Month: May 2011

Categories
entrepreneurship games industry startup advice

UK games studios and basic business failures

Recently I had reason to contact a bunch of UK games studios. I thought the hard bit would be to find the names of all those out there. Actually, the hardest part was navigating their websites to do the outrageous thing of daring to send them an email…

Here’s a question for anyone lamenting the unlucky business lives of games companies: If your business cannot be easily contacted, how many opportunities do you miss before you even get a chance at them?

Plenty of failures, but some particularly amusing(ly bad) examples I’ve cherry-picked:

e.g.: http://www.freestylegames.com/contact.php

You can *phone* them on a pay-per-minute number (nice!), but you cannot email them. Brings new meaning to the phrase “(their) time is (your) money”.

e.g. http://firebrandgames.com/contact.htm#

The contact page shows up as the “games” page.

Wow. Great QA on your website there, guys. Did *no-one* check it before going live? Do you visit it yourselves?

(and the only things you’re allowed to talk about are jobs and PR. What does this tell you about their priorities, I wonder?)

e.g. http://www.fireflyworlds.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=330&Itemid=314

You can download PHOTOS OF THEIR OFFICES 11!!!!!!1111 (featured not just once, but twice, on that page) … but you cannot speak to them.

e.g.: http://darkenergydigital.net/contact.php

Apparently, the only two possible reasons anyone would contact them is because there’s a bug in their games (support@), or they want a job (jobs@). Hmm. Again: does this reflect studio priorities?

e.g. http://www.hanakogames.com/about.shtml

No contact address, link, or form anywhere. Nice!

e.g. http://www.full-fat.com/

When you click the “contact” button, you get this monstrosity:

javascript:location=’mailto:\u0068\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0040\u0066\u0075\u006c\u006c\u002d\u0066\u0061\u0074\u002e\u0063\u006f\u006d’;void%200

(hackers trying to cross-site-script attack your browser? Or just a deeply incompetent web-designer? I’ll let you decide…)

HINT to Full Fat: webmail. Yeah. Think about it. Over 1 billion people use webmail as their primary mail client these days. Hmm.

e.g. http://www.nitrome.com/contact/

Their email is a Flash app.

A FLASH APP. To display 40 characters of text. Ya, Rlly.

Also: it doesn’t work. When you run it, it displays the text, but won’t allow you to copy it. Huh? I have to manually transcribe the letters. Why? Why, for the love of all that is good?

(and if your spam-protection is really so outdated (and FAIL: you really don’t understand where spam comes from, do you, guys?), then why didn’t you just put a static image in there instead?)

Categories
games industry

UK Games Studios: want more contracts? Contact me…

…fill out this form, please (it’s auto-filling a spreadsheet for me that has everyone’s contact details + key info):

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dFJYbEFNcjdQNmVyUE1TaUNKaGduU0E6MQ#gid=0

NB: I won’t be making this form public, although it might be interesting just to list-out all the names + websites at the end. I’m gathering this info to help with consulting engagements where several of our clients have recently asked something along the lines:

“Do you know any good game developers? We need someone to make X for us”

A few guidance notes:

  1. Respondents must be UK-based (if there’s enough demand from the comissioners, I’ll expand to other countries later – but I’m starting locally)
  2. Respondents must be game-studios with a background in making games. Very young companies can count if e.g. most of your staff are from mainstream games industry, with plenty of titles/credits.
  3. Web companies who “would like to branch into games” don’t count: these are projects specifically for people with detailed game-experience (mostly: game-design, game-asset creation / asset-pipelines, and games-specific production process)
  4. “Clients” here are usually big-name brands, or their retained advertising agencies/marketing agencies
  5. “Incumbents” are marketing-agencies / web-agencies with no games-industry background who are being called-upon to write games; they do their best, but for some projects they’re just not the right fit

Right now, no promises for new work – this is an experiment to see what the landscape of *current* UK studios is like – but I expect to make at least a few successful matchups in the coming months.

Categories
games design social networking web 2.0

Google Street Maps … of a videogame (GTA IV)

This is cool – a great use of Google’s tech, a great example of what it *really* means to drag Online Games and MMO’s out of the stone-age of “do what Diablo did, but with more people on screen”.

Sadly, it doesn’t quite work – none of the stereographic projection stuff (which is key to making Google StreetView) is working here. Oh well.

And it raises the question: why didn’t R* do this themselves, and make more of the R* Club (their “social/online” part to GTA) than the silly farting-about it was at launch?

http://www.gta4.net/map/

Categories
design games design games publishing reputation systems

“by running a spy network I am griefing”

If you’re an MMO designer, and you *still* don’t grok the griefer-mindset, or you somehow hope/believe that “one day, there will be no griefers”, then maybe this RPS interview with the always-fun-to-watch Goonswarm will help you:

MT: We are griefers. If nothing is going to happen then we’re going to try to find something that screams and bleeds and poke at it.

RPS: Griefing is something goons are known for doing, but now I’m talking to you it’s not something I can imagine you personally doing.

MT: Technically speaking, by running a spy network I am griefing.

RPS: But would you go out and aggravate other players for the Hell of it if you were a lower ranking member of Goonswarm?

MT: Well, most lower ranked Goons make their money by doing that. Scamming people is a very quick way of making money in Eve. Rather than making an honest buck, you take that buck from somebody else.

and, much further down, maybe this will help you see how griefers often serve just as positive and valuable a role as all your “preferred” player-types:

RPS: For my money, Eve might be the most fascinating game in existence today. But that doesn’t stop it from being interminably boring as well.

MT: Right. I mean most Eve players are stuck in high security space mining, and a lot of the core PvE in Eve has you sitting there are watching three grey bars slowly turn red.

Goonfleet is a socialist alliance. We give people ships so that rather than being forced to rat [fight low-powered AI NPCs] they can take part in PvP, we teach them how to scam so that they don’t have to mine, we teach them how to make ISK most effectively, we give them a lot of ISK and we reimburse their losses. This way they can focus on the fun aspects of the game, like griefing and warfare, so they’re not forced to endure derp-derp-ing around high sec.

If they play your game, you should be glad; if they grief, you should be asking yourself why – and if you’re a commercial operation, you should probably be asking:

“are they fixing a problem for us?

can we afford to leave them to it, part of our unpaid workforce?

and:

is it worth our time trying to fix the problem itself, or should we accept their help and move on down our never-ending list of pending fixes?”

Categories
advocacy conferences games industry

A brief aside: Speakers at UnConferences can sometimes be very wrong

Great writeup in PCGamer about GameCamp4, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the feel of an unconference (and google the term if you want to know more).

The first unconference I went to, the very first session … the speaker clearly didn’t know what he/she was talking about. They mouthed a bunch of nice-sounding soundbites, but way out of touch with reality. Worked out OK – the audience took over, collectively, and turned it into a great session, with lots of people providing their own knowledge.

That’s when an unconference works great – weak speakers displaced by a more knowledgeable audience.

And then we have GameCamp4. I missed the session on “crunch”. If I’d been there, I’d have cried bloody murder before letting them settle on this:

“The general consensus at the end of the half hour seemed to be that, while a lovely idea, games needed a crunch time, otherwise they’d never be finished on time. The idea that crunch wasn’t all that productive was raised, but there was enough experience in the room to shoot it down. Turns out games developers are quite happy with their battery farm conditions. Or at least, the ones in the room.”

“enough experience … to shoot it down” … WTF? Bullshit.

Let me be absolutely clear, as someone with 10+ years experience, having run teams at multiple studios, and having worked on multi-million-selling titles:

Crunch is *abuse*. Crunch is never “necessary” to finish a game, it’s something the management requires or allows, when morally they ought to be preventing it.

Anyone who says differently, first ask their job role; If they say “producer”, “manager”, or worst of all “director” bear in mind these are the roles where people directly benefit through the abuse of others; be very suspicious. It’s akin to asking a Slave-Trader whether slavery is “a Bad Thing”.

I wrote a lot more, but it came across as a rant against Mike Capps (who’s infamous for implying that only 2nd-rate developers don’t crunch) and Erin Hoffman (who’s infamous for railing against crunch, and then doing a volte face and implying that all the abusive corporates are just poor, misunderstood humans who are lovely really).

Categories
advocacy computer games games design games publishing

The 10 Games You Should Have Played

This list is WRONG (and it’s on the Internet)

…and here’s your chance to challenge it.

This was written in a frantic half-hour with 30-odd people with many different ideas and suggestions. My role was to shepherd the opinions towards a concrete list of 10. There *was* a specific agenda/aim I had in mind – but I didn’t tell people that up-front, I wanted to let them go in whatever direction they wanted.

Now it’s done, I’m reaching out to everyone who cares about this stuff, and saying:

Come up with your own rules for a top-10, define it clearly, and share your list.

Blog it, link it back here, and we’ll see what people come up with. I’m expecting a lot of variation on the inclusion-criteria for a top-10, and (hopefully) as much variation on the games people choose / reject.

Other people’s top-10’s

The original top-10

May 2011 – GameCamp 4

A few weeks ago, London was host to the fourth GameCamp – a 1-day unConference devoted to games, game-design, and game-playing.

I wanted to give a talk, because that’s half the fun of an UnConference. I wanted to do something fun, interesting, and above-all *new*. What’s the point of giving a talk you could have given at a “normal” conference?

My Plan

I vaguely remembered that Darius had once run a session on “Indie games that haven’t had the attention they deserve” (or something like that), where he’d cherry-picked some great fun games that were relatively unknown in mainstream circles, and gave them a free boost of attention.

I didn’t feel confident to do that myself,but I knew there were plenty of people at GC4 who were much deeper into the fringe of games and game-design, and no doubt *they* knew what was out there, and had played it all.

So, one quick scribble later:

“10 Games you Should have played (but probably haven’t)”

Reality

I was afraid I’d get an audience turn up and expect me to do all the work, where I needed them brainstorming and providing the ideas themselves. I could see it easily being shaped by the (lack of) variety of the first few suggestions, so I set out to come up with a wide range to kick off.

With a full TEN MINUTES before the start, I roamed the hallways, looking for victims. I spotted a few familiar faces, game designers and writers I could corral, and asked them for a quick 3 “games people should have played”.

First response I got, courtesy of Adrian Hon: “Paintball”. Ah. Thanks, Adrian. You just exposed the flaw in my title. I never mentioned the words “video” or “computer”, although I’d assumed them.

Other interesting titles I was given in the hallway included: Civilization (the computer game, via Adrian), Journey to the End of the Night (via Holly Gramazio, I think), Tetris Attack (ditto)…some good variety to kick us off.

Those 10 games in full

We had a packed room, approx 20-30 people. I won’t detail the process, but in our 30 minute slot we managed a long list, with some brief explanation of the more obscure games, and then we voted on which ones should go to top-10. Fortunately, there were 10-12 games that were CLEARLY a lot more popular than the rest.

Here’s the full list (illegible with crossings-out)

And here’s the top-10, with their respective (approximate – I was counting fast!) votes:

  1. Tetris [*]
  2. Portal [*]
  3. SimCity [*]
  4. The Secret of Monkey Island (either/both) [11]
  5. Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (text adventure) [10]
  6. Mario Kart [10]
  7. Zelda (any/all) [10]
  8. Deus Ex [9]
  9. Day of the Tentacle [9]
  10. Populous [9]

[*] = so many I didn’t bother counting; more than 2/3 of the audience.

Categories
games industry recruiting

Games Industry Art Jobs – jobs.conceptart.org

Relatively new. I had a brief look, seems to be a fair number of “entry-level” art jobs, as well as standard full-time roles:

http://jobs.conceptart.org/

Categories
agile recruiting startup advice

“I have never regretted firing anybody. Not once.” – Mark Suster

One of those things that most business people don’t talk about unless prodded. I’m not sure why, but I assume it’s one aspect of the fear “don’t burn any bridges; don’t let anyone think you can be nasty; don’t let anyone see you’re human”. None of which are healthy, long-term ideals IMHO – although they may be a good idea for many people. (they’ll often keep you in a job you’re unsuited for for longer than you would survive without them).

“I have on many occasions regretted not firing somebody quickly enough.
…
I’ve made every excuse to myself in the past, “I can’t fire him now, he owns the customer relationships and it’s a crucial point in our sales process.” Or, “I haven’t given him a long-enough chance to prove himself – let me see how he develops” or even, “it will have a big impact on morale because she is well liked. I can’t afford that right now.””

Some other good points in the post from Mark, including his list of 3 key ideals in hiring. Although … I still don’t agree with his “if [you change jobs] 5-6 times there is probably a pattern that isn’t completely the fault of some asshole boss.”. Well, I agree with the deduction – I’m sure there is a pattern, something interesting causing these rapid job changes – but I don’t agree with his conclusion that this is a bad sign in a jobseeker / candidate *for a startup*. (for a corporate role, it’s a huge red flag; for a startup, it might even be a positive selector; IMHO it’s too complex an issue to make catch-all pronouncements like Mark’s)

(and c.f. my previous comments on hiring, e.g.:

“I’ve noticed practically no correlation between skilled people going on to fulfil greater potential – many did, but many got worse. I’d still hire very skilled people – you know they’re useful – but … and this is a reflection of my own interests … in a startup environment, I’d tend to look for the enthusiastic ones by preference.”
)

Categories
entrepreneurship startup advice

“startup fundraising isn’t about convincing skeptics but rather finding true believers”

(From an aside by one of LinkedIn’s founding team (interesting blog post on what it was like raising the first Series A funding for LI))

This is one of the hardest things for “old style” European VC firms and Angels to get their heads around, IME. And it’s entirely true, IMHO.

In general, if you find your startup is like swimming uphill against a stream – no matter that you’re succeeding – then it’s either a crummy startup hardly worth doing, or you’re going about it the wrong way. In most startups there are many occasions when it’s difficult or hard work – but in each case, the “working hard” part is optional: you could keep working at a normal pace and still succeed; you just choose to work harder in order to take your “success” and make it “a bigger success”. If you have to work hard just to avoid failure … forget it.

I suspect it’s the infamous protestant work ethic that (perhaps) leads vast swathes of UK and EU people to believe:

“if I work hard, and I suffer, I’m (deserve to) going to succeed; I should expect it to be hard, and cultivate difficulty; easy things are to be suspected and – ultimately – avoided”

IMHO, it’s more likely that a lazy person will find a great product/market/timing and be successful … than that a hard worker will take a weak product/market/timing and force it to succeed by working their ass off. A startup is a company; more than any individual – if the idea is great, other people will join, and tend to pull the work-output closer to the average.

Think on this:

if you’re a lazy founder, every person you hire is bringing the average up. If you’re a workaholic, every person you hire is bringing it down.

(Who am I kidding? If you’re a workaholic, you probably aren’t allowing anyone else in anyway – and don’t have time to interview them. You’re working harder and harder, somehow subconsciously convinced that “hard work” will inevitably create “success”)

Categories
programming recruiting

1,001

Most “gamification” achievements I couldn’t care less about (and this is the Dirty Secret of gamification – most consumers don’t care), … but this is one of the few that I do:

(and I post this in the full knowledge that it’s possible to game (i.e. cheat) your way to well over 2k rep on StackOverflow … but I’m chuffed anyway)

Unlike my experiences of the SO clones, SO is *still* a very high signal-to-noise ratio, in my experience. And so I still care about it – and value the SO score on other peopl’s profiles

(yeah, not-so-subtle hint: your SO score is now a standard part of any employer’s background checks, if they’re smart. Can make the difference between getting an interview or not, let alone getting the job)

Categories
games industry

It seems, Mr. Outsourcer, that you’ve been living -two- lives…

IMHO, there are two types of outsourcing in the games industry; one type is much easier for the outsource company to get off the ground, and is therefore much much more common.

Two types…

Type 1: lowest-hanging fruit

Signs:
…”we delivered EXACTLY your spec – including the bits we knew were typos”
… managers (but none of the staff) are ex-industry people with lots of management experience
… very low-cost (often: 20% or less of the cost of doing it in-house from scratch)
… professionally managed by account directors (may be *called* project managers)
… very VERY large number of clients and portfolio pieces
… always able to fit you in (they work very fast / efficiently, and churn stuff out fast; they can “scale up” relatively easily / quickly)
… terminology is usually about “booking you in”, etc – words from assembly-line companies

Type 2: specialists

Signs:
….expensive
… less interested in the spec, more interested in the overall goals
… the staff (not the managers) are typically ex-industry people with lots of experience
… you might have to wait 3-9 months for them to become avaialble for your project
… terminology is usually about “product development”, etc – words from development studios

It’s all in the Aspiration…

Type 1 companies are either making a fast (but small) buck, or are very smart. The smart ones are growing as fast as they can, and building up a cash pile. Sooner or later they setup internal, wholly-owned studios, and build their own product – which has a much higher profit margin. They offset the risks / costs by using their own (now huge) outsource teams to do lots of the work.

Type 2 companies often drift back and forth between being outsourced dev, and being paid-by-the-hour Consultants. These companies survive or fail a lot more on their pure skill and unique abilities/experience; their profit margins are much higher, but they have way fewer contracts and growth / scaling up their team is much harder.

How should you deal with them?

Most of what you hear about “working with outsourcers” really only applies to the first group, e.g.:

  1. write an AWESOMELY accurate + detailed spec. Triple the amount of time you normally spend speccing stuff, to make sure this one is perfect. (PS: as a side-effect, you’ll end up answering lots of design qestions you probably had been avoiding or weren’t aware of yet – that’s often hard work but helpful to you in long run)
  2. be damn sure they’re profitable and stable – these companies often operate on tiny profit margins until they’ve scaled up. The less-smart ones never manage to increase their profit margins
  3. don’t be afraid to hurt the business-relationship: in their business, they have to accept every project that comes along. These companies are ever-hungry for work (to fuel their growth). Bear in mind they have aggressive, skilled salespeople, and probably love to play hardball negotiation
  4. think of them as vendors, “selling” you a pre-packaged product that you specced 6 months earlier

For type 2 companies, I feel the rules of engagement are different:

  1. don’t waste time on detailed specs: much of these guys value is that they can and will (re-)write your specs for you to be closer to what you wanted/needed
  2. be very careful of the relationship – you’re dealing directly with high-skilled experts, and there’s relatively few direct-alternative companies. Don’t piss them off, or underpay them, or they might not work for you again – you’re not “negotiating with a salesperson”, you’re “distracting an expert who’d much rather be off working than sitting around arguing over price / service / SLA”
  3. think of them as freelancers (although they’re obviously a different beast – you’re paying them to do a lot more than just freelance, much more than just follow orders), working with you to build something day by day

One of these lives has a future, and one of them … does not

In my experience, the first group often have a clear goal of success and riches, and a specific business plan to take them there. Whereas the second group often operate more as a “lifestyle business” – i.e. the individuals a making a decent annual wage, they’re doing something they enjoy, and it’s low-stress. They like the work, they get enough profit per project that they can survive through “lean times” when the market goes into recession, etc.

So, in most cases, there’s a high rate of “successful” type-1 companies (high turnover, employing 50…100…or several hundred…staff, lots of cash flowing around). Successful in sales terms, but … typically struggle to make anything beyond a low profit margin.

And a very low rate of “successful” type-2 companies (most of them are just pootling along, happy in their own little world, but neither growing nor shrinking – from an investor perspective, that’s a dismal failure: you’ll never get to sell your stake for $$$).

On the other hand, it’s usually the second group that contains the really huge successes (albeit a very small minority): the companies that pivot, the teams that come up with a huge money-making idea “unexpectedly”. There’s few better ways for a group of experts to “invent” the Next Big Thing, than to service dozens of clients a year for a couple of years and bide their time till they spot a gap in the market. By that point, they’re in a perfect position to capitalize on it…

Categories
fixing your desktop iphone

Apple UK Contact Email Address

…because Apple hates giving customer support, and buried this address deep in their website, in a tiny font where it’s almost impossible to find:

contactus.uk@euro.apple.com

…and they just screwed-up an order we’d made, but all their emails were sent from fake Apple email addresses (“You have replied to a confirmation-only address that cannot accept incoming email.”).

The only alternative they offered was an expensive pay-per-minute phone number. I’m obviously not one of the True Mac Faithful: I don’t agree that *I* should pay Apple to fix *their* mistakes :).

Categories
amusing iphone

Apple: “Yes, we have iPhones in stock. But you can’t buy them”

Apple UK continues to show that they don’t have a clue how to operate a retail operation.

We’ve got an app that’s demoing today and tomorrow, and it would help if I had an extra iPhone4 to run it on. So, I try to buy one from the local Apple shop.

Hi, do you have any iPhone 4’s?

“Do you want a contract?”
“No”
“Well, in that case: no. We don’t have any” ([To Other Guards] I told him we already got one)
“But … if I *do* want a contract, you’ve got some?”
“Yes!”
“But you won’t sell me one of those, even though you have them?”
“No!”

When will you have [these magical non-contract] phones?

“No idea. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not”
“…”
“Here’s a phone number – you can call them at 9am tomorrow morning and they’ll tell you if we have any that day”
“So, I can call, and reserve one and collect it that day?”
“No. They’ll only tell you if we have one RIGHT NOW when you call – it could be gone when you get here”
“So, this number is totally useless?”
“Well … it’ll tell you whether maybe we probably might have one. We don’t do reservations any more. We used to, all the time. But then we … uh … stopped”

http://store.apple.com/uk

“Order now, in stock, ships in 24 hours”

Categories
games design marketing and PR programming

“Do I look fat in this?” … “You do now!” (Kinect FAIL)

Here’s an excellent idea: use Kinect to display clothes on people in real-time, inside a fashion retail shop:

http://ar-door.com/2011/05/virtualnaya-primerochnaya-dlya-topshop/?lang=en (Scrub to 0:25 – first 30 seconds is moronic marketing-person bumf)

This has huge potential:

  1. Much much faster than browsing – potential for more positive purchase decisions in less time
  2. Less space lost to changing rooms – fewer rooms needed for same number of customers (space is often at a premium in retail outlets)
  3. Show an enormous range of stock while keeping very little on-site
  4. Show every size, rather than just the sizes that are in stock on-site

But hey – wait a minute – look closely at the person who’s posing in each case. Why does the on-screen person look like they weigh twice as much as the person who’s in front of the camera?

Ah. I see. It’s that recurring problem again: marketing companies that don’t know where to hire skilled tech staff. Here we’ve got 3D model wrapping apparently done by someone who’s never heard of Convex Hull. This is basic Computer Science (IIRC it’s taught in almost every CS undergrad course today) – wrapping string (or cloth) tightly around a solid object is an interesting and very common problem.

OK, it’s version one; “we’ll fix that in beta”; etc. Except … you’re demoing this to:

  1. women
  2. in a fashion store
  3. in public
  4. when they’re about to pay money
  5. for clothes

…and you’re making them look:

  1. uniform weight (which for short, young Muscovites is – according to the video – usually “much larger than reality”)
  2. saggy (look at the video – they failed to register / stretch the clothing for the head/neck-to-knees length; in most cases, the women’s busts are aroudn their waists, and their waists are around their knees)
  3. masculine (most women’s clothing hangs; it’s soft, flexible; here, the Kinect models have no physics, not even primitive struct-based bending, let alone springs. Doh)

All of which put together makes this a FAIL. Technologically it’s all fixable, but from a sales/marketing perspective it’s enough to send many people screaming. Fingers crossed that the company (ARDoor) manages to make huge sales anyway – the potential here is enormous, and some of what they’ve done looks great (I like the simple interface, and the giant “Smile!” instruction).