What Games Are

Theatrics And Charlatans [Marketing Stories]

The game and music industries have two things in common. The traditional primary market for both tends to be younger, and video plays a key role in inspiring those markets. Video is arguably more important for games because the final product is unknowable until you play it. Video makes even more sense in the age of Youtube, filling in a role that magazine previews used to perform. Live broadcasts of conferences are now for everyone. Trailers and tech demos are easy to share and dissect, often in high definition. And finally there are interviews, previews and video podcasts. 

This makes it important for a game maker to have a sense of theatre. To be able to sell a market on the vision of a game, to speak excitedly and inspire is best done with your voice, your sound and your passion. It's amazing how far your message might travel in this way, especially to markets who don't have the inclination to read. It gives you the opportunity to tell your marketing story, but it also brings with it the temptation to act the charlatan. 

Console Aphelion: Are Consoles About to Make a Comeback?

An aphelion is the farthest point from the sun of an object's orbit, when the night is darkest. Here's the relevance to games: Retail gaming is down, consoles are often thought of as old fashioned, even dead. It's all smartphones and freemium Facebook and Steam games now. It's threats from Apple, gamification, speculation over the role of the browser and the PC. It's dead-on-arrival handheld platforms.

And yet something is amiss: Despite the pronouncements of imminent doom, there are a surprising number of consoles out there. Despite the portents for middle-grade publishers, it's only really on console that we see 20m units of a title sold. Despite the seeding of games on many platforms, it's still console that sets the pace and draws the sparkle of E3.

Are they dead, or are we more in the territory of darkest hours and dawns?

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?

Marketing Stories Are Not About You

It's really tough to design a game, prototype it, ship it and fix all of its bugs. It feels like that should be the end of the story and that - if you do all of the above well - rewards should be yours. Execution, not ideas, etc.

And yet in all likelihood the media and the public will react with apathy. The fault is likely not with your coding skills, production values, the quality of your music or your design. It's with your approach. You are telling a story which is all about you.

'Me Me Me', your story cries, look how cool I am. Look how quirky I am. Look how awesome I am. Now pay me. That’s a product story, but it’s not a marketing story. A marketing story is about them, not you.

Equivocitis [Terminology Wars]

Some people argue that every kind of interactive software experience should be called a 'game'. For some, it's a statement of inclusiveness as a way to explain why games are brilliant. For others, it's about being part of a marketing story about games, for visibility. Mostly it's about pushing boundaries and escaping limits, but the thing is: All eventually fall victim to equivocitis.

Like Douglas Adams's joke about Man proving that black equals white (only to be killed at the next zebra crossing), equivocitis is the disease of bending definitions and words to connect the unconnected or gather the un-gatherable. It’s using equivocation to prove a point, inferring single-case exceptions to bridge ideas and ‘prove’ to the reader that the thing you believe might be real is actually so.

We need to inoculate ourselves against this plague because it’s the main reason why the debate over games, their status as an art and their future goes nowhere.

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.

Calling Out The Clones

In the same week, two stories about cloning are making various rounds. One involves Triple Town, a neat puzzle-sim game from Spry Fox, being cloned on the iOS App Store. The other story involves Zynga (predictably) first offering to buy and then copying Tiny Tower. Both have resulted in the original inventors calling out the clone for what it is in public.

Should anything be done?

Why I Don't Like Metro [Microsoft]

(This may seem off topic compared to this blog’s usual focus, but it’s relevant as a discussion of user interfaces, as well as one of next year’s bigger trends that will affect the games industry.)

Metro, to hear the folks from Redmond tell it, is the future. It’s in phones. It’s in the Xbox 360. Pretty soon it will be in PCs and tablets too. It’s a new marketing story about a new paradigm for a new decade.

But (for me at least) something is wrong: Metro leaves me oddly cold. I dislike the metaphor of tiles, and the way that it seems overly concerned with guiding people to content. It looks pretty and yet fiddly. It’s over-reliant on user memory and arcane actions. Its implementation on the Xbox 360 is downright bad.

More than that, it’s telling a different platform story to the one that Microsoft thinks it is, a story of a dumb PC and a more restricted future. At a fundamental level, that bothers me.