[casual_games] data reporting standards for casual games

[James Gwertzman]

Given the recent discussion on this mailing list around sales  
reporting, I thought it would be timely to announce to the general  
casual games community an initiative that the IGDA casual game SIG  
has started up around data reporting. As you know, the charter of the  
IGDA Casual Game SIG is to work to  advance the interests of  
developers in the casual game space, which  is usually (though not  
always!) synonymous with helping advance the  entire industry.

Speaking personally, I don't think there is a broad need for better  
auditing right now. For one thing, as Christopher points out, most  
distribution agreements already have clauses that allow developers to  
audit their sales if they believe there are problems. Furthermore, no  
serious distributor is going to put their entire business at risk by  
fraudulently reporting sales to their developers. I'm not sure who  
exactly has a "mistrust of publishers" but speaking as one of the  
larger game developers in this space, I can say that we have very  
good relationships with all of our distributors and have high  
confidence in the reports we get from them every month.

Instead, the problem that we feel acutely is that there is no  
standard format for distributing results electronically, and as a  
result there is no easy way to enter sales data from multiple  
channels into a single database for a unified view. Here at PopCap,  
our poor CFO literally spends days each month retyping data from  
paper copies of royalty reports into a database so we can summarize  
our sales. Not only is this time consuming, it's also error prone.

To address this problem, the IGDA casual game SIG steering committee  
has created a task force specifically to work with the major  
developers, publishers, and distributors in this space to try and  
come up with a common electronic data format for communicating  sales  
data at all levels of the industry (between developers and   
publishers, between publishers and distributors, between  
distributors  and their retail sites, etc.) Compliance with such a  
format would  obviously be voluntary, but would reduce the cost of  
doing business  for all of us.

Once we have a common format in place, there are some nice things we  
can do with it. For one thing, we can then encourage distributors to  
make near-real-time sales data available  to their partners using  
this common format. Given that we are an industry in which the vast  
majority  of sales happen online, most sales data already lives in a  
database  somewhere. Getting it out in a timely fashion should be   
straightforward. To their credit, many sites already offer real-time   
data, but usually in a proprietary web-form of some sort. Having the   
data available in a common format will make such data far more  
useful, because it would then be possible to create a real-time roll- 
up of sales across all channels implementing this format.

Another, more contentious thing we could do, is create an industry- 
wide "billboard" for top game sales. I know everyone will agree, but  
I personally believe that having a common "top 10" or "top 100"   
sales chart based on data from participating distributors would be  
valuable for our industry. Not only would it help identify   
successful games more quickly, but it would also provide very useful   
PR and marketing information which can help raise the visibility of   
our industry in the mainstream media -- and we all know that there   
are far more potential customers right now than actual customers.
We are right now just getting this task-force off the ground.  
Participation in this task-force is currently by invitation-only,  
only because we need to keep the group somewhat small if we're going  
to get anything done, however once we have something to present we  
will open it up for comment. I hope the general casual game community  
will agree that these are useful steps that will make thing easier  
for everyone.