Video Games as Astroturfing
Rachel Maddow covers the controversy over using virtual offers as a political tactic:
She does an excellent job of breaking down the economics.
An Eightfold Path for Social Game Development
Someone asked about what it takes to create a social game. This is incredibly stripped down, but here is my basic formula I use with my clients:
1) Figure out what your fundamental gameplay dynamic is going to be as early as possible. IE, what is it the fundamental unit of play that the user is actually going to be doing (including the physical button/key presses)?
2) Define and integrate your social model and your monetization model.
3) Express your concept in wireframes.
4) Determine the minimum viable level of product you will need for launch.
5) Determine the size of your post-launch including your development window, goals, and top priorities.
6) Execute on development.
7) Launch.
8) Begin to execute on your post-launch goals. These will change based on metrics and user requests.
Completing some later steps will often send you back to step one. Don’t be afraid to loop.
Zynga gets shut down- Updated
After writing a few days ago that I felt that Michael Arrington had unfairly targeted developers as being culpable for scam advertising offers, Zynga goes ahead and proves me wrong by allegedly blocking the IP addresses of Facebook employees from seeing certain ads, and getting Fishville banned in the process.
That’s led to Facebook taking action– in this case, temporarily shutting down the Fishville application, which would seem to be a just punishment if the allegations turn out to be true.
Obviously, this isn’t over yet.
UPDATE: Zynga now says they’re pulling all offers from their games.
Bioware tries a new tactic with Dragon Age DLC. Penny Arcade Notices.
So, it seems that Dragon Age has integrated virtual DLC directly into the game, allowing players to purchase extra quest lines as an integrated part of their adventure.
It’s an interesting tactic, and one that Penny Arcade has seen fit to comment on in the form of a comic:
There’s an interesting point being made in the last panel; The player isn’t going to be interested in simply doing more of what they’ve already paid for. What makes the content valuable is what distinguishes it from what they already have.
Kit Kat makes a real Virtual Goods
If you want to understand the fundamentals of how a functions gift-giving economy works, taking a closer look at this article on the Japanese candy market may give you some insight into how people relate to objects differently when they’re given a different context.
Fiorella says companies want to keep spending habits up by introducing unusual flavors and giving consumers reasons to buy. Many of the snacks only sell for a limited time or in specific regions. That caters to Japan’s “omiage” or gift-giving culture where consumers are expected to bring back something unique for friends and colleagues when they travel. For example the cherry blossom flavored Kit Kat is only sold in the spring. The potato Kit Kat was only sold in the country’s northern Hokkaido region, an area known for spuds. A nestle spokesman says the limited edition flavors stay on store shelves for average of two months before they’re replaced with new ones. Fiorella says the marketing cycle in Japan is unlike anything in the US.
But similar to something else…
In a Japanese market that is crowded with many choices, Nestlé has managed to carve out a niche for themselves by understanding that the experience of buying a candy is about more than just purchasing a bar of chocolate. Sure, it’s always great to add more flavors, but what’s going on here is more than that. In this case the company is creating a direct response to the desires of their customers, and giving them a reason to use the product in an entirely new way. They’ve turned it into something that can be considered a “good luck charm” by their customers, and fulfill a need that isn’t directly candy related.
Social Games are dangerous!
And so, once again, a few bad apples are used to blame an entire industry for being too addictive and too dangerous.
This time the man trotting out the moral panic is Michael Arrington, in this post condemning the offers system that games are using for monetization.
Any system with that many users is going to have scams showing up. The mobile phone industry is rife with them, but Arrington doesn’t seem to be *demanding* that the phone companies take care of the problem.
Here’s an example of where I think he crosses the line:
And some users aren’t dumb, either. For every user who gets tricked into some fake mobile subscription, there’s another who can beat the system. That’s where the legitimate advertisers, like Netflix and Blockbuster, get hit. Users sign up for a free trial with a credit card, get their game currency, then cancel the membership and start over. Netflix has a policy of only paying for a user once. But game developers use a complex set of partner chains to launder these leads and try to get them through for payment. Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads. Game developers, desperate to monetize, then search for ever more questionable offers to make up the difference. In the end, the decent advertisers are out, and only the worst of the worst remain.
Blaming the developers is ridiculous. There are quite a few aggregators integrating these services, and that’s how the majority of developers are making offers available. If there is “laundering” happening out there it would be nice if Arrington had provided actual examples of them occurring.
Telling the people who put these offer into these games that they need to pay attention to what’s happening would be useful. It would also be helpful to do so without pointing fingers and threatening the entire business model with extinction because it’s become large enough to actually have real-world problems. Success has its own responsibilities
Of course it makes sense to police those offers, but Arrington’s screeching histrionics and grandstanding are yet another in an endless series of moral panics that have been levied against the game industry since Laguardia took a sledge hammer to a pinball machine in the 1930s. In the end they’re far more about getting attention for the person making them then helping the “victims”.
“The Future of Games” is featured on SlideShare
The slides from my presentation at PAX are being featured on the front page of Slideshare today.
If you haven’t checked them out, go take a look.
The Future of Games
Below you’ll find the the slides from the talk I gave at the Penny Arcade Expo last week.
I really enjoyed being at the show and giving the talk. Thanks again to everyone who came out.
If you do have any thoughts or questions feel free to post them in the comments. I’m happy to discuss them.
Are VideoGames Dead?
Interesting series on whether videogames are “dying”.
What’s interesting is that I think there’s lots of interesting information here about what’s going on in the core business, and I think there’s a major shift coming in the business models as we head to the next generation.
I’m also wondering if the term “budget title” is being used as a derogatory term for casual and social.
Also interesting that discussion about the developer/publisher relationship.
Are Social Games like newspapers?
As I’ve been reading more and more about the collapse of print newspapers, and what the real business of print news was behind the articles, the parallels to Social Gaming are becoming more and more obvious.
One thing that’s important to remember as the industry pushes forward is that while the actual game is the most obvious content, it’s not necessarily your actual business. In the end what makes your money is the real business that you’re in, and we’re giving the content away.
Newspapers have, for the better part of the last century at least, been using news as an effective way to deliver ads into their reader’s homes. That’s not to say that the reporting isn’t a key feature of the user experience, but in this article on why newspapers are failing, there’s a very interesting point:
Remember “shoppers,” the poorly designed throwaway publications filled with tacky little ads? Daily newspapers are high-end shoppers. They spent a lot of money on original content to class up the operation and give people a reason to ask for the ads to be delivered. Long before the web displayed the power and leverage of critical mass, newspapers benefited from it; once you got the franchise in your particular locale, you tried not to stir up trouble, because it just distracted you from time better spent cashing checks.
The newspapers had found that the could afford to lose money on distribution by making it up in ad-revenue, along with user subscriptions. Sound familiar?
Luckily for Social Games the user revenue portion of the model looks to be rapidly outpacing advertising as a key factor in monetization. That’s important because, like many things on the internet, the cost of generating a new, and more effectively targeted platform for advertising is so cheap that unless you can deliver a focused demographic in large numbers, ad revenue is always going to be minimal.
Games also have another advantage, which is that our relationship to our community is more explicit. News media is often disdainful of the fact that they were ever a “social media”. They think that they own their audience, and are pushing hard to get government to enforce what is, at it’s heart, a social relationship between the people who make media and the people who consume it. And once you think you’re speaking for your audience instead of to them, you’ve already begun to unravel the bond with your customer.
So why is gameplay imoportant? Because while gameplay may not be the core of your business, it is the heart of the relationship with your audience. The experience you are giving them is the reason that they engage with you each day, and are willing to give you their money.
And because we have such strong methods of tracking our users, we can more effectively streamline that relationship.
