Archive for the ‘Contracts’ tag

Business Model… the missing link…

I have to say I’m still doubtful if I should address this in our blog. I will not go into the details of what a business model is what it is not, how it influences strategy and all that stuff. For that a Wikipedia link to Business Model is more than enough.

As I think it notices in other posts in our blog, I still feel that developers are not fully aware of where they are positioned in the flash game market. I’m not 100% sure but I think that what I spoke most with other developers was about business. I admit I feel quite comfortable with the business side of things and I understand that with the average age and work experience of most flash game developers, business is not something they feel comfortable or knowledgeable.

On the other hand there’s the problem of developers that feel they have a life of experience because they sold one game for $100. They use the word “noob” like there were no mirrors left on Earth. I would add to these a significant number of developers that advice others not to do something that they haven’t tried.

And where does a business model fit into this? Well, most of what defines a business model is well known by developers. What is relevant to discuss, in my opinion, is what are the options available in terms of activities and revenue. Many developers ask me how did Vortix achieve this or achieve that. How do we do it? How much do we earn… stuff like that… I can only be theoretical about it because I’m not fully aware the most sensitive piece of information: THE DEVELOPER!

You need to know yourself, you need to understand, not business but your business and you need to neglect all opinions that are negative in nature to what models, activities and revenue streams that are available to you as a flash game developer.

In the next few days I’ll address Sponsorship and Licensing, Collaborative Projects and Contract Projects as activities and their revenues but I feel that what is important is how do these activities affected us at Vortix so you can relate to your own business model. Because there is no perfect or good business model, there’s only YOUR business model.

Random thoughts on life and code

Been a while since I write here. This post will be a bit like therapy.

So life is treating us so-so. A couple of contracts are approaching the end and after speaking with Marco we concluded that we won’t be doing contract work for a good while. We have too many good stuff right now to work on that has caught way too much dust.

Looking back over the past few months, a lot of what we did was neglected because of contracts. They were alright in a way, some for the money, some for the knowledge, some for something else. But unlike our own games, there’s always a part that is missing, regardless of how good the project is. We feel that has to stop and that what moves us forward is our ability to pursue what we want: pride and happyness.

I also feel that both can go hand in hand with stability and stability is what we found in the past months. We need to step up and do our thing. We need to improve what we did for us.

Project wise, that means that we have to put Hajime on FGL, we have to decided what we want for M:A:D and we have to have time for our most promising game. Code wise this means that I have to reflect if we want to keep Bold Pixel public considering that the current version suits our needs more than it suits the initial user friendliness. I strive to keep things simple, to impose convention over configuration as a standard. Right now I’m not that sure that this will fit developers needs to the point that BPE is helpful.

We’ll see about that in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for reading and the therapy session.

Vlad out!

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