What Games Are: Game Design, Development, Publishing, Marketing and Art

Is The Facebook App Center A Big Deal?

Last year I posted that Facebook was effectively over as a disruptive game development platform. My reasoning was that Facebook relied too much on algorithmic solutions to drive visibility, which was then gamed by a few companies, and largely failed at introducing users to new games.

Unless Facebook were to produce a highly visible app store, I thought, Zynga had won. I also thought Facebook would not make such a store. Happily I was apparently wrong.

Why Not Brandification Instead? [Gamification]

My sense is that brand managers are approaching games in the wrong way. A few years ago they were all into creating virtual worlds but that didn’t really work out. More recently they went through a phase of creating social games, but again no luck. Now they’re keen to commission digital agencies or game developers to create gamified sites or software for brands, which will inevitably become coupon schemes, badges and leader boards.

The vast majority of these projects are utter failures because they end up creating vapid digital services with no soul. The ones that do succeed often do so accidentally (for example, because they were unexpectedly fun). Games are a cultural product, and like any other culture there is a line where commercial relationships become nakedly self-serving, and no customer finds that sexy.

Perhaps the branding industry should consider branding games rather than gamifying brands instead, if only for the reason that it’s more likely to work.

Windows 8 Plugin Woes [Questions]

First Apple refused to let Flash onto the iPad. Now Microsoft want to nix all plugins from Internet Explorer. Browsers, it seems, want to leave plugins behind. They want HTML5 to do what Flash used to, and from a certain perspective it makes a lot of sense. Even Adobe seem to realise that Flash is done and offers tools to recompile apps built in Flash for HTML5.

However, specifically for Flash social games, Java games, some Unity projects and some other more obscure plugins this is a really big deal. HTML5 is perfectly capable of being used for video and rich content sites, but does it really stand up for games? So far the consensus from the game development community seems to be ‘no’, but if the Windows default browser won’t support them then they instantly lose at least half of their market.

So where does this leave browser based games? Has Microsoft just announced their doom?

The Next Wave: Local Games?

Your MMO guild members may be good friends but they’re scattered all across the world. Your mobile games steal your attention away from talking to people. Your social game hassles you to bug your friends for gifts, but otherwise you play alone. Your co-op sessions of Portal 2 tend to be played with mute strangers.

Most innovations in digital gaming tend to produce solitary experiences. This is fine most of the the time, but players don’t always want to be solitary. They like to gather to play, to participate and hang out. Social contact is healthy, and games have always had an important role in helping to bind communities together.

Video games have not really tapped into that spirit yet, but it feels to me like that’s the next wave. Local games are coming.

Is Google+ the Next Big Thing? [Platforms]

The social games industry sprung back into the news last week after a quiet few months with the exciting revelation that Google+ had officially opened up its games business. Offering a clean design, an attractive financial package and even a hosting solution, it seems like it could be the next hot ticket platform.

But is it?

Social Needs Scale [Social Games]

Yesterday at Develop I attended a number of talks about socialised games. The advice across all of them was largely the same: make it social.

There is, however, something to consider: For social to be valuable to a player, she needs friends in the game. It is exponentially less valuable if she has few or none, and gating that requires her to involve her friends becomes a much harder task from a standing start. It's Metcalfe's Law basically, and is why social layers work for games that already have millions of users, but not for small ones.

Instead, consider connecting strangers.

I Think Facebook is Over [Social Games]

If Facebook games are an arms race, then Zynga have clearly won it. They have more users than their next nine competitors combined and a lock on cross promotion that can’t be beaten. Only Zynga is able to regularly make games that will acquire more than 20 million users, and they have been tenacious to a fault in dominating every channel they can find.

Meanwhile their competitors can only look on and stare at their own (mostly) declining fortunes. One publisher really does rule them all, and is about to IPO itself a couple of billion dollars to become as big as Activision. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

How Engagement Killed Gameplay [Language]

(with thanks to Casper Moller)

I used to hear the word gameplay bandied around by executives a lot. Everyone would say that their game was all about innovative gameplay, and believe it, even though most of their games looked and acted just like every other game. However something has changed.

Nobody in those meetings talks about gameplay any more. It seems to have fallen by the wayside. Now everyone’s talking about engagement. It’s changing the way that games are thought of, and so the kinds of games that are getting funded and developed.

Engagement has, in a sense, killed the ideal of gameplay, how we see games, and certainly how we will develop them in the future.

Red Oceanomics [Social Games]

Yesterday, Inside Social Games published a post of mine about the social game market and how I believe that it’s increasingly becoming a red ocean. Red ocean is a term from the book Blue Ocean Strategy, and it means a market that has become bloody with competition. Red oceans tend to be focused on aping, copying and differentiation rather than pure innovation.

This is a trend that I see happening a lot in Facebook gaming in particular, whether for bad or good. I’ll have a follow-up piece on ISG soon, talking about ways to head into the blue ocean instead, and perhaps kick of Facebook gaming’s next generation.

Muggles [Casual and Social Gamers]

Facebook, motion controllers, mobile phones and minute-long game experiences tap into casual (and social) game players. Many believe that conversion of these players to bigger and better games is just a matter of education and exposure. And so we can expand the market for games exponentially. We can take on Hollywood. By broadening the appeal of games, everyone becomes a gamer.

Not so much. Casual players have significantly responded to games targeted at them, but not to richer gaming any more than ever. They like to play games, but don’t engage with the possibilities beyond what they already expect. They still don’t seem to see games as anything other than either amusements or for ‘gamers’.

In Harry Potter terms, they are muggles. If you’re going to make games for muggles, you need to realise that you’re not in the conversion business. You’re in the satisfaction business.