The missing link - a service proposal

After you read the last blog entry it is clear that small casual-games studios are having hard time earning their keep using advertising/sponsorship.
Downloading the full version of the game does seem to produce a nice revenue stream , but is mainly done in the large publisher sites , allowing them to collect "humongous" percentage of the profits.

One solution comes in mind ...
Allow a developer to sell "serials" or "unlocks" for online game versions without the need to download a game version.
Use a service-model (like the "MochiAds") instead of the publisher model , allowing the studio to post the game to the publisher site , egonistic to which publisher is it.

Very high level architecture

• Client side - release public flash API (AS2/3) which allows locking certain features , buying an unlock-code online and submitting it to unlock the game in real-time.
• A server side - customized billing site per game , and a submission site allowing users to configure their game for unlock purchases.

This service earns money by taking a small commission on each unlock-buy.

Time frame: few part-time months of coding.


If it is so simple , why it was not done already?
Not certain.
For the big publisher , the reason is probably that they will not benefit from such a service - on the contrary : they may loose potential buys because they will be performed outside their domain.
For any individual development studio, it is not worth the effort for one game (and may even get them in trouble with the publisher)
But it looks as an ideal service for the independent casual developers out there , and unlike the hardcore-independent game industry (which is unbelievably small) , on the casual market their numbers are quite substantial.

In game advertisment - more details

After you finished marketing the game , and thousands of people play your game each day, how much money will you get from advertising?

There are common measurements for advertisement pay.

• CPC - how much money will you get per ad click (not view , but the rare actual click). This is less used.
  
• eCPM - how much money will you get for 1000 ad-views. This number mainly depends on your target-audience. As lots of publishers want to advertise to the US market , the eCPM for US target will be relatively high, however if most of your target audience is in a remote village in Africa , there are good chances that no one will want to advertise to them and thus the eCPM value will be zero.
  So , what eCPM can you reach? gamesjacket will guarantee a minimum of 0.5$ , which is quite high. Mochiads will not give you a guarantee. It can be a bit more than that , but also a lot less (In the middle-east its around 0.11$)
  

To give real numbers , lets finish with an example: Lets say your game is quite nice and had one million ad views. With 0.5$ eCPM it means 500$. With 0.1$ eCPM it means 100$.
Pocket money , at best.
Very good games (the "blockbusters") can be played tens of millions of times ( by a million or so unique players) and thus can reach thousands of dollars. But thats really blockbuster games. One example is "Desktop tower defense" which reached a 9 million games per-month for the first few months. But even these numbers will only give you 4500$ a month with a small game life-span.
There are few blockbusters that had even a bigger user base , but the numbers are not substaintly higher than the desktop-tower-defense example.

The obvious conclusion from these numbers is that in-game advertisement is only suitable for very small budget games , typically a week to a month overall development time.
Sponsership can add few hundered dollars on top of this , but the real money comes from a completely different monetizing solution. Instead of "play-for-free" solution , there is the unoriginal, old fashioned model of play a demo for free and buy the full game for 9.99$.

Lets assume, on average , the user plays the game 10 times (this means s/he load the flash game 10 times , no matter how much game-over/new-game sessions there are in each game load).
1000 views = 100 unique-players = 0.5$ of advertisment (with high eCPM).

• 100 players * BuyPercent * 10$ = 0.5$
• BuyPercent = 0.5 / (10*100) = 0.0005 (*100 for percentage) = 0.05%

This means that if 0.05% of the players will buy the game , you will get the same money as in advertisment.
But if 1% of the players will but it , you will get 20 times more.
For one million views (100,000 unique players) , this difference can be between 500$ to 10,000$. For a blockbuster , this number can be ten-folds high.

Note that I don`t know what is the percentage of players which eventually buy the game , but big companies like oberon-media successfully use this model , so it probably closeer to the 1% than to the 0.05%

Alpha-channel creator , save/load using flash10

Want to create an alpha-channel but don`t have Photoshop (or don`t want to use it)? your prayers got answered.


Suppose you have a picture without alpha-channel and you want to make one from it. for example , this one is without (the black background is an opaque black color).





You can use this small flash to load a file from your desktop and save it with the background as alpha-channel.
The huristic for finding the background color is simple: check what is the most common color and use it. On some pictures , it won`t work (but on most it will)

EcoFish - First flash casual game

I just uploaded a beta version to flash-game-license. here.
Encrypted and site locked (means only swf originated from few designated sites will work. If you download the swf and run it from your computer/on another site , it will fail)

just to see if my mochiAds and my mochibot is tracking me right

v1.0

Flash game development resources

A list of good resources I used:

Syntax
AS3 syntax fast overview (for advanced programmers)

Game dev tutorial
FlexFighters tutotial - teaching you to code a real game from scratch. Incredible post.
astroids - small, very basic , astroid tutorial.


Free Graphic Art
SpriteLib GPL - bitmap sprites , on the CPL(yes , the name is misleading) license.
photos - you need to mention the site (and link to it) as owner

Free music Art
Sound Snap - search for example for "beat"

monotizing casual(flash) games

In one paragraph:
Although casual gaming make over 2 billion dollars a year , you , the developer will find it hard to make a living from it.
Casual games cost little to develop and , as a developer ,tend to bring little money.
Rare "blockbuster" hits can generate a considerable ( 5 digit) some of money if you monetize it correctly , but those blockbuster are extremely hard to come by.

There are 3 major ways to monetize:
1. Ads in-game (mochiAds) or on the site
2. Sponsorship from a publisher site (by giving a splash-screen , and/or use only on that site)
3. -Advanced- selling unlocked, downloadable version of the online game.


The 13 steps to do when monotizing a game , from Emanuele Feronato , for the first and second monetizing ways.

forbes article with examples of (rare) blockbusters:

Why the game "Ballerium" failed

Ballerium was an Israeli MMORTS - Mass multi player Real time strategy developed by Majorem studio.

Another promising Israeli Tripe-A game company which failed. This one was the closest to success (almost published by Activision).
What were their problems?

1. Make sure there is target audience for the game niche
First and foremost ,they developed a niche game and the niche was bad.
They were unique with the RTS which is MMO , but that is generally a bad concept. There are not successful game today in this niche.
Going for a new niche is a very bold move. In the game business, unlike the other technology niches , being first in a niche does not mean you will be the most successful. It is typically the other way around. "Everquest" MMO had a small community , later MMORPG`s had more and more players and only years after the first game, the niche was accepted by the general public. I'm not saying you can not be the first an be successful (I think Id`s first FPS was a success) , but it is hard.
And as it turns out, that niche was not good enough.
This is the major reason for the game failure. A game without an audience , even if it is carefully coded , beautiful looking and aggressively published, can not sell enough to cover its investment.


2. Art - "sufficiently beautiful"
The game was bit ugly. You could see that some artists have been working there , but not enough. That was really shame for a game with so much work which was done into it. see screenshot and gameplay video.
As said in a previous post , art must be "sufficiently beautiful". sadly this game was not.


3. Don`t aim too high
: They developed all from almost scratch. Unlike "Rising eagle" , they could not use an existing game engine , because no MMORTS engine existed then, hell , the MMORPG market just started to flourish back then and no real MMO engine existed at all. They were smart enough to market the studio as both technology-engine and a game, but you have to remember that to be successful in both you need a lot of money to start with. really a lot.
Again a bold move. If the niche was good , and the game was good , they could have become an industry leader. But with the risk comes the failure. Aiming high meaning it is hard to polish the game and hard to be profitable if the game is only doing "some" money and is not a hit.

Why the game "Rising Eagle" was doomed to miserably fail

Rising Eagle is a FPS PVP (First-person-shooter Player-versus-player game) developed by "Inveasion interactive". It is in the same genre as the known "Counter-strike" ,"Team Fortress 2" , "Unreal tournament 3" , "Quake wars" games.

On the development of the game - a link in hebrew



Why was it doomed to fail from day one?
Poor technical choices , poor management choices.
It does not matter if you have 50 highly skilled geniuses which can code hanging up-side-down while sleeping , if you do not have good architectural plan , you end up with a carefully built , bug-less , piece of software , which no one outside the company will use.
Lets see some of these poor poor choices: We will first discuss the game engine choice (which killed the project) , then talk about the art (which nailed the coffin) and last but not least talk about the publishing (which burried the whole)

1. The game engine
Instead of licensing an existing state-of-the-art game engine, they decided to upgrade a low-end free game engine. I can count the number of PvP games which used this approach and did not fail on one hand (with few fingers to spare) and none of the successful games that I know of did it in the last 2 years.
One might ask himself, why oh why did they do that.
There can be few reasons , but it comes down to the "bordem level" to "minimal investment level" ratio.
Licensing a good existing engine costs a considerable amount of money (in the order of hunters of thousands of dollars) and leaves you with coding small , less interesting code. [most of the interesting stuff was already done by the engine for you]
Upgrading a low-end free engine costs nothing (in the short-term at least) and leaves you with an incredibly interesting code to code. It is cool as hell to code 3d graphics and networking code. Ask anyone.

So the rookies choose the second option which is great in the short-term. On the long-term however , it means that this game will fail miserably.
It takes a lot of time to upgrade a free engine to a "state-of-the-art" engine. I estimate it in tens of millions of dollars and 4-6 development time.
As time means money (programmer salaries are not cheap) , you end up after four years of 3 dedicated developers development with poor, buggy and hugely outdated engine.
Lets estimate how much it cost to develop this outdated engine. One programmer year is estimated as 100,000$. So it cost 3x4x100,000$ = 1.2 Million dollars. It costs more than it costs to license the engine!

So you are saying that no game studio should develop it`s own engine?
Generally yes. Most of the studios should not. There are few exceptions: if there is no engine for your type of game , or if you want to sell your engine to others , or if you are going to release multiple(more than 3) different games using this engine , or if you have an immense development budget and do not want to be dependent on someone else , then developing your own engine may not be a truely bad idea.
But for the majority of the studios it is a bad idea. very bad. The smaller the studio , the worse is the idea.


Art, or lack of
Good games do not have to look good. Games which sell do.
If you want to sell your game , you need to make it "sufficiently beautiful". It does not has to be the best looking game , but it should not be ugly. Ugly games do not sell.
If you look at game credits today , you will see that most of the development team is art-driven and not code-driven. Unlike code which can be reused between games , a considerable amount of art need to be developed for each new title.

What do you mean by art?
Not the Wikipedia art value for sure. I mean the 3d models, 3d animations, the textures,visual effects and even music effects.

Ok, I'm convinced that art is important , how much will it cost me.
In two words. A lot. Above million , but less than 20.
You need artists which are good at what they do. Unlike code , in art , there is a major difference between an average guy to a good guy. You need to get the good guys and you need to pay for them more.
You also need a lot of them, otherwise you will not finish the game in time.
Ahh, and the worst thing is that unlike the coders which may work for free/options , artists tend to want hard-cash for their work. so you really need to pay them.
If you started your company with bunch of coding friends , this is the time you will first realize you have a big problem which you can`t solve yourself. Some solve it by taking loans and pay artists (reasonable solution) , some solve it by sending their rookie coders to art-school and telling him: "how hard it can be to draw some painting / compose some music / create 3d animation". (clue: its very hard)
You can`t believe how many companies are cheap with the art. Most of them has three things in common: They did not start with a enough fund , they end up with ugly looking game , and the game does not sell.



3. The publishing
Lets say you have a working , yet unpublished game. Hooray to you , it was not easy.
Now to the publishing part. You can try to publish the game your self , but you will probably fail. So you need to go on the second bad options and find a game-publisher.

Game publisher are blood-suckers. You do all the work , they take all the money (or at least 70-90% of it). They can also decide to not work with you at all , if you do not fit their profile.
If you won`t find a publisher, you will probably won`t get anything at all , so use a publisher , and share the profit with him.
No publisher == No money at all.
Use a publisher.

Why there is no Hardcore game industry in Israel?

The "boredom level" to "Minimal investment level" ratio.


The answer is simple: mere chance.
There is no inherit reason for this. After one game will succeed , a lot of studios will pop up like mushroom after the rain. The problem is that we all wait for that first game which no-one sponsors.

You might tell me , hey , I know of few game start ups which started and failed in the past years. So Israel did try , but something in the Israeli air dooms those games to failure.
My answer is a bit complex. Bear with me.
A software start up can be categorized by two criteria`s: The "boredom level" and the "Minimal investment level".

By Boredom level , I mean , whether a computer-science student will be willing to work on this project from a year with getting low or no salary. Lets give a job of working in COBOL in a bank a 10 Boredom level , and working in a cutting-edge, high-buzz start up a 1 level. Where do you think game studio will be? I recon level 1.

By minimal investment level , I mean , what is the minimal amount of work/money needed to produce a competitive product. Facebook started as one man project , so lets say the level here is 1. creating a new operating-system needs quite an investment meaning level 10. Where do you think game studio will be? most people don`t realize it , but it needs at least a 10 men crew working on it for two years for simple games and can grow to a 100 men crew for big games. Lets give it an 8 in the minimal investment level.


Now, my theory is that startups in areas where the boredom level is low but minimal-investment-level is high will have a lot and lot of failures. The simple reason is, that a lot of bored students will start them but do not have the momentum/funds to finish them. Without getting into names (I will get to that soon , don`t worry), the Israeli`s startups usually go into these category.

So does it mean that nothing can work in this category?
No. It means that you will see a lot of rookies try to climb this mountain and you should expect most of them to fall. But, someone which understands the difficulties before hand, gather the minimal-investment-level needed will still succeed there.

So you are saying that those game companies where rookies?
Yes. Totally rookies. With extremely stupid ideas. They got into it for the fun without thinking even a bit ahead.

Give some examples, men. You can`t just litter on people in general terms.
No problems. lets litter on "Rising eagle" FPS PvP which was released but as no considerable amount of players wanted to play it , became a free game [ which means no money gained for the game ]
I`ll dedicate a post for the biggest mistakes they made, and believe me, they are big... so big that after even one month of development you could say: this game will surely fail.