(Or at least “not as bad”.)

There has been a fair amount of press in the past few months about cloned games – and particularly in relation to mobile titles. It’s reached the point that there are going to be a conference talk about the practice.

Mobile is a marketplace that is continually shifting, adapting, and trying out new monetisation techniques, with many developers now giving their game away for free and earning their pay in other ways. There have been a number of articles written about how piracy isn’t a lost sale, and instead of attempting to stamp it out, it should be embraced.

So if piracy is good, why is cloning a game bad?

Schmeconomics

To answer the question, you’re really got to look at economics. And I never thought I’d be writing an article talking about economics. So let’s make it less stressful for both of us, and talk about non-monetary economics.

We’re just going to ignore money all together.

There, that feels better.

There’s more to life than money, after all, and there are certainly other things of value in the business world than money.

Attention and reputation are two of these valuable non-monetary economies.

Celebrities trade on their reputation. Take Lady Gaga (seriously, this post is just sprinting away from my comfort zone). She releases a bunch of songs, and people like them. Because of how our squishy brains work, this means that those people also start to listen to what Lady Gaga says, and they take notice of what she’s doing. A company could now ask Lady Gaga to use her reputation to bring attention to their product.

And that product might not be something they’re expecting you, the squishy-brained Gaga fanatic, to buy directly (though obviously product sponsorship is huge business). Maybe it’s a film, and she is in it. I’m sure her acting skills are without reproach, but even if that weren’t, it would be worth casting Gaga in your film just for the extra attention (and by extension ticket sales) she would bring. Because of her reputation.

If she spoils her reputation within her fan base (maybe by selling her association to too many low-quality products), this impacts her ability to earn.

Attention is valuable in other ways. Why do game developers write blogs? It’s not to riddle them with curious keywords so they can chuckle at the Google searches that lead people there. It’s to get reputation and attention.

Every game development diary is, one way or another, intended to bring the developer (and by association their game) or the game (and by association its developer) to your attention. Whether they want that attention so that you’ll buy their games, or book them for a conference, or hire them, or so that they can use their readership figures to persuade a book publisher to accept their proposal. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is the reputation and attention.

Social media use by companies is pretty much entirely built around the ideas of attention and reputation. Even if I’m not in the market to buy a car, if I see an interesting tweet by Ford (and that may be interesting in the sense that it shows exception customer care, or it’s funny, or thought provoking) and I retweet it, I am giving it the attention of the people who follow me. And maybe one of them is in a car buying state of mind.

And don’t forget that your twitter follower list is built on your reputation. If you keep tweeting things someone doesn’t like, they will stop following you. They are following you because you have a reputation with them for tweeting things they like.

Enough About Gaga, What About Games?

So with those examples in mind, it hopefully becomes a little bit clearer where my reasoning is going.

You can make the best game in the world, but if it receives no attention (i.e. no-one is playing it), then you will not be making money from it. No matter what monetisation model you’re using – be that a one-shot payment on purchase, freemium / free to play, ad-supported – every one of those requires someone other than you to be aware of the game before you can get some income from it.

If you’re doing work for hire then you will most likely need the attention and reputation your previous projects have brought you in order to secure the contract.

Companies thrive off reputation. Names such as Valve, Blizzard, and Bungie are able to leverage a great deal of attention and goodwill towards any new product they announce, based purely on their reputation for making quality games.

This reputation translates straight in to game pre-orders. I think it would be hard to argue that a company or game series with a poor reputation will struggle to drum up pre-orders, whereas something like Call of Duty can break records, based entirely on how much players trust the developers to deliver a game they will enjoy.

It’s interesting (to me at least) that Valve’s Steam is held in generally high regard in the gamer community these days. Whereas the rival service started by EA is treated suspiciously, based on their perceived reputation for over-relying on expensive and meagre DLC. Do you think a Ubisoft could release a viable challenger to Steam, given their current reputation for DRM amongst gamers?

Skip to the End…

So why is cloning a game bad, but pirating it is good?

Piracy takes away the direct monetisation of a game, but the pirate and the game can still help build reputation and attention for legitimate copies.

But cloning takes away all three of the discussed economies – you earn no money from the clone, it splits the attention of your game’s potential market between numerous titles, and it could even sour your reputation if people believe that you are the one making unoriginal riffs on other games.

With almost prescient timing I started writing this article, that mentioned both Nimblebit and Zynga, only a few days before their open letter was published. And being the idiot that I am, I totally failed to take advantage of that and instead took almost another two weeks to finish the thing. And being a double idiot, I then ended up stripping most of the references out in the edit. I’m a game developer, not a journalist.

On the Nimblebit vs Zynga thing, it is interesting that both companies have reputation, though with different audiences. There have been articles and reports written about the lack of loyalty in Zynga’s player-base, suggesting a poor (or no) reputation. I think that’s may be the case, but it’s proven that their players trust the reputation of the games themselves. Zynga regularly puts this to use cross advertising new titles to their existing player-base – it’s how their games can get so many players so quickly, while smaller developers have to struggle to bring attention to their titles. 

In the face of news that Game, the UK’s largest specialist games retailer, might be in serious trouble, I was thinking about high street stores.

I think it’s very good for gaming as a hobby to have a dedicated high street presence (both for visibility and acceptance of the hobby as a mainstream pastime, and also so that grannies and other people can get advice on buying presents), but it’s clear (and has been for a while) that just selling boxed games isn’t enough.

So what would I do if I owned a chain of game stores? What would they contain?

An arcade (of sorts). Featuring the sorts of arcade machines that have experiences that most people just can’t get at home (big sit-in cabinets, lightguns, etc.)

A gaming cafe. Areas with comfortable sofas and big TVs, connected to locally networked and internet enabled consoles, to allow groups to play together. Hosting occasional tournaments and competitions sponsored by game publishers. And with free refreshments. Play any game in the store – and if you buy the game afterwards, you get your play time for free.

A retro museum. (With everything that’s there for sale, obviously.)

All kinds of related merchandise. Strategy guides, art books, fluffy toys, phone cases, game subscription and money cards.

Expert staff. When you go to a butchers and ask about their sausages they don’t look at you bored and say “I dunno, try these pork ones, they’re pretty popular”. Staff should be able to have a knowledgable conversation about gaming, and should be able to recommend obscure (and yes, even retro) games based off your playing preferences.

Yesterday morning during my usual scan of my rss feeds I saw the trailer video to Time Ducks.

I watched it. It made me laugh. It made me curious. I went to the app store. It’s £1.49. I bought it.

Conventional wisdom would have it that pricing such a simple game (it’s Frogger, with the controls of Flight Control and some basic time manipulation) shouldn’t be more than 69p.

And then I shared the video. And then I blogged about it.

I know about another game coming up that’s about to have a trailer filmed featuring dogs in hats. I can’t wait!

Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo has entered the UK all formats chart at number 7. Not bad going for a DS game.

What I find really impressive is the marketing campaign that’s been created for it – I’ve seen AAA console games that don’t get this kind of exposure.

A sort of version of my Twitter feed, condensed and then expanded again. Like an efficient central heating system of pointless games twaddle.

• So the MS press event starts with two non-exclusives? Seems a bit plops. It turns out there wasn’t anything particularly exciting that we hadn’t already seen or heard of. Just a lot of terrible-looking Kinect things.
• Tomb Raider – Fall 2012? So there’s an entire other E3 before it comes out. Why show things this far in advance? That’s like 14 months at least before we can play it, do you think you’re going to be able to keep customer excitement up for that long? (Insert Lara Croft / gamer excitement joke here.)
• Mass Effect 3 – Can’t wait to play that planet scanning minigame using Kinect. My arms will fall off.
• Every year there should be a booby prize for the game which has been shown the most number of E3s without being released yet. The more I think about this, the more I like it.
• Yves Guillemot: “All future titles in the Tom Clancy franchise will leverage Kinect.” They’re going to leverage kinect? Like you have to lift up heavy rocks using it as a fulcrum? This Angry Birds physics puzzle craze has gone too far. TOO FAR.
• Xbox Bing – because we couldn’t make a dashboard that was easy to browse for your content.
• FuriousRoss: “XBOX BING BOOBIES”
• Needs more Xzibit … RT: @randomnine: Oh, cool. You’ll be able to watch TV on your XBox connected to your TV.
• misterbrilliant: “Lightsaber ON.” – Obi Wan Kenobi
• And then reams and reams of bloody awful Kinect minigame stuff. No, that’s not fair. I’m sure it’s great. It’s definitely not all just Wii clone stuff with a slightly worse interface. It does at least all look very slick and polished though. That’s what’s important, right?

This is what’s (still) wrong with the games industry today.

Three pages, generating over three hundred comments, about which console version of Crysis 2 has slightly better shadows. Good grief. The most telling line comes in the second to last paragraph:

The crucial thing is that both are phenomenally attractive games

:facepalm:

Towards the end of last year, EA Games’ label president Frank Gibeau announced that he thought games with just single player content were dead, and that all games from that point on would have some for of multiplayer connectivity (interestingly, he includes social aspects, such as level sharing, as a multiplayer activity).

There was something of an outcry of players dismissing this idea. Plenty of people still play single player only games, and the healthy sales of franchises such as Fallout add weight to the counterargument.

When you look at the sales of a critically acclaimed game like Enslaved (no matter what I thought of it)I can’t help but think he’s got a point, though possibly not in the way he expressed it.

I think the pricing structure of the games market today has sealed the nail in the coffin of short single-player-only games that offer no reason to replay them.

If I hear that a £40 game is going to last me a couple of evenings, I will either hold off from buying it until it is much cheaper, buy it and then feed my copy back into the dreaded second hand market, or rent it. None of these options is good for the developers, financially.

Compelling single player content takes longer to make than an extensive multiplayer mode. Even a long SP game, such as Fallout 3, eventually runs out of new experiences (it could be argued it runs out of “new stuff to see” quite quickly, and from that point all content variation is delivered in text form) for its players. A well design multiplayer game can offer effectively limitless new play, as the various play styles of players differ and interact in new ways, causing no two matches to be exactly the same. Combined with the player investment techniques that are de rigueur you have a game that can hold a playerbase’s attention for a year, on just a dozen maps.

The question is really one of how much value for their money you have provided a player before they reach the end of the content you’ve given them.

(There is a further point of how much additional content is available for them to buy later, in the form of DLC, but I don’t really want to get in to that, and besides – single player DLC suffers roughly the same time to create / time to play ratio as the main game. Possibly lower as you may be reusing a lot of existing assets.)

As an example, I recently bought Costume Quest, which is a rather charming single player RPG, that took me maybe around five hours to complete. Was I annoyed at its short play time? Not at all, since I’d paid roughly £10 for it. In fact, I went straight to buy the DLC which offered another four hours for something like £5.

Would all single player games sell better if they were split up into episodes like this? “Episodic gaming” was something off a buzzword half a decade ago, but very little came of it. Arguably because very few developers actually produced episodic content in the true definition of the phrase. Telltale is the only one that comes to mind, and they seem to have had some success in the field.

As an aside here, I’ll just define what I mean by “replay value” in a single player game. I’m not talking about “you can play exactly the same game again, but the enemies have more hit points and are more accurate, and you’ll get a new Achievement”. Anyone willing to do that obviously loves your game enough that they’re not trading it in anyway. Likewise, being able to play again to collect arbitrary tokens to unlock a piece of concept art is not a compelling task and reward (though you could at least tie to tokens in to providing further background to the game world, in the same way Bioshock et al do with audio logs).

But the solution is not just to hammer in a simple multiplayer mode. Without a community multiplayer is nothing – literally – and though you can rely on servers being populated early in a game’s life, a few months down the line the chances are they are going to be looking less healthy unless you offer something different from other titles.

In the work time it takes for your team to create a working multiplayer game, they could have been building more content into your single player. Because nobody is going to stick around for another straight deathmatch experience.

I will be interested to see how servers for games like Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Dead Space 2 are after half a year. They offer interesting multiplayer experiences which differ from those of the blockbuster FPS games. Is that enough to keep your audience happy and make them feel like they have got value for money from your game?

So yeah, I think there’s definitely an argument that a section of single player gaming is dead, at least at a premium price point.

Harmonix, creator of some music game or other you’ve probably never heard of, is for sale after Rock Band 3 has apparently flopped hard at retail. Other potential buyers are shying away. People have been predicting the music game bubble would burst for a year or so now, and with DJ Hero 2 and whatever the latest Guitar Hero is also not setting the charts on fire, it looks like they might be right.

I don’t entirely agree.

I think with their Kinect dancing game, and the stuff they did pre-Guitar Hero, they have shown they really know what makes a music-based game tick. They have just gotten stuck down the increasingly expensive peripheral route. No matter what is done in this field now, the customer is just seeing the cost of the latest plastic instrument, and thinks “well it’s probably the same game I already bought, I will leave it”.

But I don’t believe that people are sick of “music games” as a genre, I think they are sick of Guitar Hero clones. I am including stuff like Rez, Amplitude, and Lumines as music games, though.

So, assuming I had the money, here is my plan for Harmonix.

1. Buy Harmonix
2. Have them work on a few music games that don’t require new peripherals, and that aren’t just aping Guitar Hero in a different skin.
3. Release them all as reasonably cheap XBLA / Steam / PSN games. Hell, release some of the really cut down prototypes as Flash/Facebook games, for free. This stage is really all about getting as many different games out there as possible, to a decent quality level, and creating a wealth of new IP (even if most of it turns out to be worthless).
4. See which are popular.
5. Make sequels to those, with full game budgets (still no new peripherals) & full releases.
6. Well done, you have made at least one of the next big music game franchises.
7. Sell them on a year from that point, when their star is at a high again.
8. Make out like a bandit.

Anyone want to lend me a tenner?

Football Manager Handheld 2011 for a generous £35.99 (€44.99) on PlayStation Store.

I would genuinely love to know the thinking behind this pricing (twice what it is already available for from online retailers) and if Sega expect to make any sales at this price.

Is it some kind of odd bullishness that makes them want the digital download version to fail? Or the idea that the incredibly slim sales this version is sure to get will still make them a much healthier profit per copy than the UMD version?

I have no idea. When Sony get their Store’s PSP game pricing so right, how can others get it so wrong?

It’s come to the time of year where Develop magazine (a mainly UK mag for games developers, if you weren’t aware) hosts its annual conference in Brighton. Part of this is always the presentation of the Develop awards, as voted for by industry bigwigs.

I thought I’d have a go at predicting some winners (note: not necessarily who I want to win, or think deserves it most – just who I think will). Get a drink – this is going to be a long one. Why not join in the fun in the comments?

Best New IP
Blur (Bizarre Creations)
Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream)
Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment)
EyePet (SCE London Studio)
Backbreaker (NaturalMotion)
APB (Realtime Worlds)
Split/Second (Black Rock Studio)

I think this will end up going to Heavy Rain, as I’m led to believe it’s been pretty successful both critically and commercially. Must admit to never even having heard of Backbreaker. Apparently it’s an American Football game with nice physics. Must get around to playing Heavy Rain – I have a copy bought and sat on the pile.

Best New Download IP
Angry Birds (Rovio)
VVVVVV (Distractionware)
Chime (Zoe Mode)
Machinariam (Amanita Design)
Orbital (BitForge)
Blue Toad Murder Files (Relentless Software)
Joe Danger (Hello Games)

A toss-up between Angry Birds and Joe Danger, but I will plump for the former. This is mainly because I think the people who vote for these are more likely to have played it. It’ll be a worthy winner – it’s an extremely well polished game with a nice level of complexity behind the apparent simplicity. It also seems to have done a good job of breaking into the iPhone-playing public consciousness as a whole.

Best Use of a Licence or IP
Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Games)
Metro 2033 (4A Games)
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Climax Games)
Doctor Who: The Adventure Games (Sumo Digital / Revolution)
LittleBigPlanet PSP (SCE Cambridge)
Aliens vs Predator (Rebellion)

As much as I love LBPPSP, I really hope this goes to Batman. A fantastic application of an often mishandled IP, creating a brilliant game. I think Doctor Who is the only other option that could nudge a win, mainly through the awards’ brit-centric nature.

Visual Arts
Machinarium (Amanita Design)
Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Games)
Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment)
Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream)
EyePet (SCE London Studio)
Split/Second (Black Rock Studio)

Really tough one to call – they are all solid options (with the possible exception of the Geordie Tamagotchi). I think Machinarium deserves the win for the amazing hand drawn detail, but I have a feeling it will go to Heavy Rain.

Audio Accomplishment
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (EA DICE)
Blur (Bizarre Creations)
DJ Hero (FreeStyleGames)
Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising (Codemasters)
Split/Second (Black Rock)
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Climax)
Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Games)

Interesting. I can’t really work out Batman’s inclusion on the list? I mean, it had a great voice cast, but that’s because it had the Animated Series’ voice cast. DJ Hero had a solidly created soundtrack, but I’m going to back Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Though someone should be shot for hiding the best gun sounds in an FPS behind a menu option, meaning that most will play it with just “very good” audio.

Publishing Hero
Sega
Sony XDev
Bigpoint
Microsoft
Channel 4
BBC

Sega? For releasing the dreadful Iron Man 2, and the half-baked Alpha Protocol, as well as ripping out chunks of Yakuza 3 before giving it to us? No thanks. I’m going to put my vote with Microsoft, mainly for their continued support of the XBLIG channel. Yes, it’s not perfect, but how many home made games do you see being released on other consoles?

Technical Innovation
Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream)
Sony Augmented Reality (EyePet/Invizimals)
Unity Engine (Unity Technologies)
Bigpoint Uniter (Bigpoint)
Split/Second (Black Rock studio)
Hustle Kings (VooFoo)

Hmm, don’t really know much about the various entries in this category. I’m going to plump for the Unity Engine, as I am constantly hearing that it’s a great place to look for indies wanting to make cross platform games easily.

Tools Provider
Autodesk
Scaleform
Havok
Hansoft
SCE (R&D/SN Systems/PlayStation Home)
Audiokinetic
Dolby

Not got a clue. The only ones I’ve actually used have been Hansoft (seemed like perfectly fine project management / scheduling software) and SN Systems. I’ll go for Havok to win, as I think most of the voters probably use it in their products.

Engine
Unity (Unity Technologies)
Unreal Engine 3 (Epic Games)
Gamebryo Lightspeed (Emergent)
CryEngine (Crytek)
Trinigy Vision Engine (Trinigy)

Again, not used any of them. I would hazard a guess a Unreal, though, for the same reason as above – I think enough people have made (or played) enough games that use it. Is CryEngine used for anything other than Crytek’s own games?

Services
Babel
Audiomotion
Catalyst
Testology
Universally Speaking
Testronic Labs

There is definitely a theme in the “Technology” section, and that theme is “things that FreakyZoid has never used, or really been aware of coming in to contact with”. Will plump for Testology, because it is a nice name, and QA is a good thing.

Audio Outsourcer
Outsource Media UK
SIDE
Richard Jacques Studios
Nimrod
Media Mill
Audio Guys
High Score Productions

It continues. That Richard Jacques is a nice chap isn’t he? I read an interview with him on UK:Resistance once and he came across very well. Let’s give him an award.

Visual Outsourcer
SPOV TV
Axis Animation
Image Metrics
Realtime UK
Imagination Studios

Oh christ, we’re deep into “throw a dart at them” territory now. And I am beginning to think that this update was a bad idea. Image Metrics do some nice facial (tee hee) capturing work. I’ll go for them. But as long as we all understand this isn’t really an informed choice here.

Recruitment Company
SpecialMove
Natural Selection
Amiqus
OPM
Aardvark
Handle
STUDIOS

Thankfully I have had no dealing with UK recruiters in the last year. I’m sure they’re all lovely people now, and they’ve left their wicked and underhanded ways behind them. Amiqus won it last year, so as long as they’ve managed to not piss anyone off too badly by screwing them out of a good candidate, I’ll go for them.

Best New Studio
Lightning Fish
VooFoo
Hello Games
Six to Start
Wonderland
4A Games
NaturalMotion

Breathe easy guys and girls, we’re back into known territory. Since I think Joe Danger will have been robbed of the downloadable IP award, and people will feel bad about that, I’m going to say Hello Games for this one. But that’s not to say I don’t think they deserve it – it’s a brilliant first title, and hopefully they will continue with the same quality.

Micro Studio
Startfruit
Mobigame
Amanita Design
Binary Tweed
Hello Games
Tag Games
Distractionware

I think this is a new category this year. Certainly don’t remember seeing it before. Though all of the studios listed have put out quality titles and deserve a win, Mobigame have the extra publicity from all of those Edge / Tim Langdell lawsuit shenanigans to put them in people’s consciousness. So I’ll go for them.

Handheld Studio
Rovio
Rockstar Leeds
Novaroma
SCE Cambridge
Ideaworks Game Studios
Digital Goldfish

Well obviously I am going to say that the talented folk at Rockstar Leeds should get this. They’ve put out PSP and iPhone versions of Chinatown Wars and Beaterator within the last year, and also had to soldier on despite the loss of undoubtedly their best designer. Even my love of LBPPSP can’t overcome that.

Business Development
Avalanche
Sony XDev
Eutechnyx
Blitz 1UP
X2 Games – Exient
NDreams

I’m going to go for Blitz 1UP here, and I think it’s a deserved win. They are helping indie devs out with publishing, and backing some pretty interesting games.

In-House Studio
Rocksteady Games
Bizarre Creations
Black Rock Studio
SCE London Studio
Sports Interactive
Creative Assembly
Codemasters

Does Rocksteady count, considering that they weren’t in-house at the point that they created their excellent game? Either way, I think I will back them for the win. I think SCE London is possibly also a strong contender, depending on how the voters feel about the Move controllers and system.

Independent Studio
Realtime Worlds
Quantic Dream
Sumo Digital
Remedy Entertainment
Jagex
Red Lynx

Well just a week ago I would have said Realtime Worlds stood a very good chance of walking away with this, but the critical reception to APB has not been what they are sure to have hoped for, and now stories are surfacing of internal reorganisation and even layoffs. Which is a crying shame for a company that can create such great work. I’m going to say Sumo for this one. It’s not very well known, but they have a hand in making a huge number of quality games and ports, and they are sure to have left a great impression on the voters.

Right well, there are my picks, along with all of the nominees for each category. How about you all have a go at predicting? There will be a prize (not actual prize) for the most accurate predictions!