Why build an Entity System?

At a generic level, this is covered in the other posts. But it’s taken years for me to have the time/inclination to write a new one from scratch outside of my day-job. What happened?

1. I left my iPhone in America, and it took 2 months to get it back
2. Google gave me a free Nexus One, in the hope I’d write something for it (ha! Their cunning plan worked…)
3. The Android marketplace is such a miserable morasss of third-rate crap that eventually I was compelled to write my own Android game … just so that I would have something to play (there are very few games on the Android store that are even worth the time it takes to download them)

I’ve been making games for a long time. I know how much effort will go into it, how much time, and how much slog there is before it becomes worth it. Writing a game on your own often means putting in 90% of the effort to get 10% of the reward.

Enter … the Entity System. If I were to pick a game-design that mostly used data-driven game features, I could implement it around an ES, and massively reduce the amount of planning needed to get the game running. I could maybe have a working game after a mere 20% of the effort. Hmm…

Building the ES for Android

Android runs something that’s *almost* Java (although more on that later – Android’s version of Java is very slow at some of the core libraries, and it really shouldn’t be). Technically, Android supports all the core data structures from Java (Collections), and the templating system (Generics).

If I were writing an ES in C++, I’d do it using templates without pausing to think; I wondered how well the same might work with Generics, given that Generics is *not* a complete templating system, although it provides quite a lot.

Getting started: early ES decisions

How to design/implement this thing? Well, we know one thing for sure:

Entities have a single name/label/global-ID. Entities MUST NOT contain ANY DATA: these are NOT objects, this is NOT OOP!

There you go, the Entity class wrote itself:

public class Entity
{
   public int id;
}

This immediately raised some concerns for me, being the seasoned coder I am (ha!). How the heck was I going to write any code that dealt with these things if I didn’t have references to them? Obviously, sometimes you do have references, but other times you expect to follow refs from within the objects you have, to get to the objects you need. That wouldn’t be happening here, since there are no inter-object refs.

public class BaseEntitySystem implements EntitySystem
{
	/** I'm too lazy to write a "safe" method to get a globally-unique ID; for now,
		I just return 1 the first time I'm called, 2 the second time, etc... */
	protected int getNextAvailableID();

	/** Whenever you create an entity, you'd better invoke this method too! */
	public void registerEntity( Entity e );

	/** The method to solve my fears above */
	public Entity getEntity( int id )

	/**
	 * Merely removes the entity from the store. It becomes a GC candidate
	 * almost immediately (since all other refs are transient)
	 */
	public void killEntity( Entity e )
}

…but, again, being a Veteran coder, the survivor of many painful battles on the field of programming … I didn’t trust myself in the slightest to “always remember” to invoke registerEntity. Quick trick: give the Entity class a static reference to a default EntitySystem, and have each EntitySystem check if that reference is null when starting; if so, set itself as the “default”.

public class Entity
{
	...
	public static EntitySystem defaultEntitySystem;
	...
	public Entity( int i )
	{
		id = i;

		if( defaultEntitySystem == null )
			throw new IllegalArgumentException( "There is no global
 EntitySystem; create a new EntitySystem before creating Entity's" );

		defaultEntitySystem.registerEntity( this );
	}
	...
}

public class BaseEntitySystem implements EntitySystem
{
	...
	public BaseEntitySystem()
	{
		if( Entity.defaultEntitySystem == null )
		{
			slog( "Setting myself as default entity system (Entity.default... is currently null);
 self = " + this );
			Entity.defaultEntitySystem = this;
		}
	}
	...
}

W00t! I can create Entity’s, and I can find them later on. Awesome. What about those Components, then?

Getting started: Components in Java

I’ve done ES in C++ before, with real templates, so I wasn’t really thinking at this point … I just ran with what seemed natural based on prior experience. The thought process (had there been one) would have been something like this:

1. This is java, I use Eclipse: I absolutely *must* have the IDE know what data/fields exist in each component so that Content-Assist/Autocomplete works 100%. Otherwise I will gouge my own eyes out having to remember, and doubly so each time the app compiles but dies at runtime because of a typo in a field-name.
   • Requirement: each unique Component must be defined as a java Class, with each of the fields being a public member of that class
   • Requirement: to access a Component of a given Entity, you must invoke a method which returns something that is typed (as in language typing) to the correct Class

I made a Component class, and had all Components extend it; there is a particular reason for this, but it doesn’t matter right now – essentially, it lets you define shared behaviour for all Component subclasses, and just saves you time on typing.

My first real Component:

(NB: I defined this *inside* another class, because I couldn’t be bothered having N source files for the (large number of) N Components I was bound to create. Hence the “static”):

public class MyEntitySystemExperiment
{
	...
	static class Position extends Component
	{
		float x, y;
		int width, height;
		float rotationDegrees;

		@Override public String toString()
		{
			return "("+super.toString()+" @ ("+x+","+y+") * rot."+rotationDegrees+")";
		}
	}
	...
}

Great. I have a component. Now comes the largest single piece of work in the entire implementation of the ES: writing the methods to:

1. Add a component to an Entity
2. Fetch a component from an Entity
3. Remove a component from an Entity

Fetching a Component from an Entity

This is the win/lose point: if this works well, our ES will be nice and easy to use. The other two methods (add and remove) are simply twiddling bits of data. This one is the challenge: can you make it *easy* to write code that uses the ES, and for that code to be clearly *understandable*?

public class EntitySystemSimple extends BaseEntitySystem
{
	HashMap<Class, HashMap<Entity, ? extends Component>> componentStores;

	public <T> T getComponent( Entity e, Class<T> exampleClass )
	{
	   HashMap<Entity, ? extends Component> store = componentStores.get( exampleClass );

	   T result = (T) store.get( e );
	   if( result == null )
	      throw new IllegalArgumentException( "GET FAIL: "+e+" does not
possess Component of class\n   missing: "+exampleClass );

	   return result;
	}
	...
}

Boom! It works.

Let’s just stop briefly and I’ll explain why. Reading Java generics code from cold (just like reading C++ templates) often takes a lot of hard thinking.

Looking at the “result” of this method, we want it to be (enforced by the compiler):

1. “an instance of a class that extends Component”
2. “an instance of the particular class/Component that we requested – not just any old subclass”

public <T> T getComponent( Entity e, Class<T> exampleClass )

Here, I failed. I wanted the signature to be:

public <T extends Component> T getComponent( Entity e,
	 Class<T extends Component> exampleClass )

…but I couldn’t quite get it to work. I’m too rusty with Java Generics (hopefully someone else can point out my stupid mistake(s)).

But for the most part, it works. Because it causes you to write application code that looks something like this:

public void doSomethingWithAnEntity( int globalId )
{
	// remember, we NEVER hold refs to Entity objects for long
	Entity e = entitySystem.get( globalId );

	Position position = entitySystem.getComponent( e, Position.class );
	position.x = 5;
}

…and what’s far more important is that the “type” of the “Position position = …” line is already hard-typed to “Position”. So, the content-assist will *auto-complete* anything put after a dot on the end of that line, e.g.:

	entitySystem.getComponent( e, Position.class ).AUTO_COMPLETE

…so you can instead write your method much quicker, and yet very clearly, as:

public void doSomethingWithAnEntity( int globalId )
{
	// remember, we NEVER hold refs to Entity objects for long
	Entity e = entitySystem.get( globalId ); 

	entitySystem.getComponent( e, Position.class ).x = 5;
	entitySystem.getComponent( e, Damage.class ).hitpoints = 145;
	entitySystem.getComponent( e, Renderable.class ).foregroundColour = Color.red;
}

Time-out: HashMap

HashMap is the “correct” class to use in Java for this setup: it’s the exact equivalent of Hashtable / Dictionary / etc in other languages. We need to map (somewhere, somehow) from one thing (an entity) to another thing (a component).

NB: this does not mean that you have to use HashMap as your data-store for the ES; I positively encourage you to consider other options. I used it here as the most obvious, simplest possible structure that would do the job. If you think back to my posts on Entity Systems for MMO development, I’ve often suggested that the data store could *and should* be any of many different things. In particular, SQL databases make for an excellent data-store (and remember you can get in-memory SQL implementations that do away with all the expensive write-to-disk stuff).

Unfortunately … Android seems to only partially support HashMap. You can use the class, but it runs an order of magnitude slower than you expect for a normal JVM (compared to the speed with which it runs other methods). It seems to have problems with the hashcode methods, but also even with basic iteration over the Map contents. Odd. Later on, I had to do some tricks to speed up the ES, just because of this problem.

Fetching a Component from an Entity: Redux

The examples I gave above for accessing components were lean and clear on the right hand side (thanks to autocomplete and strong typing), but terrible on the left-hand-side. By the magic of OOP, I’m going to clean up the LHS. BUT (and this is a big “but”) … make sure you fully understand what I’m doing here. With what I’m about to do, it would be very easy to fall into one of the traps of ES development: slipping back into OOP techniques.

Looking at the example:

	entitySystem.getComponent( e, Position.class ).x = 5;
	entitySystem.getComponent( e, Damage.class ).hitpoints = 145;
	entitySystem.getComponent( e, Renderable.class ).foregroundColour = Color.red;

… applying OOP mindset, we see that the first argument is redundant; the Entity already knows about the EntitySystem to which it’s registered.

Also, we know that the Entity class will never have any methods or data other than the ID. If that’s the case, the only thing we’d ever “get” from an Entity is a Component. So, we can add this to Entity:

public class Entity
{
	...
	/** Gets a filtered view of the entity's data, only returning the subset that
	 * corresponds to a particular one of its components */
	public <T> T getAs( Class<T> type )
	{
		return source.getComponent( this, type );
	}
	...
}

…which converts our usage example to:

	e.getAs( Position.class ).x = 5;
	e.getAs( Damage.class ).hitpoints = 145;
	e.getAs( Renderable.class ).foregroundColour = Color.red;

Using the ES with Systems

Recap: right now, we can:

1. Create entities
2. Add components to entities
3. Read/Write the data inside each component, on a per-entity basis
4. Fetch entities by globally unique ID

One last thing is needed before the ES can work: we need a way to fetch Entities “by component”.

e.g.:

public class MyEntitySystemExperiment
{
	...
	public void runLoop()
	{
		while( true )
		{
			// move all the entities
			positionSystem.move( MOVEABLE_ENTITIES );

			// check for collisions
			collisionDetectionSystem.process( MOVEABLE_ENTITIES );

			// render all the visible entities
			renderingSystem.render( RENDERABLE_ENTITIES );
		}
	}
	...
}

We need a way to provide the arguments that are capitalized above. We know that these should be plain-old lists of entities. We know they have to come from the EntitySystem. Finally, we know that the only defining characteristic of these lists is that everything in the list has *at least* a particular Component.

(respectively, in the example above, the lists contain: “all entities that are moveable”, “all entities that are moveable AND all entities that are barriers to movement (e.g. solid walls)”, and “all entities that should be displayed on-screen”)

So, one more method for the EntitySystem interface:

public interface EntitySystem
{
	...
	public List<Entity> getAllEntitiesPossessing( Class... requiredComponents );
	...
}

“Class…” is just a convenience; in many cases, you’ll be insisting on a single Component. In many other cases, you’ll be insisting on a set of components. Java varargs provide the minor convenience of doing both of those in one method, while retaining type-safety.

The implementation of this method is obvious: it iterates over every entity that’s been registered, and checks it against ALL the required components. If it possesses all of them, it goes into the output list.

Finis

That’s it. So easy! Obviously, there’s more to it – the other methods you need to create should be mostly self-evident – but this should be enough to get you started.

Now, I’m not sure where to go from here. I’ve got a working Java ES. I’ve got some performance improvements and feature improvements. But … in practice, hardly anyone writes games in Java (except Android programmers, and there aren’t many of those), so … is it worth it?

Alternatively, I might just run through some of the practical pros and cons I encountered when actually using the ES in writing the game-logic. There’s some interesting things that came up which most people encounter sooner or later when doing their first ES, and which might be worth looking at in more detail.

One last thought…

Did it work? Did this ES allow me to write a decent Android game?

Yep. I wrote a space-invaders / bullet-hell game with it. It worked fine on Android phones for a hundred-odd enemies and bullets on screen. On Android, thanks to the crappy JVM, it started to chug after that (dropped below 30 FPS), so I had to make some substantial performance improvements, and now it’s happily rendering 300 things all flying around at 20-30 FPS. The game is far from finished, but it’s playable and fun for a minute or so – a definite achievement considering how little of it I’ve written so far.

NB: it’s got some way to go before I’ll be happy releasing it. But, given a few more spare evenings, I hope to get this up on the Android Market as a free download in the near future.

I’m pleasantly surprised that the Android phones can handle something as high-level as an ES, in a pure, unoptimized “simplest possible” implementation.

“3D gaming? What if the game characters saw the GAMER in 3D instead of the other way around? Is it really only myself that thinks like this?”

(along with other greats such as: “A good game can be played on a 12″ black and white TV. Fact.” … and “What do all games require? The answer is someone to play them. What if a game went against that very concept?”)

Submission

• Author: (tony.almazan at gmail.com)
• Title: Galaxy Trader
• Type: Casual mutliplayer Facebook game
• Word count: 373 words

Proposal

Ever wanted to be filthy rich and travel the galaxy? Now here is your chance, you have been fortunate enough to have a rich uncle loan you some cash to fulfill your dreams. With enough cash to buy your first space ship travel the galaxy finding the best deals and then turning them into profit.

Galaxy Trader is a commodities trading game. Your goal is to travel the galaxy and find the best prices for commodities and then resell them at a higher price. There are planets to explore and danger to encounter.

The core mechanics of the game deals with finding the lowest prices and then searching for the highest bidder. Now prices are affected by other players. If another players visits the planet before you and sells then the price will drop according to how many units that player sold. If the player buys something at that planet the price of the commodities they purchased will rise accordingly. So player to player interactions occur implicitly and not directly.

There are also resources to gather in this game. Players can setup mining facilities and mine resources. These resources are use to craft items to build new ships or upgrade their current one. This is another source of revenue for the player. They can sell their gathered resource or craft upgrades and put them on the galactic auction house.

This is a casual game where all actions are time based. To travel from one planet to another could take hours in real time. The reason for making this time based is to keep the game casual.Players don’t have to sit on their machine to play this game. This is designed to be playable on a smart phone.

The game system will have an robust notification system using email. The player can make their moves and then wait for a email notification when the action has occurred. In this email will be dynamic links the user can click to performs actions like sell or buy. This allows them to play the game without having them to log in.

This game will be developed as a Facebook game with micro transactions. The only thing the players can buy is special fuel which reduces travel time.

Adam’s ratings

(based on typical criteria used when judging game competitions, with 1 being worst, 5 being best)

• Originality / Concept – 1
• Story / Theme – 2
• Gameplay / Game mechanics – 2
• Assets (concept art, pre-made music, links to a demo, etc) – 1
• Feasibility (if the comp requires actually MAKING the game) – 4

Outcome: It’s really likely you could make this game – it’s simple. The things that drag the scores down, especially the concept and gameplay mechanics, are the same things that you normally improve a heck of a lot just by trying to make the game, and realising that they suck (and why!).

So … if this were for a “make the game then be judged” comp, I think it would have a high chance to get through.

For a theoretical comp, very unlikely. It’s the most simplistic parts of Elite / Eve Online / [insert your favourite single-page-web-based game from 1995-2005 here], with nothing new or novel.

Adam’s comments

This is, essentially, the base from which to design an actual game. It’s more of a genre-description than a game-description (i.e. it’s too generic and vague in all areas).

“Closed-loop economy MMO” – words to strike terror into the heart of any designer who’s tried shipping an MMO. This *could* work, if you did it in a very careful way. In general, this doesn’t work, it’s not fun, and it won’t achieve any of the things you hoped it would. In general … you’re much better off making a carefully-tweaked fake (like with almost all game design!), using source/sinks.

The core part of the game – fluctuating prices – is de-facto controlled by an invisible random number generator (the combined actions of all other players – whoever they are), and you have no info on this. That makes it into a slot-machine game, rather than a trading game, and makes it very unlikely to be “fun”.

If you want to keep it as a trading game, you need a way for the current player’s actions to affect the prices they’ll receive, either by giving them a sneak peak, or a guaranteed min/max range, or fixed discount/penalty, etc – something to make this aspect a game in itself, not a pure dice roll.

If there’s any player/player competition, then real-time travel, as with VGA Planets and all the hundreds of clones since, seems to DISCOURAGE casual play. It’s not clear that this is anything but a single player game (with a very unfair random number generator, as noted above). If it’s MP, then being present at the exact time your ships arrive, so that you can quickly send off another order, typically increases your private game speed by 2x-3x compared to players who just play normally. That’s nearly always an immense advantage.

The quick-response-without-logging-in is a nice idea, but almost certainly unnecessary – most facebook users are logged in all the time anyway, or have login id stored in browser. Just give them an in-game link via email and have done with it :).

Final thought: if this were in a “make it” competition, I’d be looking forward to the final game, hoping that you’d quickly invent lots of cool stuff on top of the base genre. Unlike make game ideas, it’s very easy to extend once you’ve got the basic version working.

“If you have trouble grabbing the beam, just keep trying—we promise it works, but lots of readers have told us it’s not always easy.”

I’m a pretty good AC player, but after 10 minutes of trying to do that one standing jump, I gave up and stopped playing for a long time in frustration.

When game developers talk about “games should be so easy that all players can complete them; no-one should ever have to give up / fail to complete a game because something is too hard”, I usually disagree.

But in this instance, where the game is extremely, excessively difficult on something that the designer obviously intended to be extremely simple – and where the player has spent hours being taught that this will be easy – you have something different going on. It’s a failure of the control scheme; in fact, it’s a bug.

It’s a side-effect of the heuristics that AC uses to decide “what the player is trying to do” – heuristics that are far from perfect, while being very good.

In the first game, it took me a long time to get past the intro – no, really – because if you *try* to jump over gaps, then you fail. The heuristics were so heavily weighted towards “allowing” you to jump off buildings that running over a small gap became very difficult – until you learnt that the character “automatically” jumps small distances.

On the whole, I’m very impressed by the AC2 heuristics – compare it to Mirror’s Edge (a beautiful game, but feels a lot less fluid). I find them a bit too simplistic – I would love another 25% or so of user-control, and another 50% of precision on directional control – but (as ME shows) they got closer to perfect than any other game so far.

BUT … what do you do about a bug like this, one severe enough to make me stop playing the game entirely?

They had a huge QA team already (this is Ubisoft, after all), and such a vast amount of content in this game (multiple entire cities, modelled in fine detail), that there’s no way they could be sure to catch this bug.

Or is there?

This is the raison d’etre for a whole segment of in-game analytics / metrics: data-mining to discover undiscovered bugs.

Good metrics for game designers are VERY hard to describe, and IME the vast majority of the industry doesn’t know how to carefully hand-pick the few numbers they really need out of the millions of stats availalbe. Here’s a good example of how to pick well.

If the game reported

“the quest-point at which people stopped playing”

…then you *might* discover this bug. But it’s too coarse-grained.

If the game reported either/both:

“the segment on the map where people stopped playing”
“the segment on the map where people spent most-time during a mission”

…then you’d quickly and easily discover this bug. By “segment” I mean, essentially, a small patch of polygons approximately 6′x6′. This is relatively easy to measure algorithmically using greedy-polygon grabbing and hashing – although it would take a little care to make sure the measurement of the value didn’t take much CPU time (it could easily be pre-compiled for any given map, of course).

I’m not 100% of the “stopped playing” part – this is a console game, and while that info would be useful, it would mostly stop evenly distributed over quest-end points. Where it was more / less likely, it would be obvious just from knowledge of the story. ALTHOUGH: still well worth doing *in case* there were anomalies there – that should set off alarm bells.

However, the “spent most time during a mission” is more cut-and-dried.

This probe gives you a set of local maxima. It’s categoriesed by mission, making it one level finer than doing it over the entire world-map (which is too much, too uncategorised info), and it’s also coarse enough to correlate closely with user-behaviour (it merges results mission-by-mission; recurring bugs are very likely to show up by people doing the same mission and getting stuck at the same point).

The mission-based merge of results also has a nice side-effect: it tends to iron-out any anomalous results due to people wandering around the open-world game.

So. With a little bit of probing, using probes that you could/should have invented at the start of development (i.e. without knowledge of exact bugs that would occur) this bug could be ironed out. The three remaining questions are:

1. does Ubisoft do this level of automated-bug-detection,
2. do their designers bother to look at the anomaly-date,
3. and if so … why hasn’t the game been patched?

In the previous post I poked Earth Eternal for claiming to be the “*REAL* MMO for your browser”, and disappointing on that front (although it could be awesome on all other fronts). I finished with:

So … EE may be a great game … and it may be launchable from within a browser … but it’s a long way from a poster-child for browser-based MMOs. It’s still fighting the browser as much as it’s complementing it.

It’s 2010. I know a lot of people in the industry still haven’t accepted even the concept of a “browser-based” MMO, let alone realise where they’ve got to now.

I’m not in the loop on this stuff any more, but it set me to wondering what I’d be chasing if I weren’t doing iPhone exclusively right now.

What about you? Are you fighting the browser?

The Executive’s impression

Game developers aren’t stupid. Executives aren’t clueless. But some are.

In the minds of those who make games but “don’t do” browser games on principle, I’ve found “a browser MMO” often means some or all of:

1. A text-only game running off a single Perl webpage, where each action causes the whole page to be refreshed.
2. Non-real-time interaction (because, you know … web-servers aren’t powerful enough to run anything in real-time)
3. High-latency, jerky, shallow movement of characters and objects
4. Weak 3D graphics – 5 years or more behind the curve of Console graphics
5. Fat client downloads that “no-one” can be bothered to wait for, and would be better-off distributed on a DVD

What’s reality? Well, here’s a few observations…

Drop-dead gorgeous graphics … are the norm

For a look at today, go browse some of the Unity demos. Unity is *not* the “best” 3D engine, the fastest, the best language – but it’s nicely balanced towards ease of adoption. It’s very easy for new developers to get into. And so it’s setting a very achievable base standard that’s higher than many people would believe. With anyone able to produce 3D to this level, and embed it in the browser almost as an afterthought, the use of plugins becomes a new landscape.

Right now, crappy Flash MMO’s are still re-treading the ground of Dragon Fable (which is coming up to it’s 4th birthday) et al – albeit that’s now the “standard” and there is better and better appearing. But just as it only took a few games to adopt this approach and show how good it could look, widespread adoption of Unity, and a few high-profile innovative products, will drag forwards the rest of us.

(by “us” I don’t mean professional developers, I mean primarily the amateur and semi-pro teams who don’t yet work for a living – the students etc)

2 years ago I wouldn’t have thought it would be necessary to say this (I assumed that FB would have kicked everyone’s butts) but maybe it’s still relevant: going forwards, I suspect “browser MMOs” still need to be a lot more “browser” and a lot less “traditional MMO” if they wish to stand out.

The facebook question

Browser MMO, huh? So … Why is there no option to use Facebook Connect to login? In 2010, I think that’s what browser-MMO probably means to most people: “it works from Facebook”.

The massive, fundamental changes to Facebook that are coming in this year may push a lot of content-providers off FB, and back to the web – but users will continue to demand single-sign-on access, and shared access to friends lists. This already works, off-site, thanks to Facebook Connect (both for websites and for other hardware platforms, e.g. iPhone).

I may be completely wrong, but my suspicion is that many developers still want to “use Facebook”, by which they mean:

“use (the large number of accounts on) Facebook (to get lots of users in our game without having to do so much advertising)”.

…while (again, merely a suspicion) users want their games to “use Facebook”, by which they mean:

“use (the apps, data, and list of friends I already have on) Facebook (to reduce the effort I go through to play the game)”

The problem here is the developer is chasing more signups, and the user is chasing ease-of-access. IMHO, the FB changes are going to cut off most of the former, leaving the question: who will do best at fulfilling the latter?

The Glottal-Stops and Square Pegs of User Experience

When people surf to your MMO direct from the Web, do they get a feeling akin to the glottal-stop? Do they feel like they mentally “stumbled”, as the paradigms and user-interface go through a sudden change?

Embedded within an ordinary web-browser, does your MMO look like a square peg forced into a round hole?

The effects are subtle, but they decrease virality, decrease engagement. The effects are tiny, but with millions of web-users out there, they can be cumulative. Each time a user experiences this, you marginally shrink your maximum user-base, and you push your conversion rate down.

Why was I so shocked that Earth Eternal is (silently) Windows-only? (as is/was Free Realms, for that matter)

Well, largely because it reminded me of years ago, when you’d occasionally go to a website only to see:

“This site is only valid in Internet Explorer; you are not running that browser, so you are seeing this special page instead of the site. Please download IE now and then come back.” (or Netscape, or “desktop, but you are using a mobile phone”, etc)

History suggests that this is not a viable strategy when you’re fighting it out on the web…

I’ll know it when I see it

I’m waiting for one feature in a major MMO. I’ve seen it in a few “amateur” MMOs, and you get it on Facebook apps etc. It’s a fundamental expectation from the Web, and it is incredibly powerful:

Each piece of interesting content is *named* … it has a unique URL … so that I can directly tweet places, events, people, and things. I can bookmark conversations I’ve had. I can archive, I can cite, save, and return.

Bonus points for incorporating a bit.ly service in the client, so I can literally copy/paste direct into twitter

I’m hoping it’s out there already, and I just haven’t spotted it yet. When it comes, someone let me know; until then, I’ll be spending more time in flash games, and less in mainstream MMO’s. I prefer my gaming to be Web-compatible, thanks…

Submission

• Author: Chris Locher (calocher at gmail.com)
• Title: “Net Quest: The Search for the win”
• Word count: 500 words

Proposal

The game is a casual Diablo/Torchlight like dungeon crawler based on all things Internet. The player is a web browser personified in a virtual 3d world as an astronaut like being made of light in a Tron like fashion. The players view will be an Animal Crossing like convex surface.

As a browser you explore the Internet with websites/servers being the levels. The more untrustworthy a site the harder the difficulty is for that level. Forums and social networking sites will either be a high difficulty area or an arena style level. Search engines are portal worlds. Currency for vendors is either “iDollars” or bytes.

Your health is labeled either bandwidth or connection, that way when you die you get disconnected and get a 404 error for the game over screen. There was also a possibility of using your bandwidth as a game play element by making it so that you have to kill enemies to keep your bandwidth usage down. Max out bandwidth and get disconnected.

“Flamer”, “Spammer”, and “Troll” are the three different classes available. The Flamer is an all around nuking type as most of the attacks seem like excessively large forum posts in the shape of flames. The Spammer is your general necromancer summoning type with the summons being named “Spambots”. They will probably do some kind of mild ranged damage using ads or some other type of annoying spam based projectile. The Spammer’s final attack is to call down a roflcopter to shoot up enemies. The Troll is a straight up melee type. I have not decided what Internet themed weapons it will have yet. All weapons look like 16-bit pixel cursors. The doodle I made after I came up with the idea has a sword shaped like a windows cursor.

Your enemies consist of various Internet memes and other personified bits of the Internet (spyware, adware, buggy javascript etc.) and other browsers like the player.

The single player storyline is very vague in that your goal is to search for “IT” on the Internet. At the end of the journey you are treated to a cinematic of a voice saying “finally” and clicking on a link for “IT”, which turns out to be a rick roll. Once the roll loads the YouTube window folds down and rick becomes the last boss.

There is multilayer co-op in the main campaign. It would be interesting to see 8 to 16 players facing off against the hordes of the Internet but four at once is what I will be shooting for.

At a certain level you will be able to buy a server to “host” yourself. This will be tower defense like using the things you’ve seen on other servers as your building blocks. You can upgrade your server with different parts and upgrades. It may be possible for other players to try to assault your server. A reward for successful server (s/h)acking to be worked out later.

NB: there was also some very basic concept art, but as an attachment, not as a link.

Adam’s ratings

(based on typical criteria used when judging game competitions, with 1 being worst, 5 being best)

• Originality / Concept – 3
• Story / Theme – 4
• Gameplay / Game mechanics – 2
• Assets (concept art, pre-made music, links to a demo, etc) – 1
• Feasibility (if the comp requires actually MAKING the game) – 4

Outcome: you’d expect this to get through to the next round of judging, but it would have even odds of getting into the final stage – lack of innovative gameplay/mechanics means it’s unlikely to win in a tie-break, and it doesn’t have enough points to go straight into the final without tie-breaking. OTOH, other judges could well give this a 5 for Originality and Story, and the aggregate score would push it through.

Adam’s comments

Very innovative concept, with lots of character and flavour detail (shows that the author won’t just run out of steam after the initial joke).

No core game mechanics beyond “it’s Diablo”.

TD-mechanics are tacked-on at the end, badly – the whole pitch would be better without them (shorter, cleaner), unless they are re-written to be part of the core gameplay.

Therefore, this pitch succeeds or fails on the conceit of “internet as combat game-world”, and how well you manage to fufil that theme. With the niche theme, and without innovative game mechanics, this could never be a AAA title, although it would probably make an excellent Casual title.

I’d definitely put this through to the next round of a game competition, especially one where you had to actually build a demo – I’d be particularly looking forward to playing it, even just for a few minutes. But at the very least, I’d want to see what art-style and GUI you came up with (assuming you had to produce fake screenshots, if not a full demo).

I’ve been a judge on several game-design competitions. I’ve seen a lot of recurring mistakes and successes, and I’d like to see less of the former, more of the latter.

I’m hereby offering to provide *public* feedback to anyone who wants to send me their idea. I’ll publish your idea on my blog, along with my thoughts and reactions.

Here are my rules:

1. MINIMUM of 300 words
2. MAXIMUM of 500 words
3. State whether it’s intended to be a Casual game, or a AAA game
4. State whether it’s anonymous, or if you want me to include an email address and/or website URL (for people to contact you if they liked your idea)
5. I will pick the most interesting ones, and publish the main text of your email, and my reactions, on this blog
6. Email it to me directly, at adam.m.s.martin at gmail.com
7. You must include the text: “I have read everything on the blog post, and understand and accept all the terms and conditions”
8. If I can think of someone better-placed to comment on your idea, I *might* forward your idea to another industry-expert blogger, on the condition that they publish it on their blog with their own feedback, just as I would have done myself (unless you SPECIFICALLY state that you don’t want me to do this)

Some notes…

SXSW entrants

If you’re already entered for SXSW 2010, don’t bother sending me your idea until after the conference. I’m not going to allow this to interfere with that event.

Public vs. NDA

If you ask for an NDA, you’ve already lost. Forget it.

In general, the only people who would bother to “steal” your game idea are so incompetent / uncreative that the “best” game they could create – even using your idea! – would be so appallingly bad that no-one would ever play it or talk about it.

Spelling and grammar

I will judge you on your spelling and grammar. Get used to it. If you are so lazy you can’t be bothered to spellcheck your entry, you’ve just screamed:

“I AM TOO LAZY TO DESIGN OR MAKE A GAME, I WILL GIVE UP AS SOON AS IT GETS MILDLY CHALLENGING!!!”

Cheat, cheat, and cheat again

Anything you can do to make your pitch more convincing is acceptable. Within the 500 words limit, of course.

If you’ve got concept art, a downloadable MOD, or even better a faked gameplay video … include links!

This is the fourth time I’ve been a reviewer or judge for a game-design competition/panel/etc, and I’m noticing some recurring themes. This is interesting, since everything I’ve judged has been completely different (different countries, different audiences, different rules).

Recurring themes of game-design competitions

One theme in particular is that a large percentage (circa 30%) of entries are depressingly bad; it seems that many of the wannabe-game-designers in the world are just plain lazy.

Another theme is that when someone has a good idea, they often don’t realise how good it is. They end up spending one sentence (or, if you’re lucky, two sentences) talking about the interesting part, and the next 500 words spewing out meaningless drivel that applies to every game ever made.

e.g. “you will have different choices to make in this game, there will be puzzles, and when you finish a puzzle you will get a reward, rewards will be used to unlock more levels, and to finish the game you have to get to the last level, which will be harder than the earlier levels, and … ”

… and: STFU. You’re boring. Do you think that I’ve never played a computer game before? Or do you just think I’m so stupid that I can’t remember what they’re like?

Some tragic outcomes

NB: this is just one example of what goes wrong with competition entries; I could give you countless more…

Some of the judging I’ve done was at the start of a competition, where the teams then spent the next 3+ months full-time actually building their games. On those occasions where a team was let through because we saw something special in their core idea, despite them waffling about a million other things, the team tended to make the EXACT SAME MISTAKE during production. They would spend 10% of their time on the cool idea, and 1% on each of 90 irrelevant distractions. They never won (surprise!).

For the times when we just judge ideas, not actual games, my distinct impression is that a lot of “good” ideas get thrown out because they’re submerged in so much rubbish that the judges either don’t see them … or assume the above is going to happen, and so they want to give the attention to other, more focussed teams.

So…

So, I’m offering anyone (anyone!) the chance to get some free feedback on their game idea, in the mindset of a competition judge. Maybe you’ll discover holes in your pitch, maybe you’ll discover ways to improve your core game … maybe it won’t help you at all :).

Details here: Got an idea for a new Game?

(NB: the fact that you still have to login MERELY TO READ THE DAMN FAQ linked from the PR statement is IMHO symptomatic of some of MP’s problems :( )

metaplace.com is closing on january 1, 2010

We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific. The official announcement is here, and you can read a FAQ guide here. We will be having a goodbye celebration party on January 1st at 12:00noon Pacific Time.

Some of the correspondence I’ve seen on this – what went wrong? what should they have done differently? – has been interesting. Personally, I’m in two minds about it. I think there were some great things about and within MP, but from the very start I felt it had no direction and too little real purpose (and if you ask around, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of people who’ll confirm I said that at the time).

I’ll hilight a couple of things that haven’t come up so much in conversations:

Bad

1. On the face of it, MP was “the bad bits of Second Life…” (poor content tools, poor client, no direction, no purpose)
2. “… without the good bits of Second Life” (no sex, no mainstream publicity, wrong target audience to charge millions of dollars in land-rental to)
3. Poor discoverability (how do you find something cool in Metaplace? Go to site, login, download client, wait a lot, browse a weak index, wait for more downloads, wait for content to stream in … etc)

Discoverability was IMHO the killer: this is something that so many “hopeful” social sites and systems get wrong, and only a few get right. The best examples are still simple: browsing your friends’ friends on Facebook by looking at photos of their faces (hmm; who do I fancy?), or using Google to find things you’re looking for (the gold standard in tech, but also the base *expectation* of the modern web surfer).

The history of SLURLs in Second Life should probably be required reading for people interested in this – if you can find ways to experience / re-live life pre-SLURLs, and read through some of the trials and tribulations that Linden went through in getting them to work.

And even then, of course, SL still had no browsability – but it least it had “open” bookmarks and copy/paste references you could share with people, and embed in webpages. That was barely acceptable (and still “awful”) back when SL was in its prime; the equivalent “minimum acceptable” is probably Faceboook Connect with full Facebook integration (i.e. not just FC-login, but having a bona fide FB app too that acts as an alternate access-path for your virtual world).

Good

1. Well, obviously, there was a lot of great content in there. I only skimmed it, but apart from the problems above, I saw a lot of interesting stuff
2. The AJAX/CSS/HTML GUI … it was really easy for me to mess about gaining and browsing badges (both mine and other peoples).

Early on, I found the AJAX vs Flash part particularly interesting. The former showed up how weak the latter (the world-client) was: sometimes I went to the site, all happy about the badges, the popovers, etc, and as soon as I got into the Flash client, my mood would drop noticeably. Eventually, I stopped bothering visiting at all; I dreaded the slow, unwieldy, “clicking all over the place to move fractionally”, Flash experience.

One question I had was how much this was to do with the languages / platforms involved: did AJAX/CSS inspire the people working in it to make lighter-weight, faster, more abstracted core experience? Or is this just coincidence? There should be literally no reason why either of those platforms forced the designers to provide the experiences that way (Flash is capable of a much faster, snappier, fluid usability experience – it’s been excelling at this for years).

It’s been a long time since my last post on this topic. Last year, I stopped working for a big MMO publisher, and since then I’ve been having fun doing MMO Consultancy (helping other teams write their games), and iPhone development (learning how to design and write great iPhone apps).

Previously, I posed some questions and said I’d answer them later:

• how do you define the archetypes for your entities?
• how do you instantiate multiple new entities from a single archetype?
• how do you STORE in-memory entities so that they can be re-instantiated later on?

Let’s answer those first.

A quick warning…

I’m going to write this post using Relational terminology. This is deliberate, for several reasons:

• It’s the most-correct practical way of describing runtime Entities
• It’s fairly trivial to see how to implement this using static and dynamic arrays – the reverse is not so obvious
• If you’re working on MMO’s, you should be using SQL for your persistence / back-end – which means you should already be thinking in Relations.

…and a quick introduction to Relational

If you know literally nothing about Relational data, RDBMS’s, and/or SQL (which is true of most game programmers, sadly), then here’s the idiot’s guide:

1. Everything is stored either in arrays, or in 2-dimensional arrays (”arrays-of-arrays”)
2. The index into the array is explicitly given a name, some text ending in “_id”; but it’s still just an array-index: an increasing list of integers starting with 0, 1, 2, 3 … etc
3. Since you can’t have Dictionaries / HashMaps, you have to use 3 arrays-of-arrays to simulate one Dictionary. This is very very typical, and so obvious you should be able to understand it easily when you see it below. I only do it twice in this whole blog post.
4. Where I say “table, with N columns”, I mean “a variable-length array, with each element containing another array: a fixed-size array of N items”
5. Where I say “row”, I mean “one of the fixed-size arrays of N items”
6. Rather than index the fixed-size arrays by integer from 0…N, we give a unique name (”column name”) to each index. It makes writing code much much clearer. Since the arrays are fixed-size, and we know all these column names before we write the program, this is no problem.

Beyond that … well, go google “SQL Tutorial” – most of them are just 1 page long, and take no more than 5 minutes to read through.

How do you store all your data? Part 2: Runtime Entities + Components (”Objects”)

We’re doing part 2 first, because it’s the bit most of us think of first. When I go onto part 1 later, you’ll see why it’s “theoretically” the first part (and I called it “1″), even though when you write your game, you’ll probably write it second.

Table 3: all components

(yes, I’m starting at 3. You’ll see why later ;))

There are N additional tables, one for each row in the Components table. Each row has a unique value of “table-name”, telling you which table to look at for this component. This is optional: you could instead use an algorithmic name based on some criteria like the official_name, or the component_id – but if you ever change the name of a component, or delete one and re-use the id, you’ll get problems.

Table 4: all entities / entity names

(really,you should only have 1 column in this table – but the second column is really useful when debuggin your own ES implementation itself!)

…which combines with:…

Table 5: entity/component mapping

…to tell you which components are in which entity.

Technically, you could decide not to bother with Table 4; just look up the “unique values of entity_id from table 5″ whenever you want to deal with Table 4. But there are performance advantages for it – and you get to avoid some multi-threading issues (e.g. when creating a new entity, just create a blank entity in the entity table first, and that fast atomic action “reserves” an entity_id; without Table 4, you have to create ALL the components inside a Synchronized block of code, which is not good practice for MT code).

Tables 6,7,8…N+5: data for each component for each Entity

These N tables store all the live, runtime, data for all the entity/component pairs.

How do you store all your data? Part 1: Assemblages (”Classes”)

So … you want to instantiate 10 new tanks into your game.

How?

Well, you could write code that says:


int newTank()
{
int new_id = createNewEntity();

// Attach components to the entity; they will have DEFAULT values

createComponentAndAddTo( TRACKED_COMPONENT, new_id );
createComponentAndAddTo( RENDERABLE_COMPONENT, new_id );
createComponentAndAddTo( PHYSICS_COMPONENT, new_id );
createComponentAndAddTo( GUN_COMPONENT, new_id );

// Setup code that EDITS the data in each component, e.g:
float[] gunData = getComponentDataForEntity( GUN_COMPONENT, new_id );
gunData[ GUN_SIZE ] = 500;
gunData[ GUN_DAMAGE ] = 10000;
gunData[ GUN_FIRE_RATE ] = 0.001;
setComponentDataForEntity( GUN_COMPONENT, new_id, gunData );

return new_id;
}


…and this is absolutely fine, so long as you remember ONE important thing: the above code is NOT inside a method “because you wanted it in an OOP class”. It’s inside a method “because you didn’t want to type it out every time you have a place in your code where you instantiate tanks”.

i.e. IT IS NOT OOP CODE! (the use of “methods” or “functions” is an idea that predates OOP by decades – it is coincidence that OOP *also* uses methods).

Or, in other words, if you do the above:

NEVER put the above code into a Class on its own; especially NEVER NEVER split the above code into multiple methods, and use OOP inheritance to nest the calls to “createComponet” etc.

But … it means that when you decide to split one Component into 2 Components, you’ll have to go through the source code for EVERY kind of game-object in your game, and change the source, then re-compile.

A neater way to handle this is to extend the ES to not only define “the components in each entity” but also “templates for creating new entities of a given human-readable type”. I previously referred to these templates as “assemblages” to avoid using the confusing term “template” which means many things already in OOP programming…

An assemblage needs:

Table 1: all Assemblages

Table 2: assemblage/component mapping

This table is cut-down version of Table 5 (entity/component mapping). This table provides the “template” for instantiating a new Entity: you pick an assemblage_id, find out all the component_id’s that exist for it, and then create a new Entity and instantiate one of each of those components and add it to the entity.

Table 3: all components

This is the same table from earlier (hence the silly numbering, just to make sure you noticed ;)) – it MUST be the same data, for obvious reasons.

Things to note

DataForEntity( (entity-id) ) – fast lookup

If you know the entity-id, you may only need one table lookup to get the data for an entire component (Table5 is highly cacheable – it’s small, doesn’t change, and has fixed-size rows).

Splitting Table 5 for performance or parallelization

When your SQL DB is too slow and you want to split to multiple DB servers, OR you’re not using SQL (doing it all in RAM) and want to fit inside your CPU cache, then you’ll split table 5 usually into N sub-tables, where N = number of unique component_id’s.

Why?

Because you run one System at a time, and each System needs all the components with the same component_id – but none of the components without that id.

Isolation

The entire data for any given system is fully isolated into its own table. It’s easy to print to screen (for debugging), serialize (for saving / bug reports), parallelize (different components on different physical DB servers)

Metadata for editing your Assemblages and Entities

a.k.a. “Programmer/Designers: take note…”

It can be tempting to add extra columns to the Entity and Assemblage tables. Really, you shouldn’t be doing this. If you feel tempted to do that, add the extra data as more COMPONENTS – even if the data is NOTHING to do with your game (e.g. “name_of_designer_who_wrote_this_assemblage”).

Here’s a great feature of Entity Systems: it is (literally) trivial for the game to “remove” un-needed information at startup. If, for instance, you have vast amounts of metadata on each entity (e.g. “name of author”, “time of creation”, “what I had for lunch on the day when I wrote this entity”) – then it can all be included and AUTOMATICALLY be stripped-out at runtime. It can even be included in the application, but “not loaded” at startup – so you get the benefits of keeping all the debug data hanging around, with no performance overhead.

You can’t do that with OOP: you can get some *similar* benefits by doing C-Header-File Voodoo, and writing lots of proprietary code … but … so much is dependent upon your header files that unless you really know what you’re doing you probably shouldn’t go there.

Another great example is Subversion / Git / CVS / etc metadata: you can attach to each Entity the full Subversion metadata for that Entity, by creating a “SubversionInformation” System / Component. Then at runtime, if something crashes, load up the SubversionInformation system, and include it in the crash log. Of course, the Components for the SubversionInformation system aren’t actually loader yet – because the system wasn’t used inside the main game. No problem – now you’ve started the system (in your crash-handler code), it’ll pull in its own data from disk, attach it to whatever entities are in-memory, and all works beautifully.

Wrapping up…

I wanted to cover other things – like transmitting all this stuff over the network (and maybe cover how to do so both fast and efficiently) – but I realise now that this post is going to be long enough as it is.

Next time, I hope to talk about that (binary serialization / loading), and editors (how do you make it easy to edit / design your own game?).

(disclaimer: when I say “lazy” I don’t mean universally; I mean that in at least one crucial aspect, he failed to apply simple due diligence to his own named project; arguably, it’s a kind of laziness in itself not to have checked this stuff, or a kind of cowardice not to have insisted it be done “correctly”; but this post is really about the overall impact of the game, and the way that an individual, if they were to stamp their persona on a project – and expect us to read their persona from interacting with the product – comes across. I have no idea what Will Wright is like as an individual; this is a post about Will Wright as the PR entity…)

If you’ve enough optimisim / hubris / cojones / arrogance to stick your own name on a game (yes, I’m also thinking of Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa here. Oh dear…), then you have to accept that any basic, simplistic failings in that game are going to be your – personal – fault. You chose to attach your name to the brand, and you can’t just ignore the downside.

Spore doesn’t save while you play.

Let’s just repeat that, with emphasis:

Spore – which crashes to desktop relatively frequently for an EA game – NEVER saves, even after 4 hours of solid gameplay, no matter what. This was released in 2008. Even Flash games, written by 15-year-old kids who have NO IDEA WHAT THEY’RE DOING, will always – always * – save continuously BY DEFAULT because you would have to be INCREDIBLE STUPID or EXTREMELY ARROGANT as a game designer not to have this basic precaution enabled.

[*] – 4 in 5 Flash games autosave these days, including the “my first real flash game” attempts, even if they don’t do it properly (hint: Macromedia’s “local storage” isn’t used by professionals; only by inexperienced teenagers)

…

Incidentally, I’ve been blogging a lot less frequently for two reasons, and my fury at losing 4 hours of my life due to the Spore team’s stupidity here has caused me to make an exception of this post.

In general, I’ve decided:

1. I don’t want to post any more negative posts unless/until I’ve posted several things at least as positive; I’m a positive person, but certain situations (conferences) and certain outlets (blogging) tend to bring out “what frustrates me”, rather than “what delights me”, and I’d like to kick that habit.
2. There’s loads of things I’ve been doing recently that I cannot talk about for PR reasons. Not especially exciting, but it’s been stuff that I (or others) have wanted to keep quiet until / unless it actually works. All being done under “release early, release often”, but we haven’t hit first releases yet…

So, to Will Wright: please stop dicking about, making crap like Sim Earth (yes, I went there), and make decent games. Stop pretending that a “game” is beneath you (even though that attitude probably is the sole reason that The Sims came to life… ah, crap, that (best-selling game-franchise of all time) dilutes the argument somewhat): please either stop making games and go become the PhD student you seem to (secretly) want to become (and which I’m sure you’d be brilliant at), or … make games – but do it properly; do it professionally.

[Incidentally, apart from being an good-yet-flawed game, Spore is a great example of "desire to make a Social Game - but a complete lack of "ability" to actually do so...". More on that later (although that is another "negative" post I've had sitting in my in-progress pile for a year now, featuring Sony as the lead protagonist...)]

PS: I really enjoyed playing some of Will Wright’s games over the years. Spore has some great elements. But I’m reminded of Demis “I don’t like games, I like puzzles” Hassabis who equally made at least one great game, but (with hindsight) seemingly misattributed the causes of its success, and IMHO never really grokked the whole “game” thing. Perhaps Will was wiser, or just luckier.

Worse … Spore wasn’t a huge succes. And yet, if Spore had been made by Blizzard, it would have been an AWESOME game, simply because they’d have polished it properly, instead of shipping it before it was more than half-finished.

In fact, if Spore had been made by any of the medium or large independent studios, it would have been a “better” game, because it would have had a “normal” level of polish, instead of being below-par. Blizzard is just a peculiarly easy example for me to pick; I have great faith that most indies would have made it substantially better (even without Will Wright), just because they’d have done a more professional job of the thing :(.

But far, far more important to this post is the cover-letter that Tim sent to Lucasfilm (it’s a truly special cover letter (go have a look now, before you read on)).

There’s also a rich array of comments at the end of Tim’s post. The HR manager (now head of HR at Pixar) who handled his job application all those years ago even chimes in to say hi. But, again, that’s not what I found interesting; what I liked was the large number of comments from wannabe game developers trying to get into the industry right now.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Reading those comments, here’s a couple of things I noticed:

• They feel “inspired” and full of “renewed hope” / “confidence” that they have a chance of getting into the industry at all
• Lots of wishful comments fishing for a confirmation that this technique would “still work today”, while declaring that they’re sure it doesn’t (supposedly demonstrating their realism)
• The realization that lack of experience is no barrier to becoming an industry legend; coincidentally, most of the people saying this have no experience of their own

…and here’s the conclusions that leapt to my mind:

• New entrants to the industry are convinced it’s very hard to “break in”; they sound by turns cynical and hopeless. This is merely to get a *job*, not to actually achieve anything. Ouch
• No-one seems to have told them how easy it can be (how straight-forward it often is)
• They’re guessing at the reasons this was successful, and are picking the wrong ones (hint: what worked for Tim still works today, if anything *even more* than it did 20 years ago)
• Their understanding of what it takes to become a major industry figure is back-to-front

Why was Tim successful? How can you re-create that today?

OK, so Tim was: funny, dedicated, and inventive.

But we’ve all heard (I hope) of many occasions when any or all three of those have not only failed to win people jobs but have got them ridiculed (sometimes even had their desperate exploits broadcast at the company or industry level). I’m not thinking simply of the games industry here – although I noticed one the other week where a hopeful Quest Designer tried it on with Blizzard (they spent a thousand dollars on fancy-printed design docs for their proposed Raid Dungeon, drove to Blizzard’s offices, and spent a couple of days sitting on the sidewalk handing copies to staff as they arrived / left the office each day).

Rather, I was thinking of all the stories of people doing everything from sending in their Resume/CV wrapped in shiny metallic paper, to sending gifts (including alcohol) to the hiring managers, to stuff that comes dangerously close to stalking.

Reading the comments on Tim’s post, in at least a couple of cases, I’m not convinced that the posters see the difference between those disasters and what Tim did. I don’t know any of the people involved, but I do know there are positions we’ve recruited for in the past 5 years where a cover letter akin to Tim’s would have gone a very long way (possibly even “all the way”) towards single-handedly getting us to hire someone.

IMHO, it’s all about skill and enthusiasm (although few companies hire on enthusiasm, so we’ll just stick to the “skill” part)

What Tim shows is skill for the *underlying* things that his (potential) employers would love to see him employ in his day job. That requires showing ALL of the following:

• Personal interest (he plays games. He plays them enough for the next part to be possible)
• Understanding of a genre (he understands a genre well enough to pastiche it effectively; you can’t do that if all you’ve done is dabble in it (unless you’re particularly skilled at literary/experience analysis – which is great, we want that too! ))
• Ability to polish (look at the images; notice how he sends up each of LA and Silicon Valley in panels 2a and 2b, and makes out San Rafael to be the land of Nature and Sunshine and happiness)
• Knowing when to stop (again, look at the images. The “volume” of detail is actually very small; apart from the final image, they are very simple, and quick to execute)

One thing we don’t know, that I’d love to know, is the timing: how long after the phone call did he send this in? I’ve known candidates to take *more than a month* to complete something that was offered (by them!) in a job interview. WTF? If you say you have something, we assume you either have it, or will complete it imminently. i.e. days – a week at the most.

TO GET A JOB IN THE GAMES INDUSTRY, ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS …

Let’s see how simple I can make this…

Make a game.

3 words. Not bad. I think that’s pretty clear.

Sadly, most people misunderstand it *completely*.

Look back at the rest of this blog post; it all lead up to this. When college students ask senior people, and hiring managers, what to do to get their first job, and we say “make a game; make several games”, our reasons for saying that are all encapsulated in what I’ve already said.

Even if you’re in a discipline that has read-made degrees (Programming: Computer Science; Art: Fine Art, etc), what you’re usually showing with your degree is a small amount of education and a large amount of skill / aptitude. University/College rarely teaches the things you’ll need every day to do your job, but it prepares you in a more general way to be/become skilled more quickly.

Imagining a game is easy; if you like games, you should be able to imagine games you’d like to play, or make.

Making a game is easy, if you only ever make a game that fits within your abilities and resources. I’ve made games in under a day. Some of them were even fun! ;). I have a friend who *frequently* writes entire games in a single evening. He’s a programmer, with no art or game-design skills – but some of what he makes looks gorgeous and is great fun; he cheats; so should you. So … never tell me that making a game is “beyond” you; just shrink your ambition to fit.

(incidentally, “I can’t program” is not a valid excuse; pre-teen children regularly learn to program – (IIRC it’s still in the national curriculum in most western countries, although it’s not labelled “computer programming”) – and if they can handle it, what’s wrong with you that you’re too stupid/lazy to do it too? No-one’s asking you to learn highly optimized C++, that would be insane. But … all you need is Basic, PHP, Javascript, or something similar)

Finishing making a game – removing all the “doesn’t actually work” parts – is hard. But everyone who’s been there should understand: it’s *hard* to include all the bits that weren’t fun for you to make. It’s hard to force yourself to check all the buttons still work every time you change something. It’s hard to force yourself to write in-game instructions *and keep them up-to-date* each time you change the game-design, or add/remove a feature.

And that’s a big part of why we judge you on it. Because if you can do that – more than anything else – all the other problems are smaller, more tractable.

iTunes: click here to open iTunes download page

I started writing this as a real-life demo on how to use the tech for my new company (if any of our early access licensees are reading this, a project ZIP with full source code should appear on your dashboard imminently), but I gave it to a few friends to test, and they liked it so much I thought I’d put it up on the App Store too.

I’ll be updating it over time to add more of the features from our tech. If enough people download it, I might even make a paid version (which would be pretty handy as an example, too :)) with some more features, more powerups, etc.

• It’s a friendly group of people, and we seem to get along well
• Alex Crouzen picked up Objective C and OpenGL, and Shi Daniels threw together some wall and floor textures. That gave us a very basic “here’s some walls and floors, running in OpenGL, on an iPhone”, but no walking, no movable camera, no interaction, etc. It actually worked! :)
• Brian Green and Wendy Despain (both games industry pros) joined up and did loads of great game-design and plot work. As a group, lead by them, we generated lots of pages of good design – although (my fault) the remit probably wasn’t as well constrained as it should have been
• Lots of good ideas and commentary from the other people in the group
• We setup a private wiki, a 24-hour skype group-chat, and a private google group, and had some pretty good communications going between the active contributors
• I picked up Alex’s code and rewrote the underlying OpenGL stuff (I’m very rusty; haven’t done any OpenGL for > 4 years), but got it integrated with iPhone GUI stuff, so you could use drag gestures to move around the map in 3D, and added some programmatic map generation

Bad news:

• A lot of people (I think more than half, in the end!) had to step back – or even drop out – due to time constraints / external commitments (work, life, etc). Ultimately, through no fault of any individual … our team was somewhat gutted before we’d got beyond the first milestone :(
• …as a result of that, and some mistakes I personally made on the project leadership side, we stagnated, and the project has ground to a halt with too few active coders

It’s not clear where we’ll go from here, but I’m now looking at whether I can take some of the lessons learnt from this and start it all over again, do it better, more simply, and more clearly directed, as a commercial project.

One of the biggest mistakes I made personally is that I tried to do this as a volunteer project – but simultaneously tried to do it unmanaged, Scrum-style. You could fairly argue that this was foolish, given that I’ve run a lot of volunteer projects before, and they have *always* needed huge amounts of vicious, aggressive project management. Not because people are lazy or dumb, but merely because volunteer projects are always the lowest item on people’s list of priorities (way below “day job” and “family”, for instance – which is fair enough).

But I’ve got so used to working this way now (team-based, distributed responsibility, etc) that I ignored my previous experience and actively avoided aggressive PM.

I’m putting together a detailed project plan now – as if I were doing this commercially. i.e. working it out based on me personally paying other people to work on it – it may not be viable / possible, but if nothing else it’s a good practice to plan to that level of diligence. It’s just a theoretical exercise right now, although I’m sharing it with some industry colleagues and some professional coders and artists, seeing if it’s convincing enough for any of them to want to try it.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed already while writing it up that way is that – if I have to pay people – I’d start with a much smaller team, almost entirely coders, and only bring on other people once we have (*if* we have…) a substantial working prototype. Which is the opposite of how I was taught to make games originally. But it’s exactly how I was taught to do commercial startups. This could be interesting…

PS: here’s a screenshot of one of the first renders:

I’ve been playing around with GUI setups for DM / EOTB / Wizardry clones on iPhone, and thought I’d post some of the more interesting results here – I’m interested to see what other people think of each of them.

The first three are all assuming a single-character RPG, the fourth is something more like DM / Wizardry (could be 6 chars, could be 3).

Everything is clickable – small maps become full screen map, blue buttons fire spells, character portraits go to the inventory screens.

Screens with no arrow buttons require you to drag your finger forwards/backwards/left/right to move, and allow 360 degree movement. Screens with arrow buttons assume you can only turn 90 degrees at a time (like the original games), although they smoothly animate the rotations (UN-like the original games – because I have access to OpenGL to do the 3D for me).

What do you think?

Well, I don’t *need* anyone; I can do this all myself. But I’d rather do it with other people, and I thought there might be some hobbyists reading this who’d like to do something similar.

EDIT: there’s now a googlegroup for people working on this. You *must* contact me first via email (see below) or your request to join will be automatically rejected. http://groups.google.com/group/dmclone

Super-short summary:

• Clone of Dungeon Master / Eye of the Beholder (google them if you haven’t played them)
• …except “online” (not sure how much direct multiplayer interaction to allow, but probably “a lot”)
• i.e: real-time / turn-based mixture, using simple fixed-perspective 2D-faking-3D graphics, and using the built-in pauses in gameplay to hide the network latency

I would like to do these bits myself (most important first)

• Server code
• Level design
• RPG system design

I would really like other people to do these bits (most important first)

• Graphics sets
• RPG system + balancing
• iPhone client
• Quests / scripting / level-design

I could do all that myself, easily enough. Fine. Whatever. But given my limited spare time, I’d rather focus on doing a small number of things (i.e. server code) better, with more depth, than doing the whole thing but much more shallow / weak.

For the first release, everything’s GPL licensed: code, content, everything. It’ll probably take us several releases to get something we’re happy with publishing, and at the start of each new release we might mutually decide to change the license; but we’ll start off with GPL and see how that works out.

If you’re interested, email me at adam.m.s.martin@gmail.com, tell me a bit about yourself, and what you’d like to do and why. Prior experience isn’t required – enthusiasm, personal interest, and “actually producing something” is. If I get no responses, I’ll just go ahead and do it all myself. Slowly :).

1. He hasn’t “played” an MMO in decades (possibly “ever”) … because he can’t stop himself from interpreting as he uses them
2. Surprisingly many MMOs are just WoW by another name
3. He only needs to play the first few levels of a new MMO to see if it’s really new; he needn’t bother with the rest of it

He’s explained before, in abstract terms, why this is all true *to him*, and pretty much left people to stew if they don’t understand that (while always actively engaging them in conversation to try and explain further).

Now he’s blogged a concrete example of what goes through his head when playing a particular quest-chain / zone: WoW’s STV. If you’ve ever wondered, and/or been confused/horrified/dismayed/insulted by Richard’s statements online and haven’t had the chance to speak to him about it all in person, then I’d highly recommend reading it. I suspect that this concrete analysis will elucidate to a lot more people most of the meaning that the abstract explanations failed to convey. Well, we’ll see…

1. please the publishers or else be denied access to the materials they seek to review
2. please their editor or else don’t get paid; but the editor’s primary source of capital is often advertising … from the publishers
3. answer the consumer’s main question in a way that earns their trust: should they purchase this game or not?
4. stand out from the crowd of a million game players who decide to write about their hobby

Who’s your Daddy?

This has been a problem for as long as I can remember (20+ years of game playing and reading game reviews); the consumer *believes* that the reviewer is answerable to them – but it has been a very long time (10 years now?) since consumers were the paymaster of reviewers; nowadays, it’s advertisers (which usually means: game-publishers).

Of course, consumers still wield huge power. The virtuous value circle – the only circle that matters – is driven by consumers:

• A reviewer has a “readership” of consumers who are influenced in their purchasing decisions by those reviews
• Publishers therefore court the reviewer to try and curry favour with the consumers and increase sales of the publishers’ products (to those readers, and anyone they themselves influence – friends, family, colleagues, etc)
• Reviewers earn more money, and get deeper access to development teams (courtesy of the publishers), so produce more reviews

But that power is – clearly – both indirect and hard to quantify. A consumer – even many of them – threatening to “stop reading a reviewer’s reviews” is not particularly effective.

Publications like Edge helped along the indirection of consumer-power when they decided to go out of their way to obscure the identities of their individual reviewers, turning reviews into as much of a crap-shoot as buying games was in the first place. Since the web rose to prominence, it’s been eroded at the other end – there’s now so many reviewers around that, well … who has the time to remember who any individual reviewer is?

Qui custodet custodes?

But if journalists/reviewers are supposedly there as a watchdog on the publishers’ marketing depts, supposedly helping the consumer determine which are the (non-refundable) purchases they ought to be making, then who’s checking that the journalists themselves are honest?

No-one, really. And that’s where the rot begins. The storms of outraged public opinion are nothing new: examples of journalists writing reviews of games (reviews both scathing and rejoicing) they hadn’t even played go way back into the 1980’s.

A case study in lies, damn lies, and video game journalism

In case you hadn’t heard, this week a “staff writer” from Eurogamer (a games review / news site) ripped to pieces one of the most recently-released MMOs – Darkfall. At which point Aventurine, the developer of Darkfall, responded with increasing anger and dismay.

But the really interesting thing here is that Aventurine didn’t merely rant “you bastards! Our game is Teh Awesum!!!111! STFU, Beotch!” (well, they did that as well) … no, they dropped a little A-bomb in the middle of their reply:

“We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator”

Pwned. MMO developers *actually know whether your journalist played the game before reviewing it*. What’s more … they have proof…

The EG reviewer (whose “references and background are immaculate”, according to the editor – but from reading his only two EG reviews, I’m afraid it does rather sound like he knows little about MMOs), responded (via his editor) with the claim:

“the logs miss out two crucial days and understate others, … and he insists he played the game for at least nine hours”

It would seem that someone is lying (and it could be either party). Worse, someone is being particularly stupid. Because the journalist is claiming “your computers lie”, and the developer is claiming “your journalist is a lier”; either way, it’s not a subtle, small, mistake – whoever is wrong, if they get discovered, they’re going to create themself a good amount of long-term trouble (bad reputation).

Lots of MMO developers write shitty server code, and honestly don’t know what the hell is going-on inside their own game-world (but fondly imagine that they do – and proudly boast to the press (in the vaguest terms) that they do). But the rule of thumb is that devs who don’t know … don’t even know what it is they ought to be claiming that they know. The specificity of Aventurine’s claims suggests that they do have the stats, and those stats are mostly correct.

(I say “mostly” because there is a bit of vagueness about what – precisely – the reviewer was doing in-game. That reeks of holes in their metrics/logging. They clearly know when the player was logged-in, and what they did/said in chat, and how many characters were created – but apparently not what they were doing in the client, e.g. how long did they spend in character creation? Implicitly: unlogged; unknown)

Whereas it’s quite likely that a non-knowledgeable journalist, accustomed to buggy games, would assume that they could safely claim “your server is buggy, those figures are wrong”.

Unfortunately for any such journalist, server logs are generally either correct, or absent entirely – there’s rarely any middle-ground. If he knew a bit more about MMO tech he might know this; very few journos (any of them?) know that much about the games they review, though.

So … based on nothing but casual observation and intimate knowledge of the tech issues (and several decades of reading game reviews…), I’m leaning in favour of Adventurine and against Ed Zelton. My guess (pure *guess*) is that he’s been caught out being either incompetent or perhaps a bit lazy as a reviewer, and he’s thought he could get away with blaming it on buggy code. From reading the review, I get the impression he wishes he were Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (from Zero Punctuation) – although he clearly isn’t funny enough – but he seems to like saying “it’s shit; you’re shit; you’re all shit; STFU” instead of reviewing the game, and seems to think that’s good enough. As an MMO player, my feeling was that the review was, well … useless – without even playing the game, there is so much more I would want to hear in a review, and so much of his wanky whining that I couldn’t care less about. As an MMO developer, it felt downright insulting, as if he’d made no effort at all to play the game as a game. Actually, it felt like he’d hardly played MMOs in his life, and didn’t really know what they were.

(NB, from the review: his apparent ignorance of some of the most important *and best-selling* RPG + MMORPG games of all time – the Ultima series – suggests that he really isn’t much good as a game reviewer. YMMV.)

Reviewing the reviewers

Up-front I’m going to point out that I don’t believe all MMO developers are currently capable of doing this – many people would be amazed to discover the true state of metrics collection in this industry – although *all* modern MMO developers ought to, and it’s not too hard to add-on later (add it to the list of “things MMO developers ought to do as standard practice, but many of them don’t do”). But it’s a general thing that I think we should move towards.

MMO developers (well, actually, the Operators, but that’s getting pedantic) are in an excellent position to help guard journalistic honesty, in a way that traditional game developers have never been able to. I would like to start seeing the following published by *every* MMO developer each time their game is reviewed:

1. What level the account(s) started at
2. What level the account(s) peaked at
3. How many hours the reviewer spent at the lowest levels, levelling-up manually
4. How many hours the reviewer spent at the highest levels
5. What percentage of time was spent on each of the different primary character classes and factions
6. Which areas of the game / aspects the reviewer actually engaged in (hours of combat, hours of crafting, hours of chat, etc)

…but, honestly, this isn’t so much about “journalistic honesty” (I used that phrase tongue-in-cheek above) as it is about starting a virtuous cycle of developers being more cognizant of what, actually, players “do” in their games – preferably *before* gold launch. In particular, if publishers (developers) started supplementing reviews with this info (as a matter of course), I think we’d see a sea-change in industry staff appreciating three key things about metrics:

1. How little metrics they’re actually collecting compared to how much they think they’re collecting
2. What metrics actually matter, and/or are useful?
3. How players actually play the game; by extension: how fun is the game, really, and which parts suck horribly?

Does this work / matter?

At NCsoft, I got into the habit of asking prospective partners, hires/employees, and external studios which MMO’s they played (fair enough) … and how many characters they’d got to the level-cap with / what level their characters had reached. It started as an innocent question, but I quickly noticed how often it gave early warning of failures of honesty among individuals, and how much it presaged the problems they would have in the future.

The two worst problems were “complete ignorance of the MMO industry (either of pre-existing design practices, or tech practices)” and “personal self-deceit about what the person knows, and what they don’t know”. The latter tended to be a far worse problem: when someone is deceiving *themself*, it’s doubly hard to re-educate them, because first you have to get them to accept their own deception.

Of course, it turned out to lead to a lot of defensive responses and a spew of self-justification, which made us both uncomfortable. In those situations, it can easily lead to making assumptions that certain people’s opinions are “worth less” because, say, you know for a fact they’ve never really played an MMO – at least, not in the way that most of that MMO’s players would/will/do play it. I hate that tendency, since it’s part of a snobbishness that lies at the root of a lot of oyster-like, head-in-sand behaviour in our industry. On the other hand, it’s important and useful to know when someone’s ideas are random conjecture and when they’re based on fact (and very few people in a design meeting or publisher/developer meeting will honestly tell you their ideas are conjecture :)).

On the whole, though, it turned out to be a really useful line of questioning – even bearing in mind the additional (smaller) problems it created. There are obvious problems that come from the statistical supplementing of free-form prose game-reviews – but I’m confident that these will be outweighed by the advantages (and the problems that will be shrunk).

PS:

Despite the TLC of good friends, I’m still weak and sapped of all energy from my month of illness. I’m triaging like mad to deal with urgent issues, but there’s plenty of highly important stuff that’s been pending on me for a while that I still haven’t had the time + energy to deal with. So, if you’re still waiting … I’m sorry.

It was a good talk overall, with lots of honest and insightful comments from the panellists. The best bit was probably Q&A at the end – which I had to miss :(. Not everything they said was great, there were some dodgy bits, and I missed most of the second half, but it was clearly worth going to.

Bear in mind, though, that on the morning of this talk I was already considering an opportunity I’d seen that seemed to replace traditional games publishers and was looking like it might work extremely well. So … this talk was accidentally of a lot more relevance to me than I’d realised it would be :).

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).

Recap of Blue Oceans

John Welch – co-founder of PlayFirst, started at Shockwave.com.

Red ocean = bloody mess, sharks fighting each other, no innovation other than drop costs or increment company value, no product innovation.

Blue = a market you create by changing the rules.

Example brands that took Blue strategies (whether or not deliberately)

Southwest Airlines,
NTT DoCoMo,
etc

blue = aligned around differentiation AND low cost, where red oceans only choose one OR the other.

“Give customers BOTH increased value AND decreased cost” (== blue).

[ADAM: not sure why NCsoft didnt buy a copy for every employee. Oh well]

Innovation is when you simultaneously reduce or eliminate costs, and “raise” or “create” value.

Southwest/

Eliminate: Got rid of reserved sets
Reduce: downsized the amenities

Raise: increased frequency of departures
Create: aimed to make “flying” an alternative to driving

[example: showed an advert for SW saying "why drive when you can fly for $59 or less one-way?"]

Application to MMO

Eliminate: big up-front retail cost, big fat binary that has to come on DVD
reduce: production values
raise: more diverse gameplay, more avatars customization
create: ease of trial + viral features

[ADAM: interesting coincidence there - "reduce production values" was the same conclusion I came to for last year's ION/LOGIN conference, where I advised people that the next generation of MMO's should be made with the mantra "Don't worry, be crappy", and "quality" should be explicitly and deliberately thrown away]

tier 1: soon-to-be customers
tier 2: refusing non-customers who choose against you
tier 3: unexplored – noncustomers in markets distant from yours

“casual games for women in 2000″ == tier 2 / tier 3

Sebastien @ Playfish

What was a red ocean experience of yours?

“the entire videogame industry”:
- our MO has always been to “create hits”
- we aim to increase costs and investment to try and drive bigger and bigger hits
- GTA4 was taken as a point of pride but is perhaps a failure in that it’s extreme red-ocean
- success formula == quantity * price

What was a blue ocean experience of yours?

“wii” (an “almost” blue ocean)
- targetted non-customers. Advertising in Elle magazine, right outside the typical market
- …but: the success formula hasn’t changed

“Social games” [ADAM: ie: what Playfish is focussing on]
- CREATE: a new gamestyle, “playing with real-world friends”
- ELIMINATE: distribution costs (pure viral marketing)
- REDUCE: flash, web, etc
- RAISE: the monetization potential by giving more ways to pay [ADAM: this sounds to me like misunderstanding the blue ocean?]
- Success formula == V * E * M (virality, engagement, monetization)

[ADAM: unlike the first one, that formula doesn't work, neither in a simple logical way, nor in a complex mathematical way. This is nonsensical. I would advise completely ignoring the VEM thing]

learnings?
[ADAM: none cited]

Dan Prigg @ Real Arcade

What was a red ocean experience of yours?

1st: Acquiring Gamehouse
Pre-”casual games” as a label, we thought that it was all going to be about digital distribution (DD). We saw it as a blue-ocean, but we didn’t really know who the consumer was going to be. We were throwing up stuff like Team Fortress, when in fact it was Bejewelled that would be the huge success.

We had chased the wrong consumer segment. [ADAM: I guess they failed on the "attract new customers / markets" part?]

2nd: Acquiring Zylom
Pretty much the same effective action as with GH, yet again we pursued a digital-distribution strategy (created huge dominance in Europe DD, overnight).

How many people think that the casual market is a red ocean right now? [about 2% of the audience]. From my perspective, the casual PC market is still a blue ocean, BUT … what we’ve done as an industry is pursue red-ocean strategies inside this blue-ocean. We all targetted stuff around a consumer that we didn’t understand.

We’ve just been damn lucky in making a huge market without having to do much of the clever work.

[ADAM: I think that was the most succinct piece of valuable insight I heard at the conference this year :)]

No-one has really gone after the casual-industry NON customers yet. 60 years ago TV was taboo, it was thought it would mush your brain, and now it’s part of everyone’s lives. We need to understand more about how we’re going to make the same transition with games – maybe “games” isn’t even the best label for us to use going forward.

JW: I’d say that the distribution is entirely red, making a red-ocean imposed on all developers who can’t sell into the blue ocean potential area because they have no distribution that will let them get there.

[ADAM: this is the traditional "thing that has defined the entire publisher/developer relationship" in the games industry for the past 20 years. Sidestepping traditional distribution strangeholds - whether that's the exclusive contract with retailers to sell games on store shelves, or whether it's the portal front-pages and the top 3 slots on the deck on mobile network operators systems - has always been the best way out]

I really want to question our core-practices as an industry – how we actually market and promote to our customers. Part of what you see in blue oceans is explicitly and primarily working around these fears and prejudices in customers – making them stop rejecting the product outright, thereby converting them into new customers that only *you* are currently marketing + selling to.

JW: how is that we look at Playfish and all those slides … yet we’re still seeing basic time-management games in the mainstream casual industry? We’re still seeing match-3?

JW: I’m shouting out to the developers in the audience who work with RA that Dan wants you to help him – by innovating in your games that they publish – to change this industry where he says he wants it to change.

QUESTION: how do you persuade C-level execs to move to a blue-ocean when there’s no market research or stats to prove it?

You don’t – you start your own company.

QUESTION: users co-invest in the social gaming market; they upload their private data, and that gets used by the applications to “do more” for the customers. Meanwhile, in the old download world, the distribution side has refused that kind of sharing. What is needed to change downloads so that this can be unlocked?

Sebastien: I think for a long time the customers have been cut off from the process. The only input they got was to choose to “buy game X, or not buy game X”. And that, inevitably, leads to nothing other than encouraging sequelitis.

Sebastien: If you run your game as a service, not a product that is fire-and-forget .. then you co-opt them into the process. Empowered users are much happier.

Over: we power gamechannel with myspace and the one thing that’s clear is that the availability of better SDK’s for developers would massively help us move to a place where the deverlopers can do more with their users. I think it’s happening, but it needs those SDK’s to come out first.

JW: I think it’s the mere existence and effectiveness of playfish et al that is forcing the traditional casual games companies like RA to have to change how they work.

DP: I think we did innovation and small teams in the very early days, but we didn’t keep it up long enough, as we grew larger we grew away from that.

Daniel Berstein, sandlot games

[ADAM: I started to write up Dan's section, but I had to leave after a couple of minutes and the notes I ended up with were too garbled to keep. I had to leave at this point, this session had already been going for an hour, and I had a different session or a meeting I had to get to. Sorry!]

Casual, assumed, free internet access is now ubiquitous (even if the access itself isn’t as operationally ubiquitous as services assume). I can’t even access half my music collection any more unless I’ve got a wireless high-bandwidth connection available (Spotify). The other half lives on my MP3 player (iPhone) – but is static, unmeasured, unconnected, and unshareable.

This is a problem. Right now, sitting in San Francisco, the city of a thousand broken, crashing, low-bandwidth, pay-per-minute (min charge 24 hours) wifi connections, next door to Silicon Valley, a world center of innovation that only exists because the right infrastructure here and the wrong mistakes elsewhere allowed it to form, it’s particularly on my mind. SF is a great example of what will push the next Silicon Valley to happen elsewhere. A lot of people ought to be worried by that – and doing a little more about it.

In Brighton, my current (temporary) home city, the first repeated free wifi hotspots were set up – as I understand it – effectively as an act of charitable benevolence by “a couple of guys” (looseconnection.com/Josh Russell). They weren’t even rich, or old – just some kids doing something cool, and useful. Anyone could do this. Too few actually do. I’ve heard it suggested again and again (where are the mesh networks that were supposed to be ubiquitous 4 years ago?) by people in the UK – especially in and around Cambridge, in tech the UK’s closest replica of Silicon Valley – but always with excuses about why they aren’t doing it yet, aren’t able to until someone else does something else to make it easier for them. That’s crap. Just do it. Do it this weekend; what better are you doing right now?

Will Apple single-handedly save Wifi? Maybe. It could be the biggest gift of iPhone: that it finally turns the rest of the world on to building bigger, better, and above all FREE, wifi networks. Everywhere. Ironic, considering that’s exactly what will kill the fundamental device that drives the iPhone: the “cell” phone. Does anybody else remember that before we had cell phones we had hotspot phones, back when cells weren’t good enough, and were so expensive to use? So we go full circle, but this time with an ecosystem and a tech interconnection system (API’s, protocols, layers) big enough to support the worldwide rollout of such hotspots (well, and that’s what mesh was supposed to be about, right?)

But why would this happen? It doesn’t make sense … does it?

Skype is a great example. Sadly, it’s also overloaded with additional meaning that clouds the issue – because Skype is an internet app (good) that is mostly about phone calls (bad / confusing the issue).

Skype is now available on iPhone, and it’s a great, highly polished, iPhone App. It *works* (as well as anything can on iPhone – with the current version of iPhone Apple does not allow *anyone* to have their app listen for incoming connections and auto-start, so you can only “receive” Skype calls on your iPhone if you are not using any other app and instead are currently inside the Skype App.

But … the voice part only works over Wifi. This is the concession it took for Skype to be “allowed” on iPhone (NB: Apple allegedly forced the network operators to give away free / flat rate data in return for being “allowed” to sell network-locked iPhones; if Apple had also allowed Skype-on-3G/EDGE/cell network, then they would have caused people to stop paying call charges en masse. Although this is the natural future of cell phones, and everyone knows this, the network operators would probably assassinate Steve Jobs if he tried that today).

So, Skype is – effectively – a “wifi-only” application.

20 million devices cannot be ignored

But wait … there’s more. The iPhone platform has an installed userbase of almost 40 million handsets as of first quarter 2009 (yes, that’s only 20% less than the entire global sales PS3 and 360 combined; the iphone is already one of the top games consoles in the world; Sony (Computer Entertainment) is doomed, and Nintendo’s cash days are numbered, even though they’ll make loads of cash for the next 3 years – the DSi was defunct due to iPhone *before it launched*, so after those few years, the cashflow will drop off / vanish).

But … around half of those are not iPhones, but iPod Touch’s. This is very important to understand: the two devices are compile time identical, and *almost* feature identical. They are more similar than almost any pair of cell phones in the world, even ones from the same manufacturer. And by default all iPhone developers are writing code that runs seamlessly on the iPod Touch – it doesn’t (usually) “break” on iPod Touch if it uses an unsupported iPhone-only feature … rather, that part of the app silently is ignored.

So … nearly all those iPhone developers are actually also iPod Touch developers. Many of them deliberately steer clear of using iPhone-only features. Some of them (myself included) write their apps to cleverly detect whether they’re on an iPod Touch, and work around the limitations (it’s not hard – e.g. if I can’t upload scores to the game server because I’m on a Touch that isnt in wifi range, I save it and upload it next time the phone is online. As a bonus, this makes my games work “better” on iPhone when the iPhone has to go offline, e.g. when it goes on an airplane).

NOT “iphone App”, but “Wifi App”

Back to the point… There aren’t many Wifi-only Apps out there on iPhone … yet.

But there will be. More and more of them. And this summer, when Apple brings out the 3.0 update for iPhone, making ad-hoc discovery much easier (i.e. my phone will be able to auto-detect / find your iphone when they’re in the same room), wifi-local Apps will blossom.

A simple example: real-time fast-action games.

e.g. a Racing Game, that works like this:

1. I persuade you to download the free version
2. We each click on the icon on our own phones
3. The phones magically discover each other, without either of us doing anything, within a couple of seconds
4. We start playing a high-speed racing game – e.g. Need for Speed, or Midnight Club – over the local wifi network
5. The net code works beautifully, there’s no lag, everything updates very fast and smoothly
6. When we finish, the free version you downloaded pops up to say “you played with your friend because he/she had the paid version. If you want to play with different friends, one of you will need to buy the paid version. Click here to buy (one click, instant download)”.

All that is possible, and relatively easy, come summer 2009. You *can* attempt to do it over a 3G network, but it’s hard. But as a wifi-only app it becomes easy. Guess what’s going to happen?

The future of local free wifi

I predicted around 30-40 million iPhone* devices sold by now, and Apple’s 37 million official figure made me look clever (although admittedly it was only a 6 months extrapolation and a 33% error margin I quoted there ;)). I predicted around 75-100 million sold by the same time 2010, and I’ve noticed a lot of other people have come up with the 100 million estimate for 2009 since the official 37 million figure came out.

So, although I think it’s optimistic to expect 100m by the end of the year, I’m confident it’s going to be close. 100m wifi enabled game consoles sitting in cafes, restaurants, bookshops, trains, buses, hotel lobbies, city squares, pubs, etc.

Oh, and don’t forget – that iPod Touch, with no “network contract” to pay for, is a perfect gift for kids. Plenty of people have lined up to tell me that kids can’t afford them; the market research that consistently shows under 18’s as the second largest demographic for iphone* ownership suggest that’s an ill-informed opinion. So there’ll be a lot of those devices sitting in the hands of bored children / used to keep them occupied while parents are doing other things. And we all know how strong a child’s “pestering power” can be.

Monetize local wifi? Screw that; who can be bothered to monetize it when it becomes as essential a driver of custom to your store as having coke/pepsi/coffee on the menu (even though you’re actually, e.g. a bookstore…). Re-think how that affects the “monetization potential” of local wifi (hint: look to the already vast field of *indirectly monetized* Freemium / F2P for inspiration)

So, I’m optimistic. And rather than focus on how “iPhone is going to destroy the cell phone / network operator hegemony, and bring around fair pricing for consumers”, I’m focussing on how it’s going to usher in the long-envisaged era of high-bandwidth, low-latency, high quality console games and apps that focus on the local area. I’m happy with that: I’ve spent almost a decade learning how to make online games for millions of players where the core experience takes place in the local group, so I feel extremely qualified to do well out of this. What about you? What will you be doing with it?

Summary

The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it.

(I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)

All errors / omissions my fault, as ever, and my comments in [square brackets].

Not-a-post-mortem

This is not a post-mortem, it’s mid-mortem – we’re still actively doing the changes I’m talking about here.

126 million registered accounts, 11.5 m monthly logins. Seen 40% growth in last year of signups. 2008 was a good year for us. Financials arent’e public yet, so I cant say, but there’s probably good news coming up.

We’re trying to add more game to Habbo.

What’s Habbo? A Social MMO.

[description of Habbo]. We did web based first, it’s nice to see the industry validating our decision from 2001 and also moving to web-based.
[showed screenshots of Hogwarts room where people are RPing HP inside HH]
[showed American Idol RP]; there’s no tools, no logic, no control – it’s all voluntary shared play.

We’re now selling windows, so you can stick them on the walls and get pieces of views out to outside [couple of examples where people made floor to ceiling glass walls by plastering the wall].

[showed McD role-play], with people pretending to be servers, buying food, eating, etc. All emotes. Children are interested to know what it’s really like (real world) to flip burgers, theyr’e too young to really do it themselves, so this play is a way of exploring the ideas.

[ADAM: this is a big under-explored area. Looking at the real-life themeparks designed for children to play at being differet adult professions for a day (now live in 7 different countries, IIRC!), it would be good to do more of this stuff, I think]

Social MMO: we’re UGC, open-ended [self-defined by the users], not a game.

With industry people lookign at games as VWs, theres strong polarization, and people see them as mutaully excusive. I think that’s complete bull, and they are mutually supportive, and should be combined.

In general, though, the exampels of integrations you think of, like WoW, the built-in systems are really ONLY supporting games, and never social.

We’ve been trying to boost the game mechanics without killing the social experience. We’re tryignt to balance ourseves a bit better [showed Schubert triangle], be less extreme.

[becoming unfocussed?]

Problem: our socila interaction is really very hardcore. we see a 95/5 split (top 5% of users spend as much time in habbo as the rest of the world put together). Thankfully the spending doesnt follow the same distribution, its much more even.

Social value erodes quickly – if you leave for jutst a short while, when you come back you need to spend a lot of time/money re-building your reptuation, your set of currently cool items, etc.

[interesting graph of excitement vs time since joining: shoots up, then suddenly drops 60%, then bounces back up to 99% where it wavers around forever more]. My job as a designer is to get people to surive the Valley of Death after their initial enthusiasm, while they’re becomign overwhelmed and lost and fristrated, and before they get subsumed into the community and feel comfortable wihtin the expeirence.

Users can tell how old a players account is simply from glacning at their avatar clothing because its so hardcore in terms of knowing what dress culture is current, older, etc. It makes it very very hard for new users to break in to the social structure.

[ADAM: reminds me of Eve]

new users reactions: expected to be able to “earn” something (levels, etc) by playing; expected a lot more “game”-ness to it.

So … we’ve been adding mechanics. Sticking to ones that ?dont? have direct social meanings, or that support social value. Even if your’e not paritcupating actively in the social circles, you have some game stuff to do and enjoy.

1st thing: achievements. An additional in-game currency (earned)

Looking at other eperinces, people dont tie together all their features. So we set out to tie all our new suff together from the start.

Added “goals for noobs” to help people through the start.

Feedback: lots of unhappiness, but habbo users alwasy reactionary against new stuff unless it benefits them. Looked into the people who ran the anti-achievement group, foudn they were some of the top achievements-eaners in the entire game. But also some very positive repsonses, people loved it, provided context for what they do.

2nd thing: buying pixels, andother in-game currency (paid)

We’re using the earned currency as a scaracity model. It used to be that you could use money to buy anything/everyting in world. Now we can sell stuff with high earned-cost thing that forces people to earn as well as pay, supporting people who want to do goal-oriented play and have meaning

[ADAM interesting how reactionary USA companies were over doing any pay-for-advancement, and some still do, whereas Habbo is pay-only, and just seeing "some" benefit from "allowing" GOP, rather than obsessnig and assuming "people ONLY ever want GOP"]

[ADAM thought: does Habbo have a powerful enough search system for finding all these interesting rooms that Sulka is showing?]

33% of users said that it was difficult to show others the are cool or have done somethign well.

42% said it was difficult to know if others THINNk they are cool have done something well

Perhaps this is a teenager thing, that peopel are more uncertain about how they are perceived than by how they are.

3rd thing: Respect, antoher currency (earned, but giftedby other people, not self-earned)

“respect is worhtless because everyoen cna get respect” (quote from player)

It take peoepl a while to work out “what to do” with any new social tools. When you put it out, they arent’ sure what the socially-acceptable uses are going to be. So, 3 months (long time in this world) after laucnh they asked what people were using it for:

- weclomg new players, making them feel happy
- renaming it “love” and gifting it to GF/BF

Now, 76% of users say they are trying to earn the level-cap achievement for Respect (big change from launch, with the strong negative feedback, and the claims that it was fundamentally useless and terrible and would ruin the world).

23% of users have been paid to give Respect. It’s now a signficant driver of the economy.

Social mechanics change slowly, it takes a long time for people to decide what to do with them, to find ways of using them, to adpt it.

In the words of Raph: Chat is not enough. This is true, it carries you a long way, but you can go / need to go a lot futher.

Questions

how do you gather the feedback that you get from users, and how do you process it?

lst year we did 9 big releases, after each we did a huge poll of the users. Mix of feebback on concrete aspects of the change, and forward-looking statements so that we can later re-ask those post-release and see how good the predictions were / how much opinion has changed over time.

We follow fansistes too, but the forums are dominated by the loudest voices. Distribuiton of percentage of people that like/dislike a given thing is radically different between forums and questionnaires.

what %ge of time are people devoting to these new game-like mechanics?
why didnt you implement more of those mechanics yet?

Wev designed achievements as a dise product of regular actvitiy more than something you have to change your behaviour to achieve – you would get there eventually anyway for a lot of them, just be being an active, normal, good member of the social community.

how much detail are players asking for in the logic of mechanics?

we get asked for eveyrthing that exists in any game in the world, and thousnads of responses contunuosly

[ADAM: they have so many users that they're inundated with any requires you can think of; I think the questioner (worked for a company making game-creation suites, wanted to know if there was ]

have you woven in any narrative to the world?

tried some, mostly just to help new users understand the mechanics of the site and what your’e trying toa chieve.

but the world changes so fast that everytiem we put in some narraitve, it becomes out-of-date within a few weeks (the UGC fads move on too fast).

also teenagers seem to hate being given an on-rails narrative path of how they “should” be relating to the expeirence, instead of just explorng for themselves

but we do run a lot of social events where we soft-seed ideas and peices of narrative, and leave it to the players to volunartily role-play stores and ideas based on that.

Your professor tells you that you can’t study them for their own sake. However, if they’re as exciting as you say, and all the young people are reading them, then perhaps you could write an educational one? He therefore instructs you to go away and write a novel to teach addition.

For one of the conferences I was asked to speak at this year, I proposed a talk on the topic:

“Why the Serious Games movement is fundamentally bankrupt based on an idea that will never work, and what you should be doing instead, because there’s some great stuff you’re doing under that banner – but only when you undermine or ignore the classic definition(s) of Serious Games”

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t accept it. They kept on asking me to talk on something more “positive” and “business encouraging”; I kept on replying that it needs to be said, that it would be more valuable to their audience than anything else I personally could talk meaningfully on, and that if they didn’t want it, fine. Not my loss. Ah well.

(and to those of you who are doing great stuff and calling it Serious Games, but not following the foolishness of the majority – well done, keep it up, and we’re looking forward to what you come up with next!)

http://gizmodo.com/5172615/iphone-os-30-will-turn-your-phone-into-a-revolutionary-sex-toy?skyline=true&s=x

…with particular emphasis on the social / avatar / chat / networking features.

Developers will have the tools to enable in-app purchases — like subscriptions, additional game levels, and new content.

Strangely enough, this makes things a lot easier for me. Now we can stop treading carefully around the “can’t use the revenue models we know and love and have been using for years” problem on iPhone and use all that knowledge we’ve already got.

I wait to get the new SDK and see how true to the promise the reality will be…

I had a quick look at the API’s – they’ve got the right idea technically (use REST, provide PHP versions, etc), although the set of queryable data is pretty mneh (they could easily have done a *lot* more interesting stuff too). I’m impressed that they’ve got that right, and they appear to have done a great job of presenting it nice and clearly. Most importantly, because the selection of data is lame, the challenge is there – in your face – to be very creative with how you’re going to use it. Go for it.

I had a look at some of the demo apps that had already been done, and they show great variety. If you’re trying to break into the games industry as an online designer, you should try your hand at using their content (and this is *legal*) to design something cool. You (probably; I haven’t checked the legals) won’t own exploitation rights – but it could make a great portfolio piece.

So I was rather saddened that it’s taken until now, and a random glance at a newsfeed item, for me to be aware of this. Which isn’t so bad, except … I was one of the first wave of purchasers of Spore, and I played it heavily, and checked out the Sporepedia for the few months after launch.

But they launched with most of the Sporepedia either “broken completely” or “not implemented yet”. Having paid $50+ for a full price game, to discover that even after several months the Sporepedia was “mostly not implemented yet, watch this space”, my reaction was : “I have better things to do with my life than wait for you to pull your finger out and do your job properly and give me what *I’ve already paid for*”.

And because of the mind-numbingly stupid DRM decisions by EA, I’ve point blank refused to install their viruses – without which, the system isn’t going to let me upload any of my own creatures / UGC. Which takes away a lot of the other cause of interest that would have rapidly lured me in.

Finally if it had been a “real” online game (why wasn’t it? No-one really seems to know. My theory is “fear and shame over The Sims Online catastrophe”) of course … my friends relationships in-game would have meant I’d have been pulled-in to this new cool stuff as soon as it went live.

So … it would seem that when it comes to boundary-pushing game design Maxis is managing to go 2 steps forwards and 3 steps back. That’s a real pity, because I suspect a lot of people who would love what Sporepedia was *described* as being (rather than the massive short-sell it actually was) have already given up, gone home, and don’t care any more. Only the people who don’t know about the good games out there (the non-gamers who happened to pick up a copy – of whic there are many many of course, thanks to the Sims juggernaut) are still around to enjoy it.

Am I being too pessimistic here? Certainly, not a single professional I know has shown any remaining awareness or interest in what Spore’s doing for the last 6 months. That’s pretty damning, in my eyes, for a game with such big sales and the Sims driving marketing and sales for it.

(PS: in case it’s not clear – as far as I’m aware, there’s still literally zero socialising in Spore. That’s the irony of the title here. The only socialising is 1995-era “the players are doing it anyway despite the developer+publisher going out of their way to stop them”)

“It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens.”

(also … If that article is accurate, sad but unsurprising to hear that (apparently) the underpowered server tech for TR yet again managed to make a misery of gameplay, even at the very end. If that article is accurate, then well done to the ops for managing to get some instancing sorted out, but note to self: never let this happen with future twitch-based / FPS MMOs)

If you have any interest in iPhone development (you have ideas for apps, or you want to start coding for your iphone, or just want to meet other like-minded folks over beers), then come along.

Bring friends. Bring iPhones (I’ll bring my laptop so you can download and try my current work in progress)

If you’ve got anything you’ve made yourself, definitely bring it along!

We had a quiet first meetup last night, I’ll be adding screenshots / app descriptions for the two apps shown on the night to this post later.

EDIT:

Snooker Scorer

This is a simple app that keeps score of a snooker match. You can use it in a club, watching a match live or even following on tv. Just tap the ball that has been potted. Hit the ’swap’ icon to swap players. If a foul happens, hold the ‘foul’ icon and tap the ball fouled. Free balls can be added as well through the popup actions icon. Future additions will make the information line adapt to show the most relevant info such as current or maximum break, difference and points remaing, balls potted in current break, match history, undo mistakes, and whatever else I can think of.

But the interesting thing is quite how much benefit the airport gets.

Modern airports, as entities, get a huge amount of their revenue from the shops inside them. I’m from the UK, where Heathrow (and to a lesser extent Gatwick) have taken this to extremes for decades, but it’s spread over most of Europe and much of the USA by now too.

Advising passengers that they must arrive 3 hours before a flight leaves is one way to make them spend lots of money. Cancelling their flights is another (the branch of the WHSmith’s newsagent inside Heathrow airport made vastly more profit than any other branch in 2007 thanks to the plane cancellations that year). Making the airport experience a pleasant one, so that people *don’t mind* coming early is yet another. Facilitating people “working” at the airport too.

And free wifi supports not one but two of those. Making it hassle-free and ubiquitous is the difference between me wiliingly turning up more than an hour before my flight, and what I would normally do (aim to arrive 30-45 minutes before an international flight, and waste as little time as possible).

This is a model of “free” that I feel is still under-explored in the game space: Free as driver of larger secondary monetized activity.

“RuneScape is different from all other MMOs in that the free game has an epic amount of content (we’d estimate over 2,000 hours worth to get all your skills up to 99 and complete all the quests) and isn’t merely a demo for the members’ version. If anything, we see the members’ version as an expansion pack for those that really love the game”

If you’re citing Runescape *anywhere* in your design, development, funding, or revenue models (or even in your secret dreams of success), you’d do well not to miss this distinction of what the RS free version is. Remember this: it was designed and built as a free game, not as freemium game. The subscriptions were never part of the plan, and the extra content for them was added on as an afterthought. If you want to go head to head with RS with your own “free” content, that’s a high bar you have to hit.

Speaking of the new CEO, Nicholas Lovell has some thoughts on what happens when you have a CTO and and a CTO run an MMO company together.

“You know the only analogue I can come up for this is to imagine a WWII FPS where the opening cinematic tells you that the Nazis have destroyed Great Britain with a giant laser and you’re one of the few English to escape via a magic portal to Russia at Stone Henge which was planted by ancient mystics from China. However the rest of the game takes place in relatively normal WWII FPS style while the Nazis throw paltry attacks into the steppes, and yet most of the people you meet are also British and no one seems to care that Jolly Ol’ England is smouldering black glass. Occasionally you stumble across more ancient Stone Henges to learn Mandarin to gain super powers. The Nazi country-destorying laser is never brought up.”

ROFLMAO. And … excellent plot-summary there.

(remembering that I did actually *like* TR. But the OP has a point)

“No, these games failed because their developers let it happen.”

• Funcom *should have* learned enough lessons with Anarchy Online not to make the mistakes they did with AoC; not the precise same mistakes, but the same “class” of mistakes were made, suggesting that they tried to fix only the symptoms and failed to understand the causes
• Destination Games knew a long long time before TR went to beta that it wasn’t (going to be) ready even for beta, let alone launch. IMHO NCsoft collectively knew very well that TR wasn’t ready for launch, but went ahead and launched it anyway
• Bill Roper went on record to say that no-one understood their sales/revenue model, from the start. As I’ve mentioned before, that pretty much guarantees failure, and it’s not rocket-science to understand why!
• Pirates … I have no idea, actually. It’s the one that I have never played (although I really wanted to) nor even *seen* (which is unusual). I’m not going to talk about PotBS any more, since I really know nothing about it

NB: I don’t happen to agree with anything else in that post. I’ve got nothing against it, I just didn’t find anything interesting or new about the games themselves in the post, and IMHO the list of “why this happened” is too shallow and derivative to be worth saying in 2009 – the same has been said many times over the last ten years by many people, and ain’t particularly insightful in the first place. Sorry, dude.

How do you “let” an MMO fail, pre-launch?

Anyway, back to the interesting bit. This is why I find the statement particularly interesting: the choice of phrasing, that the developers “let it” fail.

The implication being that they didn’t do anything wrong, perhaps, but that they stood by and watched the train rolling slowly towards the brick wall and didn’t try (hard enough) to stop the collision.

TR was in development for 7 years (give or take a bit, and arguably just half that depending on whether you count the bit before there was an official “resetting” of the project (and re-shuffling of staff)).

When did they first ship a playable that people found fun?

Ah. Hmm. Um. Well. Now, *I* certainly wasn’t around during all this, so I can’t authoritatively answer that. However, I well remember the large number of people remarking that the beta – just before launch – was starting to be “actually a lot of fun to play”. 6+ years to get to the first fun version, eh? Hmm. Traditionally, you start with something fun, then you build a game around it, not the other way around.

Rating Tabula Rasa, in Alpha

While people are busily shooting me down in flames for such disloyalty :), I’m going to make a confession: I played TR in the alpha, and (to the great amusement – and in many cases total disbelief – of my colleagues) I actually enjoyed it. It certainly wasn’t a lot of fun to play, but there were nice elements that I could really see how they would develop (could be developed) into a great game, if we started development of the game at that point. I was accustomed at the time to making forward-looking evaluations of games, and reading between the lines and guess at how the final product would look.

i.e. it was a good pre-production prototype, and if I’d been asked “this studio wants us to fund them to turn this into a full game, should we do it?” I’d have said “well, modulo some small but fundamental changes that are needed, and the fact we need to explain to them a small number of basic mistakes they’re making with misunderstanding the MMO market, and they obviously will want a *lot* more money to build it up, flesh it out, and implement what they’ve barely sketched out in outline at this point … definitely YES. This will make a great game, probably”.

(IIRC … I was asked this question at the end of my second playsession and gave pretty much that answer. At which point he said something like “Yes. We’ve been telling them that for a while. They’re not going to do any of it”)

Which maybe sounds very negative? To me it wasn’t. At that time I was (one of many people) doing due-diligence reviews and milestone reviews for games being published by NCsoft. IMHO no game (and no studio) is perfect in pre-production. Every studio worth their salt pushes the boundaries, and – critically important – their own personal comfort zones. That guarantees that they’re not experts at producing the new game-type when they start. There are always warts; that’s partly why they make the prototype – to show to many other people, get second opinions, find out the flaws other people see, and then go “ah! yes! and actually … now you’ve said that, we’ve just thought of a much better way of doing this!”.

(incidentally, I found Valve’s post-mortem discussions of Team Fortress 2 fascinating, revealing that even for a studio with a perfect record of successes making new IPs they still screwed-up the pre-production work on TF2, and only late into the project did they really turn it around into the shining piece of awesomeness that they finally shipped. I can’t find a google link to the frank interviews Valve did on the subject, but here’s an interesting one on how much they still had left to do post launch – 53 updates (!) – even AFTER rescuing the project halfway through by fundamentally rethinking it)

Time-out: who are you, again?

I…:

1. …was the European CTO at the time
2. …was not on the TR dev team (wasn’t even in the same office)
3. …started playing TR as soon as I joined the company, and played Alpha, Beta, and some of Live
4. …unlike many outside the TR team (I suspect: “the vast majority”) I voluntarily played TR during my free time
5. …got locked-out when the game launched, and it took many months for my official corporate free account to get allowed back in, thanks to some stupid bugs in NCsoft North America’s account management systems
6. …was on a lot of the internal development mailing lists. Particularly interesting ones were the bugs list, the internal playsessions list (both for the dev teams and for other internal players), and the producers list (especially the scrum-masters list when the team eventually switched to Scrum).

I want to be clear about this: I had nothing to do with the development of TR. But, like many people who can say that, I was heavily exposed to it – both the project, and the game, and the politics. TR had a massive effect on the company at the time, everyone was touched by it. Anyone in development – anywhere – got affected a lot more than most; it affected budgets, management structures, technology investments, publishing strategy, investment strategy, etc. I’m not claiming to know what was going on in there for certain, but given my position I had the luxury of a lot of insights that other people wouldn’t have had.

So … although I know a lot about what happened, please view this post (it was going to be about the 4 games generally, but it appears to have warped into a TR-centric story) as an outsider’s view. And don’t read it as all true, I may accidentally report some rumours (and, you know, I don’t want to get sued if someone takes this as 100% literal truth) though I’ll try hard not to. TR team members may well find some big mistakes in what’s here – and I’d welcome their corrections and counter-arguments.

(I know my name appears in at least one set of the credits due to an NCsoft policy of “crediting all staff who were employed on the launch day of the product”, especially ironic since I think I’ve ended up being “officially” credited only on the game I did *not* work on :).)

Back to the topic:

The difficulty of …. Timing

It wasn’t ready for beta. I said so. Many others said so. How privately they said it, in many cases I don’t know. However, I am aware of plenty of people that said it pretty loudly internally at NCsoft (I saw the emails, or sat in the meetings).

NB: I said “wasn’t ready for beta“. We’re not even discussing “launch” yet.

But it was never going to be as easy as simply saying “hey, I’m not that busy for the next fortnight; howabout we launch TR next week? Or do you want to wait another year or two?”. On a project that had already burnt through tens of millions of dollars with almost nothing concrete to show for it (not necessarily a “fair” judgement; but if you were *literal* about it, which by that point many people were, then technically there was “nothing” to show), and had on the order of 100 people employed full time working on it every day, there was a lot of money at stake even just delaying launch by a single week.

(do the math; you’re already counting in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” each time you prolong development by a single week there)

And then there were the political issues, for instance the fact that NCsoft North America had never developed a game internally in their long years of existence (all the internal games were developed by studios that NCsoft acquired during development). That means that the core business for the USA wasn’t making any revenue *at all* (publishing and development are usually seen as different divisions). Again, I’m not defending this perspective, or claiming it’s fair – but it was technically true, and was mentioned a lot.

Such things tend to scare stakeholders, especially shareholders. Especially directors of a public company who are trying to keep shareholders happy. Especially directors in a foreign country who may or may not even speak the same language as you. (I’m not trying to make veiled accusations against individuals here, nor against the different national divisions within NCsoft – I’m simply pointing out basic facts of life when it comes to large multinational companies, and observing that there was *inevitable* pressure along those lines, independently of whether or not anyone deliberately applied it).

And there were other issues. With that many people working on one project? Some of them for more than 5 years? Well. There’s plenty of dirty laundry on a project that size. But I don’t feel that anyone except the people directly involved get to decide whether its fair and reasonable to air it (because, frankly, no-one else is going to have much insight into what really happened).

So. It was hard, surely, to make any decision on launch dates.

There are no easy decisions in such situations, no “obviously, the best solution is X” (although to many different people such obvious answers seem to exist, the “easy” answers tend to screw-over several other teams). Making any decision was hard, but the decisions that were taken were considered inarguably “wrong” by many people, immediately that they were made.

They may not have known what the “best” solution was, but they certainly recognized (or felt they did) one of the “worst” ones.

And they were vocal about it. A survey was taken, internally, asking what people thought. The results were never published – so no-one (apart from the survey takers) knows exactly what the results were, but we were told that the *company* knew.

TR: The stage is set

To summarise so far (I know, I know – this is a long post, sorry)

1. TR went off the rails on some meandering journeys into research & development for many years burning through lots of cash (this is not necessarily something to castigate them for – many hit games did exactly the same; if you can afford the cash + the chance of failure (and NCsoft is a billion-dollar company, so let’s face it: they could), then it’s perfectly reasonable to decide on this course of action / allow it to continue)
2. Very late, they eventually hit upon a good formula, a good core game
3. Before they could actually make that game, a difficult decision was taken to push the team to the wall and force an early beta test
4. …and then the even more difficult decision taken to push them even harder to do an insanely early live launch. Certain alignments of astrological constellations in the Marketing department (also known as “tenth anniversary of the launch date of the last MMO that the core members of this team shipped”) may or may not have had something to do with this
5. The choice made was widely (if not universally) regarded as “very bad”
6. The company was made aware of the volume of people holding opinions along those lines

…and as they say on the Quiz shows: What Happened Next?

And this is where we come back to the point that interests me: did we, collectively as an organization, “allow it to happen”?

Personally, I believe the answer is an unqualified: “Yes”. Because many people worked *really hard* from that point on to make the game a success; many who had been working very hard already pushed themselves to work harder. And yet, in parallel, while working their asses off to make sure the train was big and beautiful, no-one stopped the train-wreck from happening.

There are excellent mitigating excuses for why individuals allowed this, many of them related to “not wanting to lose my job”. Many others relate to “life is too short to kill myself (with stress) over continuing to bash my head against this particular brick wall” (many people had complained long and hard about TR in the months and years running up to that point). Some people had just given up hope, and decided it was less painful simply to stop caring. Others were relishing the impending catastrophe, and I can think of some individuals who I personally believe were deliberately planning to get maximum political advantage for themselves out of the death of TR.

Re-reading this as I go, I remember there was another big excuse that I never gave credence to: “I’ll bury my head in real work and make *my* parts as good as I possibly can, and hope if everyone else does the same, it will All Come Together In The End”. This one wasn’t voiced so much, but is simply what people did, in some cases.

Hope is not a strategy. Whenever your attempt to avoid disaster revolves around the H-word instead of a concrete averting action, you are doomed.

But since I’m not trying to blame anyone here, it doesn’t matter whether or not we had good reasons for allowing it. What I’m really interested in is “how to make games better”, so the important point is that – collectively – we did allow it.

What would Jesus do?

What should we have done, not as an organization, but as individuals? How often does anyone talk about this?

% of player forums posts that blame developers for launching early
% of player forums posts that explain what an individual employee should do about it

It’s very easy to “work harder” when doom is impending, but as I’ve mentioned above this achieves nothing.

There are plenty of cases in the games industry where disasters are forseen, and the people involved charge into them with gusto, screaming “YOU’RE ALL WRONG! DON’T BE A HATER!”, and deserve what they get. But in those situations where people know it’s wrong, what can they do?

One colleague attempted various things and ultimately ended up trying to deal with the “root” of the problems by bringing about wholesale organizational change. Not in terms of who was employed, who was in charge, etc, but in terms of the basic attitudes and beliefs of the people turning up to work each day. He tried to remove the cultures of secrecy and fear (*) and replace them with cultures of actively seeking constructive criticism and actively supporting naysayers, so long as they adhered to rules of “decency” when it came to how criticism was provided.

(*) – (tens of millions of dollars spent and the game doesnt work but is going to beta/live? Fear was ever-present. Maybe (I heard rumours, and saw some … strange … stuff, but I don’t know for sure) for other reasons too. c.f. my comments about dirty laundry above)

In the end, I suspect if he’d started his campaign a year earlier, it *might* have worked. It certainly seemed to be having some surprisingly impressive results towards the end.

Among other things, the team itself tried adopting Scrum, with some tremendous results IMHO. Incidentally, I’m hoping one of the talks at GDC this year will be someone from the TR team (perhaps Andy Bruncke or April Burba?) on their experiences adopting Scrum with a team of 50-100 people at the end of development of a > $50million failed AAA title.

(If that talk does happen, I’ll be the one at the back of the room during the Q&A session at the end sticking my hand up to ask: In your opinion, if the team had adopted Scrum 12 months earlier, might it have saved TR? I would be very interested to hear the team’s thoughts on that)

Of course, both of those paths – and some of the other things people tried – were probably too little too late. TR didn’t have the luxury of time – the (contested) decisions being made were by definition time-critical.

So … what should we have done? Both as individuals, and as members of an organization that we each believed in?

What would you do?

Not long after, for unrelated reasons, my manager resigned. And shortly after that, so did several other people, myself included. TR didn’t (I believe) cause any of us to leave – none of them were on the TR team itself – but some of the problems it exposed within the company did come up often in people’s informal (down the pub) complaints about leaving.

When the organization disempowers you, and nothing you do seems able to make a diference, but – in your opinion – the impending event is an “extinction-level” disaster, is resignation the only valid response? Surely not?

Final Note

To my knowledge, NCsoft never admitted that TR was a failure, internally.

In June 2008, when I left the company, the CEO had gone, the lead designer had gone, and the rest of the directors were about to get axed in the pending re-shuffle (which hadn’t been announced even internally yet) – but still no admission in sight.

I used to gently point out that until we admitted the failure, we would fail to fully respond to it, and to fully adjust and improve – so that we were almost certainly doomed to repeat it. As far as I know, the painful admission has still never been made, even internally. The subject was danced around many times, but no-one would come out and say it publically (internally); it was always oblique references, and statements such as “Tabula Rasa is doing very well, although not as well as we hoped” – eliciting mirth, disbelief, looks of remembered pain, or simply blank looks of “wanting to forget it ever happened” etc among the various people in the company.

Personally, for each of the senior management at the company at the time, I shall never forget that you guys did not make that happen. To me, this one thing was symptomatic of, and encapsulates, the institutional failure to respond to the failings of the project.

Privately, reasons were cited to me varying from “it doesn’t matter any more, everyone knows its over” to “I don’t want to hurt anyone more than they’ve already been hurt” to “just basic tact” to “let’s not rock the boat” to “we should look on the bright side and get on with the other games we’re making as a company, and not get mired in history / water under the bridge”.

But as one of my friends said at the time: what’s it got to do with hurting people? we just want to use the experience to learn to make better games. And how the hell are we going to do that when you people won’t even admit we were wrong?

(NB: my experience on the publisher side is pretty short, just a year spent working with Thomas and Diane as one of the people doing due-diligence for them on the incoming pitches, and doing milestone-reviews on the signed projects that were in-development.)

Picking a couple of their points to add to:

2. Show Passion

I want to hilight the part about not trying too hard to “tell the publisher what they want to hear”.

Every publisher is (potentially) going to make huge sweeping changes to your proposal long before they even put it before the internal funding review committee. They assume this. They will listen to your first pitch, and will already be thinking about places it needs changing, and how they’re going to work with you to improve those.

What does this mean?

It means that you need to go in with a strong, clear, unapologetic design, and not be afraid that it is “not the right thing” in lots of small and not so small ways. Yes, check that the 30-second description is of interest to them, i.e. the most core essential aspects, but don’t worry about the rest – they’ll tell you what’s wrong, and give you the opportunity to change the bits they don’t like.

Unless you can read their minds, don’t try to second guess what they want to hear. IME, many developers are a lot worse at second-guessing the publisher than they believe themselves to be. (modulo the large number of old-hands who’ve done this lots of time and really can second-guess – but they wouldn’t be reading the article anyway :)).

In the end, this means that when the publisher mentally strips away the bits they expect to change, there’s nothing left, because you were too timid in staking out what you wanted to do. And – quelle surprise! – they quickly lose interest in you.

3. Show Prototypes

IMHO in your prototype (and partially in your pitch) you’re going to be judged on a broad range of things. Whether the game is fun is only one of them. In particular, I’ve seen people ignore too many of these, or go the other way: try and prove everything, spending vast amounts trying to write practically an entire game as their demo. Inevitably, when you show a publisher a seemingly complete game they’ll want changes made, if nothing else just to justify their own creative involvement, and so the vicious circle of spiralling costs starts.

Main things I remember looking for / at (off the top of my head):

1. you know what a computer game is (this isn’t facetious; I mean do you know what a normal game menu is like? do you know what the “standard” control system is for your genre of game? do you know the difference between a good game and a bad one? etc)
2. you know how to make games from an implementation POV (”ability to deliver” is almost everything in this industry)
3. you know how to cut features brutally to achieve a shippable (the same reason as above, except that this one deals with the many times that you are prevented from delivering by external factors you have no control over – and so you have to somehow change the rules of the process in order to make it work anyway)
4. you are good at accepting direction and showing that you did what was asked without twisting it…
5. …or that you’re so much better at game design, marketing, implementation, production, and delivery than the publisher that they’re never going to need to impose direction upon you
6. you have a proposal / idea that is somehow unique
7. your output is consistently good in each core discipline (i.e. you’re not noticeably much worse at one of them): art style, novel game ideas, core gameplay, user-interfacing / usability, implementation / stability, technology, production/timelines/delivering what you say you will (you’d be amazed how many people shoot themselves in the foot by making promises to the publisher BEFORE even signing a contract, and then fail to deliver on them! That’s a great way to guarantee you won’t get signed)
8. irrespective of what your people have done before, this particular set of them working together as a team is going to “gel” well

Depending on your situation some or all of those are already self-evident based on your portfolio of previous work as a team. Up to you to work out which may be weak or non-obvious. It’s great to get independent industry people (friends at other companies, for instance) to tell you what is not obvious to *them*.

Then you decide which of these “things we have but aren’t self-evident (so we need to show them explicitly)” or “things we don’t have (so we need to give some confidence that we WILL have them, or will make up for it somehow)” you’re going to deal with in your pitch, and which in your prototype(s). Again, up to you what goes where, but a good rule of thumb is to show something in the way that’s least effort for you to show convincingly. Don’t kill yourself trying to convince on every point and ignoring the cost-of-producing-it – remember you’re not getting paid for any of these prototypes.

Above all, remember that a prototype is wasted money. There is no way that you will ever get paid for prototyping, no matter how you look at it, unless th emoney is arranged before you even start making the prototype. No publisher will say “I love it – here’s the dev contract … oh, and I see you’ve spent lots of money getting this far. Here’s some free cash to ease the pain you’ve faced the last 6 months”.

On the subject of money: cost is negotiable. Many of those other items are not. If you’re not competent to make a game it’s going to be much harder to correct further down the line than if you’re simply asking too much money and we have to renegotiate a contract with you. Sure, contract negotation may seem difficult and expensive to YOU, but it’s practically free to US. But “hiring additional programmers into YOUR teams, and firing some of your incompetent staff” is a very long way from being cheap, easy, or desirable for us.

IMHO, you’re better off – initially – getting the above things to look good even at the cost of going in with a request for funding that is much more than the publisher wants to see.

5. Timing

1. pitch everyone early, but arrange to meet them late, so that they all synchronise at the END not the START
2. aim to get down to a shortlist of publishers you’re talking to as a “round 2″ AFTER meeting all of them once, and tell publishers you’re cutting down the list. No publisher likes to be “wasting their time” talking to a team that’s talking to 20 other publishers and is very likely to sign with someone else, but knowing they’re on a shortlist won’t hurt (their egos) so much.
3. perhaps non-obviously, sometimes f your pitch is weak, it can help if there’s no-one else you’re talking to, so the publisher feels they have the luxury of taking time over you. If they like you it might give them time to work out a way they CAN work with you
4. conversely, if your pitch is strong, get everyone pitched ASAP preferably all in the same week. Pitching at GDC is probably a great start. But getting publishers lined up to speak to you all at the same time is, as noted, pretty tricky
5. find out what the lead times are for the publishers you’re interested in, and fit yourself within them. Each will be different. If they don’t happily and eagerly tell you this, you’re possibly talking to the wrong staff at the publisher and need to get yourself a better contact, fast – the “right” people will tend to be very upfront about this, because it wastes their time if you come to them with a too-fast or too-slow set of expectations
6. ditto each will be different for different “templates” of project. Some random templates are:
   • AAA $20m+ project
   • AAA $2m+ project
   • Casual project
   • Online project
   • 3year+ proejct
   • 2year+ project
   • 1yr+ project
   • …etc

NB: that’s varying in some cases by genre, in some cases by cost, in some cases by development time.

The key thing here is that a publisher is typically a tree-hierarchy of decision makers, with local territories having discretion up to a certain size/time/cost before they have to defer to a more senior person / territory. Just like bank managers and arranging overdrafts / loans, back when the banks gave large discretion to local managers: sometimes you *can* get someone to approve over their normal limits if you’ve got something amazing, but mostly it helps to match your pitch/project size to the seniority / buying power of the individual person at the publisher who you’ve got the relationship with and who’s sold on your game.

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.

UPDATE: I just spotted this short post by Furqan over at Altgate that’s pretty relevant to this topic – about measuring the “value” of a free (i.e. non-paying) customer.

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.

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:

Option 1: Does It Lose Money When You Do That? Well Don’t Do That Then

(this is also known as the “Mike Myers / Love Guru” approach to becoming a successful Executive at an MMO developer or publisher)

The rest of this post will be about this.

Option 2: To invest $50m profitably, you just need to know how to invest $5m profitably, and then do it ten times in a row

(this is also known as the “portfolio of successes” approach)

The *NEXT* post on this subject will be about that…

How to lose money when making an MMO

I’m going to use two simple case-studies here, both 2008 (there are good examples from 2003/2004/2005 too – like The Sims Online, for instance – but I’ve got more than enough to go on just from *this* year’s disasters. Tabula Rasa, anyone?)

If you want more detail, or more games, and less sensationalism, I’m available for some MMO consultancy at the moment ;) (email address is on the About page) …

Here’s one way to publish online games for a loss:

1. Target business and use-practices of people at the top end of the generational curve (ignore microtransactions, enforce creditcards, expect people to expect to have a credit card, etc)

2. Struggle along spending more and more money chasing lower and lower profit margins out of the market you still have available, using Expensive IP Licenses to shore-up the increasingly unpopular Core Gameplay

3. …Wait. Give it 3 years and your investments will be worthless, the “current” market will detest your products, and you won’t have any staff left who even know where to begin when it comes to making and selling product for the new today’s (the future today) customers.

It can’t fail.

Look at Hellgate: London / Flagship:

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.

BR: Less. It’s actually a pretty easy answer. I would have done less.

Hellgate: London / Flagship

(quotes from the post-mortem interview with one of the directors, Bill Roper – http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=3&cId=3169356)

These guys securitized bank loans – for something as ultra-high-risk as MMO development – on the total IP of the game. This really surprises me, they decided to make their success all/nothing, this deal implements a strategy of: “if we don’t succeed massively, we are deliberately forcing ourselves to fail”, since it was taking out of their hands the ONLY thing they could have leveraged for new revenue sources and for obtaining new investment.

GFW: So Comerica’s control is the IP…

BR: IP, code, tech, and tools. So to be honest, if I personally had the money, I’d buy it back out. The technology and the toolset that we built is a really powerful platform for creating titles. That was really the goal of what we were going to be doing at Flagship. We were going to be using the tech and tools — using the platform — [and] creating games based off of that as our core moving forward. –

“It was a decision that we made because we needed to get more money into the company”

On why Hellgate failed:

“Hellgate came out, and it wasn’t as good as it should have been. There’s a myriad of reasons for that. Some of them were just bad timing in the PC market. The PC market was lousy last year. Some of it was the fact that we were an independent studio. We didn’t have unlimited money, and we had to ship when we had to ship. Part of it was because we overreached, and that was a design problem that was totally our fault. We tried to do too much. We tried to be a standalone game and a free-play game and an MMO and an RPG and a shooter. We were trying to be something for everybody and ended up really not pleasing many people at all…”

Interesting, because that’s clearly not a good explanation – those things are none of them reason enough to explain the failure – but then later he says something else that DOES sound like a sufficient explanation. He talks about something that would actively prevent people from purchasing product, which ultimately is usually why you “fail” as a games company:

“BR: Free- and subscription-based. I think we should have picked one or the other. We should have said, “Hey, you buy the box, and then it’s free online play, and we’re going to [disappear] for a year, except for bug fixes, and crank out a new expansion.” Or we should have said: “You know what? There’s no single-player version. It’s subscription only. That’s how we’ve geared the game. That’s how it’s gonna work,” and done that from the beginning. We wanted to get people who’d never subscribed to a game before to play it by themselves, then go online and play it with their friends, and then they see all this new content and want to subscribe. But I think that was a model that caused a lot of confusion and caused a lot of division amongst our community, too.”

It would seem that game developers – even ex-Blizzard ones of some fame – still don’t really understand the business side of their business. One of the fundamental lessons of mass-market consumer business is that “the consumer must understand why they want to buy your product”. This is what Marketing *is all about*. Without it, they won’t buy. If they don’t buy, you don’t make money. Simple as that.

With businesses that sell to a small number of clients (e.g. middleware), this isn’t an issue – in many cases you actually WANT an excuse to sit down and explain your product / offering to the potential customer. You have enough time, and each purchase is expensive enough, that you can afford to fly to the office of *every potential customer on the planet*. And that explanation process usually enables you to find extra things to sell to them, and give you a chance to put-down your competitors. Doesn’t work with mass-market consumers, though.

“Everything from the development side to the business side was set to this model that we’d put together. We hoped that it was going to actually work, and we told ourselves that maybe it’ll work better than we think it’s going to work, right? But there was just a lot of confusion.

People were saying there’s going to be the haves and the have-nots. There was a lot of backlash against the model. It’s always tough to gauge percentages, though, because the people who post online are the people who are angry regardless of whatever, so then you’d assume that everybody hates the game, or everybody doesn’t like your magazine, or whatever it is.”

I understand this fear, this trepidation – it’s an inescapable part of trying to make a new market, something you’re always doing when you do a high risk venture aiming to achieve hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. We had the same fear at Mind Candy when we were developing Perplex City; we knew that if we got it wrong, it might well kill us as a company. But here’s the difference: we went to market with a shipped product on less than a million dollars, AND FOUND OUT … before blowing tens of millions of dollars in pre-loaded risk.

(for the record: I found it pretty scary, that first time. Props to Michael for pushing it through. Now, though, I wouldn’t do it any other way. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I stopped working for a big publisher – that they kept wriggling-out of “try it and see” in favour of “spend, spend, and spend even more, then gamble on the outcome, and fire lots of people if we guess wrong”. Bugger that for a game of soldiers…)

“We never really much left crunch mode, for the core Hellgate guys.”

“it kind of became this negative perfect storm of us trying to chase making the game better and really digging ourselves into a bigger and bigger hole. That’s why we did things like take out loans against our IP and pouring our own money into it, so we could turn the corner. And we ran out of gas before we got around the corner. ”

Damion Schubert gave this a name years ago: “Anarchy Online”-Purgatory. It’s the idea that you’re providing a service that has a high support cost day-to-day, but you naively failed to budget resource for that. So, you’re cutting so many corners trying to find enough resource to support the existing service that you have nowhere near enough resource left to do ongoing development.

Worse, if your product shipped at sufficiently low quality, your support costs are vastly inflated supporting bugs that you could have fixed for much less than the cost of supporting consumers who encounter them. But, given the above problem, you end up spending as much each month on support for a bug as it would to fix the bug – and you know it! – but you don’t have the cashflow to allow you to fix it. You are doomed, but you can carry on surviving and suffering for a very long, slow, death.

“Once marketing starts happening, if you change the date, you’ve flushed that support. We said we’ve got to ship. As we started down that path, working on the bugs and things, there was so much more there, and it was so much more complex than we’d ever imagined”

Here is what I think of as the Fallacy of MMO Marketing. I’ll be going into this in more detail in the next blog post.

Traditional game-marketing is a waste of time and money for an MMO. The MMO will always be there.

If you cannot come up with a marketing plan that works around the sales model (which, for an MMO, is “continuous”), then you need a new marketing dept. Using an old dept, who will hold you to extremely difficult ways of working (like, “big bang event” marketing), ways of working which *no longer make any senses or serve any purpose for an MMO*, is stupid. From a technology perspective, from an operations perspective, from a design perspective, from a sales perspective: from all these, you do NOT want a big-bang event. It’s only the marketing dept that wants it, and then only because “that’s all we know how to do”.

Age of Conan / Funcom

Speaking of AO-Purgatory … what about Funcom, makers of that game, who in 2008 released their next major MMORPG – Age of Conan?

It looked great. But why did Age of Conan (AoC) make massive sales, while Blizzard had a dead period in the run-up to WotLK, but then fare poorly? Why didn’t they manage to steal the WoW players permanently?

Plenty of reasons. But one set is this: here’s another way to publish online games for a loss:

1. Make a game which costs a vast amount of money up-front before you’re allowed access to the “magic garden”, so everyone has to rely on word-of-mouth for purchasing decisions

2. Make it difficult to start playing, to actually PAY that money, so that many buyers “don’t get around to buying it” for a while – perhaps not until their friends have been playing for a few weeks or a couple of months.

3. Make the game beautiful and wonderful for the first 2-3 weeks, and make it suddenly really, really bad by comparison in the third/fourth/fifth weeks.

4. Ask people to pay / renew their monthly credit-card subscription just after they’ve encountered the bad bits, and they’ve had a richly bathetic (sic) experience.

It can’t fail. Your early adopters will be asked for more money just at the point that they feel most ripped-off and are looking for an excuse to “punish you”. Their friends will “get around to” purchasing your product just about the time that all the early adopters are saying “this game sucks, I hate it, it’s really crap” – because they haven’t had time to “get over” their disappointment yet.

Confession: I’ve never actually played AoC. I’m sorry; I’m going to analyse a game I’ve not played (I make a point of trying to seriously play each and every game for a while before making a judgement. It’s a hard life, working in the games industry ;) ). But, you see, even working at an MMO Publisher (as I was at the time), I couldn’t start playing it with my friends at work. I had to pay $100 for the priviledge of trying it out. I couldn’t start playing even then, even if I had money to burn and burnt it – I had to find a shop selling a box. I didn’t need the box to play, it didn’t contain anything, it was just a magic token that someone wanted me to win in a quest before I would have proved myself worthy.

Publishers who do this are Foolish. They are clever people who’ve seen that there is money to be made in boxed retail, but they’ve sold their own intelligence short by not thinking about WHAT money there is, WHY it is there, the SIDE-EFFECTS of that money, the MARKET that is being reached, and how to INTEGRATE that market with their other markets. My example above is an example of one of those “other markets” which is being destroyed because they failed to think about product / market fit as a whole rather than as a set of discrete silos. That kind of thinking is “old style” marketing, before the internet, when companies could ruthlessly control their products. That kind of Marketing Executive generally finds it hard to get a job these days, as their approaches work poorly in the world in which we now live. And the customer doesn’t know or understand these things, but they innately perceive them – and they say the publisher is “Stupid!”. And they vote with their wallets.

But also, from the oppositive point of view, … they *learned* from Anarchy Online (AO), they *learned* that improving the new-user experience radically improved attraction and retention. I cannot over-emphasize this point: it was one of the biggest changes ever made to AO content, and it’s proven time and again to be a distinguishing feature in the commercial success of MMOs.

So, you get stuff like this (Scott Jennings, aka LumTheMad, talking about AoC’s failure):

“SJ: Well, the budget wasn’t big enough to make a Tortage-style experience from 1 to 80. Would $15 million have bought Tortage-style polish for 60 levels? Probably not. Would any amount of money have? Probably not. But … that’s what players expected.

When they got past Tortage and got to the “kill 40 snakes and bring me the skin because it is yummy in my tummy,” players got angsty about it. They felt bait-and-switched because here was this very polished experience which then … stopped.

Even more than that, though … the cutoff at that point was just so drastic, I feel like it was a decision point for subscribers. As in, “Hmm, I don’t think I want to play any more” decision point. But, zooming out from AoC for a bit to the larger view.”

…but you see, Funcom only learned ONE thing from AO – they didn’t have a holistic enough view to realise that what they were doing was creating an EASY “cancel subscription” decision-point for players, as Scott says. Successful MMO companies create EASY “prolong subscription” decision-points for players.

The tragic thing is that this concept is considered basic knowledge that every business person in most companies is expected to know. Apparently, Funcom didn’t have anyone who knew. (I’m sure they did, but what they shipped makes it look as though they didn’t have anyone. I can think of many practical reasons why the people who had the knowledge were divorced from the people who made the shipping decisions, most of them innocent but unfortunate).

I don’t think Funcom are stupid. I think they have excellent game design skills, but they are consistently let down by poor production / technology / operations / management.

Basically: Great Ideas, Shame about the Execution (not “implementation”).

Anarchy Online was a gem of a game, if you look at the content, the world, the ideas, the gameplay. Shame about the execution of AO *as a complete product*.

Age of Conan is a lovely rendition of a bloodthirsty IP. Shame about the execution.

Which means, I suspect, that Funcom will never be allowed to make an MMO again. In the games industry, it is only execution – the ability to deliver – that counts, and Funcom has now failed not just once but twice. In a row. Only a fool would give them money now.

Conclusion

Well, that leaves a lot of openings for stuff to talk about in Option 2 (learn to make MMOs profitable at one tenth the cost)…

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.

So it’s time to call-out some of the interesting things to be found in the blogging world of MMO people.

By the way … you can tell who’s working on uber-secret or personally exciting projects these days because they’ve suspiciously stopped blogging for months at a time. Lazy slackers, the lot of them. The more you do, the more you should blog! :P

There are some that should be on the blogroll but aren’t (yet), and some other bloggers I should mention (but I’m sticking to the blogroll only for this post – I’ll go through others next time). Feel free to add your own recommended reading in the comments.

Blogs to read:
Brinking (Nabeel Hyatt)
* Who? serial entrepreneur, raised funding and sold companies
* What? currently running a funk-tastic social / music / games company with a bunch of Harmonix guys
* Why? big commentator on the games/apps/making money/predictions parts of All Things Facebook

Broken Toys (Scott Jennings / LTM)
* Who? became infamous in the early days of MMOs as a player of Ultima Online who ranted publically, amusingly, and sometimes even insightfully
* What? ex-NCsoft, now doing intriguing web games at John Galt Games
* Why? In his heart Scott’s still a player, and more than anyone else I’ve seen he interprets the world of MMO design, development, and playing through the players’ eyes. Interesting point: he’s mostly concerned with life-after-launch. Funny that. Players kind of find that bit the most interesting. Also keeps a close eye on community-management screw-ups, and WoW generally

Bruce Everiss
* Who? ex-head of marketing for Codemasters
* What? um, I’m not sure what he’s doing these days, apart from becoming a “professional blogger”
* Why? he aims to comment on every single interesting piece of news in the mainstream games industry. That’s a lot of commentary. Always something to read! IMHO he is often completely wrong about anything online-games, and a lot of business and “future of industry” stuff – Bruce is from an older age of the industry. But … he says a lot of interesting things and sparks a lot of interesting debates in the process. Worth reading. Just remember he is extremely (deliberately, I’m sure) provocative, and don’t take it too seriously.

Coke and Code (Kevin Glass)
* Who? A programmer working in mainstream IT
* What? An insanely prolific author of casual games “in his free time, as a hobby”
* Why? Because he’s better at making games than many professionals I’ve met, and he is very very prolific, making new libraries, toolsets, editors, games, game engines – and commenting on it all as he goes, and throwing up new games for you to play all the time

Erik Bethke
* Who? ex-Producer for Interplay
* What? CEO of GoPets, an online casual virtual world that’s especially big in Asia (and based in South Korea)
* Why? A hardcore WoW player who analyses the game-design as he goes, and relates very honestly a stream of both emotional experiences and seminal events in the game that should give you lots of things to be thinking about, especially if you’re a designer, business person, or product manager.

Extenuating Circumstances (Dan Hon)
* Who? ex-MindCandy, current CEO of SixToStart
* What? one of the first Bloggers (on the whole of the internet!) in the UK, and an awe-inspiring assimilator of “everything happening on the internet, with technology, with media, with entertainment and the future of the world” for all of the ten years I’ve known him.
* Why? He’s still an excellent tracker of all those things, and finds memes very quickly. Nowadays he just auto-posts links (lots of them, every day) with a few words of commentary scattered here and there (del.icio.us descriptions) – making his blog a ready-made news filter for you :)

Fishpool (Osma Ahvenlampi)
* Who? CTO of Sulake (makers of Habbo Hotel)
* What? a very technical commentator, often in great detail, on the issues of running a 100-million user virtual world, with observations about Habbo’s community, business, and culture thrown in
* Why? He posts very rarely, but when he does, they’re usually full of yummy detail

Futuristic Play (Andrew Chen)
* Who? ex-VC (Mohr-Davidow Ventures)
* What? entrepreneur with a web-background who’s come into the games industry and bringing lots of useful stuff with him
* Why? blogs a LOT on advertising (and how to make money out of it in games and web and casual), and on metrics, and how you can use them to run you games or web business better. Also has a long fascination with what are the best parts of the games industry, and the best of the web industry, and how we can each put those best bits together to be even better

Off the Record – Scott Hartsman
* Who? ex-Everquest, ex-Simutronics
* What? Senior Producer for MMOs – but previously an MMO lead developer, and once (apparently) a Game Designer.
* Why? he’s funny, he knows his stuff, and he’s worked on some of the most important MMO projects outside Asia, so he’s got an interesting perspective going there.

Orbus Gameworks (Darius Kazemi)
* Who? ex-Turbine, now CEO of Orbus (a games-metrics middleware company)
* What? Likes the colour orange *a lot*, infamous for networking his ass off at games conferences (*everyone* knows Darius), very friendly, generous – and mildly obssessed with the use of metrics and stats to improve the creativity and success of game design (in a good way)
* Why? If you liked the Halo heatmaps when they came out, you’ll love some of the stuff they post on the Orbus company blog. A year ago they were posting heatmaps-on-steroids. If you thought “metrics” equalled “spreadsheets of data” then prepare to have your view changed pretty thoroughly.

Prospect Magazine/First Drafts (Tom Chatfield)
* Who? section-editor of the highly respected socio-political print magaine Prospect
* What? a highly-accomplished English Literature post-grad (bear with me here) … who also happens to have been a lifelong hardcore game player, I think the only person I know who got a hardcore character to level 99 on Diablo2, and now plays WoW a lot.
* Why? although Prospect only very rarely (like, only a few times ever) covers games, it’s very interesting to see what the rest of the world – especially the highly educated and highly intelligent but non-technical, older generations – thinks of us. And a bit of culture in your blog reading is probably good for you, too.

Psychochild (Brian Green)
* Who? ex-3DO/M-59, now the owner and designer of the revamped, relaunched, more modern Meridian-59
* What? an MMO game designer who disingenuously describes himself as an indie MMO designer but like most of the others has probably spent too long doing this and knows too much (compared to many of the modern “mainstream” MMO designers) for that to be true any more
* Why? lots and lots of great design ideas and commentary here for anyone wanting to do MMO design

Scott Bilas
* Who? programmer on Duneon Siege
* What? …in particular, responsible for the Entity System (one of my main areas of interest)
* Why? Scott’s phased in and out of blogging, but when he does blog he tends to do good meaty programming posts that contain lots of source code and some useful lesson or algorithm.

Sulka’s Game (Sulka Haro)
* Who? lead designer for Sulake (Habbo Hotel)
* What? more of a Creative Director than game designer, more of a web background than games, but above all a community/product/creative person who knows his stuff. Also a big player of MMORPGs
* Why? are you cloning Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel and want some pointers about revenue models, community management, and how to be successful with virtual-item sales? You might want to read his posts ;)

The Creation Engine No.2 (Jim Purbrick)
* Who? ex-Codemasters, ex-Climax (both times working on MMO projects)
* What? originally a network / MMO academic researcher, then a network coder, and now the person who runs Linden Lab (Second Life) in the UK. Very big proponent of all things open-source, always doing interesting and innovative things with technology
* Why? Keep an eye on the more innovative technology things that are done with Second Life (stuff you don’t tend to read about in the news but – to a tech or games person – is a heck of a lot more interesting by a long long way), and get some insight into the life of serious open-source programmers who succeed in living and breathing this stuff inside commercial environments

The Forge (Matt Mihaly)
* Who? developer of one of the earliest commercially successful text MUDs, now CEO of Sparkplay Media
* What? spent many years running Achaea, a text-only MUD that made a healthy profit from pioneering the use of itemsales (virtual goods) – and the things weren’t even graphical – and has now finally (finally!) moved into graphical games with the MMO he’s developing
* Why? one of the few MMO professionals who talks a lot about his experiences playing on consoles (especially Xbox), which makes for a refreshing alternate view – especially from the perspective of an MMO person talking about social and community issues in those games. Just like Brian Green, claims to be an indie MMO designer, but probably knows far far too much for that to be even vaguely justifiable

Vex Appeal (Guy Parsons)
* Who? ex-MindCandy
* What? Guy is an extremely creative … guy … who had a small job title but a big part in inventing and rolling out a lot of the viral marketing stuff we did for Perplex City (online game / ARG from a couple of years ago)
* Why? Awesome place to go for ideas and info on the cutting edge of doing games stuff with social networks. Usually. Also … just makes for a fun blog to read

We Can Fix That with Data (Sara Jensen Schubert)
* Who? ex-Spacetime, currently SOE
* What? MMO designer, but like Lum / Scott Jennings, comes from a long background as player and commentator, and shorter background as actually in the industry. Like Darius Kazemi, spent a lot of time in doing metrics / data-mining for MMOs
* Why? Take Darius’s insight into metrics for MMOs, and Scott’s knowledge of what players like, don’t like, and ARE like, and you get a whole bunch of interesting posts wandering around the world of metrics-supported-game-design-and-community-management. Good stuff.

Zen of Design (Damion Schubert)
* Who? ex-EA (Ultima Online), currently at Bioware (MMO)
* What? MMO designer who’s been around for a long time (c.f. UO)
* Why? Damion writes long detailed posts about MMO design, what works, what doesn’t, practicalities of geting MMO development teams to work together, how the playerbase will react to things, etc. He also rather likes raiding in MMORPGs – which is fascinating to see (given his heavy background as a pro MMO *designer*)

[NC] Anson (Matthew Wiegel)
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? Dungeon Runners team
* Why? was doing lots of interesting and exciting things with data-mining/metrics in the free-to-play low-budget NCsoft casual MMO. Watch this space…

People with nothing to do with games, but you might want to watch just because they’re interesting:
Bard’s World (Joshua Slack)
* ex-NCsoft
* Josh is one of the key people behind Java’s free, hardware-accelearted, game engine (JME)
Janus Anderson
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? um, he’s been taking a lot of photos recently
* Why? watch this space
Mark Grant
* Who? non-Games industry
* What? an entrepreneur, web-developer, and Cambridge Engineer
* Why? very smart guy, and interesting posts on web development (no games tie-in)

On the one hand, I am personally against this kind of “invisible” charging because it can be – and indeed is being – mis-represented as “free”, when in fact every single user is being charged. I also feel it sets a set of very bad incentives for the lower-end game developers – essentially encouraging them to make lower-quality games. But that isn’t really a problem for me, it’s a problem for them, so … shrug.

So bear in mind my latent antipathy :) which I’ll try to keep quiet about – but for me the really interesting part is the use of this as an alternative payment system.

The Premise

On the face of it, they started with some assumptions like this:

Computer games don’t use much processing power, and yet game-players have really powerful PCs – just go look at the market for buying new PC’s: those marketed at video games players are the only part of the PC hardware market to have preserved and grown some decent profit margins on hardware, and very high prices.

Also, casual game developers, those making all those Flash and Java games you see on Miniclip, are all awesome experts when it comes to hardcore programming optimization. They might be a bit lazy, not bothering to do it a lot of the time, but despite this total lack of practice, they are all latent geniuses if you give them enough incentive.

…although actually I think they didn’t really think any of that, they just came from a compute-farm background and jumped on Games as an easy first target market.

Plura Processing is embedding an app in browser-based games that uses local CPU to run remote processor-intensive tasks – and then they charge the remote task-owner for the “rented CPU time”, and give a percentage of that back to the game developer in whose game the app was embedded. You can see a bit more on it on GigaOM, including a brief response from the company. Their VC backer, Creeris Ventures, appears to have an exec on the board who came up with this in defence of the product:

“At the end of the play session, the game sees how much compute time the player provided and rewards him with an in-game item (e.g., +1 longsword).

So what you get is something that the user loves (because he’s being directly rewarded) and a model for computing power that does work (because it’s using the PC as efficiently as possible). Both sides win. :)”

Yep. They are actually encouraging you to reward people for leaving their computers logged-in and churning up electricity by gifting them in-game items. I’m all in favour of making computer-games unfair, but I don’t see this as a sensible way to do it (from a design perspective).

A quick perusal of my LinkedIn network suggests that the company founders aren’t from a games industry background, so I guess that they thought of charging people for CPU time (an old business model from the late 1990’s that never took off, despite many tries), and then spotted games as just a good market they could take advantage of.

Something fishy

Plura is lightweight and secure

Plura applets use minimal resources on most computers. Our system is secure and each application’s integrity is verified before it can use Plura.

If you’d like to see Plura first-hand, just click here. We think you’ll see how harmless Plura really is.

…given that your business model is to use as much resources as possible, the above statement is surely only true via sophistry? (they’ll be going for “minimial resources” when it comes to RAM usage, clearly, but maximal *CPU* usage, which is what most people care about given how cheap and abundant RAM is today). Am I missing something here?

Anyway, that’s not what this is really about, IMHO, because:

Business Analysis

Finally, because Plura is an enabling technology, it allows other people to create new sites and web applications that previously could not be financially supported. Plura does this in two ways. First, it offers a completely new revenue stream to new and existing sites.

How much money?

Well, according to their website, they’ll give the developer $2.60 for each computer that spends a month devoting all its CPU power to their processing. Is that a lot?

Let’s put this into perspective.

The ratio between “users online” and “users” is around 1:100 for a free game, 1:20 for a free MMO, and around 1:6 for a subscription MMO.

So, with Plura, in a subs MMO you would be earning at the rate of around 40 cents per month per user.
At the opposite end of the scale, in a free web game, you’d be earning at the rate of around 2.6 cents per month per user.

That’s assuming 100% CPU usage devoted to Plura. In practice, an MMO would be sparing around 1% CPU (assuming this app is correctly configured), and even for a free web game, you’d have IM running, probably Outlook, etc, and you’d expect with a *well-written* flash game on a Single-Core sysem to be seeing at most 30% of the CPU going to Plura, probably more like 5% realistically (pure guess, based on the CPU usages I’ve typically seen of Flash apps on the few occasions they’ve been tuned for minimal CPU). NB: this WILL change as adoption of Flash 10/11 increases, assuming that the rendering engine efficiencies come in as expected (flash prior to 10 uses the CPU for graphics).

What about dual-core systems? So long as flash games are single-threaded, Plura could get 50% CPU to itself (well … fighting off Outlook, IM, etc – so perhaps more like 40% to itself). I’m not about to try it on my Core2Duo here, though, since this is on a laptop and anything that maxes both cores will usually overheat and crash the laptop (a problem with the Macbook Air and it’s Intel CPU. Sigh)

So, my guess is that a typical casual game developer will see around $1-$5 per thousand users, whilst taking away their users’ CPU power. At the bottom end, that really does NOT compare favourably with advertising revenues. At the top end, it starts to look worthwhile; all depends how much CPU power you give up, I guess.

Risks

As a developer, you are merely replacing one agency-based fluctuating-value revenue model (advertising) for another (compute-farming).

Even with the many agencies and advertisers and healthy industry behind advertising, rates soar and plummet unpredictably, which is enough to put game developers out of business all on its own.

It’s going to be a lot worse working within what is by comparison a tiny niche marketplace, and where you are so heavily disengaged from the purchasers.

I’m sure plenty of people will try it out since it’s simple to attempt, but it doesn’t currently appear viable as a source of revenue for any game studio that wants to remain in business long-term.

Cost of Goods Sold … to the user

How much is this costing in electricity? Interesting question…

For a modern PC, with an Intel Core Duo, the difference between 0% CPU and 100% CPU is around 60 watts, which works out to a little over 40kWh per month.

At the moment you pay around $0.2-$0.5 per kWh for electricity. So, the electricity used by each home user will cost them from 80 cents (cheap power, efficient CPU) up to $4 (expensive power, inefficient CPU – e.g. the Pentium 4 uses almost twice the watts!).

i.e. as a game developer, you are being paid at just around the cost of the electricity used. That’s how this could be seen as a somewhat odd (but nevertheless interesting) indirect form of payment-system for users without credit-cards etc.

Growth potential?

But it’s capped at very very very low ARPU. Ridiculously low. This is a poor business model for anything except lowest-common-denominator games. Strangely, the company advertises it on their own website as a “replacement” for advertising, although they also run testimonials from a game developer who tried it and said the opposite.

(that developer, by the way, was Paul Preece, famous for making just one game (Desktop Tower Defence), and I suspect he’s getting a much better rate than $2.60 per month given the huge marketing value to Plura of having DTD as a “client”).

Market: gamers with powerful computers?

• Generally, gamers who have spent vast amounts of cash on powerful computers are playing powerful games – not casual web games
• All games, everywhere, use 100% CPU. The basic, fundamental model of game development mandates this: it is far too expensive to faff about on optimization that is not absolutely necessary
• A game that does NOT use 100% CPU does poorly in the market, because the players will condemn the noticeably poorer graphics, framerate, AI, sound quality, reactiveness (of controls), etc.

Market: casual gamers?

• Typically have weak and crappy PCs
• If you’re playing games in a browser, that almost always means you have other apps open at once
• Generally speaking, you don’t want the rest of your PC slowing down because a low-quality game is killing it
• Flash is already phenomenonally bad on some platforms, and will steal 100% CPU at the drop of a hat; this causes lots of problems in the game-playing community of casual gamers who don’t understand it, but condemn games for it and refuse to play them. If you played much on popular casual games sites, you’d notice this uncommon but not rare problem
• Flash game programmers generally know little about how to write good code (this is why Flash is great – it opens up the market to more programmers, rather than requiring everyone to be a highly experienced, highly trained expert), they certainly don’t write efficient code; if you want them to start learning how, expect a long long uphill struggle to re-educate the entire worldwide base of Flash programmers

So, I don’t think this is particularly exciting as a revenue model itself.

But I do like this idea of the consumer’s electricity bill being converted into per-millisecond subscription to the game they are playing; in a world where you are not able to get direct payment from your consumers, or are somehow prevented, this could *in theory* (I think the lack of established marketplace invalidates this in practice) be a good poor-man’s replacement for micropayments

“As children develop, they make greater and greater efforts to adapt to reality, rather than distorting reality, as in make-believe play.”

The implication, contextually, was that ultimately as a child becomes an adult, their reality becomes fully adapted, and no longer distorted. That might not be the intended implication, but it’s interesting: I’ve been fighting against this since, well, since forever, really. And spending your life constantly distorting reality it seems to me is neither a bad thing nor a limiting thing.

Because it trains you to be good at two things: seeing how you might change reality, and believing that you CAN change it.

At one end of the spectrum, distorted realities make it much easier for you to visualize what is “possible” instead of what is merely “probable”, and that’s the essence of spotting opportunities.

Entrepreneurship and Seeing Change

(good) Entrepreneurs are constantly seeing new ways to “change the world” in ways both small and large. Often the change is small, but the effects are large, or vice versa. It’s often said that “you cannot teach Entrepreneurship”, and while I beg to differ, I have experience of actually trying it, and huge experience of arguing the concept with people. Mostly, the argument against the teachability of entrepreneurship is rooted in the inability to “make” people “become able to” see Opportunities.

I think one of the primary differentiators for having/not having that ability (irrespective of whether it can be taught) is the extent to which you see:

The world as it is

as opposed to

The world as it could be

and even

The world as I would like it

Looking at the Entrepreneurs themselves:

• Good entrepreneurs, in my personal experience, see the world always as It Could Be.
• Bad ones usually see it as They Would Like It To Be.
• Great ones ALSO see it as They Would Like It To Be
• Non-entrepreneurs see it As It Is

…with the difference between Great Entrepeneurs and Bad Entrepreneurs being mainly that the former *also* see the world As It Is, and hold the two visions in their head at all times, simultaneously.

Because the Great Entrepeneurs, while constantly (many times a week) spotting things that They Would Like It To Be, also – constantly – imagine how they might transform the world As It Is, usually by a series of steps, into that target. The Bad ones simply employ the tried-and-tested Hope plan:

1. Have Idea
2. ?
3. Profit

…which – let’s be honest here – occasionally works (usually if you simply get massively lucky with timing / outside events).

Entrepreneurship and Effecting Change

Why are some people better able to see how to make their desired changes come true?

I believe it’s largely driven by two skills. Firstly, the obvious one highlighted above – that the more practice you have of thinking about how you might change reality to fit what you want it to be, the better you will be at that process.

“Better” here means that you will

• have more ideas for each transform in the chain
• be better at recognising “good” and “bad” transforms
• process suggested transforms – and transform-chains – more rapidly (quick accept/reject)

The second skill is believing in yourself and your ability to change the world. Often, the successful changes that Entrepeneurs effect are surprising to most people – they question how that could even be possible – while *in practice* not being so difficult to achieve. Usually, this is because normal people see only the beginning and end of a sequence of changes.

To take a simple example that illustrates the kind of “impossible” being “possible” given some clever changes that I’m talking about, look at Freeserve. (NB: this is based on my memory of events more than 10 years ago, much of which I found out 2nd or 3rd hand, when trying to understand how Freeserve had achieved something that had eluded all the other ISPs – so take this as an example in theory, it may not be accurate in practice! Incidentally, there seems to be VERY little public history on Freeserve, how it started, and how massively it changed ISP / internet access in the UK – I’d be interested if any readers have seen any articles / interviews about the details of its inception?)

Freeserve … the first “free” ISP in the UK

When Freeserve was created in the UK providing “free internet access” in the 1990’s, it seemed impossible. They even provided a cheap local phone number that could be used anywhere in the country – so it was cheaper on your phone bills than calls to your subscription ISP!

Ahem. Except, it wasn’t the cheapEST kind of local phone call, it was partway between an “ultra-local” call (very cheap) and a “national” call (expensive).

And, in an unprecedented move, Freeserve had managed to get the telephone company to give them a share of the revenue from that particular phone number. For reference, at the time, if you wanted to get revenue from the telco for running a phone number, you had to get a number on the “very expensive” plan, where the telco would charge the consumer as much as 10 times the cost of an already expensive national-call.

Of course, given the huge volume of calls that then went through to that number, the telco made a huge profit out of the scheme – so it worked out in their best interests, and everyone profited. (although I have no idea how this was negotiated, or whose idea it was – and “persuading a telco to change their revenue model” is itself a problem I’d usually classify as “impossible”, so I’m guessing there was another, similar, chain of small changes that lead to this being acheived).

About two years before this all happened, I was working on a project to create a new ISP, and I’d got as far in breaking down the steps as to see that you HAD, somehow, to find a way to remove the “dual-billing” model from consumers (pay once for internet access, pay twice for the per-minute, uncapped (!) phone call too). I didn’t have the confidence to believe it was possible, and after running through some fairly crazy ideas (including looking into internet access via broadcast radio for downstream, and home modem for upstream), I gave up and moved on. With hindsight, at the time, I realised that I’d have hit upon the change-the-telco idea within another couple of months, and that I’d have had a clear year to find a way to ACTUALLY get a telco to change, and still be able to launch before Freeserve.

(for the record, that event finally kicked me into realising that the world-changing ideas I had all the time, and thought through as often as multiple times a day, were actually all realisable (potentially). Many people I know, potentially good entrepreneurs both older and younger than me, still don’t believe the world can be changed to their tune, they can only see the world As It Is)

How to … Influence People

This is a big topic; whole books have been written on it! (OMG!!1!!!!0).

But just to select ONE of the most powerful weapons: imposing a personal view of reality onto the reality you find, and living and acting as though your view of reality is the real one, and keeping at it until everyone else gives in. The real beauty of this being that if the only differences between your reality and the real reality are the beliefs of people, then it becomes a self-fulfilling dream.

This is basic sales-technique: it’s usually more effective to sell people on a shared belief than it is to sell them merely on a bunch of facts and leave them to guess for themselves whether those facts are real or not. But it takes a particular kind of personality to be good at imposing their desired reality (if that’s all you do, it tends to come across as mere bullying), and also at making it stick.

IMHO, people who spend more of their time adapting reality are much better at the “making it stick” part.

Conclusion

So, ultimately, one of the things that makes a great Entrepreneur is huge practice with very much NOT adapting to reality, but instead adapting reality to their own ends. And it helps in ways beyond the obvious (spotting new opportunities).

If you want to be a great entrepreneur, I’d recommend you start dreaming more, and make your dreams more vivid and concrete, and try to change the world to fit them, rather than the other way around.

PS: from reading this post, all of which has been written between going from that slide of the presentation to the next, you may come to think that it can take me a long time to read a presentation. You’d be right. This is partly why I’ve taken to transcripting in real time every conference talk I attend (and usually publishing them on this blog) – the smallest comment can spark off so many thoughts that I miss the rest of the talk, and it’s a way of giving me a chance to hear the whole talk.

Cultural differences: game people vs web people

• concrete revenues vs “future monetizable” growth
• team-as-blob vs sliding scale of headcount
• obsessive search for fun vs time-wasting activities
• surprise and delight audience with something we liked and think they want vs randomly guess and test on live audience; iterate until done
• very high minimum quality bar vs dont worry, be crappy
• high, strict specialization vs almost no specialization
• money happens elsewhere, far down the chain vs show ME the money

concrete revenues vs “future monetizable” growth

Largely driven by the “money happens elsewhere” part, game people are obsessive about “what’s the actual revenue this will make (what’s my percentage of the revenue this will make)?”.

In particular, if you cannot *prove* the expected revenue (and in many cases not even that: instead you have to prove the *profit*), they won’t even carry on the conversation. This happens everywhere from small startups to massive publishers. I’ve seen meetings on “social networking” get shutdown by a senior executive simply saying “how much profit will this make at minimum, even if it’s not successful? Remember that these resources would instead bring in an extra $5million if we deployed them on [one of our existing MMOs]“, and refusing to carry on the meeting unless someone could prove that the opportunity cost to SN didn’t exceed its income.

surprise and delight audience with something we liked and think they want vs randomly guess and test on live audience; iterate until done

A team of game people sets out to make something fun. They like to get some input from experts on analysing and predicting the market (market researchers, marketing departments, retail executives, industry analysts, etc) – and then use that merely as “inspiration” and “guidelines” to making something awesome and new. They assume that “the customer doesn’t know what they want, but will recognize it when they see it, and fall in love” (which is largely true!), and so they go off and build something beautiful largely in isolation.

This beautiful thing then surprises and delights the consumer when it finally comes to market.

Web people do the first thing that comes to mind, care not whether it’s objectively good or bad, and test it in the market. Then they try again. And again. And again. And look for patterns in what is popular or not.

As a result, game people tend to think of web people as “skill-less” (partly true) and “puppets of the market” (largely true). Meanwhile, web people tend to think of game people as “perfectionist” (largely true) and “monolithic / unagile” (largely true) and “non market-lead” (partly true).

obsessive search for fun vs time-wasting activities

Game people don’t make stuff unless it’s fun. If it’s not fun, it’s a failure, and only a stereotypically bad EA Producer (or a second-rate clone) would OK the ongoing funding and/or production of a project that wasn’t fun any more.

Web people generally couldn’t care less. They generally think they want stuff to be fun, in a “well, it’s better if it’s fun, isn’t it?” kind of way – but they usually only really care that there is some activity going on, and that the users come back to do more of it. They are less judgemental about the type and motivation of activity going on. They will slave away to try to understand this activity, to extrapolate better ways of motivation people to do more of it, and to monetize people for doing it, but the activity could be selling used cars or real estate and they would not be greatly affected.

This one even shows up subtly in Andrew’s own writeup – he casually uses the word fun. To game developers, the word is Fun, and they would never write:

Now, I think that the productivity-inclined have their claim to the world, as does the fun/entertainment games people. But the intersection of this, in web media, is where the fun happens.

…because you don’t use the word “fun” casually like that where someone might hear it as “Fun”. You are sensitized to all uses of the F word :). Fun would never come from an intersection like that; that intersection could give rise to a number of side-effects and new content areas, and those content areas – with appropriate rulesets imposed – could merge, and react with some of the side-effects, to give rise, finally, to something “Fun”. Fun is not a simple concept.

very high minimum quality bar vs dont worry, be crappy

Game companies have QA departments that are larger in headcount than the entire development team, often by a substantial margin. They don’t ship stuff that is half-arsed, partially complete, partially working, etc. Hence, when they do, there is huge press and consumer attention around it. This is one of the thigns that the games industry has been doing more and more web like over the past 10 years – ever since they realised they could drop some launch-quality and end up with the same level of quality as standard by shipping a “patch” 1-3 months after launch (and probably getting an uptick in sales as a result, re-box the patched version as an “improved” version).

But, on the whole, games companies still consider quality the one unassailable pillar of the development triangle (”quality, short development time, cheap development cost – you can only have two at most”).

In fact, most game people turn “Quality” into 3 separate sub-pillars: core fun, longevity, and polish. And consider all three inalienable, but occasionally flirt with sacrificing one of those three instead of sacrificing either of the two other full pillars.

If it strikes you that the games industry is thereby trying to cheat and get “2 and 2/3 pillars out of 3″ then … you’d be right. Understanding this can help explain a lot both about individual games and the industry in general over the past 15 years.

high, strict specialization vs almost no specialization

A game team is (typically) made up of distinct people doing:

• Art
• Code
• Design
• Production (project management)

You need at least one person devoted to each. For teams of size less than 5, it’s acceptable to have some people do two of those roles rather than just one, but it’s often considered “hard”
(by default – although in practice many teams flourish with people moonlighting/two-hatting these roles).

It is an onrunning joke that various non-design people in games companies have the unofficial job title of “Frustrated Designer” (most usually Producers and Programmers get labelled with this). i.e. someone who secretly wants to be a designer, but lacks the skill and experience – despite potentially many many years working in their person discipline, developing and launching games. Nowadays you also see people labelled as Frustrated Artist, and occasionally even Frustrated Programmer (although anyone brave enough to do that in the face of the programmers, who tend to be quite bullish about welcoming such people to try their hand at fixing a code bug (snigger, snigger, watch-him-fail) generally is quickly disabused of their frustration).

There’s good reason for this, too – the expected level of skill from anyone non-junior in a game team is sufficiently high that it can be very difficult for people to cross skills. It’s easy if they’re willing to drop to “junior” status (the level of incoming recent-graduate – very low-paid, and with very little creative or project input/control), but few are willing to take the massive drop in status and (usually) pay to do that.

money happens elsewhere, far down the chain vs show ME the money

Interestingly, perversely, this means that game people obssess about the money, despite never seeing it themselves, and worry about how their actions will affect the ability of later people in the value chain to make money, and how much the total pot will be.

Whereas the web people generally are much more blase about the money side, because they know it’s going to come almost directly to them, and they have a much more direct relationship with it (understand the ups and downs).

Game people’s approach to money is generally characterized by Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt – plagued by rumour. Web people all know for themselves how much money can be made, and how, and don’t peddle in rumours.

Comments on Andrew’s observations

Andrew’s observations were all good, except for one thing which I think he misunderstood: “By withholding levels, powerups, weapons, trophies, etc., it creates motivation from the user to keep on playing. They say, “just… one… more… game…!!””.

…and then he makes a conclusion that makes sense given what he and wikipedia have said, but which is almost the precise opposite of the truth.

As a result of this treadmill, there is a constant pressure for players to stay engaged and retained as customers. But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product – instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!

The truth is that content-gating was introduced and/or stuck around as a technique because the cost of creating content is exponentially higher than the cost of consuming it without gating. If you have decided to operate a content-centric game, you are doomed to be unable to run a service product based on it – no matter how many years you spend developing content before launch, your playerbase will soon catch up to your level designers etc and overtake them. Content-gating, levelling especially, forceably slow players down in their content consumption rates, even forcing them to re-play set pieces of content many many times (if you can get them to replay it enough, you can lower their rate of consumption to the point that a sufficiently large team of content-creators can keep ahead of them. Just).

Various other experiments have been tried over the years – most notably, User-Generated Content, but none have achieved the same level of efficiency (or yet been as well understood) as level-based content-gating.

Richard Bartle concludes that, in the great scheme of things (and much as it might nice to think otherwise), it’s not actually that important.

So standing back and looking at it, the answer as to why there is not a lot of fuss over this 30th anniversary is that in the great scheme of things, it isn’t actually important. The mainstream isn’t interested because virtual worlds haven’t had much impact; developers aren’t interested because the paradigm is obvious; players aren’t interested because knowing doesn’t add anything to their play experience; academics might be interested in the historical facts, but anniversaries don’t figure in their analyses.

I disagree :). And not just because it’s a chance to celebrate some UK-based breakthrough in computer games (what else do we have – GTA? When you google for “history of uk games industry” the first hit you get is “Japanese games industry | Technology | guardian.co.uk”. Sigh; thanks, Guardian). I think it doesn’t get much fuss simply because it doesn’t have a community that is enmeshed in modern culture in the ways that would get a fuss caused; its community isn’t highly sought-after by advertisers and journalists, for example. Its community isn’t a major user of the web-games-newssites. Etc.

On the flip side, I think it should have some fuss, certainly in the games press. It’s particularly important to understand how many years of history exists here, just as a number. Because that implies certain things about how much prior art probably exists, and the level of detail you should expect to have been researched and/or tried out and improved upon – all of which is very helpful when designing, building, or operating new games.

For the same reason, I think it’s particularly important for people to know the game design of MUD1 in detail, either to read a detailed review, or to have played it for themselves. Because that tells you what the starting point was for those 30 years of prior art. It gives you even more info on what you can expect. For instance, looking at MUD1 and looking at a typical modern MMORPG, you can see certain things haven’t changed that much, which suggests there is a lot of (old) documentation on side-effects of those aspects. Likewise, certain things have changed a heck of a lot, which suggests strongly that there’s a lot of (old and new) documentation on what else has been tried in those areas and why it didn’t work. In particular, it suggests that there’s possibly as much as THIRTY YEARS of “weird shit” that people tried in those areas – and your new wacky idea has probably been tried before. So you can go look up what happened; can use someone else’s (possibly “failed”) game as a prototype for your “new” ideas without even having to wait for your team to build the prototype.

If you don’t know that MUD1 is 30 years old, if you think perhaps that it’s 15 years old, or that it looked more like tunnels-n-trolls, then those things all lack the same implicit value to you – and you might not bother to go look them up. So, yes, IMHO it does matter how old it is.

Which reminds me; when was the last time someone did a major review of MUD2 (how modern was it?), seeing as so many people rely on reviews these days to understand games they don’t have time to play themselves…

What’s wrong with TDH’s list:

“Make sure the game is stable” – the games that launch “prematurely” (TDH’s description) ARE stable. Perhaps he meant something about “works on the majority of machines of your target market” or “has no economy-breaking bugs” or “all the quests work out of the box”, or … or … or etc. Depending on what he meant, my response would go in different ways.

If I were him, I’d have said “make sure the game is READY”, but whilst I know what that means, and most people in NCsoft seemingly had mostly congruent opinions, that’s not something I’m sure I can quantify off the top of my head. Hey, it’s part of what good publishers do as their value add, it’s not supposed to be obvious! More on this later, maybe.

Include significant content for all levels – you cannot possibly afford to do this, and it’s NOT ENOUGH even if you could. Rather, you need to provide masses of highly polished content for two particular levels: level 1, and level 20. Levels 10 through 19 need increasingly polished levels of content. Here I’m assuming that level 10 is the end of the newbie experience, and level 20 is the highest level 95% of the playerbase will reach within 1 month of starting play EVEN USING THOTTBOT et al to cheat their way through content faster.

Why? Because you lose subscribers at two points:
1. When they start playing.
2. when their first month subscription comes up for renewal.

All players should have completed the newbie experience (level 10) before their first subscrption renewal. From the moment they complete that, you want them to be more and more surprised, in a positive way, by how much “better” the game gets the longer they play. You also want to offset the decreased sense of wonder they have as individuals as they get to know the game and the world, so that they perceive a linear, constant, level of content quality (when in fact the content quality + volume is increasing, but their expectations are also increasing).

“Add new content on a regular basis” – like the outcome of a negotiated sales price (which can never go further in the vendors favour on future re-negotiations), whatever rate of content release you provide, you can NEVER reduce that rate in future, your players won’t let you. So DEFINITELY do not go around adding the “frequent” chunks at first that TDH recommends. That may well be suicidal.

“Make it easy for players to network, form guilds” – don’t bother. They will do it anyway. No MMO in existence has bothered to make this easy, and so the players have become adept at doing it themelves. This feature is therefore a complete waste of money – UNLESS you decide to make it a major competitive feature/advantage which becomes part of your sales strategy. Given how few MMOs do it even at a mediocre level or above, you could easily get great sales out of doing it well.

“Let players move characters between servers” – except that this destroys server-level community – something that all the big MMOs make heavy use of today. IMHO, the benefits to character-transfer outweigh the losses, ASSUMING you know what you’re doing and make use of those benefits, but TDH’s explanation (by omitting these) is probably going to lead many into weakening their game instead of strengthening it.

“Keep an open dialogue with the players” – Yes! This I agree with. Good recommendation.

So, just one of TDH’s points actually works without large amounts of hedging. Hmm. What about the “don’ts”?

What’s wrong with TDH’s list part 2: “Donts”

A general observation here: these have almost nothing to do with the realities of launching or post-launching an MMO; rather, they read like TDH’s personal bugbears of what he wishes that his MMO of choice did differently. I would humbly suggest that GigaOM is not the place to be airing a random selection of your personal criticisms of minor elements of someone else’s game-design (my personal blog, on the other hand, is an AWESOME place for me to be ranting about the quality of articles on other people’s sites. HA!). I’m only going to go through them for the sake of completeness, but mostly I’m not going to bother analysing them, they’re too trivial.

“Don’t promise features that are months away” – what TDH should have said was “in the management of online communities, Expectation Management is one of your core activities. This is also try of all mainstream AAA game development, just do what you would normally (not) do with a mainstream game”.

“Avoid having portals to future places” – this is just the same as the previous point. Nevermind.

“Don’t rebalance the game too much, too fast” – Hmm. Apart from directly contravening one of TDH’s “Do” points (”frequent updates and changes”) – what does TDH think updates are? Every update rebalances the game, de facto – “breaking [players] characters” is probably a good thing rather than a bad thing, as it extends the content for them (rebalancings can be the impetus for players to create an alt (second character) for the first time ever, and thereby increase attachment / stickiness for mass-market (non hardcore) players). Just don’t do an SWG NWE (if you don’t know what that is, google it – it was an extinction-level event in the Star Wars MMO that has masses and masses of commentary and post mortems all over the web).

“Publicly acknowledging problems” – Yes! Again, TDH’s final point actually has merit. Do it. It helps. But then again, this is nothing surprising – this is, in fact, part of that basic community management I referenced above.

Fine. “So, Adam”, I hear you ask, “if you’re so damn clever, what ARE the do’s and don’ts of launching an MMO, especially with respect to the post-launch period?”

Since I am currently technically unemployed – doing a Super Sekrit Stealthy Startup – I should really just put a PayPal donation link >HERE< and/or my cell number and an offer to answer your question (and any others you may have) at a discounted $100 an hour.

Launch Period: What Really Counts

For a subscription-based MMO (the target that GigaOM chose), two things count above all else:

1. Absolute number of registered active accounts

2. Conversion rate of registered accounts to subscribers who make one monthly payment IN ARREARS (i.e. one payment at end of month, or two payments at starts of months)

There’s some extra things that matter, because you NEVER launch an MMO in isolation – there has always been months or years of development leading up to this, and at least an alpha, if not two or even three betas, before launch:

1. Retention of final beta (usually “free”) accounts that convert to paid subscriptions

I’ll come back to all three of these in a later post – I’ve been meaning to write something up about this stuff for ages now, but I don’t have the time this instant to do it justice.

As a parting shot, though…

Big Background Question Number 1

Ask yourself (and your team) this:

Do you even know what an MMO launch is? A pre-launch? A post-launch? A live team?

…and think about it; a lot of people these days don’t stop to think about the knock-on effects of that question, and there’s really no excuse now – there’s so much evidence staring you in the face, in the form of many many MMO launches that have happened. If you can’t answer those questions – and understand the menaning behind them – go do some research ASAP before you get even close to launching.

It’s easy to gloss over the launch, think it’s a one-off special event you plan for, just like alpha, or beta. It’s easy to forget some of the complexity that is peculiar to launch. We had people at NCsoft (both external developers and internal staff) who failed to include the live team as part of the budget for their games. Live team is going to be anywhere from 50% to 150% of the size of the develoment team. Since dev team staff are the majority of the project cost, failing to budget for live team is a MASSIVE hole in your budget. There are games that have launched with live teams as low as 30% (I think there’s some that were even like 10% but I can’t remember any off the top of my head) of the dev team; they failed.

Damion Schubert came up with the term “AO Purgatory” (AO = Anarchy Online) to describe live teams with just enough income to pay for upkeep, bug fixing, etc, and a few bits of content upgrade – but not quite enough to add enough content, fix enough bugs, to cause the overall subscriber base to grow significantly month-on-month. Rule of thumb: I would never launch a game without a live team that was the same size as the dev team if I could avoid it. If I had someone else’s cash to burn, I’d budget for live being 125% size of dev.

Note to web companies: the days when normal people only had one online identity died ten years ago. We all have multiple identities today. Leave us alone, let us get on with our lives, and stop interfering with who we are and who we express ourselves as being.

(this was one of the more interesting challenges I hit upon at NCsoft when analysing how Social Networks / Web 2.0 / social gaming were going to affect our games: so few people in the company realised the multiple-identity thing was going on (even though most of them had 2 or 3 discrete identities!), and so many of the systems we were building/had built had no support for multiple identities per real-life person. When phrased properly, it became easy to see how disparate major problems we had with a variety of systems were actually the same root problem of enforced identity)

People will work around this kind of stupidity from internet companies, they always do: I already have to use 2 web browsers to get around this kind of problem occasionally (needing to be logged in as two accounts simultaneously, e.g. one to gmail and a different one to adsense) – if it gets much worse, I might have to start using Chrome too so that I can have a third.

But it feels such a shame that we still see this kind of shortsightedness…

Which brings be to a recurring problem I’ve seen for a long time with the online games and MMO industry, which I suspect is going to cause a lot of damage to a lot of social games and virtual worlds companies in the coming years: online service providers are – in general – shockingly bad (lazy or plain stupid, usually) at handling their customers’ money.

And the result? Ultimately, it could drive increasing numbers of consumers back to preferring to purchase their games and other online content via retail, where the companies and transactions are more trustworthy. OH, THE IRONY!

The knock on effects include:

• Good companies get tarred with the same brush (c.f. Daniel James frequent comments about the pain that Three Rings has been through with payment-processing, especially ridiculous attitudes to chargebacks, where the company regularly got shafted)
• Good customers stop paying for your service, and probably quit the service completely
• “could-have-been” customers stop paying for ANY online services before they even start using your service, and will never pay for yours
• Pre-pay cards are going to get even bigger, much bigger than most mainstream games companies and MMO companies have realised

What’s the problem?

Well, firstly, the problem is that most online companies have terrible security. For instance, I just tried buying something on iTunes. Apple’s security people should be ashamed of themselves, IMHO. I was horrified to discover that this is how iTunes still works:

1. You are forced to tie an iTunes account to an Apple ID, and that requires an exclusive email address. If you already have a completely unrelated Apple ID (e.g. I had an Apple iPhone Developer ID), you are forced to convert it into an iTunes account; there’s no option to keep them separate (unless you have other email addresses you’re happy to use)
2. To buy something in the UK iTunes store, you have to provide Credit Card details
3. These details are immediately saved and are used automatically every time you try to purchase something, without you needing to fill them in again
4. Apple forceably prevents you from removing the Credit Card (there is no “delete CC details” option, and if you try to manually wipe the number, the “intelligent” web-backend decides to ignore your input and leaves the details in place)
5. …
6. Any time you login to the account from now on, you can spend as much money on the CC as you like, without needing to know the CC number.

(in those 5 points there are several red-flag issues that leap out to anyone with a background in security, I’m not going to go through them all – suffice it to say, Apple has clearly made a decision that the amount of (I suspect: “substantial”) money they lose in fraud claims is made up for by the amount they gain in getting more consumers to make more purchases more often) – and I’m going to look at the most obvious attack only)

As an online game developer, I can immediately tell you that stealing accounts by guessing passwords is not merely “possible” but is “common”. Companies I’ve worked at have experienced upwards of thousands of accounts being stolen this way while I was there. This is a *common attack* and has been for many many years!

What happens if someone guesses your apple itunes password and logs in? Yep – free music. They can drain your credit card dry.

Surely, there is some secret piece of security going on here to prevent this invisibly, OR this must have happened by now, I thought. Some quick googling suggests that yes, it’s happened recently.

In fact, googling suggests that Apple has had at least one flaw in the password recovery that until recently made it even easier than normal to steal accounts by grabbing passwords.

(NB: as soon as I realised that the CC was so weakly protected, and that Apple refused to let me remove it, I converted my already “hard to guess” password to a random string of letters and numbers. And I sent Apple an email requesting that they manually remove the number or else take full responsibility for all future purchases, without contesting any claims of fraud that I make. They’ll probably ignore it :()

In passing, while googling, I found a bunch of CD-sized torrents titled “hacked itunes accounts”. I’m sure that’s a side-effect of some warez marketing rather than actual username/password details for iTunes accounts – the filesizes are way too large – but it was quite interesting to see.

What does all this imply?

1. Apple can’t, actually, be trusted with your CC details (in particular, read the “$450 stolen from paypal account via Apple’s weak security” link to see their alleged response when they were apparently at fault)
2. Apple is one of the most trusted consumer brands right now; when even Apple treats customers this unfairly, the backlash from that individual (and anyone who knows them) is likely to be quite substantial
3. Many consumers have no idea what to do when they are the victims of fraud; in the PayPal/Apple example, *if* you know how liability for this stuff works, you would ignore PP and go after Apple – but this is not something consumers understand or care about

“Credit Card Required for Free Game”

Another example: NCsoft’s billing system

Working for NCsoft, with some knowledge of the billing, payment, and account-management system they use for US and EU, and being a suspicious person who’s been the victim of CC fraud before, I made the decision to never put my credit card number in the system (I don’t put my CC into any system unless I have good reason to – all NCsoft staff get all games and all subscriptions for free after they’ve worked there long enough, so this shouldn’t have been needed).

Due to that decision – even as a relatively senior employee – I was never allowed to use my free, company-provided, Tabula Rasa account. Because the same system, plus some quirks of how TR was configured, would not allow NCsoft’s own account-management staff to make my TR account free until I used my Credit Card number to first pre-authorize the account (the other games were all fine, it was only TR that was a problem, due to quirks in the system).

Oh, how we laughed.

And I kept thinking: if this is how screwed-over I am, as an internal employee, one who actually works in development (and who can understand all the technical details of the system) … what’s the experience that our customers go through?

As an internal employee, I was able (although not encouraged) to complain. It got me nowhere (even internally). Later on, I had other problems with the same system, which got bigger and bigger. Ultimately I stirred up some trouble, and ended up (accidentally) greatly offending the team that was responsible for the payment systems internally. I went to visit them and apologise in person the next time I was in their office (it was a 10,000 mile roundtrip, so I had to wait until I was flying out there anyway), and spent some time understanding their setup. Basically, in a word: “under-resourced”. Or, in several words: “chronically under-resourced and massively over-loaded”. IMHO they had a snowball’s chance in hell of ever fixing that system or doing much more than keep it limping along and praying every day that nothing “too bad” would go wrong with it. Good guys, but hung out to dry by a trickle of a budget.

And NCsoft is one of the better, more accomplished, online game companies, with (in most areas) hundreds of support staff.

The Customer

Rather than break out into any more lengthy examples, I’ll leave those two personal experiences hanging, and suggest that further interesting reading can be found by looking at PayPalSucks, or googling for “hacked account” and just about any major game, and seeing what you find in forums.

Of course, this is online games, so … I have to assume that a percentage of the raving about fraud etc from “Irate Customers” is in fact idiots who think they can lie their way to free money (another standard piece of knowledge in the MMO industry: most complaints to customer service that mention lost money or items are themselves a very low-brow form of fraud, or “trying it on”).

The key point here is that Credit Card fraud is something most consumers have little or no experience of, and when they become a victim it’s a confusing and often difficult experience for them. And that even the “good” online services companies really struggle to make it bearable for the innocent consumer.

Meanwhile, Credit Card companies can (and do) make life excessively hard for companies, punishing them inappropriately severely for fraud, and siding with the consumer wherever they can. The same consumer that we often know to be a lieing cheater (and that’s just the normal consumers “trying it on”; the professional fraudsters are far far worse…). Everyone loses! (except the Credit Card companies; which makes the developer in me bitter – but it also makes sense, since the CC companies are the lynchpin of most of the online payment in the world, and logically if any actor in the system is to be more protected than the others then it should be them: if they falter, the whole system might collapse. Even if it feels grossly unfair at times how weighted in their favour everything is).

So, as more and more companies move to add more game-like elements to their systems, especially Virtual Goods and Item-Trading, payment is going to be a nasty shock for a lot of them (not just CCs, but plenty of the payment systems too, depending upon how the operator integrates payment). (of course, first of all they’re going to get a nasty shock when they find out how many payment systems there are in the world, and that Sulake’s claim of using well over 100 different payment systems for Habbo Hotel is, if anything, probably on the small side).

And to give a hint of the joys to come for people fleeing Credit Cards, I saw another source of probable nasty shocks at the conference – there was a mobile payment provider who integrated many different mobile phone networks, allowing the game operator to just deal with them without needing to know about all the networks. This can be exceptionally dangerous, and I’m sure some of their customers (game operators) will make the obvious mistake of assuming it actually works that way. No – each cellphone network charges a different commission on each amount billed, so the “integration” is really just skin-deep (I asked the payment provider’s staff, they confirmed this). Since operators will want to know how much money they’re getting when they sell something (they want to set a price!), some will use the option this payment provider offers of setting the “price the operator receives”.

That fixed price causes each consumer to be billed a different price to the others. That’s going to be fun to deal with when consumers start talking to each other about how much they’ve paid… Ugh.

Parting thoughts

Just one, really: Pre-Pay Cards FTW!

Hey, wait – does this mean that the “Retail is Dead” folks might have struck a bit too early?

Uh, yeah, I guess so ;)…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081009/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_iceland_meltdown

If you conveniently ignore that the figures are about 100 times too big, it’s a nice thought to imagine CCP might step in to bail out the banks, or at least offer to prop them up using ISK. It’s legal tender over much of the known universe, after all.

And it would give the world’s press something to REALLY say about “virtual worlds, virtual countries, and vritual economies” :).

Microtransactions

What were these going to be? Are they still coming?

In his explanation above, Jim said:

“We’re also opening up the microtransaction API so developers can charge for premium content in their own games (extra levels, gameplay modes, etc) — we’ll take a much smaller cut of that revenue.”

The API has long been rumoured to be a bit flakey, which is no surprise for a startup (and the people in the community saying this mostly weren’t professional developers, so their expectations need to be taken with a pinch of salt). I’ve not tried it myself (I joined during closed beta, fully intending to get back into Flash and make some stuff for it, but never quite got around to it. Having to re-purchase all my now-out-of-date Flash dev tools for stupid amounts of money from Macromedia/Adobe just proved one barrier too many), but a couple of friends have, and they’ve all said good things about it’s simplicity and how it “just works”.

(for another view on this, a while back I spotted this great article by someone who decided to take a flash game made in a single weekend and see how easily + well they could make money from it by putting it on various portals including Kongregate. It’s an interesting read, and goes into detail on the time it took to get the API stuff working, and what it was like to work with from cold)

But on the whole, the API has been up and running and working fine for over a year now (from my experience as a player on the site). So, I’d expect that adding new features to the API is well within Kong’s abilities as a company / dev team.

In the list of features, it reads as though Kong intended to make this thing work themselves, but Jim’s expansion suggests instead that they wanted it to be driven by developers. I think they expected game makers to be frustrated at the low per-game monetization possible from ad revenue, and to push Kong to support micropayments for more content. It hasn’t quite happened that way, I think – Flash + Kong makes it so easy to knock up a game and publish it that I think few developers on the site really think about putting in the kind of time and effort needed to chop and slice their content. Combine that with the large revenues that Desktop Tower Defence was widely quoted as making from Kong alone, and you can see that many are probably happy with just releasing “extra games” rather than “extra content for a single game”.

This is despite the fact that with Kong’s current revenue-sharing model *that* is a sub-optimal setup for developers. The way Kong’s rev-sharing works, you get ad-rev-share, but also the top-rated games each week/month get cash lump-sums from Kong. But there’s a big drop-off in amount between “1st”, “2nd”, etc – so if you, as a developer, have three awesome games, you’re much better off having them win 1st place three months in sequence, rather than launch them all at once and only get 1st + 2nd + 3rd. So, yes, you really would be better off making one game stay top of the pile every month (and I’m sure this was very deliberately done this way to try and encourage game quality and discourage game quantity; I just don’t think it’s working all that well yet).

Here’s a wild guess as to why: even the more advanced and experienced of developers on Kong are still in the mindsets that the crappy portals over the years have forced upon them, e.g. “for better revenue, embed an advert from a portal and get a better rate; for REALLY good revenue, embed an extra-long advert and the portal will give you a single cash lump-sum”. This is unsurprising when you consider that making a living out of independent, single-person casual games development still requires you to put your product out on as many portals as possible.

Until that changes, most developers will probably continue to use whichever lowest-common-denominator approaches they can deploy across ALL the portals. In that sense, Kong has a hard struggle ahead of it if it wants to change attitudes. But that’s part of why Kong is great for developers – if it DOES change those attitudes, it makes the world a better place for developers, and for players. Unless, of course, Kong gives up and fades into being “just like all the other portals”. I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen.

Leagues

I used to like them, I used to sing their praises, but I can’t continue to deceive myself (or anyone else) any longer:

Kong’s features for communication between players suck horrendously.

They promised so much, and then delivered so little. They started off doing some really awesome stuff, inspired things like the AJAX-powered mini-forums for each game, that allowed you to post to the forum WHILE PLAYING without your web browser navigating away from the page (which, because of the nature of Flash, would lose all your progress in most games).

But those mini-forums, which worked “OK” for when the site was smaller, say a year ago, and had only 5-10 pages per forum, or 40 for a popular game, quickly became chaotic (mildly popular games now regularly have 50+ pages of comments, and top games have many HUNDREDS of pages … all with NO NAVIGATIONAL STRUCTURE AT ALL. Ugh).

And what about chat? Right from the early beta launches (probably from alpha too, although I never saw that, so I don’t know), people talked about Kong as “game + chat”, glued together “without the game developer doing anything” (Kong provides the chat system and it automatically attaches itself to the side of the game on the page). So … where’s the contextual chat? How come, when you’re in chat, there’s NOTHING that relates the chat you’re in, or the people you’re talking to, to the game you’re in?

(this is a particularly interesting question given IIRC Pogo.com – Jim Greer’s previous job before he founded Kongregate – made a big thing of showing profile information about other people in the chat window. IIRC you could choose a handful of your Pogo badges that would be displayed with your avatar whenever you chatted (in fact, IIRC it was Jim who originally explained all this to me years ago when I cheekily applied for a job with the Pogo team and he gave me a phone interview*)).

How does this have anything to do with Leagues?

Well, leagues for casual games are a classic example of how three things in gaming crossover and make something much bigger than the sum of their parts. It is a bit of a poster-child for “Game 2.0″ (a stupid concept IMHO, but nevermind), and it IS a good idea, but most people miss the point:

• Competitiveness (…in front of an audience)
• Community (…around a shared experience)
• Communication (…of shared struggle)

The beautiful thing about leagues as opposed to other Web 2.0 + Game / Social Games features is that they are technologically VERY easy to implement. That’s also the ugly thing: it means most people who implement them don’t actually know why they’re doing it, and screw them up.

I could believe that the only reason leagues haven’t been implemented yet is that Jim and the Kong team *do* understand them, and know that they “could” throw them up almost at a moment’s notice – but that getting a complete process and system that fulfils all three of the core elements is a much much bigger design challenge, and needs them to fix a whole bunch of things at once.

i.e. you’ll see Leagues appear on Kongregate ONLY at the same time as they “fix” the chat and the mini-forums, and start providing proper Profile pages instead of the quickly-hacked-together ones they’ve got now that look like a beautified output of an SQL command:

SELECT * FROM PROFILES WHERE USERNAME="playerX"

…because without doing those other things too (which we know they’re working on, according to previous commenters on this blog) the Leagues would fall far short of their potential.

(*) – about that interview (although I’m sure Jim’s forgotten completely), it’s an interesting illustration of how my attitudes to software development have undergone a sea-change, so I’m going to bore you with a description here ;)…

A recruiter put me forwards for it, but I had very little expectation of getting the job, or of taking it if it was offered. But I *did* want to know more about what EA’s “casual gaming” group looked like internally, and how they worked. I dismally (no, really: dismally) failed the programming test, I think – they wanted me to write a java game, as an applet, from scratch in under an hour. At the time, I’d just come from writing big server-side systems – also in java – and was still wedded to using rigorous software engineering approaches. They needed someone who would just churn out crap, see what was good, throw away the rest, and iterate on it. Which was right of them. But with a timed test and no run-up practices I couldn’t overcome the habits I’d been using as recently as the week before.

(I say this now as someone who is firmly in that camp too, who strongly advocates Guy Kawasaki’s “don’t worry; be crappy!” mantra – but back then, I understood the concepts, but was in the wrong frame of mind to put them into practice. Certainly I wasn’t mentally prepared at the drop of a hat to unlearn everything I knew and re-educate myself, AND write a game, in under an hour).

ANYWAY … here’s the news bit – changes to the parental controls:

By popular demand, in July we added the Official Moshi Monsters Forum where Monster Owners meet, learn, create and and chat via pre-moderated message boards. The Forum is like a larger version of our Moshi pinboards. We’ve designed a new approval system for our trusted members like you to post without having to wait for approval. No need to worry though; every forum post may be reported at the press of a button and brought to the attention of our Moderators in an instant. The only change is with the new system, active and trusted forum members won’t have to wait several hours for their posts to appear. And we continue to monitor the forums all day and night, as we do the entire website.

For PARENTS: If you wish for more details, we’ll be happy to phone you with the auto-approve posting criteria. You may email us at parents@mindcandy.com if you’d like to set up a phone call.

If you you do not wish for your child to participate in the Moshi forums, please contact us at parents@mindcandy.com and we will deactivate their moshimonsters.com account and delete the account within 30 days. Please include the child’s Monster Owner name and the email address used to register the account.

By reading this email, you agree that you understand the changes to the MoshiMonsters.com site since you registered your child and that you agree to let your child remain a member of moshimonsters.com (the friendliest site online!). If you’d like to reply to us with consent, feel free to reply and send the word YES in the reply.

I’m a bit confused – it seemes to be saying that:

• BOTH: the manual post-by-post moderation system has been replaced by “assumed OK” posting, and by reading this email you consent to that
• AND: you need to consent to that by replying to the email with the word YES in the reply

I’m sure it just means the latter (the former wouldn’t make much sense). Given that the newsletter wasn’t proofread (”If you you do not wish”), I wonder if perhaps that sentence was left in by accident from an early draft. Perhaps the final decision on “assumed consent” versus “active consent required” was taken quite late in the process, and there were two alternate versions of the text up to the last minute.

Anyway, flippant commentary and minor pedantry aside, it’s great to see that Moshimonsters is continuing to open up communication, and gradually evolve into something akin to a social space, or online game, from the almost exclusively single-player experience it’s been so far.

(I’ll probably do a proper post about Moshlings later … once I’ve had the spare time to grind for one; in a good way, I’m rather busy at the moment with other stuff)

Where to start with analysing data?

Analysis of data about what your consumers are doing is invaluable to any company looking to optimize their sales and profitability, especially so for online games. But today (2008) there is little or nothing in the way of credible products for doing analysis suitable for games. Many companies have built proprietary systems, with all the costs and horros that come with that. But that’s way out of the reach of startups and games studios.

So, where can we start? Well, website analysis is a mass-market use for these tools which has a lot in common, so there should be a good range of free software, and open-source stuff too.

Free webstats: Historical Perspective

(not *just* boring history :) – this briefly explains something fundamental about the different types and complexities of stats analysis tools that will be useful background knowledge for future posts)

A little over ten years ago, when I was still a student, and didn’t want to spend money on anything if I didn’t have to, I wrote my own web log analyser, that would run over my Apache and/or IIS logfiles and tell me lots of fascinating things about who was visiting my web site.

There were commercial alternatives at the time, varying from cheap ($50-$150) that lacked basic features I quickly wrote for myself, to expensive ($500-$1000) that had everything I could ever want and a lot more. I soon gave up maintaining my proprietary software (lack of time, real job – and the assumption that good analyser software would come down in price). I started using the open-source analysers, because they were “almost good enough” for very basic usage, and – in theory – they would improve over time.

The cheap stuff compared to free was mostly better just because it had pretty graphs and convenient user interfaces for “1st order” data. i.e. anything that could be determined merely by looking directly at raw data, e.g.

• total number of visitors
• which countries visitors came from
• sites that linked to yours

The expensive stuff compared to the cheap stuff was mostly better for having “2nd order” data, i.e. things that could only be calculated by looking at raw data BUT ALSO by using some pre-calculated 1st order data, e.g.

• percentage of visitors from each site (requires you to count number of visitors from each site AND ALSO to calculate the total number of visitors who came from any site)

…and also “higher order” data, i.e. things that could only be calculated by using 1st order and/or 2nd order data and combining it in new ways, e.g.

• number of visitors from each site who did NOT also come in from another site (requires you to first generate a list of visitors from each site, then start again from start of the logs checking for each one whether they ALSO came in from a site that was NOT the original one)

Most famously, the most desired piece of higher-order data was “find out where each user is going, the sequence of pages they click through whilst on the site, from the first page they visit to the last page”. None of the free stuff did that, and most of the cheap stuff didn’t do it, or did it very badly.

So … what is free today?

10 years later AWStats is not noticeably better now than it was then, despite being actively maintained. It’s picked up some – IMHO – relatively frivolous features and still hasn’t gained the most basic of analysis features from the commercial products of 10 years ago: it still can’t/won’t track for you the progress of a user through the site.

Analog and Webalizer, the two other free analysers I tried around the time I stopped doing my own, both of which were vastly inferior even to AWStats, don’t seem to have gone anywhere in that time either (although someone has forked Webalizer to make a slightly improved version)

Has *no-one* been playing with the source of these tools and adding basic features? I know a few sites- like the excellent InternetOfficer page on AWStats – have been adding and sharing basic hacks to vastly improve it, but these really just scratch the surface of what is needed. (if you’re using AWStats and you haven’t added the IO stuff, I highly recommend looking at them and cherrypicking some you like – although it’s a real PITA to add more than one hack because of the stupid config system used by AWStats – you have to remember to manually increment a unique ID for each module you add. ARGH!)

For the record: I have been using AWStats continuously for the last 6 or 7 years, and have hacked a lot of stuff to work with it. *I* don’t have problems with it, but it’s disappointingly lacking in areas where I need more.

So, I thought it was time to have a look around at what else is out there.

Google Analytics

When Google bought Urchin, I thought maybe this would mean we wouldn’t need to rely on AWstats any more. The truth turned out to be a bit different – Google Analytics is, in many ways, as “almost but not quite enough” as AWStats. In particular, getting meaningful Referrer analsysis out of GA is a nightmare (I have no idea why we’re still having to hack in custom regexps just to get one of the most fundamental pieces of info out of GA – and note that the manual regexp additions still don’t work for a lot of sites: I’ve sometimes set it up on a GA site and nothing happens, for no apparent reason).

GA is awesome for some things – like marketing-centric tracking – and is adaptable (as above) – but it’s still missing so much that it’s no surprise to me that other alternatives continue to be heavily used. Apart from the many things you need to make custom strings to track (like the referrers above), it:

• is several days behind “live” data (at least in Europe, it’s nearly always more than 24 hours behind)
• over-simplifies reports (very litle data is provided for most reports)
• provides no easy way to combine output of one report with output of another – no mashups allowed! – c.f. Yahoo Pipes for an example of what GA could trivially provide to the user to become totally awesome

Now, if there’s a chance GA might be “good enough” for you, then I suggest you take that route and run with it – GA “can do” a lot (if you muck around with it a lot), it’s owned by Google, and it’s very well-known. You can google for a lot of tips on using it, and I suggest reading things like Andrew Chen’s blog which has a lot of tips on what you should be looking for when doing your web metrics. I’ll be coming back to the topic of “what you should be looking for” in another post – but first I want to get the basic state of tools out of the way.

Free Alternatives – a future?

What’s on the scene today? Here’s 6 other free webstats analysers I found (in addition to the market-leader (AWStats) and the aforementioned Analog and Webaliser (which you really shouldn’t bother looking at).

Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics

This seems to be being pitched as a direct competitor to GA, right down to similar naming and presentation (as well as being free to use, and requiring the creation of a Microsoft account to be eligible for using it).

I tried signing up, but then I got this very disappointing response:

Thank you for registering for the Microsoft adCenter AnalyticsBeta project.
You will receive your adCenter Analytics invitation as capacity allows.

This is pretty fricking stupid: if you’re competing against Google, you shouldn’t go around offering users access to your program and then getting all high and mighty about how you might deign to allow them to use it at some non-specified future time of your choosing.

So, for now: Microsoft’s product is effectively vaporware. Sigh.

labsmedia’s ClickHeat

“ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones.” – i.e. it tracks exactly where the user clicked the mouse on your page, and then shows you an aggregate of “all clicks by all people”, with places that were clicked more often showing up in a lighter colour than places clicked less often. Heatmaps are a great visualization tool for aggregate data like this.

They have a nice live demo that you can try out, and see what happens on their site – use the username “demo” and password “demo” – although it defaults to showing clicks from “today” which for their site is too few to be interesting, you can just click on the “month” button in the navbar at the top to see an interesting map of their site.

In particular, the way you can change the transparency level in real time is awesome – if a map gets too bright in one area, and you can’t see what people were clicking on, change the transparency to get a better look.

Slimstats

Works fine, but … this is nothing more or less than a simplified view of the AWStats core data – it’s got less data than AWStats but makes it easier to read all in one place.

Oh, well.

BBClone

This is a first-order analyser only. That makes it a complete waste of time, IMHO. Any first order stats I want to track I can do *from the command line* in linux by typing something about this long:


cat "access*.log" | cut -d=" " -f7,9 | uniq -c


…which looks obscure and obtuse, but you can google to find premade ones that do what you want, and then you only need to change the numbers 7 and 9 in there to change what data summaries are provided. And when you use linux regularly, you can remember the whole command line off the top of your head easily, bung it in a script, and you’re done.

Roxr Software’s Clicky Analytics

EDIT: DECEIVED! This one isn’t free at all; it’s like a bunch of the commercial ones today that “pretend” to be free, but have absurdly low limits on the free usage; if my niche blog is enough to go over their daily limits (hint: yes, it does), then the service is clearly a waste of time

This one looks really good. The only problem I can see so far is that it won’t work for sites with “more than 100,000 daily page views” – that’s not going to be a problem for anyone here; when your site gets that popular, you should have the spare manpower to build/spare money to buy whatever you need.

I’ve only just started using this, so I can’t comment on it yet. But I do want to point out they are nice enough to provide a Wordpress plugin for you that automatically adds the tracking stuff to each page as required, so that makes life easier for anyone wanting to track their WP blogs.

Reinvigorate

This used to be a web stats analyser, I know a few people who used to swear by it, but apparently not any more – they’ve replaced it with a desktop application that is “powered by REinvigorate” but appears to be a lot less what we want here than the old Reinvigorate stats analysis.

There appears to be no way to get access to the *actual* Reinvigorate, the product we wanted to use; all links just go back to the download site for the desktop application instead. Oh, well.

Woopra

Looks promising – but (like the Microsoft product) it’s currently an invite-only beta, with a low limit on the number of daily pageviews, so although it *could become* totally awesome, for now it’s a case of “may work for you – IF you can get into the beta – and IF the final product doesn’t turn out too expensive”. Some big unknowns there. But worth a look, IMHO.

If you need something doing properly, you gotta do it yourself?

So, although this started off as a review of free web tools, now that I’ve got this far I’m considering digging out the source code for my old proprietary web server log analyser and starting to use it again. Maybe even share it with other people if anyone’s interested.

It was very fast (at least for some uses it was much faster than AWStats), although I think the latest version I was doing some slightly nasty and interesting-but-silly things with using the local file system as a dynamic database – not flat files, but on-disk hashes, to be able to process arbitrarily complex relationships (”show all users who did X after doing Y more than twice in the previous week, but only if they used Internet Explorer on their first visit”) large files in very low memory (hey, back then my server had about 64Mb RAM; memory was at a premium!).

This time, I think it would be interesting to do the whole thing in SQL instead, and run against an in-memory SQL DB like HSQLDB.

(really, though, I’m hoping that this absurd suggestion – that I might write a log analyser myself :) – will poke at least one person into pointing out how ignorant and unobservant I am for not noticing some open-source tool out there already which rocks and does the few things that GA doesn’t :))

Followups…

For another time, I want to cover some of this:

How is this useful for game developers (apart from the obvious)?
What other options are there for people doing online games?
If you’re going to roll your own metrics for games development, how should you do it?

Believers are wonderful people. I hire less talented believers over talented heretics every time. Three-star ability with five-star drive is how you want it. The other way around leads you to hell.

Paul Barnett, Creative Director, EA Mythic

I missed the talk, but Sulka told me about it afterwards. I’ve just seen that Scott’s commented on this too, and a lot of people are complaining that this is a Bad Thing. The thing is, how many people have actually tried it?

I met someone a long time ago, a business owner in his sixties, who proudly stated that the reason – the only reason – he had consistently built a succession of businesses from scratch, and grown all of them to be huge (as opposed to just one or two big successes, like most entrepreneurs) was that:

Most people hire on ability and fire on enthusiasm; I hire on enthusiasm and fire on ability

I think this is a clearer way of describing the same concept that Paul was referring to. In particular, that last three words is critically important (I’m saying this based on thinking about this for a long time, ever since I first heard it). If you’re saying up front that you’ll “fire on ability” then you’re making an informal contract with the unskilled, enthusiastic employee: you’re not good enough, but we’re giving you a chance to *make* yourself good enough before you reach the limits of how far you can get just on your enthusiasm. Of course, it also helps a lot when you’re hiring from a limited pool of people and having trouble finding enough candidates who are good enough to give job offers too.

But this *obviously* doesn’t work for all positions in all companies at all times. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence to think that it would. There is no such thing as a hard and fast rule for anything to do with personnel, especially hiring or firing – the world is not a simple, one-dimensional, logical place. There are positions – especially the people architecting a project, or planning future activities – where skill massively outranks enthusiasm. Where you need your experts, skill is essential. Bear in mind that “Project Lead” could be of either type – if you’re leading a project that’s plunging into the unknown, so that planning is going to be a bit of a shot in the dark anyway, then enthusiasm is probably going to outrank skill.

When it comes to “why” this works, I think this statement is really about the people who have potential and haven’t reached their peak yet. This isn’t about recruiting Directors, it’s about recruiting the people who are going to mostly be doing directly productive work. Over the years I’ve noticed a strong correlation between the extremely enthusiastic people *who also had good potential* and those who went on to fulfil a lot of that potential. 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.

In a startup, for the benefit of anyone who’s not tried it, no-one is ever good enough, and no-one ever gets to do “only” their own job. You simultaneously require two things: firstly, that on many occasions it’s “all hands to the pump”, so – frequently – everyone must do lots of things that are way outside their comfort zone. Secondly, because “a startup” is only a transitional phase before becoming “an established and powerful company in a new space”, any startup that remains a startup for a long time is actually “a failure” – so the challenges each staff member faces today will be different by this time next year, often massively different. And the skills and experiences that were directly relevant today will be at best indirectly relevant then – and vice versa. Someone who was only “a moderately good fit” for the role now may well be “the perfect fit” for what that role has morphed into 6 months down the road.

Those changes aren’t predictable – if they were, you’d do it the other way from the start – and every business has them, but the difference with startups, and any company undergoing major growth, is that they are much more frequent / probable. Hiring on enthusiasm *can* work in a normal company, but it’s much more likely to bear fruit in one undergoing rapid change, or where the product is undergoing rapid change.

Which makes it (probably) also highly applicable to any development studio who’s making a new AAA computer game. If you’re making a sequel, skill may be more important, but with the first game there’s so much that’s changing every single week, even in the core design (this is a fact of life; it’s what you do to make sure the game is “fun”; fun cannot yet be “designed from day one”).

So, when that businessman made his statement, he wasn’t just providing a simple way to make it easier to hire people, nor just making a threat to people who failed to step up, and to teach themselves on the job. He was neatly summarizing some fairly deep ideas on the hardest challenges faced by businesses that are changing heavily, and a general tactic that goes a long way to meeting them.

Question: What are the key traits, skills, and level of experience do you look for when hiring a Design Director, Creative Director, or Executive Creative Officer for your video game studio or media development firm?

My Answer:
The first thing to do is to look through their portfolio of past work.

The second thing to do is ask them to explain it.

The good ones will be able to at least say something interesting about each project.

The great ones will be able to explain precisely why they chose the particular style that was used in each case, and what that style bought them in terms of fitting the project, or emphasizing the core content, or appealing to the target market, etc.

Generally, you also look for their knowledge of best practices in key areas. For instance, do they know the standard info about dramatic tension and story arcs from hollywood and TV dramas? Do they know about art pipelines and production methodologies – can they work with modern methods like Scrum?

But, at the end of the day, the biggest single question is: how many games have you played, and what did you like?

If you haven’t played major examples of each of the 10 most popular/valuable game genres, or aren’t able to EXTREMELY coherently explain what was good and what was bad about each and every one, then you’re probably not much good, and a long way short of being great.

To put this into perspective, I’m a CTO / Dev Director / Tech Director, and I’ve personally played in the region of several thousand computer games, and for every one of them I could tell you what was good and what was bad and make recommendations for improvements, or tell you what I’d love to plagiarise for other games. I know I’m a bit strange (in many ways), and it helps that I have a near photographic memory, but I expect a good Design Director / Creative Officer to have a similar level of experience as that. If I can do it, and also found the time to learn and become reasonably good at programming, then why didn’t they manage it too?