Category Archives: blather

The Biggest Gameplay Innovations Come From Outside The Industry

The rise of the indie developer has coincided with the advent of digital downloads and gateless ecosystems. However, it’s always been true that independent and non-professional development has driven major gameplay shifts over at least the past decade. Here’s a brief list of major innovation brought on by efforts from outside the realm of professional game development:

Counter-Strike (1999)

Although the first Rainbow Six game predates Counter-Strike by at least a year, it was this hobbyist mod for Half-Life that sparked the tactical FPS revolution. Counter-Strike started out as a Half-Life mod created by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe while both were attending university in 1999. By 2000, Counter-Strike became so wildly popular that Valve acquired the game and hired its two creators. Minh Le left Valve to work on his own game while Jess still works there.

Since the creation of Counter-Strike, countless games have borrowed its competitive tactical FPS gameplay. One of the weirder cases being Microsoft’s Shadowrun–turning FASA’s beloved RPG into a cyberpunk Counter-Strike clone. Valve has made a few middling attempts to turn Counter-Strike into a full blown retail product, but has redoubled its efforts with the official sequel.

Not that I have details–but considering how influential Counter-Strike is, it seems like Minh and Jess got a raw deal.

Defense of the Ancients (2003)

Defense of the Ancients started out in 2003 as a free fan-created mod for Warcraft 3. Although the mod changed hands several times, in the end the reclusive “IceFrog” became the game’s star creator/maintainer. Once again, Valve attempted to capitalize on an indie mod sensation by hiring IceFrog in 2009.

DotA isn’t just a game, it’s an industry. DotA even spawned a new acronym–Multiplayer Online Battle Arena or MOBA for short. The genre seems to print money. Riot Games’ f2p DotA inspired RTS, League of Legends, grew so successful that Chinese gaming giant Tencent acquired a majority stake in the company for over $350 million in 2011.

The MOBA wars are just beginning. Valve and Blizzard are fighting over their own “Defense of the Ancients” titled online games. Not to mention many attempts to create MOBAs as digital, mobile, social, and console titles.

Tower Defense (2007)

There have been games stretching as far back as the early ‘80s that used what has come to be called Tower Defense gameplay. Korean mobile games publisher Com2us even trademarked the title “Tower Defense” in 2007. Still, it was Paul Preece’s IGF award-winning Flash game, Desktop Tower Defense, that took the gameplay style mainstream that same year. Since the game’s success, Tower Defense games have flooded the App Store, social networks, and console digital storefronts.

Minecraft (2009)

By now you must be sick of hearing the Minecraft story. Swedish game programmer “Notch” quits his day job working on MMOs at King.com and starts building his own Infiniminer-inspired shareware game involving carving out and building structures in an expansive world of randomly generated cubes wrapped in simple 8-bit textures.

Without any fancy f2p economies or elaborate web portals, Minecraft became a viral hit–so far grossing over $40 million for the developer. Minecraft’s success has created an entire genre of block mining games. Including Terraria–a 2D take on the Minecraft style selling over 200,000 copies via Steam during its release week alone. The Minecraft aesthetic is even leaking into other genres with the Ace of Spades FPS on PC and Brick Force on mobile.

Minecraft is often described as being like Legos. In fact, Lego released their own branded MMO during the timeframe of Minecraft’s release. The game was shut down and Lego recently began selling Minecraft licensed toy bricks. Total victory.

I could go on…Portal…even Canabalt if you want to stretch it. There’s probably more I’m missing.

Indies Created It, Publishers Decorated It

Large publishers and AAA titles seem to advance technical features that nudge gameplay along. GTA’s streaming open worlds, World of Warcraft’s massive persistent online universe, Splinter Cell’s dynamic shadow stealth, and Assassin’s Creed’s fluid climbing and crowd dynamics were all outstanding technical developments that created new twists on existing genres which have become commonplace. (Ok, GTA was more than a nudge) Most of the dramatic indie innovations are purely in gameplay–usually built on top of modest technical foundations.

Companies such as Valve have acquired and successfully worked with the developers of these innovative games. What about a company that can be as influential and disruptive as these independent efforts to start with? Is it even possible?

My Podcast Debut

Just a quick note, My friend Peter Katz had me as a guest on his Hollywood 2.0 podcast today. You can listen to the episode here.

On this episode, I’m rambling for a about a half hour about games, development strategies, the realities of the business, and a bunch of other stuff. Hey, I talk fast so it’s over quick.

By the way, I used the Samson Meteor Mic with Skype to record this. What a great sounding mic–and super cheap! If anyone else has a podcast they are desperate to get guests for, my Meteor Mic and I are ready.

Amazon Mechanical Turk Survey Strategies

I recently crafted a survey to collect data on the consumption habits of gamers. I wanted to identify different types of gamers and drill down further with future surveys targeted at specific categories of game players. To do this, I used a combination of SurveyMonkey and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Making the Survey

The first step was creating the survey. For this, I paid for an account at SurveyMonkey. I find SurveyMonkey not only has the easiest survey creation tools but great features for analyzing the data. Alternatively, you can create surveys in Google Docs for free or inside Mechanical Turk itself using HTML.

There’s a science to creating a survey. I never took a class in demography, so I relied on some books discussing proper survey technique.

A few quick tips:

  • Always ask about what the person has done, not what they will do. For instance, instead of asking how much money they would spend on a car, ask what they spent on their last car. You will get a more accurate answer.

  • Make sure they are paying attention. Especially if your survey is long, you may be vulnerable to users clicking randomly just to get through it. This Scientific American article has a neat technique for checking if the user is taking an online survey seriously. Just ask ridiculous questions at random points. If the user answers something like “Have you ever eaten a dinosaur?” positively, throw his data out. He’s obviously not giving you valid answers.

    • Amazon Mechanical Turk

    Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s micro task site they launched in 2006. You can create tasks (called HITs) of any sort and pay workers to complete them. For instance, give someone a nickel to tell you whether a username is profane or not. In my case, I paid users 25 cents to fill out my survey.

    I used this blog as a guide on how to do it. Except instead of making the survey as a web form inside the HIT’s HTML code, I embedded my SurveyMonkey survey.

    Some tips:

  • Don’t be cheap. At first, I was trying to get away with paying 10 cents per survey. At that rate, I only got 5 or so filled out a day. When I upped the price to 25 cents, I got 30-50 a day. If you look at this confidence interval calculator, you can see it takes about 400 responses to have a decent degree of accuracy. So at 25 cents you can probably get yourself 400 responses in a week. Up your payment to a dollar and you’ll get 400 in a day.

  • Don’t get excited by your first day numbers. For workers, HITs are primarily sorted by when they were created. On the first day you create your HIT it will be at the top of the list. You’ll see a significant drop off in activity after the first day. Instead of collecting results all week it might pay off to break it up into 2 day HITs. (SurveyMonkey tracks IPs to prevent users from filling your survey out twice)

  • Give workers enough time. When designing a HIT you specify a duration. Even if your survey takes 5 minutes to complete, make the HIT last at least 30 minutes. When I shortened the window to 10 minutes I started getting complaints about it expiring before workers could complete it. Yes, you will get emails from dissatisfied workers–even over a 10 cent task.

  • Amazon’s demographics are surprisingly close for the US. I had almost an even ratio of male to female responders. Racial demographics were a little off, but not enough for me to correct them. This article provides some good insight on who is using Mechanical Turk.

    • Sign up as a Mechanical Turk worker yourself to see how it’s being used. You’ll see a lot of surveys as well as tasks like transcribing audio clips or even calling customer service phone lines and rating the operator’s performance.

    You can use MTurk surveys to collect all sorts of important data on your product or service before you even start writing code. See if you are solving a real problem for paying customers with your start-up. I’ve even heard of people surveying to test how likely users are to click on different app icon designs. The possibilities are endless and the information invaluable.

    2011 Year in Review

    Location isn’t dead. It’s just everywhere.

    When Facebook announced they were killing Places, it was kind of a shock. Several months later it makes total sense. Location isn’t a feature people use apps for. Location is now part of the social web’s fabric.

    Instead of a separate Facebook feature, you can now tag a location on to anything: posts, photos, and (yes!) check-ins. It seems like location apps such as Loopt, Brightkite, and SCVNGR have faded as they all ‘pivot’ to Groupon clones or whatever.

    Now location is merely an expected feature. I’m willing to bet most people don’t use Instagram primarily because of location. Still, tagging locations on photos is popular. Instagram is outpacing Foursquare for growth. Probably because it’s actually useful beyond announcing “I’m here!” to complete strangers.

    Peak Soccer Mom.

    Zynga is a monster of a company and congrats on their IPO. I remember seeing Mark Pincus at Cassie Phillips’ very first social gaming conference 5 or so years ago as a relative nobody. This was back when SGN had more funding.

    Today, SGN is nothing but a memory. Zynga managed to upend the entire game industry, plunging the old guard into panic and chaos while blazing a trail to a 7 billion dollar valuation. Bravo!

    A lot of analysts are disappointed with the IPO. And yeah, Zynga desperately needs new customers. For this reason the company seems like it’s not a growth stock.

    Is it a risky investment? Perhaps not. Zynga is the first public company whose performance you can watch in real-time. Instead of looking at guidance and waiting for quarterly reports, just go to AppData and watch their DAUs. If only there was a way to automatically sell a stock once their user retention dropped across the board…

    Unity 3.5

    The Unity 3.5 beta is now public. The GUI is nowhere to be found–my #1 problem with Unity. Still, it has file locking for SVN and P4V support, multi-select, and a bunch of other small fixes that I’m happy with. Oh, and the Flash exporter really works. Plus, there are some promising new GUI add-ons in the Asset Store.

    Console Disruption

    The 3DS has been able to pull itself back from the brink with quality software this holiday season. This effort may prove futile as tablets and mobile devices are still pounding the handheld market into submission.

    I’m big on the Sony Vita. I even paid extra to reserve the First Edition bundle early. I am fully aboard this kamikaze mission to stuff every conceivable feature in a massively powerful device directly aimed at a market that wants nothing to do with it. A glorious death on the battlefield! I want to see how this turns out–even though a brutal, bloody loss for the axis is seemingly inevitable. Operation DOWNFALL.

    Folks I know that got a Japanese Vita say it’s a glorious piece of gaming hardware. However, the 3DS outsold the Vita during launch week in Japan. Not a good sign.

    Action Bronson Has The Best Album of the Year

    Action Bronson’s Well Done is the best album of the year. The first rapper to rhyme about how to properly cook and serve puffin. Real talk.

    Mackerel Management

    The only time I’ve ever been fishing is one trip in my early teens to fish for mackerel. Apparently this is the perfect beginner fishing trip because mackerel are really easy to catch. I remember staring in amazement as dangling a shiny lure above the water caused hordes of fish to leap into the boat. You didn’t need to hook them! I went from a total novice to catching 20 pounds of fish in one afternoon. Unfortunately, that meant eating mackerel out of my mom’s freezer for two months that Summer.

    In the software world, it’s not uncommon to be dealing with management that behaves much like mackerel. Let’s say you’ve been charged with coming up with some grand plan for a new product or changes to an existing one. (Yes, I know this is very anti lean startup, but mackerel haven’t caught up with that yet) You might come up with a ‘road map’ having all sorts of features to be deployed upon some imaginary timeline.

    The thing is, if you are working for mackerel, you have to understand that each option or feature is a shiny lure. When presented with a number of options, mackerel will jump on every single one. They are all sparkling, attractive, and worth risking a slow, gasping death aboard the deck of a fishing vessel for.

    The good thing is, mackerel are easily distracted. When managing mackerel, your job is to keep them hopping on lures and thinking they are making real decisions while you enable the people who actually do stuff to build and launch the product the right way. I’ve seen products ship using this technique. Producers convince the project leader he is in charge, but secretly direct the team to do otherwise. Once the project ships, nobody can really complain. It’s the whole “ask forgiveness later than permission before” thing.

    Mackerel management requires two things. The first one is not caring about your employment status. After all, you are directly defying the mackerel and might get canned for such brazen action. Mackerel travel in schools and don’t like to think as individuals. Also, you need the rest of the people on the project to have such disregard for mackerel that they’ll agree to silently ignore management’s requests. If you have this perfect storm of “I don’t give a shit” philosophy you may be able to upwardly manage mackerel.

    Of course, if you find yourself in this situation, you might reconsider even trying this and either start up your own thing or get a better job where such absurdity is not necessary. Still, it can be a fun sociological experiment–especially if you don’t care about getting fired.

    VCs, Welcome to the Game Industry

    After my post about how Zynga seemed to have hit peak soccer mom, news broke that their profit took a nosedive by %95 this quarter. Some may say this is the bubble bursting on social, but it’s probably not. It’s just the maturing of the social game industry.

    Zynga’s active users are down by about 3 million. Growth is flat, this is true. However, Zynga has attributed their falling revenues to the lack of major releases generating new revenue. I’m likely to believe it.

    This is a familiar pattern to anyone who follows the dinopubs–companies such as Take 2 have wildly gyrating stock prices due to the release patterns of tent pole games like Grand Theft Auto. With AAA console titles taking 3-5 years to develop, you can go many costly quarters without any decent revenue coming in. This is especially scary when you are spending $50 million to develop a title and $100 million to market it.

    Remember the early days of social games? Think back to 2008 when Jetman was hot. It was a crude Flash action title that was probably whipped together in a weekend. SGN bought it as one of the first acquisitions in the space. Contrast that with Adventure World–a lush, rich adventure in…uh…clicking on lots of stuff to generate spam. Ok, not my cup of tea–but the amount of work put into this generation of social games is deceptively large.

    Zynga has been spending a lot of money acquiring companies and massive amounts of staff. I’m sure their 2,000 or so employees aren’t sitting around filling out Netflix trial subscriptions for free FarmVille Bucks. There’s a lot of development going on. Social games are taking longer to make and fickle audiences are saturated with compelling content. Naturally, if you don’t have anything new out there your usage and revenue will drop off.

    The thing is, this hit-driven pattern was part of what made games totally off-limits to investors until the social revolution. No longer can you throw a heap of money at a bunch of pizza-eating Stanford CS grads in a SOMA loft to crank out code and buy millions of users until you supernova into an acquisition by the greater fool. VCs wanted to invest in so-called ‘game factories’ but now you actually have to produce quality games and work hard for your users. Scary stuff.

    I’m not quite sure the crop of VCs that heavily invested in social gaming are ready for slow growth and a revenue chart that looks more like a string of al dente spaghetti than a hockey stick. Will social gaming become as unattractive to VCs as the traditional dinopub industry is? Zynga better not delay their IPO much longer–or time it to coincide with the release of a major title.

    How to Talk to Rich People

    At certain times in your adventure as an entrepreneur, you may have to talk to the rich and delusional. As many you know, I advise teaming up with someone who specializes in this. Just in case you find yourself unarmed in the presence of a rich guy who is looking to invest in your start-up, here are some tips learned from observing others much better at this than I am.

    Oh and, when I speak of weird rich people, I’m not talking about VCs or experienced angels. Most of these guys at least have a semblance of a process and logic behind how they operate. I’m talking about loaded dudes who know almost nothing about your business but are looking to get in on the tech bubble.

    Anyway, those tips…

      Ask for something. Have a reason for the discussion. A lot of super rich dudes are just lonely. They break up their solitary existence by inviting you on their boat to have long, rambling, pointless discussions. Have an agenda and don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. Otherwise, you’ll spend hours going in circles.
      Never say no. When you reach a certain level of wealth, you stop hearing the word no. When talking with such people, disagreement is considered “resistance” and jeopardizes the progress of your conversation. You might just phrase “no” in a softer, more creative way. Unless he asks you to drown a basket of puppies or something. In that case, look for a life raft.
      There is no problem that can’t be solved with the simple application of more money. The idle rich do not want to hear about technical limitations of your product that might make their input unfeasible. Worst case, it’s an issue–but can simply be solved with more money. We know this isn’t true–after all, we build stuff. However, being realistic will paint you as a naysayer and killer of dreams. Keep the reality distortion field powered up.

    For many, these talents are natural. For nerdy programmer types, talking to money men is usually a learned skill. It’s also a full-time job–you can’t develop a product yourself and raise money simultaneously. Find help.

    Is Location Dying?

    I was blown away by today’s announcement that Facebook is shutting down Places. A year ago, it was announced as Facebook’s Foursquare killer. Perhaps Facebook decided Foursquare wasn’t worth killing?

    It’s kind of bewildering. Pundits complain that only %6 of Facebook users used Places. But %6 of 700 million users is roughly 3-4X Foursquare’s entire user base. It’s really not even about active users anyway. It’s about the reach of Places check-ins through the social graph.

    Places activity is featured prominently in your newsfeed. Check-ins frequently generate comments and from non Places users. These conversations can be a valuable viral marketing tool for venues and events. Check-ins on Facebook Places are far more valuable than those of Foursquare or any of its lesser competitors due to their reach.

    Facebook has stated they are opting for a new geotagging feature on pictures and posts instead of check-ins. I do like geotagging much more than check-ins, actually. I think this is one of the best features pioneered by Instagram. I’ve gone to venues because I saw something really delicious tagged at a local restaurant. I’m also more likely to geotag than check-in. Checking-in is a big statement compared to adding location information to a post. Still, can’t check-ins and geotagging all just get along?

    For developers, location just got a bit trickier. Basing a game or app on check-in history has always been a bad idea. You don’t want to require a log-in for a game–a good percentage of your users will drop out upon seeing a log-in screen. However, Facebook Places offered more of an opportunity to use social check-ins in an app since it’s attached to a mass appeal social network instead of a niche app like Foursquare. Who remembers their Foursquare password?

    Places was seemingly thrown out there with very few enhancements made to it over time. Maybe Facebook decided the cost to whip it into shape was just not worth the effort. After all, revenue streams from check-ins have always been suspect.

    This goes to show you that even if the 800 pound gorilla decides to muscle in on your turf being focused and nimble can pay off. It was looking grim last Fall, but Foursquare vanquished the beast and has emerged unscathed with a new round of funding.

    Facebook will probably use that prime area of real-estate the Places button occupied in the mobile app for a more lucrative feature. Yet, I can’t help but think they didn’t give Places a chance. The fact is, location will remain an important feature in mobile due to the very nature of the device. Facebook just can’t figure out how.

    The New Era of Virality

    A few weeks back I saw this post covering a lecture about the current trends in gaming by Tim Chang during GamesBeat 2011. Now, if you read a lot of VC blogs, please stop. VCs are very good about telling you what the trends are last year. You’re likely to crash your car doing too much rear-view mirror driving. In this case, during a bunch of stating the obvious, he claims we are in the “post-viral era.”

    This may not be the case.

    In social gaming 1.0, it was all about spam. Social game developers prided themselves on their secret knowledge of the so-called “viral expansion loop.” This black art really was no secret. Just spam Facebook newsfeeds with obnoxious ‘stories’ about lost cows and Mafia Wars riches. Whether you were selling herbal Viagra or virtual crops, the technique was the same–Shoot out millions of messages and hope that a fraction of a fraction of a percent follow through.

    In the late 2000s, it seemed like the there was a fine line between social game companies and Nigerian 419 scams. Newsfeed spam from social games got so bad that Facebook shut down all the viral channels by early 2010. Except, of course, for Zynga–with whom they have a sweetheart deal. Anyway, when the spam APIs were squelched, Facebook app virality died. This was the end of Social Gaming 1.0.

    In 2011, virality still lives. Turning your players into evangelists that go out and get others to play the game as a core mechanic is a tricky thing to achieve but it can be done. The best example of this is the wildly popular (among hipsters, at least) turntable.fm.

    A pivot borne out of the social shopping startup, Stickybits, turntable.fm is a music sharing game where you earn points by performing as a virtual DJ. Create a playlist of tracks from turntable.fm’s immense library, or upload your own. Then, play these songs for head-nodding virtual spectators.

    Is this legal? Who cares. They’ve amassed a decent chunk of users in a few short months. turntable.fm will figure that out later when the Cease-and-Desists start showing up.

    The only way to earn points as a DJ is to have a lot of virtual club-goers watch your performance. Racking up tons of points requires driving lots of users to join your room and watch you spin. The more spectators you have, the more points you earn. If you read interviews with the game’s most fanatical players, you’ll see that turntable.fm has created a group of hardcore whales who put more effort into bringing in new players than your average user acquisition manager at a social gaming company.

    For fanatical DJs that desire fame, glory, and enough credits to buy cool avatar gear, the drive to bring in new turntable.fm players is strong. Compared to many other social games, there is little friction to this process as players don’t have to actually play anything. Once invited, users merely have to log-in and consume free music.

    The big mystery is how this game plans on monetizing its audience–but I’ve seen few social games with viral mechanics this persuasive. It’s unclear if a game you actually have to play to participate in can emulate the same model, however turntable.fm is an example all game developers should be looking closely at.