Somewhere, buried inside the avalanche of spam, are a few genuine LinkedIn messages. e.g. today I saw that a friend had moved to a new company – important, useful information.

Support: why would you want to refuse our spam?

I asked the LinkedIn customer support folks how to disable the spam. Their response:

You can “only hide the member’s Twitter updates [if you] also [hide all] their LinkedIn updates”.

i.e. your choices are:

1. Get spam
2. Get nothing

Hmm. Think about the people with tens of thousands of connections on linkedin. Their linkedin home pages must be absurdly high spam-to-signal ratio.

LinkedIn’s management: Twitter? WTF is Twitter?

LinkedIn’s CTO / lead architect / whoever authorized this stupid setup apparently “forgot” that the main feature of Twitter is it *allows* you to choose the people you receive tweets from.

(or, more likely, they’ve never used Twitter – it’s just a buzzword they’d heard of from a VC)

LinkedIn removes that choice. It simply forces everything on you. No filtering. No choices. Nothing. As a user, you exist to be spammed.

As a user, you exist to consume LinkedIn’s adverts, and nothing else. The site is – it would seem – not intended to be useful.

RIP LinkedIn.com

For a business to sink to such a low level of utility, and for the management to achieve such a high level of ignorance about the market, suggests to me that LI is moving rapidly towards implosion. I don’t believe it will still be with us two years from now. And that’s rather tragic, given how valuable it used to be.

Some idiot at LI corp – who apparently is unaware of the normal consequences of becoming the lowest-common-denominator (i.e. unless you are the market leader on size, and *force* your competitors out of business, you price yourself out of existence. Well, you’re nowhere near Facebook, so you’re most likely to just put LI bankrupt) – has replaced it with a massive, 5-page long aggregation of twitter feeds.

(currently 5 pages on my account, but who knows how long it will get if more people add their twitter accounts?)

There’s a website for that – it’s called Twitter.com. Funnily enough, I already have 5 different Twitter clients, and they do an AWESOME job of subscribing to the twitter feeds I want to read.

None of that is applied to LI, of course – LI simply *forces* me to view everything that is tweeted by anyone. It’s as if the LI management team HAVE NEVER USED TWITTER IN THEIR LIVES, and have no idea how it works. Amazing!

The (hypothetical) idiot at LinkedIn has clearly achieved something – they’ve given a very short-term boost to the “Activity” on the site. At the cost of removing functionality that used to be there.

I suspect this is the beginning of the end for LinkedIn. At this rate, it will get more and more useless.

I wonder, is there a community anywhere for maintaining business contacts, viewing resumes, while preventing spam and leaving you in full control of who sees what and who can contact whom?

Occasionally, you find sites that do this. Usually, when you tell the organization, they’re a little embarassed, and rush to fix them.

From HMRC, I got a polite, pedantic, *but entirely incorrect* response telling me that the “standard” was X, when I know that to be false (as does anyone who has read the offiicial standards, as documented by the Internet RFCs).

They apparently can’t be bothered to read the standards, and don’t care that they’re wrong.

No wonder so many people hate civil servants: holier-than-thou attitude coupled with being clearly, inarguably, wrong. Sigh.

Three glaring errors I noticed in particular. One of these they’re in good company – it’s the same thing Rupert Murdoch has done, along with sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming “NA, NA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! GO AWAY AND TAKE YOUR STUPID INTERNET-THINGY WITH YOU, YOU FREELOADING BASTARDS!” (not a literal quote, of course). Although a lot of people seem to think that’s a weak strategy even for the mighty news empire…

1. Sell a large number of Flash ads, and put them ALL in the same place. At the same time

What do you see when you view a page on this site?

If you have a laptop, and you surf their site, does the battery last noticeably less than normal? (hint: yes, it should – I’ve seen this happen on a wide variety of PC and Mac laptops)

Why?

Because they put not 1, not 2, not even 5 … not even TEN … but up to FIFTEEN SEPARATE FLASH ADS all animated SIMULTANEOUSLY on every page.

Flash wasn’t designed for this – the flash runtime can overhwelm a modern computer with just 1 rogue flash app; 15 is begging for trouble.

I suspect (because some of my former employers used to purchase them, regularly) that these “mini-ads” are a decent source of revenue for GI.biz. It’s a pity then that they’re mostly Flash, because that means an awful lot of people in the target audience (game developers), see something like this:

Incidentally, I offer a tip-of-the-hat to Relentless, whose animated-GIF has so many frames of animation that it smoothly animates some stuff that looks straight out of a Flash ad. Smart move on their behalf – they DIDN’T use a Flash movie.

OMGWTFBBQ! That must take TONNES of animating frames! Why, yes – it uses an *unholy* 50 kilobytes, just to display one ickle GIF. Shocking. And yet … in 2010 … such a tiny tiny file in the scheme of things that it suffers nothing for not being Flash. (Flash was originally needed because internet bandwidth was poor; it only gradually grew into the all-singing, all-dancing beast we love today)

2. Hide all your content. Keep your news … secret

Try viewing any article on the site.

Follow any link that a friend sends you via email

Click on a link in any blog post or forum post.

Actually … you’ll have some trouble there. Lots of blogs and forums no longer link to GI.biz. Why?

Because anyone who follows the link only gets to see ONE SENTENCE of the article:

Hmm.

3. Block anyone who uses Gmail

If you try to sign-up on their site for an account using Gmail, the site refuses to “allow” you to create an account. It seems they have hard-coded a list of email domains that they consider “unacceptable” for game-developers to use.

Funny. I’ve been using gmail for my professional email for many years now. It seems a fairly common practice. Google’s … well … Google is a pretty well-known company these days. Their products are … well … kind-of popular. No?

I tried emailing the site admins to ask if there was a way I could create my account anyway – it’s fairly easy to check that my gmail account is bona fide. A funny thing happened.

Their website has no email addresses. Instead, it has a javascript that creates email-addresses on the fly. It’s a neat little javascript, and used differently would be pretty cool. But the way they chose to use it has two obvious effects:

1. It is impossible to use a web-mail client to email anyone at GamesIndustry.biz direct from the site (the right-click, “copy email address” won’t work because of the javascript)
2. Spammers have to look at the source-code to find the email address, and be a very very little creative with their bots (well within their capabilities these days)

Internet: 0, Newspaper/Web newsite: 1

O RLLY?

No, not really. I’ve got nothing against the news-site, and I’m well aware that this is only an echo of a bigger, louder noise: mainstream newspapers are in their dieing throes, lashing out at anyone and everyone in their panic.

But I’m suprised that a tech-industry focussed site chooses to fight so hard against the medium that so much of its own industry relies upon and worships. The first and third items above I would normally attribute to ignorance and just spending too little money for their web design team. But the middle one reflects an active decision to block the internet at large – even though the workaround is to create a “free” account, it’s an artificial barrier entirely of their own making.

I’ve spent a lot of time this year working with or around mainstream journalists, magazine staff, and authors. I’ve noticed a lot of this stuff going on. This is just a personal opinion, but … I humbly suggest that whenever ANY news/journalism site acts as though it’s at war with the very medium that the world + dog uses for spreading said news … that whatever else happens, it’s probably not going to end well.

(if you don’t know who Tim Langdell is, and you work in the games industry, just Google him.

Just a minor piece of recent DRAMA! DRAMA!, something to cheer up the week…

This excellent piece of Advertising / Fun / Augmented Reality / Creativity was – like most big-budget ideas – based on someone else’s idea, someone who had the basic idea (and proved it non-commercially) first.

So far, so good.

This is the 21st Century. People notice when you clone ideas, and they comment. A lot of comments are brief and reflect the emotional reaction rather than a considered opinion. Especially if you disingenuously claim to have invented the idea, and put out press releases to that effect … when there’s plenty of evidence suggesting otherwise.

Still, that’s how life goes; you try something, you veer too close to “copying”, and you get some minor pillorying on a public website. You re-adjust; next time, you’ll try to add a bit more novel to an idea – or you’ll work harder to give credit where it’s due.

OR … or, one of your team can always just go for the all-out nuclear option, and insult everyone and everything in sight. In the world-readable comments thread. For bonus points, you can then delete your comments a day later when you realise what a douchebag you appear, and how damaging it’s become to your future career:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/4752204508/sizes/o/

(I love how Nicholaus is naive enough / bad enough at his own career to imagine that simply deleting or editing a comment makes all evidence of it vanish :))

IBM, 1964:

How is it that this tiny company of 34 people —including the janitor — can be beating us when we have thousands of people?

…to which Cray reportedly quipped:

You just answered your own question.

(and, incidentally, FUD – a phrase I associated with the 1990′s and linux – apparently dates back to the early 20th century. It puts in an appearance here, in the 1960′s, and lead to CDC winning a lawsuit for $600 million. Nice. Can you imagine someone pulling that one off against Microsoft in the 1995-2005 era? Or Apple, today? I doubt it…)

Nowadays, with publishing costing nothing, it’s often un-monetized. All it takes is the slightest increase in hassle for the publisher, and they’re better off killing the content entirely.

That’s the case with a site I just shut down. A small, incomplete – yet moderately valuable – resource for iPhone Developers, with a few thousand unique visitors a month. Too small to be worth monetizing, so I hadn’t. I was eating the (very small) hosting and support costs, until someone abused the site, and those “support costs” became non-trivial.

iPhoneDevelopmentFAQ – history

I created this site at the start of 2009, because there was no good FAQ for iPhone Development (AFAIAA there still isn’t; even today, the nearest you can get is StackOverflow. SO is great, but … a lot of subjects are “forbidden” under the site terms, and the site-search is very weak).

I set it up to be low maintenance, and to allow multiple people to moderate it (very similar lines to SO, but slightly less open, and a lot more “niche”).

In the past two weeks, after more than a year of “no active moderation”, we saw forged posting credentials and then pointless offensive questions. First rule of running a passive website: leave it configured to report (surreptitiously) on all unusual activity, so you can see if it gets out of hand / abused / attacked / etc.

Options

Deleting offensive content requires only a couple of minutes (to remember the password, login, and hit delete).

Checking what happened with the forged credential (probably unrelated) is more like half a day to a couple of days. I could audit the code, audit whatever 3rd-party PHP libraries were being referenced, and almost certainly plug the hole (or holes).

Or … I could do what I actually did: two lines of typing, and Apache kills the site. In a way, it’s a bit sad – it had background traffic of a few thousand uniques a month – and the whole thing is now gone.

The fragility of niche interests

At the end of the day, I get *zero benefit* from this site. I pay a tiny amount for the web-hosting and the domain-hosting, so it’s almost free, and I’m happy to leave it running for the benefit of the thousands of visitors each month.

But if it’s going to start costing me hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in lost time when I would otherwise have been doing paid contract work (every hour not working is an hour’s salary lost) … then the balance switches and (as in this case) I’m obviously going to kill the site.

I expect that the people who abused the site were just being thoughtless, and probably wouldn’t have ever gone back anyway. But I can’t afford the time to make sure.

Ultimately: Who has the time for this? A handful of callous acts just killed a repository of info.

(EDIT: To be clear: Piracy isn’t theft, but it certainly is illegal. Please do not misconstrue: I do not condone piracy; this post is a lament at the extent to which the retail industries encourage or coerce consumers to pirate content. I am still looking for a legal way to buy the digital data I want, and in the meantime, I have Spotify…)

I want a single that came out 5 years ago. It’s available to purchase on iTunes …. in the USA.

I’m “not allowed” to give Apple money to buy that track, because my account was originally created when I was sitting in the UK. IIRC, even when I’m physically in the USA next month, I will still “not be allowed” to give them money for this (but … who knows? Apple doesn’t bother explaining this stuff to the normal consumer)

Switch to UK iTunes “mode”, and … Apple does not sell that track in the UK.

So, once again, the music industry would prefer that I go and rip the MP3 than that I *give them money*.

Do they care? Do they even know?

Of course not.

They will *never know* that I did this. They have no mechanism to allow me to *tell* them that I attempted a purchase – and was rebuffed. This would cost them nothing, but … they can’t be bothered.

Equally, when I rip the MP3, they’ll never know that I did. It has literally zero effect on their business. Because piracy is not theft: digital data is not physical property, and copying does not affect the original in any way.

Sigh. One day, the digital industries will grow up. I hope I’m still alive to see it.

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…

(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).

One of the trials I signed up for I found so useful I carried on using after I’d written the review. GetClicky had a lot less information than some services – including GA – and less detail than the free tools I already run on all my websites (e.g. AWstats). But it was a lot more user-friendly, presenting the most critical information all at once on a single screen.

Today I finally started disabling GetClicky on my sites; the company has forceably blocked my site from their service. Why? Because I had a week of heavy traffic *while I was using the premium version which allows unlimited traffic*. That’s it. I stayed within their requirements, but I was banned anyway. That suggests to me that their company is in trouble…

What went wrong?

My AppRejections.com site – a small blog chronicling Apple’s submissions process for iPhone apps – got hit by a storm of traffic for one week. I’d only started the blog a week or so earlier, and I hadn’t got around to adding analytics to it yet (it only had 5-10 hits a day!).

Once the traffic surge started, I panicked and quickly setup a GetClicky account for it. As a new site it was signed up for the GetClicky “free premium trial”, which allows the site to have unlimited traffic (more on this later). The traffic surge ended a few days before the free trial ended.

The site is now running at less than half the “limit” for a non-premium account. Well within the company’s rules. But when the trial ended, I received an email telling me they were cancelling my free account too, because my site has too much traffic.

So, assuming it was an automated email, and that they’d understand if I explained:

My site doesn’t average that much any more – it was a few days blip.

Presumably the getclicky stuff will carry on working?

To which I got a snarky email from them – NB: they have the FULL DATA on this site, they could easily have used their brains and checked:

The limit for free traffic is 3,000 daily page views. Your site has been above this number for every single day of your trial except the last 2 days. That’s not a “blip” in my opinion!

Hmm. OK. Snarky, but at least human. Let’s explain in more detail what happened (which they could corroborate easily if they cared):

I accidentally got a massive spike of traffic on a tiny blog – I
went from 10 hits a day to 50,000 a day – which made me realise that I
had no stats tracking, so I enabled GC. That traffic is now gone, it
was a flash-in-the-pan thing.

Response? They banned me. All stats stopped functioning.

GetClicky’s problems

When I reviewed the various options for analytics, the interesting problem was that GA was providing the most powerful service … and doing it for free. Arguably Google shouldn’t be allowed to do this – it’s standard monopolistic behaviour – but having done the review of alternatives, I think it’s fine.

GA is so incredibly difficult, complicated, and user-unfriendly that most people use it, but get less of out it than if they were using ANY of the direct competitors.

Google is providing an “everything but the kitchen-sink” product which is really targetted at corporates who can afford to pay full-time staff to customize and manage their GA setup. For the rest of the world, Google is offering nothing more than a lowest-common-denominator product; the field is wide-open.

The problem now for other analytics companies is how to monetize in this arena. There are some notable successes, such as the URL-shortening companies, who offer analytics on stats that are simply not physically accessible by GA.

But in my experience, most of the analytics companies today have poor strategies for how to thrive and grow in the shadow of GA.

What are they doing today?

GetClicky is a great example: there are only two significant advantages to their premium product:

1. The adverts on the stats page disappear
2. You are allowed more than 3,000 visitors / day

Normally, removing two small ads from a webpage wouldn’t be worth paying for (at least not since 2000; we’re all so used to seeing ads now that we don’t care). But GetClicky’s webpaged are rather badly written, and they block on downloading the advert-code. The advertisers webservers are often a lot slower than GetClicky’s, and you can often wait 10 seconds for a stats page to load, of which 9.9 seconds was waiting for the advert.

But, essentially, their value proposition comes down to:

A couple of trivial concepts in “forced monetization” that wouldn’t be out of place in the late 1990′s.

There seems to be no real attempt to find stuff that modern consumers care about. For instance, the screamingly obvious USP for GetClicky – they have the most user-friendly of all analytics services, bar none – is completely ignored by the company.

Growth

As a GetClicky user, I wanted to access their site on my iPhone. A year ago, you could access their website and get an iphone-only version of the site. It was using the fake webpages that pretend to look like an iPhone app.

Now, even that has been withdrawn, and their own support forums are full of people asking “when can we get an iPhone client?”, with answers dated late 2008 (over a year ago!) saying “we can’t tell you what, but something exciting will appear very soon now”.

This is ridiculous. Checking live website-analytics on the iPhone is a classic example of a service that users desperately want … and it fits perfectly with GetClicky’s USP as a company.

So … since I *am* an iPhone developer … I approached GetClicky’s Business Development guy, and asked him if there was an iPhone app in development. I added that if there weren’t, I’d like to go ahead and make one myself – either contracted to them, or as a standalone product that they’d get some secondary benefit from (it makes their service better) but they wouldn’t be able to charge for (because they didn’t own it).

A week passed, with not even a single brief email response.

The nail in the coffin

Go look at the front page of http://www.GetClicky.com/. In passing, note the testimonials – all these are about usability (but the company refuses to make money out of the usability!).

Focus on the “who uses our service” part. Wow. Lots of famous, big name websites there. Um. No. None that the target audience is likely to know or care about.

What are they selling to here? Are they trying to go head to head with GA for corporate clients? Are they targetting marketing depts internally – NOT the technical depts – who just want ease-of-use? Are they going after the small website owners, who don’t have the time/money to learn how to use GA?

Honestly? I don’t think they have any idea themselves… Which is rather sad, because it gives me little confidence they’ll still be around 5 years from now.

Unsolicited email I received today:

Hi Adam,
I’m the editor of GamerBlips.com and MassiveBlips.com I wanted to share the news that T=Machine is a hit with our readers. If you haven’t checked out these two gaming sites you’ll see that we’re dedicated to highlighting the best videogame and MMO content on the Web every day.

I enjoyed your recent Focused Work-Hours post. Your commentary on the Studio Manifesto ideology was spot on.

We’re currently contacting our most popular featured bloggers on these sites and asking them to claim their blogs. By doing so, you’re making it easier for thousands of new fans to quickly find your blog and read all your great posts.

To quickly and easily claim your blog on GamerBlips.com, click this link:

What does that link do?

1. Goes to a page with a big advert for GamerBlips.com
2. Once you find the relevant image-link (hint: it’s neither a link nor a button, but a custom graphic), you can click-through to “claim my blog”
3. Now you get asked for:
   1. Name
   2. username
   3. password
   4. email address
   5. CAPTCHA
   6. …I think 1 or 2 other fields, but I’d stopped reading and closed the window at this point

My reaction

Let’s get this straight: you want ME to signup to a site I never use, to promote YOUR site and create content that YOU monetize (but don’t pay me for!) … and – even though you already have my name, email address, and blog info – I have to jump through signup hoops for the “priviledge” of earning YOU extra money?

Some people / companies just really don’t understand the world, I think.

Or it’s a scam.

The site seemed to work OK, so I’m assuming it’s NOT a scam – just shocking naivety on the behalf of the people that run it.

Just to be clear

There is nothing in the entire website I can see that requires a username or password. It’s probably part of the fetish a lot of web-designers have for taking people’s email addresses at every opportunity.

Tragically, in my experience, a lot of them don’t even intend to monetize it in the future – they’re just making the user jump through hoops “because everyone else does it”.

And, finally

Good luck to the people running the site. Something like that could be quite useful. Although I can’t help wondering what it does that makes it significantly better than Technorati or Digg. Or any of the many clones of those two that appeared over the years.

e.g. I’d suggest you try http://www.devbump.com/ if you’re looking for this kind of thing.

Three things I have to say on this:

1. Mainstream games industry people question it’s value
2. Yes, of course it was worth it
3. What Would Zynga Do?

Mainstream games industry people question it’s value

I’ve seen a lot of people from the mainstream industry (i.e. consoles, PC games, handheld etc – eerything EXCEPT iPhone and Facebook) incredulous, unconvinced it was worth it. This was the case even with the rumoured $250 million valuation from a month ago (c.f. Nicholas Lovell’s post on that).

There’s also some discussion over at TheChaosEngine (private forum for professionals in the games industry) on the same topic, with similar levels of scepticism about the value.

The main reference points are traditional games companies and their sale prices. That’s where this goes wrong – and it’s symptomatic of something that hampers the games industry: a lack of understanding of the business side of games. For most people in the industry, this doesn’t matter – they’re making games, not selling or funding them. But for the people managing games companies, far too many of them need to get an MBA and learn the essentials of sales, marketing, revenue, and shareholder-value – and how that applies to their own day-jobs.

Yes, of course it was worth it

Reproducing some of what I’ve already written on TCE, since it’s non-public:

There’s three things driving the valuation of PF:

1. A solid business, in business-terms (c.f. Nicholas Lovell’s “6 reasons why Playfish is a steal at $400m”)
2. Quality content-producer, in games / media terms
3. Consistent success, in comparitive terms

Playfish is in the top 3 companies dominating the Social Games sector. They are the ONLY one of those companies that set out to dominate the SG sector – the other two happened purely by accident. PF was architected to take over this sector, and is succeeding at it.

From a game-design perspective, the entire business model for Zynga and SGN has been “keep bailing!”, and they’ve so far bailed faster than they were sinking (where “bailing” means “using marketing and sales ability to make up for severe product deficiency”). That might sound like I’m being derogatory – but compare it to all the “worthy” games companies who bailed *slower* than they were sinking; at the end of the day, who’s the smart one?

But good sales/marketing strategies are easy to dissect and clone, in a way that good content is not.

Part of the demand for PF is that a lot of people look at it and say: this is SGN/Zynga, except they make good games. Yes, they’re not 1st – but any idiot could take PF’s current position, throw $50m of marketing budget at it, and easily surpass Zynga. They will own this market, sooner or later – PF is fundamentally strong where Z is fundamentally fragile. (although Z’s “fragile” is still an order of magnitude stronger than most traditional games companies).

Just to be clear: I have a lot of respect for Zynga and SGN, they’ve achieved a heck of a lot. But they’re sharks. They’ve always been sharks. Comparing to modern standards of game-design, they’ve never had great product. Instead, they’ve been extremely canny, aggressive, vicious, and cash-driven – and they’ve shown how successful and profitable you can be with those things. If someone had asked “how well can you do with a weak content company if you’re exceptional on the business-side?” then these companies boldly step forth and demonstrate that the answer is: “very well indeed”.

But this is a new, novel market. Maybe there’s nothing special about PlayFish?

Well, apart from thriving in a new market against some of the toughest competition in the world, look at the comparitives. Compare PF with – say – Kongregate. That was founded by the ex TD of Pogo after years at Pogo/EA, and was expected to recreate the success of Pogo and expand on it (hundreds of millions of dollars revenue). They’ve fallen a long, long way short. PF was founded years later and is now doing perhaps 20 times the revenue (just guessing based on Kong’s last funding round and how long ago it was).

PF’s success *looks like* it’s “probably” no accident. IIRC (and I haven’t checked, I’m going from memory here, so I might be very wrong) this is the same management team that built and later floated GluMobile. Putting that into perspective:

1. these guys have ridden the wave of an emerging market to create on of the big successes
2. these guys started from nothing and ended up with an IPO
3. these guys then started all over again, from scratch, in a new market … and succeeded AGAIN.
4. …and they did it very quickly

What Would Zynga Do?

This, then, is the million-dollar question: who’s going to buy Zynga?

Zynga have followed a strategy of buying-or-burying every small competitor who came along. As I noted above, despite being rich, hugely successful, and growing fast, they have some internal fragility that PF has never had. Where PF *could*, in theory, get more aggressive, Zynga is already barrelling along flat-out on that front. Where PF has a good reptuation they can trade on, Zynga has a poor one that’s not worth much now PF is part of EA.

If it had been a smaller company that bought PF, maybe – maybe – Zynga could have afforded to try a reverse-takeover to hoist themselves up, and hold on to their top spot in Social Games.

But EA/PF is too complementary a pairing; together, they’re too effective for Zynga to get away with that. Zynga *might* have hoped, with a different competitor, that acquisition by EA would lead to a breaking-up of the company’s value. EA has done this many a time to other acquisitions: small companies vanish when eaten by big ones. But as I noted above (and as Nicholas referred to when claiming that PF’s team could “turn around the tanker” that is EA), PF’s team have enough experience and personal wealth that it is very unlikely they’d disappear inside EA. They *might* retire (despite the golden handcuffs, many EA acquisitions have lead to de-facto retirement of their founders) – but PF is so young as a company that I doubt they’re tired of it just yet.

Looking back at Zynga, this seems to be a company that sees itself as the Alpha Male. I can’t believe they’d settle for second place. So, Zynga needs to be bought. And, unlike PF, Zynga may actually benefit from being dominated by their acquirer (try and wipe out some of that bad reputation; perhaps fundamentally alter the internals of the business, make it into a good content-generator? Where PF is adding Zynga-esque marketing and sales ability, could Zynga add PF-esque content-creation/content-quality ability?).

Who?

I’ve no idea :).

But, looking around, Zynga has greatly underperformed on iPhone. There are a lot of media and consumer giants around that expect to have no problems making lots of money on iPhone. Maybe that would make a good deal, someone already exploring, or set to explore, iPhone, who doesn’t need Zynga, but who could expand Zynga on to iPhone in a huge way. That could even let Zynga save some face in the deal (“there’s nothing about our business approach we wanted to change, it’s just that this was an opportunity to dominate TWO platforms instead of ONE”).

But one theme in particular came up that I want to hilight: why is NCsoft Korea so callous / vicious / greedy / demanding / single-minded / stupid when it comes to the profitability of their games? (NB: those aren’t my terms, as you’ll see by the end of this post – but that’s how I’ve heard people describe them, while trying and failing to understand what’s going on)

(here’s a post which really exemplifies that mystification people seem to experience w.r.t. NCKorea)

It’s all about this: NCsoft’s typical annual revenues (but perhaps not in the way that you think).

2007 – 330 million dollars
2009 – 470 million dollars (estimated)

When profitability ceases to matter

This is MBA 101 (i.e. anyone could work it out for themselves – MBA courses aren’t that difficult) but a lot of people never get a chance to see it in action in the real world, and so forget it.

Which of the following would you prefer:

1. 50% profit margin
2. 1% profit margin

Ah! but I missed out a key piece of information…Which of the following would you prefer:

1. 50% profit margin on $1million annual revenue
2. 1% profit margin on $1billion annual revenue

(of course, nearly everyone would prefer option 2 – $10million profit, instead of $0.5million profit)

Next question: is there ever a time in the real-world where you’d see a pair of alternatives that were so … extreme?

Well, yes – all the time. Every single day. Because the simple, bare facts for NCsoft Korea go something like this:

1. We have $1 billion in the corporate bank account (actually I think their cash balance is something like $200 million – but they could *spend* $1 billion right now)
2. Deciding to cancel a game project, or to fund one, requires 6 highly skilled staff and 1-2 months of analysis
3. Our $1 billion of unspent cash is earning $40k in interest every week
4. Lineage 2 earnt us $5 million in revenue every week; Aion earns similar amounts

Oh, and one more thing: It is very hard to find additional teams of “6 highly skilled staff” who are smart enough, insightful enough, and sufficiently experienced to make good decisions.

Rational business management

If you have a billion dollars to spend, and you can spend it on projects that make a billion dollars return, or ones that make a million dollars return … it is a complete waste of your time to spend even one minute per day looking at a million-dollar project.

Note: this is INDEPENDENT of the costs of development.

That’s the keystone of NCsoft Korea’s activity: they don’t care how much a project costs – they in fact have TOO MUCH MONEY already – they only care what revenues it can potentially bring in.

And they are absolutely right to act this way. In fact, since it’s a public company, they are legally required to act this way (or get sued by shareholders / investigated by government and thrown in jail).

The problem for most of us is that we never get to experience what it’s like to own more money than we can feasibly spend. Most of us have never imagined the possibility of coupling that … with a requirement to make maximal additional profit. I mean … what’s the point? If you’ve got more money than you can spend, who cares about profit?

Why I don’t work for NCsoft any more

Well, of course, there’s multiple reasons – and a broad array of contributory factors – but this is one of the mega-big-reasons why I left:

I could invest $1million in each of 50 projects, and be more likely to achieve $500 million revenue than NCsoft Korea was when investing $50million in a single project

I believe everything I’ve said in this article about the rational approach to NCsoft’s business – but the probabilities of backing a successful game at $1million are NOT the same as those for backing a game at $50 million. If you know what you’re doing, the chance of success at $1 million is much, much higher.

So much higher that when you aggregate 50 attempts, on average you achieve a bigger total revenue than the average for 1 attempt at $50 million.

Believing that, I spent a lot of time and energy pushing the company in that direction. I pushed my projects that way, I helped others push their projects that way. In the end, there was too much inertia, some of it due to bad luck (Tabula Rasa failed while I was there), a lot of it due to internal corporate politics. Some of it simply due to incompetent people (who were eventually fired, “told to resign”, or made redundant – but too late)

When the company you work for has proved itself unwilling to work in the way you believe it should, it’s very hard to remain there and do a good job at the same time. I tried for a while, I pissed off a lot of people, and eventually realised I just couldn’t hack it. I was living a lie, and I was doing it badly, upsetting people, and letting people down. My poorly-hidden negativity quickly undermined all the positive things I was still getting done. It was time to go…

It’s a great piece of openness to put your bug lists in the public domain. It makes it easier for your customers and partners to make decisions that save you time because they can see what’s coming and when (and save you money in reduced support requests). It saves you money in that you get free QA / testing from your users.

The downside is that it exposes to the world the places where you are especially incompetent, lazy, or just plain self-centred.

This is a recurring theme I’ve seen with corporates looking at both Open Source and also Web 2.0:

We say we’re the best, but secretly I believe we’re the worst; if we expose ourselves to the public, people will ridicule our mediocrity, and refuse to do business with us.

Also … I will probably get fired because my colleagues and my boss will finally realise what a clusterfuck I preside over on a daily basis

Eclipse, and a tale of two bugs

I was going to log two high-impact bugs that Eclipse has had for several years. Then I did a search on that area of Eclipse, and realised that the current Eclipse maintainers don’t give a **** about this whole section of the IDE – some of the core bugs we see every day were logged in 2001, and are still open:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=&content=syntax+coloring

What you find when you do some basic research

If you go looking through the bug history for some of the more “obvious” bugs there, you often find little gems of passive-aggressiveness from maintainers. That’s an exceptionally effective way of making sure people stop helping and supporting any Open-Source project…

You’ll also find endless re-logging of the same old bugs from 10 years ago, revolving around the basic problem that Eclipse lets you set everything you could possibly imagine … EXCEPT the colours that it prints text in.

(all IDEs let you set the colours; most dont give you enough control over the other parts; Eclipse fails on the basic challenge, and succeeds on the advanced challenge)

This wouldn’t be so bad, except that its default is very bright with low-contrast – i.e. very hard to read on laptops when outside, and bad to read for long periods of time. As of about 5 years ago, you are finally “allowed” to set the colours yourself – except that the app breaks if you do, because they “didn’t bother” to allow you to change the colours on 20% or so of things.

Final thoughts

The next time someone – especially at a corporate – resists openness and transparency … in any form … ask yourself this:

What have they got to hide?

Often, once you ask yourself that question of the right person at the right time, it very quickly becomes obvious what they’re hiding (if not why). A little more digging, and you can pry open the can of worms, and see what trouble they’ve been up to…

(Incidentally (and unsurprisingly), in the face of the point-blank refusal of Eclipse developers to make basic usability concessions across the board, I didn’t bother logging either of the two bugs I’d found)

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

I was giving this talk, so … no live writeup this time :).

The slides are up on slideshare here:

http://www.slideshare.net/guest38ac74/how-to-sell-social-networking-to-your-boss-and-publisher-1215019

NB: I lost my voice the morning of the talk, and panicked, and rewrote the slides to include everything in words in case I couldn’t get my voice back (or if it cut out part way through). Hence the unusually dour presentation style. Sorry!

So … you can go and listen to an iPhone developer, an ex EA person, and an ex Motorola person, and pay for the priviledge, organized by non-developers. The cost is 50% more than you pay to go to world-famous VC/angel/investor networking events such as First Tuesday.

Or … you could go to one of the many near-identical networking + speaker events that are free, and run by real developers. Here are four examples which show that Upcoming, meetup.com – even Facebook and LinkedIn – are your friends here, with loads of stuff going on.

The issue of “how” you organize these things and “what” you provide has been on my mind a lot recently, as we’ve just started a fortnightly one in Brighton (for anyone and everyone interested in commissioning, designing, developing, and launching iPhone apps). I’ve been trying out all the above sites for arranging this (I can write up some notes about the pros/cons of the different sites if anyone is interested). If you can’t find something in your local area … why not start one of your own, all it takes is making a page on Upcoming.com, and emailing the local game / mobile / iphone / OS X developer communities … takes about 30 minutes, max?

Personally, I find the grassroots events organized by people actually making this stuff on a daily basis the far more compelling option. I also find that “special name speaker” events tend to focus on the audience being expected to shut up and listen, rather than share and learn collectively – which isn’t much use to me these days. Unconferences for the win!

Of course, sooner or later, if your event gets popular, you’ll have to start charging because the only venues big enough require large payments, and the organization effort becomes too much to do in your free time. But for the small events? My advice: if it ain’t free, don’t go.

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”)

No spam filter (there is one, allegedly, but it’s invisible, non-configurable (!), and missing obvious spam words)

(there are comments on the official forums from 3 years ago saying “we need some basic anti-spam tools” and the author replying with “we’re working on it”)

Annoying

No spam controls for reactive processing (banning users, marking comments as spam, etc).

Unforgivable

Each comment can ONLY be deleted one, by one, by one, requiring 6 mouse clicks per deletion!

The concept of a list of comments, and a checkbox next to each, and a “delete selected comments” is now well over 10 years old – and it only takes a few minutes to implement with PHP + SQL. If you ever find yourself making a web app for general usage, please don’t forget this core feature :).

(I’ve been too busy for the past month making actual iPhone apps to finish my free PHP FAQ platform, but watch this space, shouldn’t be too long now…)

Anyway, advert over. He’s posted an interesting challenge: want money for a startup? Right. You have to publish the entire business plan, and let everyone else copy it. If – as many people are fond of saying – it’s implementation that matters, not the idea, then this shouldn’t be a problem for you. But it may bring wider-world benefits to everyone else, intangible virtuous-circle stuff.

I will invest money in businesses presented here on this blog. No minimum, no maximum, but a very specific set of rules. Here they are:

1. It can be an existing business or a start up.
2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time.
3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days
4. It must be profitable within 90 days.
5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops
6. You must demonstrate as part of your plan that you sell your product or service for more than what it costs you to produce, fully encumbered
7. Everyone must work. The organization is completely flat. There are no employees reporting to managers. There is the founder/owners and everyone else
8. You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download
9. I make no promises that if your business is profitable, that I will invest more money. Once you get the initial funding you are on your own
10. I will make no promises that I will be available to offer help. If I want to , I will. If not, I wont.
11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that I specify, and I have the ability to watch the funds flow and the opportunity to require that I cosign any outflows.
12. In your business plan , make sure to specify how much equity I will receive or how I will get a return on my money.
13. No mult-level marketing programs (added 2/10/09 1pm)

PS: I love Mark’s attitude that comes across in his blog. E.g. in one of the first comments to this blog post:

Would you be open to reviewing pitches on your blog and then details privately?

From MC> No. This is an open source opportunity. Not a pitch Mark opportunity

EDIT: I have it! I HAVE IT! YES! NO MORE PRAYING TO THE GODS OF ****ING APPLE’S CRAPPY WEB SERVER! (it’s probably a corrupted download)

The problem?

Sheer mind-numbing incompetence by Apple’s web team, it would seem (NB: I may be wrong; I haven’t tried packet-sniffing the HTTP traffic to prove this beyond all doubt, but my experiments with different browsers and different ISP’s strongly indicate it is the case). They’ve (mis)configured the webserver over at developer.apple.com to kill partial downloads of this monstrous file.

If you cannot download the whole thing before Apple automatically logs you out of their website (which they do every half an hour or so if you don’t actively surf the site), then your download is cancelled, server-side. You cannot resume from where you left off (their web server refuses to honour the HTTP command that tells it to resume a partial download).

What did they do wrong?

It’s a session-management problem – you CAN pause and resume a minute or two later. Just not half an hour later.

The other major bugs in the Apple websites (including that force logout!) suggest that some novice web programmer made a half-assed Session-management system that, well, sucks. (am I sounding angry? Hell yes; Apple’s website is behaving like some naive bricks-and-mortar company from 1999, not 2009). Or maybe they picked up a 3rd party one … that sucked. Whatever. It seems the session-manager is overriding Apache’s built-in support for this core element of HTTP, and saying “no”. For no reason other than bad web coding.

In passing, I noticed that they are *still* (allegedly – it’s easy to fake) running the same version of the Apache webserver that they’ve been shipping by default with OS X Server for some years now – a version that is more than 4 years old, 8 versions behind the current “maintenance” release, and 1 major version behind the “mainstream” release. Personally, I wouldn’t run Apache 1.x if you paid me, not with 2.x out there and running a “proper” webserver arch (apache 1.x is not a real webserver, it’s a hack using forks that makes it unnecessarily slow under heavy load).

</rant>

(by the way, if you haven’t already, you should read Eric Ries thoughts on PHP…)

“Best Practices” are one of the best guides you can get for sailing between the Scylla and Charybdis of “crap code” and “over-engineering”.

So I’d like some, please.

Perfection

Anyone with zero computer science education can write crap code; that’s easy. At the other end of the spectrum we have the people who write Perfect code.

Anyone who writes perfect code is either:

1. a liar
2. too rich to work for money
3. works in an industry that is immune to marketing

…because marketing is always a cheaper and more effective way of making more money, compared to writing “perfect” code.

(disclaimer: in the past, I’ve been the first, and lusted after the third, but never quite managed the second)

The skill that marks out the difference between a competent programmer and a good (or great) one is knowing which of the language’s strengths to play up, and which to play down. Sometimes, the fact that a language allows extremely sloppy code is a very good thing. e.g. most scripting languages – especially any that run on an “intelligent” runtime like the truly Awesome JavaVM – where being grossly inefficient is not only “OK” but in fact “doesn’t happen”, because once it notices what stupid thing you did, the runtime silently recompiles everything into decent C code while you’re not looking.

So … how the heck do you win?

You look for Best Practices, language-specific (and domain-specific, but that’s obviously of more niche value).

I recently did two moderate sized PHP projects. I figured: OK, so PHP is very easy to hack code together knowing very little about the platform (and I’d been using my Perl experience most of the time when writing PHP) – but Perl showed us that Best Practices are damn useful and not too hard to stick to. There must be lots that the PHP community has worked out by now!

(as Quake3 would say, in a bass rumbling voice:) Denied!

Um, no. Apparently not. Google – with *considerable massaging* – threw out a few dozen attempts from different people.

There was some interesting stuff in there. I found some obscure bits of standard and near-standard extensions I hadn’t noticed previously when reading the manuals.

But, to be honest, nearly all of it was a waste of time – it simply wasn’t PHP specific. Telling people that they should “document function headers” is meaningless as a “PHP Best Practice”. It’s not a PHP Best Practice, it’s a general programming practice. You can find it in *any* textbook (and if you don’t know stuff like that, I suggest you go read a few key books like Code Complete, for starters).

There’s also – and this quite upset me – a lot of BAD practice out there being passed on from PHP programmer to PHP programmer and hailed as if it were “a good thing”, when often it’s about as wise and valuable as staring down the barrel of a loaded gun so you can see better while you clean the inside.

What is PHP good for? Why?

I have recently realised that the majority of PHP programmers cannot answer these questions, and that many of the rest aren’t great at answering them either. If you can’t answer them, you can probably never be a great PHP programmer, and it’s debatable exactly how “good” you are. (/me ducks and runs for cover)

I’ve not done enough PHP to know what it does from the inside.

But I’ve done tonnes of code in “languages that are not PHP”, and I have a really really good idea what it does from the outside. And most of the Best Practices I saw for PHP were stolen from other languages (especially C derivatives) and are totally inappropriate for PHP. Because PHP is not C, and PHP programmers will never be decent C programmers, no matter how big their inferiority complex, and no matter how hard they slave to try and write “high quality code”.

Some things PHP is good at: (in no particular order!)

1. It’s a Scripting Language (like JavaScript, and ActionScript, and Perl. But not like C, and not like C++, and not like Java)
   • It’s intended to be trivial to read and write code; the core language is “easy for a non-programmer to grasp”
   • There’s no feature in the language that requires thinking to understand what’s going on, by design (unfortunately, some of the libraries broke this. c.f. the great Register Globals disaster too)
   • idiots can code effectively…
   • …which means that highly intelligent individuals who were never trained as programmers can ALSO code effectively, with minimal pain and suffering
   • …and that changing (modifying, fixing, extending) other people’s PHP code is trivially easy
   • There’s no compiler. No cached builds. What you see is what you executed, literally.
2. It’s very easy to grasp two of the three most important structures of a web application (the third one is “data flow” – PHP sucks at that one). The two it does great are “program logic” and “program inputs + outputs”; together these sum to “execution structure”
   • One page == one source file : you read an output (FORM or A link) to an HREF? Or a page is crashing in the browser? You know exactly which file to find it in
   • One source file == one page : all the logic (PHP tags) and the input/output parts of the user-interface (HTML tags) are in one file. So you can’t make assumptions and the resulting mistakes
3. It’s a context-free language. This is a by-product of being so tightly integrated with HTTP/HTML. It is one of the things that “real” programmers sneer at PHP for – how can you have a context-free language that isn’t Functional and expect it to be any good? That’s some kind of mutant offspring of Fn and Imp that ought to be strangled at birth. Or … maybe … just maybe … it’s one of PHP’s greatest strengths (although admittedly it is a mutant offspring too)
   • When a single source file is executing *there cannot be any other context* (except for the Session, sadly – but this is a strange piece of context-that-is-not-context because of all the rules about what can and cannot be in a session)
   • Oh, OK: there cannot be any context from other threads, other users, other simultaneously executing code. This is one of the hardest, nastiest parts of all systems languages, the multi-threading stuff. And PHP completely wipes it out as a problem. Nice.
   • All source files – hence all user-interaction points – are (semi-)atomic by definition: either they execute, or they don’t (by default, if they start, they dont stop, not even if a crash-level event happens; more on that later)
4. Code is mingled with presentation, but is “together but apart” because it’s guarded (in the computer science meaning of that word, sort-of) by enclosing magic PHP tags
   • You can copy/paste move around code without the risk of it becoming part of the presentation code (this problem happens A LOT (and causes some awful security holes and application crashes) in some languages, especially in templating languages, even though it seems like such a simple thing. I kid you not.)
   • Any decent IDE (/wave at Eclipse (download PDT to add PHP to it)) can do a lot better at second-guessing what the programmer wants to type next, thanks to the explicit context of being either “in code” or “in presentation”. Saves a lot of time, in very small pieces many times a day.
5. It’s a mainstream scripting language: very very fast to write code, code is very very fast to read + understand (it CANNOT DO complex things like STL or Operator Overloading), and you can “make it up as you go along” when writing a program – it doesn’t expect you to plan ANYTHING in advance
   • No declarations : you don’t have to plan your variables in advance
   • No declarations = faster “flow of mental programming” : you can aribtrarily change your mind “mid sentence” when writing code, and not have to move backwards in the source file to fix a declaration as a result
   • No memory management : you don’t have to plan the LIFECYCLES of your variables in advance
6. Writing basic imperative code. Fast. (Imperative == “not Functional”; if you don’t know what that means, look it up – Fn programming is awesome)
7. Templates for pages.
   • If you’re going to use a template method (or, god forbid, “library”) in PHP, make sure that its source code looks *exactly like PHP*. Because PHP is an excellent templating language.
   • This begs the question of “why aren’t you just using PHP in the first place, fool?”. The answer to which is usually “I didn’t read Adam’s Best Practices on this website and wrote long waffling PHP source that no-one could understand”, or “I have some truly stupid accomplices who will overwrite the PHP tags whenever they see them, just for fun” (anyone using DreamWeaver has almost certainly done this at some point, without even realising it; in that case, it’s not the human’s fault, it’s the fault of their editing software – DW – but the PHP programmer can’t really tell the difference, it’s the same net effect)

Some things PHP is bad at: (in no particular order!)

1. NOTE: just because PHP is “bad” at something does not imply that this is a bad thing about PHP!
2. OOP. PHP is poor at OOP. It’s not as bad as Objective C (which is terrible) nor Perl (which is horrifically awful at OOP), but it’s not part of the core language, and it shows.
   • Actually, I don’t even know what to say here. Go on a long rant about how it should look like C++? Hmm. Not really helpful. I’ll just leave it at that. If you *really* need to ask why PHP’s OOP is bad, it’s going to take more than a couple of bullet points to explain it to you.
3. It’s an “old fashioned” scripting language; it lacks some so-called modern features (many of them are older than the microchip but took a few decades to make it into mainstream programming)
   • Closures? Where are my closures? : without this, it’s much harder to write self-adapting code, and much harder to write code “for other programmers to extend and alter without needing to change my source code”
   • No OOP scripting : without this, OOP is a pain in the ass, taking a lot more typing, and standing out like a sore thumb inside any PHP file
   • No modern Array derefence syntax : (you have to do: “${arr['var']}” instead of: “$arr.var”) this makes getting data out of arrays so hard that people go out of their way not to use arrays in PHP.
4. Data flow (the third prong of three mentioned in the Good bits section)
   • SQL in PHP is not fun : it’s all manual SQL statements, with practically zero language-level support (check out Perl::DBI for an example of how funktastic language support for SQL can get; I didn’t say “good”, I said “funktastic”. There’s a difference)
5. Distribution
   • There isn’t any. PEAR doesn’t count – and if it did, well … PEAR has one of the most appalling distribution systems I’ve seen in about 10 years. The fact that I had to hack PEAR’s installer – in 2008 – just to “not crash” let alone to get it to “start installing” says it all, really.
   • No package management. No bundling. No metadata. No repository (PEAR or CPAN? take your pick. I find both fine as manual systems, and frequent failures as automated systems).
   • (if you still don’t believe me, find yourself a Debian sysadmin and ask them to show you Aptitude, a worn-out decade-old text-based front-end to apt. And marvel at how fantastic it is despite all that!)
6. Register Globals fiasco : the maintainers killed some core features of the language in an attempt to fix a security hole, instead of just fixing the security hole
   • Sadly, the core libraries now force you to use Arrays for evertying, because the language maintainers panicked over Register Globals and destroyed the whole input-sampling system.
   • …which is bad because of the lack of Array-de-ref syntax in the language (see above)

A quick retrospective

If you’re a PHP programmer, I hope you’ve already noticed the implications of some of the good/bad points I hilighted.

There are things that a lot of the PHP community loves with a lack of reasoning that sometimes borders on obsession/fetishism, but which – from the above analysis – are inappropriate for PHP. I’ve tried some of these, and confirmed: whoever thought this was a good idea was either smoking crack or didn’t understand how to build web applications.

Some quick examples:

• Page Caching. You gotta be kidding me. There’s are plenty of reasons that all other languages push this OUT of the language, and OUT of the application, and most of them apply equally to PHP. Use Memcached instead, and learn to use it properly – that is, externally, not internally.
• Separating Code from Data. As a gross generalization, if you do this, you should stop writing PHP, because you just threw away most of the benefits of PHP, and you’d be better off writing J2EE from this point on – you’d get the benefits of J2EE and of the Java language AND of the Java standard libs (which kick the living daylights out of PHP’s weak set of “Extensions”) – and you’d hardly lose anything in the transfer.
• M/V/C architectures. If you do it the way we do it in other languages, then it’s equally stupid as the above point. It *can* be done, conceptually, in ways that fit with PHP – but the majority of PHP systems I’ve poked inside didn’t get that clever, they just tried to do it the traditional ways.

By The Way: I’m probably wrong on some of this. I haven’t spent much time thinking about it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure at this point which points are where I’m Totally Right, Dude, and which ones are where I’m Smoking Something Funky.

Sorry.

Too many words! Argh

I keep being told off (nicely) for writing blog posts that are too long.

In petty revenge, after making you read through the rant-tastic introductory bits (I have my Asbestos suit at the ready…), I’m splitting the rest into a separate post. I almost feel bad about doing this. Almost.

So, on to … PART 2: Best Practice for PHP Programming!

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.

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

iTunes App Store as Social Network

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

iTunes as Social Network: Successes

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

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

iTunes as Social Network: Future

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

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

iTunes as Social Network: Failures

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

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

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

iTunes as Casual Games Distribution Platform: Successes

Success 1: submission is now almost instantaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Success 3: No devkit required

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

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

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

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

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

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

iTunes as Casual Games Distribution Platform: Future

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

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

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

What happens next?

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

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

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

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

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

iTunes as Casual Games Distribution Platform: Failures

“Too many to list”?

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

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

NB: I can’t actually try it, of course – Microsoft is still subscribing to the classic anti-Web 2.0 ideal of making it “zero information from our walled-garden until you pass a detailed user-verification process; visitors will be shot; guests are not welcome here”.

The interesting piece for me is that they are inferring the social graph from Instant Messenger. It has long seemed sensible to me that building from existing social graphs (email, IM, phone records etc.) is a better way to go than building a new one from scratch as we have all been doing on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn etc., although there are many tricky issues around service design. Google and Microsoft think the same way according to this Techcrunch post of a year ago, although we have yet to see thought translated into action.

Yeah … we wanted to do the exact same thing with MMO publisher data when I was at NCsoft. Given how much you know about subscribers, you can infer some extremely valuable stuff (that is much harder for people like Google/Microsoft/etc to piece together). Turned out there were a lot of internal political problems in the way (something I’ll be talking about at GDC 2009: “How to sell social networking to your boss / publisher”) that really came down to a handful of extremely powerful people not getting it / not caring. It was an … interesting … journey learning what they didn’t get, and why, and how to dance around that.

(PS: all the above is assuming “without breaking privacy / data-protection laws”; if you’re reasonably well-moralled, you can provide a lot of value while being well inside the law; I have little sympathy for organizations that run roughshod all over the Data Protection stuff – IME you really don’t need to)

(tick all that apply; if you tick the “something else” option, please comment on this post and say what’s missing)

If you believe in metrics, user-interaction, and sampling your userbase, doing something like this is a no-brainer :).

A couple of things of note here:

EA thinks it can get away with what many consider lieing and cheating – and then having the CEO publically insult the customers

• Lies: they claim it’s all about piracy (the evidence suggests strongly that it’s about preventing 2nd hand sales while shoring up the artificially high prices that EA’s products retail for)
• Cheating: EA’s PR people claim you can always get around their dodgy restrictive-use business practice by calling a phone line, that they own and operate (there’s no reason they need to keep that phone line open, and there’s no guarantees that they will honour the customer request)
• Insulting: the new CEO, who came in on grandiose claims of reforming the company after the scandal of EA-spouse which revealed some very nasty internal practices of the company (apparently institutionalized abuse of its own staff), spoke to one of the largest trade-press websites and told them the people complaining were probably just pirates or stupid (*) (again, this is clearly not the case)

(*) “half of them were pirates, and the other half were people caught up in something that they didn’t understand” – see halfway down the article.

Apparently, little or no lessons were learnt with the public outcry over Spore

…in that the damage seems to be happening all over again with Crysis: Warhead, the same identical problems (c.f. the massive negative Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk ratings). I would have thought that a publisher the size and power of EA would have managed to prevent “another Spore” – if they had wanted to.

Maybe the fallout isn’t so bad this time? There aren’t quite so many negative reviews this time around, but then Crysis:Warhead wasn’t so big a game as Spore, either in marketing or in predicted sales figures.

Amazon changes it’s mind about its policy on user-reviews more often than a Politician trying to appease the electorate

They’re there! Amazon is full of negative User-Reviews!

They’re gone! They’ve all been deleted!

They’re back again! They’ve been reinstated!

(this happened with Spore. Fair enough. They weren’t sure what to do).

But … reading the comments and off-site commentary apparently it just happened all over again with Crysis: Warhead. Huh? Why? What’s going on over at Amazon HQ?

(I’m getting visions of engineers in a central control room fighting over the keyboard of a machine running an SQL database client, alternately deleting and reinstating the comments, while a prematurely-aged sysadmin huddles in the corner weeping to himself)

The customers are refusing to be tricked into damning themselves; what appear to be EA’s shills are being spotted and beaten at their own game

Witness this fascinating comment on Amazon.co.uk review page for Crysis: Warhead:

C. Chapman says:
[Customers don't think this post adds to the discussion. Show post anyway.]
I’m so glad to see Amazon has taken steps to filter out all of the useless nonsense being said by the DRM protestors.

Brian W. says:
Hey dude, Amazon just reposted all of the bad reviews and this game is down to the 1.5 stars it had a few days ago.

J. Schwarz says:
Don’t even bother responding to this troll Chapman, he is obviously a company man who is afraid that EA may go out of business. In fact he truly has something to worry about b/c the only other job he could get was shoveling the bs and for that he had to pass an IQ test which he failed.

WolfPup says:
I’m not sure which is more sad. Is Chapman an actual person, who honestly holds such crazy beliefs? Or is Chapman a corporate troll, who thinks that insulting non-crazy people will somehow make their activation DRM acceptable?

Either possibility is frightening.

Paul Tinsley says:
I think Chapman is employed to post. He does use a classic strategy that involves discrediting the thread by making the discussion descend to a personal level. He also attempts to alienate the protest away from the topic by declaring them to either be criminals or a small sector of the community that isn’t even a targeted customer. It’s textbook “digital” insurgency or deep strike, just choose your analogy and most will fit.

WolfPup says:
Interesting. I guess I just thought someone working for a corporation would be more professional about it or something, but…yeah…I probably didn’t think that through very well. They’re not above using any types of tactics.

I guess he’s still a corporate shill even if he’s not paid, but I’m leaning heavily towards him being paid after reading your post.

Paul Tinsley says:
Think of Chapman as a sort of “troubleshooter”. He’s not the sort to polish the company front line, he’s the clandestine stealth agent, sent forth to discredit the argument, to make people think they we can’t hold a solid debate without being personal and also to convince casual readers that our complaint is irrelevant. If Chapman was just another gamer like you or I, he wouldn’t waste so much time trying to make us all “look like idiots” as he might put it.

WolfPup says:
Yeah, you’re probably right. Unfortunately I have a pretty low opinion of how stupid and/or evil people can be, at this point in my life so I don’t really doubt there could be someone out there that clueless about these (or any other host of) issues :-(

Paul Tinsley says:
Well, I will be called delusional and paranoid for stating my opinion. Neither are true, as anybody who thinks that limited activations is better than no activations isn’t thinking like a consumer, they are working to a different agenda.

It doesn’t so much matter whether the OP was a shill or not, it’s the reaction that interests me.

I remember a time (“in the olden days, when I were a lad”) when the audience who A) cared and B) understood the issues were generally teenagers and a very narrow band (niche within a niche) of hardcore gamers with little experience of expressing themselves or dealing with sly cunning bastards. Those people would easily get sucked into tit-for-tat rants and regularly derailed (and sidelined) in such conversations. It was almost too easy. I was once one of them :).

Nowadays, I believe there are three differences.

Firstly, the audience who cares is much more mass-market (mostly IMHO thanks to the arrival of Playstation in 1995, and Sony’s successful marketing of it to young-professionals instead of just children), skews somewhat older (although still noticeably heavily biased towards young and male for many of the PC games, action PC games in particular), and is generally more experienced with the gamut of humanity and the tactics they employ.

Secondly, and this one surprised me, the subset who grok the issues seems to have massively expanded over the past 10 years. If you read through the negative comments, the arguments against DRM are often cogent, direct, and well-informed. Views that were once only understood and appreciated by readers of TheRegister seem to be (finally!) making their way into the mindsets of the public at large. I am beginning to think that we may yet manage to rescue ourselves and our futures (and those of our children) from the idiots who seek to make Copyright last 100 years, put a 10-year minimum jailterm on anyone who copies a *digital file*, and want to force everyone to carry compulsory, biometric, ID cards.

Finally, the audience of hardcore gamers themselves seems to be a lot more skilful at manipulation, especially the “people hacking”/social engineering skills. They are much harder to deceive, and much harder to defeat, compared to the days of Usenet (and here I’m very happy to accept I may just be deceiving myself with my own sentimental memories). If that’s the case, I believe it’s a direct result of the increased prevalence of online communities, especially out-of-game communities, and to a lesser extent in-game communities: these things have made people better at dealing with other people, in ways both good and bad.

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.

It was a good conference, some good stuff said, lots of basic sharing of info about things to do / things to avoid in the business and design of virtual-goods-driven businesses. The info was good, and although it often came close to being too basic for anyone who’s bothered to look at the history of online games, it usually managed to give interesting information to both the newcomers and those who’ve been around a bit.

There were lots of VC’s in attendance (surprisingly many), and lots of new vendor companies that were mostly payment-providers specializing in “taking payments from Social Network users” (I was surprised how many of them I didn’t know already; clearly, there’s been a boom in this area while I wasn’t looking).

A few highlights of my summaries (you’ll have to read the full writeups at F2P.biz for the rest):

The vendors on one panel – Twofish, Live Gamer, and Playspan – seem to be sitting in areas of potentially huge value-add, but … they also seem to be targetting their offerings at solving the problems that their customers don’t necessarily need solving, and would be better off solving themselves.

It seems the big players / winners in the Virtual Goods area so far are still taking a very “experimental, unplanned” approach to the fundamental worrying parts that keep newcomers awake at night: what goods should I be selling? what pricing should I offer them at? etc

Shervin (CEO, Social Gaming Network) and slightly less so Andrew (EVP Business Development, Zynga) continued to be as cagey at this conference as they have been at all the other conferences (e.g. GDC) over the past year or so. In the light of their secrecy – even when appearing on a public panel (hey, guys – if you’re asked to appear on a panel at a conference, what do you expect? Of *course* people are going to want to ask you interesting and probing questions! If you don’t intend to answer them, howabout you just decline to speak on the panel?) – we can only guess at their motivations.

…if you were there, what do you think? What were your impressions of the conference?

EDIT: interesting post from Eric Ries of IMVU starting with his thoughts on the conference, and inspiring three categorising questions about virtual goods and virtual worlds.

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 ;)…

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).

On 9/18/06, Jim Greer wrote:
>
> Hi all -
>
> I want to announce my soon-to-launch Flash game startup to this list – I’m
> looking for game developers and players. The site takes games uploaded by
> indie developers and puts them into a rich community framework with
> persistent rewards, metagames, collectible items, chat, etc. Game
> developers
> make up to 50% of the revenue we get from rich media ads and
> microtransactions.
>
> Basically we’re building a community around web games. When I say
> “community”, I don’t just mean chat and profiles. It’s more like turning
> individual web games into something that have some of the addictive
> qualities of an MMO. For those of you who play World of Warcraft – what
> keeps you playing after you get a little bored with the quest that you’re
> working on? I think it’s things like this:
>
> – you are about to level up
> – you are about to earn some rare item
> – your friend is coming online in a minute and you said you’d quest with
> them
>
> Basically it boils down to: you’ve got goals that go beyond a single play
> session, and you’re online so everyone you play with can see/admire your
> progress. We have analogues for all of those rewards.
>
> So what we’re creating is a game portal with:
>
> – chat
> – profiles
> – challenges and collectible items
> – microtransactions for premium features
> – leagues
> – loyalty points for rating games, suggesting features, etc
> – rich media ads
>
> As I said, we’re making money off rich media ads and splitting that. 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.
>
> We’re launching a private alpha version in a couple of weeks – if you’re
> interested in participating you can email me. Preference will be given to
> those who have games to upload! Initially, our usage will be low so the
> revenue share won’t be significant – to make up for that we’ll be having
> cash prizes for Game of the Week and Game of the Month.
>
> Also, we’re hiring developers to help us make our own games, as well as
> extend the API feature set. The first game we’re making is a collectible
> card game, played online – you win the cards by completing challenges in
> user-uploaded games.
>
>
> Jim Greer
> jim
> Company: http://kongregate.com
> Blog: http://jimonwebgames.com

Kong has delivered on all of this … except “microtransactions” and “leagues”. Although … that blog didn’t quite work out: it’s now a blank WordPress blog, installed March 2008 by the looks of things.

Missing features

Kong at the moment is monetized purely through advertising, which is interesting both because they have relatively low user figures to be an ad-driven site, and because most people seem more interested in the other (non-advertising) forms of F2P revenue: item-sales, fremium/premium subscriptions, etc.

On the userbase front, I’ve been wondering about it for a while: their PCU/ ACU (peak concurrent online / average concurrent online) figures are, I would have thought, “fatally” low for an advertising-driven site. The highest I’ve ever seen was around 20,000 users online at once, and a thread on the forums asking people the highest they’d ever seen topped out – so far – at 22,827.

Balancing that out, clearly there’s a very high percentage of return visitors, and high frequency per visitor. I know that other games, such as Runescape, managed to be hugely profitable on similar numbers of users, but that was a long time ago. With the increased competition for advertising these days among web companies, I’d have thought that was much harder. Even if advertising is easier and richer these days (financial crises aside), we’re only talking about $1million a year revenues. Kong has taken on almost $10 million of angel / VC funding to date, which is a *lot* of money when you look at the kinds of return on investment those people expect to receive.

Going back to the choice of revenue stream, let’s revist the original features Jim mentioned, and see how they stack up:

> – chat
> – rich media ads

These are derivative and trivial to add to any Flash-games portal. Who cares.

> – profiles
> – challenges and collectible items
> – microtransactions for premium features
> – leagues
> – loyalty points for rating games, suggesting features, etc

… whereas these are all high-engagement items. None of them work without getting the individual users to create an account on the site, and to keep logging in each time they come back. Most game portals are specifically targetted at being ultra-low engagement: no barrier to entry, no signup, no “hoops”; just play. For other portals to add these services would be tricky from the marketing / conceptual product viewpoint.

Several of them – particularly “challenges”, “microtransactions”, and “profiles” – are also technically challenging, requiring a lot of infrastructure (either server back-ends, or user-interface front-ends).

So, although Kong hasn’t yet added two of those high-engagement items, it’s got most of them. That strongly suggests it would be a great candidate for adding a more active form of monetization, as opposed to the current, purely passive, one (advertising).

And that would be a good potential justification for how they got so much external invesment (although personally I believe it also has a lot to do with a clever disruptive play to put the big games portals like Miniclip completely out of business within 3-5 years).

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)

But I’ve been tracking the European side for a while, and since I’m preparing a new MMO / Education startup at the moment, I’ve recently been refreshing my data.

So, here it is: my version of Jussi’s post, but the EU-only version :)

The Deals

Venture capital funding for social games, virtual world, casual MMO and casual games

[Time span covered: Q4 2006 - Q3 2008 (present); see NOTES at bottom]

Notes: How this was compiled

This comes from my personal collation of companies related to online games, social worlds, support services (billing, outsourcing, mobile, etc) – which is an eclectic mix of things that I’ve tracked over the years relating to my own interests and plans. I only really started paying attention in 2005/2006 when I was at MindCandy. For this blog post, I re-checked every single company via Google before adding it above, and then cross-referenced against good sources such as Calibre-One’s quarterly deal reports to see if I’d made any stupid mistakes. There were discrepencies, some of which I’d clearly made a typo (which I corrected), and others that were only subtly different, so there’s probably some mistakes in the above.

Notes: Rate of investment in games companies is increasing

How it’s arranged here it’s maybe not so obvious, but when looking through my spreadsheets it’s more obvious that there 2005-mid 2007 wasn’t a great time for these investments (especially in monetary value), but late 2007-mid 2008 has been a lot better.

Maybe that’s the effect of the Global Philip Rosedale Reality-Distortion Field? (aka “Second Life convincing people that Virtual Worlds are viable, commericalisable, and investable”) :).

Notes: German Companies really don’t like talking about money

I tried – really hard – to get info for the companies who didn’t announce how much investment they’d taken on when they announced they’d received it, but in most cases I failed.

I noticed that most countries privately owned companies are quite open about how much money they’ve raised (American ones especially), and quiet about how much they’re making. The Germans are strangely quiet, generally, on both. I believe that means that people:

• talk less about German companies
• know fewer German service providers
• consider fewer tactical partnerships with German companies

Maybe I only notice this because I’m English, and business people in the UK have long obsessed about how our inability to be brash in business (as a nation) has hampered us compared to the Americans. IMHO this silence is an ill-advised strategy, but them I’m a huge fan of transparency in all aspects of business :).

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?

To go along with that, here’s the full slides from the talk (6 Mb). The originals were Keynote (OS X only, much better software for actually giving presentations – has some special features that Powerpoint 2007 still doesn’t have), but I’ve exported them to PowerPoint so that everyone can easily read them – so some of the fancy anims have disappeared and some graphics might be slightly skewed.

Download: Web 2.0 – how i learned to stop worrying v1.1

So, I added it to my feed reader.

Now, I’m removing it, because the way he’s got his RSS setup – http://www.hartsman.com/feed – is unreadable (literally – only the first 100 words or so of each post is included, the rest is all missing).

Incidentally, this is why – after many years of using the site as a primary news source – I no longer read Gamedev.net (feed) : a site that resorts to hiding its information and news behind extra links, sacrificing usability to gain advertising money, is not one I have time for. There are plenty of people who’ll provide the info I want in an easy manner, without this jumping through hoops.

Sigh. I have a feed reader to read feeds, not to get a “free sample of your brilliance” that I then have to go to a web browser to be allowed to actually read in full…

Think about that: many of us, on a daily basis, are actively preventing our communities from helping us.

Speaker: Derek French

Given the title, this talk came far short of my expectations. At the end of the talk I also felt extra annoyed that it felt like half the talk was just waffle, mostly towards the end with lots of repetition of the same vague opinions over and over again.

HOWEVER … when I came to clean up my notes and post them here, I realised that there were a lot of concrete good points, and it was just that it got waffly at the end.

If you don’t bother reading everything below, there’s one thing I want you to read (NB: I have cut out big chunks of the talk where the speaker waffled too much, so the reading below should be information-heavy).

“We have a live team: you need one too” – he said this right at the end, and this is for NORMAL (non-MMO) games. Commentary in-line at that part of the talk, but I think it’s a very very good thing to be saying and for games companies (publishers ESPECIALLY) to be thinking about right now.

Or … don’t. It’ll make it easier for us in the MMO space to take away your customers in the offline space if you don’t, so I’d be happy with that.

Think of this as: “Introduction to using and abusing your community tools for a game”. Maybe it’s just because in MMO development most of what he said became common knowledge a long time ago that I wasn’t impressed, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s got some good points and useful to anyone who hasn’t done this stuff before.

Emails

Multiple accounts per email address was a mistake. Screws up your metrics, stats, datamining.

[Adam: this makes no sense to me at all - this shouldn't interfere with any of metrics, stats, etc, unless you made a bad mistake with how you designed the concept of "identity", "authentication" etc in your rools]

Moderators

One of our cardinal rules: if you ask to be a moderator, we deny. The kind of people who want that kind of power are the bad mods. So we just look for people who post good posts consistently, are polite, helpful, etc. We have no requirements for them to work at given times, etc.

Forum constraints

One thing we took further was e.g. for swear filter certain words we didn’t want just to censor, we had to add excpetions. We found the town of Calimshite, and Cockatrices, caused lots of problems.

We don’t just use swear filter for bad words, we use it to cut out gold selling spam, etc.

We used a points value for the words, and if your post scores 10 points or more, we junk it immediately. So then people would go back and re-edit to optimize it.

So, then we banned you for X hours where X = number of points in your score. See you in the morning!

e.g. when Australian release was a month later than everywhere else, someone complained with great venom, got banned for about 700 hours…

Interfering and accepting

With good, consistent, fair, safe rules and constraints and moderation of your forums, you’re going to make your players love to be there on the forums.

We allow people to disagree with us, to criticise us – so long as they do it respectfully – because that fits within the community, it doesn’t damage the overall value of the forums. We want everyone to feel comfortable there about talking about our games.

Patching and updaters

For NWN, we knew we’d need some kind of patching system. We felt we didn’t want to push patches because of all the modding. So, we built a custom updater where everything was in small chunks and people could manually trigger it.

Even with auto-patching you always have to have a manual update system for the cases where something goes wrong, where you make an accident with the patch or packaging.

Many interesting ideas people have about monetizing the updater, or requiring you be logged-in to community site etc – but the truth is if there’s something broken that MIGHT be fixed by the current patch, you want to get right out of the customer’s way and let them get the patch as quickly and effortlessly as possible, or they’re probably going to get even unhappier and quit.

NWN launch

Dev team took some time off before starting expansion patches, time for live team to take over and get going.

Started using the forums and bug-reporting to gather info on the game, triage issues, and sending bugs etc back to dev team. After doing this for a while found that our own live team programmers were able to do their own builds, their own updates, and work in parallel with the dev team.

[Adam: again, this sounds weird to me, because in the MMO world "live team" has a very specific meaning and there's a much better handover between dev team and live team: usually the live team has so many of the original dev team members initially that they are largely indistinguishable until people gradually move to other projects. Interesting to think about whether / how soon traditional game-dev teams will adopt the MMO model of merged dev/live teams...]

99% of UGC is crap

[Adam: not the speaker's summary for this section, mine]

In early days we found the community was making a lot of almost cookie-cutter modules: entrance, monster, treasure – and that’s it. So I took a designer on our mod team and asked them to make something crazy, do something unexpected, to demonstrate exactly how powerful Aurora was, to kickstart the community creativity.

He made a M:tG clone, and a bunch of other things, about 8 different really creative modules in a month. And then we suddenly saw some really interesting and creative modules coming out of the community.

Supporting a creative community

There were several times we thought they couldnt’ do stuff, and they did it.

creatures – too hard, but they did.
tilesets – they have no idea what the file format is, but they reverse engineered it
nothing of grand scale – someone made a 300 foot scale module, and we were floored by it, it was incredible.

[Adam: obvious. Not worth mentioning. But ...]

So … we did anything we could to support them: gave them proper fileformat definitions, provided data, documentation, etc.

People complained there was no database, so we put in a simplified database layer.

[Adam: anyone seeking to do modern community / web 2.0 / social networking systems would do well to look at that list and think carefully of another dozen or so items that would hide inside that "etc" - and I'd like to see a talk where someone focussed on that entirely]

Overall, quid pro quo with community: they find needed features, we developed them. We’ve released 21 full updates across 3 OS’s, worked really well overall.

You can’t mandate tools

How do community create content? With YOUR tools? Maybe.

We had to put in more error checking than originally expected. (we expected them to use our tools, community went and wrote their own, so the content wasn’t going through our editor’s built-in error checking, so we had to add stuff to verify content that was crearted externally)

Non-game utils

We noticed a mistake: whenever we had gone to make an autorun, launcher, installer, etc, we had basically passed this off to a junior tools programmer, usually in last 3 months of project. What we ended up doing was having the exact same mistakes were made every single time.

I got frustrated because we were repeating bad mistakes, so the live team took over authority for it. So, now we can make this stuff in a few days for a new title, instead of a few months, and we get much richer AND more stable supportive tools for launching games etc.

Launcher is the FIRST THING customers see. That’s the first moment you have to excite or iritate your customer. It’s not something to leave to end of game, or have as low priority. If anyting goes wrong, they enter the game with a bad feeling.

[Adam: when a player first has contact with a game, their opinions are very fluid, they can change rapidly from impressed to horrified and back again. But once that first interaction is past, the opinion begins to cement, and it's harder and harder to make big changes in player opinion. Only, I don't buy that the LAUNCHER experience is going to so materially affect the opinion of the game - playing the game is a NEW experience. So, basically, I agree entirely with the sentiment the speaker expresses, but disagree entirely with the particular claim he makes here]

[Adam: I cut out lots of boring notes here, this was the waffle part of the talk, with sections like "So, we had to develop everything ourselves, and we used what we already had, and it worked fine". Hmm. Why, exactly, would I care that you did "something", "somehow", and that it all went "OK"? There's just no information content for most of this part of the talk. Nevermind - you don'thave to read it! :)]

Future live team

To date, an independent group outside the other game teams. We want to embed ourselves into the next project – probably Dragon Age – work with them and leverage our previous experiences.

COD4′s RPG elements, Wow’s armory – we’re looking forwards to developing even more cool community / website integration for dragon age. Can’t talk about specifically what, but it’s great.

[Adam: /me is annoyed because the "future live team" section was basically empty on any actual info about the future. If you can't talk about it, then DON'T MENTION IT. Your secret projects, about which you won't tell us anything, are less exciting to us than you think they are. Sigh]

We have a live team: you need one too!

[Adam: I would be tempted to delete the rest of these notes and just leave that one line up there. Kudos to the speaker (he stuck it up right at the top of the slide, in big letters). Any game that launches today IS an online game, even if it thinks it isn't - your community is online (even for a single-player game), and you stand so much to gain if you just throw a tiny amount of resource at it. A live team for a non-MMO is, IMHO, worth it's weight in gold. Especially as so many other companies *do not have one* (in the MMO space, we all have them, so having one is not so much of a differentiator over competitor products - it's just an essential, so it's harder to stand out)]

Organizing options:
– separate independent team
– embedded in game team

[Adam: there's loads more options than that: strike teams, split-by-project, split-by-expertise, technology-lead, feature-lead, community-lead, etc. But I guess this is just something that MMO people are more experienced with, so we can think of more options]

Mandate
– this is essential: what are the boundaries of their responsibility and work
– one area is support: if your dev team or publisher cannot provide the level of support you want for your title, you can make forums, knowledgebase systems, etc.
– patch releases: again, if game dev or publisher cannot/will not do it, you can take control of it and do it well
– non-game utilities: …again if quality isn’t what you and the community want, take it over
– post-release content: downloadable content, premium content, etc

Structure
– need a lead
– + selection of people dependent on whatever your mandate was that you chose

Role details
– community manager: you need someone who is very good at interacting not only with game team but also with the commuinity itself. Advocating what game team needs, and helping dev team understand what the community wants. Sanity checks what they are hinking of doing, saying what community will react with.
– lead: lots of good scheduling skills and personnel management. Need to truly understand the areas that you’re working on, dev team needs, and community needs.

Conclusion
– sometimes it’s OK without a live team, but even then you end up with a fairly disconnected community/dev team pairing
– dedicated group of individuals that allows you communicate more effectively between dev and players you get a much more vibrant community and you get much more brand faith
– bioware community is 3.8 million subscribers, been around for 7 years

Q: have you ever had to shut down any community servers (websites, forums, etc)?

No, and no plans to do so. Ongoing operating cost is minimal. Systems are automatically monitored.

Project shutdown: NWN is about to get it’s final patch ever, within the next month. Will have been running for around 5 years now, much more than our expected original run of 1-2 years. Servers will stay up, but will be no further support, no further patches or content updates.

Q: how much have you used your community as a recruitment tool?

We’ve pillaged the community quite violently, we’ve hired people from all over the world from it.

We saw people putting out content that just blew our mind.

A very valuable tool for us.

Q: what was the largest size the team got to?

About nine in total, not including the infrastructure support guys (databases, server maintenance).

4 designers, 1 artist, 2 programmers, and a lead and a community manager.

Q: was it something Atari [their publisher at the time] was willing to pay for to make original live team?

very much an internal project within the developer. Publisher didn’t really notice it existed, it was just we ahppened to be the people within the developer that took responsibility for those things.

We had our own budget, so we needed to justify our continued existence internally.

Q: any problems with console games?

We only really deal with PC versions of our games now. Not really a lot to say for the 360 version right now, we don’t have so much content with the external team that does it, either. Mainly leaving it up to the standard community guys.

We do “self-help” support: a forum for support mainly helping and expecting people will discuss the issues and help themselves. Publishers do the frontline support. Sometimes we fly our support guys to the publisher and have them brief the frontline support people.

Members of our own company pile on the forums themselves. We just can’t help ourselves, we’re so desperate to make sure people enjoy our game.

Q: UGC often includes copyrighted content. Problem?

For the most part we’ll have to contact them and tell them they can’t talk about it on our forums. Since we don’t host ANY UGC, we don’t have to worry about it too much. Neverwinter vault had to deal with those situations quite a few times, because they were actually hosting the files.

That’s a lot of why we decided not to host content ourselves. I think that’s changing now for both us and for other people in the industry. We now have more faith in reporting systems and reactive handling of such problems.

Speaker: Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, CCP

I want a full-time economist working for MY company.

And: CCP staff should give more of the GDC talks, they’re good. And entertaining.

In the midst of a week of depressingly dumb comments (on the topic of economy: what possessed Matt Miller to argue against microtransactions because accountants like to see x million players times y dollar per month and find microtransactions unpredictable?), it was a joy to go to an intelligent, extremely well-informed, rational talk with valuable lessons for the future.

EDIT: photos now added inline; better quality images of almost the same graphs can be found in the official Eve Online newsletters (2007Q3 and 2007Q4)

Anyway, highlights:
– Eve now has almost 0.25 million subscribers and almost 0.5 million game-accounts
– Eve’s free-market, perfect (ish) economy only started working properly when they went over approximately 50,000 players per server: this suggests that sharded games may be doomed to never get good economies
– Trade is inevitable, as are all the side-effects such as inflation and arbitrage: your choice is whether to ignore them or try to use them to the improvement of the game
– The amount of money in your game-world MUST grow in-line with economic activity.
– An Economics Professor working on a major MMO officially stated that virtual items are real items, and gave an economic rationalization. I’m sure this has happened before, but I’m not sure if they noticed yet: sooner or later expect governments, lawyers, and accountants to be very happy indeed. Sob.

Personal extra thoughts:
– Economics is about people – just like socializing and competitive play: good to understand why these things are so important to MMOs
– Do players need EXACTLY the same amount of information that the developers have? (IMHO: probably) This is a new form of an old argument from the 1990′s: should RPG’s/MMO’s let players see their character stats? Nowadays it’s: should MMO’s let players know the metrics data that the designers are using to tweak the game?
– Dr. Gudmundsson needs to put his economics reports in a more web-friendly maner (PDF sucks, but XHTML would be good…)
– CCP needs to “get with the web” and have e.g. an “economics reports page” where you can download ALL the quarterly reports (oops, my bad – thanks to CrazyKinux for the link), as well as web-based streaming of price indices etc – even if massively time-delayed – I couldn’t find any such thing on google :(

Introduction

As a former economics professor, I’m unaccustomed to having so many people flocking into a lecture, so thank you for coming.

This talk is from myself and Sam Lewis from Cartoon Network, Dan Speed from CCP – they have the games industry background and I have the economics.

CCP: 300+ employees, and no one works there – “You simply live it!”. We work to the common goal of making EVE the best place online in the world.

Eve: 225,000 subscribers and groiwing, with 460,000 characters today, all on one single shard. And … it’s gorgeous.

Economics

Why is economics important for an MMO? Because it’s about people, and if you ever get pople coming together, you get trade, and trade begets an economy.

Principals: scarcity, economic behaviour – the individuals in the environment, and the conditions for a perfectly competitive market. I think these are the three most important principles for an MMO.

But also … fun. Economics and business is fun gameplay – the Stock Market is just one big game.

The functioning of your economy is fundamental to the success of your game, to keep the people playing together.

If you do not believe me, go to the original source, Richard Bartle (2004). [Adam: my typing isnt fast enough, not a perfect quote] “although it’s not hard to see why an economy design might fail, it’s much harder to find one that wouldn’t fail”.

Further support: Ed Castranova: “the very process of making a choice under scarcity is enjoyable” (2005).

Scarcity

Why not make an MMO where you can have everything? Real life is all about things you can’t have. Wouldn’t a perfect game give you everything in the game, absolutely everything you want, straight away?

For most people, the pleasure is in the journey, not the destination. The same is true for gameplay – we want some benefit from our hard work online, and we want to see it, we want it to be measurable.

If everything is free, the marginal utility is 0 (from economic theory). or, more simple to remember, the pleasure is in teh journey.

Behaviour

We have to remember the individuals – that you cannot make their decision, you have to allow them complete freedom of choice of what they will do.

Individuals will be evaluating options given the constraints, many not necessarily on the game world, all aspects of their time, money, etc. We call the results of these evaluations “prices”.

There are as many potential objectives as there are avatars, not just players, because as a given avatar, they have different constraints, even if desires were the same.

Market

[Adam: here he did a basic explanation of perfect competitive market]

The question becomes: do we really want a perfect competitive market?

Most MMOs have homogeneuos products – same name has exactly the same qualities. Even enhanced items honour this, because it’s a different item.(one of those)

Breaking the basic rules of economminsc often results in fun gameplay – hiding information, creating monopolies, and profit distribution held in concentrated few. Don’t people want to become the Bill Gates of their game world (not possible with a perfect economic market).

So … you really do want to break the rules. So … that’s why you want to hire me.

Advanced topics from economic theory that MMOs need to start dealing with these days:
Monetary theory, Trade theory (real world to virtual ), Labor theory (return from gameplay, benefit from extra minute spent online)

Eve history

Integrated the economic design with the core game design from start of production

High security / safe zone as centre of universe, where players start playing.

All resources are assymetrically distributed, forcing trade.

Four major trade areas have been chosen by the players, not by CCP, because it’s a sandbox game and those areas emerged from the bheaviours of the players.

Opted for player-driven and dynamic economy so that it would mould to the activities of the players. Controlled economny failed for Eastern Bloc, it will fail in your MMO.

Contracts in EVE are possible but not perfect, and the loan system too we could improve.

Here’s an example of why real assumptons sometimes fail: contract job, standard procedure is that you put up collateral that is at least the value of teh googs you’re moving. This comes down to the fact that trust is not something that was designed in Eve – it’s always easy to cheat the otehr player.

However, a small population cannot support an effective market.

So, all items INITIALLY were produced and sold both by players and by NPCs.

As population grew, items were withdrawn. Currently more than 90% of all items are produced and sold by plaeyrs. Benchmark at 30-000 to 50-000 players before the market starts to work – so … think how that works or not with sharded servers.

All major spaceships etc if there is no player making it at the moment then it simply is not available.

Example: blueprints and inventions

Higher blueprints were originally distributed through lotteries – do the quest but may or may not get BP at end.

This created monopoly for the production of certain tech 2 items. As intended!

We then introduced an invention process, so players with tech1 BPs could convert them at cost to tech2.

As soon as we added inventions, and players started upgrading BPs, the price of tech1 didn’t change but tech2 dropped by 40%.

Real-life economic theory perfectly predicted this happening.

Perfect information

Eve
– historical pricing information availalbe, but regional so you have to travel to find it all
– long term planning is possible

20 day average price, 5-day avg price, dots samples for average price that day, range of pricing that day, and the trade volume.

This was cloned from the NASDAQ reports [Adam: e.g. for Microsoft here].

WoW:
– short-term server information (48 hours max auction time)
– long-term planning very difficult

Both fit well for the function for which they’re intended. So … let intended game mechanics control the level of information available. Design your economy to go hand-in-hand with the game-design, don’t just take a “perfect” economy and try to force it on every game design.

Tritanium pricing.
– as soon as we allowed decimal changes in the ISK price,you saw fluctuations
– between 1.5 and 3 per unit
– years later we realised that in-game mechanics allowed you to refine an item and recieve at a specific price, and that that was capping the price for tritanium.
– those that read the newsletters [Adam: first one here] will know I also want to fix another example of accidental price-cap

Supply Changes

Zydrine
– sarted at 4k isk
– then a new area opened up with an easier way to get zydrine from kills
– …so a fall in price
– until may/june 2007 when it bottomed out, so game designers tried out new drop tables and put it on the test server.
– didn’t announce anything, just put it on PTS
– players noticed, and within 2-3 days, prices on LIVE server had doubled.
– this is a good example of the perfect information leading to major price changes
– they then stabilized around 10% lower than that.

Demand changes

Torpedoes
– we made a game design change to make torpedos shorter range
– cruise missiles incresed in price by 2.5 x, currently still dropping, but around 1.8 times original
– torpedoes dropped by factor of 4, no increase yet

Metrics

Designing and running an MMO is all about metrics. But … so is economics.

Reports needed:
– total trade
– most traded items
– identifying cash transfers
– relative change in rank and magnitude of individual items

Inflation

To prevent inflation problems, youi need price indices.

We have four major price indices that we publish quarterly in the newsletter, and I hope we will eventually publish live price index information, but its just my dream right now although its possible.

When I joined, players believed there was inflation, so one of the first things I did was to start calculating inflation measures.

– mineral price index (MPI)
– primary producer price index (PPPI)- items that need minerals
– secondary producer price index (SPPI)- items that need PPPI
– consumer price index (CPI)- end items, spaceships etc

[Adam: frustratingly, CCP seems to have no URL for any of those, not even defining them, let alone giving historical data :(]

First thing we noticed: deflation in the MPI.

Three small blips, one for each expansion pack. So, although overall economy is defalting, when ltos of people play at expansion pack, you get a termporary blip which is what people notice.

In 2007 – overall 14% deflation due to dropped production costs due to more people producing and competing.

Think about early 80′s in airline travel in US. When that was all freed up, prices dropped by 50% or more over the next 3 years, and you started to see the low-fare airlines come in. Exactly the same thing we’re seeing in EVE: large influx of players causes drop.

But, prices have recently started to increase (last 2 months), so I’m watching this very carefully to see what’s going on and react if necessary.

GUP – Gross User Product

Used basic GDP measures, worked with the Helsinki institute of information technology to adapt to virtual worlds.

At same time as subscription is growing hugely, inflation/deflation in reasonable limits, GUP is increasing slightly => the economy is healthy.

Money MUST grow inline with economic activity

Simple to say, but very difficult to implement in an MMO (in real life as well!)

Need a system in place that ietnifies accelerated flows of cash into the economny.
– changes in cash earnings per minute on-line
- by skills / levels

Need sinks so you have something you can tweak to change this

Must avoid reducing the perceived benefits of anything repetitive that earns – people build up expectations of the value and the reward, so taking actions can have extra effects if you upset the PEOPLE that drive the economy.

Inflation is not necessaruly a bad thing – if it affects everyone equally, and not redistriubting the wealth substantially, then it is fine.

Lessons learned

– Use economic theory, but adjust it to YOUR game design
– Constantly monitor the system – not enough just to make it well at first, must keep adapting and tweaking it

Future

Trying to have bigger game population than population of Iceland: i.e. we need to beat 350,000.

That will change the society greatly – and I want you to realise that MMOs *are* societies.

We’re making changes to provide support to the society as it grows in size.

Emerging society with it own social, pilitical and financial instituations.

In Iceland we’ve had democracy since 930 AD, so we’re hoping that Eve will grow and thrive with a democracy.

Still want to add Futures, but we will need much more advanced financial institutions, so that will take time to happen before futures are feasible.

Will MMOs become their own world, or will they be based on real-world institutions?

Linden turned to real-life instiatutions, last year they said no-one can be a bank in SL without being a bank IRL, to fix their in-game banking problems.

Value in a virtual world is real because the players are real.

[ARGH!]

[Adam: he also mentioned the ability to cash-out virtual items as real-world equivalents as a possible future direction. More like Magic:the Gathering's ability to get real-world cards from the virtual world purchases, I think, than the simpler, more obvious, less powerful scheme of SL's and Entropia's taking out of cash.

Q: why must money grow in line with activity

If not, more people will have more money and cause extra inflation, and gradually shut-out the influx of newer players

Q: I play auctioneer in WoW. In chinese new year the prize of gold out of game doubled because the farmers were all viiting their family and not around to farm gold right then. Do you monitor the external forces and deal with them?

From the numbers that I have today it's not substantially effecting the gameplay, yet.

Q: Do you consider OOG knowledge as a bug or a feature?

In EVE that's anticipated and hoped-for - I cant say that officially, as its not my job, but knowing the guys that do I'd say it's quite fun for us to see.

Q: Gold-dupe bug: how would you deal with that at the economic level?

Won't talk about specifics. We have had cases like that. The key is making sure that your tools on CS side are good. Tracking things back, reversing things.

Essential to find out and react as SOON as possible. Spot it, flag it, track it back, and react.

We're much less effected by these things because people are intelligent and don't do too much, so not so bad, or they do too much and we see it very early and stop it very early.

Q: Would you subtract money from people who'd benefitted? Or would you knock the worst people and hope it smoothed out?

Yes. And I can't say any more.

Q: Couldn't these advanced financial systems be developed by players?

Yes, they could, but there's an issue of trust. You need someone that the players can trust absolutely.

There are a few people that have built-up a very good reputation. On the forums they only argue with "read my record". But that's a very scarce resource (trusted players) in Eve - eve players are generally not trustable.

Q: Goldfarming - with economists on the team, it would seem that farmers are simply part of supply and demand. So, what is too far, when does it become damaging?

As an economist, I also believe that drug trades should be made free. So, although I might agree with you, not many players may necessarily agree with us.

You earn your status in blood, sweat, and tears - this is what hte players believe. Since they believe it, we support it - so we go after the farmers because that's what a fundamental part of what they believe.

[Adam: seems to me he was saying that it's a part of the fundamentals of the *society* they've built, since he believes that each MMO is a society, so they have a responsibility to intervene to help support the society, rather than because they like intervening in arbitrary bits of game design/gameplay (CCP infamously doesn't interfere in an awful lot of player-player griefing)]

Q: do you actively control the amount of money that is ciruclating, and how do you add/remove?

Players mostly do the adding through doing missions.

We only monitor what is going out, and if not enough then we add additional sinks (which he didn’t outline).

If you have a very dynamic economy, then you will find that an NPC based system will tend to break. So you either have to tweak things over time or have extremely adaptable NPC systems.

Speaker: Michael Smith, MindCandy

Another half-hour-long introductory topic talk from the Worlds In Motion summit. Short but sweet. A nice overview of lots of different things going on in the use (and sales) of real-world goods as part of online games / virtual worlds. Misses out plenty of things, but does a good job of giving a taster of the sheer variety that’s going on right now.

Like Adrian’s talk from yesterday, I would have loved a second follow-on talk – now that everyone’s been brought up to speed – that explored where we could be going with these, and looking at how these have been used in more depth / detail.

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

Overview

This is the first time we’ve spoke about it outside the UK. I hope some of my quirky, eccentric, leftfield thinking might spark off some new thoughts amongst the game designers here.

We could talk about anything from economics to worlds you take anywhere on your mobile phone. But I’ve got limited time, so I’m going to focus on what you can do with physical toys and merchandising.

Every major toy company either has an on/offline toy product at the moment or is currently developing one. Currently a $22billion industry, led by Webkinz. I believe there’s still a huge amount of opportunity in this space – there’s still a long way to go before WK catches up with beaniebabies, who people said were too late to the space, but are still way ahead in terms of overall sales, and have now started doing it too with beaniebabies20.com

Whistlestop tour of new stuff coming out now…

But why should we care from the game design perspective.

1. It’s a major new revenue stream, a new opportunity.

2. More importantly, it allows consumers to connect with our virtual worlds wherever they may be, and makes our worlds more fun.

Mindcandy

It’s a games company I setup focussed on creating social games. First product was PerplexCity [no longer running], played by thousands of players around the world, using lots of different media, e.g. emails, websites, distributing data by phone.

We buzzed players with helicopters, put stuff in newspapers, lots of offline stuff.

The players were trying to locate a real $200,000 treasure we buried somewhere.

Second major product is MoshiMonsters (MM). Imagine tamagotchi mixed with Facebook, with a bit of braintraining mixed in. Aimed at kids, early testing suggests we’ll have a big audience outside our target of 7-12 year olds – teenage girls especially.

Timing – Why do MM now?

– Flash technologies have advanced
– Broadband penetration has increased

Wanted to create a life-like pet in the browser, with great animations. We also wanted to build a very deep behavioural engine: how often you visit, whether you take it shopping, how much you play with it, etc.

Second important point was desire to create a lot of social tools. What you do with your pet you can show off to other players…

– We made a pinboard which lets you post notes, like the Wall in Facebook.
– We think the product is very well suited to being widgetized, we expect our older users to do stuff with Bebo, Facebook, etc.

Final element that is right at the heart of what we do at MindCandy is education.

– Build a product where kids are learning in a stealth way, they don’t realise they are doing homework.
– Vocabulary-boosting by the pet telling you their word of the day, or monsters talking about their current moods (emotional learning) etc.
– General IQ boosting by having a daily “puzzle-challenge”, 60 seconds of challenges that earn you in-game currency

[Adam: there's currently no other way to get in-game currency, and there's no trading facility at the moment]

Status

We’re in beta at the moment, going live in about two months. Business model is very similar to Club Penguin: tiered subscription where you unlock premium content when you buy a Moshi Passport. Many of the products we’re releasing in the real world, such as offline puzzle books, will have unique codes that get you stuff in-game.

The first product is the Mopod, which you attach to your phone. It’s quite sensitive – will go off when walking down the street next to other people, so people attach to their bags even though they don’t have a cellphone.

[Adam: brief dewscription of Michael's background where he explained Firebox.com - "like Sharper Image but cooler and hipper" :)]

Webkinz

They retire certain models over time, creating a strong secondary market, like with Beanie Babies (BB). Recently added new merchandising – can now get figurines you buy, that then also appear in the gameworld.

Other clones:
– shiningstars.com, MyePets.com, mushabelly.com, buildabearville.com

Doll-specific clones:
– barbiegirls.com, be-bratz.com

BG taken early lead because you don’t need the USB key on you at all times in order to play, unlike BeBratz.

Card-games with scratchoffs to reveal unique codes that unlock stuff online:
– WoW
– Bella Sara
– chaoticgame.com
– Maple Story (NB: WotC webserver seems to be AWOL at the moment reporting webapp config error, but I *think* that’s the right URL…)

Other merchandising:
– moo.com – business cards
– stardoll.com – design your own clothes from your doll and buy them for you to wear in real world
– figureprints.com – get a physical model of your personal WoW avatar
– perplexcity.com – awarded small badges (Leitmarks) [Adam: sadly no longer available, perplexcity isn't running any more]
– testtubealiens.com – fill tube with water + special liquid, then hold up to screen, and the alien has a sensor that changes status based on what’s on the screen
– ubfunkeys.com – like the Keys you get in kidrobot, but random what’s in the box, USB dongle to unlock
– tamatown.com – (Tamagotchi) newer models have infrared to allow you to meet other people on the street
– me2 (from irwintoy.com) – motion sensor which you attach to yourself like a pedometer, records your physical activity, then USB dongle gives points to your virtual avatar based on how much you walked that day
– ibuddy.info – detects which emoticons you receive over IM and glows different colours based on them
– ambientdevices.com – e.g. umbrella that changes handle colour based on weather predictions downloaded from net
– edoclaundry.com – unique codes, websites, etc hidden in the fabric [also the labels etc]

t-shirts
– t-qualizer.biz, wi-fi detector t-shirts, proximity detectors that you buy as a pair and when next to each other the t-shirt design changes

…end of the whistlestop tour of what’s going on that’s interesting and unusual.

Summary

New revenue streams
Increased PR opportunities
New avenues for viral growth due to physical visibility to people on street
Increased user engagement because of ongoing conversation with the product

Mostly I’m covering online-related and social-networking related topics, but jumping around between GDC Mobile, Serious Games, Worlds In Motion summit, Independent Games, and the Game Design, Production, and Business tracks.

EDIT: Slides + voiceover on Adrian’s site now – freetoplay.biz

A good introduction to people wanting to start paying attention to what’s been happening in MMO industry for the last 5 years. Didn’t delve into the recent changes in the last 1-2 years, more dwelling on the fact that the last 2 years have seen the cash-cows of the first wave of changes (F2P itself) delivering revenues that were no longer just “bestseller” status for a normal game, but were actually now much bigger even that that.

So, for instance, apart from a brief outline of FoodFight, there was no coverage of the way games have been colonising social networks, or where this seems to be heading next.

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

Introduction / background

[Adam: I missed some of the start trying to find a seat in the massively over-crowded room]

Fundamentally with F2P, you’re banking on the fact that increased player base size increases options for alternative monetizations.

Top 15 or so MMO’s by number of players include only one pay-to-play MMO (WoW)

91% of the online games that any given kid plays are f2p

Virtual Item sales
– unlimited ARPU
– …

[Adam: ...and so it went on, no new information, but a decent 101 guide to low-end MMO monetization and F2P.

Most of the talk at this point is just re-quoting statistics and information from the well-known players in the various branches of MMO industry (RPG, free RPG, merchandised/branded retail webkinz, information sale/food fight, etc) nothing you wouldn't already know if you had come to the rountables and lectures at GDC, AGDC, etc over last few years. Decent catchup for newcomers.]

Looking Forward

– respect the free players: it’s tempting to overlook the non-paying players, but they are critically important, they make the game feel like a whole world of people

– Support integrated graphics: Nexxon claimed they’d lose 80% of their playerbase if their games required any retail purchased graphics card

– Go browser-based or small download: even WoW is now using a streamed client

[Adam: I feel that's disingenuous: browser-based is at its heart a fundamentally different proposition from instant-play, e.g. because of the way it integrates into the Web 2.0 concept in a very different way; I'm pretty sure what he's trying to say is the latter ONLY, i.e. "keep time-to-start-playing as low as possible"]

– Support regional payment systems:

[Adam: personally, I'd say just go to any of the main casual games conferences, and speak to the european publishers/portals/etc, there's plenty of big companies who've been doing the multi-headed payment system game for a long time now.]

– Provide short compulsion loops: what’s the incremental investment of time needed to levelup or satisfy some gameplay pleasure?

– Defer user sign-up: Sherwood is a good example of minimal user-sign-up

[Adam: I'll write something up about this in more detail soon, as it's an area I've long argued internally, and I feel there's quite a lot to say that Adrian didn't mention at all here]

Challenges

– virtual property
– slow broadband
– rising dev costs, as happened in the casual games industry, now with multi-million dollar production costs
– SL slowdown [Adam: actually, I think this is largely irrelevant - Adrian talks about money and confidence being affected, but IME no serious VC that knows enough of what it's doing that it was going to stick around with this stuff longterm in the first place ever thought that SL's success level was particularly relevant]
– secondary markets
– kids-only games: players stop playing F2P games when they stop being a teenager

Trends

– New platforms (software: Facebook, hardware: iPhone, etc): will be interesting to see how they get used
– Disappearance of walled-garden games: metaplace is a good example of where there are no walls making users play a particular game and stay loyal
[IMHO, this is a very dangerous direction to go in. Sure, a lot of people, especially the incumbents, need to explore it to ensure they don't get left behind, but unlike general information (outside the games industry), where sharing is clearly fundamentally good, games are a different beast altogether, where it is FAR from obvious that games benefit from openness; Personally, I'd say the majority of evidence currently points the other way. So ... openness may happen, but it may also disappear quite quickly too]
– Old NPD top sellers appearing as F2P games, e.g. Jagex/Runescape talking recently about making games from 5 years ago, but doing them as downloadable in a browser now technology has moved on
[This seems a bit of a no-brainer, the publising industry has always been exploring and improving it's capitalization on back-catalogue items, so I think the exploration of this stuff by incumbents now is nothing new]

Q: Does the pareto principle hold true here: 20% of your users provide 80% of your income?

Yes, I think that holds true across the spectrum of games, web, etc.

Q: What comes after free? Once everything’s free, online, everyone’s playing, what next?

The ability to share content between games, to move avatar investment to a different game

Maybe *your* game would be what comes after…

[Adam: The person asking the question was the guy behind PMOG]

Q: What are best practices for user-acquisition in free to play games?

Viral word-of-mouth stuff is really good.

Miniclip.

Q: From a game-design POV what would be the best thing to do to increase percentage of monetized users?

Make it as frictionless as possible to put money into your world.

[plus some fairly obvious ideas off the cuff]

Last year I would have ranted about how retarded it is that game data is either entirely inaccessible to the web, or only accessible to an “official” website. …This year, however, is all about the positive. Rather than rant about no one providing such a feed, this is an un-rant about someone providing such a feed.

Dungeon Runners!

I found this via a news post about character sheets being viewable online at 3rd-party sites, making the assumption this meant an XML feed was available, and then digging through the forums until I found the post with a link.

This is really cool, I should tell you, just in case you don’t get that.

Receptions like this help keep us motivated to keep doing more of them :).

a couple of us are going to get together and chat about the head-on-collision between games and Web 2.0. Come along
and see if you can outdo everyone else by picking an even larger number and sticking it on the end of a word (why stop at Games 3.0? Let’s go to a hundred!).

There will be no free drinks. No free food. And definitely no cabaret/live entertainment/superstar DJ’s. But hopefully there will be some interesting and friendly people with a shared interest here.

Have a look at the quick report I did for the AGDC07 meetup to get an idea for what this might be like.

At Austin GDC, I expected about 5-10 people, and we had about 30. I have no idea yet how many people would be interested at GDC.

EDIT: details…

Time: 20:00-22:00
Day: Wednesday 20th February

Courtesy of Mike Leahy (http://www.egrsoftware.com): The space is called “The Bubble” @ 73 Langton St. SF 94103 which is near 7th/Folsom.

If you’re coming and haven’t emailed me (amartin at ncsoft.com) please drop me a mail to say so – we should have plenty of spare room, so RSVP isn’t required, but on the off-chance we get lots of people, RSVP’d will get priority.

Nice and easy from the convention center: go south-west along Howard St for 3 blocks, then take a left on Langton St (circa 10 minute walk) :

Google maps directions

Does this sound familiar?

If you’re in Marketing, it should – it’s what Sergio Zuman (one-time head of marketing for Pepsi Co, and later Chief Marketing Officer of Coca-Cola) wrote in the Conclusion to his book “The End of Marketing As We Know It”.

Only, of course, where he wrote the word “consumers” I put “players”, and where he put “marketers” I put “publishers”.

This was his call to arms in 1999, for the Marketing industry to wake up and smell the roses, and to realise that the modern (or post-modern, or post-post-modern … whatever) consumer was a different beast to traditional ones. Consumers now have been liberated by the internet – they have access to more brands than you can imagine, and those brands have access to millions of them for, at the bottom-end, no cost at all. And to top it off, the consumers are inured to traditional Marketing. This means that the big Marketing people need to start playing a new game: more focussed, more willing to “experiment”, to not only accept failure but to embrace it – and quickly work out what’s failing, why, and change it – and perhaps fail again – but to keep going back and changing until you get it right.

And there’s some parallels there to what Web 2.0 means for the games industry too, where the consumer has undergone a similar change. Games players now number in the hundreds of millions, at the low end (heck, there’s that many people who’ve bought a PlayStation alone, and I’m more interested here in the wider market of non-console gamers, the people who play games on their PC, or on their phone, and haven’t had to pay for the priviledge of playing games – they already had the hardware), and more and more of them live on the internet, which is the Web 2.0 part.

We’re in an age where every individual has a very good idea how little it can actually cost to “share” information – and anything that can be encoded as information, from music to computer games – thanks to the internet. And as that changes people’s outlooks on many things taken for granted, and we see consumers actually winning against the combined legal might and bullying of desperate entities like the music publisher-backed RIAA, you’d be foolish to suppose that their attitudes to buying – and playing – games aren’t changing already as well, just as fundamentally.

So, in the meantime, go listen to the ever-brilliant Lawrence Lessig. I’ve just been listening to his 2006 talk on Free Culture. There are too many memorable, insightful, or funny elements for me to be able to sum it up; I’ll just say it’s one of my favourite LL talks amongst those I’ve seen.

“This is not about (quote) “piracy”. If I thought this fight was about your right to get access to Britney Spears music for free, I’d be on the other side, because I don’t think you should get access to Britney Spears music … at any price”

(no, not really, but the digital photos from the official photographer were seriously amateurish, so I thought I’d have some fun. The ones of me make me look far worse :))

“WHAT?!? Why would you say such a thing?”

“Oh, so you think that’s funny, huh?”

“You’re making me angry; you wouldn’t like me angry…”

“GRRR…too late!”

(Sulka pulls out his secret weapon…)

(Invisible Shotgun!)