My Digital Dragons 2019 talk: The Lost Art of Immersion on mobile

Digital Dragons was so nice to record my talk and post it online, here it is:
Enjoy!

GaaS

If you never heard of GaaS maybe you should invest some time to learn. Game as a Service, or GaaS, is the latest craze on mobile and they are all hurrying to learn what it takes.

Some games implemented GaaS and made a mediocre launch a huge success. Like Rainbow Six Siege, which meanwhile is called the best tactical team shooter of the planet having over 30m players. OR GTA V, which, despite its age, is closing on selling 100m.

Maybe you don't know the fun part of GaaS. The lessons you need were defined over 20 years ago, by a game called Ultima Online. And the developers spread the knowledge of their experience on GDC. Just check Raph Kosters talks and articles here.

So sometimes I feel walking in the past when advising clients on what GaaS means to their development and company.

Why "old" Publishers don't get it?

With old publishers I mean the great EA's, Activisions, Ubisofts etc. They usually are so busy in their own world that they have a hard time looking what is happening outside.

With "world" I mean Fifa, Battlefield for EA, Activision with Call of Duty and their other IP's and Ubisoft with their Sandbox titles.

So when a new trend comes along they usually miss it - big time. EA tends to buy that stuff - and destroy it afterward (remember Command & Conquer and many many other examples). Activision merely does their own thing. Ubisoft just buys smaller studios usually and are busy making Sandbox titles.

What trend am I talking about? A mega trend - which is actually older than they realize: Survival games.

The recent example of Battlegrounds is just the most recent hit the Survival genre produced. Its originator DayZ started it (with some influence from Indie titles). As DayZ was based on the Arma engine the game including DayZ stayed in the Steam charts for months - an eternity rarely achieved by other titles other than Valves.
Really, not even top titles could touch the success. Many others followed and even ones with questionable quality had good sales. Even unfinished survival games stay in the charts - Survival is strong.

But none of the big ones follow up on them. Imagine, the budget of Battlefield behind a Survival game. It could be even a stand alone expansion.

But no, they ignore it. Why? No one knows.

So this is the gap you can jump into. Survival AAA produced and sold by a publisher with the marketing force behind it. Go for it, its here since years. It's time. And if you do and make millions think about the guy who pushed you ;)

Update: someone mentioned Dying Light in the comments. That's one of my favorite games of that time and is a good example that Survival works - and it sold really well.

Quo Vadis 2014

The title doesn't mean I am asking where we go in 2014 but it is the name of the largest developer conference in Germany happening next week April 8th to 10th.

My talk on Thursday morning will dissect the monetization of Puzzle & Dragons. After my talk about doing the same with World of Tanks was so successful I decided to expand those topics. Btw this is the first talk I will hold on an iPhone!

At Casual Connect 2014 in San Francisco in July I will repeat that exercise with League of Legends.

I am doing this simply to educate teams how these games work. I usually pick top f2p games for this as they aren't at all "evil" - which seems to be a major criticism of f2p. I assign 3 pillars on those dissections:

Public Metrics
Numbers and data I find online, either from services like Appannie, Comcast or simply from the game providers PR or shareholder messages.

Own Monetization & Online Game Experience
I use my professional skills to take the game apart into its foundations and mechanics and examine them for their functions.

Self Experimentation
I play the game as a player for a while (usually until mid game) and then as a payer (note the missing L) and research what this changes in the game experience compared to the former experiment.

Those three usually give me enough information to understand fully how the game works in terms of game mechanics & monetization.

I hope to see you at one of the above conferences.

Transition Years

In 2004 I made a talk on Quo Vaids, the largest German developer conference, about our game industry cycle. (btw. the next Quo Vadis is in April, highly recommended!). This talk was adapted into a major article on MCV, the leading industry magazine by its time.

From there on people knew what it meant to be in a transition year. Although the term "transition year" was coined by EA I can take credit assembling the facts and regular events what a transition cycle causes.

Basically the games industry goes through a cycle which is kicked off whenever a new console enters the market. The old one doesn't do the revenue anymore it used to and the new one hasn't grown enough yet to do good revenue.

This forces the big players into a conservative mode which means:
- Studios are getting shut down
- Media spending is reduced
- Releases are safe bets, i.e. sequels

The side effects are usually that independent studios are no longer able to place their next developments and shut down if they don't have already one under contract. Also some media are shutting down like games magazines or game web sites as the reduced media spending also hits them.

However as developers and teams are looking for alternative revenue streams they put their creativity into other platforms like the new wave of good games on PC digital or the immense growth on mobile games this transition cycle. Some also find ways into f2p on consoles or PC.

Why is this important? Because 2013/2014 is the current transition year where bad things already happened and worse is still to come. From the last count of studio closures at least over 15000 developers were laid off over the course of the last 18 months in USA and Europe. Some cities were laid to waste in terms of game development like Austin or Boston.

Why I am saying this? Simply because I want to calm you guys down that this is perfectly normal and part of our cycle. It is like hitting Ctrl-Alt Delete and re-install. Everything will be smoother and better afterwards, you just need to be prepared.

Not complete overview, just samples:

Disney
http://kotaku.com/disney-lays-off-700-employees-1537889729

Lucas
http://kotaku.com/how-lucasarts-fell-apart-1401731043

Eidos
http://kotaku.com/big-layoffs-at-thief-developer-eidos-montreal-1536315021

Bioshock Devs
http://kotaku.com/what-next-for-dozens-of-ex-bioshock-game-creators-1525989099

EA
http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/29/5043244/ea-cancels-free-to-play-command-and-conquer
http://gamepolitics.com/2013/07/12/ea-closes-phenomic-studio#.Uxi7Cvl5Mg8
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-09-30-ea-closes-north-carolina-studio-report
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187793/Dragon_Age_Legends_studio_BioWare_San_Francisco_closes__report.php
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187116/EA_lays_off_workers_across_multiple_studios.php#.UTW-ZldZcaU
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/ea-confirms-medal-of-honor-studio-danger-close-is-no-more/#!yJiMy
http://hothardware.com/News/EA-Cuts-More-Jobs-Shuts-Down-PopCap-Vancouver-and-Quicklime-Studios-Total-Number-of-Casualties-Unknown/

THQ
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/01/thq-bankrupt/

Misc
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/06/gree-layoffs/
http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/4/3836168/social-games-developer-majesco-boston-shuts-down-say-former-employees
http://allthingsd.com/20130603/zynga-to-lay-off-520-employees-18-percent-of-staff-and-shutter-new-york-and-la-offices/

Buy Banished

I rarely do this but I would love you to take a look at this indie game and give it a try. It was released just today (and will be on Steam tonight) and is a resource management game just like Settlers or SimCity. Beware that the learning curve is steeper so I recommend the tutorials first.

Information about the game: http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/
Buy Humble Link: http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/buy/

Good F2p games clones and what it means for you

Well guess what: most successful f2p games are all clones of existing games. Or at least close adaptions.
Lets check some out.

Clash of Clans (iOS)
The best monetizing f2p game from the west does 2 million US$ a day, but the team did a close to identical game called Galaxy Life in their former company Digital Chocolate, which again is an adaption of a Facebook Game called Edgeworld by Kabam.

HayDay
By the same developer Supercell this is basically a Farmville variant. A good one yes, but still a lot of mechanics were taken from that old Facebook game by Zynga (which in turn cloned it from an Asian game)

League of Legends
Yes, even they adapted the grandfather of Moba, a Mod for Warcraft III called Dota. And yes, Dota2 is the sequel. Of course the setting and graphics changed, but the fundamental principle of the game remained the same (and yes, I know the guy is one of the original Dota mod creators)

Puzzle Dragons
A match three game with RPG elements and monster fusion meets Pokemon. The most successful mobile game from Asia even dwarfing Clash of Clans in revenue. Variations were available before (like Puzzle Quest) but not the mix like they did. Clones are appearing daily.

Candy Crush Saga
Well take Bejeweled, attach a meta game and progress, voila you have a game which does 30m a month. Many tried but King.com Saga recipe seems to work for casual games. Only after Candy Crush moved to iOS it bat their former revenue king Bubble Witch Saga which doesn't work on mobile as well due to interface issues. Clones have been tried, the more successful ones are even from the same publisher King.com. None can reach the success (and if you wonder there is a reason for it).

World of Tanks
Counterstrike with tanks. Nothing special right? Attach a progression system and monetization and voilá you have a hit. I might be too simplistic but under the hood WoT is nothing else.


So what did those games above do to actually be that successful? The numbers are extreme. Millions of users, millions of revenue even daily. The above games dominate the f2p online space. No wonder companies try to clone those games - some even 1:1- all those images are from a different Clash of Clans clone.

It seems there is enough potential in old successful game loops that you simply take these, attach a meta game with progression and monetization strategy and you might have a million seller. It seemed to work for the companies above right?

What really happens is that f2p is still young and exploring new areas, so expect more mature games (or more core as you would say) to expand into f2p space soon, so that the two leaders LoL and WoT can be challenged.

Also expect any game loop you know to be misused as a f2p game at some point. Some already have been tested like Black Jack, Golf, Poker, Asteroids, Mahjong etc. It is a formula and simple (core gamne loop + Meta game & progression) and will be exploited as such. It is so simple that I wonder why the huge wave of these games hasn't arrived yet.

Steam Machines will fail

I won't write a lengthy blog post about them. I simply predict they will fail. Read on.

The Gordon Kelly sums it up in the comments with these questions:
1. Can you can tell me why a mainstream user would buy a Steam Machine over a console?
2. Can you tell me why hardcore gamers would buy a Steam Machine over a standard PC?

Read yourself here: http://goo.gl/5hIWgE

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2014. It will be an important year as the last generation of consoles will start to fade out while the new one takes over.

This Christmas will be the time of the new generation. The last hurrah of the last gen consoles will be in its software. Some good games are still to come.

The problem however is numbers. The last gen won't sell the millions of games it used to be simply because some users migrated to the new one, some users stored their consoles away or they simply break (remember the last gen is particularly prone to this).

The next gen won't have the numbers yet. GTA V sold zillions on a market with 140+ million consoles. The recent sales numbers of Xbone + PS4 are close to 8 million in total. If you extrapolate this to Christmas we might end up with maybe 24 million end of this year (both Xbone + PS4). Thats ca. 15% of the last gen market so publishers won't expect more than 20% of the revenues counting the effect in that there aren't many games yet and people buy everything they can get their hands on.

So the revenues of all publishers will be DOWN this and the next fiscal year (ending March 2015). Still it is an important step as afterwards we will end up with a better and healthier console market simply for some of these factors:

The PS4 and Xbone embraces online much better than the last gen. This will help smaller titles to be distributed online and make smaller console teams viable.

This will also allow MMO's to migrate to the consoles helping with long term revenue and retention for these titles. This include f2p titles (and first ones are very successful like Warframe)

More importantly the architecture of both consoles are very PC like as they use PC components. This will make cross platform development much cheaper and easier helping return of investment, lessening the risk of large scale AAA game development like Assassins Creed IV or GTA V was. You can basically develop for 2 consoles and PC at once without losing too much quality. The last gen had problems due to their custom architecture. Hint: this will push PC gaming a lot as a side effect.

So I expect further consolidation in 2014 until more money is being made on the markets (including mobile, online) which will have an investment effect in 2015+ soonest, maybe even as late as 2016. In 2016 we will be back in a market of 100m+ consoles making even more money than this gen. Remember this kind of investment has a lag of one fiscal year.

What about the other markets? Mobile will still grow (and is still growing in case you doubt it) but it is getting rather populated. The market is swamped with clones of games already existing making it even worse for new innovative games to be noticed. I think this is only a temporary phase until the markets mature and both developers and providers find ways to offer better visibility and customer acquisition. Signs of this are already there.

What about me? I will have public appearances in Helsinki at one of their Universities teaching f2p:

http://avp.aalto.fi/courses/games

I will also attend Casual Connect in Amsterdam participating in the Evil Game Design Challenge and talking about WoT:

http://europe.casualconnect.org/

Next I will attend Game Developers conference in SF analyzing the monetisation of World of Tanks:

http://www.gdconf.com/

Finally I will be in Berlin for Quo Vadis of course, ranting about our industry and giving German developers a glimpse what awaits them;

http://die-entwicklerkonferenz.de/

See you on one of these events or on this blog. Thank you for your loyalty and listening to my rants!

The GTA V billion

We all read the news of the fastest selling entertainment product of all time: GTA V made a billion on the first weekend. This gets all sorts of media attention and jealousy - and most of them get it wrong.

First: the billion mentioned is retail revenue. That means Rockstar did NOT make a billion as they don't get the full sales price. So what do they get anyway?

First you need to deduct VAT from the price you paid, something around 15-19% depending on country. Your government gets that.

Then retail takes their share, somewhere 10-15% usually, sometimes more, sometimes less. That leaves (very rough calculation!):


$69
$58 -VAT
$49 -15% retail
$46 -5% distributor fees
$33 -$13 MS/Sony license & Production fee, includes BlueRay, Manual & Packaging

So, $33, minus Take2 share as they own Rockstar & paid the hundreds of millions of marketing, so less than half actually arrives at Rockstar.

Considering the game costs somewhere around $200 million they broke even first weekend with that billion - barely. Rest is profit now, but you see that without that record they would have had a harder time to break even. 5 years development time with hundreds of people does cost some serious money (120-200 million depending on country).

So there. Yes they deserve the record, the money, but they don't have a billion yet. For that they need to continue selling strong and maybe ship some add ons (or the PC version!)

So if Sam Houser reads this: great job man, the first GTA since Vice City I enjoy!

Retro Trend

My last blog entry gave me more feedback than any other before. People enjoyed it and are asking for more, so I will write up some stories about Giana Sisters, MUDS, Apprentice, Citadel of the Black Sun, Jinks and my time in Advertainment.

See you soon.

Gamasutra Interview

For your reading pleasure my interview about my upcoming talk at GDC Next:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/200393/Whats_Next_Move_to_mobile_or_fall_behind.php

The f2p audience and you

If you design a f2p game the formula MAU*Conversion *ARPPU will define your designers live. Whats important is that MAU is also a function of your setting & genre.

In other words if you pick a niche setting your reach will suffer, so will your revenue. If your setting is niche then marketing will have a harder time finding users - which raises acquisition costs which lessens your revenue.

So it is important to know how large your audience can be depending on those two factors. Hardly any marketing research has been done, most picks for those are gut feelings of the developers. Is science fiction niche compared to general topics? Or Fantasy?

If you look back into history you will notice that Fantasy on a world wide level was niche until Lord of the Rings hit the Hollywood blockbuster list. Yes, it was apart from one territory, the USA.

Oh no, you will claim, I read Fantasy all my life! It can't be! Well it was as you aren't the large reach audience, you are the niche. If you are large enough then f2p will work easier for you.

That is the difference between Clash of Clans and its "predecessors" Edgeworld (SciFi). Or why Candy Crush has such a large audience. Or why Call of Duty works better than SciFi shooters.

That is also why IP's seems to make it easier as there is already a defined audience. Note I say "seem" as that IP can also be a bane to your growth if said IP isn't popular enough.

So in order to lessen the risk, increasing revenue and lowering costs of user acquisition you should make sure your setting is cool - worldwide.

And I haven't even touched genre yet ...

The gaming industry and you

I am kinda famous in Germany, but not because I shipped top 10 hits, simply because I do this job since a long time and shipped 100+ games, some of them I won't even tell - those are my skeletons in the closet .

So therefore I got a lot of "friends" on Facebook who either read or ignore whatever troll post I publish. I know who my close friends in the industry are, and I also know that many don't like me simply because I polarize a lot. This is basically part of my self promotion: instead objectively publishing analyses about theories I do talks which are a little bit more - lets say - demagogue.

Why? Simply because it gets people to think than to get bored about numbers and careful statements. That's all I want.

Recently I went into fights with 2 industry colleges on Facebook on 2 different occasions. On one case he simply attacked the f2p business model aggressively in a way which I don't even know from him.

The other case I simply posted that the writers of magazines & blogs should at some point return the favor when they find newsworthy things on my wall (which happens more than I thought it was). One of them attacked that post in a way which I never have seen him - emotionally, aggressively - even damaging to both of us.

On Gamescom I met them both. The journalist surprised me as we simply talked about other hobbies and we both realized that we are pretty much nerds alike. He was building tank models like I did - something which I never thought of him doing. This somehow gave us common ground and a better understanding of each other.

The other one was totally changed and we talked about one of his upcoming titles which gets excellent previews so far and he simply said "email me, I send you one". Maybe a peace gift, but I see it simply as "maybe we both went too far - lets get over with it".

All I want to say is "I am sorry" - next time we should simply clarify things one on one instead publicly fighting about the small things. There are more important things than to fight each other.

Thanks to you two, you know who you are.

My GDC Europe 2013 talk is online

GDC 2013 vault opened today and my talk "Getting past pay to win" is among the free content. Check it out here:

http://www.gdcvault.com/free/gdc-europe-13 for a list of all talks

and

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1019236/Getting-Past-Pay-to

for mine. Enjoy!

The Tigers of Asia

When I started in online games 1997 I realized this is going to be big. I had no idea how big, but I felt it as I was already hooked to online gaming.

When I experienced free to play the first time and learned it came from Asia I knew they were ahead of us. Luckily the Asian developers and publishers didn't know how to tackle our gamers at that time. There seemed to be a vast difference in play style and game style. I even made a talk about it on KGC, the Korean Game Developer Conference.

Some years later the Asian Tigers became giants, so large in fact that they own major shares in western gaming giants. The revenue they pull in just from their local market is so high that they can play money games in the west - exactly when we are shaken up by the console transition year.

I said years ago we should be prepared for the time when Asia understands our gaming market. Are we prepared? I doubt it. Maybe we should prepare for a time where most large and creative companies are owned by Asian online companies.

Largest player battle ever in Eve Online - I was there

So in case your games site hasn't told you yet: Yesterday on July 28th the largest player battle happened in Eve Online with over 4000 players participating.

Coverage of the Verge: http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/28/4565558/eve-online-biggest-space-battle-in-history

And the Mittani report: http://themittani.com/news/live-reports-battle-6vdt-cfc-victorious and an aftermath report of it of the same site: http://themittani.com/features/6vdt-cfc-battle-report.

We won. Our enemy, the TEST alliance, retreated to Delve, another area of the universe. Their retreat basically give us the region "Fountain" under control.

If you ask how it feels to be there let me explain: if you haven't done this kind of mass battle yet you will get frustrated, annoyed even. The reason is that the only way CCP can run such a battle is to slow down time. They call it TiDi which makes all actions slower than real time. In our case TiDi was so bad that all actions took 10x longer than normal. That doesn't sound much but imagine targeting a ship takes 3 minutes ... and shooting it up to 10 minutes. The whole game runs in slow motion in this one sector.

The advantage of such a TiDi is that the game doesn't lag or crash, it only slows down. If you are used to it and learn to cope with it its actually fun. I finished GoT season three while fighting in it. Yes that's how much time you have.

You might argue that this isn't fun but you need to know that Eve is not an action game, everything in Eve is slow so slowing it down even further to fight crash lags is no problem at all. Many players complain about it who never fought in these battles, but they work and you must work them because otherwise you can never defend against .... 3000 players invading your system you worked years for.

There will be a time when server architects know how to run 4000 players in one "arena". But so far there are still physical limits to overcome and Eve sets a record here.

Now that the news is spreading even the BBC covers it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23489293

Codes: Things some developers never learn

I am wondering why obvious best practices get ignored so often.

I am talking for example about serial numbers & codes. Whether it be windows serial numbers, Steam codes, Nintendo Club pins or codes from iTunes some of those are ignoring obvious solutions to common problems.

Lets take a look at a sample code:

             ABlO-XY12-ZU80-I1lO-4354

Note that a lot of characters can't simply be identified. Is it a one, "L" or "i"? No one knows. The obvious solution? Do not use "L", "I" or 1's in your codes. Its as simple as that. Do not use "O" like in "Order" and zeros. (Feedback from readers: do not use S, Z, 5, and Q either). Even if your printer promises they can be distinguished at some print run its being ignored and your users can't.

And: ignore upper and lower case entries, treat input as identical. PLEASE.

Besides those obvious errors the entry of the codes in your input field can be optimized as well. Why in hell can't I copy/paste some serials with multiple code sections like above into an input field with 5 separate fields? Because it all pastes into the first field, ignoring the other 4. They don't carry over. Its not really hard to do.

Also: the last digits is a check sum. This check sum does NOT check the code server side for validation, it is to check client side if the USER did an error. Server side validation is always against a database so your codes can't be cloned.

It is not hard to do codes correct. So whenever you are involved in a project where codes are either for licensing, installation, or bonus codes please follow the simple rules above. It makes your live easier, less support tickets and less frustrated customers.

p.s.: A co worker pointed out rightly that the statements above might say that the serial number check sum client side is all you need. This is of course wrong, the check has to be made server side all the time. The check sum I meant is the user input check so at least the basic serial is correct and not gibberish. That can be client side. However exposing your check sum method in the client isn't wise either. Maybe we need two.

The App Store Problem

Developers complain that their game doesn't sell in the app store or doesn't have enough downloads and thus doesn't make enough revenue through their in app purchases.

There are problems getting visibility on the app store, its key to success. However the main problem I see isn't visibility - its boredom of the users looking at your app.

Let me give you one example: I am looking for good strategy games in my iPad and iPhone since months and can't find a lot. Most so called strategy games are Tower Defense games or variations of games already in the app store since years. There are exceptions like Autumn Dynasty or Ravenmark. But most other strategy titles can be put into 3 or 4 drawers or "me too" or clones of existing concepts. Boring.

The same is happening on many other genres. It seems that developers look whats selling and copy that concept - and then complain their game isn't selling. How lame is that. I can understand that licensed IP's for movies like Despicable Me simply copy a game concept (runners) and be good with it - but long term revenue is not happening on game types which exist in the app store since years.

Developer friends told me they are tired of the App Store. Its not as exiting as it used to be. But that's exactly whats happening. 90% of all games being published already exist.

That's exactly why indies have better success than commercial developers: they despise copying concepts.

So the first step for success on the iOS store is to make a big step away to all mass concepts like runners, tower defenses and match three games.

n00b iPhone app mistakes

#1: ignore the sound switch the user set. Blare loud in the office when I start your app although I switched it mute (talking to you Skype!)

#2: save games. That's so last century. Auto save. Also cloud save so I can reuse it with re-installs or across devices. Thank you.

#3 super long intros. You know that most players don't even remember your company name and really don't care about the licenses you used. Stop doing this shit.

#4: make intros not cancellable. Yes. Let the user look through a 1 minute intro before he can play. Most users uninstalled your game faster than your intro finishes.

#5: full animated cinematic and voiced over sequences. Make your game a 1.8 GB download. Thank you. Enough said? Its a mobile device.

#6: make a mandatory registration. Yes, let me register before I can play and your registration either doesn't work or doesn't like m password or even needs a confirmation email click. Sorry. Uninstall is so much quicker and even user friendly!

#7: before I even finish your tutorial you ask me to rate your game. You know. I don't. Let me take a look at your game first. Thank you.

#8: Don't use incremental updates. Let me patch a 1.2 GB update. Thanks. Took an hour.

#9: Don't give me those updates "bug fixes". Give me a list of bug fixes. I know you just want to reset your ratings, ad placement or trackers.

#10 (Feedback from Tino): When I turn off Notifications I mean OFF. Not "maybe I can notify you again - without asking?"

Having more oddities and don#t likes of games on iOS? Let me know!