Contracts vs sponsorship vs advertising vs sushi vs shovels
GamePoetry has a nice article up about making money in the Flash space, specifically discussing how contract work can be much more profitable than sponsorships an advertising. From my experience, I’d agree. We have been lucky enough to get to the point where some sponsors are paying us up-front for game, which is a nice luxury. Armor Wars was the first, and it’s gained a respectable (but not fantastic) 1 million plays to date. For us to have earned the same amount of money via advertising would have required at least 5-10 times the amount of plays, which is very difficult to achieve. It isn’t a perfect product, but I think there’s also a certain popularity ceiling to card games.
Thus, one of our upcoming titles is another “board” game (although more in the “board” vein, not the “card” vein), and the other will be a fantasy RPG of sorts. There are a lot of traditional “AAA” publishers starting to take look at the Flash space, and I think that will give it much more of an air of respectability. Will it escalate, XBLA-style, into the realm where hundreds of thousands of development dollars are required to have any success? Hard to say…
When will the gaming industry “grow up”?
Kotaku has published a great article which echoes many of my feelings about the maturity (or immaturity) of the AAA game industry. From my view, games won’t become “serious/arty” until the teams themselves are. Often dev teams will have ‘writers’ who can’t actually write, fanboy designers, producers obsessed with violence/blood/sex, and programmers who don’t want to implement unproven features. I think the best hope is small teams who can innovate in specific areas — story personalization, NPC interaction, moral ambiguity, these sorts of things.
The “new” E3
The “new” E3, not like the “old” E3 of the last few years, but suspiciously like the “glory days” E3 of 5 years ago.
While I’ve enjoyed getting, err, “tipsy” at a number of E3 parties — do we really need to bring back the booth babes? As if we didn’t have enough problems with people thinking the game industry is obsessed with T&A? Does every publisher’s booth really need scantily clad models-for-hire, wandering around handing out schwag to bored journalists and creepily obsessed fanboys?
Flash games and “impressions”
I was just reading an article on Gamasutra about researchers who were measuring “engagement” in first-person shooters. Using biofeedback, they graphed various physiological factors over time — finding that the tempo and pacing of cutscenes, combat distances, weapon interactions, all affected how engaged the user was in the game.
One of the things that immediately struck me was the time scales they kept mentioning. For example: “[…] long and boring tutorials delay the first moment of engagement, that critical moment when players realize they can indeed be immersed in this game. In some games we’ve tested, the first strongly engaging event does not occur until 20 minutes into the experience, a lifetime for a gamer who just wants to have fun.”
Twenty minutes?? In the Flash gaming world, twenty minutes is an eternity. From my decision, the average time between a user playing a new game and forming an opinion (or worse, entering a rating) is well under 5 minutes, and in many cases in the 60-second range. It can be very instructive to watch new games appear on Flash portals, especially when they only have a couple hundred plays, and how quickly they can be rated — often so quickly that the user wouldn’t have had to time complete a single mission. This creates a herd-like mentality, where users initially rate games very superficially, and ratings take 12-24 hours to converge towards a realistic representation of the game’s popularity.
Given this, successful Flash developers have to find ways to engage the user immediately, especially for games which contain non-trivial mechanics. Interestingly, on many portals, the highest-rated games are the ones with the most depth and replayability. This seems at odds with the previous statement; since to achieve that depth, most of these games have sophisticated underlying mechanics. To me, this signals that the games were able to “hook” the user with some sort of initial fun/graphics/technical interest, and then were able to smoothly transition the user along the usability curve, teaching them the gameplay mechanics along the way.
Big-name PC and console titles aren’t hit so hard by this due to a simple fact: the user has a monetary investment in the title. I have personally had the unpleasant experience of going to Gamestop, spending $50 on a terrible game, and then sitting on my couch thinking “Well, I spent 50 bucks on this, and it sucks. Maybe I should at least play it for a while, perhaps it’ll get better…”. In the web world, why waste time on a game you didn’t pay for?
Perhaps it’s just a matter of time compression — free, “bite-sized”, casual, web games operate in a very compressed timeline. They load quickly, they’re played in short bursts, and snap judgements are made about them. However, the upside of all this is a much bigger potential market.