Facebook Indie Games

How to Stop Moaning and be a Happy Clonee

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:26:59 -0800

Has your game been cloned by Zynga? Rovio? LOLapps?

Before you call your lawyer or whip up the tide of online vitriol, consider some other strategies.

Position your game as "the game that inspired..."
Tarantino films are notorious for assembling ideas from other films, TV shows, and creating a pop culture collage of obscure music. Along the way he's turned little known movies, tunes, and artists into cult classics. A big name clone of your game can do that too. Most people who have heard of Crush the Castle heard of it as "the game that inspired Angry Birds". And I'd have never heard of the Vaselines if Nirvana hadn't covered several of their songs.
Emphasize the differences, not the similarities.
Your game will do some things differently from the clone. Emphasize the differences, because some people will prefer the way you do it, some people won't. What does Tiny Tower have that Dream Heights doesn't? TELL EVERYONE. If 10% of Zynga players decide they prefer pixel graphics to childish cartoons, Nimblebit gets a big win. But if Nimblebit makes a point of how both games are the same (except one is from a huge brand and has the same graphical style as the most played games in the world), there's no reason for Dream Heights players to explore the alternative.
Clone back.
If the clone is more successful than the original then be honest with yourself: it's probably more popular because there's some things about it that's more appealing. Look carefully at the clone game and decide if there's anything you can copy back to your game. Then do it. Pinkass made a fair point that while Zynga may copy game play innovations from indies, indie devs are now selectively copying their monetization and social play innovations. That's the way this merry go round is going to work.
Take it to a VC.
Zynga will beat Nimblebit because it has lots of capital. Nimblebit has proven they're a hot property that can deliver great games. If they want to take the fight to Zynga, they need a warchest. Or if you want to stay "nimble", invest in releasing more innovative games and maximizing profit between their game's launch and the launch of the inevitable clone.
Cloning is piracy. Ignore it.
Maybe cloning is like piracy: it goes on but doesn't take people away from your game as much as you'd think. It might even act as free advertising. Is it really stealing if you lose nothing but your pride?

Cloners are going to keep on cloning. If you have a really successful indie game then bigger and better capitalized companies will copy it, and copy it well. You need a strategy that can thrive through the cloning experience.

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Your Plain English, 4 Step, 5 Minute Game Marketing Plan

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:57:00 -0800

Just answer these four questions about your players and your game. Write them down somewhere, expand them over time. Keep it simple but take it seriously.

1. How do they find it?

What's going to get your players aware of your game in the first place? Are the techniques you have powerful enough to alert enough potential players about your game?

Most people need to hear about something several times before they try it, so watch out!

2. Why do they try it?

What's going to get somebody who hears about your game to download it to their device, try it out on Kongregate, or give it permission on Facebook? Are there enough reasons to convince somebody who hears about your game that they really should try it out? Is there anything that will make them feel confused or doubtful about it?

3. Why do they stick at it?

After they've tried it, what's going to keep them coming back for a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th play? "It's fun" on its own is not enough. There are millions other fun things people could do instead of revisiting your game. Make sure they're not doing them.

4. Why do they buy it?

What's going to motivate them to switch from Lite to Full, or to make purchases inside your freemium game? How can you make sure there's enough resistance in the free version that they are motivated to buy, but not so much that they stay with free for ever?

Answering these 4 questions is not the most thorough marketing plan in the world. But plenty of game developers don't seem to even answer these simple questions properly. Now you have a head start on them.

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Mark Pinkus "has a reputation for being an a--hole". You read it here first!

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 02:30:28 -0800

Fascinating bio of Mark Pinkus ahead of IPO.

He's not as young as you'd expect. His background isn't really in games (surprise surprise). And he's one hell of a focused individual.

When the Support.com board brought in former Hewlett- Packard Co. (HPQ) executive Radha Basu as the new CEO, Pincus asked engineers to work on weekends so he could give them projects not authorized by Basu, said one of the people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named.

After Support.com, Pincus focused on investing in new startups, including Brightmail Inc., Napster Inc. and Friendster Inc. In 2000, he bought Eric Schmidt’s airplane, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, and devoted more time to his hobby of flying. He also invested in a movie, 2001’s “Kissing Jessica Stein,” which grossed more than $7 million on a $1 million budget, according to the Internet Movie Database.

Pincus made an early bet on the social-networking craze when he started Tribe Networks Inc. in 2003. Though the company was sold to Cisco Systems Inc. in 2007 before gaining wide popularity, it helped established Pincus as a predictor of technology trends, said Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.com Inc.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-11/pincus-faceoff-with-zuckerberg-shows-fearsome-prelude-to-zynga-s-ipo-tech.html

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What if Zynga made games for good? Fast Co.Exist finds out.

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:06:07 -0800

The demographic most addicted to Zynga games is also most likely to support charity. So why not make charitable games? Sojo can't see any good reason why not and is launching WeTopia today.

One important element is using games to make tragic news stories stick around longer. News has to be new, but games can build awareness over a longer period:

Sojo Studios founder Lincoln Brown first became inspired to create a game with a mission after noticing that the media coverage of Haiti’s devastating earthquake died down just a few months after the tragedy. That lack of coverage corresponded with a drop in giving to the cause. Brown thought: "There had to be a way to create better giving experiences."

It all makes a lot of sense: virtual gifts are the perfect match for charity gifts (like the middle class white man my goat got for Christmas last year.)

Link: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678868/wetopia-what-would-happen-if-zynga-made-games-for-good

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Urinal games? OK, but what FBIndie needs is something that will help get the flow going...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:56:10 -0800

BBC News reports new urinal games that you control by aiming for different parts of the bowl.

Unfortunately it doesn't support a multiplayer "who can get highest" competition.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15923438

(It runs Windows 7, of course.)

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Trouble at Farm: Zynga struggles to make players and staff stick around.

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:35:00 -0800

Businessweek reports growing pains at Zynga -- the "thrill is gone" from virtual worlds. Mafia Wars 2 bombed, for example:

Mafia Wars 2 had all the makings of a blockbuster. Its development team, which grew to 80 people, worked for nearly a year on the game, heralded in an October media launch at the company’s new headquarters. (The lobby contains a 1970s Winnebago and a tunnel lit with color-pulsing LED tubes.) The game peaked at more than 2.5 million daily active users in October. Since early November, the virtual organized crime adventure has shed more than 900,000 players, according to research firm AppData.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/in-some-virtual-worlds-the-thrill-is-gone-11232011.html

Which means the thrill of working for company that had a license to print money and was single-handedly buildling the future is also gone. Staff are starting to revolt at the companies vicious hiring and firing practices:

Led by the hard-charging Mr. Pincus, the company operates like a federation of city-states, with autonomous teams for each game, like FarmVille and CityVille. At times, it can be a messy and ruthless war. Employees log long hours, managers relentlessly track progress, and the weak links are demoted or let go.

But that culture, which has been at the root of Zynga’s success, could become a serious liability, warn several former senior employees who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals.

As the discord increases, the situation may jeopardize the company’s ability to retain top talent at a time when Silicon Valley start-ups are fiercely jockeying for the best executives and engineers. It could also hamper deal-making, a critical growth engine for Zynga, which has spent about $119 million on acquisitions in the last two years.

(bonus tidbit: PopCap turned down a buy out from Zynga because of the company's culture, then went on to accept a buy out from EA!)

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/zyngas-tough-culture-risks-a-talent-drain/

FBIndie was set up with the mission to "steal Farmville's thunder one player at a time"...

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Yet another reason to think twice about building your plans on Apple's platform.

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 02:43:00 -0800

“We were notified that the app was removed,” said Paul Thelen, founder of Big Fish, a game publisher in Seattle. The app had been available since Nov. 18, he said. “We’re trying to follow up with Apple to try to figure out what happened.”

Thelen said he was surprised by the move because Big Fish had worked with Apple for several weeks to ensure that it met the requirements for recurring monthly charges made through the App Store, a method most commonly used by magazines and newspaper publishers.

“It was officially approved,” Thelen said. Apple had even seen the app's press release before it went out earlier today, he said.

via bloomberg.com

Apple's removed Big Fish Game Subscriptions from its App Store, even after approving the app and working with Big Fish together for weeks.

"Apple declined to comment." The PRs at Cupertino have that tatooed on their forehead.

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Top Down vs. Bottom Up Forecasting (Bootstrapping a Game Studio)

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:15:41 -0700

Guy Kawasaki states as one of his 11 laws of bootstrapping:

Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: “There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to install our satellite radio systems. That's 1.5 million systems in the first year.” The bottom-up forecast goes like this: “We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.

It's much harder to get a big enough number with bottom up forecasting. You soon find that you need to take action and make changes to drive the numbers up... actions that you wouldn't have bothered with if you'd used a top down approach.

How does this apply to game studios?

In a top down model you start with the whole market -- a very big number -- and work down from there. In a bottom up model you start with yourself, and work up.

If your forecasts start out using assumptions or data like:

There are over 200,000,000 iOS devices in existence.
The top Facebook games attract up to 100,000,000 players.
Minecraft has made more money than Dr Evil would dare ask for

Then you are using top down forecasting. The next thing you always say after this kind of statement is "if we could only capture just 1% of that then...". 1% doesn't sound like much: anybody could do it right? No, they couldn't. Specifically, you couldn't. Not like that.

Bottom up means you start with your situation and capabilities -- pretty small numbers, I bet -- and work upwards to hopefully a decent number. You might look at all the options you have to drive views to your game's web or app store page, and make assumptions about how many visits you can deliver through various channels. And then think about how likely each view is to convert:

We have 2,000 followers on Twitter. Let's aim to get 50% of them to view the game, with 10% of them converting to a sale. That's 100 copies.
Our web site gets 500 views per day. Let's put an ad on each page. We might get 20% of visits to click the ad, and 10% of those to buy. That's 10 copies per day.
If we get featured by Apple we can expect sales of ~500 per day for a week.
We'll assume we get positive reviews on 3 fairly popular review sites. Let's assume 10,000 people read those reviews, and 1% of them go ahead and buy. That's 100 more copies.

As you can see, not happy numbers. But that's the point: this kind of forecasting reminds you that you need to find more ways to publicize your game, and that a big market doesn't guarantee success on its own.

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Good Game, Bad Cop: how HECTOR: Badge of Carnage made a killing

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 06:16:00 -0700

HECTOR: Badge of Carnage is a true iPhone game success story. A first time release that's had great sales and strong reviews, all at a relatively high price.

GAMESBrief has a guest post from the man behind it exploring how such success was achieved.

What are the real lessons here?

1. Aim for a ready-made, passionate, and hungry niche. In Hector's case, graphic adventure fans. Adventure gamers know what they like, and are not afraid to tell each other about it. That's what you need if you want word of mouth marketing.
2. If you can't go IAP, find another way to get more than one sale from each customer. In Hector's case, episodes.
3. Make the tone of your game part of your marketing. Game designers talk about how a game is a "magic circle". If your marketing can bring people into that circle, so much the better.

This is the best guest post Nicholas Lovell has ever found for his GAMESBrief site.

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"Actually, I'm a Game Designer"

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:08:13 -0700

With hats off to @johnwfisherii for twitting this.

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Stick Run: First True Indy Facebook Hit?

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 03:53:47 -0700

Stick Run is a simple Facebook game reminiscent of Canabalt, but with most of the things that make Canabalt brilliant left out: the graphics are basic, there is little atmosphere, and you run at a constant speed rather than getting faster.

It's also delivering 300k+ DAU for its developer, which must be raking in enough money to keep him comfortable.

The game follows many of the rules I set out for Facebook action games last year: high scores, luck, no levels, unlockables. It isn't against the clock but each game is short enough that if anything a quick go of Stick Run will take less time than a game of Bejeweled Blitz. For an indy developer focusing on making the game fit the expectations of the platform is more important than crafting a really polished, deep game.

Source: Play This Thing!

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How to blame games for riots

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:26:43 -0700

Lots of talk in the game industry about how you can't possibly blame games for the recent riots in the UK. Brainless parroting of the general prejudice that you can't blame games for anything (unless they are social games of course, in which case you can blame them for everything).

I wonder...

If the riots had occurred 20 years ago, when I was about to enter my teens, I would have had no clue what to do. I had no practical experience that I could bring to bear in a situation of mass lawlessness, even if I could see from afar that it would be fun to get involved. Confronted with a risky, unknown situation I would have run away.

Games are great ways to teach us. The strongest proponents of games are very keen to tell us what marvelous educational tools they can be. Violent games might not encourage me to be violent, any more than playing Bejeweled encourages me to move bricks around on the floor. But they do help us learn what to do in situations where violence -- or matching 3 coloured blocks -- is called for. If the opportunity for violent fun arises, players of realistic violent games have the advantage over those that don't. Perhaps that gives them the confidence to get stuck in, whereas a non gamer will watch from the sidelines, unsure of what to do even if the tendency and desire for violence is just as strong.

If violent games and movies teach us what to do in lawless situations, they also make these situations seem less risky. They teach us a pattern that violent action is followed by reward, not punishment. Even though we KNOW a game is a simulation we can't stop ourselves matching the pattern from a game ("I drove at 100 MPH in a built up area and nothing bad happened") with the same situation in real life. We are remarkably bad at not learning from "fake" situations: to the point that we find sitcoms with canned laughter funnier even when we know it's canned: we can't stop ourselves finding laughter infectious, even when we know it's fake. Many rioters fell victim to their own sense that they were in a low risk situation, posing for photos with their stolen loot -- as if they were about to claim a new high score for their escapades, not a custodial sentence.

So while games might not encourage us to be violent, for those who want to be violent for other reasons (i.e. because it's fun and you get free stuff) games make a difference:

Train us in how to be violent successfully
Reduce our sense of fear in an unfamiliar situation
Teach us that the consequences of successful looting and violence are usually positive

Did games cause the riots? Of course not. But I bet there were more than a few kids who found it easier to get involved because they'd already had some practice simulations.

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Check Out Money Grubbing Whale Exploiter @NicholasLovell's Free2Play Slideshow

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:56:00 -0700

via gamesbrief.com

If you read Gamesbrief (and you should) then this will be pretty familiar, but it ties everything together nicely.

I wonder if Nicholas over-emphasizes cosmetic and expressive purchasables (status, emotions, feelings), when the research suggests the real money is in consumable resources that let you progress faster.

Of course he might come back and say that "progress" is a form of social status... but I'm not so sure. Once you're addicted to a game progress feels important even if nobody else knows you're playing. (OK so you are paying for feelings when you pay to progress, I guess.)

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Opinion: The Worst Thing Nintendo Could Do is Sell Games on the iOS App Store.

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 03:12:29 -0700

The worst thing Nintendo could do is sell games on the iOS App Store. Once Nintendo IP starts appearing in the App Store, even at a premium price, it will be a short while before Nintendo goes the way of Sega.

The strong attachment players have to the Nintendo IP comes from the IP always being together: Mario and Zelda are both Nintendo and exclusively Nintendo, and various other IP such as Pokemon, Donkey Kong, Metroid and Star Fox are either exclusive to or closely linked with the Nintendo brand. Once they're on an App Store alongside Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and Cut the Rope the uniqueness of the IP will disperse quickly and Nintendo will become just another iPhone game publisher. The Nintendo brand will cease to be a big deal because there will be nothing tying all these different IPs together in the mind of the player.

Consider Nintendo's 3 major income streams:

Hardware sales -- Nintendo is the one console company that doesn't sell loss-leader hardware
Selling its own exclusive IP games
Licensing 3rd party games to run on Nintendo hardware

If Nintendo offers its own-IP games on other platforms then revenue stream 2 will increase, for sure. But they remove one of the major reasons for buying Nintendo hardware, abolishing the platform exclusivity that makes Nintendo's stable of IP so valuable in the first place. Meanwhile as the distribution of Nintendo hardware descreases, so will the value of their platform to 3rd party game publishers.

From both a brand and revenue perspective, launching games on iOS would be suicide.

What, then, are Nintendo's other options? They can either move away from hardware but still try be be a "platform", or they can remain a hardware company as they are now.

If Nintendo is going to go software only then they need to run their own software platform. Everybody needs to know that if you want Mario or Zelda then you have to go to the Nintendo platform, even if that doesn't mean you have to purchase their hardware. It could be that you have to subscribe to the Nintendo club, or visit Nintendo.com and sign up, or whatever else. The point is Nintendo needs to own the platform and find another way besides exclusive hardware to provide a walled garden around the Nintendo experience.

If Nintendo wants to stick with hardware then it needs to figure out what its hardware is for, particularly in portables. Nintendo's position has always been that it's the most fun console maker. The Wii is the perfect example of a console that is fun. Nintendo made a mistake thinking that 3D was a path to more fun in handhelds: it's a gimmick that for many players undermines fun, excludes young kids, gives devoted gamers (the ones who want to play for hours at a time) a headache, and is something that smart phones can replicate quite easily. Bad move.

Nintendo needs to find a new standout hardware feature for its next hand held... just as the Wii controller was a break through for consoles. These are the requirements:

Something that adds a LOT of fun.
Something that can ONLY work on a games machine, and can't be copied on a general purpose mobile device.
Something they can build cheaply.

I don't know what that is, but I'd suggest looking at the control system hardest. The weakest point in iOS and Android games is the limitation of touch controls.

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Freemium Spending: 68% Consumables, 30% Durables, 2% Personalization

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:50:00 -0700

via techcrunch.com

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Franchises Come to Facebook: Sims and Smurfs are Fastest-Growing Facebook Games

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 05:37:00 -0700

Ubisoft and EA lead this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users with The Smurfs & Co. and The Sims Social. Zoo World 2, The Pokerist Club and GnomeTown round out the top five.

via insidesocialgames.com

Existing franchises are starting to figure out how to crack Facebook, with Smurfs and Sims now the fastest growing games on the platform.

This puts some fire under Zynga and similar game publishers. Their IP is weak and generic compared to what's coming.

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Wooga: Social gamers spend on shortcuts, not decoration

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 07:46:00 -0700

Of the eight ways to spend real-world money in Wooga's flagship Monster World, just 0.3 per cent is spent on avatar customisation and only 2.3 per cent goes on cosmetic decorations.
2.8 per cent is spent on territory expansions, 6.3 on instant building shortcuts, 9.6 per cent on buying materials instead of finding or farming them and 10.5 per cent goes on in-game currency.
The two biggest sectors of income, by far, are Magic Wands – which make crops grow instantly – and Woogoo fuel, which powers the factories which make rare items. Both of these sections bring in around a third of Monster World's revenue each.

via gamesindustry.biz

Wooga's army of mainly female players are more keen to spend on time saving items than decorative ones.

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One Hit Wonder Factory Rovio Pushes to $1 BILLION Valuation

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:16:00 -0700

No wonder those Angry Birds have to work hard at keeping those pesky pigs at bay - Rovio Entertainment, the company behind the game is about to get a round of funding that would push the value of the company to over $1 billion.

$1.2 billion in fact.

via zdnet.com

Brave. The business plan is mysterious: one hit game, a bunch of gimmicky products, $1 billion.

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$14.99 Retro-Remake Final Fantasy Tactics Enters Top 20 Grossing iPhone Chart

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:59:00 -0700

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions — A retro game remake appears this week in the form of Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions. Ranked at #16, the $15.99 game is a turn-based strategy title set in the Final Fantasy universe and is the iOS rendition of the 1997, PlayStation classic. Released August 4th, the game is created by veteran Japanese console games developer and publisher, Square Enix.

via insidemobileapps.com

iPhone gamers WILL pay more than 99c for a game that appeals to them, even if it's not cutting edge tech.

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Zombie Farm iPhone Game Adds Social Features, Shoots Up Top Grossing Chart

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 04:53:19 -0700

I'll let Inside Social Games do the talking:

Zombie Farm (Social Update) —Zombie Farm is another older, and popular app that also received a significant update. Currently ranked at #12, the game, which allows users to build a farm and grow their own army of zombies, is now social. Updated July 28th, Zombie Farm lets users connect and play with their friends viaFacebook, email or username. Beyond visiting one another’s farms, players can now send gifts, receive daily rewards, and even engage in a game of “zombie tag” with their friends’ zombies. Monetizing through in-app purchases, Zombie Farm is developed by California-based studio, The Playforge, told us they have more than 20 million players for Zombie Farm.

Adding social features to an already successful game (with enough players for social to make sense) pushed this free to play hit to new heights.

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