Games Brief

The future of media, in 45 minutes

2010-09-06T09:48:00Z

I gave a talk entitled Whales, Power Laws and the Future of Media at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival last month.

In essence, the old media model is that all consumers were treated equally: one price, one experience. They had to be, because physical distribution meant it was impossible to offer personalised experiences in a cost-effective way.

The Internet has changed all that. I can enjoy dabbling in a free-to-play game gratis, while another gamer can spend money on progression, or pimping his ride, and gain whatever emotional satisfaction that the game provided. A record label can generate the same revenue from a combination of free and high-quality, high-status products for it’s true fans as it used to be able to do by offering the same product at the same price to everyone.

It’s the future of the media, and with evangelistic zeal, I want to spread the word. Please, please help me. I want this video to be watched by game executives and designers, by record labels and television producers, by analysts and journalists.

If you like the video, and think the message is important, please spread it. Tweet it, post it to Facebook, tell your friends in the pub.

Thank you in advance.

YouTube force us to break these into fifteen minute chunks. I’ve embedded them all below.
You can view the slides from the conference at www.gamesbrief.com/2010/08/whales-power-laws-and-the-future-of-media/)

Part 1: Why publishers can no longer charge 80% for their services

Part 2: Why our analysis of free-to-play success has always been wrong

Part 3: How the record industry will be saved by the whales, if only they work it out in time

Part 4: Questions

Why consumer is a dirty word

2010-09-03T14:54:35Z

Welcome to twenty-first century media, where there are no consumers.

To consume implies to use up. To expend. To stop, by the act of consumption, someone else from having the same thing.

CDs are consumables. If I buy one, someone else can’t buy it until the manufacturer presses, packages and distributes it to the retail store. So are books, or copies of Red Dead Redemption from GAME.

But an iTunes download is not. Nor is a PSN game, or an ebook, or a map pack.

In media, we have no consumers any more. We have users, or experiencers, or customers. We have fans, and players, and gamers.

More importantly than that, every time someone downloads a piece of digital content, they are not consuming it;. Quite the reverse. They are creating a new copy.

Perhaps if we move away from the idea that people “consume” our content – that each time someone experiences our creativity they somehow reduce the sum of our content in the world – we will see the simple truth of twenty-first media.

Our users are not consumers. They are multipliers.

LucasArts confirms layoffs, perhaps as many as 85

2010-09-02T10:41:42Z

Kotaku reports swingeing cuts at LucasArts HQ, with perhaps 60 developers and 25 QA staff believed to have been laid off.

Added to the Job Loss Tracker.

Self-publishing lessons learned from Simon Barratt of Four Door Lemon

2010-09-02T10:27:04Z

Welcome to the latest in the series of Lessons Learned from developers who have bitten the self-publishing bullet. They’ve experienced the highs and lows of publishing their own games, wrestled with games marketing, distribution and finance and they are kind enough to share their wisdom and experience with us all.

if you’re interested in self-publishing you can download the first two chapters of How to Publish a Game right now for free. Now, over to this week’s developer.

Simon Barratt is a director of Four Door Lemon, a Yorkshire-based developer of games.on multiple platforms. The company mixes work-for-hire development with self-publishing on Apple platforms. Recent products include You Are The Ref, a football trivia quiz based on the comic strip as seen in the Guardian and QuizQuizQuiz.

What’s been the best thing about self-publishing your game?

As this was our first self-published title it felt really great to be engaging with the players.

We integrated quite a few analytics into the product that allow us to see the playtimes and even now, ten months later, there are a lot of people really enjoying the game. In the past we’ve had a publisher and a client between us and the customer even when we’ve done the majority of the development so this was really refreshing for. We’re able to take the feedback on board and update accordingly.

What’s been the worst thing?

Lack of guaranteed funds! We were very fortunate with QuizQuizQuiz and it sold well for us but self-publishing is obviously a risk and we do have on-going office and staff costs as well as company growth to think about.

I think as we develop more products we’ll see the benefits of the long tails on digital distribution sales and we’ll have a few decent streams of income.

What would you do differently if you did it again?

Although we planned marketing and the first update for QuizQuizQuiz we didn’t plan beyond that till we did the Christmas version. We also threw our pricing plan out the window when we got into the top 10 charts,

I don’t think we really expected it so had no suitable plans in place.

What advice would you give someone thinking about self-publishing for the first time?

It has been mentioned many times before but marketing is key, you can build a great product but if people don’t know about it what’s the point?

Be sure to enable your app to spread virally if possible, give people a feature to show off quickly to other people to help sell the game. One good piece of advice is to make it really easy for users to give you feedback from in the game, engagement with your players is key and will produce evangelists within your fanbase.

You can find out more about Four Door Lemon at www.fourdoorlemon.com.

Vampire: Bloodlines’ Brian Mitsoda: “It would be nice if there were more unique $500,000 projects.”

2010-09-01T20:11:46Z

This is a guest post by freelance narrative designer, Tom Jubert. Check him out at http://www.tomjubert.com/

Interactive writing and narrative design is one of the fastest growing areas of game development. This positions it – potentially – at the cutting edge of our medium, and in constant need of discussion, analysis and re-evaluation. I set up my blog, Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch, three months ago so that content like my recent interview with Brian Mitsoda – whose career has included time at legendary writing houses like Black Isle, Obsidian, and Troika – would have a home.

In the interview I try to avoid the usual topics (eg ‘Your new zombie RPG Dead State looks amazing; can I take someone’s arm off with a shotgun?”) and discuss interactive writing and the business of making games in more depth. We cover the issue of indie risk/reward, the drawbacks of working on AAA, and the reasons game writers have yet to remove their training wheels. Excerpt below, and the full thing over at Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch.

TJ: Bloodlines embodied, for me, a very Fallout vibe, in so far as it took the now entrenched western RPG template and without drastically changing the mechanics pushed the boundaries beyond what they could arguably handle. As anyone who played the game out-the-box will know, it was a rough edged diamond. I know you’ve said that game overpromised, but would you really rather be working on a Dragon Age where arguably the biggest advancement over the past decade has been the engine?

BM: Well, working on successful games is nice because you have the money to keep the lights on for the next game, but I loved working on Bloodlines, despite all the problems and challenges we faced and its lack of (immediate) success. It was a smaller team and I think we felt real ownership over our contributions. That’s something you don’t really get on larger teams and it’s somewhat a trade-off for large scale projects – you either get better compensation or more control, but rarely are you going to get both. Some people want stability and a small piece of a gigantic machine to work on, and that’s fine. I’d much rather work on projects where everyone knows everyone and where we don’t have to have several meetings to decide on the color of the hero’s shoes. I don’t necessarily think every project should be the most ambitious ever, but it would be nice if more games took some risks. I completely understand when projects with $50 million+ budgets play it safe, though it would be nice if there were more $500,000 projects that made you felt like you were playing something unique.

Why having only 1,000 users is not a disaster for a game

2010-09-01T09:54:00Z

I sometimes get companies saying to me words to the effect of: “We’ve just launched our game and it only has 1,000 users. It’s a DISASTER.”

And I say to them.: “It may be a disaster. It may not be. You just don’t know.”

In the old world, where units sold was the ONLY metric that mattered, 1,000 users was a disaster. Hell, in current times, 130,000 sales of a boxed product IS a disaster.

But in the new world of try-fail-iterate, it’s not an unimportant metric.

You need to change the question

The question is not “How many users have I got?”. It’s “What my conversion rate and ARPU?”

In other words if, of your 1,000 users, 20% of them are spending $25 a month with you, you’re laughing. You can buy customers far more cheaply than their lifetime value. Spend money on buying customers and you will snowball. Heck, I’ll sell my house and give you the money if you don’t have it. (For equity, of course)

If instead you have only 0.1% of those 1,000 users spending $1, you’re in real trouble. No marketing in the world will solve that problem.

And here’s the thing. This is a game design problem, not a game marketing problem. You are not retaining customers and you are not monetising them. Stop everything until you have fixed that core conversion or ARPU problem.

And thank the Lord that you only have 1,000 users who saw your initial failure.

Now go, iterate and launch again.

Why creatives and business types MUST mix

2010-08-31T13:33:00Z

I was inspired to write this post by Jimmy Mulville’s Richard Dunn memorial lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

Jimmy runs HatTrick, one of the most successful UK independent production companies that makes some great comedy shows like Have I Got News for You, Whose Line is it Anyway?, Outnumbered, Father Ted and The Kumars at No. 42. He is a very successful businessman and a very successful comedy writer. I have enormous respect for him.

Which is why I found the lecture so disappointing.

It was funny, well-structured and well-presented. Jimmy put the boot into “strategists” and “management” and “accountants”, making the point that creative people can’t be incentivised by targets and spreadsheets and rules. They’re creative; creatives break rules, that’s their job.

All true. But overall, I’m not sure it’s the most helpful way of thinking about running creative businesses.

At one point, Jimmy said coming up with the creative idea is difficult; exploiting it is easy.

That’s so not true.

And that’s what really got me cross (and tweeting in a passive-aggressive heckling way).

We’re all in this together

Creatives need managers, and financiers, and distributors, and marketers. Marketers and managers and financiers and distributors need creatives.

We may not understand each very well, but we are all trying to achieve the same thing: getting good quality content out to audiences and making money from it. Sure, we may have different motivations – some creatives might just want to get money so they can make more content; some business types might see creative content as a route to profits – but we are symbiotic.

The same is true in Health and Education and any organisation with expert practitioners that are separate from management.

What Gerry saw

Three years ago, I watched a TV series where Gerry Robinson tried to improve the operation of an NHS hospital (Can Gerry Robinson fix the NHS?).

Of course it was biased and trying to create conflict, but I was gobsmacked – genuinely jaw-droppingly gobsmacked – by the hostility and antagonism between the administrators and the medical staff.

The doctors were unmanageable, self-opinionated and shockingly arrogant individuals with no team spirit; the administrators were spineless worryworts who were more focused on spreadsheets than people.

And here’s the thing: doctors don’t want to manage; managers can’t doctor. So why can’t they both see that they need each other.

Gerry said that when he was CEO, he viewed his job as trying to find out what resources his frontline people needed in order to deliver what he wanted them to deliver, and give it to them. The NHS was totally dysfunctional about achieving this simple objective.

What leaders do

I’ve been a CEO (admittedly of a tiny and not massively successful company). What I realised very quickly is that you had to make sure that everyone knew that everyone else was critical to the success of the whole company.

The product guys had to realise that without marketing, no-one would buy their product. Sales had to realise their job was to sell the great stuff that development had created, not rashly agree to random improvements to close a deal; finance had to realise that they had to find the cash to make everything work and *everyone* had to realise that the bean counters were totally critical to everyone getting paid this month.

That’s what leaders should do. Help everyone understand that everyone else is valuable.

And what if everyone isn’t valuable?

Well, that’s simple.

Fire them.

Why so cross with Jimmy?

Jimmy set out his stall with a number of cheap (but funny) shots at management.Along the way, he acknowledged (albeit in a pretty sotto voce way) that he ran a creative company that has business processes and management, but he tried to keep them out of the way of the creative process.

I agree wholeheartedly. But many listeners would have been forgiven for hearing Jimmy calling for the end of management. Not a partnership with management.

So I urge anyone reading this, and anyone who listened to Jimmy’s talk, to reflect on this:

if creatives can build a working relationship built on trust and respect for the people who finance, distribute, market and sell their product AND
if those people can find a constructive way of respecting creatives for their disorganised, unstructured way of having brilliant ideas

we’ll get more great content, we’ll get more money to make great content and we’ll all be richer.

Can’t we all just get along?

(Oh, and in case you didn’t get the point, I think that this applies to developers and publishers of games as well. If you don’t respect your publisher, don’t work with them. Try to learn the value of what all your partners do – if they’re not adding value, don’t work with them. But realise that usually they are doing a job that someone needs to do – and if they aren’t doing it well, find someone else that will.)

Why the mass market will NEVER be gamers

2010-08-31T15:22:19Z

Margaret Robertson pointed me to this article on Scott Pilgrim vs the World. The article is not about the film, it’s about the endless carping about the assumed teenage, ADD, geeky males that the film must be targeted at, according to many, many reviewers.

The full article is worth a read, but this is the quote that leaped out at me:

“[I am] not a gamer. I own a Nintendo Wii, on which I enjoy boxing, tennis, being extremely bad at Super Mario Galaxy, and sometimes even playing Dancing With The Stars (deal with it), in which I have mastered the cha-cha at the professional level. If you are under the impression that this makes me a “gamer” anywhere except possibly in the sun-dappled rec rooms of some very rad retirement communities, you’re off your nut.”

The author is a lady named Linda Holmes. This is what she says about herself:

“I’m a woman, I’m in my late thirties, I can’t handle first-person shooters, I’m afraid of Comic-Con, and I really, really liked Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.”

Linda IS the mass-market. She plays games. I’ve never played Dancing with the Stars, but mastering the professional cha-cha sounds like a commitment to me. I would call her a gamer.

But she won’t call herself one. When stopped on the street by a market researcher with a clipboard trying to find the elusive mass-market, she won’t acknowledge she’s a gamer.

I’m guessing (and only guessing here) that’s because Linda thinks that “gamers” own PS3s and 360s, not Wiis. She thinks gamers play Modern Warfare 2, not Dancing with the Stars. So Linda doesn’t classify herself as a gamer.

And that makes me think that the casual, mass-market gamer will *never* classify themselves as a gamer. In the same way that I watch movies but wouldn’t call myself a film buff.

In short, the mass market will never be gamers.

But they will all play games.

Tom Clancy studio Red Storm lays off 38

2010-08-27T20:47:59Z

Ubisoft has confirmed that Red Storm Entertainment has laid off 38 employees in its North Carolina studio.

More details at GamaSutra.

Added to the Job Loss Tracker.

Ten dos and don’ts for TV companies making games

2010-08-27T12:32:00Z

I was privileged to be part of a session at the Edinburgh Television Festival about games. It’s so important that games and TV start exploiting crossover opportunities much more. Alongside Chris Deering (ex-head of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe), David Yarnton (Nintendo Europe), Paulina Bozek (developer of Singstar) and Sean Dromgoole (CEO of Some Research), I got to talk to telly execs about games.

I very much want to help television producers to make games, and this is my initial sighting shot on it. (Although I think television executives could really benefit from reading Whales, power-laws and the future of media).

The slides I gave at the event were very image heavy. This is the word-heavy version to be read as stand alone.

I think it’s relevant to anyone making games, albeit aimed at television tie-ins.

Ten dos and don’ts for TV companies making games

View more presentations from Nicholas Lovell.