[casual_games] More payment model ranting

Mon Oct 9 12:42:47 EDT 2006

"Maybe I'm simplifying things a bit too much, but it seems to me that if the
customers don't want to play a game after the initial 5 hours of playing
(through the version jumping), there's a bigger problem... we're not doing
our jobs properly and not providing a compelling enough experience."

- If we start with the premise that we are selling $20 games, yes, you are
perhaps right that we need to be giving them more than 5 hours of
entertainment. But I think that premise is inherently flawed.

My point is, we HAVE given them 5 hours of entertainment - 2x as long as a
feature film that costs $7-10 bucks to see. So isn't that worth *something*
- even if not $20? If they get even an hour of enjoyment from our game,
what's that worth? A quarter? A buck? A couple of bucks? It seems that the
casual game player is really looking for a few hours of entertainment - so
we need to be looking for ways to monetize THAT - not looking at ways to
cram a 10 hour game down their throat. We're all still clinging to an
outdated idea that games have to be AAA 24 hour masterpieces at a high price
point to survive. What if we let go of that belief, and see our games for
what they really are: popcorn entertainment for the masses.

I hang out with my business school friends all the time. They are our EXACT
target demographic: Over 30, primarily female, lots of disposable income,
highly computer literate. They ALL play casual games. And NONE of them buy
them. They just surf the hour demos, and that's all they need. And maybe
THAT'S OK. If THAT is the experience they want, lets give it to them in a
way they are willing to pay something for. Most of them use Rhapsody or
iTunes - so I know hey are willing to drop a buck or two every now and then
for digital entertainment - but they are NOT willing to drop 20 bucks for a
gem-matching game or Galaga clone when they can go down to Best Buy and pick
up WoW or Oblivion for 30-40. This is our audience, and they are TELLING us
what they want with their buying behavior. Why don't we listen?

As for all of the problems with micropayments, etc., I think the solution is
pretty simple. There are about 10 really big portals that sell the vast
majority of games in the industry now: Real, Reflexive, Big Fish, Yahoo,
MSN, Oberon, Boonty, Wild Tangent, Trymedia, a few others. If all of them
could introduce a model that started monetizing a few hours of play, I think
we would be on to something.

Visualize this, from the consumer perspective:
1) You go to PORTALX and buy $20 worth of tokens. The credit card charge is
on that, and thus no bigger a problem than it is now.
2) You can play as many games as you want, as often as you want. But every
time you open the application again, it knocks off a quarter.
3) If those quarters ever reach the purchase price, "whammo" - you own the
game.
4) That's it.

There are a hundred things you can do with a model like that, like:
- give discounted tokens when the player buys $50 worth
- have brand new games cost 2 tokens for a week
- have the very first play of some of the discount games be free
- give the first time buyers an extra $5 of tokens
- Give out tokens for winning games of contests
- Have tournaments for the games with worldwide highscores, and charge extra
tokens to submit your scores - with the possibility of winning real prizes
like vacations and crap.
- sell huge blocks of tokens to advertisers and marketing companies for
promotion giveaways.
- ...and for those who LOVE the Korean micropayment model, have extras you
can buy IN the game with the tokens. Virtual pets and crap.

The list goes on and on and on - and we're not doing ANY of it - instead,
we're straightjacketing ourselves in a very restrictive and inefficient $20
a game model that's creating a very brutal crap-shot industry of a few major
winners and a lot of losers.

Wild Tangent has already done most of the hard work of building and testing
a system VERY much like the one described above (minus the owning it when
your credits = purchase price). They are testing it and getting very good
results. If each of the portals adopted the same basic system - and they can
all have their own coins, and fight for customers, that's just fine - and we
STOPPED GIVING AWAY OUR GAMES FOR FREE, we might all make some money at
this, no?

Its simple, all it takes is buy-in from the major portals - and it's likely
MORE profitable for them anyway. In fact, it encourages stickiness to one
portal or the other - which they should LIKE. 

So, smart mailing list people - where is the hole in my plan? 
Or what's your better plan?
How do we fix this model, and get our window shoppers to pay up?

Cn

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Kurt Boutin
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 9:08 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: RE: [casual_games] Version jumping

Maybe I'm simplifying things a bit too much, but it seems to me that if the
customers don't want to play a game after the initial 5 hours of playing
(through the version jumping), there's a bigger problem.  That problem lies
with us.  If a customer is satisfied after playing 5 hours, then our games
aren't good enough.  If, at the end of the 5 hours, they're not saying,
"Hell yeah, I need to buy this game!", then we're not doing our jobs
properly and not providing a compelling enough experience.

Kurt
----
Kurt Boutin
Director of QA
Pronto Games
kboutin at prontogames.com

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org
[mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]On Behalf Of Cole, Vladimir
Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2006 10:53 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: RE: [casual_games] Version jumping

Is the assumption about this "version jumping" prevention idea that
customers who currently version jump will choose to purchase the game
instead of version jump? Is that a valid assumption? Would these
customers just leave the market entirely if they were prevented from
version jumping? At the very least, these folks are generating
monetizable page views right now. If "version jumping" is a significant
issue, perhaps it points to strong consumer demand for ad-supported play
(or even pay-per-level) instead of downloaded games at $20 a pop.

Maybe instead of trying to lock casual gamers out of games via a
coordinated anti-version-jumping effort, the focus should instead be on
how to better monetize customers who are willing to play, but unwilling
to pay $20.

Questionable assumption aside, if there were an easy way to prevent
version jumping and if everyone implemented it, what would happen?

Portals would race to be "first" with new titles, as the portal that
convinces customers to install a game first will have prevented rivals
from offering a fully-featured demo. That could get ugly. One result
might be that portals will fight harder (i.e., pay more) to acquire a
game exclusively for some window of time. Maybe portals would be more
aggressive about marketing the game during that exclusivity window.

But the rivals who lose a bidding war for exclusive access to a game
might be less willing to market or merchandise a game if they know that
it's been exclusive at RivalX's portal for some period of time. Why
market or prominently merchandise a product that your customers won't be
able to enjoy?

The end result of a truly effective "version jumping" prevention program
might be single-portal exclusivity for new games, with lower aggregate
sales for each developer (but with perhaps greater payments to
developers as portals bid for exclusivity).

Still, a world in which portals regularly score exclusive content might
allow sites to differentiate themselves according to content choices.
That could be interesting.

- v

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org
[mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of Ron
Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2006 12:01 PM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Version jumping

> - Has anyone experimented with this? What do the
> portals feel?

I have spoken to one portal about a way for the game to know if it's in
the try-to-buy period, and they were very against it, mainly because
they didn't feel that the devs would use it effectively (i.e. turn off
the wrong features, show an incomplete game, etc).  They felt that the
user should have a true experience in the try-to-buy period.  I don't
agree.  I think building "demos" that people can play (maybe forever) is
a much better idea that just letting them play the whole game for an
hour.  As I've stated before, I think the try-to-buy model is very
broken and costing us a lot of sales.

I think the issue you bring up could turn into a huge problem.  I have
used this technique many times when I need to explore a competition's
title for longer then an hour, but I always figured the "casual user"
wasn't going to go to the trouble, but that might be changing.

Hopefully this is something the portals will get on top of quickly.

Ron

Allan Simonsen wrote:
> We're seeing a lot of our users bypassing the 60
> minute demo-timeout by changing providers (getting 3
> or 4 different 60 minute sessions downloading the same
> game from Reflexive, BigFish, etc).
>
> I'd argue that this endangers part of the casual games
> business model; if we wanted the user to have a 5 hour
> trial period, we'd probably offer him or her that in
> the first place.
>
> We're seeing a lot of players focusing on the
> single-player campaign (the story mode, or similar).
> Once they've finished the campaign, their motivation
> for actually purchasing the product drops
> dramatically, even if there's still additional puzzle
> or community modules that they haven't explored. That
> some of the portals don't interrupt the play-time at
> 60 minutes (effectively allowing the user to play as
> long as he/she wants, provided they don't close the
> program) doesn't help.
>
> So.. solutions. The simplest path is probably to
> implement a maximum playtime in demo-mode, using a
> registry key or similar to ensure that irregardless of
> distributor, the demo-version can only be played for
> max 60 minutes. You'd need to check against the DRM
> wrapper(s) to ensure that purchased versions don't
> have this problem.
>
> - Has anyone experimented with this? What do the
> portals feel?
>
> - What are the DRM APIs that you'd need to support on
> this? Has anyone looked at doing an abstraction layer
> to simplify supporting all of the common APIs?
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Allan Simonsen
>
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