Once upon a time in flash game development – part I

It seems there is a bit of a rant about what Kongregate’s well known Greg McClanahan had to say about developer expectations regarding the return on their investment regarding game sponsorship. As quoted by Ryan of Untold Entertainment and transcribed from GameZebo’s website, what Greg said was:

Developers are shocked when they produce a game that they’ve been working on for four months and they only get a $1,000 or $2,000 sponsorship offer on it. The thing is, no one really asked them to make this game. It’s something they did on their own, and reverse logic doesn’t really work when you try to break it down by the hour. It doesn’t matter how long you spent on the game, it’s the final product that matters.

Funny enough… this post was “refactored”… nothing like a bit of coders geekness to set things up. But down to what matters, in my opinion Greg is absolutely right and he is right because…

Market rules apply

Once upon a time in flash game development, a growing number of people was creating games for the love of it. There weren’t many professional full-time flash game developers. Ideas were born and amazingly addictive mechanics were created. These designers, considered below-par developers because they lacked all the huge technical skills from PC and console market, were able to do what the game industry was starting to lack: fun!

As soon as this was noted and portals popped like mushrooms, it became a business and with it, market rules apply. Good portals get money, good developers get money, all the rest strive and fail.

From a game developer point of view reasons for failure fit two categories: business failure and production failure.

Business failure

When we launched Tech Wars, we were asked how much we wanted for the game. I put up my calculator, saw how much work was involved and gave a figure. The portal in question said that for that number they were not interested.

We ended up loosing money with Tech Wars, but we learnt something. We learnt that, like Greg mentions, we should not expect to be paid by the hour and now I agree. As a matter of fact, if I wanted to be paid by the hour, I could have another job, working for an employee, right?

We had to adapt… again… just like we had done with the previous game, but we survived and future looks sharp right now. As a matter of fact our adaptation was very influenced by two email exchanges I had when we were launching Tech Wars.

To avoid business failure a flash game developer needs also to be able to think outside of the box, that’s what made this whole market work in the first place. The model upon which the market grew is different from other media, or entertainment or gaming, even the game desing is thought out of the box from day one. I mean this, not from a development point of view, but from a business point of view. We, flash game developers MUST DO what other game developers cannot do: embrace risk and walk that extra mile for our games. We are not hired like other developers are, we do games for the love of our games and the bigger the love, the bigger the pay, if you use your brain.

So?… now what?

I will deal with production failure on a separate post. The subject is big enough to deserve it’s own set of paragraps. I’ve thought a great deal about what Greg and Ryan wrote. Like I said this post has been corrected and re-written as I mature my opinion about it, but once upon a time in flash game development, there was more care for the game, not the hourly return of investment. If we start focusing on that, flash game development will be just like any other segment of the game industry and when that happens we will be endlessly searching for a way to keep our by that time very dull IPs instead of refreshing our designs and ideas. Then, a kid in the mom’s basement is going to make a hit game that will be better than ours, because he was just too excited about it while we were too worried about money.

It did happen to us, with Tech Wars. I believe we learnt a lesson back then and even if for the very nature of working full-time on game development we are very business oriented, I don’t doubt for a minute that we returned to the basics of the pure pleasure of creation and that made a huge difference.