[casual_games] New Issue of Casual Games Quarterly is available

Mon Jan 9 16:58:40 EST 2006

The most important takeaway on that front for me was the issue of length of
game demos.

There is some sensitivity in how much to show people for free that needs to
be fine tuned in order to provide enough interest to people to create a
customer, and there is a little evidence in there to support that an hour is
just too much.

The other thought is that you can create feature locks and privilege levels
for games. This way you can explore some scenarios, and have a DLL or lib
you link against that is provided by the DRM partner to provide an API to
expose the privilege level.

Potential Levels:

FREE - user has paid nothing, only gets levels one and two
BRONZE - user paid 9.95 for the basic game, gets all levels but no powerups
of type X, no leaderboard
GOLD - user paid 19.95, gets levels, some powerups, leaderboard
PLATINUM - user paid 39.95, gets levels, powerups, secret levels, cheats, in
game personalization features, etc

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Lennard Feddersen
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 1:44 PM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] New Issue of Casual Games Quarterly is available

Am I missing some way to use the site to get actual sales #'s?

I thought the iWin article by CJ Wolf was useful in several ways and 
appreciated the simple breakdown of earnings per download.  His opinion 
that we shouldn't drift towards a price war and to find more ways to 
calculate the most profitable pricing were well done.

Happy game makin'

Lennard Feddersen
CEO, Rusty Axe Games, Inc.
www.RustyAxe.com

Lennard at RustyAxe.com
P. 250-635-7623 F. 1-309-422-2466
3521 Dogwood, Terrace, BC, Canada, V8G-4Y7

James C. Smith wrote:

>>>Interesting data from James Smith's Real Arcade article... 
>>>only there's a fundamental flaw in the presentation of that data... 
>>>      
>>>
>
>You bring up some good points. Those are things I did consider but didn't
>have any good solution to.  
>You can do you own analysis along those lines using all the data I made
>public.  If you go to www.game-sales-charts.com you can run the queries
your
>self on the current data and tweak some of the options. Or you can click on
>the IGDA Article link on the site and download the full data used for the
>article in an excel file.
>
>On the issue of a games position in the top 10, if you go to the web site
>and run the "Top Games" query it will have a column for 'number of weeks'
>and also a column for 'score'. There is an option to rank the games by
>either number of weeks or score.  The "score" is a simple formula that
gives
>more points to game that were ranked higher.  But the problem is there is
no
>clear answer for how those scores should be weights.  Is 2 weeks at #1
worth
>more then three weeks at #2? What should the point difference be between #1
>and #2?  Or between #2 and #3?  My "score" system is just a very simple
>linear scale with 10 point for each week spent at #1 and 1 point for each
>week spend at #10.  But for the article I chose to rank the games by weeks
>rather than score because it is a more transparent method.  It is less
>subjective. Any "score" system I devised could be tweaked to favor one type
>of game over another.  More importantly, it just didn't make much
>difference.  Most games fallow a similar pattern of quickly climbing to the
>top of the list and slowly falling down.  The longer a game was on the
list,
>the more likely they spent a long time near the top.  When I compared the
>rankings based on weeks vs. the ranking based on 'score' I ended up with
>very similar rankings.  I decided it wasn't worth having people questioning
>the score system and instead just published the raw number of weeks since
it
>ended up with nearly the same results anyway.
>
>
>Your second point about the competition at the time of the games release is
>also very relevant but has no clear solution. How much weighting should be
>applied? It is more useful to look at a games performance compared to the
>other games available at the time of it's release. For example, for a game
>released in 2005, only compare it to other games also released in 2005.
You
>can do things like that using the options on the web site or by downloading
>the data and doing your own analysis. But I presented a simple summary in
>the article to peek people's interests and let them dig deeper themselves.
>
>There are a dozen different ways to summarize this data. I presented a few
>in the article and more several more available on-line.  It is not perfect
>but it is a great start.  It is wonderful to have access to all this data.
>I hope you would share any results you get from analyzing the data
yourself.
>
>James C. Smith
>Webmaster: www.game-sales-charts.com
>Producer: Ricochet xxx, Big Kahuna xxx
>
>PS: I am sorry my game-sales-charts.com web site is not very reliable
>lately. I will be moving it to a new host soon.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
>On Behalf Of SCOTT HANSEN
>Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 12:49 PM
>To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
>Subject: RE: [casual_games] New Issue of Casual Games Quarterly is
available
>
>
>Interesting data from James Smith's Real Arcade article... only there's a
>fundamental flaw in the presentation of that data... 
>
>First, it doesn't take into account the ranking within the top ten over the
>life of the game... Game A can spend 10 weeks at number 1 and Game B can
>spend 10 weeks at number 10, yet both would receive the same overall
'rank'.
>
>
>Second, it does not factor in the increasing number of games. Earlier games
>lasted longer on the top ten because there were fewer games to push them
>off.
>
>Wouldn't it be more relevant to have some sort of weighted average which
>takes into account the proportional relevance of the rank within the top
ten
>over the life of the product? It can even be 'inflation adjusted' to take
>into account the churn rate at the time it was active on the list... 
>
>Scott P Hansen
>Game Designer, MumboJumbo
>shansen at udgames.com
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
>On Behalf Of Wade Tinney
>Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 9:20 AM
>To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List'
>Subject: [casual_games] New Issue of Casual Games Quarterly is available
>
>
>There is a new issue of the Casual Games Quarterly now available at
>http://www.igda.org/casual/quarterly/1_2/
>
>Please don't hesitate to send feedback, ideas for the next issue (which
will
>focus on game design), or questions. 
>
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>  
>

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