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Surviving as an Indie Game Developers – Monetization and Engagement

I’m starting to realize that one of the largest roadblocks to the growth and evolution of the gaming industry is the poor profitability of many experimental games. I realize that stories about the success of the indie game Braid and its game designer, Jonathon Blow, driving around in his crimson Tesla Roadster sound pretty lucrative and fantastic but the reality is that most indie game don’t make money.  In fact, according to a recent article on Fierce Developer, 97 percent of App Store revenues are taken in by only 20 percent of the iOS developers on the iTunes store. Half of the games on the iTunes store make less that $3000 in revenues. That is a sobering statistic that any indie game development shop should consider before they spend the next year living in a damp basement apartment.

There seem to be a number of reasons but a lot of it seems to due to increased competition and consolidation of the best companies. Basically if you start producing profitable games you’re likely to be purchased by one of the larger companies, keeping that 20 percent with a tight grasp on the top.

So, what do you do as an indie game company with a great idea? You need to have a monetization strategy in place before you even start to design. The number of players out there buying apps is dropping, there is a growing movement towards freemium models. It the dominant trend in game development at the moment with 9 out of 10 games are being distributed for free. You basically give your game away for free and hope that you’ve created a compelling enough experience that people will want to purchase items inside the game to improve their experience. Building this model into your game takes a careful consideration to see if it matches the design you’ve chosen and making changes, if necessary. There are also companies like GetJar who are building monetization and advertising services into their system for developers.  These kinds of tools warrant an examination. It is estimated that in-app purchases accounted for only $970 million in sales last year but they will grow to $5.6 billion by 2015.

Aside from creating a meaningful and amazing gaming experience, you next biggest challenge is figuring out how to make it profitable. Hopefully this post made those decisions a little easier.

 

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Big data analytics for video, mobile, and social game monetization

Although there is a lot of debate about how game design is growing and maturing, the business side of games is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

A recent article by Kimberly Chulis has identified a lot of the analytics that are being drawn from video game behaviour. Although this is mostly focused on monetization and marketing I think there are a lot of areas that are still open to further exploration, in fact I think there is a lot that hasn’t been examined yet.

 

Big data analytics for video, mobile, and social game monetization.

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70% of Organizations will have at least one “gamified” application by 2014

A report by Gartner is predicting that game mechanics in non-game environments are going to grow substantially in the next two years:

By 2014, more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one “gamified” application, according to Gartner, Inc. Analysts said that while the current success of gamification is largely driven by novelty and hype, gamification is positioned to become a highly significant trend over the next five years.

Gamification describes the broad trend of applying game mechanics to non-game environments to motivate people and change behavior.

“Gamification aims to inspire deeper, more engaged relationships and to change behavior, but it needs to be implemented thoughtfully,” said Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner. “Most attempts at gamification currently miss the mark, but successful and sustainable gamification can convert customers into fans, turn work into fun, or make learning a joy. The potential is enormous.”

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What If The Next Generation Outgrow Games Before We Do?

One of the most interesting findings from my PhD research had to do with the point in time when an individual started to take responsibility for their own personal growth. They began to look for the kind of meaningful experiences that would challenge them and help them evolve a more sophisticated worldview. This was often the part of the conversation when I would ask them about the future role of video games in their life. Their answer was usually “none”, they had outgrown games and most of them were around 20 years old. That’s why it is so interesting that a new book by Anna Anthropy called “Rise of the Video Game Zinesters”  comes out at an interesting time. There is a good article about the book and Jade Raymond of UbiSoft here:

Maybe video games are stupid. Maybe they’re junk or trash or action movies, at best. Perhaps they are not at all making the world a better place.

And maybe it’s not an old person—some out of touch politician who once bumped into a Pong machine—who will declare this.

Maybe it will be someone young, someone who Occupied Wall Street or someone who is in the exact target market for big-budget video games—they’ll be over 17 and under 35 years of age; male; with money. Maybe that person will declare that video games are not worth their time. And maybe there will be people who agree with them.

Full Article…

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AI designs its own video game

Video games designed almost entirely by a computer program herald a new wave of AI creativity

IT IS never going to compete with the latest iteration of Call of Duty, but then Space Station Invaders is not your typical blockbuster video game. While modern shooters involve hundreds of programmers and cost millions of dollars, this new game is the handiwork of an AI called Angelina.

Software that generates video-game artwork, music or even whole levels is not new, but Angelina takes it a step further by creating a simple video game almost entirely from scratch. “It has only been very recently that we’ve asked ourselves, could you procedurally generate the whole thing?” says Michael Cook, a computer scientist at Imperial College London and creator of the game-designing AI system.

Angelina creates games using a technique known as cooperative co-evolution. The system separately designs different aspects, or species, of the game. In Space Station Invaders – in which players control a scientist who must fend off rogue robots and invading aliens to escape a space station – the species include the layout of each different level, enemy behaviour and the power-ups that give a player extra abilities. Angelina creates a level by randomly selecting from a list, then scattering enemies and power-ups throughout the level. Enemy movements and combat behaviours are also randomly selected from a list, while the effects of the power-ups are also random.

It then combines the species and simulates a human playing the game to see which designs lead to the most fun or interesting results. For example, levels that are initially hard to complete but get easier through clever use of power-ups are considered fun, while those that are impossible to complete are discarded. Angelina then cross-breeds and mutates the most successful members of each species to evolve a new generation, typically 400 times.

Combining these simple elements can produce surprisingly nuanced effects. For example, in one level of Space Station Invaders the player acquires a power-up that boosts their jump power but quickly discovers the added height still isn’t enough to reach the platforms directly above them. To proceed, they must travel to another part of the level. “That was a very precise design of those power-ups to make sure the player couldn’t get up too easily to the exit,” says Cook.

Angelina can’t yet build an entire game by itself as Cook must add in the graphics and sound effects, but even so the games can easily match the quality of some Facebook or smartphone games, with little human input. “In theory there is nothing to stop an artist sitting down with Angelina, creating a game every 12 hours and feeding that into the Apple App Store,” says Cook.

So should game designers be worried? “I like to think that Angelina won’t steal anyone’s job, I think it will actually be a really positive force for designers,” says Cook, suggesting that developers could use a system like Angelina as a collaborative tool for designing games. For example, a developer who creates a new power-up for a game could ask Angelina to design a level that would teach the player how to use their new ability.

“I like the idea of a conversation,” agrees Mark Nelson of the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, but he says a system like Angelina needs to be transparent so users can modify what it considers to be a good game, rather than just producing games at the push of a button. “Designers would find that annoying.”

Source: New Scientist

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Game Design and Worldview, Part II: The Burning Itch

I’ve covered the basics of worldview, it is a complex topic but I was as brief as possible. This post is a bit more about why it is relevant to game design. The simplest way to put it is that your worldview helps to filter information that comes to you every day. Your worldview is going to be the main tool you use to find the kinds of experiences that are going to fulfill your needs. In video games, your worldview is going to help you pick the game you want to play and make sense of that experience. For one group of gamers I came across in my research, the answer to which game they would play was simply, none.

The Research

One of the more interesting things to come out of my dissertation was a conclusion that there are some people looking for challenges to their beliefs. They are motivated to find those kinds of experiences that help them to grow. This might seem purely intellectual but there are many different kinds of intelligence. Social, emotional and intellectual intelligence are all valid targets for the kinds of dissonance that these people are seeking. They are looking for these kinds of experiences everywhere, in books, movies, television, whatever media they can find.

I haven’t included games in that list on purpose. Although game design is all about understanding the motivation behind your player and designing game challenges that can fulfill those motivations, these kinds of players weren’t finding those kinds of challenges in video games. In fact, most of them talked about leaving games behind as they just weren’t getting what they needed from gameplay anymore. They would still play occasionally with their friends as more of a social activity but games didn’t really interest them beyond that.

There are a lot of reasons for this switch. Much of it seems to be based on their lack of ability to find the right kind of game. Some of it is based on societal beliefs that games are a waste of time. With that belief in mind they simply aren’t looking very hard for a different kind of game. Sometimes they only saw games as the escape mechanism they had used through adolescence to survive. They didn’t even think that games were used for anything more than a temporary retreat from life. For many games were headed into the same kind of cultural ghetto as comic books, a shallow, one-dimensional experience that they would quickly dismiss. They have limited free time and they don’t want to waste it. They are going to use it to pursue the activities they see as most meaningful.

The Game

So the real question is if a different kind of game existed would they even play it? If there was something that could provide an experience would might lead to personal growth would it interest them? I’ve seen a lot of the advocational and serious games out there that are supposed to provide “meaningful” experiences for people. They get a lot of press but not a lot of players. They must be missing something in their design, or they were designing for the wrong people. Something didn’t quite click and to most people it was suspiciously like another offering of chocolate covered broccoli.

There are a couple of things standing in the way of commercial companies every publishing these kinds of games. One is that the worldview of the game is a reflection of the worldview of the game designer. It would take a designer with a pretty extensive understanding of personal epistemology to design a game that would address the needs of different worldviews. As far as I  know, there aren’t a lot of classes or books on the subject in the game design world. Perhaps they will eventually come. The second reason is that this is new and risky territory. Game companies exist to make money and taking risks on new ideas isn’t popular with the people who run those companies. Right now there are a lot of independent companies trying to be innovative but they aren’t getting rich and most people don’t even know their games exist.

So here comes the motication for some new experiments in game design. There are already a lot of people out there experiementing with game design. I’ll be talking to them about what motivates them and what they are discovering. The academic world often talks about this kind of creativity but they rarely seem to have the resources to actually build it. That means I’ll probably be talking to game designers and independent game companies. Eventually it will be time to take these ideas and create a design document for a new game. The next step will be building that game and getting it out there. It will need to be an agile development, getting as many interations out there as possible. I suspect a lot of mistakes will be made along the way and it will be important to learn from those mistakes quickly.

The Itch

We are all born with the burning itch of curiosity. It drove us ask questions and seek out new experiences. Sometimes we settle down and stop asking the questions because we think we have all the answers, or someone has told you they have all the answers. For the people that are still going, who are still driven to keep that curiousity alive, video games should be one of the most dynamic, vibrant parts of their lives. Games haven’t quite achieved that yet but perhaps it is time to think about who they will.

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Game Design and Worldview: Part I, Our Beliefs

What if a video game challenged your beliefs? It pushed back at you and told you that everything you’ve ever believed about the world might be wrong?

Would you play it?

As we get older we have more and more invested in our personal beliefs. They define us and help direct us as we make daily decisions about life. For many people, questioning those beliefs is stressful. Most people already have enough stress in their life so they aren’t out looking to create more of it. This avoidance makes them resistant to ever changing their beliefs. We’re good at ignoring things that challenge us. In psychology it is a phenomena confirmation bias. It lets us conveniently to see things as we want them to be, rather than as they are. It provides a lot of great material when we want to talk about the quirks of the human condition. Writers write about it, psychologist study it and daytime television makes a living on it. The question is, can we make video games that addresses those beliefs, allowing people to explore their beliefs and then consciously think about it? Well, from a game design perspective I think it is possible, the challenge is actually building something that people would want to play.

Our Beliefs

There are a few places that people tend to settle in their beliefs.The simplest way to approach life is reduce things to a black and white perspective, there is always a right and a wrong and that is it. Why torture yourself by thinking about gray areas and the complexity created by different situations or contexts? You’d be in good company as about 45% of people tend to think this way.

Not everyone believes in absolutes though. About 40% of people believe that there is no right answer. They’re convinced that everything is relative and that all knowledge is really just an opinion. This means that whatever they believe is pretty much as valid as anyone else’s opinion.

There are a small number of people, about 15%, who tend to question their beliefs all the time. They’re invested in evaluating new things, even if that might challenge their beliefs on a regular basis. This is because they believe that knowledge needs to be constantly challenged. In addressing these challenges they feel that they can grow intellectually and personally. These people might sound like pure scientists but it isn’t just science that gets challenged. It is also ethics, morals, philosophy and just about anything that is based on knowledge of some kind.

It Matters

You might wonder why it really matters? If people view the world in a certain way it is just a personal choice, right? Well, it is actually becoming more and more of an issue. We live in a world where our success is increasingly become based on a more sophisticated approach to thinking. Technology is creating a knowledge economy where we need to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity almost daily. Understanding how to deal with change is going to have a big impact on our success in the world.

Next: How this relates to video games and game design: The Burning Itch

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The Art of Outgrowing Video Games

There is an upcoming exhibition, The Art of Video Games, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibit explores the evolution of video games as an artistic medium over the past 40 years. The winners were voted on by the public and the result was 80 games that were divided into era, game type and platform. The list can be viewed here.

As I looked through the list of winners I saw the progression from simple, abstract games to increasingly sophisticated visuals. This seems consistent with the criteria that were used to choose and score the games. These criteria focused on visual effects, creative use of technologies and work from influential artists and designers. Although this list of attributes created an interesting selection of games, I’m going to be more interested in the GameFest Event that will be run March 16-18. I see from the schedule that some of the panel discussions will get into the future of video games. Of the many possible topics about the future of video games, art and video games is one of the most contentious. A number of respected people don’t even think the two are compatible. Roger Ebert’s Video games can never be art is perhaps the most well known. The main belief is that games lack a convincing definition of how they represent art and at the most they are decorative rather than artistic. Although he later went on to regret ever making the statement as he didn’t even play video games (See Okay, kids, play on my lawn). I see the Kellee Santiago is on one of the panels and she has debated Ebert on this topic. I’m looking forward to her panel’s discussion about the future of video games. It would be interesting if they decide to focus on going beyond the criteria that were used to create the exhibit in the first place.

Spectacular visual effects and great concept art have not pushed games into the realm of fine art, at least for most people. This may be a matter of maturity, video games are still quite young. It may also be that we’re not having the right conversations because our worldview is so focused on the technological and programmatic side of video games. The growth of games may come from the expansion of our ontology, or vocabulary, that will allow us to start having the expanded conversations we need to being designing something different. My own person interest in this comes from my dissertation research. About 20% of my research subjects believed that they were outgrowing video games. They had reached a point where they were looking for something more from games and they couldn’t find it. They weren’t just making these demands of video games as they expected more challenging and thought prov0king experiences from every part of their life. They could find those kinds of experiences in literature, film and art but they weren’t able to find the same kinds of experiences that “stretched” them in video games. I think understanding how art and video games can become more synonymous is going to be one of the things that keeps those gamers from leaving games behind as they grow up and move onto bigger things in life. I truly believe that the talent in the video game industry can begin to develop those kinds of experiences. It isn’t likely to occur right away though, it will probably happen one conversation at a time.