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

Category: business

Strategy game specs are going mad

Posted on August 8, 2010

I just saw the recommended system reqs for Civilisation V.

  • Operating System: Windows® Vista SP2/ Windows® 7
  • Processor: 1.8 GHz Quad Core CPU
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
  • Video: 512 MB ATI 4800 series or better, 512 MB nVidia 9800 series or better

    • What?

    WHAT?

    512MB video cards and quad core, for a turn-based strategy game? The min specs…

  • Operating System: Windows® XP SP3/ Windows® Vista SP2/ Windows® 7
  • Processor: Dual Core CPU
  • Memory: 2GB RAM
  • Video: 256 MB ATI HD2600 XT or better, 256 MB nVidia 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics

    • That’s still crazy. We are talking MINIMUM specs here, for a geeky turn-based game. GSB has high specs (for me) because of the real-time battle playback shinyness, but I’d still think they are lower than this.

    I like games like CIV, but ultimately these games are not about the graphics. I just cannot imagine where the processing power is going. This trend to make the campaign maps of strategy game run at 10 FPS just boggles my mind.  What about all the strategy geeks with old PCs or laptops and no interest in buying new ones? Don’t people want their money?

    Someone with the min spec above, tell me how GSB runs for you. Please tell me it runs fine or I’ll look a right dork :D

    The fine line between marketing and addiction in games

    Posted on August 5, 2010

    I don’t normally blog just to link to someone else’s writing, because that kind of bugs me, but allow me this rare indulgence. This is worth a read:

    http://kotaku.com/5605532/how-an-army-of-junkies-and-kids-enriches-tech-titans

    It’s a bit one-sided. I don’t like the moaning that virtual items ‘never existed’. Just because something is encoded digitally does not mean it has no value, even if the scarcity is artificial. (I own a ‘limited-edition’ print of a painting of a native american dancer, on the wall of my office. That’s artificial scarcity, and nobody minds that…).

    But given my beef with that specific complaint, it’s still an interesting read. I’d hate to think people spent too much money, money they didn’t have, especially if they got into debt… on my games. I need to earn a living, but I don’t need money enough to risk getting people addicted to something just to line my pockets.

    There is a fine line between clever marketing and design, and exploiting psychological tricks to wring every last penny from addicts. Modern companies of all types need to pay attention to that line, and not cross it.

    I don’t need a 2nd job, or heroin

    Posted on August 2, 2010

    There seems to have been a huge growth in two areas of game design in the last 5 years.

    1) 2nd Job games.

    Most people call them ‘MMOs’ , but the basic gameplay seems to be this: You start out at the bottom. You go to someone who stands there all day doing nothing who tells you to go kill 5 spiders. When you do that, he gives you a miniscule promotion, and then tells you to kill 10 spiders. Repeat until dead.

    This sounds like some of the early office jobs I did, only rather than the spider-dude paying me at the end of each month, with an MMO, I pay for the priviledge of doing this job. No thanks.

    2) Heroin

    I’m lucky. I don’t get really addicted to farmville games, or flash MMOs. I know people VERY addicted to world of Warcraft or EVE. People who run online games who I know have tales of people spending $300+ a month on in-game items. Why? Because they are addicted.

    Peoples’ brains are different. A BIG chunk of people have whatever neurotransmitter or collection of neurons it takes to get them totally hooked on games which keep you in a  tight feedback/reward/effort loop, ad finitum. A lot of big companies are tuned into this and boy do they exploit it. Keep them playing…Keep them playing… Spread out the gameplay, because the players time is considered worthless to them. Quantity, not Quality…

    And we are only at the very early days of this. People have already shown adverts to people while they lie in MRI scanners to fine tune the ads to the way peoples emotions trigger. This will come for games, if it isn’t already being studied.

    Luckily, I seem to be immune to 2) and I already have a job, so 1) doesn’t appeal to me. There are still fun games out there that I enjoy, but they are becoming an endangered species. Company of Heroes is now Company of Heroes online, because they want micro-transactions and the addictive push-button-get-banana gameplay that earns zynga so much money…

    I see *why* gaming is going this way, I just feel left out and a bit saddened by it.

    Ransomware cheap DLC

    Posted on July 28, 2010

    I was looking at a certain games portals ‘new releases’ list recently and saw tons of tiny bits of DLC for under 3 dollars. Very cheap. I assume that this stuff makes money, or at least breaks even.

    It got me thinking about the possibility of similar priced DLC for GSB. I’m not especially keen to do any more fully fledged expansion packs. I did three, and you’d be surprised how much work is involved in adding new weapon types and modules. The game is hugely involved now. The weapons for the order took ages to balance. The swarm was easier, but they still took a while.

    Right now, I’m 100% dedicated to the GSB campaign game, which is horribly complex to code (yet pretty simple to play, it’s not galciv or anything like it). As a result, I’m not about to make any new module types or other gameplay-affecting stuff.

    But then… is there a market for just new ships hulls? Either more hulls for the existing races, or maybe another new race, but one with no specific new tech. Just new visual shiny basically. Would people be interested? To do a whole new race costs a lot in artist time (and some cliff-time for the damage textures)., but if I could find a way to make it break-even, I’d do it. I love designing the ideas for new ships. It’s mostly artist work, so I can keep working on the campaign.

    Has anyone ever run, partaken in, or seen a ransomware model working? The idea is that people pledge money (and actually hand it over, it’s not just a promise) to a third party. When that amount reaches $X, the product is produced, and released (presumably for free?) and the developer gets the money. Kind of like donations, but with a target.  If the limit isn’t reached, I assume the people get their money back. I hear people talk about this idea, but I’ve never seen it happen. have you?

    The marketing / production tradeoff

    Posted on July 27, 2010

    There is a tradeoff every developer is making when it comes to spending money. You either spend it on the product, or marketing and promoting the product.

    Now the romantically inclined might suggest that the best thing to do is just make the best possible game you can (100% product) and then the product will ‘sell itself’. Word of mouth news of your awesome game will do the work of the ad-men, and you will sell games by the bucketload.

    The cynically inclined might suggest that the best thing to do is to market the hell out of your game. It doesn’t matter if the product istelf is a bit rough, because if 20,000,000 people get to hear about it, then you are bound to find enough of them who are bored enough to hand over the cash.

    Obviously sanity lies somewhere in the middle. Finding out exactly where it lies, is not easy. To make a rational decision requires you to be able to measure the difference each dollar you spend actually makes. Clearly that is not easy.

    With improvements to a games quality, you can sometimes tell that (for example) version 1.23 has a 22% higher conversion rate from the demo than version 1.22. This is assuming you have a clever enough order process to track that, are sure people aren’t trying an old, mirrored demo download and so on. Even then, this is completely useless, because it only works on the demo. Maybe version 1.23 full version is so awesome it encourages 18.34% more of your buyers to refer a friend to the game? Maybe screenshots from version 1.23 got featured on a website whereas 1.22 would not have, thus pulling in more eyeballs etc…

    You might assume that it’s an easier thing to measure how effective marketing and promotion are. To a point this is true. I can tell you the CPC, CTR CPM and other boring acronyms for all my ads. I can plot very accurately the curve of CPC rising as total ad spend also climbs, and the  sales/ad spend is also very easily measured. Google Analytics even shows you the ROI for each individual site where your banner was shown. However, this leaves out an absolute ton of variables. Maybe someone saw an ad on their work PC, then bought it later on theirs (not tracked). Maybe someone saw an ad, told a friend, and the friend bought it (not tracked) and so on…

    And that’s only for directly net-connected stuff like ad buys. I ran a competition where I gave away a hideously expensive plastic spaceship model. Did that get me any PR? any sales? any good word-of-mouth? VERY hard to tell. I spend quite a bit of time replying to emails from journalists, and seeking out websites to promote the game. Is the return on investment there better than coding? Who can tell…

    For me, spending money on ads is quite an easy decision, because there is only one of me. Doubling my ad spend doesn’t require any more of my (overstretched) time at all. So I’m not having to do a weigh-up of time on marketing vs time on the game. it’s much harder to weigh up anything that takes actual time away from coding. There is still the decision as to weighing up money spent on contractors (art, web design, sound) vs money spent on ads. And then of course there is the tradeoff between employing an artist (product) vs employing a PR guy (marketing).

    Personally, I’m wary of actually employing PR people. I’m a one man company. The ‘brand’ ‘story’ and ‘image’ of Positech games is just me. It would feel silly to have someone try and ‘re-brand’ me. That’s a level of corporateness which I don’t want to get into.

    …of course, if I’m really good at PR, then I already employ a person to do all this, and he is the one typing this blog post. Cliff’s busy coding, as always

    ..or is he?