This article was originally published in Game Developer Magazine. It was the fourth in a series of business columns that I am writing for GDM.

Some lessons are harder to learn than others. One of the toughest lessons you may ever learn is that granting someone a generous share of the revenue from your game in exchange for a service (assistance with development; publishing; etc) does not mean that you can assume your incentives are properly aligned.

Say that you give a publisher 50% of the revenue from your game in order to promote the game, to handle customer service, etc. Or perhaps you’ve agreed to develop a game in tandem with a few other individuals and split the future revenue equally. In either case, you’re making an important assumption: that a significant percentage of future profits will ensure that all parties will do their “best” to make the game a success. And sometimes, that’s exactly what happens. But not always, unfortunately.

Revenue shares and publishers

There are many situations in which even a large share of your game’s revenue may not result in the behavior you need or expect from your business partners. A publisher, for example, may view your self-funded game as just one of a great many small gambles in their portfolio; something worth putting a few hours of effort into and/or maybe a few thousand dollars, but certainly no more than that until the game “proves” itself. The fact that you’ve given them (for example) 50% of your revenue and paid for development yourself may mean very little to certain publishers because they view your game as a lottery ticket… and you don’t win a lottery by spending large sums on a single ticket.

But if giving a publisher ~50% of your revenue isn’t enough to get them to really get behind it and help you in significant ways, what else can you do? The answer, in some cases, may simply be “nothing.” If you aren’t effective at pitching your game and your studio, you may discover that the only publishers who are interested in getting a piece of the game are those who want that piece for free. If, however, you have a competent pitch, and if you seem like a developer worth building a long-term relationship, there are certain demands that you can and should make of any publisher.

For example, you may demand a recoupable advance against your future royalties. If the publisher believes strongly in your game, this theoretically costs the publisher very little (just the interest payments they would have received from that money during the time period in which they advanced it.) And it gives the publisher a good reason to get behind the game — they want to recoup that advance at bare minimum! An alternative is to ask for committments: i.e. 300,000 downloads, as a random example. If the publisher can’t get your game downloaded at least that many times, their revenue share should be reduced or in the case of an extreme shortfall, the publishing contract could be terminated.

Revenue shares and development partners

Things get significantly more complicated when sharing revenue with individuals or companies with whom you have partnered to co-develop a game. Such arrangements are a big leap of faith for everyone involved, and you absolutely cannot assume that healthy revenue shares will keep everyone on the same page. Here are just some of the reasons why a co-development partner might disappoint you (or vice versa!) despite the fact that you’re splitting revenue:

• Different financial needs. Someone on the team may not actually care much about money. Maybe they are independently wealthy. Maybe they simply aren’t motivated by money no matter how little or how much they have. In either case, a revenue share is zero guarantee that this person will share your goals.
• Different financial goals. Even if two people on a team have exactly the same level of financial need, one might be satisfied with a $10K payoff while another might be dissatisfied with anything under $1M. There’s a good chance the latter person is going to become frustrated with the former if the project is marginally but not largely successful right off the bat (and of course, most projects aren’t.)
• Different priorities. Even if two parties have the exact same financial needs and goals, there are other priorities to consider. How important is the success of this game to each party involved? If it’s a make-or-break project for one party, but something that could easily fail without consequence for another party, there may be problems down the road. If one party needs income from the project in three months to survive, while another can plug away for years without income, conflicts could easily result — especially if this isn’t discussed before the project is kicked off. If one party owns the IP the game is based on while another does not, once again, there may be a vast difference in motivation to perform.

The aforementioned examples are just a tiny slice of all the possible differences between people (and companies) that can result in serious disputes down the line, especially once real money is involved. And unfortunately, there’s no perfect way to predict and prepare for all possible disputes. To some extent, when you’re splitting ownership of a game and/or its revenue, you’re always making a big gamble. The best way to reduce the risk of all parties involved is to carefully talk through your goals, priorities and commitments before kicking off a partnership, and document in writing the results of those conversations.

Talking it through

Would you be disappointed if your partner didn’t work at least 20 hours per week on the game, on average? Discuss it, and put something in the contract that specifies exactly what happens if someone doesn’t meet their commitments (i.e. their revenue share drops from X% to Y% after a given period of time.) What if someone gets sick and can’t work for a month? Agree to something and put it in the contract, too. What happens if the game launches and is not successful? How long are you all willing to keep working on it? What happens if someone bails on the project before this time period has elapsed? Talk it all through, and put it all in a contract.

Unfortunately, doing this will not guarantee that you avoid disappointment or drama. If you partner with the wrong folks (or even with the “right” folks but under the wrong conditions) no contract is going to help you. But going through this process is vital. Most importantly, it may help you avoid getting into the wrong partnership. Additionally, it will give you a framework to rely on in the event that disagreements arise between you and your partners.

The challenges presented by misaligned goals and incentives have been a topic of intense study in business schools all over the world for decades. Whether you’re looking at a publisher, a development partner, or anyone else you will rely on in a significant way, do not simply assume that “things will work out” because the other party has a good reputation, is a friend, had a big revenue share, etc. That sort of assumption is exactly the kind of thing that leads to disappointing outcomes and hard feelings in the long term.

Danc and I do more than our fair share of taking platforms to task for their failings. We’ve (rather bluntly) advocated for shorter approval periods on Apple’s App Store; we’ve railed against Amazon’s poor management of the games marketplace on e-ink Kindles; we’ve given whole lectures about the ways in which platforms, in general, can become abusive when they become large and successful. What we — and most other indies, IMO — don’t do often enough is publicly thank platforms when they do something good for us. So I’m going to put away my cynic’s hat and call attention to a few nice things that platforms have done for us lately, in hopes it encourages said platforms to do more of this for more indies.

Apple and Google both take a lot of flack for allowing blatant clones on their respective platforms. So I think it’s worth pointing out that both companies have taken down some Triple Town ripoffs. Google has delisted two clones on Android Market… and one of those was taken down within literally three hours of being reported. Apple just recently delisted one Triple Town ripoff after a period of a few weeks. There’s certainly more than Apple and Google could do to protect indies from total ripoffs, but I think it’s worth mentioning that they aren’t just sitting on their hands right now.

Also worth sharing that Google and Apple have also been incredibly generous in how they’ve featured Triple Town. Google gave us the main banner over the Market homepage, and Apple has put us in the “new and noteworthy” section twice since February, in addition to tweeting about us. I am 100% confident that Triple Town’s mobile edition would be a dismal failure without this exposure.

Similarly, Facebook — which doesn’t have the most indie-friendly reputation — seems to be really ramping up its efforts to support innovation on its platform. Many people don’t know this, but Facebook spontaneously chose to feature Triple Town almost immediately after its launch, well before TTown enjoyed the good reputation it does today. Members of the Facebook team have spent many hours introducing themselves to us, coaching us on features which might help Triple Town, and generally being incredibly supportive. It’s clear they really want original, innovative games to succeed on their platform. The same is true of Google+, which gave Triple Town the honor of being only the 20th game on that platform.

Some people will read all this and think, “well, sure, they do these things for Triple Town, but not most other indie games.” So it’s important to understand this: Triple Town is not a “hit” by Google, Apple or Facebook’s standards. Not even close I’m sorry to say. We have a small, extremely passionate fan-base, but I don’t think platforms are supporting Triple Town for that reason, or because they expect to generate huge amounts of revenue from our game.

So, thank you to Apple and Google for standing up to at least some of the folks who have ripped off our games, and thank you to Apple, Google and Facebook for promoting our games despite the fact that they have essentially zero impact on your bottom line. We hope you’ll continue to do this for more indies… particularly those who are working hard to do something new and different, even when that isn’t necessarily the most profitable path. (And PS: you can find some of those folks here.)

Want to learn more about the exploits of Spry Fox from its co-founders? Looking for insights into the nutty world of f2p, web-based, and/or mobile games? Curious to see if Danc and I are as relentlessly and unforgivably opinionated in the flesh as we are on the Internets? (Spoiler: we are.)

Well, here’s where you can find us at GDC:

Realm of the Counter-Intuitive God (SOGS Postmortem)
SPEAKER/S: David Edery (Spry Fox)
Monday 11:15-12:15 Room 135, North Hall
Social and Online Games Summit / 60-Minute Lecture
Description: Realm of the Mad God is a web-based f2p MMO with a penchant for breaking rules. It’s a MMO bullet-hell-shooter… in Flash. It is based on open source art. It features permadeath (the ultimate in retention challenges)! And it just so happens to be surprisingly popular and very profitable. This lecture will review some of the unusual design and business choices we made and explore which worked, which didn’t, and why. Financial and other data will be shared (and not just the stuff that makes us look good).

Create New Genres (and Stop Wasting Your Life in the Clone Factories)
SPEAKER/S: Daniel Cook (Spry Fox)
Tuesday 3:00-4:00 Room 135, North Hall
Social and Online Games Summit / 60-Minute Lecture
Description: Re-releasing old designs with pretty new graphics means me-too titles fighting off a crowd of similar products. This is the path to mediocrity. To become a master designer, you need to break past a slavish devotion of past forms and create vibrant, new experiences. This design talk covers practical techniques for reinventing game genres. The goal is the invention of a unique and highly differentiated customer value proposition that makes both strong business sense and is also deeply creatively fulfilling. We cover designing from the root, reducing design risk, and igniting original franchises. We also cover the pitfalls of design innovation including fending off shark-like fast followers and other cloners. The presentation covers personal examples from recent titles such as Steambirds, Realm of the Mad God, Triple Town and other innovative successes.

How F2P Games Blur the Line Between Design and Business
SPEAKER/S: Soren Johnson (Game Developer Magazine), Ben Cousins (ngmoco Sweden), Matthias Worch (LucasArts), Tom Chick (Quarter to Three) and David Edery (Spry Fox)
Friday 4:00-5:00 Room 2003, West Hall, 2nd Fl
60-Minute Panel
The free-to-play movement is here to stay and will touch every corner of the games industry. However, the format blurs the line between game design and game business, so that business decisions will become increasingly indistinguishable from design decisions. Free-to-play content must be fun enough to attract and retain players but not so much fun that no one feels the need to spend some money. Managing this tension makes free-to-play design extremely difficult, especially for traditional game designers who are used to simply making the best game possible. Our panelists will discuss this transition and best practices for building free-to-play games with soul.

This article was originally published in Game Developer Magazine. It was the third in a series of business columns that I am writing for GDM.

What would the typical publishing executive do if someone came to them and said, “We’ve taken open source, 8-bit art and created a f2p, nethack-inspired MMO with permadeath. You can attain the maximum character level in just 30 minutes of play. The game currently has no means of generating revenue and can only accommodate 60 concurrent players per server. Will you work with us on it?”

That’s essentially the question posed to Spry Fox one year ago by Alex and Rob, co-creators of Wild Shadow Studios, when they presented us with an early build of Realm of the Mad God (RotMG). And I can guess what others might have said to them, because when we subsequently described the project to contacts of ours, the reaction was inevitably one of skepticism. Permadeath? In 2011? How the heck are you going to retain users? And surely you mean 600 concurrent players per server, not 60?!

A “mature” company behaving in the stereotypically mature (i.e. risk averse) manner would have passed on RotMG. Its design was unconventional and terribly hardcore. It was written in Flash and unsuitable for distribution on consoles. It was relatively expensive to operate. Its developers did not have an established pedigree in gaming. The list went on and on. Better to get behind yet another first-person shooter with slick 3D graphics and call it a day.

We (Spry Fox) had a different perspective. Here’s how we evaluated a risky project, managed that risk, and created a financial and critical success.

Alex and Rob were new to the gaming industry, but they had advanced degrees in computer science and substantial experience working on massively scalable systems at Google. They were smart, earnest and motivated, and obviously willing to buck convention. So we partnered with Wild Shadow, with the goal of refining RotMG’s design and implementing a coherent monetization plan. And, crucially, we treated the project not as a huge bet or investment that could not be allowed to fail, but as one of several experimental games in our portfolio. And as with all our other titles, we accepted — and embraced — the possibility of failure, because we do not believe that it is possible to truly innovate in any other context.

Going public early, and staying public

One technique we used to identify and fix major design issues in RotMG was to skip the “private beta” and iterate rapidly with a public audience throughout the majority of the development phase. Despite the public nature of our work, we regularly made dramatic changes to the game. Some of the changes were well-received by players; others caused riots on the RotMG forums. In each case, we did our best to explain our rationale to the game’s slowly-growing community, but we never stopped making big, public changes and observing the results. Most companies plug away at their games in secret, using (at best) highly controlled playtests to learn how to improve them. For an MMO, especially an MMO aspiring to any sort of originality, that’s an incredibly slow and taxing process. We believe that our methods were faster and more effective.

We essentially ripped the “beta” label off of RotMG when we launched it on Chrome Web Store on June 20th, 2011. Google featured RotMG on the CWS home page as well as two subpages. Shortly thereafter, the game became the subject of an ongoing series of articles on Rock Paper Shotgun, and was reviewed favorably by many other sites and individuals. The subsequent increase in traffic and publicity has been gratifying; we hope to leverage that and launch RotMG to great fanfare on many other online game portals in the months to come.

Managing ARPU

During the final phase of RotMG’s public beta, the “average user” spent approximately $1.68 per month. (There’s really no such thing as an average user; the vast majority of players spend nothing, and a very small minority spend enough to support everyone else.) Post launch, monthly ARPU has peaked at $3.40, partially because of an increase in retention, and partially because of high-value conveniences that new players tend to purchase soon after deciding they enjoy the game, like more inventory space (vaults) and the ability to use multiple characters concurrently (slots.) We expect our ARPU to eventually settle somewhere north of $2.00 but below $3.40, until we:

A) Enhance our methods of collecting revenue. With direct integration of a mobile phone payment solution, gift cards, and additional payment platforms that are locally relevant (i.e. outside the United States) we expect our ARPU to climb substantially.

B) Identify additional premium features and/or items that we can sell in RotMG without jeopardizing the spirit of the game.

C) Provide an optional subscription offering to our players, many of whom have told us that it is easier for them to sign up for a recurring billing plan than to pay piecemeal for things in a game.

We believe that a monthly ARPU of $5+ is totally achievable for a game like RotMG. That’s a heck of a lot better than selling games for 99 cents on iTunes! Our positive experience developing and commercializing RotMG is yet one more reason why we have abandoned the old world of disposable downloadable content and embraced the new (and much more satisfying) world of f2p games. The vast majority of players enjoy our content without ever paying a dime, yet we still earn more revenue than we would on XBLA, PSN, etc. What’s not to like?

And most importantly, this business model enables us to keep iterating and innovating. The Web is a huge and wonderful place where kooky ideas like RotMG can not only survive, but flourish. Technologies like Flash and HTML5, plus business models like F2P, make it entirely possible to bring original, “niche” content to millions of people.

There will always be a big market for the next derivative console game. And there will always be big publishers too risk averse to make anything other than the next derivative console game. Savvy independent developers can and should aspire to better than that.

We (Spry Fox) have filed a copyright infringement suit in federal court against 6Waves LOLAPPS in response to their release of Yeti Town, their blatant copy of Triple Town. This was a difficult decision for Danc and I. We are not enthusiastic about the prospect of spending our time in court as opposed to making games. And in general, we believe that only in the most extreme circumstances should a video game developer resort to legal action in order to defend their creative works — the last thing our industry needs is frivolous lawsuits. Unfortunately, it is our opinion that 6waves has behaved in a reprehensible and illegal manner, and we can not, in good conscience, ignore it.

The full legal complaint can be downloaded here. In particular, I will call attention to these issues:

First: Yeti Town, as launched by 6waves, was a nearly perfect copy of Triple Town. We’re not just talking about the game’s basic mechanics here. We’re talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store (how exactly did 6waves “independently” decide to price 200 turns for 950 coins, or 4 wildcards for 1500 coins each? That’s quite a coincidence!) But don’t take our word for it. Here are just a few quotes taken from the numerous press articles that were published shortly after the release of Yeti Town:

• Gamezebo: “Unfortunately for Yeti Town, the only substantial difference between it and Facebook’s Triple Town is the platform it’s on. Otherwise it’s the exact same game, only this time with snow.”
• InsideSocialGames: “Yeti Town is a matching game nearly identical to Spry Fox’s Triple Town”
• Games.com: “Replace “saplings” with “bushes”, “tents” with “houses” and “yetis” with “bears”. What do you get? Something that would look a lot like independent developer Spry Fox’s Triple Town”

Second: what most people don’t know is that 6waves was in confidential (under NDA) negotiations with us to publish Triple Town at the exact same time that they were actively copying Triple Town. We gave 6waves private access to Triple Town when it was still in closed beta, months before the public was exposed to the game. We believed those negotiations were ongoing, and we continued to give private information to 6waves, until 6waves’ Executive Director of Business Development sent us a message via Facebook on the day Yeti Town was published in which he suddenly broke off negotiations and apologized for the nasty situation. His message can be found in its entirety in the body of our legal complaint.

It’s bad enough to rip off another company. To do so while you are pumping them for private information (first, our game design ideas, and later, after the game was launched on Facebook, our private revenue and retention numbers) is profoundly unethical by any measure.

Despite all this, Danc and I still struggled with the idea of initiating a lawsuit. However, 6waves brought the issue to a head when, rather than openly and honestly discuss their actions, they had the chutzpah to tell Gamasutra that they had developed Yeti Town completely independently, and characterized the legitimate public criticism of their company as simply “part of the natural process” of game development.

We believe that there is nothing “natural” or ethical or legal about 6waves behavior. What they did was wrong. And if they get away with it, it will simply encourage more publishers to prey on independent game developers like us. We refuse to sit back and let that happen.

-Dave & Danc

You might be wondering why a studio as focused on independence as ours would choose to work with a publisher. Here, in no particular order, are the reasons:

• Our games have reached millions of users, but never concurrently. We have constantly worried about our ability to scale without major service interruptions or other related problems. Our fans are our lifeblood and we do not want to let them down. Playdom, unlike us, has grown and managed many games with massive concurrent user populations. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from them and lean on them.
• The social gaming market is the most hyper-competitive environment that we have ever worked in. Successful games are cloned with lightning speed and the clones frequently outperform the original. Yes, we could raise a bunch of capital and use it to spend our way to higher user counts, but raising capital takes time and, having never managed a major user acquisition campaign, it is safe to assume that we’d probably spend our marketing dollars inefficiently. Playdom, on the other hand, is in a position to not only cross promote Triple Town to its many existing players, but to help us advertise the game in an effective manner.
• Playdom, unlike many other publishers, offered us a fair deal pure and simple. They did not treat us like creative-but-helpless indies to be mercilessly exploited. They treated us with respect. It was also clear from day one that they were totally in love with the game. We’re pretty sure that some of the execs at Playdom play Triple Town much, much more than we do!
• We want to create great original games. We do not wish to spend our time creating a massive company with a huge operational arm, with all the overhead that entails. So, we will retain complete creative control of Triple Town on Facebook while Playdom takes care of the many important operational and marketing responsibilities that Spry Fox is not well positioned to manage.
• Playdom has made some very advanced tools available for us which will make it substantially easier to analyze activity on Triple Town, to connect with our players, to do AB tests, etc. We could theoretically have built and/or acquired all this from third parties but even in a best case scenario, it would have been neither easy nor cheap, and we would not have had Playdom’s advice as we leverage those tools and grow Triple Town in general. We are not so egotistical as to think we have nothing to learn from one of the biggest players in this market.

So that’s the story. As always, you can expect to hear updates from us as to how it goes. :-)

-Dave & Danc

October has been an insane month for Spry Fox. First we launched Triple Town. Then we launched Steambirds: Survival, mobile edition. Now I’m pleased to announce the launch of our latest original game, Panda Poet for the Web, a total remake of our original Kindle game which was released in 2010!

For a limited time, Panda Poet is available exclusively on our website and the Chrome Web Store.

The Kindle version of Panda Poet is a single-player word puzzle game, but the Web-based version is focused on asychronous multiplayer, and the core gameplay mechanic has been completely revamped to accomodate that. The quickest description of the new Panda Poet is “Scrabble meets Go.” It is a battle for territory between two players, and words are your weapons.

Panda Poet is also our first HTML5 game, which is an interesting experiment for us. We’re looking forward to seeing how we can leverage some of the big platforms that have recently begun to emphasize HTML5 games and comparing the traffic they drive to the traffic provided by Flash game portals, our traditional bread and butter. And we’re curious to see how browser compatability issues affect our retention, if at all. One thing’s for sure: its exciting to fire up the browser on my phone and play Panda Poet on it without any major issues. :-)

As always, we’ve launched what we consider to be the “minimum viable product” and we expect to keep improving the game over time. Four months from now, Panda Poet will look very different. And of course, we plan to put it on social networks and mobile devices, so there is a huge amount of work to be done.

The current business model is simple: Pay $2.99 to disable advertisements and enable the option to play on a 9×9 board in addition to default 7×7 board. My guess is that this won’t be enough to provide the kind of ARPU we are shooting for, but it will hopefully provided a decent baseline that we can build off of. Of course, we expect to generate some revenue from the advertisements itself, but it is hard to imagine that being very significant unless Panda Poet becomes a monster hit. That’s just not something anyone can bet on.

So anyway, please check out Panda Poet and let me know what you think! I will post an update in a few months on the game’s performance. (Speaking of, I’m overdue for an update on our other games. I’ll try to post something in a few weeks.)

Steambirds: Survival (SB:S) is now available on iTunes! iPhone/iPod version here. iPad version here. We hit a slight snag with the Android version but you can expect to see it launch very soon as well. :-)

For those of you who haven’t heard, this version of Steambirds is the result of a collaboration between Spry Fox and Halfbrick (aka the guys who made Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride.) We worked together to evolve SB:S, which we originally co-created with Andy, from its humble beginnings into a robust game with 120 missions — 64 available for free at launch — and some cool new features, like a recruiting system that lets you hire additional planes to help you beat more difficult missions.

Why Halfbrick?

I thought some of you might be wondering why we partnered with Halfbrick as opposed to any other company, like Chillingo for example. There are quite a few reasons, but foremost among them were:

• I’ve been friends with the guys at Halfbrick since I greenlit their first XBLA title many years ago, and I trusted them to be good partners.
• Halfbrick has massive reach thanks to Fruit Ninja (and now Jetpack Joyride as well.) They can cross promote a game to millions of people.
• Halfbrick’s QA team is as battle-hardened as they come. We had trouble with unexpected OS-compatibility issues with the previous mobile version of Steambirds, and I wanted to avoid a recurrence of that if at all possible.
• Halfbrick’s games are polished to a brilliant shine. We wanted their help doing the same to Steambirds.
• We weren’t looking for a publisher. We’re perfectly capable of publishing and promoting our own games. We were looking for a partner. And I definitely think that we looked in the right place.

Our arrangement is atypical. Spry Fox is technically the publisher of the game, though if there was a way to have registered ourselves as “co-publishers”, I would gladly have done it (hopefully iTunes and Android Market will accommodate arrangements like this in the future.) We co-designed the game. We share the game’s cross promotional space and revenues. We are truly partners in this effort.

The competition

When we first started working with Halfbrick on SB:S at the beginning of this year, we knew we might have some competitors lurking in the shadows. Steambirds had already inspired a number of similar games on the Web, and it was only a matter of time before a strong alternative appeared on mobile devices. As many of you know, that indeed ended up happening just a few weeks ago.

There’s been some public discussion about whether “Crimson: Steam Pirates” is a clone of Steambirds or not. I think it’s pretty clear at first glance that Crimson was heavily inspired by Steambirds. Nobody appears to be disputing that. But its also fair to say that Crimson isn’t a total ripoff. It has some interesting new ideas in it and a different narrative style. I think Steambirds is a better game of course, but then, I’m biased. :-)

I’ve tried to keep my mind on what matters: our fans and potential fans. People just want the best possible game, and we’ve tried our best to give it to them. Steambirds: Survival offers hundreds of hours of tight, well-balanced gameplay to anyone who will give it a chance. It isn’t perfect, but it is a damned good game and it is going to get better with every (frequent) update. And it’s totally free, as opposed to “try/buy.” I can’t wait to see how people react to it.

Looking forward

The more successful we become, the more competitors we are going to attract. All we can do is keep making original games and keep trying to be smart about marketing and distributing them. Hopefully over time we’ll build a loyal fanbase that recognizes and reflects who we are and what we do. That’s ultimately what is going to make Spry Fox successful. Danc and I want to make people happy, and we want our fans to feel like they have a real connection to our company. That’s what matters most; everything else is noise.

And speaking of: if you’re a fan of Steambirds, of Spry Fox or this blog, I’d be very grateful if you’d help us out by telling all your friends to download Steambirds: Survival! Tweet it, Facebook it, Google+ it, email it. We can use all the help we can get. :-)

And as always, if you’ve read this far, thank you! (I’m always flattered that anybody does.)

I’m pleased to announce the public beta of Triple Town, our original twist on the match-3 genre, which is launching on Facebook and will soon appear on other platforms as well.

Triple Town has always been a very special game for Spry Fox. It was one of our studio’s first titles, and it was good enough to be chosen by Amazon as the first indie game to be released on the Kindle. Triple Town also has the highest user rating of any game we’ve ever released (4.72 out of 5 on Amazon.com based on 158 reviews as of the time of this writing.)

So, when Danc and I started talking about how we might want to dip our toes into the turbulent water that is Facebook, Triple Town seemed like a natural fit. We knew the game was fun. We knew it would appeal to a broad audience. We knew it wouldn’t require a massive development expense because it is a relatively simple game. And we had observed a relatively limited amount of content in what I’ll call “the Bejeweled Blitz genre” on Facebook… a market opportunity that we felt we had a decent chance of capitalizing upon with Triple Town.

Additionally, we thought that if Triple Town failed to make traction on Facebook for whatever the reason, it wouldn’t be hard to reskin and release the game on Flash portals. Those platforms have historically been our bread and butter, and we generally feel more comfortable with a project if we think it can eventually find a home in the Flash portal ecosystem.

Of course, the game needed a revenue model. Fortunately, Triple Town is an extremely deep puzzle game once you really wrap your head around it. An expert player can stretch a single game out for hundreds of turns… and that depth creates plenty of opportunities to sell virtual items that might appeal to players. Play the game for a while and you’ll discover how surprisingly tempting it is to purchase that final tree you desperately need to complete your magnificent plans… plans that you’ve been working towards for the past 100 turns!

But, as with most good f2p games, we don’t force you to buy the tree and many skilled players will probably learn how to succeed without doing so in 98% of situations… and in the other 2% of situations, they’ll have earned enough virtual currency to buy what they need for free. Is it possible we’re leaving money on the table? Yes. But we’d rather err on the side of leaving money on the table, rather than send a message that this game is for paying customers only.

We also decided to experiment with limiting the number of turns a player can take for free during any given time period. This is something that most social games do (i.e. limited energy in CityVille, for example) but most puzzles games on Facebook do not do this. It might work for Triple Town; it might not. We’ll find out during the beta. The questions for us are first and foremost: does limiting free play hurt retention? If so, is the revenue generated from selling more turns enough to outweight the downsides? Once we have the answers to those questions, we’ll re-evaluate our design.

I look forward to telling you more about our plans for Triple Town in the weeks to come. We intend to build a whole world around this concept; the current incarnation of the game is just the first step towards that goal. While we work our way towards that grand vision, please do check out the current build and let me know what you think!

Moderated by Jamil Moledina (Director, EA Partners, and fellow board member of the IGDA), Jack Buser (Director, Playstation Home), Bob Meese (New business development, Google), and myself.