Zynga’s fall from grace

Now, Zynga’s stock is not the only taking a nose dive following disappointing Q2 results (Apple disappointed analysts too, failing to impress for the first time since 2003).

However, there’s a notable difference – Apple saw sluggish sales of iPhones (probably in anticipation of iPhone 5) that were not offset by more iPads, iMacs, etc. Zynga, on the other hand, has experienced no growth (apart form its acquisition of OMGPop) and although revenues grew a notch, expenses grew faster:

Faced with a dismal quarter, Zynga lowered its outlook for the year on Wednesday, citing game delays, reduced expectations for “Draw Something” and what it called a “more challenging environment on the Facebook Web platform.”

Comments made by Zynga founders (this time it’s Eric Schiermeyer, not Marc Pincus) are not mitigating the crisis at hand. On the contrary, they are further alienating whoever has any good will left. Eric Schiermeyer publicly acknowledged Zynga games are little more than a Skinner box, you know the one where mice press a lever to get random rewards.

Of course, games are not that great of a Skinner box, compared to say real-money gambling. So guess where Zynga is headed next? That’s right (quote courtesy of VB):

Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, said in a conference call with analysts today that the company will launch its first real-money online gambling poker game in the first half of 2013. The game will likely be launched outside the U.S., since real-money online gambling is still illegal in the vast majority of states.

2012
07/26
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Sources of Inspiration, part I

When it comes to fantasy unit design, I find three constant sources of inspiration:

  1. Historic – that is the most obvious and often works flawlessly. Make your choice from Varangians to Teutons to Tartars. The big downside is avoiding cliches and meeting the player expectations. For example, making Teutons to be light-armored archers will surprise your players a lot!
  2. Word combos – sometimes a cool word combo will trigger associations for a unit design. Most often, I’ll keep the coolness for the name itself and the description will twist it a bit around. For example, the Gutrippers are one of Riftforge’s elite assassin battalions. However, the description states that they started as kitchen help before moving on to active duty (but the nickname remained).
  3. Music - for a long time, I’ve only focused on cool names and here rock and heavy metal come in handy. From the Ironmaidens to the Blackhearts (Joan Jett’s band) to Harvesters of Sorrow. Unfortunately, I have a problem with all of these – they are too literal, so the direct association breaks the immersion.

So music is relegated to inspiration about LOOKS!

Yes, punk rock becomes tribal, black leather becomes cultist/savages, and disco… Well, I’m still processing disco but it’s hard to top disco when it comes to flamboyancy, so it shouldn’t be hard to place it with a highly-individualistic race.

Exercise One: Here’s an over-the-top punk-rock-new-wave band from the 80s, see if you can find a place for it in your game design.

Now tell me you’ve already thought about putting a ripped pantyhose on the face of a character. No? Well, now you know it looks great. For the record, I first heard Sigue Sigue Sputnik in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, so sometimes it takes 20+ years of movie watching experience to pull off a single unit.

2012
07/23
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When to sell out

“Sell-out” is not a pretty label but in business timing could be of essence. Case in point: Groupon, Zynga, and Facebook. Zynga seems to be the worst of the bunch right now, but Groupon can easily beat them. Facebook is much more stable but its valuation is not.

The reason I post this is that TechCrunch just published this news: Betaworks Acquires Digg (For Significantly More Than $500K)

Consider that Digg was valued at 100 million in 2006 and Kevin Rose made the cover of Business Week. Now he has a payday of probably 300,000 (before taxes) which is probably half his salary in Google.

2012
07/13
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Always Hardcore

Experimenting with game apps at Apple’s appstore, I’m even more convinced that indie developers are left with an “interesting” conundrum: with the low price point of the appstore you need a pretty big market to recoup your costs; at the same time, the casual game market is so saturated that you are forced to differentiate your product by addressing a genre audience.

So the question for indie developers is: Do I go after casual players (like Rovio) or do I focus on hardcore players?

In the appstore, Rovio is equivalent to the sound of the jackpot being hit that is heard all over the casino. It reinforces a compulsive behavior that benefits the casino. Apple are getting tons of apps for no development cost at all. If you make a Flash game for Kongregate or Miniclip in the good old days you could expect at least $5,000 plus a profit-sharing agreement. With Apple, you pay to get access to the appstore (was $99, now at $29) and you only get a few pennies from each purchase.

So the answer for indies could be found in the video below (or in the title above). Go hardcore and stay out of the appstore (unless you have a free app with a marketing angle). Finding a hardcore audience on a platform that you can support long term – be it the web or mobile – is the only answer for building a game company that survives it’s first release.

With Riftforge, we have targeted hardcore fans of fantasy RPG tactics. It’s developed with HTML5, so it’s compatible with all Apple devices (you should check it out on the new, retina-quality iPad!) but you don’t need to go through the appstore. Just fire up Safari.

2012
07/03
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App Baby song?

Thanks to Steve Jobs and his biography by Walter Isaacson, many people have rediscovered the 70s and the 80s with homemade computers and Atari ruling supreme in the video games industry (a fraction of the size it is now).

A punk band Sigue Sigue Sputnik even had a song called Atari Baby. I wonder if there will be an App Baby song and if anyone will remember the appstore in 30 years.

2012
06/14
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Diablo 3 game design blunders

This isn’t going to be a rant – that would be too easy. The point is that there’s plenty to learn from game designer mistakes… that are persistent in the sense that they exacerbate the situation with every patch. You know, the famous: “this isn’t how it is supposed to be played” line.

Exhibit A – Attack speed nerf

The new patch promises to nerf attack speed as it led to “not supposed to be played”. That could be the case (I play as a Demon hunter and have stacked as much IAS as possible). However, two minutes spent on closer examining the issue will reveal that this is a direct consequence of INFERNO difficulty design decision to make every mob one shot you, regardless of equipment.

Prior to inferno, I always bought/kept items with dexterity and vitality and I had a health pool of about 35,000 HP. Come INFERNO, it doesn’t matter if I have 35K or 70K, I simply cannot get hit and survive. So I ditched all my vitality and protection gear and bought the only alternative – attack speed. I’d be extremely happy to go around with no attack speed but being able to withstand a hit. Dying from something offscreen is extremely frustrating and game designers should address this and not the fact we stack attack speed.

Exhibit B – Repair costs 5x increase

This is a different exhibit but with the same cause – INFERNO difficulty one-shots you. Of course, people will chain rez, it is the only way to defeat a boss when everything that touches you, kills you. Blizzard’s solution? Increase repair costs five times (!), so that people will care about dying. We care, trust me. Now make it possible for us to gear so that we can survive a hit.

Exhibit C – Game creation limit

Blizzard have just announced they’ve introduced a limit to the amount of games you can create in a certain time interval. No worry, it shouldn’t affect anyone but the botters, right? Wrong! After getting this insightful error message: “Input limit reached. Please wait to perform more actions”, many players found it unable to play. So Blizzard reverted the measure temporarily until the technical issue is solved.

However, the implication here is that a big PART of the excessive game creation is game designer’s fault. For example, constructing the Staff of Hoarding that gives you access to the Pony level (a.k.a. cow level), requires ingridients that are extremely easy to collect but spawn in 10% of games or less. At level 60, I had to create no less than 30 games in Normal difficulty just to get the merchant in the oasis to spawn. Is this the challenge now? Beating the random number generator?

People who are just starting to build their staffs will find it very difficult to find that merchant. In an extreme case, it could take a day or a week (assuming you also want to play).

Instead of putting a frustrating limit, simply increase the spawn rate to 50%. It is how it is supposed to be played, if any of Blizzard’s game designers actually played the game, instead of filling in Excel spreadsheets with spawn rates.

2012
06/13
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Fantasy Art Styles

Jon Schindehette has an interesting post over at the WotC site about art style, specifically when it comes to armor. He ends with the following conclusion:

Armor should look appropriate to the culture, environment, materials available, and technology, first and foremost. If the armor doesn’t pass that test, then it doesn’t matter whether it is being worn by a man or a woman.

I agree with his sentiments, but more importantly, I like his visual guide to the three general art styles when it comes to fantasy characters and their armor:

Once you have this guide, it’s really a piece of cake to figure out that Blizzard are fond of fantastic realism. Even Diablo 3, which previously sported a dark, gothic style, has now been transformed into another WoW when it comes to over-the-top fantastic realism with cartoony colors.

For Riftforge, we have chosen the third style. It requires a lot more effort on the part of the artist but when done right looks so true that Renaissance painters turn green with envy.

2012
05/02
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Character Art
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