SimianLogic

When I originally tossed the Stockmoose up a couple of months ago, it was mostly a prototype–one that had taken a single evening to produce, and one that was based on a single request to my artist girlfriend: “Can you draw me a moose with a tie?” Well, now it’s finally back with a new coat of paint, some basic anti-gaming measures, and a few other things to spice it up. The “borrowed” Yahoo stock charts have been replaced with our own proprietary charts, and each stock now has a sort of miniature info card so the choice isn’t based solely on name-recognition. We also created a list of 25 Silicon Valley stocks that most people around here have probably heard of–just to make it a little more engaging. Some of the early results are actually a little surprising. In our SV25, TiVo is actually pretty close to the bottom while Netflix is near the top. Based on what I know of the two, I would’ve actually assumed this to be the opposite of what would happen.

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As of earlier this month, Filler has been out for exactly six months–definite long tail territory for a flash game. I did post-mortems at one week and one month, so I thought I’d continue the trend with another look back. I’m a bit of a stat-hound, so I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the numbers so far, as well as various other comments on the game.

Stats
Total gameplays are now over 9,000,000 (at least on Mochibot enabled versions), though the actual number is surely much higher than that. Roughly 5,000,000 of those gameplays came on licensed versions (AddictingGames being the biggest single contributor) while the other 4,000,000 or so came through ad-supported versions on Kong and the Mochi network. Daily gameplays are down to around 12,000/day but seem fairly stable around that number. Read the rest of this entry »

I always thought of Google as Mr. Algorithm, intent solely on developing programs to automate anything web-related.  I was pretty surprised when they announced Lively last week. The implementation had some shortcomings (a browser plugin? for real?), but it does show a little personality. I was even more surprised just now.

We’ve got a couple of casserole dishes that we haven’t used yet, so I did a search for recipes and saw this:

Notice the little symbols to the right of the links? Essentially, you can vote up the result or make it poof out of the results altogether (really, just to the bottom of the page). This link has a little more on the “experiment.” It’ll be interesting to see if this thing disappears back into the labs or it actually improves search results.

I finally finished playing Mass Effect a few days ago, and it was everything I expected it to be. Pretty graphics, great dialogue, good characters, fun fight system… all in all, a fantastic game. The one criticism I have of the game isn’t so much about Mass Effect as it is about the state of games in general.
I’m tired of being the epic hero.

Sure you can play the bad guy if you choose the “mean” dialogue options, but whether you’re good or bad, you’re still the epic figure in charge of saving the universe. Really then, my issue is with the “epic” part and not the “hero” part. I get it. Games now cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, so anything less than an epic experience seems like too little bang for your buck.

I blame Bioware for being too good at what they do. The dialogue system, the backstory, the universe itself is just too good to only be capable of telling one type of story. The sad thing is that’s all we’re likely to get out of them (until an equally epic sequel hits, that is). I thoroughly enjoyed playing the Star Wars-esque space opera the whole way through, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much more amazing it would be to play a Maltese Falcon or a Seven Samurai or a Die Hard or a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (I’m talking story structures, here, not direct adaptation) style game using this same engine.

The engine is already built, so they might as well squeeze as much out of it as possible. Instead of one single epic that takes 30-40 hours to complete, why not build a half-dozen or so 2-5 hour long stories using the same engine and slightly more human storylines? You could call it Mass Effect Tales or something evocative of a short story collection. By doing so, they would bring us one step closer to legitimizing games as a storytelling medium–and for a fraction of the cost!

My newest game launched this time last month on Shockwave. It’s a sort of ballistic match-three game. A boulder sits on a central pedestal, which you can pull back and fire at other boulders on the playing field. Wherever your boulder lands, it wipes out all connected boulders of the same color. Just to spice it up a little, some of the boulders are two-toned (meaning a chain can pass from one color to the neighboring color). There are three “power-boulders” which affect the pieces around them: a magma boulder rotates periodically and destroys all boulders in the same row/column when it’s hit; a bomb boulder destroys all pieces within a certain radius; a “spirit” boulder destroys all pieces of a certain color. By aiming tactically, the player can further grab three more “meta-powerups” that affect the game mechanic: the aim powerup allows the player to eschew the slingshot mechanic and instead simply click on their desired target; the freeze powerup prevents any new boulders from dropping; the match powerup grants you a bonus for successfully targeting a specific color of boulder instead of flinging wildly. The game marks a number of first for me as a game developer: Read the rest of this entry »

Not a lot of activity in the last month, but I think July’s going to be a little crazy. My latest game, Boulder Blast, launched June 10th. I did a whole post-mortem on the game, but I’ve had a few hurdles to jump through before it was cleared by Shockwave’s legal department (nothing nasty–just had to dot my i’s and cross my t’s). I’ll refresh that a little and get that out ASAP. Later this month will mark the 6-month anniversary of Filler’s release, so I thought it would be cool to do another “progress report” post. There are a couple of cool things going on at work that are probably worthy of a post.

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As Rory Breaker, the villain of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels said, “If the milk turns sour, I ain’t the kind of [cat] to drink it.”

I saw over on SlickDeals that WalMart has a promotion running on PS3s that gives you a $100 gift certificate along with the purchase of a 40 GB PS3 at $399. Obviously, you can’t use the $100 on the PS3 itself, but so many peripherals are needed along with a system purchase that it might as well be $100 off. The posting on the deal said Best Buy was matching it, and I try to avoid WalMart on the weekend if I can avoid it (I’m not a huge fan of insane crowds).

Just to make sure, I called up the closest Best Buy, got a manager on the phone, and asked if they were honoring the $100 gift card deal. They were. In the 45 minutes it took me to drive down there, pick out a few peripherals ($80 for an HDMI cable, $60 on an extra controller, $60 each for two games, $25 each for two Blu-Ray movies, and $40 for the non-Blu-Ray-but-recently-released season 3 of Rescue Me), they received an email from corporate that WalMart was out of stock, so they no longer had to honor the deal. When I got to the checkout counter, he told me there was no way he could give me the $100 off coupon. Read the rest of this entry »

In my mind, practically all the reasons you’d want to own a house instead of rent an apartment lie in the back yard: a grill, a small garden, and space for a dog to run around during the day. With it being Memorial Day weekend, I couldn’t wait any longer to knock item #1 off my list. I’m from Atlanta, birthplace of the Big Green Egg–and my dad has had one for probably 10 years now. They’re expensive, but they pretty much blow all the other grills I’ve seen out of the water. I was lucky to find a BGE store locally (the aptly named Eggs by the Bay). The BGE corporate website listed a few distributors that were closer to my new house in Redwood City, but for me it was worth it to drive a little further to give a sale to a small business. The extra driving was rewarded, incidentally. The owner had the large Egg I wanted, but but not the large-sized table for it. He was nice enough to loan me a nest (basically metal legs for the grill) until he could get the table in–plus a few days to allow me to paint and lacquer the new table. I sincerely doubt that any large specialty retailer would’ve been willing to do the same. The Eggs by the Bay store is actually having a sale later in the summer for gently used demo eggs (basically used for their one-day barbecue festival), but forgoing any grilling for an entire month+ just to save $100 or so wasn’t quite worth it for me. Besides, my economic stimulus check was burning a hole in my pocket (though that only covered about half of it…). Read the rest of this entry »

I went up to the little Interplay conference yesterday, so I thought I’d post a few notes.

The Future of Social Gaming
This panel had guys from Kongregate and Meebo (two companies I actually like) and guys from SGN and Xynga (companies I’m not sold on yet).  Of the last two, they get a fair amount of Facebook traffic (some of which is organic and some of which they’ve merely bought).  From what I heard, the two hate each other… but both of them had their diplomatic hats on and mentioned that creating a genre (social games) was more important than any one company.

I found one thing the Xynga guy said pretty funny: “Every couple of months, the networks ratchet it up and make it harder to be viral.”  In my mind, what he’s basically saying is that every couple of months the networks make it harder to spam users.  If the content is good, and it really stands on its own, you don’t need spam for it to go viral.  That he’s bemoaning the anti-spam filters lead me to believe that they’re a little lacking in substance.  By building a single, large game channel, though, they’re essentially cutting Facebook out of the regulation picture.  Once their install base is high enough, they can actually just spam within their current users to drive eyeballs to their new apps.

10 Ways to Monetize Social Applications
I didn’t notice on the agenda that this was a “sponsored panel.”  It could’ve been called “10 Ways to integrate OfferPal into your Facebook Application.”  They quoted some pretty obscene eCPMs (>$200), before later revealing that was only from the actual “complete an offer” page that 5% of the users visited.  I have no doubt that this sort of thing works for teenagers (or anyone without a credit card), but these things are the sleeziest types of offers in my opinion.  Unless I was designing an application purely to make a buck, I don’t think I could stomach their system from a user-experience point of view (and I’ve actually got a couple of ideas that would work perfectly for it).  The funniest thing about their presentation was how many people got up and left right in the middle of it (as soon as it became apparent that it was a sales pitch)–it was really like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

The State of Social Games
This was one of the more interesting talks, in that at least Developer Analytics had some data to share.  After crunching a number of applications, they boiled pageviews per daily active user into some pretty interesting numbers:

• Messaging Apps (Wall, Poke, etc) generate 3 page views per DAU
• Dating Apps generate 20 page views per DAU
• Social Gaming Apps generate 50 page views per DA

They basically saw only a handful of monetization channels for social games: digital goods, virtual currency, microtransactions, and CPA type offers.  They estimated that a successful app in today’s market generates around $40 per 1,000 DAU per month.

Funding the Social Gaming Sphere
This was a panel of three venture capitalists (Accel, Lightspeed, Hit Forge).  The moderator was a bit of a pain, but there was some interesting info.  One of them mentioned that current apps are seeing about $0.50 per DAU per month (right in line with Developer Analytics’ estimates).  The biggest way to make money, they suggested, was to let the guys who can spend $1000/month spend that much and let the guys who can’t afford $0.25/month play for free.  In America, though, gamers have been VERY resistant to letting players pay for a competitive advantage–essentially limiting the market to purely cosmetic items (i.e. Pimp My Avatar).  They also made a noteworthy distinction that Social Games are not just multiplayer games.  With multiplayer games, you are willing to play with anyone.  With social games, part of the fun is derived from playing with people you actually have relationships with.

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed mentioned that they look at applications that see a total of around 100 million minutes of engagement per month.  I don’t have any actual stats on Filler’s average playtime, but I’d peg it conservatively at 5 minutes.  It’s well into its long tail by now, and averaging around 10,000 views a day.  Doing some basic math, 10k views/day * 30 days * 5 minutes per user… that’s about 1.5 million minutes of engagement per month.  Flash games and social games are different in that flash doesn’t serve up multiple page views (or create meaningful interactions between friends… yet), but I think it’s worthwhile to compare the two.  There has been huge inflation in sponsorship costs over the last year or so (basically since MochiAds hit), but the money tossed around for flash games is still nowhere near what some of these social apps are getting.  I see the difference in the two, but I don’t see the difference as being THAT huge–both are essentially diversions.  I think the money for flash games will continue to rise while the money paid for social apps will decline over the next year or two.

They also mentioned a few criteria for apps (or really, the developers behind the apps) who might get venture funding:

1. Applications that are user content-driven (and therefore inherently more viral)
2. Applications developed by someone with a portfolio of hits
3. Applications which hit a stable niche (i.e. Poker) and own that niche

The question that they didn’t really answer, though, is why any of these applications need venture capital at all.  Most of the apps have next-to-nil production budgets, and those that become hits are likely profitable already.  Without any sort of cash burn to deal with, I don’t really see the need to give up part of your company for VC money–unless, perhaps, you want to quit your day job and do app development full time (I doubt a VC would invest in someone who wanted to keep doing development on nights & weekends).

Building a Successful Business
The founder of PlayFish gave a great talk on how they’ve been so successful so far.  I hadn’t heard of them, but after seeing their apps and hearing about their processes, I think these guys are going to make a mint.  Essentially their core value proposition is that they want to elevate the overall quality of Social Games to a level on par with a Nintendo DS or Wii title.  He gave five bullet points on how to build a successful business:

1. Think Like a CFO (i.e. you should plan with the bottom line in mind, not what’s necessarily the most “creative”).  This will allow you to manage risk and learn how to manufacture hits over time.
2. Create Great Product.  By this, he meant be the #1 or #2 in your competitive field, as this will create exponentially higher value in the long run.  I agree with his sentiment, but I’m not entirely sure it works for Flash Games (where there’s a new #1 or #2 every week).
3. Kill Product.  Learn to pull the plug when something isn’t going the right way, and never look at that as a failure.  Make bold decisions if necessary and don’t look back.
4. Build Platform.  Develop and document your tools and processes.  Not only will this improve efficiency, you’ll actually have an artifact repository that creates “enterprise value” (i.e. something that can be sold to someone else).
5. Budgets Increase.  Plan ahead that the budgets will always increase.

Advertising and Marketing on Social Games
This was a panel on in-game advertising featuring DoubleFusion (I think… I was grabbing a Coke when they said the first guy’s name), OfferPal, NeoEdge, EA, and MochiMedia.  Perhaps because I was already so familiar with the space, I didn’t take much away from this panel.  The NeoEdge guy spoke most of the time, but the lady from OfferPal jumped in as often as possible to reiterate her sales pitch (”We have FIVE PhDs working to make you money!”).  Everyone on the panel was fairly subdued, but she looked a little out of place.  Not to sound sexist, but she would’ve fit in better as one of those hosts on QVC or some other home shopping network–just a little too overdressed and just a little too eager to sell you something.

Microtransactions and Virtual Goods
I didn’t really learn anything from this one, but it was interesting to hear the guys from Friends For Sale and Packrat talk about various problems they’ve had to deal with in regards to cheating, inflation, etc…  The panel moderator made very sure to explain the concept of monetary faucets and sinks SEVERAL times (though I’m sure the crowd was probably familiar with the idea already).
All in all, the conference started out kind of slow but ended with a few nuggets of information.  A friend of mine who’s interested in entering the space has been to a few of these things in the last couple of months and said most of the info has already been mentioned at other conferences.  Their was an open bar afterwards, so I at least got to feel like my $100 was well spent.

I went to the Yahoo! SearchMonkey (one word apparently) launch party/developer presentation thing tonight (a friend of mine works there and told me that there’d be free t-shirts, food, and beer involved… SOLD!). After I got back, I whipped up the little example above just to test the system out. All it does is scrape the Lottery Button, figure out how many tickets have been issued today, and supplement the search results with that data. Other than the fact that no one actually searches for it and that no one claims any tickets, the tech works pretty well… for me.

The biggest problem I have with the current SearchMonkey implementation is that it seems to be awesome for large, well-known publishers and utterly useless for small websites. Each SearchMonkey application has to be added manually by the end-user, which means that unless you search across a single website’s pages many many times (and see the “enhanced search results button”), you’re likely never going to feel the need to add that application. Worse, this will actually drive business away from the little guys in favor of the big guys.

Imagine Bob, who sells widgets. Bob was one of the first people to sell widgets, so he comes up first in the search results. A month or two after Bob’s shop started selling these widgets, Amazon also started to sell them. Bob’s page still comes up first in the Yahoo! search results, but now Amazon is second. Bob has almost no traffic (compared to Amazon, anyway), so no one ever bothered to add his SearchMonkey application (assuming the struggling small business Bob operates is even aware that it exists, and that he has enough time to build an application). Amazon, on the other hand, is an early adopter. Their search result, though second in the listings, shows a photo of the widget, used and new prices, a 4-star rating, and a user review–along with links to similar products. Which links is the average consumer going to click on?

Until the distribution model for SearchMonkey applications goes automatic (meaning site owners can verify that they do in fact own the site and automagically make people’s search results add their applications), I’m afraid it’s going to be bad news for the little guys.