What Games Are

If Platforms are Countries, Marketing Stories are Religions

If it helps to understand the power and role of marketing stories, think of them in this way:

Platforms (PC, Steam, Facebook, iPhone, Wii, board gamers, roleplayers - think loosely) are like countries. Players are members of the country, understand the country's rules and play within its borders. They may be aware of other countries, but their on-the-ground awareness of them is often shallow. Only a few especially motivated gamers are true internationals, and even they often have a favoured platform or two where they spend most of their time.

Marketing stories are like religions. They are the causes, memes and ideas that matter. Some go across many platforms, but many don't. Stories that motivate Steam players are unintelligible nonsense to Facebook players, and vice versa. Although the processes of many platforms seems similar (much as the laws in many countries are), it's the people and why they are there which is different. Values and identity are different. Customs are different. 

It's very important to figure out whether your chosen country has the religion you want to tap into. Many don't, even if they seem like they should. There is no Facebook indie audience, for example, even though it seems like there could be. There is no audience for streamed cloud gaming like Onlive, even with all the funding, technology and strategy documents in the world. Nobody cares. 

It's especially important to understand this now: The platform rush of the last five years is basically over, and even the new platforms (Windows 8, for instance) are likely to fill very quickly with the same content as you see on other platforms. The next phase is the marketing story phase, and the renaissances and reformations that go with them.

Though you may not realise it yet, you're basically in the church business. 

Freemium Is Not Shareware 2.0

This morning I read the sorry story of Gasketball. The game is an above-average puzzler in which you bounce a basketball off walls and other objects to shoot hoops. Like many such iOS games it's charming, pretty good fun (though not amazing I would say).

However, despite achieving 200,000 downloads, its developers have ended up homeless and borrowing money to survive. They released the game for free and using Apple's in-app purchasing model to allow the player to upgrade to the full game for a one-off price of $2.99. So far they've had 0.67% conversion (or 1,340 sales). Their reasons for only having one purchase are moral.

Like many developers, they believe that freemium business models are abusive. Their idea was to use the same system, but only have one payment. In other words they confused freemium with what we used to call shareware. Unfortunately it seems that nobody told them that shareware was never that great to begin with. 

On Ultraviolence in Games and the Lessons of Porn

The gaming sphere (myself included) debated about whether E3 had gone too far and had the ultraviolent kinds of game on show were representative of games any more. Many a journalist reflected on their personal feelings of depression in the wake of the show, thinking that for all the high talk games had not really moved on. All fair points, but studios go to the extreme like that for a reason.

They need the coverage, even if bad, because obscurity is the enemy of all creative endeavour. If you're not remarkable then you're not remarked-upon, and that means you're invisible - so nobody buys your game. Ideally game makers would all love to be talked about for their design, technology or aesthetics, but those attributes are often unreliable. A splashy, gory, over-the-top video though? Money in the bank, or so they think.

The problem is that that kind of extremity eventually gives way to apathy, and from there it's a short hop to commoditisation. The approach of being bigger/better/faster/harder than the other guy ultimately results in a bland white noise where even the most shocking act is no longer really that shocking. In this, the E3 games industry may find itself traveling down the same sorry path as the adult entertainment industry.