Dear Duke Nukem: Compromise Is Part of the Process
There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the decade long debacle of Duke NukemForever, but the key one here, I think, is that any creative process is going to have elements of disappointment when you launch. Things you imagined would be better but aren’t, or ideas that you hoped would flourish but didn’t. But at some point you have to look at what you have, and try to make that great. Otherwise you’ll either end up making more, and more drastic, compromises then you ever expected, or not ever shipping at all.
Ironically, the end was within reach, even if Broussard couldn’t see it. Raphael van Lierop, who was hired in 2007 as a creative director, was given several pieces of the game to play. It took him about five hours. Broussard was stunned; he’d thought those levels would take half that time to get through. “You could see the gears turning, with him thinking, ‘Oh wow — maybe we’ve got more game than we think,’” says van Lierop. Broussard had been staring at the game for so long, he’d lost perspective.
Van Lierop was excited: From what he’d seen of it, Duke Nukem Forever was so well developed — and so graphically superior to any other game in production — that if 3D Realms pushed hard for a year, they could release it and “blow everyone out of the water.” No, no, Broussard replied. It was two years out. Van Lierop was stunned. “I thought, ‘Wow, how many times have you been here, near the finish line, and you thought you were way out?’”
A Vision for a Magazine on Digital Dveice
This technology doesn’t exist yet, but it’s good to see people are already thinking about the impact of the next generation of digital devices.
The good stuff starts at about 3 minutes in.
The first generation of digitized media tends to closely relate to our analog experiences, but quickly takes advantage of the flexibility of the virtual medium. Early word processors were much more like a typewriter, for instance, then the advanced editors we have today.
Why Zynga is worth $2.5 Billion
With their latest huge investor Zynga is now valued at somewhere around 2.5 billion dollars, give or take a billion (and who’s counting, right)?
As usual when these huge valuations come around, people tend to question whether or not the company is really worth it, especially when you consider they pulled off this kind of value in only 18 months.
But, as Venture Beat notes, this is all about the size of the audience. And let’s be honest here, games have never been this popular before. Even casual’s attempts to be mainstream meant titles only sold a couple of million at most.
Zynga has changed the game because they have done the single most important thing that you need to do in order to succeed online: They found the audience. Then they followed that up with a business model that works. It’s shown us an effective way to business in a world where the old media is still fighting their own biggest fans through draconian laws and DRM.
These are television numbers, and while there are many things that can (and probably will) go wrong as this business is further defined and consolidated, there is no doubt that things are different now then the were a year ago, and we won’t be going back.
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.