In case you don’t know it, the guys over at Nonoba.com provide a payment engine for flash. From what I understand it is a library you can just plug into your flash game to allow people to buy in-game items with real money.
http://www.nonoba.com/developers/payment/overview

It is quite tempting not having to go trough all the hassle to setup a payment system and just use such an off the shelf solution. However I find two things rather discouraging:

• 30% Revenue cut for Nonoba. Dude, this is serious money. My Ultimatum Game instincts start to tingle.
• 5$ minimum payment for Paypal transactions. This is again apparently because Paypal also takes a cut and Nonoba wouldn’t make a profit below that.

So although very intriguing, I found myself struggling to develop a plausible scenario with that system. I could imagine developing a small flash game and sell an expansion pack with some really challenging levels for people who really liked the basic game but would people pay for a 5$ “level pack”? Does anybody have experience with that kind of revenue model? What do you think will happen?

You know what time it is? It’s statistics time! Oh yes, it’s business time! Look what I’ve prepared for you:

Because of the console wars, the various manufacturers started to publish data about the units sold on a regular basis. Somewhat weird. There is competition in other industries as well but finding actual data on units shipped for cellphones or cars is much more difficult then in the games industry.

Anyway, I took a few minutes to grab some of the numbers and visualize them to better understand what’s going on. The idea is to try to answer the question “How many people can I hope to reach if I choose a specific platform”. So here are some of the findings:

Continue reading “Fishing in the big pond”

What do game designers do when they are not designing games? Well, it turns out that a surprising amount of game designers are actually into manned spaceflight. So far, I could associate three popular game designers with the space industry:

Richard Garriott – is currently at the ISS conducting some privately-funded space experiments. He will be the fist private astronaut to perform a space walk. An interesting fact is that his dad was an astronaut too. Also, this doesn’t seem the first extravagant science adventure the Garriotts perform, as this video shows.

Will Wright – doesn’t actually fly into space but has keen interest in space technology. He collects space junk. According to Wikipedia his collection includes “a 100-pound hatch from a space shuttle, a seat from a Soyuz… control panels from the Mir, and the control console of the Soyuz 23, as well as dolls, dice, and fossils.” Will also builds robots for Battle Bots and won an illegal coast-to-coast race in a tricked-out Mazda RX-7. (Oh my god, these are EXACTLY the things I would do if I had the money, right down to the car manufacturer. Spooky.)

John Carmack – wants to go to space but he wants to do it all by himself. From the three, I would say this one is the most ambitious space-geek. He actually started a company to develop a private vehicle capable to reach space. The company is called Armadillo Aerospace. They even participated in the Ansari X-Prize but obviously lost to Space Ship One. However, since then they have been successfully building up rocket-science know-how and now provide the rocket engines for the upcoming Rocket Racing League. And they didn’t give up their spaceflight plans yet. Though their planned vehicle is somewhat… unorthodox.

So there are just three – big deal? Yes it is! If you consider how small the private space industry is and how little famous game designers there are.

The Success of Exits never fails to amaze me. Back when we made it, we only hoped it would spread virally. Actually, the briefing was to create a viral game. But viral marketing is a tricky beast and the results aren’t predictable so it felt more like a stab in the dark.
But we hit something after all and Excit had more then 2 Million Plays. Even today we get around 3000 hits a day. We were paid for the game itself by the client and we even made some change with ads. How ironic that the game is more prevalent then our client. The project was so successful that I consider flash games as a means to earn my money.
Recently, some people started to contact me to show me their Exict clones. I must say that I really enjoy seeing them. Having people play your game is one thing but seeing how your work inspires people to follow your steps is a whole different ballpark. So here is a list of the Excit clones that came up so far:

Excite (not a well chosen name) is a clone of Excit in C#. It seems like this one is in an early phase of development yet. At this stage, it lacks a lot of polish but it already comes with some interesting features. For example, it introduces “harmful” blocks. Back when we made Exit we decided against them to simplify the rules (only one game over condition). They do allow some different level designs, though.
Unfortunately this clone also shows quite nicely the advantages of Flash as a game platform: no installing, no compatibility issues – it just works, right here right now.

Spreadsheet Escape came out recently. Visually, this one is obviously Excit-inspired but there is a nice gameplay twist: the cursor stops “inside” of walls rather then in front of them. Walls also become passable after the cursor hit them once. I really like it because of this small difference. Too bad it lacks so much polish, I wonder what kind of impact this difference has on level design possibilities with a higher difficulty.
It is also interesting how the author has to endure a lot of flames on the Kongregate comments for “ripping off Excit”. In fact, all of them do. Even we had our share of that because of similarities of Excit with Orbox and Roadblocks. Isn’t it strange? Why is this considered a bad thing with this kind of game but no one complains when yet another Tower Defense game comes out? It seems like there is a certain resistance to clones if the genre is not well established yet.

Target is one I found by accident by checking comments on Spreadsheet Escape. The level of polish is somewhat comparable to Spreadsheet Escape, unfortunately. However, what I like about it is how it features a look and feel similar to Excit without explicitly adapting its spreadsheet theme.

Traction 2 is the oldest ones we found. Technically it is not an Excit clone. The Author claims that he never saw Excit. If this is true, the similarities are uncanny. Either way, Traction 2 is the most polished one. The graphics and animations are simple, crisp and functional. The the controls are responsive, the Interface is well thought-out. My personal favorite is the typography – I have a thing for Futura. So why does Excit outrank this one by a factor of 100 on Kongregate? What do you think?

That’s all for now. If you found a game that was clearly inspired by Excit, please tell me!

If you want to make a game similar to Excit – I don’t mind. On the contrary: by all means, go ahead! Just tell me if you finished. And it wouldn’t hurt if you could link back to Excit.

I think everybody was at least curious how Spore would turn out. Now it seems that success of the highly anticipated game is heavily tainted by some draconian security measures.

There was a big outcry because of the DRM system SecuROM being implemented. The system was especially tight: it would have to “validate” an installed version of the game every 10 days online. This was – of course – a problem for those who couldn’t go online regularly so the system was changed to its current form and it is not better. Now you validate the game only once but you can do it only 3 times in total. And you loose a validation every time your hardware configuration changes. After you’ve lost all 3 validations, you can’t play the game anymore. You can however gain a validation back if you un-install the game before the system configuration changes. This is a bad idea for many reasons, obviously. One which I think is particularly important is that you can’t really re-sell the game after you’ve bought it because the buyer can’t be sure how often the game was validated.

But there is more: it seems like you can have only one online account per CD-key. This is especially inconvenient for families (major target group?), where different members of the family play the game and want to post their creatures independently from each other. To add insult to injury, the European handbooks incorrectly state that you could have several online accounts.

It seems like the problems pile up. As I’ve already pointed out, the amazon reviews are flooded with anti-DRM rants (it’s over 2000 now – ouch!) and I can hardly blame them. I would expect that implementing effective and non-invasive anti-piracy measures shouldn’t be a problem in a game where a vital part of the joy comes from playing online. Am I missing something? It is a shame seeing how the obviously game suffers from these problems. Considering how there is already a perfectly working pirated version out there, I do hope EA gets the clue.