Facebook Indie Games

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.
   

HECTOR: Badge of Carnage is a true iPhone game success story. A first time release that's had great sales and strong reviews, all at a relatively high price.

GAMESBrief has a guest post from the man behind it exploring how such success was achieved.

What are the real lessons here?

1. Aim for a ready-made, passionate, and hungry niche. In Hector's case, graphic adventure fans. Adventure gamers know what they like, and are not afraid to tell each other about it. That's what you need if you want word of mouth marketing.
2. If you can't go IAP, find another way to get more than one sale from each customer. In Hector's case, episodes.
3. Make the tone of your game part of your marketing. Game designers talk about how a game is a "magic circle". If your marketing can bring people into that circle, so much the better.

This is the best guest post Nicholas Lovell has ever found for his GAMESBrief site.

With hats off to @johnwfisherii for twitting this.

Stick Run is a simple Facebook game reminiscent of Canabalt, but with most of the things that make Canabalt brilliant left out: the graphics are basic, there is little atmosphere, and you run at a constant speed rather than getting faster.

It's also delivering 300k+ DAU for its developer, which must be raking in enough money to keep him comfortable.

The game follows many of the rules I set out for Facebook action games last year: high scores, luck, no levels, unlockables. It isn't against the clock but each game is short enough that if anything a quick go of Stick Run will take less time than a game of Bejeweled Blitz. For an indy developer focusing on making the game fit the expectations of the platform is more important than crafting a really polished, deep game.

Source: Play This Thing!