Day: May 17, 2012

Categories
games design games industry games publishing

Lvl 50 on Kongregate; how many games industry people say the same?

I’ve played many hundreds – probably over a thousand – games on Kongregate alone, now.

On top of all the thousands I’ve played on console, PC, flash, handheld, mobile, etc.

I feel pretty confident in analysing game mechanics, and success/fail reasons for given game-designs, based off my extensive experience.

I frequently use my knowledge to influence design decisions and programming decisions in the games I work on.

But how many people in the games industry can say the same?

Hmm.

(PS: many people claim to “have no time to play games – too busy working”; my view has always been: if you really care about the art and the craft of this industry, you’ll make the time. No question about it)

Categories
games design

NASA cloud satellite data animation – hourly bitmaps?

I can’t find this. NASA’s web presence (in their defence, they have a **** tonne of data) is damn hard to navigate for simple queries (i.e. anything that’s not highly-specific, PhD material). I’ve found the “12 months of the year blue marble” dataset that gives you: Earth, without clouds.

And that includes a single momentary snapshot of: Earth, with clouds.

But – surely – somewhere there is “24 hours of clouds moving around earth”? Can’t find it! Help?

Categories
games industry games publishing

How much royalty/bonus for successful AAA video game?

Something like 90% of game developers NEVER get a royalty for their games, and almost as many never get a bonus.

But for the handful that work on titles where the studio negotiated a good deal (modulo the Publisher’s legal team using legal chicanery to make all royalties work out at “$0”) … it’s interesting to see what they get.

So, for Call of Duty, we have: Infinity Ward’s 2003 royalty deal with Activision.

NOTE: that doc *does not include* bonuses; it mentions them a few times, and says they’re taken out “before” the royalties. One of the publisher tricks is to award 100% of the profit to their own executives as “bonuses” – so that the external developer gets a royalties based off $0. You’d really want to see the bonuses doc too to check what the value of these royalties is…

Anyway, that aside, some headline points:

  • no upside limit (royalties aren’t “capped” – a sneaky practice I’ve seen publishers use before. A dev studio should NEVER accept a cap!)
  • NEW game series / IP created by the developer: developer gets 10% of net income (profit)
  • Sequels to the developer’s NEW games, or NEW games that re-use the developer’s game-engine, and NOT made by the developer: developer gets 2% of net income (profit)
  • Sequels made to the developer’s EXISTING games by the developer: developer gets 10-15% of net income (profit)
  • Sequels made to the developer’s EXISTING games and NOT made by the developer: developer gets 4% of net income (profit)