Facebook Indie Games

Old tech, not interesting. Don't build a brand on it.

Google is fumbling. Google+ is a failed attempt to compete with Facebook and Twitter. Google Drive is a backwards step. Google Play is a nonsense.

It's a pity, because what we need is a platform on which businesses and individuals can build the open social web, just as Google's combination of search, AdSense, video hosting, and analytics enabled us all to build the open content web over the past 15 years. It's increasingly obvious that Google is not going to provide it.

To reach the same number of active users, a developer has to contend with:

1. Almost twice as many key screen resolutions
2. Twice as many OS versions
3. 10x as many phone models
4. 75% less revenue per user
5. 10x as many distribution channels
6. A fragmented ecosystem

Google Play will at best increase revenue per user and may unify distribution channels a bit. But is that enough to overcome Android's major weaknesses as an app distribution platform?

Probably not, which is why we must pin our hopes on Google's recent hints about a unified Google Games platform that brings together social, web, and Android games into one cross platform soup. This is the biggest chance they have in leap frogging iOS to 10x the user base, which will be enough to make any developer overlook a few of Android's painful irritations.

Before you call your lawyer or whip up the tide of online vitriol, consider some other strategies.

1. Position your game as "the game that inspired..."
   Tarantino films are notorious for assembling ideas from other films, TV shows, and creating a pop culture collage of obscure music. Along the way he's turned little known movies, tunes, and artists into cult classics. A big name clone of your game can do that too. Most people who have heard of Crush the Castle heard of it as "the game that inspired Angry Birds". And I'd have never heard of the Vaselines if Nirvana hadn't covered several of their songs.
   
2. Emphasize the differences, not the similarities.
   Your game will do some things differently from the clone. Emphasize the differences, because some people will prefer the way you do it, some people won't. What does Tiny Tower have that Dream Heights doesn't? TELL EVERYONE. If 10% of Zynga players decide they prefer pixel graphics to childish cartoons, Nimblebit gets a big win. But if Nimblebit makes a point of how both games are the same (except one is from a huge brand and has the same graphical style as the most played games in the world), there's no reason for Dream Heights players to explore the alternative.
   
3. Clone back.
   If the clone is more successful than the original then be honest with yourself: it's probably more popular because there's some things about it that's more appealing. Look carefully at the clone game and decide if there's anything you can copy back to your game. Then do it. Pinkass made a fair point that while Zynga may copy game play innovations from indies, indie devs are now selectively copying their monetization and social play innovations. That's the way this merry go round is going to work.
   
4. Take it to a VC.
   Zynga will beat Nimblebit because it has lots of capital. Nimblebit has proven they're a hot property that can deliver great games. If they want to take the fight to Zynga, they need a warchest. Or if you want to stay "nimble", invest in releasing more innovative games and maximizing profit between their game's launch and the launch of the inevitable clone.
5. Cloning is piracy. Ignore it.
   Maybe cloning is like piracy: it goes on but doesn't take people away from your game as much as you'd think. It might even act as free advertising. Is it really stealing if you lose nothing but your pride?
   

Cloners are going to keep on cloning. If you have a really successful indie game then bigger and better capitalized companies will copy it, and copy it well. You need a strategy that can thrive through the cloning experience.

Just answer these four questions about your players and your game. Write them down somewhere, expand them over time. Keep it simple but take it seriously.

1. How do they find it?

What's going to get your players aware of your game in the first place? Are the techniques you have powerful enough to alert enough potential players about your game?

Most people need to hear about something several times before they try it, so watch out!

2. Why do they try it?

What's going to get somebody who hears about your game to download it to their device, try it out on Kongregate, or give it permission on Facebook? Are there enough reasons to convince somebody who hears about your game that they really should try it out? Is there anything that will make them feel confused or doubtful about it?

3. Why do they stick at it?

After they've tried it, what's going to keep them coming back for a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th play? "It's fun" on its own is not enough. There are millions other fun things people could do instead of revisiting your game. Make sure they're not doing them.

4. Why do they buy it?

What's going to motivate them to switch from Lite to Full, or to make purchases inside your freemium game? How can you make sure there's enough resistance in the free version that they are motivated to buy, but not so much that they stay with free for ever?

Answering these 4 questions is not the most thorough marketing plan in the world. But plenty of game developers don't seem to even answer these simple questions properly. Now you have a head start on them.

He's not as young as you'd expect. His background isn't really in games (surprise surprise). And he's one hell of a focused individual.

When the Support.com board brought in former Hewlett- Packard Co. (HPQ) executive Radha Basu as the new CEO, Pincus asked engineers to work on weekends so he could give them projects not authorized by Basu, said one of the people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named.

After Support.com, Pincus focused on investing in new startups, including Brightmail Inc., Napster Inc. and Friendster Inc. In 2000, he bought Eric Schmidt’s airplane, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, and devoted more time to his hobby of flying. He also invested in a movie, 2001’s “Kissing Jessica Stein,” which grossed more than $7 million on a $1 million budget, according to the Internet Movie Database.

Pincus made an early bet on the social-networking craze when he started Tribe Networks Inc. in 2003. Though the company was sold to Cisco Systems Inc. in 2007 before gaining wide popularity, it helped established Pincus as a predictor of technology trends, said Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.com Inc.

The demographic most addicted to Zynga games is also most likely to support charity. So why not make charitable games? Sojo can't see any good reason why not and is launching WeTopia today.

One important element is using games to make tragic news stories stick around longer. News has to be new, but games can build awareness over a longer period:

Sojo Studios founder Lincoln Brown first became inspired to create a game with a mission after noticing that the media coverage of Haiti’s devastating earthquake died down just a few months after the tragedy. That lack of coverage corresponded with a drop in giving to the cause. Brown thought: "There had to be a way to create better giving experiences."

It all makes a lot of sense: virtual gifts are the perfect match for charity gifts (like the middle class white man my goat got for Christmas last year.)

Link: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678868/wetopia-what-would-happen-if-zynga-made-games-for-good

BBC News reports new urinal games that you control by aiming for different parts of the bowl.

Unfortunately it doesn't support a multiplayer "who can get highest" competition.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15923438

(It runs Windows 7, of course.)

Businessweek reports growing pains at Zynga -- the "thrill is gone" from virtual worlds. Mafia Wars 2 bombed, for example:

Mafia Wars 2 had all the makings of a blockbuster. Its development team, which grew to 80 people, worked for nearly a year on the game, heralded in an October media launch at the company’s new headquarters. (The lobby contains a 1970s Winnebago and a tunnel lit with color-pulsing LED tubes.) The game peaked at more than 2.5 million daily active users in October. Since early November, the virtual organized crime adventure has shed more than 900,000 players, according to research firm AppData.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/in-some-virtual-worlds-the-thrill-is-gone-11232011.html

Which means the thrill of working for company that had a license to print money and was single-handedly buildling the future is also gone. Staff are starting to revolt at the companies vicious hiring and firing practices:

Led by the hard-charging Mr. Pincus, the company operates like a federation of city-states, with autonomous teams for each game, like FarmVille and CityVille. At times, it can be a messy and ruthless war. Employees log long hours, managers relentlessly track progress, and the weak links are demoted or let go.

But that culture, which has been at the root of Zynga’s success, could become a serious liability, warn several former senior employees who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals.

As the discord increases, the situation may jeopardize the company’s ability to retain top talent at a time when Silicon Valley start-ups are fiercely jockeying for the best executives and engineers. It could also hamper deal-making, a critical growth engine for Zynga, which has spent about $119 million on acquisitions in the last two years.

(bonus tidbit: PopCap turned down a buy out from Zynga because of the company's culture, then went on to accept a buy out from EA!)

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/zyngas-tough-culture-risks-a-talent-drain/

FBIndie was set up with the mission to "steal Farmville's thunder one player at a time"...

Guy Kawasaki states as one of his 11 laws of bootstrapping:

Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: “There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to install our satellite radio systems. That's 1.5 million systems in the first year.” The bottom-up forecast goes like this: “We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.

How does this apply to game studios?

In a top down model you start with the whole market -- a very big number -- and work down from there. In a bottom up model you start with yourself, and work up.

If your forecasts start out using assumptions or data like:

1. There are over 200,000,000 iOS devices in existence.
2. The top Facebook games attract up to 100,000,000 players.
3. Minecraft has made more money than Dr Evil would dare ask for

Bottom up means you start with your situation and capabilities -- pretty small numbers, I bet -- and work upwards to hopefully a decent number. You might look at all the options you have to drive views to your game's web or app store page, and make assumptions about how many visits you can deliver through various channels. And then think about how likely each view is to convert:

1. We have 2,000 followers on Twitter. Let's aim to get 50% of them to view the game, with 10% of them converting to a sale. That's 100 copies.
2. Our web site gets 500 views per day. Let's put an ad on each page. We might get 20% of visits to click the ad, and 10% of those to buy. That's 10 copies per day.
3. If we get featured by Apple we can expect sales of ~500 per day for a week.
4. We'll assume we get positive reviews on 3 fairly popular review sites. Let's assume 10,000 people read those reviews, and 1% of them go ahead and buy. That's 100 more copies.