Here is what I'm up to:

* Speaking at a roundtable on third party development issues at the Gamesauce event on Monday

* Organizing a partnering event for a provincial interactive agency later in the week (pairing up developers in the social/casual/iPhone sectors with leaders in those sectors)

* Doing business development work for one of my clients (a large consumer electronics company) - scouting out talented games content partners

* Producing a post-show report for a multinational, multiplatform games client

* Taking any meetings that come my way!

Please drop me a line using the contact form on my consulting site if you'd like to get together during Casual Connect!

Minimum Viable Product is a product development and release methodology pioneered by Eric Ries. Its main tenet is the development and early release of only the core of your product, allowing the marketplace to vet and feedback on its pros and cons. While the developer still has a roadmap of their own, risk is mitigated and the product offering more tightly focused when the core is released early and iterated upon often, in response to real customer feedback.

In my presentation, I'll go into why MVP has (or should) become your standard operating procedure for launching new products, especially in the online space. Hope to see you there!

The call for papers for GDC Europe closes this Friday, April 23 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Lectures and panel proposals are being solicited from the international game developer community for all five of this year's GDC Europe conference tracks, which include Business & Management, Game Design, Production, Technology, and Visual Arts.

To read more about the conference topics and the submission guidelines please visit: http://gdceurope.com/conference/c4p/index.html.

The event, taking place Monday through Wednesday August 16-18, 2010 at the Cologne Congress Center East in Cologne, Germany, will once again run alongside gamescom to present the leading game industry event for developers, consumers, publishers and trade professionals. GDC Europe will offer content to address the development community at a central location in the heart of Europe and command the critical mass of the European games sector.

For more information on GDC Europe visit: www.gdceurope.com

Who is going - or considering going - to GDC Europe? I would love to see some of you there! Can't think of a better excuse to go than to submit a panel or lecture... do it!

Adrian

Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship

• Moderator: Andy Moore, Andy Moore Games
• Colin Northway, Fantastic Contraption
• Daniel James, Three Rings
• Sian Yue Tan, Rocketbirds
• William Stallwood, Cipher Prime

Daniel (when introducing himself): Whirled is at $300K revenue, $5M invested. Abject failure.

Andy: How do you define success?

William: Everyone says money. But for us, it was to shift from doing rich media apps to doing games, something we love. It had to be financially feasible. Philly cost of living is lower, so it was a bit easier. Success is to be able to do what we're doing with a year's worth of income in the bank, at least.

Sian: Getting this game out on a platform. That's our end goal. We like Flash and its ease of distribution. Helps out for pitching it to various parties who might be interested. We are fairly new and the game only came out recently, so we are still experimenting with different distribution and selling systems.

Daniel: It's a Maslow's Hierarchy question. Base level is food in our bellies. Beyond that, we would have all made different career choices if we were all motivated by money - aside from those working for Zynga (ooh zinger! as I sit beside a Zynga Studio GM). Farmville has tremendous culture meaning, 70M ppl playing 4 or 5 times a day - that's a tremendous success. For us, our aspirations are not that high. We are not chasing Zynga. We are making FB games and success both economically and opportunity cost wise, if we can get 1M to try a game, that's amazing. If we can get 100-200K of those ppl to stick with it, then that's a level of success we can justify moving forward on. We can be sure that some of those ppl had an enriching experience. I got an email from a girl who had met her boyfriend on Puzzle Pirates and was tickled about that. More and more we'll see life-changing interactions via games.

Colin: I want to do something I like and I don't want a boss. That ties into monetizing on a portal or without a portal, because in some degree the portal sets the rule. They decide what success means, they want a specific game, you lose a lot of control if you start making games to someone else's tune. One of the advantages of going off the beaten path is that you can do what you want without worrying about what others think.

William: We took a different approach. We had some good deals we could have taken from portals. But having our own destination site allowed us to make the experience we wanted to make. But not we can tailor our environment to exactly what we want. We can see everything about our game. We can better gauge the fun level. We wouldn't be able to do that if we were on a portal due to the saving of the information (i.e. who owns the customer data). We got viral very early on - we went down on Thanksgiving with 80K hits, we had no donation or pre-order button - this was a first time experience for us. We missed the train - they loved it, but they found something new and interesting. We put a mailing list sign up there and got 17K addresses, but we missed the monetization window. It's important that when success happens, you're set up to handle it. If you're really going to take a big risk to make a longer title, then make sure you've got the ability to monetize it when it releases. We missed that and I'd hate for others to miss it.

Andy: Attaining critical mass is the key challenge to selling a game. Did you do anything specific to create that?

William: Our first press release went to Jayisgames.com and that was huge traffic. Getting to know all these people and establishing these press contacts was really important. I still write individual emails to our press list rather than blasting our releases. They follow us and evangelize us.

Colin: Press is a good thing when you have your own site vs being on a portal. There's not mixup between you and portal - you get all the benefit. The press says the game is by you, those customers know who you are and of value to you later.

William: Big advantage to having a small company. When our game first came out, we really sold ourselves, not the game. All about our backgrounds and driving people to us because of our personal story. Press people want those personal stories.

Sian: When we rolled out, we had a major deadline, we wanted to hit the IGF deadline and go live that day. We put the final touches on that game and made sure it worked up to that day. In hindsight, we should have press released and made it known as soon as our game was out. But we didn't because we wanted to soft launch and debug. So we took a low key approach so we had time to fix problems. But then the press got a hold of it and we were overwhelmed by the response. It helped a lot once the nominations came out that we were on that list. Now we're discussing getting it onto the distribution networks and selling it as a downloadable.

Andy: Fantastic Contraption had no press releases...

Colin: This is the big difference between going with the portal and doing it yourself. When doing it yourself, your biggest challenge is getting people to your game. Internet is the best... iPhone is more challenging. Content is solved on the internet so you can be found in a myriad of ways. Jayisgames and Stumbleupon sent me a ton of traffic. Fantastic Contraption's main mode of spreading is by making things... so when they save a creation, they can send it to their friends via a simple URL. So they can send that item to all their friends, which drives people back to your site. It's a genuine notion of people sharing what they're creating. Now people are thinking about more creative ways to drive traffic back to their site. When you're doing game design, if you are prototyping something that people want to share, then make sure you expand on that.

Andy: How did you get that early success with Puzzle Pirates?

Daniel: Puzzle Pirates was 2003, 2004, 2005 - so ancient history. Tough to draw current lessons from. Penny Arcade gave us a big bump and we still have paying subs from that, 5 years later. We are systemically crap at marketing our stuff. We are good at making them, bad at marketing them. We have done some rev share agreements with PopCap and Shockwave and Miniclip. Miniclip continues to promote us. Those deals were hard to do and have become harder to do. You'd think it would be easy, but most portals have a lot of sensitivity about the strategic value of keeping their users on their websites. We would happily use someone else's billing platform, but most of them don't have a billing platform that would support Puzzle Pirates subs or microtrans. Even Steam doesn't support free to play.

Andy: Is there anything looking back that you wish went differently? Mistakes?

William: We really didn't have a lot of thoughts about monetization. Looking back, would we have done better if we had wrapped the game and sold the exe? Hard to know. We will be doing our next game through Steam. Problem is when talking to peers about strategies is that they're all different games - tough to draw conclusions. Another thing about a destination site is that you're taking their money and they have no idea who you are. There is a lot you have to do there in terms of customer support. You can go another route and not do the destination site thing. More value in it though.. just a lot more work. Not as simple as just making a game.

Colin: You have to wear an incredible number of hats.

Andy: Choosing between subscription and flat fee can make or break your game. Fantastic Contraption was one of the first games to ask for money. How did you set the price?

Colin: Price point is tough. I don't have an answer for that. I should have probably fiddled more with price points and pay walls. You should definitely take advantage of that when you have control over it. If things don't go perfectly at launch, you can still change things. I should have done more of that on FC, but didn't. I figured it was half as good as World of Goo so I charged half as much.

Sian: Rocketbirds sold for $10. It's somewhere between $5-$15 and that seemed sort of right. We thought it was a good price to pay for our game. We didn't count on the game selling worldwide. $10 US may not work in other territories. Perhaps we are pricing it too cheap? $15 might work better - it's a full blown game, just happens to be in Flash. Once you choose a price you shouldn't mess with it, is my belief.

Daniel: Tons of research on changing prices. People will complain, but it's a very good idea to change prices. Steam drops some prices to $2 over Christmas - they make lots of money. Definitely the evidence is that you should experiment with price. The subtext of what Colin said about pricing is that we pull the number out of our butts. With microtrans in Puzzle Pirates we made up the initial prices due to lack of reference points at the time. Making it up is a reasonable approach, but not testing them is not reasonable. Be diligent about testing your hypotheses. As someone who is inclined to take a product-led approach - execute your genius idea and get rich - but if you are not of this approach, if you would prefer to reach a large audience, make money, have commercial success, then you really want to find out as soon as possible. So test your hypotheses as soon as you can. We didn't do this with Whirled. We had all these hypotheses re: UGC and rev sharing that didn't come true. We could have tested these for an order of magnitude less money than we wound up spending developing it. Lots of ways we could have found out if users would use our tools, but we didn't. Recently we shifted our entire product development to lean development - Eric Ries, minimum viable product (ed note: definitely check this out - amazed how many people still don't know about this). Execute, iterate, and change based on customer feedback.

William: We did come up with an answer to pricing. We took donations a week after launch and made about $10K - but don't get false hope because that's an abnormally high number. We found our price point by looking at the average donation. The way you bracket donations dictates the average donation. We played around with this and raised our average donation ($3) and eventually got people who would on occasion donate $100. At this point, there still was no game. We were discovering what people would pay. Tim Ferriss recommends the pre-order fake sales page to capture user purchase intent before the product is ever developed (ed note: this is another form of MVP - minimum viable product).

Daniel: You can even have a form that lets people state what they would donate, but then cut them off before they give you money and say it's not available just yet.

Andy: SIan, did you do any testing on pricing?

Sian: Um, no I didn't. I pulled it out of my ass.

Andy: What about advertising?

Colin: I've had no luck either selling ads or advertising the game itself. Not really sure why... well I sort of know. It's hard for you if you own your own site to get the dollars... you don't have enough traffic to get decent CPMs and can't attract attention. If you go your own way and don't use a portal, it's a lot more work. It sure is, but there are a lot more advantages. Also sometimes your game may not work on a portal. Some people have tried to make their own portal, but most have failed. Hopefully you are making a game you love. Some people feel like the game they're making chose them, rather than the other way around. If that's the case, you should explore all your options and do testing before you spend a year in development. Be really creative in what you're doing and don't be afraid to try things that others are too afraid to try.

Daniel: I like eating (in reference to needing to earn money). Returning to ads... we've spent lots of ads over the years. The rev share deals are tough to get done but work well. We have not had success with Google but I know people who have. IMVU is the most obvious VW with ubiquitous ads. We've been doing a lot with FB ads lately. We've driven some Puzzle Pirates traffic that way. You can buy by CPC and target demographics... certain age, town, interest, etc. Very powerful ad platform. All done online - no calls to greasy salespeople. We actually tested 6 concepts by doing FB ads and landing pages and looking at click through rates and landing page conversions (pages said "coming soon"). Winning concept from all that blew away all the others by five-fold - so now we are making that game with the confidence that it is the right concept. Start by driving a small amount of traffic to your site each day - say $50 - vary your offering and measure stickiness. You don't need to have a launch event. There's usually an initial spike then a quick trailoff - that's not a sustainable system for a product like ours. It's all about long-term sustainability.

William: Actually monetizing ads on your site is pretty impossible. Building a system to target someone demographically, etc is very tough. Portals have an advantage here. This is what portals do, so if you have an ad-supported game, portals are probably your best bet. You can put the Google ads on your site, but to give you an idea of what you can make we made $1000/month initially when we went viral, but then Google found out we were a game dev and they cut us off. They didn't want that kind of traffic. It wasn't a viable option for us. If you're bigger than a five person company, then go for it.

Daniel: Lots of other ad networks like Mochi - I am surprised it's not more viable.

William: You can get great targeting with Google ads and they actually improve your SEO score so it helps your pagerank. Worth doing - you can run different sets of ads to see if the next year of your life is worth spending on this game.

Andy: If everything works out how you want, what do you think the industry will look like?

Colin: I would love to see FB act like as a massive ramp to get more and more people playing games.

Daniel: FB is interesting, but the thing to compare and contrast is the situation with casual portals and any website that is curated and managed by ppl who believe they understand their audience is a walled garden. When an audience is walled it is a less vibrant and free market than it would be otherwise. What excites me is the trend toward transparent, open markets where players can discover games for themselves via genuine word of mouth. Sometimes on a good day I feel like we're on a fast track toward greater transparency. But on down days I feel like things like some of FB's recent moves make it feel more like a curated platform than a wild west, free market.

Sian: I hope cloud gaming becomes more prevalent. Rocketbirds uses cloud servers to stream the data as quickly as possible. I think it's a great way to play anywhere. I hope people will continue to do that.

William: I want to see the day when Flash games don't get called Flash games anymore. (applause from crowd) I want to see more time spent on the game and less time spent on A/B testing and marketing. I want it to be OK just to have a game and not have it need to be called a Flash game.

Question: Maslow's Hierarchy of needs has self-actualization at its top... despite not having reliability of steady job, has it been worth it?

Colin: Hell yeah. Easily yes. I do think that having an incredibly boring day job is a fantastic way to make a great game.

Daniel: I didn't get paid last year, but it's still worth it.

Sian: Same here. The reward is sharing the game with people.

Question: What is it that you're going to do on this next project that will make it that much more successful?

William: We have a new title coming out soon. We're going with Steam. We're wrapping it so it doesn't look like Flash. We're thinking of using portals as a marketing ploy. We will have a free Flash version of the game to draw people to our site. Premium version sold through our site and Steam.

Colin: I am full speed ahead on using Flash. I want to use social interaction to get people to tell others about the game.

Daniel: We continue to do a lot of things - probably too many things. We have an MMO that will launch this year, possibly on Steam. We are very focused on the distribution opportunities. We are also doing a lot of FB stuff - we are gung-ho on that as a platform, but there a big question marks on FB. Interesting the psychology of download - why will ppl gladly hand over money for something they install vs a browser game?

Sian: We've noticed that performance is always an issue. Our action game is of course reliant on performance. We'd like to lower the minspec and see how low we can go.

Question: Have you thought about taking the experience to mobile? Checking leaderboards while in line at Starbucks, etc? Then go home and play on browser?

Colin: I love the idea. Playing the game online as well as playing a component of it on your phone. We have these advantages that console devs don't have... we have the net and can take full advantage of it. We can push it a lot farther.

Daniel: We've not done a lot of mobile stuff. I am a big iPhone fan, but I am not a fan of the discovery process in the App Store - it's a bit of a crapshoot. If you have a large established web property then you can drive mobile adoption. But we're not quite big enough to do that.

Sian: One of the other benefits from us driving down our minspec is being able to deploy on mobile, console, etc.

William: I think it's awesome, so if someone is going to do it then great. Having one game that you access in different ways from different platorms.

Colin: How about a pirate game where you build ships and fight battles on your iPhone? (directed at Daniel)

Daniel: I'll test that. (snickers)

Question: Which wrapper, William?

William: Nprojector.

Question: What about scalability issues - how did you overcome that?

Sian: We use Amazon's cloud service. Easy to use. Within 2 days you have your game on their server. Our game is about 100mb as a full download and you don't want to be hosting that yourself and have it shut down when you're successful.

Daniel: We use Amazon for all our new stuff as well. Re: how to anticipate traffic volume, ppl usually guess too high. World of Goo was run off of one box for a long time. Puzzle Pirates gets 2000 concurrent players on a single piece of hardware. So you have some breathing room. Unless you're doing some crazy big launch event (which I suggest you don't), then you've got a chance to work out the kinks.

William: If your server goes down its almost a good PR event sometimes. But be prepared to get it back up quickly if you need to. Our server went down and we went to dinner for two hours before coming back to get it online.

• Moderator: Sana Choudray, Traffichoney
• Dan Fiden, Playfish
• David Stewart, Playdom
• Gavin Barrett, Crowdstar
• Mark Skaggs, Zynga

Sana: What are four words that are the keys to successful social games?

Dan: Social - provide a context for meaningful interaction, Relatable, pick themes and mechanics that are understandable and aspirational; Rewarding, emotionally rewarding and socially, reinforcement schedules to keep players engaged, Emergent gameplay, easy to pick up but emergent complexity and depth

David: Appealing- people have to be attracted to the game and able to acquire new users easily, making something that appeals to a casual user is critical; Addictive - once you've acquired user, you need to retain them - important to make a game that makes users come back; Social - that's the secret sauce about Facebook and what makes the space different - need to have users want to share what they're doing with their friends; Fun - if something isn't fun, it won't monetize...

Gavin: Monetizable - if it's not fun, you won't make money out of it; Quality - look at games in the market and know the benchmarks for playability, aesthetic quality, etc

Mark: Mass Market - if it doesn't appeal to enough ppl, it won't be as successful as you want; Invest - ppl need to be excited about investing their time in it, Express - needs to be a game that ppl want to express themselves in; Relationships - allow ppl to create new relationships or nurture existing relationships

Sana: How well do you think some of the casual game devs are doing with moving to Facebook/social games?

Dan: Depends on what you're objectives are, but Bejeweled Blitz is successful. Social mechanic makes the core Bejeweled mechanic even more fun than it used to be. So if that's your basis for success, they've been successful. As a player, I enjoy it. It's created meaningful social interactions for me.

Gavin: Lot of ppl knock on your door with IP and think they can create a great social game and make lots of money. To date, there's been limited use of existing brands in the space. Bejeweled is probably the best example.

Sana: Why do you think those casual game companies don't experience the same success on FB?

Mark: Guild of Heroes was a Diablo 2 clone - I joined the company as it was finishing up. The question was how is it social - and it wasn't. The team thinking was that they'd add the social afterward. And it doesn't work. Needs to built from ground up.

David: I agree. So many examples of that. Lots of examples of games on FB that would be big if they weren't on FB... FB games need to be social from the ground up. Also, lots of the users in the social gaming space are REALLY casual, so Bejeweled did it right with short play sessions, accessibility. Lastly, understanding all the API tie-ins on each platform - i.e. you should know what a user-to-user wall feed is vs a general feed is. Really important to understand these details.

David: Notifications have gone away. FB is moving away from one-to-many notifications and toward more deliberate, one-to-one notifications. User to User, App to User.

Dan: This move by FB has not had an effect on our games so far - it's been net neutral. If you're giving users a meaningful experience, they will go the distance to communicate. Cutting out the spammy communications has not affected us.

Gavin: I think this is a pretty profound change. Makes it increasingly difficult for other companies to reach the same success we have. Will be very difficult for other companies to get where we have. Changes way you're going to distribute your game. For business people, it's something they need to look at closely to see how they're going to grow their game. You're going to have to spend more money to launch something.

Sana: What is the quality that a Crowdstar or another company would look for to choose to cross-promote, etc.

Dan: What it isn't is amazing incredibly high polish art or sound. It's a polished game experience... getting into game easily and understanding objectives. Production values are part of it, but it's easy to mispend focus on things that aren't super important to the end consumer. Make sure that you're thinking about your end user.

David: Things we look for in our own games are what we look for in others. We're interested in partnerships and acquisitions. With new environment, it's becoming harder and harder to expect to plop something into FB and experience explosive viral growth.

Mark: The platform and industry is always going to change. You will always need to evolve. Make sure your game is a game that ppl will want to come back to play. We can send players your way, but if you can't keep them it's pointless.

Sana: Are Zynga and Playfish looking for developer partnerships?

Dan: Yes.

Mark: We tend to acquire teams.

Gavin: Part of my job is to find outsource partners in Europe and there wasn't any. If you can do it right in this space, there are great opps for partner services or be acquired.

Sana: What should we expect a year from now?

Dan: Over the next 12 months it will get harder... there will be consolidation. More branded content over the next 12-24 months.

David: Production values and player expectations will go up. Not as easy for one person's 6-week game to take off. Cost of entry will increase.

Gavin: Interested to see how EA gets involved with Playfish. Have you made an announcement about Madden (to Dan)?

Dan: No.

Gavin: Oops. I read it on the internet.

Dan: Then it's probably true.

Mark: Technical and gameplay production value arms race will continue. But with a new vector: social: Everyone will try to one up each other there. NYT was talking about FB Connect and how everyone wants to take their experience with them outside of the ecosystem.

Sana: What are the key metrics you look at for your games? We all know DAU, ARPU, etc.

Mark: We look at DAU, MAUs, retention. We try to get retention above 30%. If you have a game where 5 out of 10 ppl come back every day, then you have a good game.

Gavin: Revenue per DAU is a great one too. Games team should be looking every day at actions that can drive revenue and retention.

Sana: Most of you have two currencies, right?

David: We have a couple PHDs helpding to manage our economies.

Gavin: I heard one of the Playfish guys saying they deal with a billion pieces of data a day(?).

Mark: Zynga collects 5TB of data per day and we have a team that turns that into reports we can track.

David: Very different from any other industry I've seen. I came from Google and YouTube and thought those were data driven companies, but this is way beyond that. You can make valuable decisions within minutes because everyone is logged in all the time and the quality of the info is so much higher than worrying about cookies, etc.

Question: Do we have benchmarks or targets for revenues for active users?

Gavin: I direct you to Justin Smith - Google him - he has a lot of good benchmarks.

David: How leaky is your bucket... retention is big for us. Need to look at how the revenue piece fits into virality and retention.

Mark: Make sure expenses don't exceed revenues... user acquisition costs don't exceed lifetime revenue per player, etc.

Sana: What are the different user acquisition methods?

Mark: Ads, fan pages, forums, podcasts, recommendations from friends (these work best). Word of mouth always works best.

David: Totally agree with that. As we're all growing, cross promotion is really important. Not just friends to friends or word of mouth, but if you can build up a trusted brand, then people want to try the next game you put out.

Sana: Is community marketing important to you guys?

Gavin: Support of your community and the interaction with them is the most important thing you can do. They need to feel that you're there and listening. You need to find a way to feed what you're getting from your community back into the game.

David: We have different levels of community marketing. We have fan pages, blogs for more hardcore users, and forums are the deepest - for a smaller number of really dedicated users.

Dan: Managing your community is really curating your space. All of it goes toward getting players to the point where they will promote your game for you.

Question: What do you guys think of the FB currency platform?

Gavin: Positive thing. It's a trusted brand. The amount of ppl who actually make purchases in our games is quite low. We want to build up that number. So if FB currency increases that number, then great. If it gets more ppl used to spending money on FB, awesome.

David: We've been working with FB a lot as well and it is already showing signs of reducing friction in payment, so it's promising. One of the challenges all devs are working on is trying to figure out how to fit it into the game while having the same freedom we did in the past (in terms of seeding premium currency, for example).

Mark: My sense is FB is really working hard to take care of their ecosystem. If you have your own currency, you can give it away. But with someone else's you can't. However it plays out, I think FB will get it right as they know the value of developers.

Question: What is the minimum bar for success?

Mark: 5M DAU

David: Don't have one.

Dan: It varies. Metrics are important, but we also want to accomplish something creatively.

Question: If games come out today, what chance for success do they have?

David: If you're really sure you have a hit, do you have the resources or partnerships in place to make it a success.

Gavin: The ladder is going away... getting harder to succeed.

Mark: If you copy, you're doing what everyone has done before. Innovate and you might have a chance to be successful.

Question: Returns for investors... do you think you are providing good returns?

YES ALL AROUND, of course.

Question: Aren't these games just sophisticated slot machines?

Mark: Farmville brings families together. Moms play with their 4 year olds, etc.

Sana: Are a lot of people opting in to giving you their emails on FB?

Dan: Yes... we're just starting to use it, but if you have a positive relationship with your end user, then it can be great.

David: We're getting high engagement. It's been very successful.

Mark: Email, used right, opens new possibilities for interacting with players. We don't have to worry about feed phrasing or whether Facebook likes it - you can communicate directly with players.

Sana: What is the ARPU across all your games.

NO ONE ANSWERS, of course.

Mark: Look it up on the web - lots of what's out there is accurate.

Sana: Retention rates across games, what are they?

Gavin: Available on the web, but 30% is a good benchmark.

David: We track 1-day, 2-day, 3-day, 7-day retention rates.

Sana: Percentage of time spend on new IP versus optimizing old?

David: Playdom was 60 ppl when I joined in July, but now we're 300. So we're really focused on new games now.

Gavin: It's all about innovation.

Mark: I spend 100% of my time on new IP. I was trying to calculate this across Zynga and I suspect it's about 30% spend on new IP.

Dan: Same at Playfish. Teams grow at launch, of course.

Mark: Real work starts after launch. Can't discount the innovation that happens after launch.

David: Our teams grow when a game goes live - we don't pull away from it.

In the past, I've attended GDC as a speaker, delivering a presentation on Free-To-Play games to 400 attendees, or as press, covering the conference for this blog.

But most often I attend GDC and other conferences as a developer and game consultant, meeting up with clients of the past, present and future. If you are looking for design, production or strategy consultation to get a game-related product to market - and you're attending GDC - contact me and we'll setup a time to meet.

I'm looking forward to making new acquaintances and reconnecting with my colleagues from gaming hubs throughout the world.

See you at GDC,

Adrian

Designing for a casual MMO.

• Differences in designing a casual MMO
• Play sessions are shorter - as short as 5 mins
• Competition - lots of distractions... new games for this group every single day
• Skill set and skill level - way different from traditional players... don't spend hours playing games like we do

Change the way you think

• Keep the focus on the players
• Think outside the box
• Don't base everything on what you like or prefer
• Don't rely on your own judgment over UX testing
• Question the "way things have to be"
• Understand your audience well enough that you can speak your audience's voice. I am speaking as the player here, not what I think - what I think doesn't matter.

Theory, Practice, Results

• Design team would have been better off if we had this process from the beginning.
• Drivers and passengers - analogy of a tour bus experience. You have a captive audience that you want to entertain.
• Designers are drivers. We are planning where people go. Plan the route, equip bus, pick stops and sights, determnine cost, provide entertainment along the way.
• Passenger is in control. It's his trip, money and time. He can get out of the car anytime he wants. He can blog about how your trip sucks. He can never ride with you again. Enough unhappy players will shut you donw.

Focus on passengers:

• Identify who the passengers are
• Set guideposts - how do I know I'm on track
• Look at competing tours
• Clear the path - get rid of your assumptions
• Design the passenger's experience - control exp start to finish
• Head out on open road

Identify the passengers

• Who are we trying to attract and entertain
• How do they spend money: Pre-planned vs impulse (boxed vs online), small increments vs large purchases - determines pricing bundles, retail vs download - assumption is retail is higher value... people may buy online because they saw it in store, convenience vs function vs vanity (maple story has nailed this distinction)
• What are they interested in?
• What are they watching on TV?
• Understand your passengers
• Don't base decisions on yourself or your own family
• No matter how normal or typical you feel, you probably aren't - we like BSG, general populace likes Desperate Housewives

How to get info

• Zandl Group Hotlists
• Iconoculture
• Others

Identify the passengers

• Free Realms player is boys and girls equally
• 10-15 years old
• Secondary is casual players and parents and family
• Example of Zandl Hotlist - provides demographic insight into what they are doing, wearing, etc.
• Pets in Free Realms can wear outfits. For every bionic dog there is a princess cat. Enough options and people feel welcome in your game.

Set Guideposts

• Short set of goals - guideposts or landmarks. Team goals.
• Check them with every decision you make
• Include development goals, when it's good for players - ex need really robust tools for designers to build content - good for players... equals lots of new content for players. Making content for impulsive players could be key for you.

Free Realms Guideposts

• Virtual world for teens, tweens, and casual players
• Support four play styles: Adventure, mini-games, simulation gameplay (housing, pets), Socialization
• Quick to start - get into game very quickly as first time and returning user
• Easy to understand
• Rewarding to play - a lot of online games have you working toward longer term goal
• Never assumes based on age or gender - won't assume your girl character will start as a cook... can alienate ppl and close off market

Free Realms Key Design Decision

• Create a game with a wide variety of activities that are all optional but all equally rewarding
• Players do what they want to do and feel like they are playing a game made just for them

Free Realms Interaction Reward Cycle

1. Player Need (Wealth, relationship, personal skill, etc)
2. Interaction (NPC, object, Mini-game, etc)
3. Reward (money, friendship, leaderboard, pet level up, etc)

Assess competing tours

• Tours that explore similar landscapes in terms of demographics
• Free Realms competing tours are: Runescape, Maple Story, Habbo, etc
• Other games: EQ, WoW, Animal Crossing, Nintendogs, WCIII, DotA, Viva Pinata, The Sims, Gears of War, Cooking Mama, Puzzle Quest, Gears of War (reload mechanic will show up as a part of housing)
• Inspiration comes from anywhere

Clear the Path

• Discard assumptions you may have about how to make game your making
• Look at assumptions from passengers POV
• Analyze each feature
• Challenge every assumption
• "In writing you must kill your darlings" - William Faulkner

Flow Chart

• Is it fun?
• No? Is it essential? - No, Get Rid of it; Yes, Improve it!

Shot of Disneyland theme park map - they are the best at controlling experience. Lot to learn from that.

Design the Passenger's Experience

• We use SCRUM on Free Realms
• Traditonal view of user story: written desc used for planning, conversations about the story, etc
• Should be written from player perspective ("don't want to run out of inventory space")
• User stories as the foundation
• Orient design docs toward user stories... inventory design doc could start with user story
• USer stories + solutions + implementation details + game design
• Design the passengers experience

Servers

• Assumption: a character is locked to a server
• Sucks for my friends on different server - sucks when server is down
• USer story: want to play with friends on diff servers
• User story: want to play when server is down
• Other games, Runescape, Wizard101
• Solution: Play on any server, any time
• Hindsight: should have included server transfer while in-game before launch
• All languages + all servers = new problems (great from player perspective... but lots of delay in translation)
• Need server recommendation logic - take server select out of experience... to do that you need a system that recommends a server based on where their friends already are
• Jumping to a friend may mean a long download - if you stream your content... if you haven't been to your friend's part of the world, you will spend time waiting for it

Classes

• Assumption: a character is locked into a class at character create
• Problem: I can't understand the choice before  play
• User stories: As a player, I don't want to make a long term choice before I play
• User story: As a player, I want to try different classes
• Solution: jobs
• Hindsight: too many choices, all at once
• Making a job cool = lots of investment in that job = expectation that subsequent jobs will be that robust
• Putting job choice up front in new player experience
• Create a stronger link between fave jobs and identity
• Gleam and Gloam are really important to give a sense of purpose

Inventory

• Assumption: have to limit inventory space... buy additional space.. inventory tetris is good
• Problem: I have to decide what to throw away, I have to spend money to carry things I earned
• User story: don't want to have to choose to destroy something to pick up something else
• Other games: none
• Solution: unlimited inventory
• Going to buy items in Free Realms is like going to target - shields, swords, but also housewares and automotive
• Hindsight: unlimited inventory + no delete? ooops; single char is 2mb and growing, before housing... a lot to xfer to and from client;
• Implementing a super high inventory limit... as well as a way for players to sort inventory and give players a closet in their house where they can store inventory items

The Fun

• Assumptions: MMOs are about systems and rewards and not gameplay
• Problem: audience expects moment to moment fun, so I expect more polish
• User story: want to have fun ACTUALLY playing your game; all play styles need to be available to me
• Other games: puzzle pirates, puzzle quest, etc
• Solution: emphasize interaction and reward equally; For each min--game target a specific gender and age with the mechanics... mining (boys), harvesting (girls)
• Solution: have a sense of humour... anything is more fun if it's funny
• Hindsight: Game developers are not normal... what we thought was fun was not; inveting more in 2D games, improving 3d games so they are easier to play, improving camera, exploration should have been optional - will change it to be a playstyle not mandatory, activities need to be clearly marked;
• All play styles and mini-games need reward and progression... our tower defense game had no rewards and wasn't being played... once we added rewards it went through the roof
• Players want to make their own fun. Parties are very popular in Free Realms.  Always a party going on. Need to give players tools to make their own fun and just hang out.

Stats

• Assumption: MMOs have to have stats.
• Problem: how do I choose between items with lots of confusing stats?
• Problem: I don't want to have to use a calcuator
• User story: I want to understand my choices without having to learn these stats
• Solutions: Only derived result stats - all explicit about what they do for you, very few stats, shard system
• Hindsight: Stick to only derived stats, but add more depth; find ways to better separate appearance from stats, enhance "walking leaderboard" variables (need to look at someone and know what they've done)
• Players who walk around in banana or hotdog suit get challenged to more duels.

Look & Feel

• Assumption: high fantasy is cool
• Problem: fantasy is not cool, it is for nerds; embarassed to talk about; I want a player that looks like me
• Free Realms has to appeal to the guy who beats up the kid who plays WoW
• Smedley's kid decided he wasn't going to talk about WoW anymore at school because he wanted to get dates
• User story: As a player, I want the choice to look cool and wear real clothing that looks cool to my friends -
• Solution: FR is a mix of real world and fantasy and player can look the way they want to look
• Matrix: Costume, Freestyle vs Combat, Non-combat
• Critical shift to go from fantasy to real
• Hindsight: Need more clothing choices in character create for girls; need more bad ass appearances for boys; need more elaborate outfits for high character progression

Progression

• Assumption: characters level up only by playing combat
• Problem: game looks cool, but I don't want to fight; things I like (crafting) aren't important enough to level up on
• User story: As a player, I want to level up for what I do - don't tell me what I like isn't important)
• Solution: level up for multiple things
• Hindsight: Need more meaningful items; need more robust and accurate leaderboards, achievements will be really significant in progression when they come online in a week; need more consistency across jobs
• Figuring out how a postman and a ninja level up in a consistent way was designer hell. If you are considering a game that has multiple play styles that are equally rewarded, think of it a lot up front otherwise your game will feel like a carnival.

Sessions

• Assumption: Should take many hours to get the best rewards in the game
• Problem: I like this game, but I don't get anywhere playing it 2 hours a week; Why won't you let me spend more money on your game?
• User stories: Don't want to commit all my time to one game; want to decide whether or not I want to buy game changing items
• Solution: Gameplay is in 15 min chunks, interactions give frequent rewards; game-changing items avail in store - add exp, etc
• Hindsight: we shipped the game too easy... will make combat harder; will change game to make sure best gear is dropped not bought, putting more limited time items on marketplace, adding a wheel of prizes... helps short sessions

The Open Road

• How do you know if any of your ideas will work? You don't. Get to the point where you can try it on people outside of your live audience... really key.

Solutions lead to new problems

• How do leaderboards work if you char is not linked to a server?
• How do you set difficulty when your char progression is so shallow? There will be more diff between level 10 and 20 character in the future.
• How do you deal with hackers when everyone can create a free account? Player char dressed as referee. All our C/S agents wear this outfit when are in game - only our GMs can wear these. Players know they can trust this person. Guy in police outfit is the enforcer... you know you are going to get hit with a ban stick - players will stop doing something when they see him. Only 1 enforcer per server - they are a real person the GM needs to "check out"
• How do you help players understand unlimited inventory.
• How do you keep stats light and meaningful? Majority of our audience is level 5.
• How do you satisfy casual and dedicated players?
• How do you balance earning coins as postman vs pet trainer, etc? Best you can do is to try to do things in a way that doesn't alienate people. Boots for postman were way overpowered. Designers nerfed it, we patched it, players freaked out. We unnerfed it - let the 100 players who had the boots keep them, but made new boots fixed.

Design Cycle

• Identify passengers: who is actually playing? Are the ppl we wanted to play, playing? Do we need to retarget?
• Set guideposts: What now is important to players? What are they asking for?
• Competing tours: Never stop looking. After we released, several competitors changed web flows. No we are changing.
• Clear Path: What of our assumptions were wrong.
• Design passengers experience: 3 levels of data: Stats (how many ppl play Postman), Trend (are more people playing postman now), Correlation data (most important: how many ppl who play postman now but didn't before are now buying items?)

Parting thoughts

• Stay focused on goals
• Find creative solutions
• Understand that each solution creates new probs
• Play game in your head and look for edge cases (what happens if bought a job but my membership lapsed and I tried to interact with something)
• Evaluate each decision against your guideposts
• Design every system to be as flexible as you can - easy to make changes without people noticing
• Be willing to take risks - but be willing to cull it early if it looks like it will fail
• Be willing to kill your darlings
• Stay in touch with your passengers
• Keep focus testing! Ends guesswork and arguments.

As a developer, what is your bias/approach when you're pitching your own products vs opportunity to do a publisher's IP?

Feargus: Pubs are more willing to take risks when there is money. When we are looking at what we will pitch, we consider the climate - i.e. if publishers are willing to take risks. Normally we put together 2-3 pitches, hand them over, then we get the word on what they would really like us to work on (i.e. a license). We will often look at a publisher's catalog to see what they have - sometimes what they offer doesn't make sense for the platform or genre - we try to figure out what would a license that works for us look like as a game. That's where we focus our efforts. If we pitch a license they already have and it blends with what we do, then you've gotten past step 1.

Jean Marcel: Different pubs have different priorities. Some are heavily driven by their slate. For me it's all a question of quality. It's all about what a developer can deliver. Sometime the brand you are working with will define the boundaries and you'll ask the dev to stay within those boundaries. But sometimes you want the dev to bring their own ideas and see how they fit within your brand. Can be dangerous for a creative org to take directly what the publisher wants and not bring their own creativity.

Question for Leo: You've worked on titles like Matrix Online and Star Wars Old Republic. What are challenges of producing online vs standalone?

Leo: Couple challenges... from a user's perspective, you have a bunch of passionate people. When you are making a single player game that is more scripted you can have a better understanding of how they will interact with your IP. In an MMO, users may find a bunch of different areas fun - combat, harvesting, etc. Working on an online game, you have to make sure that all parts of the IP are well thought out so that any way a person comes at the experience is unique and well done.

Feargus: The licenses we've worked with a lot (D&D, Star Trek, LOTR), when you are making a big game with a license you are usually expanding the license. So we need to ask lots of questions... when we wanted to use some iconic characters from within D&D, we had to ask what the IP holder cared about - can we change colours, etc. We didn't wait for them to tell us. Can we blow this city up or can't we? Need to bring the question of boundaries up ASAP. We did a little design work, but not much, just to find out these boundaries up front with tons of questions.

Jean Marcel: Great point. Most of the company may be risk-averse, but the role of the developer is to push the boundaries, otherwise you will end up with a copycat product and no one will be happy in the end.

Feargus - do you feel more or less secure as a developer because it is based on an IP or not?
Feargus: I would feel much more secure about working on a licensed property in times like this or not. From time to time, we're living in the minutiae of making a game and the publisher is looking at ROI. It is easier for non-gamers to understand a game if it is a license than if it is not. Licenses are something we pursue more in these economic times because the org would understand the product more due to license.

Jean Marcel: I understand this point of view. Right now movie license games have bad perception among consumers. Sometimes they don't make sense to greenlight. That's why I go back to quality. When you have an IP holder who has a big vault of IP, it is good for the developer to come back to the publisher with what they would like to do - regardless of whether there is an upcoming movie tied to it. More secure for developer because the amount of promotion that needs to get done for this type of product is less than original IP.

Arkham Asylum doing incredibly well without being released with a movie. Dev times getting longer and longer. What's your POV on this approach on not tying a game to a movie launch?

Feargus: That's interesting. Talking to my neighbour... he knew WoW and the name of the company I worked for. And he didn't dress like a gamer. Acceptance of games as a whole by everyone. Led to an understanding that games are a part of a brand as a whole. Now when we are approached for a movie game it's no longer a 6 or 9 month dev schedule, now they are calling 24 and 36 months out. Great to see that there is an acknowledgement of how making a great game can push the whole brand. Also seen a lot lately that people are open to not following the plot of the movie. We can now add in more creativity. Great business decision too.

Leo: Lot of things come into play when considering this issue. What does a coordinated entertainment launch due in terms of a multiplier effect. Does that drive concurrent movie/game releases. How does this corrolate to kids games? Do you have to make a 95% game? Or is it more important to hit at the same time as the big movie? My experience is that it's a balancing act between associating a game with a movie release or delivering a well reviewed adult-oriented product.

Jean Marcel: I agree. Let's take the big movies - $50-100M marketing investment. If you position yourself very differently from the movie, your game may be lost in translation. But it's important to understand the world, but not re-tell the same movie they just saw. Need to have a deep dive on how we build the product from a dev perspective and how we can create more synergies with movie and its director, right from the beginning. If there is a better synergy from scratch - the game guys have good dialog with movie director - then movie director can get cool weapons in film, etc. But in the past, we were struggling with the lead time. Movie script takes lots of time. For developer, takes a long time to create tech and pipeline. But if we can match the 2 schedules together, then the result all around is better.

Do you think the market is more fickle? As dev times have become longer, how do you forecast status of an IP that far out?

Jean Marcel: No risk, no business. We are trying to protect the companies with a different level of risk. What is the trend of this property - invest early enough to capitalize on that. But there is a level of uncertainty still. Market has changed dramatically lately. Dev community is trying to change processes but there are some timeframes which cannot be compressed. It will always be an issue we have to fight with. But if we have a great product, I still believe the product will find its consumer at the end. Biggest mismatch can be platform - if there is a big change there, that can be the biggest error.

I was surprised by Lego Stars' success. Two disparate brands, now they've defined their own genre. Do you guys have an example of surprising brands in games?

Feargus: We're going through all the failures in our head... Superman, Ironman, etc. Telling... there are so few of these licenses that have done well.

Jean Marcel: That's interesting, because Lego was not in great shape when developer went in with that license. They had to rejuvenate the brand. The quality of the product with drop in drop out play, etc elevated it. Kingdom Hearts is another example - taking a lot of characters and putting them in a world no one expect. Wound up a good matchup.

Eugene: Many industry types were surprised Kingdom Hearts succeeded... throwing all those IPs together usually regarded as crazy.

With a Star Wars Lego title, is that an example of a game contributing to the brand?

Jean Marcel: Definitely. Where Lego was before and the tremendous job they did extending that brand to a different medium. Now around the world you see Lego stores, attractions, etc.

Leo: The game reinforced both. I can see through my kids how they react to these things. They hadn't watch Star Wars but only wanted to after playing these games. By bringing those two things together, it helped expand and solidify the love of Star Wars in another generation.

Jean Marcel: Interesting to devs and pubs is that it is a broad offering - dads playing with their kids - and I know a lot of people at my age who are playing those games. Key challenges for dev community to emulate that success. How do we touch the massive audience rather than just the core. How do we create these titles that create a fissure in the business to expand it.

Eugene: Developer was incredibly passionate about both IPs. Rock Band Beatles was driven by Harmonix - it is now part of big worldwide event - the re-release of these albums - and now this dev is part of a huge event. Says a lot about games' relevancy. The reverse of that for developers is that devs can get so passionate about the IP, but they may not want to work with IP holder.

Feargus: We all have the things we love. You get a chance to make a game about it and the opportunity is weird. When I got to be in charge of D&D games, it was bizarre. My part in it was great opportunity. It can jade your vision in terms of what is important from a business perspective. Now with the big budgets if you are too enamored you are at risk of making the wrong decision. On the flip side, it can be a positive if you are that into it. Can be a good decision, but it's a risky decision. As a developer we've tried to focus on the business so we can stay in business. By bringing yourself back and making the judgment call about ROI versus passion... you are better off. I.e. our $9500 per man month vs the $11K we're getting paid - we can't put any extra man months into it.

Leo: You can't let your passion drive insanity and feature creep. Have to be cognizant of your passion driving you away from business necessities. From a marketing perspective, I can be passionate about something but I too have to be conscious that my approach may not be the right one for introducing the product to the consumer. Take it back to business perspective so you don't go crazy.

Q&A

With iPhone and webplatforms and quick turnaround, how does that affect relationships with IP holders, etc?

Feargus: It will probably go back to overall goal of using the license. iPhone games can get done quickly, but the goal may not be met. It may not be synergistic with release of a movie - an iPhone game can have SOME impact, but probably not big enough to build on what's happening with the movie. No magazine covers unless it's a AAA game.

Jean Marcel: All those approaches are always good for the business. Especially as you can plant more seeds and see what you get out of it. But the massive hype is only going to come from something big. There is probably a mix of products to do, but ultimately you have to hit the date with a big product. A small product won't help you. Perhaps a smaller product can serve as a focus test for a larger one.

Eugene: Very difficult to market mobile and web games - they are more viral. Games usually try to ride on coattails of big movie releases. Breakout iPhone and web games may be helped by being tied into movie releases.

How has dealing with license holders changed over time? What is it like for a developer to go out there approaching them now?

Feargus: I can speak to my experience. Very dependent on the people you are working with at the licensor. We've worked with D&D... from 95 until just recently. When you're dealing with a licensing group that is incentivized to work with you, it's more likely to be successful. At one point the licensing $ went to Wizard of the Coast, but then at one point it did not. When that happened the relationship changed. Might be a question to ask at the outset. We always look at it as "it's their license, not yours" and when you treat it that way, you get on their side. When we ran into trouble with Wizards of the Coast, we'd fly up there to help us stay in touch and keep it together. As to how I think it is now, I think there's more of an understanding about games. But it really depends on who you're working with at the licensor.

Jean Marcel: Licensor really understands the value of their IP or brand. So they are much more careful about doing poor products... need to product their franchises and be careful in selecting their partner. We are still fighting with the perception in our business - especially related to movie games - that it is enough to slap the image on the front of the box and the game can be poor.

Often the publishers and licensors are people who don't know games. Why not hire someone who has dev experience? Are you seeing a change in that?

Eugene: 15 years ago you were working with licensing, not interactive groups.

Leo: Just quick, 10 years ago, what would happen is companies would recognize they don't know games so they'd find one person in the department who was a game player. That was detrimental to process. Now most IP holders have departments of people with real experience.

Feargus: You are still going to run into licensor reps that do not understand games. I also was that guy once - who didn't know anything. I was telling people how to make games (when I shouldn't have). All you can do is help them understand how games are made and don't talk down to them. Ultimately they are going to believe or not believe you.

Jean Marcel: Question of skills and talent among guys on licensing front. They should recognize who they need to bring in and what they don't know. If they don't, then it's probably the beginning of a bad relationship. As soon as you touch the creative side, everyone wants to be involved. This can be a very slippery road. This is the role of the developer that they need to make sure the creative stays with the people who know what they're doing. The role of the licensor is to translate the brand. People need to stick with their responsibilities.

As media companies come into business (again), how are these companies newly approaching their re-entry into gaming business?

Jean Marcel: Culture, Talent, Processes. Culture because game space has a different culture than toy space or movie space. So you need to deal with that and make sure the two can work together. Talent because you need right skills and people to do the job. Processes because you need the right tools to get things done. Companies that are born and raised in games - i.e. 25 years in the business - have this as their DNA.

What advantages do media companies have over EA, Activision, etc?

Feargus: Deep pockets and diversified businesses.

• Gaia been around for 5 years
• 10M uniques/month
• #1 time spent in social media - avg 51 mins/visit
• Gaia feels like a mix of a socnet and an MMO like WoW
• Dig into user experience or talk to ppl using it and they describe it differently - feels like 21st century version of the mall or downtown or summer camp
• Place you go to hang out with friends and do a dozen different activities

At this point, Craig is talking and flipping through slides SO fast that I'm not sure he wants anyone to really take this stuff in (later confirmed as he says slides won't be avail online - it's a management slide deck). So I stopped taking notes for this segment.

ZOMG producer comes up

Be Both Accessible and Engaging

• Need to be accessible and engaging
• Gaia started out engaging, but lost accessibility for a while - fixed it with better UI and user analysis
• But we do "engaged" with authority - largely due to our 20 ring circus, retention is very high
• Another positive example: Facebook - You lose hours without realizing, there's always one more thing to do, lots of flavours for lots of different user types

Three Key Lesssons

• Make it fun
• Get users to buy
• Make it easy to buy

MAKING IT FUN

Identify your Audience, then own it

• You can't satisfy everyone, so design features to satisfy a niche
• Understand your niche - identify key features by talking to fans; get the core right before taking on more tasks
• Good things happen when you nail the niche - great reputation, word of mouth increases, once you have more users you can get diverse
• Gaia example: started as anime lovers forum catering to artists, forums to talk about it all, bragged to others and it grew
• Gaia focus has expanded over 5 years, adding features slowly - went to housing (ppl who do housing aren't necessarily the ppl who do the dress up doll stuff - diversifying), rally cars
• Also provide custom mini-games, attract the most casual of gamers, they have social aspects within them allowing chat, etc
• Eventually expanded to a full-fledged MMO, ZOMG (video doesn't play - Craig working on bringing it up)

Keep your Audience Involved

• Internal marketing for both present and future features
• Players want to be excited, so make it happen
• Schedule of events to keep players looking forward, so they never want to quit
• If players ever get bored, there are a million other net destinations to go look at - never let them get bored

Talk to your Users

• Your ideas may not be what players want
• Find out
• Implement after you figure out how it makes business sense - either soft or hard returns
• Don't come up with a money making scheme then foist it on your players

Bite Sized Content

• Frequent rewards
• Smaller time commitments
• Early accomplishments
• WoW reward schedule is way too long for web world
• Random events system in ZOMG has world constantly changing around you so it's never the same - lots of different experiences so every time you go in there is something new and different

Keep New Features Coming

• Keep evolving, refining, adding
• Stay flexible
• Never stop
• ZOMG rolls out stuff every two weeks or less
• Always make sure players are fully aware of what's coming up

Build a 20 Ring Circus

• No single idea appeals to everyone
• Satisfy more of your core audience by creating new ways to interface with your site - dress up vs marketplace vs games vs hangouts etc
• MMOs multiple kinds of gameplay within the game

Create a variety of experiences
Cater to many different player types with features such as:

• Forums, guilds
• Collectibles
• Gathering, crafting
• Social community
• Social gaming
• Combat, PVE, PVP
• Mini-games

Gaia invited fans to meet employees after a company softball game in San Jose. Fans travelled from Florida, Washington state, etc to meet them. Very passionate.

ZOMG is Engaging Users

• Extremely high retention over 10 months since open beta launch
• Avg play time 2.5 hours
• ZOMG players 4x more likely to purchase than main site players
• Incredibly easy to try, free, no download, four click entry
• Achieves its goal as fly paper for the main site

Get them to stick, then you win

• The more entertained, the longer they stay
• Longer they stay, more likely they are to buy something
• More likely they are to make a friend
• Once they've made a friend and bought something, very unlikely they will go away
• Cultivate, nurture and entertain your users

Get Users to Want to Buy

• Accept it! Most users won't buy from you - but those that won't buy are still critical to your business, they will keep the community alive and exciting for those that will buy
• Build things that entertain everyone - then enable ways for buyers to participate or get ahead via purchases

What do they buy?

• Anything that promotes self expression
• Anything that promotes sense of belonging to the community or friends
• Anything that lets users get to an end goal faster or easier
• Anything that looks like it can be turned for profit

How Does Community Affect Revenue?

• Community provides the venue where users can brag by displaying their earned/purchased items and abilities - forums, profiles, guilds, marketplace, games, UGC, town area, post artwork, get ratings - hot or not, etc
• If they can't brag, they don't want it and the items and features are worthless

Are items entertaining? You bet they are?

• Gaia makes all their money off sponsorship or microtrans items
• Item types are a form of entertainment - decorative, functional, and/or collectible - but they don't satisfy 100% of your audience
• Have to keep coming up with new stuff
• Items that evolve - i.e. the egg that hatches into a Phoenix are very cool... people speculate on how it will evolve, gains value over time

Non-Item Revenue Examples

• Shout outs (Maple Story)
• Time shortcuts (powerup in ZOMG, points in Zynga games)
• Name changes/server changes (Everquest, WoW and traditional MMOs)
• Premium features (features or areas avail only to members - Club Penguin, Runescape, etc)

Make Buying Easy

• Utilize every payment option
• Mobile payments
• Game cards
• Credit cards
• Cash
• If you can use ALL the available payment systems, use them all. They don't cannibalize each other
• Habbo Hotel has over 170 payment methods

Recap

• Make it fun for everyone, but focus on your niche first
• Get users to want to buy, make it exciting, let them know what's coming up, features oriented toward core
• Make buying easy - if you can make it 1-click, make it 1-click
• Customers win, you win, everyone wins

Q&A

Any mobile plans?
Craig: great evidence you can be successful in this area. GREE and DNA (Mobile Game Town) in Asia are both doing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue

Average age of Gaian?
Craig: Median age is 18 years old, 60/40 girls; doesn't work for a 10 year old - sweet spot is 19-20 girls.

Sponsorships - can you talk about it?
Craig: Sponsorships work well for us. We had no ads 3 years ago, now we've done a ton of deals with big brands. Skittles is on our site - they funded the creation of a variety of virtual spaces that had some game mechanics in them or custom mini-games or cooperative experiences in site where if you did these experiences you would earn Skittles and the community's goal was to collect as many skittles as possile and build a rainbow. When it was done, there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that rained gold (Currency) down on all users. We partner with a brand to build something that adds value to the user experience. They fund it, but we build it. As a result, turns out you get better response rates for advertisers.

Have you found a sweet spot for price?
We are still experimenting with that. We don't have a lot of items over $7.5. Many other companies say there is no price insensitivity between pennies and $7.5. The real issue is the penny gap - charging anything more than $0. Anytime we raise a price, revenue goes up. The sales of the item do not go down.

How do you value sponsorships?
We have to tie it to CPMs as there is no other way an agency can value a deal. Otherwise they can't show metrics the way they are used to. We get over 2B page views a month, so it's easy to offer impressions.

How do you QA new content without breaking old stuff?
It gets harder and harder. Make thorough checklists and resist tendency to just get it out because "you know it's good" - gets to be a certain size of an MMO where you try to compartmentalize your code so things are less likely to break, but ultimately good QA processes will make or break you.

Along the QA lines, how much do you use automated QA or is it all manual?
It's all manual in our case. We have some process checks (scripts compile, etc) but in general most of our stuff is manual and we rely on checklists. All our QA is in-house. We only did a hardware compatibility test externally.

How big is the development side of the organization?
105 people in whole company. 40+ of whom are developers. Include QA and backend operations, then maybe 50 dev. ZOMG team is impressive... 15 people (5 artists, 10 devs) on ZOMG MMO (draws laughter from crowd).

Is Membership Suitable for Gaia?
Craig: I think you have to choose Runescape or Maple Story model. Pogo has pulled off both though... you can buy sub that gives you a collection of virtual goods. I think you have to decide up front what you want to be. One gives you more users, but less revenue per user. Sub models give you more predictable revenue stream, but microtrans have potential to blow that out of the water due to uncapped ceiling on ARPU.

Do you have a mix of time-based vs consumables vs permanent items?
Most of our stuff is permanent. Then there is time-based stuff (fish only live for 90 days in an acquarium) and then we have consumables. Just did deal with Vivix - you can modify your voice, but it only lasts for a few weeks.

Is 60/40 split for Gaia the same within ZOMG?
Yes it is. 90% of our users have never played an MMO before. Game has a lot of combat - worried that we would only attract guys. But that hasn't been the case at all. 60/40 girls, just like main site.

Demographic among national boundaries?
North America is 85% of the player base.

What were your advertising efforts to get your name out when you launched?
No money was spent. Even still, we spend almost no money on marketing. Almost all word of mouth. Tools within Facebook and their invite loop systems are probably the easiest and cheapest way to acquire users. That said, we haven't used that yet - most of our growth is word of mouth at school. We have started to test online ads and we've got it so we pay less for the ad than we get from that user lifetime.

How to build your own interactive marketing campaign. Self-publishing. Empower you so that when you are working with a big pub, you are in a strong position to work with them.

Games first passion, second passion is community building. Founded Bardo in 2007, focused on combining both passions.

What is Interactive Marketing?

• Not Facebook profile, not Twitter
• People connect with 18 friends 1-to-1 and ping 110+ people each week
• <5% visit social networks for purchase decision guidance
• <9% of tweets have value
• Marketing has moved from transaction=based effort to a conversation
• Interactive Marketing is not ONLINE marketing - although the internet facilitates interactive marketing. Easier to collect info and communicate.

Developing a Marketing Plan

• Cover the 3 pillars: Advertising, promotion, PR (+business development).
• Map out key selling points, roadmap for asset release, tentpole events, specific programs, budget
• Initial programs should be designed to test waters and fine tune campaign
• Start early enough to build momentum
• Promote, Engage, Measure, OPTIMIZE
• Establish your tentpole events - what's the hook?
• Design to drive interest in 1 big POP
• Use interactive marketing to go deeper - build the buzz through conversation
• Blogs, forums, podcasts, events
• Answer questions

Finding Your Key Influencers

• The key is not to market to everyone, but the key influencers. These are not necessarily people who will buy your game. How do you find these people?
• When John was marketing Hudson (Konami's parent co), he found some people who really had fond memories of the company. He then first created a campaign that targeted these people. Created an exclusive club for them, gave them tours and inside info, etc. These are ppl who told them they'd give cover stories if they brought back the company... or retailers who said they'd give direct distrib deals if the company was brought back. Within 3 years, Hudson became the most profitable unit within Konami. Those key influencers were hugely important.
• Don't treat your key influencers like Rock Stars. You are the rock star. These guys are your entourage. They get into this exclusive club because they hang with you. Go out of your way to take care of your entourage.
• Gave out Elder Scrolls backstory to key influencers.
• Focus on High Impact Programs
• Want to work on high impact programs that drive conversation
• Blogs have a major impact on purchasing decision
• Content will always generate a greater response than an ad
• Position content in middle column - heat tracking shows ads are not noticed
• Reach out to 1 new site a week - connect with them, get to know people on a personal level, get to know blog's culture and demographics
• Make it easy for them, create a FAQ or choice sound bites... most bloggers write on the side (ME), limited time money attention
• Follow and engage readers in the comments section and forums
• Don't do 1 big story, do lots of smaller stories - blogs generate 1.5 page views per session (about half of all blog readers never go past home page), buy viewers come back frequently - so break up your stories to constantly engage, rather than 1 big story
• Don't just focus on big blogs... small fan sites can become powerful... even a $200 ad placement for a small site can make them an ally

You Gotta Wow Them

• Make your interaction shine
• (shows picture of a crappy demo room - actual room at a huge publisher... room looks like a closet
• Shine and affect all 5 senses - create an environment that feels warm, including the environment you present in
• Interaction Shine also applies to online
• Keep a positive attitude - don't get caught up in flame wars
• Give your fans a chance to defend you rather than replying right away
• Don't "sell" your product, but don't get too casual - the focus is not your life story and issues
• Develop a list of instant answers so that you don't share incorrect info or reveal anything that is still under wraps. Share this list with everyone who is communicating online. But don't just cut and paste those anwers.

More Tips Working with Online Media

• Meet them in person
• Live demos - make the demo fun - the enthusiasm of the person demoing the game and the entourage is what sells the game
• Big sites only cover you a few times and want the exclusive
• Use smaller sites to share info constantly
• Create a Press Asset section online, easy access to screenshots, FAQs, videos, logo
• Get a Media Kit from the magazines or large website - they are free. Tons of good industry data. Many times they will have free research reports.

Go Beyond Virtual World

• Engage people in real life... plan events
• Have gear ready to go - podcast and video equipment, digital camera, laptop
• After 6pm meeting - beers, etc
• Take advantage of smaller events - i.e. Destructoid's NARP
  Event planning for just a few K
• Always looking for great games to showcase
• Sponsorship opportunity - mrdestructoid@gmail.com - can sponsor for as low as a couple hundred dollars
• Don't just give away swag - make people work for it by interacting with you
• Booth babes are ho hum, bring on board "escorts" who know how to woo your customers - the escorts served as concierges or guides for high profile guests... made the high profile guests into rock stars... helped them avoiding lunch lines, etc... but also knew how to play Hudson's games - invested 2 full days training them in how to play their games and then used them repeatedly as they already knew Hudson's history
• Work with other developers to share costs

Common Developer Dilemma

• Limited time, budget and knowledge for marketing
• Not enough products in pipeline to keep conversation going
• Current outreach effort not reaching enough people
• Built something called "The Kartel" - a social media marketing platform akin to the one American Idol uses
• TheKartel.com is a new gaming community portal designed to connect devs, pubs, impact players
• No need to reach out to 100s of social media sites
• Content is not consumed in isolation
• Experience is part of a connected conversation - 75% of web surfers read more than 1 blog per session
• Gamers have one convenient spot to find all the info they want about different game devs
• Quickly start a fan club
• Instantly connect with lots of people
• The Kartel manages all the admin stuff
• Fosters a lively place where gamers contribute in a positive way
• Built in rewards and loyalty program
• Earn Karma points for contributing to community and keeping things lively
• Sega Nerds example: site been around for 8 years... 3,000 blog posts to date. Home grown effort. Generates more consumer activity than what Sega does internally. To grow it, they went to TheKartel.com - seganerds,thekartel.com. Results - 50% traffic growth in 3 months, potential for 200% more. 50% more time to focus on content and community building.

Final Notes

• Reach Key Influencers
• Focus on High Impact programs
• Engage in Conversation
• Don't go it alone - form your own Kartel or join one
• Costly? No - does require heart and soul.
• Let the rich guys woo a girl with diamond rings and fancy yachts - your strategy: write her a hit song, paint her a $1M portrait, cook her a gourmet meal - bring something to the table that no one else can