Archive for the ‘Developers’ tag

Business Model Activity: Conclusions

So after all the walls of text I just put up, what does this all mean? Let me start by saying that Vortix was not born to be a flash game development studio. It was born to be a game development studio. For the last two years we have focused on flash the same way we may focus on some other technology. We do what we have to do to develop games. That is what we want to do. But to be successful we need to be able to monetize it. It is pointless to create a commercial project if it isn’t to be commercial and no, you don’t have to sell your soul to do it.

To be successful we have made decisions. We developed our own activities:

1. Sponsorship and licensing because it is our current form of monetizing our core business and our core business is creating games.
2.  Collaboration projects as an low-risk extension of #1.
3. Contracts as a very-low-risk activity that would allow us quick and steady monetization.

Everything we did, was done with a purpose. There are a bunch of things you can do as a flash or game developer. Some devs operate portals, some devs create software that helps other devs, some devs have a day job, all is fair game, but doing things with a purpose allowed us to set goals and each goal that is achieved is a step forward into that purpose.

It boils down to this:

Do whatever you have to do to be able to do whatever you want to do.

Less than that it’s either a hobby or a bad model. What you need to ask yourself is:

1. What do you do best? Capitalize on that.
2. What do you want to do? Improve on that.

Never stop moving, choose what you have to do and choose what you want to. Be smart, create value, raise the bar, raise your worth.

To finish, keep in mind that you, like us, are probably small fish in a world of sharks. Here’s something worth reading: The Bootstrapper’s Bible. That should put it in a wonderful, motivating new perspective.

Business Model Activity #2: Collabs

Following the Business Model series that started some days ago and after rambling about Sponsorships and Licensing, it is now time to ramble how and why we see Collaborations as an activity separated from Sponsorship and Licensing.

Most flash game developers, be it coders or artists, usually lack the other side of the coin. Many coders don’t have design and/or artistic skills and many designers/artists don’t have coding skills. This gap became deeper with Actionscript 3 for well known reasons.

Collaborations the activity that we planned the most. The main goal was to monetize schedule holes. To do this we started by marketing it at FGL. First slowly and carefully, we were absolutely clear that we were not looking for “any game”, but rather targeting potentially high profile projects. We behaved a lot like a sponsor, checking every proposal we got by email, discussing the pros and cons of each. About a handful of projects never started, one was never sold (or put to sale as far as I know) and a couple did well.

Now it is important to determine what “doing well” exactly means. Maybe you are imagining that doing well is getting 5 million plays or we earning $5000 per game. It isn’t. We clearly defined the objectives we wanted from Collaborations:

1. Our collaboration must create enough value in the game so that the developer that proposed the game makes more money than he would if it wasn’t for us. All games that were sold achieved this.
2. Our percentage of the collaboration must cover our cost. I didn’t crunch numbers on this one, but I think we rarely achieved this. It is always a win situation for us since like I mentioned earlier, our initial motivation was to monetize schedule holes that would never make any money.

It was a bit disheartening that as soon as developers create a hit game with us they prefer to hire us. I admit that from a commercial point of view that is the right call and we say from the beginning that we don’t won the IP in any way so we really have no take on the subject. But from a personal point of view, I feel sad that our share of risk and support is left behind and given a lower priority against money… I don’t let these personal feelings get in the way and I share the same amount of respect and even friendship, but it’s a bit… sad…

Final thoughts on collabs and why we did it this way: we monetized, created value for ourselves and developers that worked with us which was exactly what we wanted to do. To achieve this we didn’t consider this activity as part of sponsoring and licensing since we never owned the process of production and sales. Collaborations are half sponsorship and half contacts. That was the only way to fit it into our business model.

Long time no see…

Hi everyone, Vlad here!

Sorry about the lack of updates, but things have been somewhere between messy and overloaded here. A lot has happened since Marco wrote the last post, so this is a quick update now that we are back on track.

Projects that you can know about

While we were missing in action (from a blogging point of view) we worked on some contracts and collaborations. Not all have met the light of day yet, so those won’t get free advertising here, but two of those projects not only are amazing games, but also gave us the opportunity to work with top notch developers.

Palisade Guardian

Mark Loika designed and produced an excellent game in which we had the pleasure to collaborate. Palisade Guardian is a WWII shooter game where the player struggles against the forces of the 3rd Reich.

Try it out!

Crunchball 3000

Soon after, we had the pleasure of working on a contract with Ben Olding aka DJStatika, creator of IPs like Starfighter and Warlords. The result was amazing. Based on the oldie but goldie Speedball 2 for Amiga and PC, Ben Olding created Crunchball3000, an amazing futuristic violent sports game.

…and yes, clicking here will take you to it!

From a production point of view, both games were an amazing task for Marco, featuring full 3D animated models rendered to be animated in Flash objects. There’s more happening with both Mark and Ben and in due time we’ll let you know about it. As far as we are concerned here at VGS, it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to work in both these projects but, more important, to have the opportunity to work with both these developers of enormous quality, both technical and human.

So… now what?

Well, we have a couple more projects to announce but those are not out yet, so we need to be silent. We’ll also try to get some more action to the blog, I have a couple of easy and neat ideas for it… and I won’t tell Marco about it!

I really don’t know when we’ll release our next self published game for several reasons, but the two more relevant ones are that we are getting a lot of contract work which always hurts internal game production and that the new game is a complete new chapter in our offer… just take a look at the previous post.

The art and code of PhotonStorm

PhotonStorm

There are a number of developers I trully admire. My developer wise admiration often triggers when two factors are present in the same person: technical quality and the capacity to openly discuss any subject in a true open minded way.

Richard Davey, better known as PhotonStorm fits the description perfectly and I can prove that! Or at least the technical quality…

PhotonStorm entered The Flash 4K Competition and his results are astonishing. Infinite Ammo is his entry and an admirable feat on my book. I know some other great developers are running, maybe Richard’s entry isn’t even the competition winner, but after chatting with him about it and going through the source code I have to say I’m surrendered to the quality of his art and code and can only wonder what would he do if he could use 16KB.

Well done mate!

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