If you enjoy Postmortems or the Total War games, don’t miss this one.
Read: Unite 2012 – Design, Code and Art: Total War Battles Postmortem (video.unity3d.com)
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Money and the App Store: A few figures that might help an indie developer
“Eighteen months ago, when I left Ubisoft to start an independent game studio and focus on making my own games, I looked online a bit to get an idea of how much income I could expect to make as an indie. At Ubisoft I used to work on big AAA console games, and I had some figures in mind, but I knew they wouldn’t be relevant for my new life: $20M budgets, teams of 200 hundred people, 3 million sales at $70 per unit… I knew being an indie developer would be completely different, but I had very little information about how different it would be.”
This article from January 2012 provides some really good insight into how much money you can expect to make on a game if you get lucky on the App Store. Well worth a read in case you (like me) missed it.
Read: Money and the App Store: A few figures that might help an indie developer (thegamebakers.com)
‘Doodle Jump’ Creator: Gamers Expect Freemium
“In a video interview with Mashable, Pusenjak explains why players now expect freemium content in their mobile games.”
Worth watching.
Read: ‘Doodle Jump’ Creator: Gamers Expect Freemium (mashable.com)
Guild Wars 2: This is how you do community management
“The [Guild Wars 2] community team took to Reddit to provide an example to the community of how these supposed unfair bans were far from the truth. It was after seeing the positive reaction to this interactions between developer and community that ArenaNet realized that a full post on Reddit may be the best way to deal with the issue.
As part of the full post, the team responded to angry players who believed they had been banned for no good reason. “I would love to know what I was banned for,” says one Redditor, after which the ArenaNet representative pastes the exact crude chat which led to the ban, complete with vulgar, racist and sexist terms.”
Lots of people were banned early in the game, and lots of them went to their favorite social blogs to yell about what appeared to them as unfair treatment. What most of them didn’t know was that ArenaNet (the company behind GuildWars 2) had kept rigorous records of each ban, and posted this information publicly to anyone that was truly upset why they got banned.
Read: Guild Wars 2: This is how you do community management (gamasutra.com)
Analysing a Top Grossing Game: Rage of Bahamut
“Here’s my attempt on breaking down some of the key elements that make it such a monetization monster.”
Superb and in-depth analysis by Simon Newstead of the game Rage of Bahamut. Don’t miss it if you’re into free-to-play games.
Read: Analysing a Top Grossing Game: Rage of Bahamut (iteratingfun.com)
Funcom shifts to smaller online games
“Funcom is laying off employees and shifting its focus away from giant, expensive MMO projects, as it tries to recover from the recent disappointing launch for The Secret World.
Though over 500,000 users registered for the subscription title’s beta, only 200,000 consumers have purchased The Secret World since the game launched two months ago, which the Norwegian developer admits is below its expectations.”
When over half of all beta testers don’t want to buy the final product, it’s not a good product. I was quite disappointed by Age of Conan myself, and would never buy another Funcom game without reading through at least a couple of good reviews.
Read: Funcom shifts to smaller online games after The Secret World setbacks (gamasutra.com)
The fall of Angry Birds
“Right now, 18 of the top 25 grossing of all apps are Free To Play Games (72%). Also, it should be noted that 22 of the 25 top grossing apps are in the games category (88%), confirming the fact you need to be into games if you want to have the biggest potential payout. The reason for this is people have a stronger emotional attachment to games than any other type of app, therefore they are more likely to spend money.”
In case it isn’t clear to everyone yet – don’t make a game that users need to pay for up front.
Read: The fall of Angry Birds (treysmithblog.com)
Zelda: Wind waker Tech and Texture Analysis
I loved playing through the entire Zelda: Wind waker game on my Wii, so I found this recent thread over at Polycount highly interesting.
Read: Zelda: Wind waker Tech and Texture Analysis (polycount.com)
Don’t Stop Polishing: The Need to Stand Out in Mobile/Social
Nick Bhardwaj discusses F2P design lessons learned from My Horse and Natural Motion’s CSR Racing. Well worth watching.
Everyplay for iOS, in-app “FaceTime for gamers”
Instant replays to friends, and a “twitch.tv” style camera stream that can be integrated into apps. Looks good, I will keep an eye on this one.
Read: Applifier launches Everyplay, its in-app ‘Facetime for gamers’ video recording tech (pocketgamer.biz)