Skip to content

Tag: research

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?

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.

Inspired work to earn trust

Published by Paolo on 27/08/2024

Reading and watching the latest releases in video games I arrive to a thought.

You need inspiration to make a good game, no matter the level of experience you have in this sense. If you want to earn the players’ trust, you have to deliver something novel. Not something new, but a product that works and has unexpected elements that surprise people.

People are great at understanding the personality of what we deliver. They understand when there is a derivative choice or something that comes from the truth of our craft. In some platforms, they can decide to close an eye.

  • Whales of f2p mobile games know that the game is designed to grab their cash, and they decide that it’s fine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHtNcTA8t6A
  • People playing Helldivers 2 understand when a new upgrade on weapons is made to sell them a season pass.

On compromise and experience

Published by Paolo on 26/08/2024

“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.

Lessons from Black Myth Wukong

Published by Paolo on 23/08/2024

Everyone is talking about the monkey, a breath of fresh air during those challenging times. I am watching the game intro over and over, it is probably one of the best I have ever seen.

  • Character: he’s brave, he’s not humble, he is imperfect. He is relatable with Goku also for non-Asian audiences. That cloud flight scene is pure genius.
  • Combat: it starts from the best thing of the game, fighting bosses. You cannot lose here, and you have everything unlocked it’s on you to discover.
  • System: it shows you a possible evolution of your character
  • Promise: the theme is well set at the end of the prologue. It’s about rising again.

But wait, why did the semi-god fall off? It’s not clear and I am not the only one that wants to know why…

Regarding the development, the team had experience in live service games and they decided to steer off completely learning Unreal Engine from scratch.

Great things happen when you have motivation and true experience but in lateral sectors! Black Myth Wukong is another proof of this.

Indies and F2P

Published by Paolo on 20/06/2024

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.

Grinding and working fantasy

Published by Paolo on 06/06/2024

One thing games and stories have in common is that, for some weird reason we love when they talk about work.

We love stories of lawyers and we love power-wash simulators. A friend of mine bought a freakin’ airplane cabin for his garden and teaches maneuvers to newbies every night on Il-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad.

We also love games with less fidelity, still on work-related stuff. Nintendogs had a tremendous success, for instance. Some DS owner just got that game and that’s it.

One of the best moments of What Remains of Edith Finch (the most memorable, to me) happens while you are cutting and cleaning fish.

These games can tell stories that we relate to deeply, and give us a different sort of escapism.

When we are kids, many of us play actual professions. I was an astronomer, I bought zines and everything: a true expert! I spent my afternoons with maps, numbers, and theories I didn’t understand.

When a game is bad or “grindy” for us we often say “I feel like I am working”, but the working fantasy has a huge narrative potential.

Games and novels can turn mundane experiences into ones that pull on our psychology of reward faster than the real world. There are sparkles, rewards, sounds, and bouncing numbers.

The working metaphor can be easily related to reality, we can feel productive in terms of that particular fantasy. A well-thought work fantasy can also intrinsically motivate players who like to feel productive and valued.

Squad Busters beat the “voluntary play” test

Published by Paolo on 03/06/2024

Squad Busters is a great toy, for me. I noticed this is a game led by game designers. I guess that they want to prove the long tail of this concept. And I hope they will because they are making something they like.

I bet that this game has passed the first very important test of any successful game. This is NOT the D1 retention that can be calculated in at least 4 different ways to trick stakeholders.

I call this test “voluntary play”: if the team is playing the game for pure pleasure, you have a promising game.

Only 5% of games pass this test. If more people would make this test we would have fewer meaningless games in the stores. We prefer to keep working on something uninteresting because “we should check CPI”, or “Let’s see D3“.

My question is: why should the people play that crap if you won’t?

Squad Busters has a strong hook, for sure. If its tail is high enough, building the mid-experience on vertical progress should be easier than following the old playbook. And if it doesn’t work, it’s still a game related to their brand. They could also try to expand to more platforms.

I would play this on Steam, for example.

And for mobile, I would add a new control system for people like me who prefer to swipe. A system based on giving directions to the squad by swiping on the screen. With points of interest for them to act with elements in the range.

Self-expression means self-discovery

Published by Paolo on 31/05/2024

A report I read days ago confirms self-expression as one of the trendy drivers of motivation to play a game. This is why the top games are always Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. These games are masterpieces and they are champions of self-expression.

According to the MDA Framework, there is an aesthetic of games (which means an essence of a playful experience) called expression:

Expression: the Game as self-discovery.

[…]

Expression comes from dynamics that encourage individual users to leave their mark: systems for purchasing, building, or earning game items, for designing, constructing, and changing levels or worlds, and for creating personalized, unique characters.

Self-discovery is to provide tools to the Players to create their assets inside of the game. That is expensive because there are usability issues. It’s hard to prepare an economy on self-expression motivation.

It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!

When it comes to self-expression, in my experience there are 3 archetypes:

  1. Creators: they play games that empower them to create their own worlds. They want to turn their vision into reality.
  2. Storytellers: they need freedom to hold the protagonist’s actions in their hands.
  3. Belongers: they want to be part of a team and feel a sense of relatedness.

There are 3 main drivers: creation, emotional immersion, and independence.

For creation, ask yourself these questions:

  • How can I create a world of my own?
  • How can I use my imagination?
  • Can I explore the way I want?
  • Can I create items that I can call my own?
  • Can I explore new environments in other worlds?

For the emotional immersion, ask this:

  • Do I feel completely engrossed in the world/story?
  • Can I care for something or someone within the game?
  • Will I feel an emotional connection to the story?
  • Do I feel a sense of ownership?
  • Do I have an emotional response to an experience?
  • Do I feel like an integral part of the story?
  • Can I be someone else?

Finally, for independence ask yourself:

  • Can I create a different life I want to live?
  • By playing this game can I feel in control of something important in my life?
  • Can I have an experience and not be judged by the game?
  • Can I break the rules?
  • Can I do something I can’t do in real life?

That’s it! Now take Fortnite, Minecraft, or Roblox and answer the questions above. You can see they mark all the checks.

The thing is alive!

Published by Paolo on 30/05/2024

Game design is the act of deciding how a game will be. The whole team designs the game, in the end. Every member puts its grain of salt. And then the game starts to drive the game design!

Game designers care about Players, as I said the other day. The game is a medium to realize a playful experience for them. The team builds the game brick by brick. And we play the build every day. It happens that the build itself starts to drive its iterations.

I am reading many analyses of the new game from Supercell. Many of those are written by consultants who have to sell their services. Which is good and healthy, I am a consultant too! I don’t consume all this free knowledge to know what to do. I study because it helps to improve my toolbox, not my choices.

Players, do not care about monetization flows and core loops. Players want a game on their phones fast and engaging when they feel stressed. Something that continues forever, they want to feel the sense of progress. Someone wants to connect with other people through a game.

Every tentative of building a game on best practices, breakdowns, and playbooks fails miserably. I have worked in the last 8 years on dozens of games and it’s always like that. Many business people would love to have an algorithm to create the best game, but it doesn’t exist.

The personality is impossible to imitate. There are companies built on imitation, and the result has always shown their personality. In game design, we need tools but we give our best when we work with what we truly, deeply love and understand. And that happens rarely, that’s probably the main challenge of our craft.