Bit Shift

Despite what you may read elsewhere, putting a game on a mobile app store isn’t an instant win. Especially if the game is a port from another platform. 

Retro RPG specialists Zeboyd games have enjoyed pretty decent success on the PC for their old-school feel and thanks to their tie-in with Penny Arcade for the third Rain Slick Precipice game. However, they are halting future efforts to carry their games into the mobile app world, citing a lack of interest in their mobile games.

The easy conclusion is, “Eh, maybe there’s just no interest in humorous 16-bit RPGs on the mobile platform…” Could there be any other forces at work?

As Android Police points out, their game ports have been reviewed fairly terribly on the Google Play Store. In the case of Cthulu Saves the World (ported by Tinkerhouse Games, like all of the Zeboyd Games on mobile), there are currently as many 1 star reviews as 5 star reviews. Users cite constant crashing as well as troublesome controls. The Penny Arcade port is being reviewed better so far, but it has a small install base, yet. And many times, recently-released games that were notable elsewhere get a free pass on their heritage alone.

Chrono Trigger’s Android release has a similar review disparity (high 1:5 star ratio) as Cthulu. But it’s been around for much longer and it costs far more: heritage doesn’t stand a chance for $10 mobile games, especially games that use DRM. And if your game costs $10, your controls should be flawless and certainly not worse than an emulator’s.

I tend to focus on how the digital world differentiates itself from traditional markets, here. But most of the time, the digital market provides the most extreme example of what is really just traditional market forces at work. And bad ports of good games certainly will kick that into gear. Good luck, Zeboyd.

A few days ago, RPS published some excerpts from their interview with Trevor Longino of Good Old Games (GOG.com).  One of the parts that stood out to me most was this:

[A steep game discount is] not good for the industry. But users want the option because they never would’ve bought it otherwise. So our stance was, ‘If you’re buying a game you wouldn’t have bought otherwise unless it was 80 percent off, what are the odds you’re going to play it?’ And our users said, ‘We don’t care. Sometimes we like to collect games, or maybe we’ll play them later. That’s not your concern. Just let us buy the games we want.’

This is an apparent flip flop, after GOG had made some disparaging remarks about discounts in the recent past. EA’s Origin spokespeople had echoed similar sentiments, but it was more understandable because 1) They are EA and 2) EA is a game publisher who values its intellectual property more highly than its customers do. But it made sense from GOG’s perspective, because the entire premise of the site revolves around cherishing good games, not stacking them up as if all games are just another number.

But, I’m somewhat forced to point back to my previous article “Hoarding’s Rightful Place is in the Cloud,” wherein I totally called all this. At least to an extent I did. In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with trying to make digital games scarce. However, since marginal cost is zero, there’s also nothing really wrong with introducing steep sales often. Once you make your costs of development or deployment back, everything else is gravy.

This is why “Steam Sales and Indie Bundles Prevent More Piracy than DRM (or artificial scarcity for that matter) Ever Has (or will).” Because this is not a battle for a larger slice of the pie, but it’s more about growing the pie of both money spent on games overall and of types of stuff consumed. This is something that Steam fundamentally understands better than anyone else, because they are watching the pricing experiments and keep having the sales anyway. In fact, Valve discounts its own games far lower than you would expect a pseudo-monopoly to attempt.

Contrast the Steam and Valve model against Apple’s own App Store or EA’s Origin or Microsoft’s XBLA. The difference is striking. Valve seems to be very happily doing what most outsiders believe would be cannibalizing itself over and over again. And is snowballing into a very profitable behemoth. And, while we’re comparing Orange (Boxes) to Apples, EA’s complaint about Steam’s one camel-back-breaking rule is incredibly superfluous compared to the restrictions that Apple requires of its App Store participants. And yet, EA happily takes part in that money grab.

The long term reciprocation of this on game licenses might seem sketchy to the developers, but to gamers this is just one way to get their attention. You could always make a really great game and keep the price high and see how it goes. :)

Netflix just put up Indie Game: The Movie, which I had been meaning to watch since it was released on Steam. Here are some thoughts, but if you like anything about this blog, you should just go ahead and see it (on Netflix here).

First of all, the documentary is not exactly full of mirth and cheer. In fact, it’s a kind of depressing tale. It follows the stories of both Team Meat (of Super Meat Boy fame) and Phil Fish (of Fez fame) in parallel as they strain themselves to reach their respective release deadlines. It also has sound bites from Jonathan Blow (of Braid), Ron Carmel (of World of Goo), and others, but the bulk of it features SMB and Fez.

While the romance of game developing is used as a hook early on with some callbacks throughout, the creators are shown over the months of development spiralling outwards in their own ways. Edmund McMillen is definitely the most mentally stable of the three, but he and his wife both seem very emotional around the release of Super Meat Boy.

Part of developing anything successfully is being too dumb to know better, so peeking behind the indie-game development curtain like this feels like it’s a warning sign to kids with aspirations of glory and the easy life. But in the end, despite the horrendous setbacks and the terrible way that Microsoft interacts with its indie community (more on that in a later post), all the trouble and hard work seems to be worth it (spoiler alert!).

I’d recommend this as good watching for indie game fans, but also I feel that it’s education for the uninitiated as to what the indie game community means. For people who remain on the fence about whether or not the numerous indie game bundles provide real value or for those who confuse indie games with the $2 game bin at Walmart, this should be an eye-opening experience.

Despite what you may hear about the Greenlight nonsense, Steam loves independent developers. Besides the fact that Valve are one, the Steam platform actually accelerated gamers’ acceptance of the indie developer as a noble profession with something to offer you.

I’d say that Valve legitimized Peggle to core gamers by including a free special edition of it with Orange Box. Valve also was one of the first prominent stores where indie games were given equal billing to AAA games. In the lull when consoles looked like the only obvious choice for the discerning publisher, Valve partnered with scores of independent game devs to bundle together their games and to provide value for the ignored PC customer base.

So, it’s not terribly surprising to hear yet another tale of woe about the XBLIG from ticked-off indie developers. As part of the Indie Games Uprising III, a discounted bundle of independent XBLIG games will be presented for the Xbox Live subscribers to obtain. The primary reason for this is that Microsoft is horrible at marketing XBLIG content to the public. This is another example of how Valve (and even Apple, to a lesser extent) get it right by focusing more on the service part and less on their platform.

When you combine that news with the recent release of Steam’s Big Picture mode (which transforms your Steam library into a gamepad-friendly console interface), it becomes very apparent that there is an ever-widening gap between what the current core game consumer looks like and the fronts that Microsoft is fighting on. Maybe it’s smart for them to just ignore Steam and mobile, and Games for Windows Live for the 10th time; just focus on making Windows 8 into a walled garden and wait for the money to grow within it.

But, if natural consumer choice is preserved, I think more folks would go over to the Origin swamp than the Windows Live/8/Metro Game Garden or however it will be monickered. It seems Big Picture Mode couldn’t have come at a more opportune time, then. And with OnLive’s trouble and this Agawi cloud-based competitor binding itself to Windows 8 + Azure, the PC gaming world will almost certainly look a lot different in another 3 years when the next consoles are rumored to be sold.

And the bridge from now til then is paved with respect for independent devs. I really believe that, not because people don’t want to pay for AAA titles (although, they are willing to pay less now than they were 15 years ago). But, because indie devs bring life to stagnant formulas and they do it for a relatively low cost.

Consumer lock-in is another reason. Once you have your first 50 games tied to a service, and the service isn’t awful, you tend to want to continue investing into that same service.  It doesn’t really matter if those first 50 games were 20% AAA and 80% short indie games, it still looks to me like there are a lot of material goods in my list.

I’m going to start using indie love as a yardstick for digital game service respect from now on. Consider doing the same.

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Amnesia developer on piracy: “screw it”

Isn’t this really the only practical stance to take towards piracy?

We sold some games to customers, we built a tribe, and the pirates don’t get counted as something that deserves our attention.

Greenlight’s asking for money… then giving it to a charity. 

Indie game developers are balking at the audacity of Steam asking for money for putting up a project submission… so that the developers can ask for money from the customers.

If the money Steam is charging isn’t a profit, what is it? It’s for the permission to grasp a hold of an audience. A discerning, money-waving audience with limited time to pore over 500 Half Life 3 joke game submissions or 1,000 ideas without enough promise to convince the author to develop it.

And let’s define what we mean by art. Nobody is stopping you from making your video game as art project for free on a barebone computer. But you still need to earn the right to get it in front of an audience. Video games are to traditional arts like painting and singing as water polo or the biathalon is to traditional sports like running. You don’t exactly stumble into it.

Honestly, if the $100 is making or breaking you as a developer, I don’t want you hanging your life upon whether or not it gets accepted into Steam. I want you to succeed, but please go deliver pizza for a couple of months to build up a reserve. 

Remember, the average small business is started with $5,000 in capital. Consider that, if you got this far on less than $100 invested, you are way below the average. So, take a moment, gratefully reflect on how blessed you were to develop a prototype game for less than a Benjamin, and fork over the submission fee. Oh, and then work tirelessly promoting your thing every waking moment.

I’ve discussed Steam Greenlight’s potential to become a gameable platform a couple of times. But that was all theory. Now, with the aptly-named Green Light Bundle we get to see the first real concerted effort to get games into the Steam ecosystem. Assuming this works, we’ll probably see many more of these bundles later. But, that’s not a bad thing, in this case.

For those who are not aware, indie bundles have become an effective marketing tool for small game (or music, etc) developers who might otherwise have a tough time finding an audience. Most of them are “pay what you want” or pay some amount exponentially smaller than the sum of all the games’ suggested prices and get all of them. I think they are generally a good thing for indie developers and for gamers, but it’s questionable exactly how effective they are for games that seem to be more tag-a-longs to the more well-known titles.

There’s one critical aspect of the indie bundle that can make or break its success, and that is Steam activation. For many PC gamers in recent years, Steam has become their de facto game collection. That means, if I buy your game and I don’t get it on Steam, even though I have access to DRM-free copies, I won’t play it. It’s almost worse for me to own a game off Steam, because I feel that I’ll eventually end up paying for it again once it releases onto Steam anyway.

The ethics of that effective monopoly aside, suffice it to say, “Steam activation matters.” Some bundles get no love because the games aren’t on Steam (yet, or may never be). The Green Light bundle finds a clever loophole here and incents would-be bundle snatchers to, not only pay for the bundle, but then put their voting-money where their money-mouth is. They don’t explicitly command anybody to vote for a bundle in exchange for some benefit (which is what my gameability concerns revolved around), but the entire bundle is set up for the sole purpose of getting potential Greenlight voters to get some hands-on time with the game and nudge them in the direction of the voting page.

I’m not personally familiar with any of the games in this bundle except for Muffin Knight (which felt like a Super Crate Box knock-off when I tried it on my Android phone a while back). In fact, most of the games seem to be known solely as smartphone game ports. But, smartphone game ports that are well-done and priced adequately are not clogging up the Steam catalog. And holding Steam activation above the head of someone who has already paid a little bit for the game so long as they upvote it doesn’t mean a lot to very many people. So, it’s not quite the Farmville problem I fretted about so long ago.

I hope we see a lot more Greenlight ideas like this. The next bundle will show what type of games tend to desire inclusion in the Green Light Bundle. I think we’re all hoping for some hidden gems with clever spins on how to capture the Greenlight audience’s attention.

I’m actually glad that almost anybody that has an opinion on the Emily White/David Lowery digital music controversy has already talked, because now I know there’s nothing left for me to say about it. So I’m gonna talk about video games some more.

Rock Paper Shotgun weighed in on the new Kickstarter Stats page to discuss why the Games category has only 33% success rate. This isn’t a shock to anyone, I think. Kickstarter isn’t magic. And if most games were successfully funded by the crowds, I think it’s safe to say that something about the balance of nature has gone terribly wrong. 

On the heels of his own Kickstarter’s instant success, Seth Godin was quick to reinforce that his numerous calls for tribe building and permission are the only real magic part of a successful Kickstarter campaign. The ease of participating with the Kickstarter site is just one less thing for the ponderous tribe maker to worry about.

In light of the Games category and the permission of developers to market to their tribe, I think 33% is a pretty great success rate, really. Lots of game developers would love to have engaged their fans to the point that full 1 out of 3 of them would pro-actively pledge money to support their next project. I dare say that the big publishers wouldn’t bet on that community support to game concepts nearly as much as the target audience apparently will.

So, whither music? What music? Oh, you mean the category with the 54% success rate? The third highest success rate on the site? The one with the second highest total dollars overall?

There are an infinite number of ways to draw engagement from your audience, and it doesn’t have to be T-shirt (or even Kickstarter, or whatever comes next). But it also doesn’t have to be the old labels, or the old royalties, or the old copyrights.

In fact, arguing about where the old stuff is going just gets in the way of finding where the new stuff is taking us. The independent games developers have a lot more potentially-wasted resources on the line than an independent musician does (it’s a lot less feasible to do a game all by yourself), but somehow they are finding ways to weigh the risks (such as rampant piracy and short lifespans) versus the rewards (both monetary and intrinsic).

Game makers can teach music makers quite a lot, I think, because video games have been the canaries in the digital distribution coal mine. A lot of the thorny paths are forgotten and there are still some new experiments being learned from. But ease of access and ubiquitous availability seems to be an important part of their success so far. Nobody says it’s perfect or even fair, but building the tribe is enjoyable and profitable enough that even the moderately successful game devs are sticking with it.

And despite piracy concerns from the big boy publishers, DRM-free indie games seem to be paying their makers fairly well. So the long term benefactors are not Google and not the filesharing sites, it is the people on both ends of the transaction who voluntarily enter into the turbulent sea fully aware of the storminess of it… and they keep going forward.

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