What Games Are

On Crowdfunding Fixing The Woes Of Games Investing [TechCrunch]

My column for TechCrunch this week talks about the inherent difficulties of investing in actual games (rather than game technologies or distribution), and my hopes for crowdfunding being able to solve that.

Here's the article

Nobody Loves A Beggar [Marketing Stories]

 

For most studios the big problem these days is discoverability. When they make their game, get into the market and try to make sales, they discover that they are just one in a sea of many. They're not on the front page of the App Store, not being reviewed and not attracting fans. Nobody tweets about their game or likes their Facebook page.

So they try every kind of tactic they can think of to get precious eyeballs and clicks. For example: I receive a lot of automated newsletters, tweets, press releases and emails from game makers' publicists. Some even offer me money to write about their game. Similarly, many gaming websites are falling down with automated advertisements begging me to click, to play and to tell my friends.

What they are doing is begging for a response, like Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross. They need the exposure but the best tactic they can think of is using brute force to achieve it. If they can snag us, they hope, some of us will convert to customers and love them. But nobody loves a beggar. 

Free-to-Play and the "Freecore" Gamer [TechCrunch]

I have a new post on TechCrunch this morning talking about the rise of free-to-play, the decline of retail sales, and the plight of mid-level publishers. It also asks whether there really is a hardcore free-to-play audience or whether that is just a pipe dream.

Here's the article.

Great Story, Bad Game: Should The Walking Dead Be Nodal?

The Walking Dead is superbly written, well-voiced and complex. Its characters all have hidden sides. Its sombre music adds a quiet but persistent sense to the horror of its setting. It is beautifully animated, soulful and occasionally very sad. And it uses the fact that it is episodic well, foreshadowing events that might happen and taking account of different branches in the story that you may have chosen.

It’s really great. Until, that is, I play it for a little while.

The Verbal Elegance of Apple and Nintendo [TechCrunch]

My latest column is up on TechCrunch this morning. It talks about the physical verbs of play, how some companies (particularly Apple and Nintendo) are expert at inventing them and how this is the key to understanding their success. 

Here it is.

I'm Now Also On TechCrunch

After a very successful republishing of Zyngapocalypse last month, Eric Eldon and I have decided to try a regular weekend column of gaming insight for TechCrunch. (This is not as a replacement for this blog.) I will also post links to the material from here under the tag TechCrunch, to make it easy for you to find them. 

This week's post is: We Have All Become Parallel Gamers. 

Do You Need Pixie Dust To Market Your Game?

A curious blog post over at Develop maintains that big-console developers and publishers need to be secretive to avoid over-promising features and getting yelled at. Whereas independent developers can apparently be open because indie players are much more forgiving.

Anyone who works in metric-led development will probably see this as flawed reasoning. They come from the school of minimum viable product, customer validation and proof. Hiding your game and ensuring that nobody gets to see it until you are ready to rock? That's just another way of saying you want to spend millions of dollars inflating your ego for no real purpose (in their view).

Are they right? Mostly. 

I Wish Steam Greenlight Was Actually Steamstarter

The first thing that sprang to my mind when I heard of Steam Greenlight was that it would be a Kickstarter for games. However it actually appears to be a voting platform. It asks the players to choose what Steam should publish, with the most-voted games getting the nod. Fine, but it's not going far enough. 

Voting with a yes is different to voting with your wallet. It's easy because it involves no commitment, and so the decision to vote comes naturally. Funding, on the other hand, is a much more deliberate choice. You might idly vote for a game just because its blurb sounds fun, but actually not purchase it. To decide to purchase you'd need more, to believe in the game and its maker. This is what lean startup people call customer validation, and it separates the real marketing stories from the fake ones.

My hope remains that Steam will eventually get into crowdfunding. It would be wildly popular, and Valve has the back end support and delivery mechanism, as well as the pre-qualified audience. What's stopping them really?