Problem Statement
- We recognize the difference between a game’s audience, which connotes a single direction relationship from developer/publisher to the game’s player base, and community, which connotes a bidirectional relationship between the developer/publisher and the game’s player base.
- We looked at how short form games (games meant to be consumed and discarded) and long form games (virtual worlds, games with ongoing content, game aggregation sites) relate to community.
- We sought examples of how indies have created community.
- We itemized potential forms of revenue derived from community as opposed to revenue from direct sales.
- We studied a concern that long form games are going to become so good that customers will not leave them for the short form games that employ many of us.
- We then applied some of these principals to a sample game to see what could be done to better make it resonate with community.
Solution Description
1. Audience vs. Community
Time was, games had an audience. A game was released to the public, and they played it. Now games have a community. A game is released to the public after an extensive pre-release campaign to create and build a community. The community plays it, makes comments to one another and back to the developer/publisher, creates user-generated content, goes viral. Developer/publishers take this information directly and indirectly via data mining to create more of what the players want, in a continuous feedback loop.
2. Short & Long Form Games & Community
Long form games naturally foster community, as they are defined as a “service” in the first place.
- On-line activity & play patterns bears out more usage data for developer/publisher to mine
- Multiplayer gameplay means the audience is in contact with each other as part of the game experience, not just the metagame/web-connected fan base
- Deeper content means more fan-created sites
Short form games must adapt!
- Digital distribution helps by shortening time to audience, making it easier to collect data
3. Creating Community
Large-scale publishers can throw money at the problem / make it be part of the P&L. We recognized ways that indies have created community.
- Jonathan Blow did a great job of this, with a strong web presence; seeking out a potential audience before his game was created; trade show appearances; trade publication presence; and soliciting and responding to feedback. In essence, he befriended his community.
- PixelJunk did a great job of this, by labeling its brand; all sequels are immediately recognized as being part of a franchise. Brand YOU, YOUR TEAM, or YOUR PRODUCT. If “Tomb Raider” had been named “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”, more gameplay settings would have been possible; as it is, she is pretty much stuck raiding tombs.
- Wolfire (wolfire.com). Overblogged the entire development experience. Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Wolfire speaks at Berkeley.
4. Traditional & Emerging Community-Based Revenue Streams
TRADITIONAL
- Dev pub.
- Work for hire.
- Sell the meta-game / tools (e.g. Metaverse). Sell to the GMs.
- Licensing. Flash games licensed to multiple sites.
- Socialism. Get grants. Better with public support.
TRIED & TRUE
- Free-mium: Pay money for value added. No barrier to entry.
- Micro-transactions.
- Subscriptions: It’s a club.
- Episodic. Really, just long form games with short form buzz.
ADVERTISING
- Ad supported: Can destroy community. But - it can drive community into other revenue models.
- Sponsored: 3rd party is paying for a game. Work for hire.
- Advergaming. Can be as slight as product placement or as fundamental as core mechanics.
TAXATION
- Rake: As in casino poker - take a percentage of player to player transactions. Foster exchange between community members.
MERCHANDISE (optional & required)
- Merchandise: Webkinz. Physical connection between you and your community.
- Direct Cross Subsidies. Any product that entices you to pay for something else (Guitar Hero).
- Super-premium. Comic book model, where they subsidize creation of books by selling production materials as collector items. Requires strong dedicated fan base community.
EMERGING
- Negative Price: Third party pays to participate in a market created by an exchange of two others. FreeConferenceCall provides a free service to consumer by getting paid by phone companies to increase long distance dialing charges.
- Asymmetric Monetization: There’s an audience that will pay because you made a market they want to be part of. Monster.com. “Ladies in free, men pay”. Relies entirely on community dynamic.
- Mechanical Turk. Crowd sourcing player base to solve problems, the solution of which has value to someone and monetizing the result. A game to efficiently pack cargo containers, the solution of which is used to pack cargo containers. A security screening game that uses actual TSA scanner pictures, where each image is seen dozens of times, the average assessment of which is used for in-depth searching.
- Pay what you want / Choose your price. Radiohead “In Rainbows”
- Barter (choose how you pay).
- Vanity. “The William Shatner Game.”
5. Potential Problem of Long Form Games
We studied the possibility that long form games are going to become so good that customers will not leave them, in essence, crowding out short form games. We studied solutions to this problem in two different ways: first, from a “pessimistic” perspective, that suggests this will happen and how to respond; and second, from an “optimistic” perspective, which suggests that this will not happen, pointing out the factors thereto.
The pessimist perspective: Long form games are going to become so good that customers will not leave.
- Go the Apple BMW route: Create boutique but expensive products to a smaller audience. Create an expensive niche.
- Join the “long formers”. Treat their long form experience as a platform, to which you write a short form experience.
- Change. Completely reinvent your business model. When airplanes replaced cruise ships as the predominant form of transportation, cruise operators created a new “cruise ship as destination” business. In Brazil, top-selling recording artists give away their premium release gold masters for free, as a way to promote their concert tours (where money is made not just from tickets but from refreshments & concessions)
- Go on game welfare. Subsidize game development. (Residence in socialist country required.)
The optimistic perspective: Long form games will never completely marginalize short form experiences.
- Brain hacks (use of human behavior patterns, data mining & technology in game design to home in on a player) are an exhaustible resource, eventually they do not challenge you.
- Brain hacks are increasing our player base which is excellent for our industry.
- People will move to new brands
- We used to create products, but now we need to initially create communities to create games for.
6. Case Study: Realtime Audio Adventures
The Problem:
Realtime Audio Adventures are a critically acclaimed, unique gaming experience, yet sales of ~8,000 copies did not cover production costs.
The Ideas:
- Build a community
- Create a more engaging web experience
- Create a “viral” mocumentary on-line presence of the game characters
- Get customers to recommend the game other customers
- Episodic content - push data more frequently
- Reach out similar media outlets; give away the linear version for free on radio stations
- User-generated content: record player experiences and share them on the web site
- With volume, lower production cost
- Write for a community that already exists (Lost, Twilight, Harlequin Romance…)
7. Take-away from the study: The community is not just forums, email lists, community managers, and the content generated by it: the community is the product.
Reference Material
Recommended reading:
Tribes by Seth Godin
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
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