I have hired a concept artist to help me with keyart and logo design, then I made this onepager to introduce the game to potential publishers.
Blog on game design and empathy
Category: Business
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!
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?
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?
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.
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.
“I sit here
drunk now.
I am
a series of
small victories
and large defeats
and I am as
amazed
as any other
that
I have gotten
from there to
here
without committing murder
or being
murdered;
without
having ended up in the
madhouse.as I drink alone
again tonight
my soul despite all the past
agony
thanks all the gods
who were not
there
for me
then.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
The Concord game is out and it looks like a failure. People have worked for 8 years to something that will be shut down in the next few months. 8 years ago, the Overwatch fever brought many companies to invest in this new genre. We are seeing new games with Marvel and Star Wars IPs coming out these days.
The developers have accumulated experience and developed a compromise towards their colleagues over the past 8 years. They made something beautiful. The game is great, but its personality is not in line with the market right now. You can still see beauty, experience, and design.
Can we consider that their job has gone down the drain? It depends on how you see your work. If you are in the “American dream” of making lots of money and success in a few time, maybe yes. Maybe you just lost your time with a failure.
They have worked for 8 years together with other experts. They are more savvy now. Next projects will be benefit from all this. Maybe someone will go and build something different, something new.
The time we invest into our craft is never lost.
I am following a couple of projects lately that are tackling F2P that in my humble opinion is completely wrong. I won’t name the projects, because it’s not meaningful for this short conversation.
The first project makes the mistake of designing the game for addiction. They seem to be designing a shop, not a game. Well, while some early metrics could show promising that will be not the case for the long term. A F2P game is a game and the Player wants to get out something. It’s not a gambling game, but a true game. Some Player may experience addiction, but you shouldn’t design for that. I mean it’s also bad for the business.
The second project makes the mistake of designing the game F2P because its competitors are doing so. “Why should the Players want our game if it has a price and the other one is free?”. Well, in that case, I am sorry, but you are not really believe in your game. Players may choose to play your game instead of that other because they love it! Having a premium game against a service based one can be also an advantage according to the kind of audience.
When to go F2P?
You should think in F2P like a luxury service. You give your game for free to a mass of people because you create another layer for the wealthier part of your audience. You need to think in red carpets, VIP treatment.
If your service permit EVERYONE to have fun and a small part to be treated like Kings (including by winning), you can create a good F2P service. Otherwise it will be simply a race to the bottom.
As a freelancer I work with many realities, but never AAA games. I work mostly with indies and free-to-play companies. I had some blockchain gigs, too. They paid very well even if the business was confusing, to say the least.
A significant difference between free-to-play companies and indies is their definition of success.
F2P CEOs are looking to solve a formula: CAC < LTV. Customer Acquisition Cost less than LifeTime Value. Indie founders, instead, want to be able to make another game. Everyone would like to become rich of course.
On one side we have people thinking of something scalable, on the other teams who want to continue making games. They both can learn a lot from each other.
- The importance of thinking in a business
- The importance of having the right KPIs to measure results
- The importance of working on something you love.
I am an optimist, and that doesn’t mean that “everything’s gonna be alright”. Being an optimist means having hope that my actions can lead to better results in the future.
In the last few years, I have been perceiving the development of two spaces in the games industry (and also in music and films).
The first is the space of big corporations and companies related to them; it’s the space where serious money flows. Where the top talent works. It’s the space that right now is struggling a lot.
The second are the solo developers, the small teams, and the people who serve the minimum viable audience. This space is the one that is growing right now.
Look at the good news of the last year and a half. More than 80% of them are about some project that seems to come out of the blue. And of course, it’s not the case. It’s just that until then we weren’t part of that small audience that was following the project for months and that creator(s) for years.
I went to Retrobarcelona yesterday, a local fair dedicated to the games that made me. Arcades, pinballs, classic consoles. Craftsmanship dedicated to the IPs that still make my heart beat. People with metal band t-shirts, and a better vocabulary than the average.
I spoke with friends making more money making games for SEGA Mega Drive than they made with Switch and PS4. I met a friend who is a brilliant marketing consultant for small teams with little budget. I assisted in 2 talks of local streamers with a strong, loyal, cultured audience. I purchased books from a guy who closed his retro games store during COVID and now writes short sci-fi stories, runs a podcast, and is making a game for Dreamcast.
These realities have become bigger in the last few years. The tools to grow are there and are free. Today it’s easier for one single guy to make everything needed to run a business.
Was the other side present too? I have met a couple of friends, with exceptional talents. They were working for some of the biggest brands that landed in “sunny Barcelona”. Or they were working for investor-backed startups with huge ambitions. They either lost or left their jobs.
I am aware that my perception can lead me to the wrong reading of things, but that’s my rant for today. There are opportunities for those who are not waiting to be picked. For those who don’t use the playbook.
It’s great to have a fancy title in a corporation that belongs to the macro-culture. I still dream about it on certain days. But belonging to the micro-culture, finding and serving that minimum viable audience, can be profitable. Reddit, Substack, Patreon, Kickstarter…
That can be exciting! Not easier, you have to work a lot on it. But a concrete possibility. Something that gives me hope, that makes me an optimist.
