[casual_games] Community Functionality

Tue Jan 31 17:22:28 EST 2006

One thing that is vastly different are the $ to build.  To build a title 
that you are going to take to EA is typically going to cost millions of 
$, not the case with what we do.  OTOH, most of us are building out our 
own little stores and finding that 250K visitors a day isn't that easy 
to achieve so, the big portals are providing a real service.  The best 
way to "combat" this is to create your own portal and pay developers 
more, possibly for exclusivity, which is the direction I think Alawar is 
going.  The other thing that is happening is that developers who 
consistently hit it out of the park are getting bought up or are able to 
go to places like PlayFirst and get funding.

A problem for the casual space developer is that it's very easy to get 
into casual space development, so there are a lot of us.  There are only 
so many eyeballs and the portals have found a way to garner them (in 
some cases by spending a heck of a lot of $ every month to drag those 
eyeballs to our games) and for a lot of us, this has enough value to 
give up the percentages that we do.

On another note, I've been following the main part of this thread with 
interest because I know that all of my portal contracts say that my 
games can't communicate with external sites.  I think most will be fine 
with a high score internet connection that doesn't advertise the site 
that the scores are stored on, but not much else.  The ideal for me 
would be a common registration system that let all casual gamers have a 
single unique ID, ie. SuperLennard means me on every casual game that I 
play, that would allow casual gamers to uniquely identify themselves 
everywhere and also make it easy for us to track foul language abuse.  
This would have to be independant of any one big portal and would 
represent a value for the casual gamer.

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

Ron wrote:

> You know, this is a very interesting topic (ok, a little off-topic), 
> and something that has confused me for a while.
>
> In the mainstream game business, a publisher provides 3 basic functions:
>
> 1) Financing of the game.
> 2) Marketing/PR support and funding.
> 3) Production guidance.
>
> In my experience, the portals (who are often referred to as 
> Publishers) rarely provide any of these.  They are, in my mind, 
> nothing more than distributors and/or retailers, but they take a 60% 
> or more cut.  A distributor should be taking a 20% or less cut.  What 
> it basically comes down to is the developer is taking all the 
> financial risk, and getting very little of the reward. It's strange 
> that it evolved this way, and I don't have enough history to know why.
>
> But my question is:  How long is this going to last?
>
> It would be one thing if the publishers/portals were paying for 
> development or real marketing, then I would expect them to be getting 
> the cut they do.  With Risk comes Reward.
>
> Am I missing something here?  I've asked this question to a couple of 
> developers and they are respond "yeah, sucks, what are you going to 
> do, they have all the traffic".
>
> Is that really it?  Do games with strong community elements start to 
> break this down, or do they only make it worse because the barrier to 
> entry for a small developer is now even higher.
>
> Ron
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Juan Gril wrote:
>
>> Distribution is selling goods to the consumer, and publishing is 
>> creating the goods for the consumer. Multiplayer games require that 
>> you create the goods, and to create a relationship with the consumer. 
>> In the videogame world so far this has not been a huge problem 
>> because the distributor’s business seems to not be affected by the 
>> publisher’s after-sale relationship with the consumer.
>>
>>  
>>
>> But in the online world, the line becomes a little blurry, isn’t it? 
>> So since the consumer purchases a digital good, it doesn’t really 
>> make a difference for the consumer to buy it at the distributor’s web 
>> site or at the publisher’s web site, isn’t it? It’s just a URL after 
>> all.
>>
>>  
>>
>> So is this the survival of the fittest? Is distribution/publishing 
>> becoming one entity, and at the same time, polarizing in less than a 
>> handful of companies? If so, aren’t most of us in this list in 
>> serious trouble? Will Google save the day? J
>>
>>  
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>  
>>
>> Juan
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> *From:* casual_games-bounces at igda.org 
>> [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] *On Behalf Of *Joe Pantuso
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 31, 2006 11:52 AM
>> *To:* IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
>> *Subject:* Re: [casual_games] Community Functionality
>>
>>  
>>
>> Exactly.  And responding to Juan; it's not the big guys that are 
>> scared stiff, I should have been more clear.  It's the smaller 
>> portals that just aggregate games and don't have deep pockets.
>>  
>>
>> The big guys will screw it up because they want to keep each others 
>> players out of the other guys hands.
>>
>>  
>>
>> We'll no doubt have other limitations of our own, but at least we're 
>> going to be trying to bring games to all the IMs.
>>
>>  
>>
>> On 1/31/06, *Ron* <lists at rzweb.com <mailto:lists at rzweb.com>> wrote:
>>
>>>  It's interesting. Makes you wonder why Pogo, Yahoo! and MSN 
>>> invested in
>>>  multiplayer infrastructures since the late 90s. I have a hunch that's
>>>  it's a little bit more complex than that.
>>
>>
>> I don't think that it's so much that they are scared of community, it's
>> that they are scared of loosing control.  Much like the IM stuff,
>> everyone's happy if you can only use their system, but once you can hop
>> around, it becomes a problem for them.  Community in Casual Games is
>> probably the same.  The portals are in in favor of it, as long as you're
>> locked in.   The last thing Yahoo wants is you playing with MSN players.
>>
>> But I agree that community is going to be huge as soon as it moves
>> beyond just chat and doesn't turn into PvP.
>>
>> Ron
>>
>>
>>
>> Juan Gril wrote:
>>
>>>  Joe was saying:
>>>
>>>  "My own opinion on all this is that community driven casual games are
>>>  the next big things, and the portals only figured this out the last 12
>>>  months and they are all scared stiff."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  It's interesting. Makes you wonder why Pogo, Yahoo! and MSN 
>>> invested in
>>>  multiplayer infrastructures since the late 90s. I have a hunch that's
>>>  it's a little bit more complex than that.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  Cheers,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  Juan
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
>>>
>>>
>>>  *From:* casual_games-bounces at igda.org 
>>
>> <mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org>
>>
>>>  [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org 
>>
>> <mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org>] *On Behalf Of *Joe Pantuso
>>
>>>  *Sent:* Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:58 AM
>>>  *To:* IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
>>>  *Subject:* Re: [casual_games] Community Functionality
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  My own opinion on all this is that community driven casual games 
>>> are the
>>>  next big things, and the portals only figured this out the last 12
>>>  months and they are all scared stiff.  My thinking is admittedly 
>>> biased
>>>  as we've been working on infrastructure specifically for this for 
>>> nearly
>>>  3 years.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  Our approach is this; there is room for community features in all 
>>> games
>>>  and they will be de riguer very soon.  There will also be an 
>>> increasing
>>>  number of multi-player 'casual' games.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  One of the models I'm hoping makes sense to people with existing
>>>  single-player games is to look at doing multi-player or MSOG versions
>>>  (http://www.traygames.com/Developer/FAQs.aspx?faq=dev_terminology 
>>
>> <http://www.traygames.com/Developer/FAQs.aspx?faq=dev_terminology>
>>
>>>  <http://www.traygames.com/Developer/FAQs.aspx?faq=dev_terminology>) of
>>>  their games that are hosted through us, but go ahead and do the single
>>>  player version for all the portals.  Since we want *only* games 
>>> that are
>>>  MSOG or multi-player we're perfectly happy for your single-player
>>>  version to be on every portal under the sun.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  I assume there will be a trend in these things similar to what we're
>>>  seeing happen in the IM products.  They've been rabidly insular the
>>>  first decade, and only the past year are we starting to see signs that
>>>  things will open up.  Within 18 months you'll be able to inter-operate
>>>  between all the major IM products.  This is a big boon to us as it 
>>> will
>>>  make our strategy of being the service you install to add games to 
>>> your
>>>  IM (regardless of which one you have) much simpler to make happen.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  I expect that eventually it will be hard to compete without at least
>>>  some community features in a game.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  -J
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
>>>
>>>
>>>  _______________________________________________
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>>>  Casual_Games at igda.org <mailto:Casual_Games at igda.org>
>>>  http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/casual_games
>>
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>>
>>
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>>
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