Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: business

Zyngas numbers are scary

Posted on July 3, 2011

Lets look at how many people are logged into steam right now, in the middle of their BIG summer sale:

2.3 million

Wow etc. Lets all say how huge the steam audience is. It certainly shows how much bigger valve is than positech, that’s for sure :D. But hold on…

Zyngas IPO means some real stats on the people playing zyngas games:

148 million unique monthly players

Holy alphabeti spaghetti batman. That’s a lot of people. Even though the majority of them never give Z any money, it’s still a staggeringly good business. Granted, Zyngas profits aren’t that high given the silly value the company has been put at, but even so, lets forget the money for a moment, and look at the fact that there are 148 million people prepared to play zyngas games.

That’s incredible.

It’s just a pity that the company was founded by a guy who didn’t give a fuck about his customers, and even bragged about it. I don’t care if my next game sells 1/100th of GSB. I still won’t bundle some shitty toolbar with it.

I hate it when companies like that do so well, mostly because it sends out signals that encourage the good guys to do the same thing. That’s whats so cool about successes by minecraft, frozen synapse, world of goo etc. It’s so cool when game devs who are nice guys and genuinely love games do so well. You don’t have to be like zynga to make a career from making games :D

The unthinkable? GSB micro-transactions? or…?

Posted on June 24, 2011

I had plans to do another GSB expansion pack, with a new race, much like the Nomads.

And then….

GTB has basically taken over. Combine it with ShowMeTheGames (which isn’t getting enough attention as it is) plus lots of home-life related building-stuff, and I just am not getting enough sleep. But I do have

  • Lots of GSB players
  • An artist willing to make new GSB ships.

I like to maintain control of stuff, so farming out DLC production to someone else is probably a ‘no’ right now. The thing is, the time taken to make new damage textures, new weapons, balance them, and do the whole package would be a bit of a nightmare.

So I was thinking, especially on this day that Team Fortress 2 goes ‘Free To Play’, that maybe micro-transactions are the future, and I should just leap into the market for them with GSB. I could get new ship hulls made, and designed, and have them sold as mini-DLC. Of course, the problem there is that there are minimum credit-card fees that I get charged, so anything below $4 is basically a disaster in terms of profit, making the whole thing unviable.

So I am scratching my chin thinking how viable it is to just do a bunch of extra base-race ships for GSB and sell them as a $4 mini-DLC booster pack. New federation, alliance, rebel and empire ships, by the original artist. That would take fairly minimal work, compared to the design of a whole new race. But would it make any sense? would there be a market for it?

Would you pay $4 for a bunch of new ships? I know a lot of people would not be interested, but there don’t have to be thousands of people for it to break even.

Amazon, Google checkout, and the letter T.

Posted on June 23, 2011

Something great has happened in the world of online payment providers. OK, it’s not up there with the discovery of fire, but BMTMicro, who handle the majority of my direct sales, have added amazon payments and google checkout to the payment options at last. I’m not too excited by google checkout (who here actually has an account?) but amazon is a different story.

Here in the UK, at least, amazon is VERY popular (although their tax-dodging behavior irritates me no-end) so a LOT of people already have an amazon account. What this means is that:

a) People who are lazy, and can’t be bothered to find their credit/debit card can buy my games just by remembering their amazon password. yay for frictionless selling!

b) People who are terrified of buying online can buy my games without ever trusting any payment data at all to a third party (even an established, safe one like BMTMicro).

I see both of these developments as steps along the road to easier sales, and encouraging people to buy direct now and then. Hurrah. AFAIK only BMT Micro support this option right now.

In other news…. I am having name-change thoughts AGAIN. Originally game 4 was called LB, then I changed it to OTT, then GTB. Now I might change it from GTB to GTB, where the letter T means something else. It means registering yet another domain, and getting a logo re-done, but I suspect it might be worth it. Oh the nail-biting angst….

Not long until I actually show some footage / screens/ etc

This is what they want (as tiswas used to say)

Posted on June 9, 2011

I got a lot of grief from various parts of the web for daring (how dare I!!) even mentioning the topic of games pricing, and the value of an indie game. Apparently, this topic is as off limits as anti-semitism or saying that The Phantom Menace was cool.

Meh.

Free markets conspire to give people what we want. We get exactly what we deserve in so many ways. People don’t care about politics, so we get corrupt politicians. People don’t care about eating healthily, so we get hormone boosted beef and…

People like games where you just click stuff and spam your friends. So we get farmville. And to go one stage further…

People LIKE to argue about the price of games, DRM and piracy. Trust me, I know, I have blog traffic stats. I know what gets people reading, and commenting. A tiny fraction of people get abusive and angry, but then this is the internet and as charlie brooker has said, you could give people online a free massage and they’d moan at you.

It would be simpler, and pretty boring to have a blog where I just talked about vertex buffers, never said anything about the games industry was bad or could be improved, and just had some cat pictures. But that would be boring to type and you wouldn’t read it. 99% of games developers talk purely in tedious bullshit marketing cliches about “How we are excited to work with our partners to bring this compelling new SKU to the market”. I’m pretty sure we have enough people doing that already :D

xkcd gets it...

 

crowdsourcing a small business

Posted on June 7, 2011

Here is a crazy idea for a website that I wish existed.

Say you had a small business, probably a one-person affair.  A corner-shop, or maybe a hot dog stand, or anything where there is just one or two of you. An indie dev would be fine, actually.

Imagine a website where you could go, and anonymously (in terms of not saying exactly where your business was, or what it was called) you could lay bare ALL of the facts about your business, in terms of finances. Every day, you would upload your current sales figures. All your expenses and bills would be online (anonymized).

the site would have forums, and you would need an account to post. The idea, would basically be to help run peoples business. You could comment on their sales, and their plans. You could suggest new pricing strategies, refer them to data on other businesses you thought appropriate, and the owner could decide whether to take people’s advice or not, optionally awarding karma to people who provided decent feedback.

What’s in it for the business owner? It’s like having 1,000 varieties of the ‘bloke down the pub’ who has an idea on how you could do better. This time you get advice from all over the world, from all kinds of people. On the whole, people will be genuine and helpful, and if they aren’t they will get modded down anyway.

What’s in it for the forum posters? Entertainment. There are a lot of armchair experts and business-obsessed stats geeks like me. I’d love to wade through the sales stats for my local shops. Maybe I’m sad, and unusual, but I bet I’m not the only one. It’s a big internet.

What’s in it for the website owners? Money. A site like this would be a magnet for small business owners. High-value advertising screen-estate for people flogging business books and accountancy / marketing services.

Why isn’t there a site like this?