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Category: Business

Blue and red Oceans

Published by Paolo on 29/10/2024

For me, game genres are not markets. For example, there is no “merge games market”. There are “merge games” in the “mobile market”.

Every time I see a team created like this:

  • someone believes that a genre has formed a market (on the last sad news you can find a lot of “hero shooters”)
  • hires talents who already work in that “market”, also if they would enjoy better another kind of game, in some case
  • the offer is attractive and the project is new, easy to convince the bored employee

in 3-5-7 years everything gets shut down without results. Surprise, there was no market at all.

When do I see that things work?

  • a group of enthusiasts of a genre get together to explore it
  • the team (including marketers) engages for real with the players
  • concrete and measurable experiments are done to define a vision well
  • after years of effort, they publish the game.

In this case, the probability of success increases. Even if the timing is somewhat unpredictable (never seen a success in less than 7-10 years, in mobile f2p).

Games please our entertainment needs uniquely.

  • People play Royal Match to relax, brain train, tournaments, curiosity… Not because they want to “play a match-3 game”.
  • millions are playing Metaphor: ReFantazio because of the story, map revealing, and challenge with combat… not because it’s a modern JRPG.

The fact that a specific game gets massive doesn’t mean we have a new market around its genre.

This means it has found its audience in the market, which is different!

Playing with my Dreamcast

Published by Paolo on 12/10/2024

Sometimes I dust off my old Dreamcast, connect it, and replay Crazy Taxi, Soulcalibur, Frame Gride, and Chu-chu Rocket. I feel like they are gifts that I sent to myself from the past.

Before, the support contained the entire game, not just a license. You bought it and they lasted “forever”.

The market has evolved, and commercial expectations have changed. In the last generations, you can play a game you bought until it is removed. There are many reasons for this, but in the channels I follow to get information I often read the frustration of many people. Games are perceived as something expensive (it is not true, they are not) and uncertain. You buy the license, but you do not know if it will last.

Game-as-a-service has added limitations on top of that for this specific audience: they are always connected games, potentially infinite.

In summary:
– it is not clear whether the game belongs to you or not
– it is not clear how long you will have access when you buy it
– it is not clear why you have to wait for connections to servers and login to external services
– it is not clear who’s this guy on the other side playing with me and what are his real intentions
– it is not clear if and when you can beat the game
– it is not clear what will happen if you miss some event

In this, frankly, I prefer the old style, where the only thing that was not clear was how the game itself worked. Onboarding to games has improved a lot, but before you just had to press a button and you were in a few seconds.

Not anymore. Today, pressing a button makes us feel a bit spied on by systems that want to figure out how to get more money out of us.
It is very true that the industry has matured, that it employs many more people, and that these are increasingly sophisticated games. However, the player experience for this specific audience (which is a big audience) has worsened in many ways.

And I see a business opportunity there.

Every game for itself

Published by Paolo on 09/10/2024

Reading the terrible news about a company that is praised in the industry, I think we are approaching one of the worst moments in the industry. I am talking about Roblox, of course.

The feeling I have is the domino effect, which will spread especially in businesses that are supported by attention.

We have all played that game that makes us think “but how can this game be so successful?“

Well, often it is because the numbers are rigged and the players are not real people, but machines. New technologies only make this situation worse. I am afraid that many CEOs are playing the wrong game here. Faking the numbers, looking for the short term, that is the result.

It’s sad, but it’s good for the future of the industry in my opinion. We need some people out.

I went to IndieDevDay24

Published by Paolo on 30/09/2024

I was at IndieDevDay24 and I came with good insight. Only one selfie, this is me waiting for a free piñacolada.


Game development is getting faster thanks to growing technologies.

I was impressed by an overview of Construct that a nice guy gave me. You can make a prototype on the web as quickly as editing a video for TikTok.

Instant games combined with live elements can bring audience to small creators.

Another thing, you will read everywhere that tens of thousands games are published every year on Steam and that the market is overcrowded.

But then you meet people doing games for Steam and you discover that a huge portion of them made their plans on the concept of “hope”. They hope to find a publisher, hope to finish the project, and hope it will work.

Hope is not a good strategy. I get the beauty of tackling game development as a liberal discipline, without servile constraint. And I love it, but you should make a discerned choice.

Speaking of which, the best emotion for me is to meet former students. They always call me loudly, they make me sit and play their games. They take notes on my comments. I love to teach, also if there is a bureaucratic wall around teaching that pushes me away from it. But I always try to come back in some way.

You can control your development time and your budget. You can design good games around that. Game design is removing things!

Tens of thousands publish every year on Steam, but few take care of these things.

There is still much space for indie games, market saturation is just a Chimera.

3%

Published by Paolo on 13/09/2024

To understand the situation in which we are in the video game industry, I propose to make a parallel with the downfall of rock music.

  • In the late 90s, in the USA, a legislative change allowed large corporations to decide on radio programming.
  • After years of glory and the climax of Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, music production became homogeneous because a few influential producers controlled the sound.
  • Managers began to exploit budgets to their advantage, driving costs skyrocketing and leaving very little to the artists.
  • Napster arrived and music consumption changed radically. The greatest impact was on record sales.
  • The collective experience of enjoying music diminished, given the little appeal of the bands in circulation. Everyone wanted to produce predictable and already-heard sounds, like those of Nickelback.

Consolidation led to a loss of diversity and originality in rock music. Barriers were created for capable artists by producers interested in the short term. The arrival of Napster led to fewer record sales and also to more isolation in listening to music. Before you went to the store to chat, now you were alone casually looking for something to listen. The experience of listening to rock became fleeting and fragmented.

Today new platforms allow rock artists to find and cultivate their audience. This suggests the potential for a new era of creativity, which will probably not reach the ancient glories.

I want to leave every parallelism open to your interpretation today.

Mine is certainly too biased.

Have a great weekend!

My doubts on current leaders

Published by Paolo on 11/09/2024

The ex-president of SONY Computer Entertainment Europe, Chris Deering declared on a podcast that “if money isn’t coming in from consumers on the last game, it’s going to be hard justifying spending money for the next.”

And I agree with that. But after watching the presentation of PS5 PRO yesterday, featuring games as old as The Last of Us 2 (2020, 4 years old) to show the power of a brand new thing I have serious doubts about this kind of leadership.

Yeah, ok, he WAS a president. Still, he has influence somehow.

A team’s ability to create hit games improves over time. The more a team works together, the higher the chances they will make something better. I have 2 questions:

  • If you hire and fire that easily, how can you hope to get better games over time?
  • If you have worse games how will you sell more expensive consoles?

Blue and red

Published by Paolo on 10/09/2024

Every business owner I engaged with in the last 5 years wanted to find a blue ocean. If you manage to find a blue ocean, they said, you can eventually make it. If you work in a red ocean, instead, is too risky.

But then I look at the history of every successful game out there, and also every successful product. I see that they didn’t find any ocean. They found a niche. And they found them also in red oceans.

An ocean is a deep, dark liquid full of mysteries. A niche is a calm, safe place made out with people. Isn’t that easier?

Strong niche

Published by Paolo on 05/09/2024

There is something in common among Minecraft, Fortnite, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Helldivers 2. They all started from a strong niche.

  • Minecraft was a solo project of a developer willing to make something alone. Notch then found his niche thanks to YouTube.
  • Fortnite started like a PvE project in an internal game jam. Something small that found the first formula with the niche that liked both games like Minecraft and shooters.
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 is the 3rd episode of a game created by a company founded by 2 doctors, willing to make something for the niche of D&D role players.
  • Helldivers 2 is the second episode of Helldivers, a shooter with few mechanics very popular among a small niche.

Finding a strong niche is the first step to massive success. Always. That’s also why publishers are investing so heavily in remakes. Remakes are reworks on something that found a niche, they are more probably be interesting for a wider audience.

How do you know if you found a strong niche? There are many ways, in F2P you should measure the % of regulars, people that come play the game every single day. That’s the best indicator that the niche you found is truly interested in the game.

They should give the game for free

Published by Paolo on 04/09/2024

Wicked problems have nuances. How to get people’s attention and understand their motivation to play a certain game.

“The market is oversaturated“, yet I don’t have new games that I am hyped for right now… So the market is saturated for who, specifically?

Creating good free-to-play games means having a game with the biggest spend depth possible. Or that the game is so massive that sustains itself on (truly) micro-transactions. You either make a Witheout Survival or a Candy Crush Saga.

The latter is complicated nowadays because people learn and the market evolves. What had value before is not the same as today. People discovering casual games on a Facebook invitation are not the same as people who decide to install a game after watching a YouTube interstitial today.

That is why modern casual games (that work) rely a lot on ads. Their business is with ad networks, more than players’ wallets. And that is a complicated and also shady business, are you sure that your team is ready for that?

As I said, on the other end we have games with a big spend depth. These games are much more deep and complicated. They manage to create a gamified society, by pushing for regulars: players that play every single day. That’s the single most important KPI of all, if you ask me. In that case, and only in that case, the wealthier cohorts decide to spend high. And that makes your business grow for real.

Making free-to-play games is like making luxury goods. You should aim to the rich, if you want to have more chances. And to do that, you need a strong service.

When we give something for free, time becomes the currency with which people decide. It’s not just “give them for free, otherwise, they will not come“. If you are already thinking like that, you are on the wrong track: you are not believing in your own game.

You need to build something that makes you think “This is an incredibly amazing game, people will play this every day!“. And then, if you’re lucky, you will have a TOP Grossing game with high concurrency.