Archive for the ‘Contracts’ tag

Contracts, games and Pedro

Hi everyone, Vlad here.

A lot of people has approached me on MSN lately wondering what we were up to since there was no news from us for some time. Our blog hasn’t been updated with the exception of Marco’s previous post, we haven’t used Twitter lately or done our daily visit to FGL.

Some have wondered if everything is ok and so on. Well, it is! I’m currently working on a big contract that we will let you know once it’s public. This contract is the major time consuming ‘thing’ that has made hide in our dev cave and one very nice addition to it is that it is using our Bold Pixel Engine framework, which means that we will release version 1 as soon as we deliver the project.

Marco is juggling several things. For starters, this contract also involves art… well actually it involves the whole product, so art is part of it. He has delivered all known assets and he is currently working with a programmer that is doing some really cool things for us. The name of this fellow is Pedro, so give him a round of applause because he really deserves it! Trust me, he does and you’ll know about it soon. Marco also worked on Palisade Guardian 2, which I’ve failed to announce… so… I owe Mark Loika that one!

So apart from the forced disappearance d in our dark dev cave, everything is well, right? Not really… M:A:D, the game that we’ve been talking about is completely stopped for the reasons mentioned above, which is kind of sad since it was going out really well and we are already aware that maybe some other projects will get a higher priority before we can resume its development. Can’t win it all can we?

So I guess this is just a heads-up for everyone and we’ll be back soon.

First Year of Flash Game Development: a Balance

I’m not aware of the exact date we said “We’re going flash games” but since I registered us on Flash Game License mid-July 2008 and our first game took about 6 weeks to be made, I would imagine that mid-June would be near the exact date.

I know it’s irrelevant, but I’m brainstorming so bear with me…

Technology was… refreshing!

Oh well, what to say… we used to work with Torque Game Builder and C++, mostly because Torque Game Builder had some… erm… issues. In those days, that damn thing didn’t know how to render a font on screen properly, so, to get a commercial game out, we couldn’t trust it and we needed to change the actual C++ engine.

Actionscript does have it’s issues also, first and foremost, it’s not a game engine, nor there’s any proper commitement from Adobe to change that. But game developers are used (and should be used) to make the wrong feel right and Actionscript is a bag of good suprises in that department.

Money was good!

Money is not only licensing… we did more stuff… but let’s start with the part that interests most developers.

Licensing

While I still believe that the topmost games of the casual download market space do make more money than topmost flash games. But download games take more time and more people. Another thing with the casual games is that it is a hit market and the vast majority of the money goes to a tiny minority of the people.

We released one download game and we were working on the second when we ran to an halt: we had a lot of proposals for distribution, none for publishing. If you don’t know what this means, basically we didn’t have any upfront money to work and that would kill us in a couple of months.

I would love to share with you real money values but under contract of the download game I cannot, therefor, I’ll give you comparasion figures. I calculated a revenue ratio:

revenue ratio = revenue / team members / months of development

Balloon Bliss has a revenue ratio of 1, because it’s what I want to compare with. Our first game, Tech Wars was a disappointment, mostly because we didn’t know what we were doing, but ok… still the revenue ratio is 1. This means that the revenue per month work per developer involved is exactly the same as a download game… hmmmm… for a game that is less market friendly.

Atomik Kaos and Atomik Kaos 2 have a ratio of 6 and 7.5 respectivelly and Lucy Swashbuckler has a ratio of 2.25.

Average is 4 times more revenue per team member per month worked than casual download market.

Contracts and Collaborations

We had some great ones and some bad ones, most of them were great ones though! Some of the contracts are yet to hit the web, which is a shame because we are very proud of them, but this section is about money so let’s cut the chase… is it good or not to have contracts and collaborations?

It depends… Using the exact same ratio, we had contracts that ranged from 1 to 10 and collabs that ranged from 0 to 36.72. The problem is that 0 there… some developers started projects with us, received assets and then dropped the project without a word. That’s nasty.

I think that we will have less collabs and more contracts in the future, which is ok I guess, but although a higher risk, it’s potentially more profitable to have a collab than a contract. Something we’ve discussed a lot is to what extent is more interesting to get these gigs instead of our own game development? On average our own game development is more profitable, but it has the highest risk, so I guess it’s a matter of balancing things.

Conclusions…

While we did more money per team member per month, we really need to sort how to balance between contracts, collabs and internal production.

Contracts offer 0 risk but lower income, internal production presents the higher risk with a potential higher income and collabs are somewhere in the middle. Since collabs were the more profitable the also the most problematic, I think that what we need to balance is internal vs contracts and leave collabs drop unless we get a really interesting project.

Visibility and contacts

Like it or not, a business is as viable as is it visible unless you are running some illegal thing, then it’s the exact opposite.

About a year ago our games were played by roughly ten thousand players. In a year we got around ten million players, that’s the equivalent to our country’s population, so kind of a milestone for us.

Our visibility, simply boosted and most of it happened because of the good people we had the pleasure to work with.

Flash Game License

All started here: please click here if you don’t know what it is… The services offered by the portal allowed all our primary and exclusive game sales, but it did not end there. Adam in particular has been always open to hear our complaints and suggestions and drive business our way. I’m sure we would do it sooner or later, but not has fast and as hassle free as while working with this wonderful group of people.

Portals

All the portals that worked with us. All, from the smallest to the biggest, have part in the visibility of our work but more important, all of them cared. I never felt that these portals were some faceless institutions that overloaded us with paperwork or false intentions. They wanted the best for their service and worked with us to deliver it. Sometimes it was possible, other times wasn’t.

I’ll open a new link section to be sure I don’t leave anyone out… and drive a little traffic their way too, why not?

Conclusion and future plans

This first year was very good. Next year is a bit edgy for us. We want to continue growing but we need to sort what our bets are and how we will manage somethings.

I don’t doubt for a minute that I’ll be here a year from now making a year 2 balance.

See you all soon,
Vlad