On publishers 'clearing out the attic'

James Bridle has an other excellent piece up about the evolution of text - or I should say the evolving value of text while text itself needn't evolve into other media. It's a good read if you are interested in text as a medium and/or a business.

Toward the tail end, he discusses the challenges to publishers bringing online their back catalogs of text - and how they must do things to add context to the work in today's connected world:

 As publishers spin up their digital and print-on-demand backlists, more and more is published with less and less context. These efforts amount to land-grabs and rights-squatting, without adding value. Works without TOCs, indexes, author bios, footnotes. Placing work in context is one of publishers’ primary tasks, stretching out to commissioning introductions, assembling background material, supporting biographies and critical studies. Design belongs here too: good book design, appropriate book design, as important now as it has ever been.

It struck me that this can easily apply to all those game publishers looking to sift through their back catalogs and re-publisher works onto new platforms and business models. Something to think about.

Book Review: The Age of Persuasion

Came across The Age of Persuasion at the library and picked it up. It was OK in some ways, poor in others.

The book is a history of modern day marketing, as seen through the eyes of an advertising copywriter turned broadcaster. It covers a lot of interesting history, rife with colorful examples, of advertising over the past century.

On the plus side, there are a ton of interesting factoids, and the authors seemed to have done their research. They cover the advertising side of the business and the factors motivating players in each strata of the business.

On the down side, there are three flaws I find with the book.

The first, which is minor and forgivable, and which can be seen by the cover art, is that the book is very much trying to ride the coattails of Madmen, focusing, and perhaps over-glorifying advertising's 'golden age'.

The second is that "marketing" is not the same thing as "advertising". If the book's tagline were "how advertising ate our culture", that'd be fine, but otherwise the authors perpetuate the myth that marketing is about ramming stuff down people's throats. It largely ignores the other half, which is figuring out what they want or need to begin with.

The third issue is that by seeing the world through an ad man's eyes, the book is too quick to ascribe too much value and too little blame to advertising in the influence that it has. Where they do cite negatives, it's always the other guys, the inept and evil ad men, not the creative good ones (which they likely include themselves in). I feel like it's really not so black and white.

If you can see past the negatives, there are some interesting data points and interesting bits of trivia here. Just make sure you take much of the book with a grain of salt.

The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture

Extra Credit: An open letter to EA marketing

A bit old, but right on the money. EA really should fire whoever greenlights all this shit.

Book Review: Secrets of the Moneylab

This book surprised me and is probably one of my favorites of the year, at least as it is really timely for our industry, as I'll soon explain.

Technology companies generally have laboratories in which they do research & experimentation. Game developers often do so as well. Perhaps not formally in R&D labs (though some of the larger publishers have them), but certainly doing experiments for new rendering techniques, AI models, physics experiments, etc.

For all this though, it's surprising how little science is put into the business side of the business. Things like pricing, to pick one example, are often done using some gut-feel starting point and by following competition.

Kay-Yut Chen, author of Secrets of the Moneylab, runs a lab at Hewlett Packard. He is also an economist. The lab he runs does research on behavioral economics and it's application in the tech industry. The book runs through experiments they did on consumer pricing, marketing, supply chain management, and much more. Also, they look at a number of different experiments from different industries.

Why is this so timely?

Consider the point made by Neal Young of NGMoco at his GDC2010 keynote, where he said that for the first time in the games industry, the business model is in the hands of the game designers. Add to that the fact that digital distribution channels and competing appstores will mean that developers have the opportunity to try many different experiments as they bring their games to market on different platforms (Something Dave Edery at Spry Fox has been doing).

Success on these emerging platforms is going to come from people's ability to put some science into the business side of their business, and this book provides an excellent start to getting your head around that kind of thinking.

Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business

[note: I'm post-dating a couple of these posts as I didn't have a chance to sync them while I was travelling, and I like to track by when I read the book]

Several good reads this week around the web

A few good finds this week to read over your morning coffee, or over turkey hangover:

• Tim Berners-Lee (inventer of The Web) in Scientific American: Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality. A lengthy dissertation on open standards vs walled gardens, Net Neutrality, and Electronic Human Rights. Much of it covers known problem, but it's good to see them called out so eloquently.
• iReaderReview has a piece examining What Impact are Kindle Exclusives Having. There are some parallels with games here. In a crowded market like books (or, say, small downloadable games), does having an exclusive on even a significant number of titles make any difference for the platform's appeal.
• Gamasutra has a good piece up on Console Hardware Trends in the Bundle Era. I find the title a bit misleading, and would rather label it "Hey Guys, how goes the mid-life booster rocket?". Title aside, though it's interesting. The table of 360 HW sales by month is interesting, showing 2010 to be a banner year thus far, and that was BEFORE the Kinect and its bundles launched.
• Good CNET piece on Netflix's Secret Sauce for Acquiring Content. Good lessons here on being a good partner.

Go read! Discuss!

Game Dev Story: A Niche market is you!

Game Dev Story is a fun little iphone sim about running a games studio. I found a lot of developer friends talking about how enamored they are with it.

I found it ironic that I saw Facebook contacts raving about it the same day I saw an announcement that there are now 300,000 apps on the iTunes store.

At that point, iPhone devs constitute an interesting niche market, and selling them this game is kind of our industry's version of shovels-to-miners.

As an aside: Hey Apple! Pro-tip: When you have that number of apps, this is no longer a positive number for your marketing pitch. You are essentially telling devs the store is overcrowded, and your consumers that they may have trouble finding what they want. At this point "lots" will do as a tag line.

Book Review: Free

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Man, I really wanted to not like this book. I'm not sure any other book has been cited, oft out of context, to me over the past year. The fact it was cited to me to make points I disagreed was what made me want to read it. I realized it was often being cited incorrectly or out of context, but did have other issues with the book.

After reading it, while I *do* have issues with it, I have to highly recommend it nonetheless.

The basic thesis is as follows: As the marginal cost of creating & delivering a product drops towards zero, its price will do the same. It then goes on to discuss how when the price goes to zero, interesting things happen.

The thesis is sound. And the important part relevant to many cases cited (e.g. print, music) is that when the cost of *creation* of the product is near zero, then you have a market where the cost of delivery is the biggest factor, and when that falls to zero, things go non-linear. (Divide by zero = undefined :-)

I agree with this 100%, and it's clearly had huge impact in many areas, some of which are cited in the book. Craigslist decimates Newspaper classifieds. Online distribution completely tips the music industry on it's side, Amateur journalism gives pro a run for its money, etc.

There are a couple issues I have with the book:

1. Inconsistent definition of "Free". The author cites many different versions of 'free', some of which have been around a long time. Take for example "free prize inside". Early in the book, he points out that this isn't really what he means by free, because it's just bundled into the price of the product. Yet later in the book, he cites this as an example model of free. I think this a case of the author falling into the very common trap of trying to stretch the thesis too far. This happens a lot in business books, and it's a shame, because it dulls and confuses the fundamental point, which is a really good one.
2. The author doesn't adequately take the cost of creating the product into account. He mentions it, but often only looks at the cost of distributing the product. He gets around this by saying that when the product is made of bits, the distribution cost goes to zero, the development cost is sunk, and therefore can be viewed as negligible. However, there are two cases where the cost of development cannot be ignored. One is when the market for a product is limited. At the end of the day, the development cost has to be distributed across the total customer base, and if that is finite, then lowering your distribution costs may let you get more efficient, but once you saturate the market, that's it. The second issue (and it's kind of the same) is when the cost of developing the product is really high. If you made a film that takes $100M to produce, and you beleive it has a market of 100M people, then the per user cost doesn't go to zero, it goes to $1 (given perfect efficiency, etc). Anyhow, I would have liked this more thoroughly taken into account.
3. Free doesn't exist in a vaccuum. While the simple thesis looks at cost of developing a product and cost of distributing the product, these are only a couple factors. Lip service is paid to things like cost of supporting a product, shelf life of a product, value of scarcity (real or perceived), value of exclusivity (real or perceived), etc. While these are mentioned, it is only in passing. Depending on the product or business being looked at, the value of these things may be a signficant factor that needs to be taken into account.

These issues aside, the book is highly recommended. At the very least it'll give you some food for thought about your business. As a bonus, there are many examples included from the games space, including demos/trials, freemimum models, etc.

I'll post another set of thoughts about some implications for the games industry when I get a few moments.

The Five Year Post

2010 has started with a ****load of work, and so the usual set of predictions I'd write at the beginning of the year has had to wait. At the same time though, I noticed that the fifth anniversary of my blog has come up. I thought it was worth taking a few minutes to ponder what's happened in that time.

Personally, a lot has happened. The twins went from cute little one year olds to thriving, brilliant little kindergartners (and gamers!). We had a smaller auxiliary backup child. I moved from Intel to Microsoft and back to Intel again (which brought a move from PDX to SEA and back to PDX). I went from running an engineering team to doing business development to doing long-term business planning. Hard-core games to casual games and back again. I edited GPG5, and of course, wrote a 1301 of blog posts. 1302 if you count this one.

To quote JK Simmons in Burn After Reading, "So... what have we learned?"

I'm certainly posting a lot less, from almost 400 posts in my first year, down a bit in 2006, sharply dropping off 2007,2008, and levelling off in 2009 with almost 150 posts. Part of this is attributable to things like Facebook, where more trivial short subjects and links might get posted as a FB status update rather than a blog post. Mostly though, it's concentration of my effort on the blog toward matters that I think will provide interesting food for thought and spur conversation in the blogosphere. In contrast, I do less linking to other people's stuff (I really should get my del.icio.us links working in an automated fashion, as it would make doing that far easier)

I did a couple experiments in generating revenue. I never thought these would amount to much, but want to experiment a bit just to understand the mechanics of it:

• I tried advertising with Google, later switching to TextLinkAds. the latter pays WAY more, generating a steady $30/40 month (google was much less). Hey, its beer money.
• Amazon associates, for my level of traffic, is hardly worth the effort, generating maybe $10/year for me. The new relationship with Google should make the link building/posting easier, but otherwise its not worth the bother.
• There was a period a couple years back when bloggers/social media frequented the news. A bunch of people sent me copies of products in hopes that getting blogs to write about them was the new path to success. That seems to have tapered off, which I believe indicates less indiscriminate shot-gunning of product.

It's no secret that traffic can spike depending who links to you and why. The most popular posts (as judged by linkage, comments, etc) fall into a couple categories:

• Post-mortems of conference sessions that people couldn't attend, like this one trashing Google's Casual Connect session on AdSense for games, or this one on Stumptown Game Machine's iphone post-mortem.
• Opinion pieces on games business models/economics/marketing, like this one on used games, or this one on Indie games marketing.
• Anything controversial, like my post in defense of Chris after his Wii rant.

In thinking about it though, the popularity of the blog (what little it has) is of little import. The entire effort has been highly positive, and the value has come mainly from two things:

First, the blog provides a place for me to post my thoughts, and this in turn requires me to organize them. When I post something on a technology or business models or whatever, I'm forced to structure my thoughts into an argument, look to the other side, etc. This leads to a better understanding on the topic.

Bigger than this though, is what the blog has done to start new friendships or reinforce existing ones. It's through the blog that I've become (or become better) friends like Mark, Robin, Alice, Darius, Raph, David, and many many others.

For these two reasons alone I would highly recommend blogging as an activity for building relations, structuring ideas, and getting feedback. From this respect its been a huge return for the time invested.

Lets hope it continues to be for the next five years!

The Crapware Carnival

A while back when we replaced my wife's laptop, and eventually ended up going through a Sony and a Lenovo before finally settling on a Macbook Pro, I'd meant to do a post on the difference between the out-of-box experience of the three.

The 'OOBE' for PC's is *horribly* broken. Both the Lenovo and Sony machines came loaded with so much crap I could hardly believe it. That Best Buy can charge money to "fix" a brand new computer, or that MS views offering PC's free of such junkware as a 'signature' offering are sure signs of how broken the PC platform is. The mac OOBE was, well, all the consumer electronics sensuality you've come to expect from Apple.

Catching up on my holiday feed-reading, another Seth Godin post on the subject caught my eye, as I thought he summed the problem up perfectly:

The digital world, even the high end brands, has become a sleazy carnival, complete with hawkers, barkers and a bearded lady. By the time someone actually gets to your site, they've been conned, popped up, popped under and upsold so many times they really have no choice but to be skeptical.

I'm a big believer in open platforms and open markets. The upside is that it provides more choice, better pricing, and more end-user say. The downside is that at it's worst, an open market devolves to a cross between a wild west town and the above-stated carnival - with no sheriff in town to protect you from the bearded lady.

If the PC vendors can't find a way to compete other than using crapware to subsidize the race for the lowest sticker price, then Apple deserves to win.

The correct way to treat a customer who just forked over $800 of hard-earned money for your product is not to say "how about you hand over another $30 to a "partner site". Instead, PC vendors should be finding out how to say "You just chose us to give your hard earned money to, and because of that, we think you are a fantastic, intelligent, and downright sexy person. We are sending over our VP of marketing to cook you waffles while you relax on the couch!"

The Passion Trough and the Ho-hum hump

Seth Godin has an interesting post up about weak analysis of data - in this case, a poor reading of data by a NYTimes blogger's analysis of Kindle review data on Amazon. I think it holds some lessons for the games industry, if you'll bear with me.

Its worth reading both posts, but here's the synopsis: Analysis of the reviews of all three Kindle products (breaking them down into a pie-chart of 1-5 star ratings) shows an increase in the percentage of one-star ratings over time. Conclusion: Kindle customers growing more dissatisfied over time.

There are a number of reasons this is erroneous. Many 1-star reviews are by non-owners ("I'll never by Kindle because..."), the early adopters more passionate than others, they are different products, etc.

However, the more interesting thing to me were these comments by Seth:

Amazon reviews never reflect the product, they reflect the passion people have for the product. As Jeff Bezos has pointed out again and again, most great products get 5 star and 1 star reviews. That makes sense... why would you be passionate enough about something that's sort of 'meh' to bother writing a three star review?

...

The Kindle has managed to offend exactly the right people in exactly the right ways. It's not as boring as it could be, it excites passions and it has created a cadre of insanely loyal evangelists who are buying them by the handful to give as gifts.

I think the lessons here are to Ignore graphs intended to deceive, and to understand the value of the negative review.

Point being that the negative reviews have value as well. For one thing "there's no such thing as bad publicity" (not true of course, but there IS a downside to NO publicity at all. The sound of crickets chirping is not accompanied by the sound of cash registers ringing). Another thing is that the negative reviews let you know who *are not* your customers.

So, what's this got to do with games?

Well, the industry puts some stock in review aggregators like Metacritic, and others are claiming this may not be indicative of a game's potential sales.

However, Seth's post made wonder whether we're looking at the right thing. Take the following fictitious graph:

The vertical axis represents number of reviews, and the horizontal axis represents 1 through 5 star ratings. Series A represents what I call the "passion trough" - reviews polarized toward 1 and 5 star ends of the spectrum (Seth's point about passionate reviewers). Series B represents the opposite, what I call the "Ho Hum Hump" - reviews clustered in the 'meh' range. Each of my fictitious products get 150 reviews

So, which is preferable?

Well, for one thing, it depends what you consider a "3" to mean. If that's a passing grade, then series B is preferable - two thirds of people gave you a passing grade. Series A gets only just over half.

Traditional thinking would be aiming to satisfy this. Do the best you can, for everyone - even if it costs you some of the more passionate customers. Better a 3-star with everyone than a 5-star with only a few people. (Some of the tradeoffs we've seen to 'mainstream' titles might lead you to call this the 'compromise chasm' :-)

I think this would be the wrong conclusion though.

For one thing, per Seth's point, I'm guessing the reality would be that Series B would get far fewer reviews, all other things being equal. It inspires little passion in people. Whereas A is more likely to inspire reviews - both good and bad.

Secondly, For Series A, on third of the reviewers are VERY passionate about the product, and therefore perhaps likely to buy it. For Series B, all those people giving it the middle of the road review are also people with a lot of alternative products to choose from.

Someone will need to crunch the numbers to determine if the above is indeed the case. If I'm right though, then we're looking at the wrong thing by looking at average score. We should be looking at standard deviation, total number of reviews, etc - if looking at Metacritic at all. Not to mention looking at user reviews vs press reviews, but that's a whole other topic.

My gut tells me you are way better off with the trough than the hump.

Correlation vs Causation, and the MetaCritic MetaQuestion

This piece on Gamasutra offers an interesting take on the metacritic issue, concluding that review scores are among the least important of the factors affecting game sales.

The same subject came up at a round-table discussion at MIGS that was lead by EEDAR's Jesse Divnich.

An interesting snippet from the Gamasutra piece that is worth chewing on a little:

Analyst Doug Creutz says "We believe that while Metacritic scores may be correlated to game quality and word of mouth, and thus somewhat predictive of title performance, they are unlikely in and of themselves to drive or undermine the success of a game"

This highlights a point I brought up at the MIGS round table: That there's a difference between correlation and causation. Scores can be correlated to sales, but not necesarily affect them.

The correlation is fairly straight forward. Most game reviews are written by reviewers who fit the mold of the "typical gamer" if there is such a thing. A high meta-critic score is a small sampling of people who fit the demographic of the customer. "9 out of 10 people gave this game a thumbs up". These reviews serve as this indicator *even if not a single consumer ever reads them*.

Now, whether the average consumer consults these reviews and uses them to decide on a purchase of one game over another, and how that factors in versus everything else vieing for their attention is another matter. I have no idea whether there is any causation here, but it is certainly a more tenuous assertion than the correlation above.

Does it matter though? Of course, and here's why.

If you beleive in the correlation, then you can use meta-critic as an indicator of sorts. The publishers seem to be doing this, and there has been plenty of talk about developers having bonuses tied to MC scores and the like.

Now, using carrots'n'sticks motivators for developers, and tying those to MC scores is being done to drive behavior, I assume. It is essentially the publisher telling the team "Please go do what it takes to acheive 90% or better".

If you beleive only in the correlation, that the reviewers are essentially a sample group of gamers, then you focus on building a great game that they and everyone else will find enjoyable. [A cynic like me would say you also focus on building a marketing frenzy that will have everyone salivating for the title, so that reviewers are ready to write their 98% review before they've laid hands on the game - but again, you are doing nothing for the reviewers that you wouldn't do for the consumer as well]

But if you beleive in causation, then you focus part of that effort in gaming Meta-Critic itself. You go out and try to influence reviewers, beleiving that gaming a high score out of the system will result in high sales.

So the meta-level question about metacritic is whether you beleive it serves as a focus group, or as a marketing tool. I beleive its the former, but choose your own opinion and proceed accordingly.

Addendum: As I was writing this I had an interesting epiphany: If viewing MC as a 'focus group' of sorts, then it would be interesting to treat as such. Do games score extremely high with a subset of the focus group and low with another? And if so, how do those fair vs those with a more homogenous set of scores. Does an 80 MC title with scores ranging from 60-100 fair better or worse vs one with scores ranging from 75-85. In short, does MC standard deviation indicate something? Hmmm.... time to curl up with Excel and a glass of wine...

Indie Pop

I've often found that some of the best lessons in marketing are those involving commodity products. No difference between Coke and Pepsi, so the marketing better get creative, right?

Well here's a great video about the Soda Pop Stop, an indie grocer that has carved out a niche for himself by combing the world for quality product, catering to only those customers that care for such, and telling Pepsi to pound sand. I love how passionate he is about his customers and his products. Awesome.

I really hope this guy has kids and/or nephews. What a great role model he'd be while sating a kid's sweet tooth.

'top grossing' appstore list challenges assumptions

The iphone appstore added a 'top grossing' filter to the 'top paid' and 'top free' lists (which were based on units only.

Some of the takeaways are going to challenge conventional wisdom, which is that (a) there's a $1-2 sweet spot where impulse buys propel you to riches, and (b) that originality and innovation will be rewarded.

Some things to note on the list:

• Only 5/25 are $1.99 or less, and only 1 of those is a game (Battlebears).
• 14/25 are games. Just over half, despite a huge glut of game titles in the appstore overall
• 5/25 are priced $29.99 to $99.99 (Utilities, GPS apps...)
• Brands rule: Of the 14 games, 10 are around recognizable IP (Madden, Scrabble, Uno, Tetris, Bejeweled, Sims, Need for Speed, Dexter, Monopoly, Civilization). More than ever, brand matters when you have limited time and space to influence purchase decision.
• Publishers rule: EA has 6 of the top grossing apps. Gameloft has 4.

They don't state if this is the current week only, or cumulative lifetime gross, though I beleive it's the former, or the list would be far more stagnant.

This approach isn't perfect. Why should an app's large gross revenue be an indication of whether I want it or not? And like any of the lists, it can be gamed (a publisher could, say, purchase a bulk number of applications to prop up their own numbers).

Still, it's another perspective, and thus interesting.

So, if you are a small indie developer, what do you do?

• Develop remarkable product. There's a lot of competition, and if you don't have something special, and you don't have a publisher's marketing budget, then nothing's going to help you.
• If you don't have a recognizable brand, then at least develop an intuitive name. (I'll post a presentation I did a couple years back at the Montreal Game Summit on this subject, but the challenge I discussed in that presentation was about the casual games space where the same limited shelf space, attention time, etc, exists: You have a fraction of a second to get someone to determine if your game is something they might like. "Magic Gem Collapse", "StuntBike", etc) Oh, and don't make the name one that is so long it gets cut off in the app store list! Looks like approx 24 characters is it. Unbeleivable how many people blow that one.
• Lobby Apple HARD for a Sundance Channel style indie games list. You want a store where you don't have to compete with EA. Then work with the dev community, press, and Apple to make it cool for people to buy games there. Both hard tasks, but the alternative is competing with EA, and last I checked, that was hard too :-)
• Build community on the web, use your community to market outside the appstore. Use the community to game the app store itself. Lots of people experimenting here, but the idea is to get escape velocity and get your app into orbit (aka on the prominent lists). One idea might be to offer a PC version for some amount of time before, offer a code for an extra level for people that buy the game, provided they buy it during the introductory week. Get them on a mail list for when launch is going to happen, and then when it does, get them to go buy, mail them invite codes they can mail friends to get a discount or free extra level or something.

It starts with building a great game, but now more than ever, that's only the beginning. In a limited shelf-space world (and don't kid yourself, Digital Distribution doesn't fix this, it only changes the rules a bit), marketing matters more than ever, especially for the little guys.

Rock Band Network: Marketing Tool or Moneymaker?

This...

Attention Bands, Studios, and Labels:
Create. Play. Get Paid.
The Rock Band Network is Coming.

Coming Soon - Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase

Is just awesome.

It's interesting that they took the route of offering a cut of track purchases, when they could just as easily have claimed that tracks serve as a promotional tool for sales of the tracks on iTunes, etc, which they are.

Either way, its cool to see. It will be interesting to see how this evolves. In addition to laying out tracks, if music artists could add new character choreography, awards, avatar costumes, maybe involve fans in doing different RB track layouts and picking the best ones, etc.

It'll also be interesting if one of the 'doing RB tracks as money makers' and 'doing RB tracks as marketing tools for the music' intents becomes dominant.

Book Review: Ignore Everybody

I finished up Hugh MacLeod's book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity the

othr day, but am only getting around to blogging about it now.

If you are a fan of MacLeod's, are a GapingVoid reader, and have read his How to Be Creative writing, then there's not a lot new here for you.

I recommend buying it anyway. The ideas are ones that are worth revisiting and reassessing from time to time. More than that though, the book is one you'll want to share with a friend or two. If his drawings are cube grenades, then the book is an Idea Bomb.

And on the subject of sharing it, the author had a nice promo going where for the first 1000 people to order the book on amazon and who sent him a copy of the receipt, he would mail a second copy, signed, free of charge. It's a great promotion, and now I have my nice signed/doodled copy to keep in ideal condition, and my Idea Bomb version to pass around to friends, blowing up their brains, hopefully. [Note: he appears to be doing another round of this]

Putting the toothpaste back in the tube

GamePolitics has this post about how EA sent reviewers a press kit for The Godfather II. The press kit included a set of brass knuckles.

Kind of a nifty piece of schwag, but also an illegal one. As GP points, out brass knuckles are illegal in a number of states, and so EA's trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube but mailing out return mailers to get the contraband weapons back.

If there's a lesson here, its that EA's delicately worded efforts to get the items back are generating more news than if they were straight-up about it. The comments to the press are along the lines of:

"I hope you're enjoying our Godfather II press kit, including the
novelty brass knuckles. To help you take proper care to dispose of the item,
we're sending you a pre-paid shipping package"

And then replying "no comment" to any further questions about it.

'Proper care to dispose of the item'? Please.

What they really should have said was "oops, we fucked up. We thought this would be a good novelty item in keeping with the game's theme, but didn't realize these were illegal in some states. We're making best efforts to make sure we get these all back, and would really appreciate it if our friends in the press could help us out here. We'll send you an even more awesome, but completely legal, piece of schwag afterward for your efforts."

Take a Mulligan?

From Gamasutra:

Pac-Man CE Creators Want Second Remix of Galaga

From VGChartz:

PacManCE units (lifetime to date):  329,698 

Galaga Legions units (lifetime to date):    43,510

"Uh. That didn't work out so great. Can we take a mulligan?"

I guess the interesting thing to ponder is whether, if publisher/MS were to give them the chance, would consumers be more or less interested in checking it out? At the very least it could be a unique marketing angle.

iPhone Games Market: Promised Land or Cesspit?

While at TGS, I had a lot of hallway & dinner conversations about iPhone games, with people weighing in on whether the iPhone Appstore was the promised land (a la XBLA circa 2005) or whether it was going to rapidly turn into something less than that.

Some thougts on the subject:

• The fact that the Appstore was not part of the initial design of iTunes is apparent. There are some fundamental features you would want to enable here that are lacking. Most significant of these is a "Try'n'Buy" mode which right now developers are implementing by shipping two versions of their games, which is a broken experience. Other examples include couponing, gifting, friend invites, discounting, retail point-of-sale cards, on-deck pre-installs, etc. (some of these, like gifting and friend invites, are going to become especially important when you look at the marketing challenges which I discuss below)
• Two different people involved in the business of iPhone games told me that "Try'n'Buy models actually often result in people NOT buying the games". This may be true, but the opposite means that the customer has made a purchase he/she will regret, and will be more reluctant next time. If it's good product, let them see it and try it. Fooling them into buying it is a loser strategy.
• The "open" policy of letting developers put anything up on the store (vs, say, XBLA's approval process) is good for a number of reasons, but it has implications:

The store is CROWDED. Even more than XBLA, the responsibility of getting your app noticed falls on the developer. Crossing your fingers and hoping to make the "featured" page or the "top 25"page is not a strategy.

The quality level is highly variable, and the long-term effects this is going to have on the customer impression of the store is TBD. My guess is that over time, there's going to be negative perception for this reason, and Apple's going to start reeling it in (either by pushing low-quality titles to the 'back shelf', or pulling them off altogether).

• We are going to start hearing questions about transparency. For example, if the Featured page is a big driver, then how does something get featured? Can people buy their way onto that page? Maybe not today, but the pressure will be there to do so going forward.
• An additional driver for transparency will be that some developers will choose to 'spend their way out of the clouds' in terms of development budgets, quality, etc. If they do so, they are going to want to know BEFORE they develop their titles, if they are going to be allowed to ship. This is especially true for apps that might be viewed as conflicting with Apple's business model or on-deck apps, but also true for games.

All in all, I think some of the shine is going to come off the apple, but that it's definitely a compelling platform and has reached critical mass as a platform that it's here to stay for developers. 

I don't think developers should delude themselves though. This is rapidly going to become an even more crowded space in which quality titles are going to be expected, and in which the challenge will be in overcoming obscurity - which you can read as "developers need to do their own marketing and they need to be good at it". Alternatively, they an rely on a publisher to do that marketing for them, which is one of the reasons that a publisher business makes sense in this space (Ngmoco, for example, was an early entrant into this space).

[Speaking of Ngmoco, they've announced their first couple titles, and while I'll reserve judgement on Maze Finger and Topple, I will say that Rolando, an innovative platformer using both accelerometer and touchscreen, looks awesome. Trailer here]

Last thought: On the subject of marketing, several folks I spoke with were in agreement that devs/pubs need to do their own marketing outside of the Appstore e-tail placement. However, there was some varied opinion on what that marketing should entail. Several folks I spoke to were of the "viral" mindset. (i.e. you do it on facebook and myspace and via mechanisms incouraging friends to join mail lists and such). There wasn't much excitement around traditional mechanisms like, say, print ads. On the other hand, if you think about it, this is a very interesting marketing problem. The iPhone customer, I'd guess, has a widely varied demographic, is affluent (they aren't cheap), and there may not be one answer to he question of how to reach them. Maybe print ads make sense, but if so, where? Wired? Forbes? Tiger Beat?. Maybe do something at retail, but where? Target? AT&T stores? Starbucks? Maybe coupons/invites in your cell phone bill? Will be interesting to see what turns out to be successful here.

More on marketing of indie console titles

Gamasutra has a postmortem up of the XBLA beat-match-3 title Go Go Break Steady.

Of note is the last point they make on their 'what went wrong' list.

5. Marketing XBLA games as an indie.

What is hype? We completely underestimated the marketing effort required for a successful XBLA title. One of the most attractive reasons for us to develop for XBLA was that we wouldn't need a publisher or major marketing, as the game would always be available online and would be able to garner enough sales for us to make up our investment.

This might have been true when we first started developing for XBLA, as there were then fewer than 10 titles available. We, on the other hand, were the 150th title on XBLA, and we were released alongside a very popular remake of a classic arcade game. Going into our release, we had next to no hype and much to our chagrin very little post-release hype.

Researching this more, we realized that this seems to be the bane of all indie developers. Although we found someone to help us with the PR work close to the release date, in retrospect it would have been prudent to show more of the game earlier so consumers would at least recognize the name when they see it on XBLA.

As I've been saying for some time, this is the real challenge for downloadable titles. Both Braid and Castle Crashers are great examples of devs creating their own buzz.

Indie devs can't count on XBLA, PSN, Steam, or any other digital distribution service to do the full marketing effort for their titles. Doing so would be the equivalent of EA counting on EB Games doing the marketing for Madden. The storefront plays a role, but there has to be anticipation built for the title over time, etc. Viewed differently, if you do well, the storefront will bolster your effort. If you don't do well, they'll forget about you quick.

Re-treading the re-tread games argument

GamesIndustry.biz has a post up about Frontier's David Braben making some comments about the second hand games industry. I've commented on this issue before (e.g. here), but thought it worth adding a couple things.

First off, this idea that a rental games market could replace a second hand games market is a bit of a fantasy. The second hand games market IS a rental market, at least it can be looked at as such.

That aside, however, there's a basic math problem here that doesn't add up. Either you are going to charge consumers more for the same thing (which then won't replace the second hand market), or you are taking a portion of the retailer's money (which he isn't willing to give up). 

Put differently, the problem is that users are getting the same product, and they and the retailer are getting better value by cutting the developer/publisher out of the equation, and neither gives a damn.

So, what do you do? It seems there are two pieces to address. Here's the same sentence with a couple pieces highlighted:

the problem is that users are getting the same product, and they and the retailer are getting better value by cutting the developer/publisher out of the equation, and neither gives a damn.

Let's spend a bit of time thinking about each:

On the First front, the "new" has to be demonstrably better than the "used". People have done this by linking it to services (MMOs, Steam). There's also the personalize games idea. There's also the idea of shipping the game with something that doesn't transfer as well. Guitar Hero discs are worth less without the guitar, and people often want to keep the peripheral for sequels, etc. 

On the second item, getting people to give a damn, there's two pieces to that:

1) Getting retailers to give a damn. This is a tough one. They make a great amount more money on a second hand title, especially a hot one. In a case like that, a $60 game (from which they make maybe $15 or less) sells for $55 (of which they might make $25 - paying $30 to the consumer for the title). Nevertheless, I have to beleive there are some things that could be done to help incent them to curb the behavior:

• Cut them off. Don't do business with them. Granted, this is cutting off your nose to spite your face, but if you are Rockstar, people will go find your title. 
• Give exclusive release periods to retailers that don't sell second hand.
• Give rebates/discounts/etc to retailers that don't sell second hand.

2) For consumers buying second hand titles, getting them to care, I beleive, doesn't come through their wallets but through their hearts.

• They need to be educated where the money's going.
• That needs to be PEOPLE, not COMPANIES. i.e. No one cares that some of Spore's proceeds are going to EA. They *might* care that it's going to Will Wright. 
• They need to know that the people getting the money appreciate their support.
• They need to know that its part of a relationship they have with those creators.

I know I find myself having to explain to EB employees, trying to get me to buy a second hand copy of a game for 

The music business has an element of this happening. Why can't we get the same thing in games? It seems like in a funny way this related to the whole game credits thing that the IGDA has been going on about for some time. But that's a discussion for another day.

I guess the point is that whining about not liking a business model isn't going to change it. You've got to go build something better.