What Games Are

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.

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. 

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. 

Ouya? Booyah! [Marketing Stories]

With 26 days to go and $4.4m already raised the Ouya is probably on course to the be the biggest Kickstarter-funded project since the last one. However the reaction from the industry and its press has been generally negative. 

There are some fair assessments like that of Kris Graft, who welcomes disruption to the console space but is unsure if Ouya's the platform for the job. Then there are others who question whether it can be delivered on time, what the cost of manufacture could possibly be for it to "match up to expectations". There's even the comment from Jeff Gerstmann (of Giant Bombcast) that relying on Kickstarter is some sort of sleazy end-around tactic.

I think they're mostly missing the point. Unlike the Phantom, the Gizmondo and the Indrema, the people behind Ouya have proven on day one that there is a very excited market for a hackable console. Ouya taps into the same sentiment that's driving Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, Makies and so forth. It also verifies that there is great interest in an app-store, low power fun-games-on-TV machine as many wistullfy hope the Apple TV would become. In a word: resonance.

Almost nobody in games seems to have grasped that Kickstarter et al aren't charities (sorry Andrew) soliciting a few donations around business-as-usual. Crowdfunding is a direct manifestation of the marketing story, the cause in which people believe and want to see made happen (reason bedamned). The tribe is falling over itself wanting to give its money to make these kinds of project succeed, and yet the industry wants to tell us why they shouldn't. 

This is probably what watching dinosaurs fight while meteors streak overhead looks like. 

On Player Characters and Self Expression [Game Design]

"There is no such thing as a player character" is the kind of tagline that gets me into trouble in some places. So is "the emotional connection between player and character that many game makers believe exists in fact does not". Both contain a powerful subtext, questioning everything from a player's sense of identity to the validity of their experiences. Read the wrong way, they can seem to say that all the emotion you feel in playing games is made up. 

Of course that's not my intent. When I say "there is no such thing as a player character" I don't mean that there is nothing. When I say play occurs through "dolls", likewise. My intent is to reinterpret the emotional experience of play within a game-native context, and so derive useful insight that could apply to all games. In otherwords, the emotions are real but our way of talking about them is broken.

This is an essay to fully explain this concept, to set what's really going on when most players play games in context, about the importance of identity and self expression. (Warning: this article is over 8000 words in length.)

Your Game Is A Graph

Forget everything else for a moment and consider that your game is just a graph of users over time. There is more than one kind of viable graph, but knowing which kind you are aiming for is important. It should affect every strategic or marketing decision that you make. This week's news that Draw Something's user numbers have already dropped by 30% is significant, for example. It makes Zynga's purchase of it look like a lot of money spent based on misunderstanding that game's graph.

Do you know which kind of graph you are creating, and are you making the right choices to improve it? Are you targeting your monetization strategy in the right way, or are you basing it on a faulty understanding of its likely graph?

5 Million Copies Later [Minecraft]

Just over a year ago, I wrote a well-received article about Minecraft, an indie game that few in the ‘proper’ games industry had even heard of that sold a million copies. This game-mixed-with-sculpture garden had broken all the rules. It was hard to get into, was (at the time) selling in a bare alpha state and hadn’t even had the decency to put together a proper website with a nice shop window. Instead, the developer had just thrown up a PayPal button and that was that.

Many at the time said it was lucky, niche, a kind of fringe market reaction. That, yes, a million copies meant something but not necessarily compared to a Zynga. Meanwhile Minecraft has continued to grow. Just this morning, in fact, Jens Bergensten tweeted that the game is but 500 copies away from 5 million sold. Most ‘proper’ games never sell that many.

I’ve always maintained that Minecraft is a symbol of something resonant in the games market, a deep shift in how it works that changes everything. It is yet further proof that we’re not really in the business of packaged goods and experiences any more, but of services, communities and emergent worlds. The question is are you willing to see that, or can you only see the world in terms of ‘proper’ and ‘fluke’?

Noble Failures [Double Fine and Notch]

Not only has Double Fine raised $1.8m from its Kickstarter campaign, Markus ‘Notch’ Persson of Minecraft has suggested that he would pay the $13m required to develop Psychonauts 2. But why?

Psychonauts is the archetypal example of a noble failure, a game that fans believe failed due to publisher incompetence, but which if it had had its fair shake would have done much better. This interpretation is almost always wrong, and leads me to think that a Psychonauts 2 is a mistake.

The Kickstarter Effect

A most interesting piece of news this morning comes from Double Fine. Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert got together and decided to throw up a Kickstarter campaign to fund a point-and-click adventure. It launched 8 hours ago with a target of $400,000 and as of writing 9,249 backers have already contributed $424,393.

What’s also interesting is the spread of backers. Around half have donated the basic $15 pledge, which gets you a copy of the game plus video documentaries. A further 35% have gone for the $30 pledge, which gets you to the video in HD plus a soundtrack. 10% have pledged $100. 3% have pledged $250. 31 people have put up $1000 each, 5 people have put in $5000 a-piece and one intrepid soul has put $10,000 into the project.

In a way, this activity is a more organised version of the pledges that propelled Minecraft to success. It also shows how the dynamics of tribal marketing are becoming ever-more important in game making. Whether for small projects like Puzzle Clubhouse or more significant undertakings like Double Fine’s, fans will spend to support, and spend big. Perhaps in the future all new franchises will launch in this way first.