From GamesIndustry.biz‘s article on the new XBox dashboard:

“All the applications are built in that same way, which is really really nice,” [Pawan Bhardwaj, UK product manager for Xbox Live] pointed out.

“It’s really important. One of the examples I have personally have, on my phone the applications that I download, every single one of them is different, they all work slightly differently, and it gets a bit annoying.”

So does he not have a Windows phone? Or is he saying that he finds his Windows phone a bit annoying because everything works slightly differently?

I remember reading on a couple of other blogs recently a discussion about “what does the label of indie developer mean to you?”

There were numerous replies along the lines of creative control, studio size, target platform etc. Anyway, today I was reading this interview with John Pickford (one half of the Pickford Bros. in case you didn’t know) and one quote in particular really stood out and hit home.

So I will pretty much nick John’s words here and say that this is what “being indie” means to me.

Creating something that is inextricable from ourselves. We aren’t running a huge staff or other big overheads. We aren’t going to go bust and our IP will never be for sale. We might not get rich either, but at least we’ll be making games that we believe in and the game you see is the game we set out to make.

If you haven’t already, you really should give their game Magnetic Billiards a look. It’s very nice, and you can try it out for free.

PocketGamer.biz have put up an interview I did in about starting up as an indie.

I’ve obviously not quite got the hang of this press malarky yet, as there were no bold statements about the death of AAA, no slagging of competitors’ games, and no calling anyone mean names.

I have quite a “live and let live” approach to the games industry, and I think there is plenty of room for all tastes and scales of product – just because someone’s going to buy Call of Duty it doesn’t mean that they won’t buy an iPhone version of Carcassonne, and vice versa.

I’m surprised that all the years of wrongly predicting the end of PC gaming hasn’t put anyone off these silly statements.

In reality there are ebbs and flows as tastes change. As some people naturally find themselves without the budget for buying dozens of $60 games a year and move to playing cheaper mobile software, others will find their passion for games re-ignited by their phone play-time and invest in a new console with the peripherals and big titles that entails.

But it’s all games, and we should all just be happy that our hobby is being taken up and enjoyed by more and more people.

Anyway, here’s the interview link again. If I would say anything before you read it, it’s that I’m not as money obsessed as I think I come across!

New Indie Studio “Mainly About Games” Launches in Edinburgh

Ex-Rockstar Designer goes back to bedroom-coder roots.

UK, Edinburgh, 15th June 2011. Anthony Gowland, a games development veteran of over ten years, has formed a new indie micro-studio Mainly About Games to create mobile and web games.

After more than six years at Rockstar, including senior and lead design roles in acclaimed titles such as the Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and Red Dead Redemption, Gowland decided it was time to try something new.

“With the varied distribution opportunities now available to developers, it felt like the perfect time to move away from AAA development. It’s totally viable for a small team, or even a single dedicated guy, to create and market a successful game independently”, said Gowland.

“My passion is in creating small titles that have solid gameplay hooks and big budget polish”, he added.

The studio is also offering freelance game design consultancy services.

“Each year there are a lot of games that are very good, when they could have been great. Playing through them you often get the impression that it’s the little details that are missing or have been overlooked.

“I think there’s a real benefit to having an outsider with a proven track record play through your game with a fresh pair of eyes,” Gowland offered.

###

For more details on Mainly About Games, visit their website http://www.mainlyaboutgames.co.uk

For more details on Anthony, view his LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=22234311

If you would like more information, or for an interview with Anthony Gowland please email anthony.gowland@mainlyaboutgames.co.uk

So, Activision have announced that they are releasing an optional subscription for Modern Warfare 3 that will give additional benefits. Though there are no solid details yet of what the package contains, it has been stated that playing multiplayer will remain free, and this is just a perks package.

Online internet reaction, at least in the bits I read, has been suitably backlashy.

Thing is, I can easily see how this is a great idea. Offering optional stuff so your hardcore fans can pay even more if they want to? Sounds good. Call of Duty is one of those games where customers get wildly varying amounts of entertainment time for their money. Some (like me) just play the single player. Others play the multiplayer solidly for the whole year until the next one.

I’m not surprised at developers knee-jerking that this is a terrible idea, I am a little disappointed in the lack of imagination that is being shown about what this service could potentially include.

The trick as I see it will be in not fracturing the player base and unbalancing the game, while still making the up-sell tempting to the have-nots. Map packs (the only paid-for extra that CoD current offers) fracture the player base, as their system makes it impossible to play on maps you don’t own.

There are a lot of other things you could offer that would still allow people to play together (which is what you want, to keep the temptation of signing up wafting in the face of those who haven’t yet).

Stuff like: unique weapons, perks, and classes are all fairly straight-forward; being able to get an extra ten ranks before you hit the cap and have to prestige to continue progressing; allowing a player to select one weapon or perk to take with them when they prestige, rather than starting again entirely from scratch; putting a little “Elite” symbol next to people’s names in-game and on leaderboards; unique player skins.

If they started offering a video & screenshot capture and upload service then give the Elite subscribers more slots to upload to, so they can keep more of their best kills (like Bungie do with Halo).

As well as the usual “bonus XP” weekends for all players, have special weekends where all Elite players earn 50% extra XP.

Or how about adding bonus objectives for people who’ve signed up? The Elite get a random extra target to reach every game that rewards them with more XP and moving up a special leaderboard that tracks this stat. Then you put a prompt on screen to the “have nots” saying “ah, I’d you’d been signed up, you would have just completed your bonus objective for this match, and earned all this extra XP. If you sign up now you can still claim it – do ya wanna?”

It wouldn’t be hard to put together a package that, in addition to having map-packs for free for the duration of your subscription, would seem like a fair deal to CoD’s frequent players, while not ruining the game for everyone else.

Again, I have no insider knowledge of what Activision are planning. These are just some ideas that came to mind as to how I would go about providing worth to subscribers.

You may continue your “which is definitely best, Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3″ rants now…

UPDATE:
Well, some firmer details have come out now, though I’m not entirely sure they are meant to have. From what I’ve read the service sounds a lot like Bungie.net, with advanced stat-tracking, video uploading, and that sort of thing. It also apparently includes the ability to matchmake with other players through social networks, which sounds very interesting.

Certainly nothing that will fracture the player base, and definitely things I could see frequent Call of Duty players wanting. The only question now is the price point.

I would imagine this coming in at somewhere around £4 a month. It sounds like a tiny amount of money (because it is – the cost of a London pint, or even broken down to just a pound a week – who would miss that?) so it will be an easy sell.

And yet it adds up over the year to £48, or slightly over the high-street cost of buying a new game. So Activision would essentially be selling you two copies of Call of Duty a year. (Assuming a 1:1 take-up, which they obviously won’t get. Though even a couple of million signing up would reap high rewards, considering there would be no retail or manufacturing to share the pie with.)

IndustryGamers has a fairly interesting interview with Silicon Knights chief Denis Dyack, where he foretells doom and gloom for the social gaming space. Of course, it’s not uncommon for industry bigwigs to badmouth anything and everything they’re not involved in, though in this particular case I think he has a point.

Though I don’t believe social is a balloon that’s going to pop, I do think there is a lot of hot air in it, and pretty soon it’s due to deflate at some point. A case of “Too Many Dicks on the Dancefloor” – though it’s a much larger potential market than the “hardcore” game space, there is a lot of money being thrown at it and I see a lot of those investments not delivering anywhere near what’s expected.

All that aside, it is funny to read the developer of ten-years-in-development, poor selling, Too Human saying things like:

when games actually have to start showing pure revenue and real ‘here’s how much we made and here’s how much it cost’ …I think that industry is going to not last very long.

It suddenly seemed so insane how serious everyone takes an industry whose goal is supposed to be entertainment.

From Team Meat’s postmortem of Super Meat Boy on Gamasutra.

Because I want to enjoy it.

I want to go into that world knowing only what I know from the first two games, and from what the next one tells me as I’m playing. If a character has a cameo appearance, I want that to be the surprise it was intended to be. I don’t need to be able to sit there, turn smugly to my cat, and say “I knew he was going to be in this because Kotaku reported that his voice actor was listed on IMDB”. My cat doesn’t give a shit.

I know that there are people whose jobs it is to make me excited about the game. I’m already excited about it, but I’m sure there are other people who aren’t. Maybe reading hundreds of pages of text, and seeing lots of screenshots about it will work these people into a frothing anticipation-high. Maybe this level of exposure will make every aspect of your game crushingly familiar months before it’s even released.

I know that there are plenty of people out there who lap this stuff up. But those are the same people who, rather than enjoying Fable for what it did contain, spent their entire playtime sad that they couldn’t watch a tree grown from a seed. As if that was an epoch-defining feature that was missing.

Look, we’re all adults here. We all know that things get cut from games. Sometimes early, sometimes very late. Sometimes they come back later as DLC, sometimes you will never see that feature. So I’d prefer to play the game I’m given, rather than whatever fantasyland version of it I have constructed in my head based on advertorial previews written by half-cut journalists.

One word: Character.

And now, a longer explanation. A discussion came up recently on a developer forum asking what could possibly be done by indie devs in the face of huge companies such as Zynga and Gameloft. These companies have massive resources at their disposal, and have shown in the past that they are not against the idea of being “heavily inspired” by other successful games. If your indie game was a success, what is to stop them from cloning it onto another platform?

The answer to that, for me, is character.

Take the case of this week’s iPhone sensation Tiny Wings. You should buy it, by the way, because it is charming and lovely and has nice simple gameplay that suits the platform. But already reports are coming out that it is based on another game, called Wavespark.

Why have people taken to Tiny Wings, when they didn’t flock (yes, that was a bird joke) to Wavespark? Perhaps you should read my quick review again. The game has character. The graphics are simple but well done, the landscapes are stylised without being offputting, the cheery relaxing music suits it perfectly, and the little chirps the bird makes put a smile on your face. The whole package is charming.

Yes, the gameplay is good, trying to get further each play is compelling, and the single control fits the iPhone to a tee. But people aren’t loving it purely for the gameplay, and that character is what would be difficult to clone.

See also mobile darling Angry Birds. Obviously it’s not the first game with that gameplay. There are tonnes of free Flash games that are essentially the same game. People keep mentioning that fact as if it changes anything. It won’t be the last game of its sort either. But can you buy plush toys of the stars of the other games? Do people make cakes in the image of the enemies? Do people love Angry Birds in part because the characters of these very annoyed avians, and the increasingly battled faces of their pig enemies are funny and charming? Of course.

Or how about Team 17′s classic Worms? Again, not the first or last of its genre. Possibly not even the best. But the game’s sense of humour keeps winning it fans on each platform it’s released on, over more than fifteen years.

And it’s not just small or indie games. Gears of War is often mocked for its ridiculously over the top machismo, but without larger than life characters like Cole Train you would have just had a grey cover shooter with a nice reloading mechanic.

The Fable series also has amazing character. It’s actually one of the few that feels to me like it has been made by the same country developers who made stuff like Head Over Heels and Skool Daze. Where others have run off and been happy to embrace Hollwoodisation, Fable is filled with every regional UK accent you can imagine. It has chicken kicking, blowing raspberries, sweary evil Gnomes, and dressing up in silly costumes. Not for any particular reason, but because those are funny things to do, that fit perfectly into the game’s universe.

The examples go on and on.

If your game has a strong sense of its own character, and players like that character, you will do well and people will not be able to clone your game successfully.

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.