Video Game Industry Veterans to Rescue Indie Games
From a press release titled “Building a Viable Path to Market for Independent Games – Because the Games Exist. The Need Exists. The Technology Exists.”
Game industry veterans Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson announced today that they are joining forces to launch Manifesto Games, a new venture to build a strong and viable independent game industry. Its site will offer independently-developed games for sale via direct download–a single place where fans of offbeat and niche games can find “the best of the rest,” the games that the retail channel doesn’t think worth carrying. Three types of games will be offered: truly independent, original content from creators without publisher funding; the best PC games from smaller PC game publishers, including games in existing genres like wargames, flight sims, and graphic adventures; and niche MMOs.
Every time you make an offer or counteroffer, look at the situation as “negotiation practice.” Even if you don’t get exactly what you ask for, you can still learn a lot by initiating the negotiating process and seeing how different approaches work. You might even be surprised how far you get just by asking in the first place.
Taking the “negotiation practice” viewpoint also provides some much needed emotional separation. Since it’s “just practice”, you don’t have to be emotionally invested in the outcome. There’s little or nothing on the line. If they accept your offer, you’re ahead. If they counter with another offer, it’s likely to be at least better than what you started with. So, again, you’re ahead. And if they just say, “No,” you’re at least not behind any.
The basics of negotiation don’t change, of course. You still need to know what you want, and how much it’s worth to you. So if your “negotiation practice” doesn’t end up with a deal that fits your goals, you can wrap it up and move on. Keeping emotions out of the process makes walking away much easier.
Finally, with the concept of “negotiation practice”, you’ll find yourself actually looking for times and situations when you can practice negotiating. And as you get more and more practice, you’ll find that you’re looking at every aspect of the deal on the table and making sure that it fits your goals, or at least isn’t contrary to them. You’ll ask more questions of so-called “standard contracts” to find out what clauses and sections can be modified and removed. You’ll spot missing pieces and request their inclusion. You won’t be so worried about arbitrary negotiating deadlines and less susceptible to pressure.
Everything improves with practice. Let that work for you.
“Are we negotiating?” asked the lawyer (Keanu Reeves).
“Always!” replied the devil (Al Pacino).
–The Devil’s Advocate
We all should negotiate more. Too often we just take what’s offered, or decide not to take what’s offered, without making a counteroffer.
Why don’t we counter? Partially it’s a cultural thing. In the USA, we’re brought up paying retail. If you want something, you go to the store, and you buy it. Dickering on the price is virtually unheard of, outside of a few isolated cases. Another reason, possibly also cultural, is we tend to avoid confrontation. Most of the images of negotiating we see in mass media are very argumentative, very confrontational. Who wants to go through that every time you want a Snickers bar? Which provides another reason for the lack of negotiating: laziness.
Truth is: everything is negotiable, in one way or another.
You can’t start negotiating, though, until you know 2 things:
1. What you want.
2. What it’s worth to you.
When you know those 2 things, you can evaluate any offering, any pricetag. You don’t have to default to the first asking price, like so many American consumers are used to doing.
Next, put some thought into these 2 things:
3. What they want.
4. What it’s worth to them.
Put yourself in the other person’s position. Look at it from their side. This serves multiple purposes:
You can see possible objections to your counteroffer, and think of compromises or further adjustments.
You can tailor your counteroffer to meet their needs.
Sometimes negotiating can take a few rounds, as both sides come to understand the other and make or demand concessions. As the process goes around, though, never forget #1 (What you want) and #2 (What it’s worth to you). If you aren’t getting #1, and/or it’s costing you more than #2, then you’re probably better off with no deal at all.
Ultimately, negotiation is the art of coming to a compromise. Compromise, despite its bad rap among fundamentalists and radicals of all stripes, is not about giving in or sacrificing your ideals. Compromise literally means “to promise mutually.” That is, “I’ll do A, and you’ll do B.”
I started with a quote from a movie. I’ll finish with a quote from a book.
No one can force you to buy anything without drawing a knife. (slightly paraphrased)
–The Burning City, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Bob Walsh announced his upcoming book today: Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality, from Apress, due out in January 2006.
Here is a summary:
Chapter 1: Having the vision. How to find the right application, web service or product to build your own micro-ISV around.
Chapter 2: Micro-ISV Development. Developing when you (or you and you couple of partners) are the IT team is very different from working for someone. Here’s how you manage quality, testing, source code and the all-important beta.
Chapter 3: The Product. Your application is not your product. Your application, plus your web site, blog, graphics, payment processing, customer experience and unique selling proposition is your product.
Chapter 4: Business is Business. The mechanics of legally defining your company (US, U.K. and Australia) and Getting Things Done, including an interview with GTD guru, David Allen.
Chapter 5: Focus on the Customer. The more you understand, connect with and provide value to your customers, the more successful you will be. The five key ways to connect with your customers: your marketing plans, email, search engines, your discussion board and technical support. Why tech support is a strategic micro ISV advantage. Making it possible, easy and preferable for customers to find you on the web and in the real world.
Chapter 6: Welcome to your Industry. You’ve created your application, shipped your product, started your fledging business and found your first customers. Now, you get to play with others, and they are bigger than you.
Chapter 7: What happens next? So you’ve turned a vision into a product, and a product into a company. Now what happens? That’s up to you. A set of interviews with various successful micro-ISV and no longer micro-ISVs.
“Micro-ISV” is the phrase coined recently by Eric Sink, referring to a software company built around one person, or only a very small team. In other words, indies, but with an IT focus rather than video games.
Ever since the publication of The Indie Game Development Survival Guide in 2003, I’ve been waiting for another book (or five) to come out on roughly the same topic. Why? Because the topic needs to be verified by the publication of other books. Sure, there’ll be some overlap and competition, but with only one book covering a topic, it’s hard to notice the topic. More books means more interest, and maybe even our own shelf at the bookstore some day.
Lists of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) have become a staple of the Internet. Almost every piece of software, whether it’s a game or a journaling program or an operating system, has an associated FAQ.
FAQ’s are a friend of the struggling startup indie for one big reason: FAQ’s reduce the amount of customer support required. The player can just visit the Web page, see the FAQ link, and help himself. What could be simpler?
The fly in the ointment, though, is that the number of players who find the FAQ is only a fraction of those who have the problem being addressed.
Ask yourself: When you install a game, and something doesn’t work, do you go hunting for a FAQ, assuming that the problem is something you’re doing wrong?
Hell, no. This isn’t your problem. The damn game is broken. Obviously. Or it would work. So you un-install it and that’s the end of that.
In other words: don’t look at FAQ’s as a permanent solution, problem handled, and you’re free to go the beach and relax.
I recommend looking at FAQ’s as a prioritized list of bugs to be fixed or processes and documentation to change, with temporary workarounds provided for the diligent player who gets this far.
A list of common issues that developers often face, and “solve” with FAQ’s:
Unexpected interface conventions - In certain genres and types of game, people expect the interface to work a certain way. If you vary from this, even if you think you have a good reason for it, be prepared for confused players. In Artifact, for example, after years of trying to explain the mentality behind the interface, I finally adopted a slight variation of what had become the RTS standard single-click interface. As an option, of course, because our existing players didn’t want to change. But new players found it easier to use. In The Journal, I early on adopted MS Word as the de facto standard for hot-key assignments (there isn’t a total match up, but many of the core commands have the same hot-key).
Unexpected command behavior - This is similar to the above, but is tied to functionality and not interface. Sometimes this is a result of vague documentation, but it can also be a confusion of vocabulary. Words can, after all, mean different things in different contexts.
Unexpected user behavior - This is usually the result of a user naively assuming that the software would “just work” the way they thought it would. Either because the interface confused them, the functionality wasn’t what they expected, or just because they really did think that the function should require more than a single click on the appropriate button.
Don’t look at these as though the player “just doesn’t get it.” Don’t look at them as threats to the “integrity” of the game or product. And don’t just put them in the FAQ and forget about them.
Look at these as what they are: Stumbling blocks for the player.
Or, to put it more bluntly: These issues almost certainly stand between you and more money.
Users and players don’t want just more features. They also want the features and gameplay to “feel right” to them, intuitive even. The way you engineer intuitiveness is to pay attention to what they player does to achieve a desired result. Regardless of how far off the mark that action seems to you, as designer and/or developer, that’s what their intuition told them. And you weren’t there for them. The player didn’t “do it wrong”. You fell short.
So take the time to review your list of FAQ’s and start thinking of ways you can remove each question from the list. The best time to answer a question is before the player even knows to ask it.
Lately, I’ve been utilizing the services of Nolo.com. Nolo sells books and sample contracts to cover a lot of typical situations. The legal language is sometimes a bit “general purpose”, but you can easily modify things to fit your specific case. In a very real sense, this almost exactly what a “real” lawyer does: he (or she) will start with a general purpose contract and make it specific for your current needs.
Nolo even sells some software. The software isn’t going to blow you away with ease of use and GUI, but it works and does what it says.
If you want to be “more legal” as an indie, using written agreements and signed contracts, but don’t really want (or can’t afford) to hire a lawyer, you should check out Nolo. They’re inexpensive, and they’ve been around for a couple decades now.
…World of Warcraft has become such a runaway success that it is now prompting a debate about whether it is helping the overall industry by bringing millions of new players into subscription-based online gaming or hurting the sector by diverting so many dollars and players from other titles.
“If you’re only playing WOW and you’re paying every single month, what does that mean for all of the other Internet games out there that are trying to get your $10 or $12 or $15 a month?” [Jeff Green, editor in chief of Computer Gaming World] said. “WOW is now the 800-pound gorilla in the room. I think it also applies to the single-player games. If some kid is paying $15 a month on top of the initial $50 investment and is devoting so many hours a week to it, are they really going to go out and buy the next Need for Speed or whatever? There is a real fear that this game, with its incredible time investment, will really cut into game-buying across the industry.”
Anything that grows the market is good, I figure. And anything that finally convinces people EQ was never much of a game, well, that’s just a bonus.
