Coincidentally enough, as I continued to read How to Be a Billionaire, I received an email from a user of The Journal that stimulated further thought:
“Have your thought about pursuing venture capitalists/investors to take your program to the next level?”
Besides spurring pleasant thoughts of suddenly have access to Somebody Else’s Money, his question made me realize: I’ve never really defined what the “next level” would be.
I’ve always had a tendency to “trend upwards”, especially with The Journal, and get more sales each year than the previous year. But I realized that it had been some time since I sat down to think about what the “next level” would be for The Journal, or for Artifact, and so on.
As I thought about Next Level-ness, I considered, and then dismissed, defining the next level exclusively in terms of sales. “I want to have 1000 new sales of The Journal each month” is a commendable goal–and would really help out with funding my indie game efforts–but it’s not very specific. In fact, it’s more of a wish than a true goal. And if that wish-goal approach actually worked, I’d've been at the “next level” years ago.
Defining the next level includes defining how you’re going to get there. And that probably means deciding what’s got to change, either in how the business is run, how the product is marketed, or whatever. Without change of some sort, you might as well assume that things will continue to trend as they are currently trending.
And, since we’re trying to Break the Cycle here, as you’re thinking of your own next level: DON’T START WITH WHICH NEW FEATURES YOU’LL ADD.
I know, it’ll be hard. I’m a programmer too. It’s natural to look at our software and think, “If I could just add that One Big Feature, this thing will take off!” But that’s the very vortex we’re trying to break free of, the cycle we’re trying to break.
It’s entirely possible that you don’t need to change anything about your game/product at all. Referring back to my earlier post asking, “How would I run my business differently if I had just bought it?”, consider that you, as a buyer, would be disinclined to making fundamental changes. Fundamental changes, after all, cost money and time to make. What you want is a new approach to selling the existing product. A new, hopefully uncluttered market full of people with credit cards and the urge to use them.
The key, I think, is as simple as do something different. What we’re doing now has put us on the level we’re at now.
So…what’s the next level? And how do we figure we’ll get there?
The past few days I’ve been reading How to Be a Billionaire, by Martin S. Fridson. As I read about the billionaires who built their fortunes through acquisitions, and how they would restructure the companies they bought or consolidated, making them more efficient and, usually, more profitable, it makes me think.
How would I run my business differently if I had just bought it?
Instead of having spent the past several years building this company from nothing to what it is today, what if I had just bought the company, with all its assets, liabilities, intellectual property, and procedures? This brought up a number of questions, like:
How would I increase profitability?
What processes can be streamlined–or eliminated entirely?
How would I change the marketing message?
How would I modify the product to support the new, improved marketing thrust?
After all, if I had just bought this company, I’d want it to start turning a profit damn near immediately, in order to start repaying the investment. And if I had just bought the company, I must’ve had a reason for buying it, some market I thought I could reach and exploit with the product.
It’s easy, when you’ve been working within the company, and building the product, to find yourself too close to it, too personally invested to have an objective perspective. The value of “what if I had just bought this?” is that it gives you a chance to step back and see how you might do things differently if you were starting over today, building on what you had available.
Another way to approach this exercise is:
What would need to be done with my business to make it attractive to me, as a buyer?
With your current product, software development practices, procedures, profit margins, et al, would you even want to buy it? Why or why not?
All of this goes along with my Break the Cycle article from 16 June. The only way to break the cycle is stop doing what we’ve been doing. Maybe by forcing ourselves to look at the issue from the perspective of a profit-hungry capitalist intent on a big payday we can gain some useful insights.
SAN FRANCISCO – June 27, 2005 – Rules and submission guidelines for the eighth annual Independent Games Festival (IGF) are now available. This year’s festival features major changes to the format of the competition, including a $20,000 Grand Prize for best game, a new modding competition, and increased prizes for smaller award categories. Submissions will be accepted in August. The deadline for the main IGF Competition is set for September 6 and Modding Awards and Student Showcase submissions are due November 15. The festival honors innovative videogames created by independent game developers and students.
The IGF was established in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, in the way that the Sundance Film Festival has benefited independent filmakers. The IGF has given away hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes and major recognition to innovative, independently created videogames from all over the world, from early pioneering titles such as Tread Marks and Shattered Galaxy, through recent stand-outs such as Oasis, Alien Hominid, and Gish.
More than $45,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to IGF competition winners this year. The main IGF competition will give out five major awards for Visual Arts, Audio, Game Design, Technical Excellence, and Best Web Browser Game, chosen from a pool of finalists. Additional honors from amongst the finalists will be presented for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Independent Game of the Year and the Audience Award. The IGF’s new mod competition will award the most outstanding, independently developed total conversion modifications for four major games. IGF supporters are invited to help choose the titles to be included in the competition by voting at www.igf.com. The IGF’s Student Showcase will highlight a total of ten games this year, including a new category for games created using middleware.
“With the new changes to the IGF this year, we look forward to seeing entries from even more innovative developers who dare to take creative risks,” said Simon Carless, Co-Chairman of the Independent Games Festival. “From the new modding competition to the enhanced prize categories, the 2006 festival will present the best this thriving community has to offer.”
The IGF takes place annually during the Game Developers Conference (GDC), scheduled for March 20-24, 2006 in San Jose, California. The GDC is the largest gathering of videogame creators worldwide. Developers interested in submitting a game can visit www.igf.com for official rules and entry forms.
From a New York Times article today, “They Got (Video) Game; N.B.A. Finals Can Wait”:
And it is not just fans who are embracing the video game era in sports. Brian Billick, coach of the N.F.L.’s Baltimore Ravens, said he was hoping to use video game and virtual reality technology in his team’s training. “I can hardly get my guys to stop playing video games anyway,” he said in a telephone interview.
From the commencement speech given by Steve Jobs at Stanford last weekend:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
An advantage that indie games have over indie film, as I see it, is that indie games can be monetized rather quickly and easily.
An indie film has no immediate market. Once completed, the filmmaker has few options beyond submitting the film to one festival after another. The goal being twofold:
Win some category of the festival that has prize money attached.
Catch the attention of a distributor, studio, or producer that will either buy the film or hire the filmmaker.
That’s about it. Unless you’re making movies for one of the main outlets (theatrical release, cable or broadcast TV, or straight to DVD), your options for the completed product are pretty limited.
With indie games, on the other hand, the developer can put up a Web page, hook up with a payment processor, and start selling the finished game directly to players almost immediately.
This advantage of rapid monetizing, though, can also be a disadvantage. Why? Because most game developers have no idea of why any game sells, our own or anyone else’s. Even worse, we don’t recognize this lack of knowledge. All we know is that we did what we do, and someone paid us for it. So we do it again.
Getting money, even a little bit of money, so quickly after completing the project feels good. Hell, it feels great! You’ve been validated. Your work has been accepted as worthy of swapping hard earned cash for. It’s also addictive.
It’s well known that without further effort, that little stream of money stays a little stream. But indies are a hardworking bunch, and have proven their ability to motivate themselves and get the work done. But in this case…so many times we have no idea what kind of “further work” we should undertake.
So we do what we know how to do:
We tweak the gameplay.
We remove the UI “warts”.
We polish up the graphics and sound.
We do all of that, and then some more, and release an update. That’s another advantage indie games have over indie film. Moviegoers seldom get a chance to last week’s bad movie fixed. Most of them wouldn’t even accept that as a possibility. But it happens in games all the time.
In any case, our existing players are happy with the update. The game they already enjoyed just got better. Sales, though, are hardly affected. Maybe a slight uptick as you’ve managed to improve your conversion rate marginally. But no gush as if the floodgates have been finally opened. Maybe you send the game to a portal site, or get some affiliates to help you sell it, but after an initial, short-lived spike, sales settle back down.
Money is addictive, even a little bit, or a small uptick. So we do it again, or we just move on to the next game, somewhat disillusioned but still excited by the possibilities. And it happens almost the same way again.
Why does this cycle repeat itself over and over? Why do we put ourselves through this frustration time after time?
Because we have no clue what we’re doing wrong.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that expanding past a handful of sales each month has less and less to do with the technology of the game, and even the so-called production value of the game, and more to do with coming up with new, or at least very different, marketing approaches, ways to find and hook up with the players who would like our games.
The only way to break the cycle is stop doing what isn’t working.
Spiffy 3D effects aren’t a useful marketing tool. Nor are realistic physics. Nor 5.1 surround sound. Nor multiplayer, massive or otherwise. These are features, not reasons to play.
It’s possible that even focusing on “fun” isn’t useful. It’s too vague a concept. After all, we can “have fun” in many, many different ways, few of which have anything to do with a computer or the Internet, and a lot of which are free.
Instead of fun, maybe we should focus on the experience of playing: The mystery. The wonder. The frickin’ PAIN of it all, maybe.
Something, anything, other than “business as usual”.
Right now, I’m not sure what nifty new marketing trick or tool would work get us out of this rut. But I can say that the way most indies, including myself, have been going at it isn’t working. It’s time for something different.
There are billions of game players in the world. Not finding them seems like it would be a harder task than finding them. And yet…here we are…reaching only tens and hundreds of them and patting ourselves on the back for reaching even that many.
My recent exploration of photography, brought on by the purchase of my nifty-keen Nikon D70s digital SLR, has made me question something that has become almost gospel in the self-help arena: The importance of focus.
It’s not just the self-help crowd, either. Extreme narrowness and selectivity of focus has become a feature of the workplace, as well. In today’s employment arena, it’s necessary, it seems, to know more and more about less and less.
It’s like those photographs that close in one very specific flower. Being able to see the whole bush, or the entire rose garden, just won’t get you anywhere. You’ll be wasting your energy, they say.
And the narrowing of focus doesn’t stop there. If you can see the whole flower, you’re still too far away. Too general. We’re told we need to focus even closer, down to a single petal, a single leaf.
Use this one tool, this one language, this one API for this one platform, to create a specific type of game or application within a specific domain or problem space.
Or to put it another way: Become an ideal employee, be one of the finely tuned cogs in the machine.
There is another element to focus, though, that’s incredibly important: depth of field. Depth of field is the area of sharpness (Ansel Adams would say “acceptable sharpness”) that extends in front of and behind the focus point. As a general rule, the longer the focal length of the lens used, the flatter or narrower the depth of field, the less of the image will be sharp or in focus.
For closeups like the flower above, the shallow depth of field helps the image by rendering the background elements indistinct. But sometimes, to make the image work, you need the depth of field to extend much further, even into infinity.
Over the years I’ve often wondered how much further along one I would be in any one of my interests if I had just discarded all the others. What if I had focused on game development and never built, or extended, The Journal? What if I had dropped software development entirely and focused exclusively on writing? What if I chose non-fiction over fiction? What if I had tossed my fiction aspirations and put all my energies into my pen-and-paper RPG rules system? Hell, what if I had actually done something with all those oil painting lessons I took as a teenager or had never sold off my tenor sax?
Some people really want to do just one thing. For them, a narrow focus makes perfect sense. A macro lens focusing at a distance of a few centimeters with a shallow depth of field works for them.
Me…I like to know lots about lots. A single, tight focus has never worked for me. And I think it’s time I stopped being hard on myself about that. It’s time to stop resisting my natural tendency to look at the big picture, to admire the whole forest for a bit before picking a few of the trees to climb.
Ansel Adams made an entire career out of photographs that were almost always in complete focus, utilizing extreme depth of field. When he included something in a photograph, he wanted you to see it. Maybe not right away, but when your eye came to that part of the image, it was waiting for you.
Focus isn’t about seeing just one thing. It’s about seeing clearly.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m working on a book about serious games. My co-author, Sande Chen, and I are in the last weeks of finishing the manuscript. Though I’ve (sometimes rather publicly) struggled with this book, I’ve always been convinced it was worth writing (even during the time when I wished someone else would write it).
My interest in serious games came from my unexpectedly wide travels last year. My first exposure to the world of serious games was at GDC 2004, when I covered several sessions of the first “Serious Games Summit”. At that time, my indie book had only been out a few months, and I was on the lookout for new opportunities for indie game developers. Serious games seemed like a real indie possibility:
Small budgets – outside of the military, most serious game budgets are in the 5- and 6-digit range.
Reduced content – by being focused on a specific topic or skill in a specific context, serious games could be made without needing a multitude of CDROM’s and, more importantly, without a huge art staff.
Vertical markets – “Get big, get niche, or get out” With serious games, indies could exploit niche opportunities, possibly even multiple, parallel niches.
After GDC, when I was pondering a new topic for a game development book, especially one that would coordinate with The Indie Game Development Survival Guide, I remembered my coverage of the Serious Games Summit. Specifically, I wanted to write a book that would be targeted not at educators and corporate trainers (who are the audience for most serious game books), but at game developers. I wanted to introduce game developers, big, small, indie, or owned, to the possibilities of serious games.
It was my trip to the Australian indie game conference, Free Play, though, that really showed me what could be done if game designers would look outside the traditional retail video game genres. There were artists and developers at Free Play doing some truly amazing work. Some were creating “art games” and game-like art. There were people creating “documentary games” and political protest games. There were games exploring sexuality (beyond the typical E3 booth bunnies) and the human condition. I came back from Free Play fired up about indie games, serious games, and the staggering number of possibilities open to both.
Another way to look at it is that the advent of serious games (which is not a genre so much as an umbrella phrase) sets to rest the Age Old Question: Are games art?
Serious games also rather handily answer That Other Age Old Question: Do games teach?
The answer to both is, of course: Well, duh. YES.
Beyond the possible financial incentives listed above, serious games offer game designers the following less-tangible benefits:
The ability to express themselves more fully in what is likely to be the mass market medium of the 21st century.
The choice to focus beyond entertainment and “having fun” and say something.
A way to contribute or give back to your nation, local community, the school where you graduated, or favorite cause.
The future is full of possibilities that go beyond Bejeweled and Grand Theft Auto and EverQuest. Far beyond.
When a New York taxi game teaches English…
When the survival rate of combat troops is raised by preparing for a mission in a game…
When a driving game helps people overcome agoraphobia…
When surgeons make fewer mistakes after fine-tuning their motor control pushing around a virtual ball…
When a Web game helps to balance a state’s budget…
When Israeli and Palestinian teenagers learn about each other in a game..
The Game Initiative announced the Casual Games Conference speakers and conference schedule today. The conference takes place July 19-20, 2005 in Seattle, Washington and provides insights to the business opportunities and design considerations required to succeed in this rapidly-expanding game industry segment. Sessions include speakers from leading developers, publishers and distributors of casual games.
Early registration for the conference is now open. The price is $195 (save $200 off the full conference fee) if you register before July 11, 2005. For more information about the conference, please visit:
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – June 2, 2005 – To share the valuable knowledge that was generated during its Quality of Life Summit, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has made available recorded videos from the entire event. Additional Summit materials, including conference proceedings, slides, papers and reports, are also available free of charge.
To view the Summit materials, including proceedings, slides, papers and reports, visit:
Adverse working conditions were first addressed by the IGDA in last year’s Quality of Life white paper. The paper not only documented the long hours and pressures exerted on developers, but also provided best practices to help employees enjoy a sensible work/life balance. The white paper is available for free download via the IGDA site:
