[casual_games] Community Functionality
Kenny Dinkin
kenny at playfirst.com
Tue Jan 31 20:25:31 EST 2006
James is right - portals and publishers are not the same. Though Juan's
got a point that there's lots of shades of grey in our (still
semi-nascent) industry, at the core Portals are primarily retailers.
Their focus is on selling LOTs of different games to lots of different
customers.
Publishers partner with developers to help developers get their games
successfully published -- at the same time publishers want to build and
grow their portfolio or label of content. A real publisher should do all
the things that publishers do in the book or record world or always did
in the PC/console space: funding from concept, marketing/PR and
distribution, even licensing. And if your content's good, a good
publisher ought to be able to exponentially broaden your opportunity -
giving you a bigger pie to take a slice of.
Publishers and developers are likely to be more focused on the game
making and thus closer to the content than a retailer/portal can ever
be.
An analogy we sometimes use - imagine a portal being like Barnes & Noble
or Borders. They have customer relationships, community features
(coffee shops, book signings), guidelines for the content they want to
sell, the whole deal. In that world, you still need a strong Simon and
Shuster, or Little Brown - the publisher - to take risks and ensure a
pipeline of diverse content for the platform. The retailer may
sometimes be interested in their own first-party content, but
theoretically this is not their core business.
Also, to clarify and respond to Lennard's point - PlayFirst is
interested in working with developers with inventive ideas, not just
slam dunks. We believe in taking risks on great new concepts and we've
got a handful of developers whom we're funding from concept- and several
first or second time developers working out of their homes with very
small teams. We think it takes all types of developers to create a
strong portfolio of great interactive entertainment.
-k
-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org
[mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of James C. Smith
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 2:33 PM
To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List'
Subject: RE: [casual_games] Community Functionality
>> In my experience, the portals (who are often referred to as
Publishers)
It is a mistake to refer to them as publishers. You will see this
mistake
made by some newcomers. But no professional in this industry will use
the
term publisher when talking about a "portal".
>> They are, in my mind, nothing more than distributors and/or retailers
>> A distributor should be taking a 20% or less cut.
A place like Yahoo, MSN, Real, Shockwave is a retailer. The are not
simple
distributors. They deserve more than 20%. The run the store front. They
are
retailers. I would only use the term 'distributor; for a middle man
like a
content aggregator who probably does only deserve 20%.
>> It would be one thing if the publishers/portals were paying for
development or real marketing.
There are companies who do those things for casual games. We call them
publishers. This is why it gets confusing when people start to use the
term
publisher for companies that are actually retailers.
-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org
[mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Ron
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 1:58 PM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Community Functionality
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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