T=Machine

Here’s a question about increasing the profitability and decreasing the development cost of any MMO, although probably no-one except the web-people will recognise it as such (and even some of them won’t get it):

How do you improve the customer support for an existing MMO?
[where do you start, and what do you target?]

Or, to put it another way, here’s three questions that I bet most games companies cannot answer without waffling:

1. What is “good” customer support?
2. Why do we care about customer support?
3. How good is our own customer support?

Time-out

Before I go any further with this, I want to point out that there are (at least) three main areas of Customer Support, of which I’ll only be covering one. The others are all covered reasonably well within the industry (hmm…maybe not so well, actually - but certainly better than this one).

Those other two areas are:

• Controlling what CSRs (Customer Service Reps) say and do to make sure they are “on-message” with what the Marketing and PR departments are trying to do
• Managing a community via forum-moderation, live events in-game, real-world events, etc

The other kind of Customer Support

…can be looked at in two different ways:

1. Handling routine questions, complaints, rants, and moans from customers. Helping them fix their PC enough to play your game. Helping them get their credit-card payment to go through successfully
2. Buying future revenue for unrelated products, one person at a time

This latter view emphasises the idea of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). I’ve worked with plenty of people who felt we “ought” to be nice to customers, and make their experience with us a pleasant one. They generally disliked (or detested) the first view, but they themselves were only half-way between the two views; they didn’t really know why we cared (or should do) about customer support. I was like that myself for a long long time, until I sat down and thought about it properly.

We still don’t know what “it’s a service not a product” actually means

I’m sad to say this, but it’s true. On the whole, MMO and Online Game developers/publishers *still don’t get it*. They think they do, but they don’t.

Various people started chanting the mantra “MMOs are a Service, not a Product” back around the time of Everquest (the first one) and Ultima Online. In the game industry at large it peaked around the time of Gordon Walton’s “10 reasons you don’t want to make an MMOG” talk at GDC 2003. By now (5 years later) the industry has understood a couple of things about this subject, but on the whole it’s failed to think about it strategically, and has pretty thoroughly *missed the point*. Most people see the trees but not the wood - the mantra is so short and simple and easy to understand, people tend not to think it through, and so don’t realise the connotations.

What’s the most important high-level goal of a Product company?

“Shift more boxes”

What’s the most important high-level goal of a Service company?

“Purchase more customers”

…huh?

Yes. The primary goal with a service-oriented business is to BUY something, not to SELL it. Because a serviced-customer is a cash-cow that can be milked at any point in the future, every day for the rest of their life (in the case of corporate customers “the rest of their life” can be a very long time, maybe even measured in centuries). It’s worth buying them, even at great cost.

For people who are accustomed to the box-shifting view of business, this feels like it flies in the face of everything they know about business. Actually, it doesn’t, but it exposes an unstated assumption they’ve made throughout their lives: with EITHER business, you are NOT really selling (or buying) anything - you’re entering into contracts. A “sale” is, to give it its full title, a “contract to exchange a thing of value (a good or service) for a price”. In the case of box-shifters, the terms of the contract merely state that they are receiving “an amount of cash”. In the case of service-managers the terms of the contract state they are receiving “a batphone connected directly to the mind + wallet of the consumer”.

Or, to simplify: box-shifters “sell” for cash right now, and service-managers “buy” a relationship that they can later rent for cash in the future.

And there we have the root of all that follows: any company that chooses to sell a service instead of a product has - implicitly - chosen to FORGO cash IN LIEU OF taking possession of a RELATIONSHIP. i.e. they’ve actually *paid money* to get this “relationship-thingy”, so they’d better make sure they know what they’ve bought, that they didn’t “over-value” it, and that they know how to extract the “rental money” in the future.

Yes, you can still charge cash AS WELL as buying the relationship - but most people are doing that well enough already, and don’t need help from me to do it better.

Time for me to answer some questions…

Why do we care about Customer Support?

(NB: CS == every time a customer needs or wants something and get its from something you’ve done or said, whether they contact you directly, visit your website, or merely go back and read past emails you’ve sent them)

ANSWER: Second only to the in-game experience itself, CS is the richest, most direct part of the Relationship that you’ve purchased. For a service, it is more important than all the rest of your Marketing and Sales.

Marketers fight constantly to get their voice heard loud and clear - and without distraction - by consumers. In practice, thanks to free speech, anywhere that YOU can talk to the consumer, so can all your competitors. And so you find yourself desperately trying to “stand out from the crowd”, and get your message across. Even then, you cannot personally visit each customer, you have to rely on communications channels, different media (print, TV, news reporting, etc) - and each one of those channels introduces Chinese Whispers, corrupting (or deliberately censoring e.g. your mighty claims) your message.

A direct, unfiltered, uncensored, uncontested channel to every consumer’s mind is the best thing a marketer can hope for.

And you have one. It’s

• …sitting down in your CS department swigging a bottle of meths and wondering why no-one cares about it.
• …lieing in a filty heap of smelly clothes out the back of your website, wearing a tattered hat marked “Account Management”.
• …parading itself in a smokey bar full of leering shadows, doing lap-dances in a bra covered in sequins that spell “Abuse” and a thong that says “…My Email Address”.
• …erected a toll-booth at every corridor in your User-Experience Building, with three forms you have to fill out in triplicate for everything from getting a glass of water through to going to the bathroom. The three forms are titled: “Username”, “Password”, and “Best friend’s neighbour’s mother’s maiden name” - and each corridoor has a different layout of forms, and a different set of valid answers. Some of them swap about randomly every morning “…to confuse the Enemy!”.

Fine. Enough poking games-companies in the eye with a blunt implement. Where do we go from here?

What is good Customer Support?

That makes it quite easy to answer this question now. It has to:

1. Monetize the relationship we paid so much money for
2. Prop-up the relationship when it starts to falter
3. Cement the relationship and make it stronger
4. Remind the customer how much nicer you are than their last Girlfriend/Boyfriend, and that if they leave you they’ll never find true love again
5. KEEP THAT RELATIONSHIP AT ALL COSTS! (up to the difference in how much it’s worth and how much it cost to buy in the first place)

I’m sorry to all the people who diligently work in CS with no thought of monetization and think they’re just genuinely helping people. Yes, you are helping people. But you’re paid to do it because someone else in your company (your boss? your boss’s boss?) is using that as part of how they monetize it, or as part of something that helps to make sure the customer is still around in the future solely in order to BECOME monetized.

I put that last item in caps for a reason other than dramatic effect. Since the first item is “to make money” the last item is “…(profitably)”. If you calculate the total FUTURE revenue from this customer, and then spend up to that amount in order to keep them, you are guaranteed to always be profitable. Since you cannot guarantee they will remain a customer, you have to put a percentage discount on the expected future revenue that is proportional to how many of them you think you will lose unavoidably. Obvious stuff, and obvious difficulties abound there … all makes for a busy time for CFO’s and CMO’s to extract the most profit possible.

How good is our own Customer Support?

Most companies cannot answer this. In desperation, they collate graphs such as “number of support queries per month” and “percentage of support queries marked as Resolved by the customer, and with a customer-rating of 4 stars or above”. So what? That tells you some stuff about how good your CSRs are at being nice to people (not a lot, but some); it’s largely irrelevant from a wider CS point of view.

What you need to evaluate (again, self-evident from all the above) is more like this:

1. How much money are we spending on each customer? (min, max, average, median)
   • this is a simple headline figure, it solves no problems, but it can hilight that there IS a problem … somewhere

   • should be “total cost of the Relationship” not “how much do we pay our CSRs”
2. Segmenting customers by type, what’s the profitability for each Relationship?
   • Choosing those types is what you pay your Marketing Director for, it’s not trivial (inventing them is tricky, but working out how to actually MEASURE each type can be really difficult)

   • examples include:
     1. “people who bought our product at retail”

     2. “people who bought the digital distribution version via steam”
     3. “Spike TV viewers who saw our review in January 2005″
     4. “Parents who liked our game so much that they bought a copy of our game for their children”
     5. “Parents whose children liked our game so much that they bought a copy for themselves”
     6. “People who created an account on our website”
3. Ditto what’s the loss-of-relationship rate?
   • i.e. ONE of the inputs for calculating that “discount percentage chance-of-losing-a-given-customer-over-time” figure mentioned earlier
4. How much money are we making from each customer?
   • YES, it’s “what are they paying in monthly subscription / virtual goods purchase volume”, but NO that isn’t all it is

   • How much cash have we made by selling them some unrelated product or service (careful: that one will need to be monetized too)?
   • How many unique products have we sold them?
5. What are the trends in all the above for our userbase, zero-aligned?
   • i.e. if you measure all those figures and graph them over time for a user, you get one graph for each that shows e.g. “after 12 months, they bought their first secondary-product”

   • …if you average that for “all users in a given segment” (see above) then you get a graph that is both observational (based on fact) and also predictive for any future consumers of the same or similar type
   • You can then use this to spot trends in your relationship-management and relationship-capitalization
6. Then get fancy: instead of graphing the above by “time” on the x-axis, graph it by “milestone”. This way you can see if e.g. “having to visit the website to file a bug” is damaging your Relationships (people buy less other stuff once they’ve done that), or is failing to capitalize as much as intended (people don’t buy ANY MORE THAN BEFORE after they’ve visited your website to file a bug)
   • Read that example carefully. Think about it. Most MMO/online games companies don’t think about it.

   • HINT: Remember what I said earlier, about how the Relationship is a direct channel to the customer. Think about what that SHOULD have been going down that channel while the user was filing the bug
7. …and so on…

All the above list is, to a marketing person, teaching a granny to suck eggs. Good ones should know this stuff inside out. On a daily basis they ought to be working with more detailed, cleverer, more difficult-to-measure-but-we-measure-it-anyway-because-we’re-hard-workers demographics and actions. I’m presenting it more to illustrate the point than as an actual guide (I wouldn’t advise any real company to blindly do the above verbatim).

Conclusion

The Relationship is *everything*, and it must be:

• Guarded
• Monitored
• Strengthened
• Monetized profitably

at all times. It may seem that the last of those conflicts with the first three. In fact, all four of them are mutually conflicting, and you have to continually comprise, and re-compromise, finding the dynamic balance that best fits your company’s overall strategic aims.

The mistake many game companies make is to obssess about just one of the above (usually the “guarded” part if you “care about the company’s reputation”, or the “strengthened” part from a partially-enlightened marketing person). Many just ignore all four of them, and instead only look at the “spending” half of the word “profitably”, and ask continuously “how can we reduce CS costs?”.

Many game companies consider that the roles of the Sales and Marketing departments are to do this kind of analysis and activity on “future customers”, and fail to recognize the inherent waste of potential profitabilty that comes from ignoring the most valuable asset the company has: the hundreds of thousands of Relationships that it has bought, and paid for, but is only partially monetizing.

The simple guide I found here doesn’t actually work, although it “mostly” works. Several bits are out of date. Even then it only *partly* works, because it leaves all PEAR commands as requiring root to run. That may be what you want, but I doubt it. Not what I wanted.
(more…)

phpMyFAQ is a nice idea, and mostly it’s well done, but with a few basic mistakes in how it’s been implemented that were so annoying I couldn’t live with them. There’s no Debian package for this app, sadly, so things like “using a better version of TinyMCE” require you to manually fix them all (no package-management based solution here, unless you want to maintain it yourself?).
(more…)

In my joyous travels developing a fun little iPhone game recently, I kept track of all the many tips and tricks and gotchas I came across. There are a fair few bugs in Apple’s IDE (including at least one critical one that bit me), some stunningly bad flaws in the Objective-C language (it’s *horrible*), and some slightly surprising lack of docs from Apple in key areas (like: how/when do I get paid?)

There was too much to blog it all, so instead I installed a free FAQ software and I’m gradually transferring my notes over to this FAQ (only got a few questions in there at the moment, just fresh installed):

http://iphonefaq.t-machine.org/index.php?action=show

(the one you probably want to start with is: How to make applications for the iPhone?)

There’s an awesome feature to this FAQ too (not that I’ve tested it): anyone can go to the site and click “Ask a Question” and it gets added to a list for admins to answer and post. You can even answer your own question at the same time as asking it.

If you’ve been developing iPhone apps yourself and have some burning questions or neat tips of your own, feel free to go to the FAQ and add them in. Any problems, email me (email address is on the About link at the top of this page)

Dan’s put up the slides from his talk at the Let’s Change the Game Conference - but more importantly he’s done a long writeup with the slides embedded in the text, so you can get the flavour of the talk he gave even though you missed it.

He set out to be mean and nasty and ranty, but I think Dan is far too nice and friendly a person with too little viciousness in him to be like that in person. IMHO, on the day he was much more genteel, and so in some ways I think the written version of the talk is even better than the talk itself.

Anyway, well worth reading if you have any interest in making better ARGs. Don’t expect to get any concrete advice, this is a talk aimed at prodding you to re-think objectively just how often you give in to temptation and use weak devices and shortcuts that if you saw someone else doing you’d berate them for. Although it may not seem like it, I think Dan’s talk is an excellent intro for beginners to ARGs, since it will likely warn you off the big temptations that experienced ARG makers avoid or use with care, but newbies these days may find it easy to go overboard on. Don’t take it too literally, if you know all about ARGs already.

Gamasutra’s just posted an Opinion piece (so it’s not GS’s position, they’re just giving air-time to the author) about the interview process for getting a job in the video game industry.

Right up-front the author states that one of the three aims of the employer is:

“To pay as little as possible”

What?

No.

Don’t work for companies who have that on their agenda, unless there really aren’t any better opportunities available (hey, it’s a recession - maybe you just have to accept a second-rate job right now).

A company that wants to pay as little as possible cares less about you than they do about sucking value out of you for their profit and spitting you out once you’ve been used up. Note: this is not “making best use of their assets”, this is “carpet-bagging value-extraction”. It’s an attitude that leads to miserable work environments and unstable teams.

So, to anyone getting a job in the industry: Please stop propping-up the bad business models of the companies that do this, and work for the most decent company you can find instead.

EDIT: clarification, after several people responded to say that the statement really meant the company was just aiming to “pay no more than is necessary to secure your services”:

• I will pay a contractor “no more than is necessary”.
• I want more from an employee. I will pay them how much I value their contribution to the company.
• Then when I ask or hope for more from them than 37.5 hours a week and a “I only do what it says in my job description” attitude, I can feel that the balance of payment is fair.
• And when a contractor says “that’s not in my contract”, I’ll feel guilty for trying to sneak a freebie past them - and blame *myself*, not them, for saying no.

(NB: I like the overall idea of the article, but I object to quite a few other details, especially from the employer perspective; for instance, telling candidates to pretend to be something they’re not just in order to get the job is not appreciated, dude. Both company and candidate need to be honest in the interview, because otherwise one or both of you will get rather unhappy starting about 2 hours into your first day on the job, and it’s not a relationship that’s going to last)

Bienvenue au blog, M. Bidaux!

“There were many reasons, but mainly, we decided against it because we knew that we would be very busy and the blog was always going to be left as a “when we have time” thing, and that always translate into in a “if we have time” thing.
…
The main issue was the commitment a good blog requires. There is nothing as sad as a blog you really like that gets updated irregularly. We will solve this right now, in this first post, just by managing the readers expectation: we won’t commit to have regular updates and features on this blog.

It’s OK, Thomas - we won’t stop loving you if the blog updates are irregular. I think it adds to the charm.

Fortunately for us, Thomas and Diane forged ahead anyway, and the ICO Partners blog is now open for business, featuring “in an approximate English and at irregular intervals”:

* news from the online game sector
* views on common and uncommon problems we encountered working on online games
* news on ICO Partners activities

…could be that the “beat your staff with a stick, and if that doesn’t work … beat them harder” style of management was de rigeur for the Norwegian games industry:

AoC, in the words of an (alleged? ex?) employee:

the problem with Age of conan is that the game was in “crunch” for almost 3 years.

…who had *great fun* working for a company called Funcom:

then i was sick for a week, after having worked so intensely. i’ve never been that sick before, says “theodor”.

after having researched if the workers rights are after the work environment laws, and talked to his colleagues about this, he was asked in by the management. there he got a lucrative quitter-package if he stopped working the same day, which he agreed to.

…and Anarchy Online:

Keskin tells that he chose to leave Funcom because he was treated very badly by person in management. as he was being laid off, he claims that lies were spread about him from the management to his earlier co-workers.

i worked on anarchy online, and played that game for several years. it was a joy to work on the game, but if you ask questions, either about what they say to the public, or about something ethical– there’s a lot of strange things going on there– they turn around very quickly.
even if the whole thing is about if you want to do improve projects you’re working on, keskin says.

Of course, it could all be a big misunderstanding (mistranslation), since I don’t speak Norwegian, and I have no idea where any of my Norwegian friends are these days to ask for a second opinion on the translation (PS: Bjorn, if you ever read this blog, get in touch :)).

The App Store is just another casual games distribution platform + social network. You can pretend it isn’t (sometimes I think Apple is still pretending that it’s just an extension of iTunes, and ignoring the social side completely - Doh!), but that doesn’t make it true :).

Apple’s had the iPhone version of the App Store running for more than half a year now, and made tens of millions of dollars from it, so what’s it like? Where’s the social stuff good and bad? Where’s the game distribution stuff good and bad?

iTunes App Store as Social Network

• SHARED STRUGGLE: find good apps that you want, and don’t mistakenly pay for ones you don’t want
• SOCIAL ACTIVITY: three ratings systems for all apps (number of reviews, average STAR rating, text of reviews listed 25 at a time)
• COMMUNICATION CHANNELS: only one: the text of hand-written reviews, with each author required to use a globally unique “nickname”
• SELF EXPRESSION: authors get to include freeform text + 1-5 screenshots, and can name their apps using common branding (e.g. TapTapRevenge is one of several “Tapulous” apps). Consumers get to write freeform text within reviews

iTunes as Social Network: Successes

Um … not many. Apple is doing a very poor job of this right now.

They’ve barely provided the absolute minimum to allow for the emergence of a social network, although they do have enough there. Clearly the users are already making it into a social network, despite Apple’s failure here (just read the review texts).

iTunes as Social Network: Future

Things that we can expect to see as the network matures, assuming no-one at Apple wakes up and smells the roses and puts more SN features in place first:

• reviews with embedded URL (”see my other reviews here”), allowing individual reviewers to become brands (c.f. Amazon’s top reviewers for how successful and mutually lucrative for both Apple AND the reviewer that can be!)
• app descriptions that talk about the brand more than the app (actually, this has already happened; I’ve seen quite a few apps that have 4 paragraphs of description, the first two of which are talking solely about the OTHER apps from the same developer that you should go and buy instead. This happens especially with FREE apps. No surprise there, standard marketing technique)
• conversations inside the reviews (again, already seen this a few times where one review refers to other reviews of the same app by nickname or by the content of the previous review). Apple made the reviews system “look like” a web-based forum, so its no surprise that people try to use it that way (I think Apple would see this as a bad thing, and I suspect they count it as one of their foolish mistakes), but the UI is very difficult to use in this way (there’s no timestamp for comments, no threading, and pagination is very poor; a typical popular app with 1500 comments has 60 pages, all of which load slowly!)

iTunes as Social Network: Failures

Well, there’s obviously a LOT of things it’s missing as a Social Network. c.f. my previous posts on Kongregate’s more than 15 rating systems for ideas on what Apple MUST do there, and how far short Apple is right now.

Just looking within Apple’s own design, a few “bang forehead against wall” design flaws become quickly apparent:

• When you try to review an app, you HAVE to provide a “title” for your review and a “nickname”. But … when you’ve written the review, and saved it, and left the screen, it does a check to see if anyone else has ever used the “nickname” you specified. If so … Apple automatically deletes your review. No, I’m not making this up - there is no way to keep the review or re-submit it if your nickname is already taken. Good luck finding a unique name, folks! Note: this is not merely a question of being your iTunes account - you already have to be logged-in to your iTunes account before you even start a review (it prompts for password before letting you write the review).
• The only place you can give a 1-5 star rating for an app is from the screen where you install it. But … as soon as you click the install link, it takes you out of the install screen and to the main desktop, where you get to wait while the app downloads. Fair enough. Except … Apple has one other place where you can rate an app. When you delete / UNinstall an app, Apple pops up an automatic rating dialogue and asks you to click 1-5 stars. Hmm. Let me think for a second; if I’m DELETING the app, what bias am I likely to put on the rating? Oh yes. There is no equivalent for getting you to rate the apps you actually like.

iTunes as Casual Games Distribution Platform: Successes

Success 1: submission is now almost instantaneous

In December 2008, I submitted an app on Sunday evening. Two working days later, 17:30 California-time on Tuesday afternoon, the app was accepted by Apple. It appeared on the App Store available for purchase + download that same evening.

Apple has been on the receiving end of huge amounts of anger, frustration, and disappointment over the time it’s taken them to review submitted apps this Summer. They’ve been berated time and time again for failing to anticipate the obvious demand from developers - especially considering they CHARGED each and every developer $99 before the developer could even start coding, so they had plenty of warning. But the fact is they appear to have finally got on top of this, and are turning around apps fast.

(NB: I’m partly basing this on things like this thread on the iPhoneDevSDK forums where people have for months been posting to a thread how long they’ve had to wait for approval, so you can see how it’s changed over time)

Success 2: Operator Price-control is almost non-existent

You can give your apps away for free, if you want.

You can charge $1, $2, … all the way up to an amazing $1000.

No matter how much you charge, the operator’s margin is always the same: 30%. Nice and simple.

As a developer, you get a reasonable, albeit still not “fair”, 70% of the revenue. Compare this with casual games portals, where 50% share is still marketted as “generous”, and many portals try to get developers to accept 25% or even less. Oh please, don’t make me laugh - portals depend entirely on content for their revenue, and most should be giving the developers 75% of the revenue as a base figure.

The only failing in price-control / free market I’ve seen so far with this is that Apple won’t let you charge different prices in different territories. I don’t think that’s necessarily such a bad thing - geographic differential pricing has long been used to rip-off consumers - but it does have a weakness: there are many territories that are more price-sensitive than the US/UK/France/Germany, and developers lose the ability to price themselves in to those markets.

(NB: there is a workaround for this. You can choose to sell each app into precisely any combination of countries. You can also choose to localize each app for any precise combination of countries. So … you could make an English app and sell it for a single price, and separately make localized apps which are identical but just have all dialogue in a different language, and sell them at a different price. Technically, you could just make the same app without localization and sell at different prices, but I’m pretty sure Apple would reject that at submission time, since they’ve hardcoded the system to not allow you to do that the easy way)

By comparison, console manufacturers typically charge a flat license fee per unit sold. I.e. if you make a Playstation game, no matter what price you charge for it in the shops, you have to give Sony e.g. $10 for every copy sold. That becomes a de-facto form of strong price control.

Success 3: No devkit required

How much does it cost to (legally) develop Flash games?

Well … about $700 (just don’t buy it in the UK…), plus the cost of a PC. Yep, that’s what Adobe is charging for the developer versions of Flash these days. Go figure; most Flash game developers are almost certainly using pirate copies. (you *can* technically get much of the toolchain open-source, but none of it was production-ready last time I looked).

How much does it cost to (legally) develop iPhone games?

$99, plus the cost of a Mac, plus the cost of an iPhone.

NOTE: “the cost of a Mac” - this is one of the big sad things about iPhone development: someone in Apple won the political battle to try and use iPhone sales to prop-up the weak sales of crappy Mac desktop computers; it is impossible (and I suspect maybe even illegal, technically?) to develop iPhone apps on most computers. You have to use a Mac instead.

But if you have a Mac, and an iPhone (just a normal one - no “devkit” nor “testkit” required), then it’s a mere $100 to develop AND LAUNCH a game live on the App Store.

iTunes as Casual Games Distribution Platform: Future

This is tricky. I’m not a fan of crystal ballgazing (sic), and hate e.g. “my predictions for the new year” that everyone loves doing every December. But anyone devoting resources to iPhone development MUST have an opinion on this stuff right now, because it’s going to define the success/failure of their strategies. So … here goes.

Thinking about the histories of classic markets and platforms, though, you can see that the history of iPhone App Store has gone something like this:

• Private pre-admission of “special” developers
• Launch, with a small number of apps
• Early adopters, every developer made lots and lots of money, even for poor quality apps
• With no limits on quality nor number of titles per developer, the market became saturated, and new apps make zero money, while consumers find it hard to find anything they’re looking for

What happens next?

With a closed platform owned by a large well-funded corporation with lots of marketing dollars, we can expect that very soon Apple will make some sweeping change to the way distribution works. This is because they have been making large amounts of revenue, and huge ARPU, to date - but are almost certainly seeing ARPU’s drop off as the consumers struggle to find new good stuff. (revenues should still be zooming up as more and more customers acquire iphones, and more and more of them buy the “classic” apps, for instance buy for the first time the whole of the top-10 most popular that are automatically featured by the App Store)

NB: Apple couldn’t give a flying squirrel about the developers; don’t for a minute think they care what happens there. What they care about is that consumer-confusion is leading to dropping ARPU’s - which means they are missing-out on a lot of potential revenue.

NB2: Apple almost certainly would care about developers if they started haemhorraging the good ones to Android, but the evidence to date suggests that developer love of the iPhone is far too great for that to happen for a long time to come.

Obvious things Apple might try (remember: Apple is infamous for “bold” moves, and pride themselves on it)

• Integrate Facebook with App Store, giving every developer a Facebook page, so that consumers have a richer interface (Facebook + web browser) for browsing the store
• Allow iPhone apps to be run on PCs and Macs - the language they are written in (Objective-C) works perfectly well there already, and they have a high-quality iPhone Simulator that all the developers are using to test their games (it looks like a photo of an iPhone, with your app running on the “screen” and responding to input in real time). This would allow general web-based marketing and general web-based purchasing. This would either be stupid (throwing away all the benefits of their closed platform), or genius (taking over the world of casual app distribution and putting out of business not only portals but also ultimately many mobile phone companies, and probably once and for all killing Microsoft on the phone).
• Build a better App Store, perhaps do like Sony did with the PS3 store, replacing a UI nightmare with a basic, simple, ugly - but functional - system. Given how small the screen is and how much data there is to navigate - and the fact that you can’t use modern nav systems like Tag Clouds on an iPhone screen - I suspect they would have to go for ugly+functional even though they love “pretty” design (they’ve done ugly in lots of places both inside the iPhone and in OS X, wherever function or cost was more important, so this is not unprecedented). This is the boring route, and for anyone but Apple, I’d expect them to take it. I’m not sure they can restrain themselves to “boring” though.

iTunes as Casual Games Distribution Platform: Failures

“Too many to list”?

Apart from all the obvious rants that people have blogged and forum-posted all over the web, there is a slew of technical and operational bugs and failings in the system, some of which are unacceptable (i.e. CRITICAL bugs and the like).

But mostly these are only of interest to people actually coding for iPhone, or team leads managing the distribution profiles and app submission, so I’ll cover all those in a different post.

(a.k.a. “How to invest in MMO development … profitably”)

The world is full of games companies that blow stupid amounts of money on making online games (typically “massively multiplayer online games” (MMO)). It’s time to put a stop to this madness; honestly, I thought everyone learnt their lesson about 5 years ago when we had the last wave of “everyone’s making an MMO … oh god, these things are TEN TIMES as expensive and ONE HUNDRED TIMES as difficult as we thought … Run away!”. Apparently not.

I think there’s two ways you can learn for yourself how to make a profit from developing online games:
(more…)

As part of our super top secret new startup we’ve been making some educational games, and for fun (in my spare time) I tried porting one to my iPhone. It’s a simple maths game which I thought would work well with a touch-interface. If you have an iPhone, you can get it here:

Download from Apple iTunes Store

(this is a bit of an experiment - if enough people like the game, I’ll take the time to plug it in to some serverside stuff we’re doing which will add a bunch of feedback/stats/scores features for anyone who’s got the game)

Here’s some screenshots (note: it’s specifically designed for people with big fingers/thumbs … like me … hence the big buttons :))

You have to drag your finger over numbers to select a group that adds up to the TARGET, and try to clear the board against a time-limit. You can select in any direction, and jump across gaps (HINT: it’s a good idea to select a bunch of numbers in the middle early on to give you more options later).

NB: if you do buy the game, feel free to comment here with wishes/suggestions. I’ll be making some small improvements over the coming weeks (once you have the game, the updates are semi-automatic and free) - although I fit this in to my spare time. I’ll definitely fix any bugs.

Also, I thought it might be interesting to include the Backlog I used when making this game. If you don’t know what a Backlog is, go read the main reference for Scrum (it’s an easy read and hugely valuable - Amazon link on the right). All items are recorded in chronological order of when they were COMPLETED (several of these items were only added halfway through implementing other items, but were completed first).

Completed Items:

• get touch working to move arbitrary images and alter logic-states
• get a grid of numerals on screen
• get touch detection for each numeral to know its been touched
• make nice graphics for each numeral
• chop the images into 8 separates: 1,2,3,4 + green versions
• keep a list of which array-indexes are “currently selected”
• add touch-stopped logic to reset all green images to grey by iterating over the list of currently-selected when let go
• add an array of the number values
• use the correct images for each number
• change the image-changing code to change the images to green versions
• add a target number label at bottom of screen
• add touch-stopped logic to calculate whether sum == target
• add a label at bottom of screen of score
• update score with += (10 * correct sum / time in seconds taken to get it)
• fix allImages to be fully dynamic array
• resize the images (imagemagick? or in an on-the-fly way) to fit 4 across and 4 down
• add icon image for app
• need to call “set menu bar dispay == false”
• selected numbers are removed and unselectable once a correct sum is given
• -== MARK this is where I switched from alpha to beta (new Xcode project) ==-
• make background black!
• make the clear-screen-gives-bonus-resets work, see if its fun
• make the TARGET much more prominent, huge even, at top of screen
• add a RESTART button for when player cant continue
• track the highest score so far in the current play-session
• move all source graphics into a safe place
• fix artifacts on numeral graphics
• FIXED - check the touch bounds - I think its 320×320 by accident somehow
• FIXED - can select the first item of next row by clicking off RHS edge of last col
• FIXED - graphic for number 3 is missing RH final pixel column (possibly)
• get Quartz primitives working at the same time as sprites
• add a timer progressbar style
• increase the timer each time the player gets one right
• add initial popover: HELP or PLAY ?
• make touchesBegan modal to handle initial HELP/PLAY dialogue
• make HELP switch-view to a help screen, with BACK button
• add HELP screen that explains how to play (probably one big static image?)
• if num-selected == 1, popup message: must select more than one number at once
• if no score after 10 seconds, popup help message on how to play
• add app description stuff for iStore
• submit to apple store!

Pending Items: (not sure if I want to add these yet; still playtesting them)

• if no correct sets left, popup message: stuck! game over
• remove the possibility of “impossible” boards (still possible to kill yourself through bad choices!)
• make the timer get faster and faster so that you cannot “play forever” and get an infinite score
• vibrate each time the player gets one wrong
• add an animation cycle for wrong answers that temporarily paints them in a red colour

Rejected Items: (features that I thought of originally but later decided it was more fun without them)

• add touch-accept logic to refuse the additional selection based on context
• change the background colour - black through to red - as timer ticks down
• if incorrects in a row > 2, hilight a correct set
• randomly pick target using LEGAL options, and change when correct

Remaining Bugs: (due to be fixed in next update)

• change last line of cells to pick not “average” but “smallest viable” first to reduce number of impossible boards
  • NB: the way the board algorithm works, the first 3 rows are completely random, and the final row is carefully picked to make sure the whole board is a multiple of the TARGET number;

Coding for the iPhone has been a fascinating experience, and I’ve been taking lots of notes as I went along. Expect a veritable PLAGUE of iPhone development blog posts soon ;). The ultra-quick summary would be something like:

1. Programming for the iPhone is great fun.
2. Objective-C is a poor language, and lets the phone down.
3. The frameworks / libraries that come with the iPhone are *mostly* very good - about as good as the better standard-libs from Java (J2SE, not J2ME!)
4. the IDE is about 99% working, but is missing perhaps as much as 50% of the functionality of today’s standard IDE’s (!)
5. the dev/distribution system is about 90% working, and the other 10% can easily take you many days just to “upload a binary” (!)

It took me a bit longer than 2 hours and 40 minutes to make, and *days* to workaround the problems and bugs in Apple’s systems, but once I’ve learnt the rest of the libraries (I haven’t worked out sound, video, web, networking, complex animation yet) I reckon I’ll be able to make new games quicker than in java but not as quickly as in Flash.

Alice Taylor, Channel 4

From the ARGs in Charity and Education conference last week. Alice was forthcoming on real data - and, more importantly, C4’s outlook/perspective - on a bunch of issues. Very useful stuff.

As ever, errors and ommissions my own, and my commentary [in square brackets].

Background

Until 2008 C4 education had a budget of £6m to spend on TV shows. We had a morning slot around 9:30, target audience british 114-19 year olds. All great telly, but 14-19 year olds are either at school, work, or college, so we were merely getting the odd ill one and practically no others.

So we started thinking about where they really were, physically, and go to them.

So this year we’re spending all that money on x-platform projects. Combination of:
- straight-up TV
- games on the web
- new platforms (we’ve never done anythong on before) such as mobile or XBLA etc

ARGs…

Two of the projects for 2009 are … sort-of … ARGs

Projects we really liked that we saw: Perplex City (PXC), World Without Oil (WWO), Jamie Kane (JK), Lonely Girl 15 (LG15)

LG15 people thought was an ARG, but wasn’t.

PXC you can think of as an ARG, but it wasn’t entirely. [ADAM: Ha!]

If you define ARGs as a realtime mystery to solve using lots of tech, it becomes too narrowly defined. But we love narrative and cross-media content and live events etc.

We put out a call for “broad appeal” + “something ARG-like for 14-19 year olds” to see what we’d get.

Content

We dont work to the curriculum per se, we go for the softer stuff that they need help finding their way through - sex drugs alcohol relationships etc

We’re doing x-platform games, some single-platform games, it has to be free-to-play (we have to make this F2P because its Education as PSB).

WWO: the great thing was that it was such a serious topic, and yet also had a really high impact.

• Want to avoid scaring people senseless (c.f google: Wonderland ARG weird)
• Want to attract wide range of people, dont want to alienate the main audience
• Giant audience who dont want to do much interaction

Channel 4’s ARGs

First game: genomics, genetics, evolution, etc. Scientific core that would appeal to teenagers, introduce teenagers to privacy of genetic material etc. Trying to balance spicing up without dumbing down. There are flash games with DNA themes - trying to get attention, very easy to play flash games. Going to distribute those across miniclip, yahoo games, etc - try to bring people in, get them to watch videos on the side, get them even more engaged, and then finally get them into the ARG stuff.

[ADAM: immediately brings to mind Xenophile Media's reGenesis ARG that was run explicitly as a TV show + web ARG a couple of times in Canada. Assuming this isn't just a syndication of the original RG, it will be interesting to see what parallels (if any) there are between these]

Second game: privacy, security, personal security - and what happens with social networking. Lots of msitakes by kids, eg 12 year olds, discovering the hard way how dangerous it is. We’re going to get them to experience eg cyber-bullying both as victim and perpetrator, so that when they really experiece it they’re a bit better prepared to handle it.

How will we measure success?

We have to compete wth the broadcast TV part of Channel 4, which means competing with “millions of people overnight”. We’ve been asking: how can people play these games if they stumble over it a year later on the web?

Well, we have to hit UK people, young especially. Doing a hell of a lot of research, especially on PR - how to seed it, when to seed it, etc. We will probably publish a whole load of data afterwards to say “this is what happened”

Q&A

Q: are the games standalone, separate from C4’s brand / TV channels?

One of them has a sponsor/partner (Wellcome Trust). They loved the game theme so they provided us with real scientists and look at all the data we put in the game and vet it for accuracy.

Do we use the rest of C4 to help this along? Yes.

With the first game we’re having a large launch event at C4 head office. C4 Edu does get some TV slot between programmer at peak time - so we’ll put URLs in between adverts for e.g. Hollyoaks.

Bow Street Runner was done to complement a post-watershed show (City of Vice). You could push from the TV to the game, but we weren’t allowed to go backwayrds becuase the game was designed for teenagers.

We found that having an advert on the telly does create a spike, but talking to the target audience direclty works much better - e.g. seeding on gaming blogs was much more effective. TV definitely useful, but definitely not the overwhelming promotion thing.

Q: is 3 months the optimum time for a game? (both the C4 ARGs for 2009 are coincidentally that)

Dont know. Maybe its because we’re a broadcaster and they’ve targetted it to us as what we’re used to for TV dramas etc.

Q: do you have to play the 3 months simulcast?

Out of 3 args we looked at:

• One was: live theatre stuff, if you miss it all you can do is watch the videos after
• The other two were: turn up play through anytime

Q: can you syndicate an ARG experience?

I really think you can. Where they work is where they have post-finish value. WWO is being repackaged as a teaching tool now, for instance.

They can be localized relatively easily.

At C4 we own buy the rights to the specific game, we never take the tech or format rights, so it’s easy for people to re-sell as re-skinned elsewhere

Q : [ADAM: ... 3 questions at once ... I didn't hear them at all ... ]

14-19 yo if you go for the full bracket yo uhave to be appealling to a wide variety already, so it will often hit 12 years too, but definitely we’re expecting to hit people a lot older than 19.

There are 4m 14-19 in the UK. We check whether the amount it costs us is worht it for the number of people we get it. 15 minutes a month is the benchmark for getting a single viewer on TV, so games are way higher than that normally, and TV is also extremely expensive compared to games stuff. We get 50% of C4.com viewers as overseas, so attracting non UK people as well is fine too.

[ADAM: what about forging international-relationships between people - is this not covered by PSB? That's a bit sad if not]

It would be a problem if the game appealled only to, say, Australian OAPs, so missed our target competely.

Q: is there competition in the games?

There will be prizes to be won, there will be status tracking, but no overall winner. We are not aiming to have a “win point” for the game.

Q: if going for younger audience how does privacy about taking peoples details affect you, how does it affect community if you limit talking?

If you introduce registartion, the will to play drops off massively. Even asking for email address maybe 50% of people will remain. Adding another field gets rid of another 40%, so you end up losing 90%.

[ADAM: pet peeve here - while the basic point is very true and very important, this is something that a lot of people doing their first online game have no idea what they're doing, and screw up - but it's well-understood and well-researched if you go and do your homework. ARG's are not *that* much different from signup for casual games, MMOG's, etc, and I don't consider the 50% figure a reasonable estimate except for alpha and/or low quality implementations, and while 90% can happen, it's so far from what you should see if you do any pre-planning that it's not worth talking about, IMHO. Also, I wonder if Alice's figure is an overall drop rate (?) and doesn't take into account those people who were going to leave anyway, which would inflate it anywhere from "a bit" to "a heck of a lot" depending on what your traffic sources are. e.g. make sure you run A/B tests to establish a baseline drop rate]

Sometimes you have to - e.g. when running live events for legal reasons you need to.

Juliette Culver

Main post on the conference is here.

As ever, errors and omissions my own, and any personal commentary is in [square brackets]

EDIT: updated with some corrections, courtesy of Juliette

Introduction

Started when the CRUK competition was launched about a year ago, we were the winners of that competition, and made this game. Did it all in our spare time, and the game only finished last week.

To play the game, you signed up as a trainee secret agent on a website - http://www.wearenottheagency.com/ - main site has a grid in the centre, 10×10. Each cell it he grid is an agency sleeper cell that needs to be funded to combat EVIL.

New cells got released gradually over the course of the game.

On release, each cell has to be sponsored with real cash, usually up to around £30, and the sponsor gets to choose the icon that then represents it. The team who sponsored got a 10-hour headstart on the mission (it was free to play - you would just always be 10 hours behind the curve).

Puzzles

Most missions were puzzles of some sort

(example: listening to morse code recording and decoding it)

(example: create a scene from a James Bond movie in lego)

(example: make a cake)

(example: knitted cup of tea and knitted biscuits (angelsk))

As well as the puzzles, we had a story. Key NPCs had their own blogs, and one had a twitter feed. Story revolved around working out which of the NPCs was a mole.

EVIL = Erudite Villains In Leather

EVIL website was available (and ugly) and the players had to work out the password to get in at one point.

The evil mastermind’s pet goldfish had its own blog, and would drop hints to the player, because she hated her owner.

Each time you complete a puzzle you get a reward of some kind from the sleeper cell. Sometimes these were cosmetic / fun / jokes, other times they were bits of a huge jigsaw puzzle, a blueprint for a doomsday mahine. That jgisaw puzzle also had encrypted numbers in it that players had to decode and find a particular book - The field guide to the Birds of the West Indies (which inspirted the naming of James Bond) - and the nubmers from puzzle decoded names of the birds that lead you to cancer research UK shop, where a copy of that book contained a clue to a masterplan kept in Bletchley Park.

Rewards

If you sponsored the game, you got a certifiate in the mail, and a business card which had a single letter written on it in UV ink. Players didnt quite manage to get all that data together in time to make the message with it, so game ending had to be changed a litle.

Stats

amount raised: £3110

donations: 108 (by 66 people)

players > 4000 = 42
players > 1500 = 72
605 reg players
62 people posted to forums

34 twitter followers
5300 visitors
avg time on site 11.5 minutes
num players on facebook group = 135
number of players at end of game social event = 2

forum posts = 1296

Q&A

Adrian: do you think it was a success, what would you change

Juliette: 4 main things to change: our original plan was amibitious (such tend to win competitions) and we should have scaled back after winning before starting, and added them in as we had time. We had too many people involved in development which made things inefficient and it was particularly hard to make decisions quick enough during the live game. We didn’t think enough about the game design before making it, partly because the team was mostly working remotely, one of the key people at the start was in liverpool when most of the rest were in south east; getting together in real life was the most productive thing but we didnt do it enough.

Dave: the biggest problem was that we relied a lot on skyped, and it would have been a lot easier if we’d been physically co-located.

Alex: either think more creatively about advertising, not enough time thought about how to market it, too much thought about just delivering it.

Marc: spent a lot of time making a game for ourselves, and we could have thought more about who was going to play it, and what they would like, and where they would spend most of their time. Turned out at the end that most players really just wanted the puzzles, and weren’t that interested in the meta-story / mega-meta-puzzle we made - so that time perhaps wasn’t entirely well-spent.

Adrian: what would you try out next time

Alex: we launched at start of school term, but didnt take advantage of that. We had some teachers contact us wanting to do thigns with their kids.

Q: I found the puzzles at the start were so hard that I couldnt get as far as the meta-story. With PXC (Perplex City) there were millions of forums posters who constantly helped you with the puzzles as an individual, so it was OK it was fine, but with this there were very few people helping you.

Dave: a lot of people have said to me that it looked eally good, but the initial puzzles were - perhaps not too hard - but more engaging, maybe some easier, maybe some more attractive. We had a lot of people visit the site who never engaged. Eventually we added a Start Here cell which helped a bit, but it was late. We had no obvious starting point for people new to the site.

[ADAM: very interesting observation here - PXC was a major commercial undertaking, with 1.5 years of warm-up marketing before the main game launched, and then lots of professionally-managed PR etc. Other ARG makers need to be careful when taking inspiration from PXC to note which things were inherent to the genre/game, and which were inherent to the presence of a substantial full-time professional development company]

Q: generally do you think that ARGs are a viable mechanism for charities, not only a resource financially, but also the market - are ARG-players the correct market that charities are trying to reach?

Adrian: during conversations we’ve had with charities, a lot of them want to target younger people because their own demo is skewed too much away from that right now.

The time it took is a red-herring - we didnt spend that many hours over the course of the time we spent.

Adrian: getting a lot more players at the start would help using non-ARG techniques eg CRUK has a lot of marketing it can do itself for such a product. CRUK was such a big organization that there were lots of people inside the org who had no idea of the existence of the ARG.

Q: with 600 people playing, how did they find the game?

Word of mouth, people blogging about it (e.g. the Guardian games blog ran an interview about the game) [ADAM: GGB has a substantial readership, and Aleks Krotoski has featured ARGs quite a few times, so I'm surprised they didn't get more players than that], about 2 thirds were ARG players already.

We didnt really have anyone concentrating on the PR, which let us down a bit.

[ADAM: