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Tag: research

A forest

Published by Paolo on 09/05/2024

When I walk in a wood, I focus my attention on the path and stop to admire the trees. Some of them are like monuments, they grew a lot. Fantastic!

Then I discover maybe a little mushroom that has grown during the same night. That mushroom will last a few hours or a couple of days.

I don’t give too much attention to the little herbs, the underwood that’s everywhere. It’s common behavior, I think. Still, they are an important part of the view and the smell that I get from the experience.

The fact is that the big tree exists and it’s big thanks to the whole biome which permits that. It’s impossible and surreal to think in a forest made out only of trees with no herbs.

The underwood is fundamental to the ecosystem, it’s what permits the big trees to be big in the first place. And the underwood can grow up to a certain point, that’s a quality, not a limitation.

If we want more trees and a bigger forest, we should let the underwood spread more and not cut it off just because it’s not tall enough.

Dreaming of Switch 2

Published by Paolo on 08/05/2024

Nintendo said that during this fiscal year, they will announce Switch 2. As far as I remember, this is the first time that Nintendo has put a number on the previous one. That makes me think that they will not innovate that much, this time.

But maybe I am wrong, and I imagine which improvements Nintendo can bring to their business.

The first thing is that their controllers, influenced by the competitors I don’t know, got very complicated. We passed from the cross and two buttons to 2 sticks, a cross, 4 frontal buttons, 4 retro buttons. A simpler control system will make more people want the console.

What if my Switch 2 is also my mobile phone? I would buy that. A mobile smartphone capable of running WhatsApp, and LinkedIn and making my work that is also the console I can play with my daughter. A smartphone that I can plug on my projector and play bigger.

Being a smartphone, a camera can add AR features to games.

And maybe they could try to bring back the Gameboy printer why not?

Small nuances in game design

Published by Paolo on 06/05/2024

I am playing Squad Busters intensively these days. Hopefully, this game will work because it contains many elements I have been working on with another project up to last year (under NDA).

I am glad when top developers make certain design choices that I proposed or I was guessing but I didn’t have enough time to complete. “Please, Paolo, focus on this other task” is a classic when I start insisting on some point. It’s like when a singer sings exactly your feelings. Satisfying!

But I was also thinking of something else. I was in the middle of an intense moment. A player with a squad better than mine was chasing me. I didn’t have enough coins to open the chest, so I used a booster to open it.

And it reminded me of a quote from J. Riccitiello: “When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time”.

I remember that everyone hated that, the only difference was that Mr. R. was pitching a power-up instead of a booster.

(In the jargon adopted by the companies I have worked with, boosters are the ones you buy BEFORE a match, while you can get or create power-ups DURING the match)

The reality of things is that we like to win, as players. And we can also pay for that. I respect the choice of putting this element on a strategic level and not on a tactical one. The latter would have upset too many people.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how a small nuance can make all the difference in game design. So that also a bad (in the sense of evil) idea can be played well if we have the right time and resources to work on it.

GTM, Innovation and Marketing

Published by Paolo on 03/05/2024

I read a post from a VC firm looking for projects to fund. One of the points was “clear GTM strategy”. GTM stands for go-to-market. Experts claim that the next big company will figure a novel way of distributing games out. Distribution is part of go-to-market of course.

I am fascinated by this concept of the minimum viable audience, which is the minimum number of fans you need to serve to make your business viable.

Another concept I like a lot, better than agile IMHO, is the shape-up methodology, where you basically set up deadlines and deliver making the best you can in the fraction of time you decided.

Those would be part of my go-to-market strategy, for sure.

Innovation in mobile games

The playbook is not working anymore and Players are claiming innovation, too. For mobile games, there are elements from the world of apps that mobile games never adapted and I don’t know why.

The first is the infinite scrolling feed. Mobile games are still stuck in the world of Flash games somehow. We still use pop-ups as if we’re operating on the World Wide Web. In some cases, I spend precious minutes closing pop-ups at every session. Also, video ads have to be dismissed with the X in top right corner. It is incredibly slow and frustrating.

An infinite feed guarantees engagement and also ads and special offers can be put in it. Every game can become more streamlined, helping the Players do other things while playing.

The second element is the widgets. You know that things that are not app icons that appear on your smartphone. Why should I enter the game to see who attacked me or to collect a daily bonus?

A widget would also be a reminder that the game is there, why is nobody using it?

I think that one of the issues we have with innovation is that we are not making enough efforts to find ways of measure certain design elements and choices. Everything can be measured in certain fashion. But more often than not designers are in a company just creating content, not solving problems. The “everyone is a designer” reigns always in contexts led by product managers, and there’s nothing to do with that.

The company I dream of has that issue fixed. But, I know, I am a dreamer.

Distribution

Marketing has become not about the brand, but about the people behind it. If you see the last ad from Supercell or you read about the last successes on PC, you will clearly see that.

Is it possible to make that scalable? Probably, yes. I would start from there.

The head of marketing from Larian Studios declared that marketing is dead and everyone is angry at him. He expressed quite bad, but I understood what he wanted to say. The marketing is super important, more than ever. But the old fashion of doing marketing is gone.

Happy 25 April, you all!

Published by Paolo on 25/04/2024

Today is a special day for the nation where I was born. 25 of April represents the Anniversary of Italy’s Liberation. It’s a national holiday that commemorates the culmination of the liberation of Italy from German occupation and the Italian civil war in the latter phase of World War II.

Today I want to dedicate a post to 3 Italians who are contributing to making a great industry. I want to share with you 3 talks that are available for free and online, that prove the Italian contribution to our fantastic micro-world where lots of people would work.

The first talk is by Riccardo Zacconi, who years ago founded King (nowadays part of Activision/Blizzard). I remember having seen this talk years ago and it made me dream about working for King.

The second talk is an interview with the solo-dev, creator of Vampire Survivors one of the top indie games of last year. Luca Galante created a simple game with lore that is not possible to understand if you’re not an Italian, but it’s SO FUNNY if you are. Clerici, Dommario, Rottin’Ghoul are all references to the Italian trash culture and irony.

The last talk is with Massimo Maietti, one of the creators of Monopoly GO! which is the last huge success in the video games industry. I like to recognize in this person something very Italian, the connection we always make with culture and history in everything we make.

What the 3 have in common?

  • They are all Italians
  • They all had to live out of Italy
  • They made success in Angloamerican environment (curiously the Angloamericans helped a lot during liberation)
  • They all came from gambling games, like me. I will always say it: gambling games can be bad to you, I respect that. But they put you in contact with something very innate in the human compulsion. It’s all about amigdala!

Hypercasual was R&D with glamour

Published by Paolo on 24/04/2024

Now that the “hypercasual” word is not cool anymore, let’s talk about the benefits of R&D (which is a term for dinos, at this point).

Research and development in video games leads to the discovery of new technologies, mechanics, dynamics, and narratives. It is an activity that is hard to integrate within a business, especially in high-competitive environments.

I helped a couple of years a developer of hypercasual games and, in the end, to me, that was a little miracle. Why? Because for the first time in my career, I saw the fruit of R&D becoming an actual, shippable product. The CEO was happy, the developer was happy, and the marketer was happy.

Proposals were coming directly from publishers following trends, there were syntheses of popular indie and AAA gameplays. There was also heavy research on social/viral trends. I felt a volcano of ideas, that was a good period professionally speaking.

And it was because of the collision of 3 hacks: the CEO could save money thanks to the Unity Asset Store, developers could save time and the marketer could use concrete techniques to reach the hypercasual audience.

Many Players of hypercasual games were tech-savvy and very smart. They loved to find the flaws in these prototypes and they had fun in discovering how to become a “hacker”. They went very deep into the rules (which were the only elements well thought out) and they found a way of cracking them.

A breath of fresh air in a context where timers, special offers, and artificial scarcity were playing with their compulsivity!

Today the business model is gone, because it is not possible anymore to target directly these people with ads. It’s much more expensive to reach them so the little you make with ad monetization doesn’t cover the costs.

But these Players are still there, waiting for super innovative mechanics to break. Shipping “R&D games” every 2 weeks is still an available choice.

Happy World Book Day

Published by Paolo on 23/04/2024

Someone is claiming that AAA is dead when in fact is quite the opposite. AAA games are still driving the vast majority of revenue.

AAA development is struggling, though. I have never had the pleasure of working on a AAA game. That’s because every time I applied to an AAA company the answer was that my resume didn’t show AAA experience.

One of the good things about mobile free-to-play, instead, was the inclusion of professionals also from outside of the games industry. I had personally the pleasure of working with marketers, product managers, and UX designers coming from the world of apps, fintech, and so on. That created an explosive new opportunity where also AAA professionals come to work.

Endogamy creates struggles. Specialization is good also because it opens the opportunity for generalists, people with broader knowledge, to enter into the “game” and create disruption. Why are we often closing those new windows?

AAA development is struggling with endogamy, in my humble opinion. And mobile f2p is starting to follow the trend, too. When you have markets with high risks and high possible returns, often experience can be a setback. We need more opportunities for people with different backgrounds.

We need frogs that go deep, hedgehogs that go straight forward, but we also need birds that can see the horizon, and foxes who can spot different patterns in the forest.

A great book that demonstrates this thesis is “Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”, by David Epstein.

Let’s talk about generative AI

Published by Paolo on 16/04/2024

Imagine this business: you write which furniture you want for your flat. A green sofa for your lounge. A carpet for the studio. A small library for your dorm. You select the image of what you like and, for the price of transportation, you get the furniture.

Imagine you live in a country where robbing apartments is not a felony. And you know that this furniture was stolen from someone. How would you feel? You may think in the short term, you don’t have money. You don’t want to go to IKEA and fight the whole day with your spouse. Plus, it’s no felony so who cares?

Let’s switch context for a while…

We have lots of hints and suggestions redacted by millions of people over the years. Doctors who tried to solve some specific health condition. Programmers helping others to understand how backend development works.

Every time we need this information to solve some problem or face a challenge, we invest our time in finding the right answer. Meanwhile, we learn about other things we didn’t consider. In some cases, being faster can save lives. In other, don’t.

You are running for what?

Let’s take game development. The more you learn, the more things you spot you should consider, and the better your games will be. So, is it interesting to be faster?

Sometimes I am sure it is. Most of the time doesn’t.

LLM services offer a collage that makes you feel you can make art, or writing without having the talent needed to craft it. Like the stolen furniture example I made, they are a deliberate steal. They take things made by others and give them to you.

An interesting feature is that they provide a summary of hints too. You look for how to code something and they give you the code. You can be faster, but you need to understand what the code does. Also, the slow process of looking for solutions can make you discover things you didn’t consider. You have lost that if you surrender to LLMs.

In any case, they consume water and energy. They pay for that, but they pay a market price that I am afraid is not aware of the long-term damage.

Is it worth it? No, it isn’t.

It can be worth in a life-or-death situation. If a machine is better than the human eye to detect a condition, that case is good for LLMs.

Progress and difficulty

Published by Paolo on 12/04/2024

I am reading a paper on personalized difficulty in games and I see this graph:

The graph shows clearly that the probability of playing tomorrow depends on how many levels (amount of progress) you beat today.

At GDC24 one of the talks showed this graph:

Kills in 10 matches of a FPS will influence the probability of playing again.

What can we learn from here?

  • Theory of Flow is always valid
  • It’s about the Player: the player of your game should feel good enough and progressing enough. It’s about them, not you!
  • You need to deeply understand the elements of friction, goals and mechanics that shape up the difficulty of your game.

Hyper-casual is still an opportunity

Published by Paolo on 08/04/2024

The hyper-casual business model is dead, but I believe that hyper-casual games are still very attractive. The real challenge is to find a suitable model for these games with little friction and complexity.

During the golden years of hyper-casual, the gold rush pushed many people to forget the basics of game design. With a couple of clients, I have seen in first person the sloppiness of businesses in making games.

One game per week was the mantra. Just do it! Test the CPI. D1 retention is too low: out! Next one!

This is not how good games are made, of course. I believe that hyper-casual games met the need of lots of Players but then they didn’t understood them. The business model is dead because of this lack of empathy. This in the name of fast earnings.

False promises

The promise of hyper-casual was to have an instantly playable lightweight games. A snackable, high engaging experience based in low perception effort. This translates into a high retention at the start.

But then the games are filled with ads with no specific connection with the game itself. At the same time, the experience is not refined after the first days. The result is a drop in players. Imagine, you spent actual money to make the people install your game. And they go after a while.

Companies started to make everything to lower the acquisition cost and increase the ads seen per player. That was the first, and wrong, solution to the problem. The good approach, instead, would have been starting from understanding how to serve better the Players.

The second issue with hyper-casual games have been that they were very easy to clone. The mechanics were so simple to copy. Probably, a competitive advantage would have been to focus on mechanical friction hard to imitate. To make an example, souls-like games are hard to make. The same is valid for good match-3 games.

When a game is boring is because the mechanic has no deepness, or that its deepness has not been explored enough. This causes to the game to be repetitive, and so Players will quit.

The solution to this challenge is to start from the passion for games and social engagement that part of the hyper-casual players had. Look at this data:

You can see that Players are also playing more complex and online games. This is indicative that something can be done to properly serve them without treating them like ad-watchers, clockwork orange style.

Starting from where they love, the games they play and simplify them. Try to find the essence of battle royale, arcade, role playing games. That would have been a success.

  • Is it necessary to have a different character for every silly minigame? Maybe the Player can have a chosen group of avatars represented in different behaviors and mechanics.
  • Which mechanics from hardcore games can be synthesized in a simple game?
  • The game can open in more complex mechanics based on different frictions: start from the mechanical, but then add informational or strategic.

I used two old reports from Facebook and Pangle+Newzoo to make my reflections. Images are taken from there.