arrogancygames.com

This is a semi crosspost from what I told the XBox Live Creators earlier today. I thought it may be of interest to others, so I’m posting it here.

My profession, besides amateur game designer, is Advertising/Marketing/Design, and as such, I’m constantly looking at things here from a marketing angle. Here is a severly truncated version of the basic marketing report I have made for XBox Live Community Games, focused on the parts we as creators can do to increase exposure of the service. It’s no secret that XBLCG games do not really sell well, and the biggest problem is that not even 1/10 of the people that visit XBLA go to Community Games in the first place.

Now that Angry Barry has been released on Community Games, I’m essentially focusing strictly on marketing. As I do this, I wanted to share my thoughts on how this is going, and also what we can do as creators to help sell ALL of our game, and also what the XNA team at Microsoft can do to promote our games more internally.

After studying this around as in-depth as I could with the information I have available, my assumption is that our sale ratio is normal for a gaming portal - the problem being that we aren’t getting the pure numbers going to our portal to make the service as profitable for games as it could be. Games typically sell at 2-4% rates on portals, and that’s what we seem to be doing on average. Non traditional games and applications (Massagers, RC Plane sims, etc.) have a much better conversion rate probably because when people look at an application in particular it is easier at this point to fulfill what they want than to fulfill a specific intangible with “fun,” which makes it profitable at this point to make an application or non traditional game; not quite as much for a traditional game. Our goal, then, should be to increase exposure to the service, to raise everyone’s profits. In turn, raising profits will allow for better games on the service since it then makes sense to sped 6+ months on a game. Right now, a game taking more than a month to design will essentially automatically be a money loss, scaring away skilled developers, and lowering the average quality of game.

I know some people are in this strictly for fun and a hobby, which is fine, but we should make it a place where both the hobby guy and the businesses can both thrive.

What we can do as a Community

 - TALK about our games.

One thing I noticed when googling around is that people are not talking about their own games, much less Community Games in general. If you don’t talk about it, other people probably wont - so why aren’t you guys on forums all across the Internet blabbing about your games and other people’s? Why aren’t you on Twitter; your own sites, supporting our review sites or talking/commenting in there/on XNA Roundup Videos, etc.? And when you do get an interview or something, don’t just mention your own game; raise awareness of the service in general. If you talk to the press, mention that there are a lot of gems on the service and that there are sites set up to find the good games, and thank them for providing exposure since nobody wants to cover our stuff in general. Talk, talk, talk. And not just BEFORE you release your game, afterwards. And then talk about other peoples’ games too. If you play a game that is actually good among the sea of crap - TELL people about it! Help others to help yourselves.

- Harrass the gaming media

I wouldn’t normally recommend doing this, but we’re essentially in ‘desperation mode’ when it comes to getting our games covered. I sent approximately 50 press releases out to the gaming media about Angry Barry a week ago, and I got around 3 responses based on that (one of them was Gamespot, surprisingly). The mainstream gaming media not wanting to cover a game with a fake-Obama beating up old ladies just shows that they don’t pay much attention to the “little guy,” when they have to devote so much space to the big guys to keep their advertising/exclusive looks coming in. Which is predictable, but sad.

However, just because they wouldn’t listen once doesn’t mean that they won’t do so, period. I’m waiting for the E3 newscycle to die down, and then, guess what, I’m going to send out 50 MORE “updated” press releases. Don’t give up; our games don’t go away, so there’s no reason that we can’t KEEP trying to get people talking about our games.

Also, google is your friend. Game reviewers have names, names have google trails. Don’t harass their facebooks or myspaces or anything, but see if those reviewers talk in forums or communities elsewhere, and then spark up discussion of your games in THOSE places.

- Make games that people want to talk about

It’s no secret that our game quality is low, which obviously doesn’t help general perception/sales at all. So working on the quality of our games is probably the major issue, and we don’t even really need to get into that as everyone knows about that elephant. But still, there’s more to it than that and that’s what I’ll focus on now.

We’re independent developers. Repeat that to yourself. Independent developers. That means we can make whatever game we please. So MAKE whatever game you please. You can’t program anything better than Breakout - that’s fine, make Breakout. But instead of making your Breakout with blocks and circles and calling it Blocks and Circles (with crappy box art), do something inventive with the premise. Make it about a dog hitting a cat into some poop or something; you may not be able to make the best game, but at least try to make something INTERESTING that people would talk about or actually want to spend 5 minutes playing.

My goal when designing Angry Barry was simply to make a fun game that would make people laugh and get people talking about the service in general. And while the fun quality is debateable, it does seem to get people talking, as my google searches are telling me. People are going on CG, seeing a game with a fakepresident beating up fakepoliticians, saying “WTF” and then telling other people on forums and their twitters and their blogs “WTF, you’ve gotta see, there’s a game about Obama on here!” And that was the plan. I could have made the exact same game with GENERIC BUFF GUY beating up GENERIC STREET PUNKS, but why do that when I could parody the election season instead and make people laugh while playing? Cold War Commander got a similar reaction on a smaller level. Weapon of Choice got that reaction from its art direction on release. If we keep making off the wall, crazy stuff, guess what - more and more people are going to keep coming just to see what new crazy games are coming out for the service instead of just seeing “what new apps are coming out” or not coming at all. So be creative, it only helps out everyone.
What Microsoft/XNA team can do
- We need better exposure. The “millions of Live users” only see what is thrown in front of their faces. And Community Games aren’t really thrown in their faces. We need better dashboard presence, we need to be talked about in general gaming interviews, we need Microsoft to send the gaming media more press releases about our games (while they won’t listen to us, they will listen to Microsoft), etc.

Also, looking at the main dashboard, Community Games needs a spot in the Game Marketplace ‘featured’ tab. I see one company spotlighted, one XBLA game, two downloadable games…why no Community Game? People often don’t go beyond their main dashboards, which is why they don’t know about CG - nothing on there ever features a Community Game. So feature something! There are some good games in there!

- Change the most popular = most featured thing. From what I can tell, on XBox.com and in other places they just feature the most popular games. Which typically means all/mostly apps because of what was mentioned earlier, and the general ease of checking them out. That doesn’t mean people only LIKE apps, it just means that they sell through very well. Which is fine, if you’re looking strictly at short term money, but long term, you need to bring more gamers in with the quality stuff and the “crazy” stuff that gets them talking. So pick more subjective choices to spotlight - focus on games that you think are well designed but don’t necessarily sell as well, or games that you know will get people talking strictly due to content.

- We need our quality rating system/better organization. Right now, this is how things work - you’re a New Release, you get in “Most Popular” for a while, maybe, and then you drop off, never to be heard of again if this happens at the wrong time or you don’t get high enough on the list. And the things that DO end up high on the list STAY there because the Most Popular list tends to self perpetuate itself. Angry Barry would up at #4 on its second day, so now I’m scouring/brainstorming ways to get it to the number 1 spot and sit there for a little while so it self perpetuates itself up there just because that’s how Community Games end up selling the best - not enough people check it out en-masse so we’re dependent too much on a long tail. If we had a better sorting system, we might not have to depend on the luck of the draw on when you’re released and how many people notice in that initial release.

- Give the gamers a little power. One of the reasons Youtube is so successful is that people can comment and rate the videos they see. by being able to rate things, they feel like a part of the process, so they keep coming back. Newgrounds - same deal, etc. So if Community Games is the only section on XBL where the users can interact to some degree, either by rating or commenting, or whatever, it will bring a contingent of users that come there just to do that. If gamers feel more involved, then they will want to BE more involved. So that’s something to look into.

I have more and a bunch of stastical data etc., but I’ll cut this here as I’ve been typing too long and you guys probably don’t care that much, and it’s time for some more excessive Google searching and forum scouring.

This is going to be short and quick.

A lot of people want to know my idea behind making Angry Barry. It’s really quite simple. As a guy with a day job working on a game in my limited spare time with another guy, I really can’t afford to make a 500 hour open ended RPG supreme. I can only make a short, memorable experience (for now, maybe if Barry gets enough sales, then I can take a year off and finish something grand).

I was thinking about how much fun I had during the election season, and said, “you know, why don’t I compress all of this silliness into one big parody?” So I did. Based around the basic idea behind Bad Dudes, Rolling Thunder, etc., I tried to make a game with as much humor packed in as possible. I parodied everything I could think of; shoes, ACORN, stereotypical catladies, you name it, and packed it into a relatively short arcade experience. And, I hope you guys end up liking it!

Adventurer Pets
Release: w/o 11/23
Cost: 200 points

This little title will be coming out sometime of the week of November 23rd, depending on how long it takes to pass through.

Basically when designing this game, I locked myself in a room and payed through all the games I remembered having a lot of fun with with friends in the room when I was younger. So, basically Floyd of the Jungle (and old C64 game), Bomberman Saturn, Mario Kart, and a few others. And I realized that the most fun part of those games were screwing people over. So I invented a local multiplayer party game where the goal is just to screw your friends over as much as possible.

It can be best described as a single screen platformer with up to 4 people. The object is to get the most points to win (or in single player to progress through the levels getting points, a la Donkey Kong, or a time attack mode, a la Geometry Wars 2’s countdown). You get random power ups that help you or screw other people over, there is collision between the characters and you’re unleashed in 6 different levels racing for points and trying to kill each other.

I dunno, I have been playtesting with friends and we’ve all been having a lot of stupid fun creating devious ways to kill each other or racing to the top - and it reminds me of being a kid again. And I never typically have this much fun with my own games, either, so I guess it’s a pretty good game. I’d suggest buying it when it comes out!

Ugh, waiting on the DBP results is excrutiating. It wasn’t a big deal at first, but now that monetary situations have changed and Paul will have to pick up a new job if it doesn’t look like we can get a decent amount of final sales from our game (and Paul getting a job means that he’ll have almost no time to work on the game since he typically does very heavy programming work), knowing has become half the battle. I think we have a pretty good shot at ranking somewhere, but there’s no way to know - and now that the contest results can literally show up at any time (there is no definite release date), every minute is pins and needles waiting on a call, email, or site update, or at least hearing that someone else won so that we can both get back to day jobs again (or in my case, finding new clients to fill up the time I spent working on the game).

We put forth our best shot and think we have a pretty fun game, but we’ve seen 4-5 titles that my marketing eye tells me Microsoft would like to push just as much or more, and 4-5 games that I’ve played that I thought were as fun as my own game. Well, I guess we’ll see…whenever. I’ll be sitting here counting the seconds…minutes…hours…days…

I ran a quick test of the demo on the 360 for Paul since he’s back in England and can’t see how it runs currently. I had to use analog to record so the quality kind of sucks. Of course, this video might help if you keep dying early on.

http://www.youtube.com/v/5qT5a9TX-Bk

I know I don’t really post here much; I’m not really one for blogging. Here are a few concept sketches for the game that I came up with - you might find my pre-mastered drawing style interesting:

Your “helper” Beeku after you feed him enough and he ‘evolves’ once:

Your helper Beeku before he evolves (when you first get him):

Adam Frist, the main character:

I’m having a bit of trouble at the moment balancing eye candy and playability. To explain, take for instance, ‘The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.’ When someone first looks at the game, they say, “Woo, that looks exciting!” I think I was impressed in the same way at first as well (not taking anything away from what Silva has done; I’m still impressed with it). The reason why is that every action in the game is accompanied with a reaction. Attacks have blur effects and filters attached, the camera is constantly zooming in and out, and the entire game basically being grayscale helps the particle effects and blood (which are in color) to stand out more. That was my basic design philosophy behind the Angela Game I was working on, after all (never finished it). 

But I feel that takes away from gameplay as well to a degree. It looks good in video, but it’s hard to focus on things when particles are exploding all over the place and things block your view. Zooming in and out is good to a degree, but you don’t want to obscure someone’s view of the entire stage if at all possible. All those things I consider when designing our game in the long run.

But in contrast, I look at stuff like Braid, which I think is artistically stunning (the hand painted, colorful backgrounds are beautiful, and the effects, while plentiful, never call attention to themselves), and look at the relative lack of “wow” effect that it has on the casual gamer. Yes, us artists like it, and industry insiders find it interesting, but that’s not who keeps us financially afloat. And that makes me worry about the marketing aspect of subtlety in design.

In the end, my design style is basically similar to the Castlevania series, which was one of my stronger influences. I’m putting tons of effects and particles and such in there, but as a highlight or a compliment, and (hopefully), never a distraction. We had an automatically zooming camera similar to Dishwasher or Silhouette Mirage going, but I made the decision to make the camera user controlled so that people can zoom in as close as they like when they’d like. I put some background effects in, but I try to keep them as subtle as possible to hopefully add to the ambience instead of taking away from it. Etc.

I THINK I’m making the right choice, but then again, I look at 12 year old comments on Youtube “WOWIIIEEE-ing” any excess effects, and I think I’m making the wrong choice. Only time will tell, I guess.

God, I hate web design, I really do. That’s why I’m just using a default template for this blog; anything else meant goofing around with the images and css and…it’s not really worth it.

So anyway, I’m pretty much done with this website and soon the blog can focus on actual game development. I’m waiting this week for the big Dream Build Play Announcement that was rumored – hopefully, the template basically follows what last years was. If so, I might focus on polishing what we already have done more than creating new areas and enemies and music and stuff. In fact, for the last week, that’s what I’ve been doing – polishing up the backgrounds and making a few more eye-catching things. Paul just created a new ‘camera’ system in which you can manually zoom in and out of the action at any time, which is cool, but ultimately useless.

Yeah, so I started a blog on here to update basic game progress and stuff. I don’t really feel like writing at the moment, so this will just serve as an introductory post. Weehaw.