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concerned mom posted:I had an idea a couple of years ago called Millionaire Leaderboard where you pay 69p to get your name with a link in it to the top. If you pay more it stays up for longer. You could have some publicity stunts like someone proposing with a link to a picture of a ring or Coca Cola paying to get their website to the top or something. If anyone uses this idea please send me some free coke or propose to me thanks. This is a riff on the million dollar webpage, right? How about an endless runner app where you can pay money to sabotage people above you in the rankings. For 99 cents the 50 people in front of you have to jump over an elephant. For $5, everyone who is about to pass your record falls down a pit and dies right before they do it. And then their apps crash. ... actually, that sounds almost fun (if you're rich)
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Mar 14, 2013 21:30
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concerned mom posted:I had an idea a couple of years ago called Millionaire Leaderboard where you pay 69p to get your name with a link in it to the top. If you pay more it stays up for longer. You could have some publicity stunts like someone proposing with a link to a picture of a ring or Coca Cola paying to get their website to the top or something. If anyone uses this idea please send me some free coke or propose to me thanks. Get ready to cry at this anecdote from CRAAAAAZY Asian MMOs! Back in maybe 04 or 05 or so, there was a PVP MMO in China. It had a function where you could pay some nominal amount of real cash to do a world broadcast to all players. The catch was that if someone wanted to do another broadcast within a short window of time thereafter, it would DOUBLE the price of the previous broadcast. After a while, the price would reset back to the original amount, but I think you can see where this is going... Rich Guy A sends "Player B's clan touches little boys." for $.50. Rich Guy B sends "No way, YOU touch little boys!" for $1.00... ... repeat. By the end, it was up to $32k before it finally ended.
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Mar 14, 2013 21:32
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That is so smart and we need to all form a company asap and make this.
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Mar 14, 2013 21:35
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mutata posted:and c), not the only method to make games and make money, so my personal conclusion is to avoid that line of thinking, trends be damned. Yeah but it's waaaay harder to make money your way. Your options are to hope to make it lucky like Notch or get hired at a studio that doesn't have to worry about most of that stuff (increasingly difficult even in AAA studios). Or work for free.
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Mar 14, 2013 21:59
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concerned mom posted:I had an idea a couple of years ago called Millionaire Leaderboard where you pay 69p to get your name with a link in it to the top. If you pay more it stays up for longer. You could have some publicity stunts like someone proposing with a link to a picture of a ring or Coca Cola paying to get their website to the top or something. If anyone uses this idea please send me some free coke or propose to me thanks. Hmmm... make an app with an associated TV Station for kind of a free-market/crowdsourced/Commie channel where people bid for time slots to run their own programming/advertising. I'm not sure WHY, but it could actually be fun.
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Mar 14, 2013 22:01
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It's like a one-dollar auction where the final prize is having the last word. So the penultimate bidder feels like they've already got such a sunk cost into winning that... By that measure, the doubling of cost for announcements wouldn't be as good as just charging an additional dollar each time. Let's use the psychology of the All-bid auctions and fee-bid auction sites to create a game where everyone has to use IAP just to bid for a chance at winning the game. It would work like this: there's a "race" every X hours to win a giant prize. Entering the race costs a certain amount of currency / IAP, and you have to spend consumables to have a reasonable chance at winning. You an redo any section of the race as many times as you want to improve your chance of winning.. so if you do a pretty good run at first, there's a high incentive to spend a lot to fix the one section you did bad on.
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Mar 14, 2013 22:01
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concerned mom posted:I had an idea a couple of years ago called Millionaire Leaderboard where you pay 69p to get your name with a link in it to the top. If you pay more it stays up for longer. You could have some publicity stunts like someone proposing with a link to a picture of a ring or Coca Cola paying to get their website to the top or something. If anyone uses this idea please send me some free coke or propose to me thanks. There was also the infamous pimple popper pricing experiment, though I can't find a link anymore. Toward the end, he was selling a lovely pimple popping game for $500, and then $1000, and still making sales. Apple shut him down before he could make a ton that way.
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Mar 14, 2013 22:06
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You're thinking of I Am Rich. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich Also see: tamago egg
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Mar 14, 2013 22:09
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j4on posted:Let's use the psychology of the All-bid auctions and fee-bid auction sites to create a game where everyone has to use IAP just to bid for a chance at winning the game. It would work like this: there's a "race" every X hours to win a giant prize. Entering the race costs a certain amount of currency / IAP, and you have to spend consumables to have a reasonable chance at winning. You an redo any section of the race as many times as you want to improve your chance of winning.. so if you do a pretty good run at first, there's a high incentive to spend a lot to fix the one section you did bad on. That's some mad-scientist level genius right there.
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Mar 14, 2013 22:09
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emoticon posted:Yeah but it's waaaay harder to make money your way. Your options are to hope to make it lucky like Notch or get hired at a studio that doesn't have to worry about most of that stuff (increasingly difficult even in AAA studios). Or work for free. Well, as that poster pages and pages ago so definitively stated, anything that's worth doing is hard! 
mutata fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Mar 14, 2013 |
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Mar 14, 2013 22:13
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Shalinor posted:There was also the infamous pimple popper pricing experiment, though I can't find a link anymore. Toward the end, he was selling a lovely pimple popping game for $500, and then $1000, and still making sales. Apple shut him down before he could make a ton that way. By indie darlings Adam Saltsman and Tommy Refenes, even.
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Mar 14, 2013 23:07
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j4on posted:It's like a one-dollar auction where the final prize is having the last word. So the penultimate bidder feels like they've already got such a sunk cost into winning that... By that measure, the doubling of cost for announcements wouldn't be as good as just charging an additional dollar each time. Isn't this how F2P games already work?
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Mar 14, 2013 23:35
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So speaking of the quality of games in the mobile space today... If you have experience building mobile games (or any games, really) and would like to build mobile games that are actually quality games first and foremost, PM me.
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Mar 15, 2013 05:11
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No I want to hire them. Come make games with me! 
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Mar 15, 2013 06:36
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Where are we talking?
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Mar 15, 2013 08:18
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I always thought the "well arcade machines were the same way" bit was pretty disingenuous, especially coming from game developers who should know better. Game devs have advanced light years since then in making things compulsive. Paying to continue is like a caveman banging rocks together when we have stuff like paying to skip an 80 hour grind, or paying $600 to not let your guild down. "Sure, we have the atom bomb, but back then they had slingshots, and those could hurt people too!" That and I don't believe the designers of arcade games got your quarters directly. The degrees of seperation probably helped some. I think the f2p stuff may be unavoidably detrimental to game design. Though, I think the negative effects can also be minimized. Just not sure if that's a particularly good idea to try to preserve the design for fun side. Will see I guess. Doing a LoL-ish class buying design but in a single player game next. After that probably doing a collection and breeding toilet game called Babnies Fart! It'll be about babies that you combine to make babies of new races. It'll have timers out the rear end and gacha and maybe gacha pon. Will compare the two games and see what wins.
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Mar 15, 2013 09:48
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I think the distinction between the arcade games of old and the micro-transactions now is that the arcade game didn't change if you paid more money. And the game design changes reflect that. You could maybe be more careless playing the game if you had a lot of quarters, but at some point you hit game over if you didn't develop the skills necessary. Today, you pay to make the grind for more exp/money to make your character stronger less grindy. Eventually you'll hit a wall where you flat out can't progress no matter how good you are at the game because you need to be a higher level/have better gear/whatever. You have to make a choice between being bored a long time or paying money and being bored a shorter time, telling yourself that eventually you'll get to the 'fun part'. And I think that's a pretty crap way for games to evolve. It's not universally true, of course. I'm having a lot of fun with War Thunder, despite not having the money to spend on it and I still feel like I have a chance, however small, of winning a dogfight against a Mig in my crappy Zero or whatever. But that seems to be the trend.
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Mar 15, 2013 11:59
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It's not a recent occurrence, trading time for money in games. It's just now systematized. We used to buy/sell MUD/MMO characters and gear because we didn't want to have to camp rare spawn X or spend hours and days slogging through the XP/gear grind. It just used to be handled through somewhat dubious 3rd-parties and not go into the developers' pockets directly. F2P isn't the End of Artistic Vision or Great Game Design. It's another option, a lower barrier to getting people to play your games. The doom and gloom and cries of pure evil, psychological trickery, and so forth have been going on since I've been playing games. Dungeons and Dragons was king of "DLC", baseball cards are the original slot machine / gacha, the flickering high score screen was amazing for retention, and shareware was a fine model for "free, but with the option to pay for more". Side theory that I haven't really thought through or know if I believe but I'll ramble it out anyway: Is the rise of cheap distribution options (mobile, flash, etc) and lower barriers to game creation (Unity, high-level languages, better art tools, etc) tied to the increased naysaying from the rapidly expanding game developer community? When you needed to publishers' blessings, money, and hardware, you were responsible for at least attempting to make decisions informed by finances. Without that requirement, developing games is open to anyone with an old beater computer lying around and their own creativity. Previously, if I wasn't on-board with selling games, the only option I had was to make low budget PC games and distribute them in computer game stores, BBSs, or things like CompuServe/AOL/the internet. Now though, we have people following their dreams and making all sorts of crazy stuff, but that stuff doesn't always succeed and it's maddening to see something that doesn't "deserve" to "win" making a ton of money. But it's not just sour grapes or the adherence to some artistic ideals, there's something else going on. I just don't know what it is. Yeah - that was rambly. Ignore it or use it as a springboard or something!
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Mar 15, 2013 14:12
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I really like F2P games but I really haven't played many F2P mobile games that don't either piss me off or get me frustrated with all the obnoxious pop up or in your face advertising to fool you into thinking it's a better game than it really is, even after you invest money into it. The two best F2P models I've experienced have been Blacklight: Retribution and Path of Exile for PC, and it's mostly because they are amazingly fun and polished games that aren't borderline mandatory to pay for unlike some mobile titles I've played. They're also made by fairly small studios (granted Zombie Studios' work is published by Perfect World) and are pretty successful.
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Mar 15, 2013 14:44
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So I'm curious what you guys think about the fact that a number of "premium" niche titles seem to be doing fairly well on iOS. I'm thinking of Slitherine/Matrix in particular, who were apparently successful enough with Battle Academy at $20 ($50 with the expansions) to make plans to port a large portion of their backlog to the platform. Most board game adaptations land in the $4-15 range as well, and there seems to be no end in sight to those. The guy who did the Phantom Leader adaptation recently posted a small post-mortem on BoardGameGeek where, after being harassed in the comments thread, he claimed the $15 price point was one of the things he felt he did right. Slitherine is also apparently planning on a simultaneous iPad/PC release of whatever they're working on with the Warhammer 40k license that they just picked up. Jeff Vogel is another developer that's been successful at bringing his titles over at a premium price point. I realize none of these games ever had any hope of making their developers a fortune, but they're obviously profitable enough to keep the studios making them afloat. Slitherine in particular is a large enough developer and publisher that I can't imagine they'd keep putting effort into the iPad if they weren't getting something out of it. Is this a case of smaller niche titles having enough of an in-built audience that they're guaranteed to be profitable at these price points? And if that's the case, what's the stop smaller indies from targeting less saturated mobile genres? I'm not particularly trying to argue against anything anyone is saying in this thread, I'm honestly just curious what you all think about the fact that there are all these small companies that no one really talks about staying out of the free to play market altogether.
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Mar 15, 2013 14:52
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Paradoxish posted:Is this a case of smaller niche titles having enough of an in-built audience that they're guaranteed to be profitable at these price points? Paradoxish posted:And if that's the case, what's the stop smaller indies from targeting less saturated mobile genres?
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Mar 15, 2013 15:04
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FreakyZoid posted:It boils down to that, yeah. The hardcore fans who want that sort of game are willing to pay premium prices for quality iOS titles. Actually, it's because the premium title bracket on iOS is even riskier than free, and thankfully, most indies are smart enough to realize that. You don't really want to risk a huge dev time $9.99 title on mobile without a large pre-existing fanbase, so you kind of need to do mobile as a secondary target after leading on desktop. If you go the other way, you vanish on mobile, and desktop derides you as a lovely mobile port. This is precisely what I'm doing for my next title. Kickstarter -> Desktop -> Mobile, mobile probably showing as a stretch goal. $9.99 on mobile, $10-$15 on desktop. Indies don't operate in flooded genres because they want to. Making a runner was a compromise for me, a way of working on "kind of" what I wanted in a genre that stood at least some chance of working at the F2P tier. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Mar 15, 2013 |
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Mar 15, 2013 15:11
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Shalinor posted:Actually, it's because the premium title bracket on iOS is even riskier than free Fans of niche titles will hunt out those niche titles (and when they find them, tell other fans on their "fans of space 4x games" forums), so if you're in a marketplace of maybe a dozen competing products you are in a much better position than trying to stand out in a hugely saturated marketplace. For hardcore strategy games iOS is a great space to be in, people are desperate for stuff like X-Com, Frozen Synapse etc. wheras on PC those markets are well catered for so an indie would have a harder time.
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Mar 15, 2013 15:38
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Shalinor posted:Actually, it's because the premium title bracket on iOS is even riskier than free, and thankfully, most indies are smart enough to realize that. Is it? It seems like I very rarely hear about high profile failures at premium price points, especially with niche titles. I'm sure you're looking at data that I'm not so I'm not necessarily disputing what you're saying, but posts like this seem to strongly indicate that large, premium games do relatively well on the platform. Some are ports and some are by very large developers, but in terms of successes and failures there seems to be a pretty good mix of both free and premium games. FreakyZoid posted:I completely disagree, for niche titles. For example you get stuff like space-based 4x game Distant Star that have sold solidly for a couple of years with no updates or IAP at $4 (admittedly, the low end of the premium space, but then the game's not terribly polished either) on zero existing fan base. That's actually really interesting. I bought Distant Star when it first came out and I always wondered how well it did. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Mar 15, 2013 |
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Mar 15, 2013 15:46
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FreakyZoid posted:I completely disagree, for niche titles. For example you get stuff like space-based 4x game Distant Star that have sold solidly for a couple of years with no updates or IAP at $4 (admittedly, the low end of the premium space, but then the game's not terribly polished either) on zero existing fan base. Compare it to Granny Smith. It sits consistently higher in the charts AND it had a useful Top Grossing in Overall spike that would have hopefully paid off dev costs. All you're showing is that iOS has a long, consistent tail for premium games - a small tail, but still, present. I think? it might have a long tail for all notable games. That makes it an ideal secondary market, but not an ideal primary market. EDIT: To be clear, you can use Top Grossing Rank in Overall to estimate the daily income for a game. If you're not on Top Grossing for Overall, you're looking at at the neighborhood of $1-100/day, as I recall, though being precise for off-the-charts data is difficult. That Distant Star never even charts in Top Grossing for Games, let alone Top Grossing for Overall, suggests it cratered, and hard. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Mar 15, 2013 |
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Mar 15, 2013 16:33
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Paradoxish posted:Is it? It seems like I very rarely hear about high profile failures at premium price points, especially with niche titles.
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Mar 15, 2013 16:34
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mastermind2004 posted:If a niche premium iOS title fails and no one is there to notice (because it's a niche title), does it still make a sound? Successful niche titles do get noticed, so can you really blame the failure of a title no one hears about on its price?
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Mar 15, 2013 16:43
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We tried the "niche premium" thing with ARC Squadron and will not be going that route ever again. Despite getting featured, major love from outlets like Touch Arcade/etc. - nope.
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Mar 15, 2013 17:01
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An unfair generalization: Arcade machines: pay to play IAP: pay to not play. This is true, but ignores that lots of people can choose to not pay and still get a lot of fun out of the game. While with arcade machines, they don't get anything out of it at all. What would be really nice as a gamer--in particular for iOS--is if IAP prices were accurately represented somehow. Like if alongside the game price (free) it reported the average amount spent in IAP by the average player and the average player that beat the game (if applicable). Then I could judge if I wanted to buy it. hailthefish posted:Isn't this how F2P games already work? Actually, I just read up on the Gacha mechanic. This is that.
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Mar 15, 2013 17:05
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devilmouse posted:It's not a recent occurrence, trading time for money in games. It's just now systematized. We used to buy/sell MUD/MMO characters and gear because we didn't want to have to camp rare spawn X or spend hours and days slogging through the XP/gear grind. It just used to be handled through somewhat dubious 3rd-parties and not go into the developers' pockets directly. One of the biggest drivers behind World of Warcraft's phenomenal success was that someone finally made an MMO where buying a character or gear was laughably unnecessary. It's not exactly progress to reverse this development because our staff economist estimates that we can make more money by bringing back Lower Guk and offering to directly sell you the .01% drops. No, F2P isn't necessarily the end of 'Artistic Vision' or 'Great Game Design,' but there are definitely variants of F2P that are antithetical to making an actually good game.
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Mar 15, 2013 18:26
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devilmouse posted:It's not a recent occurrence, trading time for money in games. It's just now systematized. We used to buy/sell MUD/MMO characters and gear because we didn't want to have to camp rare spawn X or spend hours and days slogging through the XP/gear grind. It just used to be handled through somewhat dubious 3rd-parties and not go into the developers' pockets directly. Sure, I agree, but my post was making fun of this assertion when used as defense. nowadays we're really, really good at the compulsion tricks part. And it's directly tied to the money you can make from the model, there's no degree of separation. Example of this difference: The 3rd party loot trading in Diablo 2 versus the Real Money Auction House in Diablo 3. Diablo 2 had rare drop rates to make for psychologically pleasing grinding, but Diablo 3 lowered the drop rates much further, to the point of outfitting your character without RMAH usage wasn't feasible late in the game. This was all for the incredibly lucrative RMAH concept, and lead to some bitterness. How'd you put this? Player advocacy versus making money? I think it'll always be a tough balancing act between the two for this model, and ther will always be some give from the advocacy side. Also I'm serious about Babnies Fart! don't steal the title anyone
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Mar 15, 2013 18:57
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Most people in the industry work less than 50 hours a week. The difference between 40 and 50 is pretty significant, of course, and this doesn't tell us how many people work a consistent 50 hour week. But if you consider <= 50 hours sustainable, this does tell us that most people are working at a reasonable, sustainable pace. So don't let your studio tell you that 60+ hour weeks is the price of making games. It isn't.
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Mar 18, 2013 19:16
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So all you goons going to GDC have posted in the meetup thread that I can't find that you're going to go to GetWellGamer's Chevy's thing tuesday, right?
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Mar 18, 2013 20:00
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Sigma-X posted:So all you goons going to GDC have posted in the meetup thread that I can't find that you're going to go to GetWellGamer's Chevy's thing tuesday, right? I swear I'll make it to GDC one year... this one won't be it.
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Mar 18, 2013 20:23
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Mega Shark posted:I swear I'll make it to GDC one year... this one won't be it.
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Mar 18, 2013 20:29
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On that note, if anyone's going to be out at PAX and wants to come to the Microsoft NERD party thing on Thursday night before the show, holler and I'll send you the code for free tickets. This thing: http://paxparty2013.eventbrite.com/
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Mar 18, 2013 20:40
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This is the third time I can't go to GDC. drat crunch hours! 
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Mar 18, 2013 20:42
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DancingMachine posted:So don't let your studio tell you that 60+ hour weeks is the price of making games. It isn't. Real motherfuckin' talk. I love making art for games as much as the next kid but that's no reason for a company to literally abuse your enthusiasm or guilt trip you into staying late. If a company needs you to stay late they should either be paying monitored/limited amounts of overtime (Blizzard) or if they can't do that at least make it clear that it's optional and offer dinner or something (most non-poo poo companies). If you're doing crunch for over 2-3 months something isn't right, employees shouldn't be the ones to bare the brunt of managerial/scheduling fuckups. I wish students were taught these ideologies so less employers would think they can take advantage of people new to the industry. I've only been working as a professional game artist for a year and a half but I've worked plenty of other jobs and most normal people wouldn't take some of the bullshit I've seen/heard happen in the games industry.
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Mar 18, 2013 20:49
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ceebee posted:I wish students were taught these ideologies so less employers would think they can take advantage of people new to the industry. I've only been working as a professional game artist for a year and a half but I've worked plenty of other jobs and most normal people wouldn't take some of the bullshit I've seen/heard happen in the games industry. ... which is why I usually give the advice: don't go AAA if you're a student. Try for mobile, try for casual, and work up from there. If you go into the EA ringer, you might come out the other end with solid experience, but you will CERTAINLY get worked to death in the process. Once you've got 2 years in the industry doing something respectable, you're way more able to take sane jobs and avoid the crunch-happy places.
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Mar 18, 2013 20:55
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ceebee posted:Real motherfuckin' talk. I love making art for games as much as the next kid but that's no reason for a company to literally abuse your enthusiasm or guilt trip you into staying late. Working in QA, it's really frustrating when 2 guys on your team are taking the maximum overtime every week for 60 hours a week compared to my 45 average, and those guys become the rock stars that the manager and all the devs go to for projects because they're ALWAYS THERE.
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Mar 18, 2013 20:59
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