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
Paolo's Blog Posts
I am currently stuck in a limbo, and I will not come out easily from here. But I will do it.
I am preparing all the material needed to participate to the IndieDevDay24. I have hired a freelance artist to help me to the promotional material (one pager and pitch deck) of Pawtners Case.
For now, zero publishers accepted to meet me. I don’t know if this is normal because it’s the very first time I am willing to pitch to indie publishers. Anyway, the experience is worth to me. I am doing something different, at least.
For the rest, here’s the limbo: from one side I have companies that are offering very high positions to me, but then they disappear because I have never held that same position in another company. From the other side I am getting in touch with smaller realities that value well my work but they are offering too low compensation.
That’s a mess, and it’s hard to be patient with money running out of the bank every month. Wish me luck, if you read this.
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!
I come to your house and I like your sofa, a lot. Then I can decide:
- I’ll go buy one from my own apartment
- I’ll steal it!
The first choice is similar to taking inspiration. Inspiration is doing my thing inspired by yours. It is different from stealing, which is taking your thing to do mine.
The current trend, I am sure it will end soon, is to use tools that take other people’s job and give it to you mixed with other robbed stuff. Which is worse than stealing, at least when you steal you know the victim. Here we’re talking on another level, completely.
It’s inevitable, they say. Well, it’s not. I am against that. You should too.
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?
It’s easy to talk about other projects when we are off the hook. Using strong words is also easy to gain traction. That’s what the whole business of podcasts is based on, in the end.
Enrico Fermi used to say that you should never read a book on inventions written by someone who has never invented anything.
The same is valid for what we decide to watch and listen, I guess.
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 am an avid listener and consumer of information on the business I love. I like to hear about market trends, data, and insight. It’s not a matter of knowing which trend to follow. I like to learn more about how the market reacts to our craft.
The issue with that is that majority of this content comes from consultants and managers. They pretend to quantify everything, and it doesn’t work like that.
Market trends influence the industry and investments because those act when informed on this data. But data cannot measure intangible things such as cognition and emotion.
Creativity evades quantification. Business people want certainty: I put X and then I will get Y.
It’s what we put out there that shapes the market. We design games for an audience, and we shouldn’t decide to read the previous spending choices for that audience. We should instead focus on what they were looking for, in exchange for their money. Our job is to read something intangible, but existent.
- If millions of players play daily a specific game in a genre it doesn’t mean there is an actual market around that genre. They will most likely continue to play that game in that area. And they are looking for another kind of experience to complement the one they get from that game.
- Also, mobile games have shifted in the last decade from the first long-term minded business based on brand (Rovio, King, Supercell) to the last short-term performance marketing companies (MiHoYo, Voodoo, Playrix). And the results are out there, few winners of the race to the bottom.
That’s where the art of game design truly helps. Too many times our business is led by people who prefer to make something bad but controllable instead of something good but not controllable.
And to make something spectacular, you should focus on making something good in first place.