Wood Panels
"The Revolution will be Downloaded"
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a panel of
IGDA
with some live blogging by me. Or not.
Kenny Dinkin
is the moderator, hooray. Downloadable games are awesome. They will save
the industry from
- sequel-itis
- random licenses
- something else; I forget what, but it was bad
Or not.
Casual games have something like 95% growth rate per year [for the last
few minutes that casual games have existed, anyway]. Mostly people 35+
years old [cool, I'm not old enough!], mostly women. So that's good.
Different market, different challenges. Tech savviness is probably a factor,
people used to spending money online [thanks,
Amazon!].
Kenny loves DRM, hooray, we time-bomb and ruin the experience! Then they
give us money for their next fix.
Now other people get to talk, to disagree with Kenny.
So, WHY should I care?
Mitzi: hardcore game makers should care because otherwise you're missing
revenue; casual games are fun [more fun?]
Peter: the iTunes-ization of games is great; having games on the web makes
it possible to get players who are not able to be at their console of choice,
they can play in Study Hall
Juan: great for developers, sets the bar high because you generally only
have sixty minutes to prove yourself to the potential player; your mother
will finally understand what you do because she can play your game
Greg: Lots of money to be made here; chance to take risk, explore new areas.
So, WHAT is a casual game?
Greg: Addictive fun game play and ease of use. Popcap developer last week
said "no casual game has ever failed because it was too easy to play"
Juan: non-violent game, non-violent theme; user should understand game
in a minute and a half, tops; game mechanics should be point, click,
execute, not at the same time
Mitzi: accessible, easy to get on your computer, smaller than 15M, fast
download, fast install, just work
Peter: a good video game is fun, a great video game can ruin a life [and
a family], casual game isn't challenging, just an activity; casual games
are revenue sources beyond download, try, and buy
Kenny: does it need to be a dragon, a spaceship? These elements are great
for hardcore gamers, alienate casual players
So, WHO is playing (and paying for) these games?
Peter: it's everybody, mass-market
Mitzi: her 72 year old dad, was playing and buying casual games before
I was; her daughter, her husband; everybody has 5-10 minutes to devote,
if you can draw people in, you can have a winner
Greg: 2/3 women, 1/3 men, it's everybody who plays, purchasing is an
even higher percentage of women; games are crossing over to hardcore
audience, Xbox Arcade, mobile phones, age is skewing older, not one
segment which dominates
Juan: depending on theme, your audience may be different; mah jong style
games mostly female, other type games mostly male; college students to
30 year olds are really into multi-player games, many ported from Korean;
traditionally, mostly female, formerly 85% purchasers female, now down to
65%
So, HOW do I design for this market?
Greg: the central mechanic is crucial
Mitzi: if you find a game mechanic you like, expand it; coin op games have
the mindset of the quarter drop, what do you do to get the player to drop more
quarters, apply that lesson to the games
Peter: the goal to get further next time; understand the level progression,
so you can expect that your money will be worth spending for the
additional levels / experience you'll get
Juan: some risk to pushing a single game mechanic, because it may not
scale, might be fun for thirty minutes but fall off therafter, fine for
a web game, but not something long term; taking two approaches, video
game approach: build universe, hang game play off of it or build
mechanic: build game-play around something hopefully fun to do; look at
what's out there, look at what's successful, look at the games,
themselves, figure out why they're fun, design to be that rich or better
Kenny: a lot of what we did with Diner Dash, Nicole has an article about
the difficulty ramp
Greg: it's important to have both competitive and relaxing modes in
game play
Mitzi: Big Kahuna Reef
does it right, has timed and untimed modes
Juan: wouldn't use competitive or relaxing to label it, label it
rewarding, if it's rewarding for the players, if they feel great, that's
the way it should be
Peter: there's a web game, AdventureQuest, it's like a MMORPG without
other players, just a couple clicks to rewarding experience
Mitzi: tutorial is a great way to get people into a game
Peter: reward with some sort of feedback, not necessarily achieving a
goal, don't punish them for clicking around, exploring
Audience question about Fate, it's like Diablo, but distributed through
casual game channels, very complicated.
Juan: Fate successful in some channels, with male buyers, surprisingly
so, not as popular as Aloha Solitaire, but the developer can consider it
a success; as the audience grows in numbers, this changes the challenges
involved, can the developers target niche markets
Peter: maybe it would have done even better if it were part of a
subscription model, where people could pay to get multiple games, and
not feel like they wasted their money on a single game
Audience question, is the casual game market a response to the existing
game pressures from the big players, doomed to fail in turn?
Mitzi: no, the resource demands, disk, bandwidth, time, newer computers,
means there's a completely different market
Greg: we're seeing the same copycatting stuff happening in the casual game
market, but it's early on so we're going to see integration [innovation?]
Kenny pulls up slides showing copycat games from many companies, including
Trijinx, hooray. So how do we balance Innovation versus Commercial Success?
Juan: lots of room for innovation, imitation is a natural consequence of
success; casual game market is healthy, in terms of number of new ideas,
working in it every day, it may not seem that way because we see so many
games, but many imitators get filtered out before they're released to the
world; doing better than console market at avoiding imitation
Peter: how do we define innovation or imitation? Not every match-three
game is created equal; we look at things from a portfolio point of view,
try to balance things, have some risks, some sure things, you know there's
a demand for a mah jong game, that stability gives you freedom to
try experimental games; lots of opportunity to do new stuff, some straight
up copycats don't sell, don't succeed, so you need to innovate sometimes;
match three is a familiar mechanic but people love it
Mitzi: top selling game last year was a match three, took four months to
make, second seller took eighteen months, do the math; again with the
portfolio metaphor, have yet another match three with another innovation
on the 'clearing out the corners' innovation iWin has
Peter: you need core titles to be bread and butter, once bills are being
paid, branch out, but avoid action/arcade/sports because casual games are
the wrong space for them
Greg: there are many untapped genres, Tradewinds is a light RTS which is
new to this space, adventure platform has a larger female demographic, but
much much more to be done here
Audience [Nicole] asks what process is to make a game developer learn and
improve their game audience.
Kenny: Playfirst really believes in experimentation, has paid off big for
us, big things are to study what went right, what went wrong, learn from
that, test the product early and often, focus test, user test, beta test,
keep getting feedback, friends and family, respond to it, listen to what
the players tell you
Mitzi: we prototype in Flash, because it's amazing, concepts get ten chances
to be interesting before the idea is killed, Shockwave is great to go and look
for feedback
Kenny asks what the kill rate is for games
Mitzi: about 30% before production, probably 5% after production starts,
realizing it wasn't a good idea, many games get tabled because they're
taking energy which needs to go into other games, not killed
Juan: prototyping is great, but there's a problem as to how tell whether
a user issue is bad prototyping or bad game concept, it's sometimes hard
to capture game design via prototype sometimes, other industries have better
tools, such as film industry; even with Flash, it takes a long time, larger
team to build a prototype than it should, would like to see better
prototyping tools
Greg: even though prototyping tools can be rough, it's relatively easy to
get to the heart of the mechanic through prototyping, in early stages it's
more useful, once working with partners, can get feedback from prototyping,
can put tracking tools into the games themselves to get usage pattern stuff
back, cool and huge to see how players interact with games
So, WHEN do I need help?
Peter: we're a little different from other companies represented on this
panel because many of our games are web games supported by advertising, so
the games we get are different from most people; the other day we tracked
down a developer because we wanted to publish it, we called and left a message
and his dad called back; if I were a developer, it would be daunting to
identify all channels and negotiate a deal with each and every one of them,
a year ago I wouldn't have seen the value of publishers but now I can see
the value they put into the chain
Greg: two parts to the value equation, what the developer believes they
need, what the publisher believes they add to the equation; varies
widely from developer to developer, some just need funding but most people
get value from QA resources, hardware resources, probably the biggest add
from iWin is insight into the market, what has been successful, what hasn't,
with developers who don't always have the same insight we do; distribute
top titles, see what sells, collect user feedback, during beta process,
tracking tools and data can go back to developer to shape final game
Mitzi: you need help when you need money, to pay rent on the garage you're
doing your development in, a lot of times publishers want games which are
complete are nearly complete, don't quit your day job, finish your game,
take it a publisher; lots of publishers don't want to do one offs, there
are aggregators who will take some of your margin but help you place
your games with the publishers
Juan: depends upon game and audience you want to reach, publisher
relationship can be great for infrastructure, if you target an audience
publisher isn't trying to reach, it's not such a good match; several
games do fairly well going it alone, it's getting harder and harder though
to get noticed with out a publisher, at the same time the casual game
market is growing
Audience questions about whether casual gaming has room for violent
gaming with simple interface, second question about Steam.
Juan: games are getting bigger as broadband spreads but it would be
really hard for violent gaming to catch on, but maybe multi-player
casual maybe has room for violent games, look at the success of
Korean multi-player, they don't have time to commit to World of Warcraft,
they've got twenty minutes to spend on it so a game they can jump into
and do mayhem is good
Mitzi: [disagreeing with Juan] as soon as you cross over the line
from family friendly, you have to deal with the ESRB, your site is
being monitored, everything is being rated, even if it's just for
one game, it's a whole other level of complexity, only if it will
make you a bunch of money
Greg: no on violence, this is the wrong market, the people it will appeal
to have other platforms which will deliver better for them
Peter: violence doesn't belong in a download-then-purchase market but
an ad supported game or some other model like subscription [cites
AdventureQuest again] is quite possible
Kenny: think about what mass market means, think about popular television,
popular arts, hope what we're looking at in this downloading market is
reaching popular mass markets with downloadable entertainment, re-frame
the picture and don't reject violence in games out of hand because we're
at the start of this and there's going to be a whole range of tastes,
there's lots of good TV out [Kenny gives shouts out to BSG, Six Feed Under,
Sopranos, Entourage], if you want to do violence, stand it on its head,
push it way out to the horizons, so that everyone can experience it,
don't just go after the cap turned back Xbox players
Time's Up! Everyone is invited to go drink with panelists, yay.
posted at 21:05 PST (-0800)
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