I haven’t post an article in my blog for 55 days. No, it’s not because I lost my passion or that I didn’t know what to write about. It’s because I wanted to try if you can survive in the on-line world going off-line.

I went off-line on September 1st. The first days have been quite hard. I had to finish couple of on-line tasks but without access to Internet it was very difficult. I could check email via dial-up and GMail but answering emails was very time consuming due to low Internet connection speed.

After few days it was clear that without faster Internet connection I will waste time and money. You have to answer support emails and maintain regular business communication. I decided to get ADSL 256kbps, but instead of unlimited access with flat fee I signed up for per hour charge.

Now it’s clear to me that you can survive, but you have to forget about on-line tools. Forget about GMail, about reading forums, doing a lot of guerrilla marketing. It’ll be easier for you if you focus just on game development. Going off-line will increase your productivity a lot (that’s why I tried to go off-line).

I will not be on-line until mid December… at least until that day I won’t have unlimited Internet access. Hopefully my sales will not dry more that they already did.

How to shoot yourself in the foot?! No, I’m not talking about us, developers. I’m talking about portals. It looks like we are going to face another war between the key players in the casual game market. And it starts to look like some portals want to become evil.

Market review

Big Fish Games is one of the biggest, if not the biggest casual game portal. It’s one of my favorite portals. It’s easy to navigate, delivers wide variety of games, is great to work with and very responsive. They’re not afraid to risk the launch of new genres or not so casual games. There’s just one problem with BFG - their game club which offers games at discounted price of as low as $6.99. But is it really a problem?

It looks like other players in the market starts to think so. What’s more, Big Fish Games is very successful at getting exclusive deals, mostly short-period. And that’s another thing that bothers other players. Some portals start to send threats to developers - if you give even short-time exclusive to BFG we won’t launch your game. You can read more about it at The good BIG bad FISH exclusive GAMES… in Maciek’s blog. Initially I was very upset about it. But let’s take a closer look at possible scenarios.

The end of exclusive deals?

Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right, you can save 90% on ANAWIKI GAMES. How’s that possible? Well…

Due to increasing piracy and development costs we decided to rise prices of all our games by 1000% (so it’s 10 times) since April 2nd 2008. We understand that the price rise is quite big so I decided to give you the last chance to buy our games at regular price and save 90% of what you would pay tomorrow. Here’s what you can get:

Runes of Avalon 2 & 1
Pony World
Maggie the Gardener 2
Tom’s Hen House

Don’t wait until tomorrow. This might be your last chance to buy one of our games.

Yesterday I had to run to my post office to pickup a parcel. I had about 10 minutes to find the nearest ATM machine, withdraw the money and comeback to post office. I did it, but man, I was soo tired after all this running. The thing is I haven’t run such a long distance for 5 years or so.

I noticed one thing - before I started to run I said to myself - man, that road is so long. But when I made my first step, then another, then started to run I realized that it’s actually not so long and that it’s getting shorted with each step.

I wish I could say the same about game developmet. Sometimes I believe it takes forever to complete a game. Especially, when your game looks like ready, when all you have to do is just add a popup or two, polish one or few things, adjust levels difficulty. Each day I say: just one more day. But then it happens that we missed the deadline by 40 days. Or more. It is so demotivating when you can’t say it’s ready, but it looks like it is.

The problem is - you cannot skip it. You either get in top 10 on portals or die.

It’s been a month since my last post. Some could think that I dropped the idea of blogging… and I am here again to tell you that there will be few very interesting posts coming in the nearest futere.

First of all, I haven’t been blogging for one reason - I was focused on Runes of Avalon 2. I was also working on Pony World Deluxe. Getting the games ready for launch is very time consuming, but I’ve learned a lot and I will share my experience with you.

Here’s what I will talk about in the next few posts:

- From 0.8% to 3.6% CR - how I improved CR from a crappy one to a stellar one
- Are you ready to be picked by Apple? I was not!
- Get in top10 or die! Big Fish Games Top 100 analysis inspired by Jake from Grey Alien Games.
- Importance of beta testing

So see you soon.

So I already told you why it is good to work with publishers. Unfortunately working with publishers isn’t great for all the time. Even if the deal looks great on paper, sometimes it doesn’t work out for you. It doesn’t work out for many reasons, but here are my top 3.

#3 Less creative freedom

Once someone agree to put money into your game he may want to have creative control over your game. Most often both sides will work to make the game the best thing on earth, but it may happen, that you’ll be forced to add or remove features that doesn’t go with your ideas.

Remember, you have the passion for your game. Employees of your publisher may not.

#2 Lack of experience

Yeah, I know how does it sound, but believe. Just because they are cold publishers, doesn’t mean they are experienced in the area you are wanting them to be. Need an example? Great retail publisher doesn’t have to be great online publisher (and vice versa).

If you work on a casual game, make sure your publisher can provide you quality beta tests. And put it in contract! Casual game success depends a lot on gameplay balancing and without a real player testing your game it is not possible to catch all weak points in your game. Some devs advice to test game mechanic on every stage of development. Make sure to test it after each bigger change in gameplay mechanic.

#1 Money

Early cash advance is great, but then you have to wait for a long time before the flow of cash comes in… It can take 4 mothns (best case scenario) or… but it may never happen. Your publisher takes 50% or more of your game NET revenue and needs to recoupe your advance first.

Publishing online is quite easy. It can take some time, but it’s not worth giving away 50% of your games revenue. The only reason to go with a publisher in this case is only when you can’t get there without him… and there are only 2-3 places that will not work with indie developers directly (AOL, Yahoo). So sign a deal to publish your game only on those two portas. Submit your game yourself to the others.

Your publisher may want to trick you that he will get a better deal with a portal than you do on your own. I really doubt it (mine didn’t). Portals just don’t feel like giving more to anyone and it doesn’t matter for them if you’re small or not. Of course, they may want to try to give you lower royalties, but it doesn’t mean that you have to agree. Learn to say no. Negotiate. It is a great skill in the long run.

And last but not least… let’s say your game is not so hot as it seemed to be. With so many titles in publishers portfolio they may just don’t work that hard on monetizing your game, cause they may have better converting game. If you sign exclusive you’re screwed. Your game is probably all you have… you’ve been working on it for 6, 9, 12 or more months. You need to make those money back. Even if your game is not so well converting among all other games it may still be the best converting game in your portfolio. Keep at least the right to sell from your own website.

Whatever you choose - good luck!

Yeah, I know it’s odd to post New Year resolutions in the beginning of February. My thinking is that if you post them so late then actually they are worth anything.

Year 2007 was not a very good one for me. I had great plans in the beginning, but in December I started to wonder why it didn’t happen? The first half of the year wasn’t so bad, but the second one was devastating to all my plans.

• We released Pony World… and then received request to translate it to 6 different languages. We had a contarct and we couldn’t deny request and each translation took so looong, because Pony World is a complex game with a lot of written and rasterized text. If you ever want to translate your game, make sure it doesn’t use rasterized text or make it data driven. Each menu, caption, buttons, icons should be defined in a file that you can change without the need to recompile the game.
• We started 2 or 3 game projects and run into cash-flow issues… I didn’t expect that getting money from released game takes so long.

Well, there are other minor things that made it difficult, but 2008 looks much different.

Year is very long… and it’s very difficult to predict in detail so I decided to split my predictions into 3 parts: short term (first quater), medium term (first half of the year) and long term (second part of the year).

My main goal is to improve company efficiency at making games and selling them. Making games is time consuming so when I written down all our projects I was shocked. If I want to finish them as I plan I should release a new game almost every 2-3 weeks. Yep, it’s sounds unbelievable… though we create games in a way that we can easily make add-ons and sequels.

So here it goes:
• Pony World Deluxe - should be released in Feb
• Runes of Avalon 2 - should be released in Feb
• JigSaw Quest: Avalon - scheduled for release in March
• Alice Adventures - scheduled for April
• … and 5 more games to be released in the first half of the year
• … and 2 more in the second half of the year

Sounds crazy when I look at it… though first four titles on the list are in production or near completion at the moment. We just have to focus on finishing it one by one instead of making little steps in each game. In the second half of the year we will release only two games. If game development is your business, then monetizing comes first and if you have no games to monetize you run out of the business.

It took us more than a year to create Pony World, about nine months to create Runes of Avalon. How about you? The trick is that those number state only start to finish dates. The real thing is here (posted originaly by Cliffski on IGF forum):

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him. “It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

I really like that legend. Yep, nine months, but I started creating games when I was 15 (and thinking about creating games when I was 10). Now I am almost 30. It took a lot of time to learn all that little tricks to make great looking and fun games. Entire life seems about right. Keep that in mind next time you negotiate publishing contract.

Every day StampOutPiracy reports hundreds of links to illegal pirated games that are hosted on file sharing accounts. StampOutPiracy also try and take down full warez sites/blogs and Ebay listings.

The idea behind the awareness week is not just to remove links but to educate people and inform them about game piracy.

Stop saying that you can’t fight piracy. Educate yourself. Educate others. Or just don’t approve it. That makes a difference.

The Facts

• By using pirate games you are basically stealing from the actual developer of the game. This is how they make their living. If you don’t pay for the game, then they don’t make any money.
• Game development takes time (sometimes years) and money. It is only right that developers get paid for their hard work.
• By using a pirated game you are not entitled to any technical support or updates for that product.
• Pirated games can often expose your computer to viruses, spyware and adware, to name a few. If your computer is infected then you only have yourself to blame.
• The bottom line is that pirating games is illegal and people do get caught!

Piracy: Why is it wrong? - An article by ELSPA to make consumers aware of the issues with piracy.

I will just quote one argument from that article:

By knowingly purchasing or downloading a counterfeit computer game you are running the risk of children having access to unsuitable material.

Does your game have downloadable content? Can your customers make new content for your game?

Games with downloadable content sell 114% more, says EEDAR. Research firm Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) have found that publishers have the potential to nearly double their profit on any given game through revenue generated by both purchasable and sponsored downloadable content. “…console storefronts represent a major opportunity to offset growing development costs and stabilize revenue momentum between major releases,” EEDAR stated.

After examining 180 downloadable games and 2,100 pieces of downloadable content for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii, EEDAR found that Xbox 360 games offering downloadable content sell 129 percent more and PS3 games sell 16 percent more (Wii offers no extra downloadable content currently).

You can read the whole story here.

While EEDAR examined console games I am sure this can be applied to indie/casual games. My games don’t have downloadable content yet, but releasing a level pack for Runes of Avalon at least doubled my monthly income. Prof. Fizzwizzle has a lot of downloadable content and it is one of the best selling affiliate games on my site. Make sure your next game can have downloadable content. It’s one of the easiest ways to increase your revenues.