that involves companies trying to make a quick buck are the major problem, not necessarily Joe Schmoe Gamer who got a copy from his friend. I also like how Blancato mentioned that draconian anti-piracy measures will turn off paying customers. After all, if you pay for something and have to jump through hoops to play it, but the person who pirates a copy gets to just play it sans hoops, isn’t there something wrong?

All well and good, but I am still getting pretty upset that people will equate software piracy with theft. The two are not the same. Even the courts say that they are not the same. The only ones who claim they are the same are the companies who gain an advantage in making you think that copyright infringement is the same as theft. Oh, and the people who hear this kind of thinking and start to think that way as well.

One problem is that people like to make analogies with things that just aren’t like software. People compare software to cars. If I take a car, that’s theft, so why isn’t it theft when I “take software”?

It’s because you aren’t preventing someone else from “taking” software. When I take a car, there is one less car for the car dealership to sell. That’s actually stealing something. When I “take” a game, it’s theft if I literally steal the box from the retail shelf. If I instead make a copy of a CD from a friend, I didn’t steal anything, and no court will ever allow the prosecution to claim it was an actual theft. When someone makes a copy of a game or music CD, it’s illegal because of a violation of copyright. It’s an infringement on the copyright holder’s rights. Of course, if the ESA, MPAA, and RIAA all complained about the “rise in copyright infringement” it wouldn’t invoke as much feeling as “they are stealing from us!”

Software piracy isn’t as cut and dry as some would have you believe. The way some people argue it, when someone pirates a copy of a game or movie or music, it directly equates to lost revenue. It would be true if every pirated copy would be paid for by the infringer, but in reality, come on! Let’s ignore the real criminals who make many copies for the purpose of selling them since they are clearly a separate case. Let’s focus on the casual pirate. He/she might make copies of every game simply because he/she likes the idea of collecting all these games. Take away the possibility of pirating those games, and I really don’t think this pirate will have the ability to pay for it all. This pirate will just not collect as much. Pirated copies of games like Catwoman wouldn’t magically turn into revenue, I’m sure.

I’ve yet to see a real study on this issue, but I wonder just how many of these non-professional pirates would be forced to buy a game that he/she couldn’t pirate. I think that most people would just not play the game, but that’s just my hunch.

Still, you can’t say “theft” and mean “software piracy”. Yes, software piracy is serious. Yes, it can mean that a developer might make less revenue. I do not deny that it can have very real effects. But let’s call it what it is and stop trying to manipulate people. We’re grown ups now. We can handle the truth. Software piracy is copyright infringement, but it is not theft.

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Marketing/Business

Indie Power Trip

Don’t Fear the Indie is about what it might be like to have your own income independent of your regular job. When an employer gets nervous about a potential employee who gets income on his/her own, it’s scary.

Nothing, it seems, scares employers more than employees with independent income.

Why? Because independent income removes one of the primary levers employers use to control their employees: the paycheck.

It basically complements what David St. Lawrence says about corporate life. The days of long careers at a corporation that takes care of you are long gone, and the only really safe (and sane!) thing to do is work for yourself.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Marketing/Business

Quake 3 Source Now Under GPL

It’s been in the news for some time, but it is still very cool news: Quake 3: Arena Source GPL’d

id has been pretty good about releasing the source to their older game engines. It’s not a new idea for the company. Apparently you still have people who think that the GPL is about stealing someone’s work, as this comment shows:

A Shame
Why did not you buy this game ?

Quake 3 is a great game, it costs few bucks

You want games for free, so I ask you to work freely, without salary.
Give your goods for free if you ask the games for free !

Huh?!? id released the source code to their engine under the General Public License. The game data and scripts remain proprietary, so you can’t legally play the GAME unless you pay for the proprietary data . It isn’t like some GPL zealots hacked into their servers and placed the code under the GPL. It isn’t like Carmack will come out with a statement like, “It is with great regret that I must inform everyone that we’ve lost our source code to the scourge of the GPL; however, we will not give up. We will fight back, and we will win!” It was a conscious decision to release the source, and no one is under the delusion that it is a free lunch except for people who think that the GPL equates to legalized piracy.

The Complete Text of General Public License
The GPL covers whatever an author wants to cover. Some games, source code and data, are covered under the GPL entirely, but the terms are restricted to the engine’s source code in this case. Therefore, the GPL dictates the terms of copying, modifying, and distributing the Quake 3 Arena source code. Not how you actually use the program. Not what you can do to the art or music that comes with the game. Copyright law gives id exclusive rights to the Quake 3 Arena engine source code. If they want to allow people to read the code, change the code, compile the code, redistribute the code, etc, they have the right to do so. The GPL is simply one of a number of standard documents to express what rights they are allowing others to have.

Don’t worry. No one is ripping id off.

Categories
Games Marketing/Business

It’s Your Turn…Oh Wait…

I have a free account on itsyourturn.com, which is a great site to play games like Chess and Jamble (a Scrabble-like game) among others. Basically, you can play against real people without requiring them to be there in real time. You make a move and an email will be sent to your opponent if he/she does not move within a few minutes. It’s a great way to keep up with people, too. You can send messages to your friends, startup new games, or just talk about whatever. There are tournaments and multiple variations on games. I don’t play against many people, so I almost never hit the free account’s move limit, but you can pay a membership fee to get more benefits.

I always suspected that IYT was a small team. I knew it couldn’t be some large corporation, but I always wondered if it was just a few people working out of an apartment or something. It didn’t seem like an overly complex website, either, so it didn’t seem to require much more than maintenance. The site never betrayed any information. There was never an about page, never any info on the people behind it, etc.

Then disaster struck.

Friday August 19, 2005

We have experienced a major disk crash, and our backup is also unusable.

While we are trying to retrieve what’s left on the disk, the prognosis does not look good. We will be down for a few days at least, and this may be as long as 2 weeks. If it takes that long, your membership will be extended by a similar time.

It’s still down as of this writing. More updates were posted periodically, but the best ones weren’t the cold/professional “We’re working on this issue as fast as we can. Thank you for your patience”. The best updates were along the lines of:

When these things happen, some of you email us and ask us why aren’t we smarter or why don’t we work harder. We understand that this is a huge inconvenience for you, that you paid for this product, and any abuse we receive is well-deserved. Please understand that we do not do this intentionally. Given a choice, we would prefer not to have to go through this. We experienced what was almost a “perfect storm” of events that destroyed both our main disk and our backup file (which are on completely separate RAID disk units) at the same time.

We are working as hard as we can to get the site back online as quickly as possible. Please check here for more updates (I will try to post updates several times a day, but please understand that we are spending most of our time trying to fix the system).

“…any abuse we receive is well-deserved.” When was the last time your game company admitted to a fault and said, “Yes, we were bone-headed, and nothing we can say will make up for that”? They even opened up a blog to let people not only know what was happening but also let them comment about it!

In the first couple of entries, comments were VERY negative; however, very supportive fans arrived in force. A number of people expressed anger over a number of a issues over the years (and some very personal attacks were made as well), but most of the people informed the company that they will be patient and will renew membership.

Wow. You can’t buy that kind of loyalty. Something goes wrong, and the team of IYT are honest and open about it. No hiding or trying to be “professional”. Some people get turned off by the company, but most people stand by it. IYT may have had a huge disaster, but they did the right thing by being open about it. It’s actions like this that result in the real fans standing up and coming to the rescue. That’s passion.

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Marketing/Business

Incorporating GBGames

Usually when I talk to people about making games, I will say that I have plans to start my own game company. In general, I had the idea that I would start out by filing as an LLC, which is a limited liability company. I didn’t think that incorporating was necessary or even desirable, as I would be a one man company. An LLC allows me to keep it as simple as a sole proprietorship while getting the liability protection of a corporation.

Which is all well and good, but I haven’t really been doing anything about it. I can’t always plan to start my own game company. At some point I have to actually start it. Looking at my written goals, I don’t see anything that says, “Incorporate GBGames by MONTH DATE, YEAR”.

I think the reason why I didn’t put it up as a specific thing to do is because I just assumed I would handle it when I had games to sell. Why create a formal company when I’m still trying to make something for the company to make revenue from?

Then a friend of mine incorporated his company recently. I can see that many of his expenses can actually be applied towards his taxes, many expenses that I myself have. Also, he is really kicking into gear with his business. At the moment I can take my time since nothing is pressing me to make games or try to sell them, but if I had a formal company, it would force me to actually do something. I’d get a feeling of urgency since I have a business to run. So maybe incorporating now wouldn’t be too early.

I’m not sure of the answer, so I need to update my research on this topic. Did double taxation laws change this past year? Are LLCs still the best compromise? Any reason why a formal corporation would be better? Should I form a company before a product is actually created? What responsibilities do I need to take on if I do create a formal company? There are quite a few questions, but at the very least it gives me a new set of topics to blog about. B-)

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Marketing/Business

Fool the Game Press

It’s long, but don’t let that fact turn you off. Read How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press And How The Gaming Press Wants To Use and Abuse You to get not only good tips on how to get better press coverage for your game but also to read some interesting anecdotes about Introversion Software, Peter Molyneux, and what it is like to work in the gaming press.

From my own experience working as a reviewer for Game Tunnel, I have to say that I was always impressed by companies that sent out packages, complete with press releases and hint guides. While most companies only offer a download option, receiving actual, physical mail was always cooler. I don’t usually get packages unless I order something, so receiving big packages filled with the latest gaming goodness always stood out for me. Of course, I’m not a member of a major game magazine who may receive lots of mail and think it is old hat. Still, sending your game means that it has a chance of getting covered. Why reduce your chances to 0% by not sending it at all?

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Success With Style

I didn’t know that Donald Trump had a blog, and I never really paid attention to him anyway. “You’re fired!” was never really a catch phrase I cared about, and I always thought that he was just an incredibly rich guy. No reason to care one way or the other about him, right? I find it funny how many of the comments on his blog are just people throwing compliments left and right. Not just compliments, either. Worship is probably not too strong a word to describe it.

Anyway, I did enjoy reading Success with Style, where he essentially talks about how true beauty is deep. Success comes with style, and style isn’t something you can slap on as an afterthought. It has to be there throughout the design and development of whatever endeavor you are taking on.

While he wasn’t talking about game development, I think that if you were to make a game and try to add higher poly counts or orchestral sounds without truly paying attention to how it fits into the game, you would have something superficial, and people will know. Generally, it is understood that a good game isn’t just good graphics, although I have been surprised to find people who thought it was the most important thing in a game. Of course, it isn’t like there is a definite formula for making a good game since the definition is different for so many people. Still, I think that if you keep style in mind, how can you go wrong?

Now we just need to decide on exactly what style means, and we’ll be all set. B-) Maybe this is related to a timeless way of game design?

Categories
General Marketing/Business

Sheep or In The Know?

An iPod Sheep Fights Back at Creating Passionate Users made me laugh. It was funny to me because it was a shrill defense against the accusation that only sheep would pay so much more money for an iPod (or Mac hardware in general) just to look cool. The Ignorance Premium, as Hugh McLeod refers to it as.

Why is the iPod so successful when perfectly fine alternatives exist? I don’t pretend to know, as I am one of the three in the world who don’t own one. But as I understand it, it is supposed to be the best form and function. It’s not just cool. It’s sexy.

And almost everyone has one. That’s what is so mind-boggling about it. If everyone has one, then how can everyone be sexy? But there it is. And people are willing to play extra for it.

Nevermind the DRM. Nevermind the issues with replacing a battery. Nevermind the need to choose between hard drive OR music player. Nevermind the lack of .ogg support. Nevermind that you can’t transfer music between friends that the local band told you was perfectly fine to do. People will pay a premium for the “best” music player, best being defined somewhere, I’m sure.

I’m fairly cost-concious. I didn’t shell out extra for a Starter jacket when I was younger even though everyone else had one and they all made fun of me for it. I didn’t think much of “diamonds” in my gym shoes, especially since those shoes were always heavier than mine. I didn’t even want to pump on my shoes. And I didn’t rush out to buy an iPod, partly because I haven’t been all that into music and so didn’t exactly have a portable CD player to replace anyway, and partly because of the neverminds I list above.

But wait. There was one thing that I fell in love with when I first experienced it. When Starfox 64 came out for N64, I remember praising the Rumble Pak that came bundled with it. Friend didn’t “get it” when I told them about it. “Wait, let me get this straight. While you play, this thing makes the controller shake? Um…so?” Since only a few games had rumble compatibility, no one was rushing to get one. Of course, once I let someone play, they quickly loved it too. Today, if a console doesn’t have controllers that “just shake while you play the game” it would be found lacking. I even bought a Logitech joystick that had force feedback.

But hey, I’m totally different from those iPod sheep. Force feedback was cool. B-)