Projects

Lot of stuff happened… Hajime finished and was sold, we worked on Warlords 2 and Async Racing with Ben Olding, we finished two major contracts and started a couple of other ones.

I must say that project wise I have split feelings. On one hand we did put a lot of stuff out. On the other hand most of our time was used with client IPs, which can be heaven or hell, but never our heaven or hell.

Couple of other small victories I reckon… not entirely relevant for the company has a whole.

Business

I don’t know the exact figures of 2010 yet, but I’m pretty much sure we grew more than 100%. This would mean that 2010 was the year of our stability. While this is somewhat true it is not that black and white. Right now my predictions are that we will match 2010 in the 1st quarter of 2011 and still I’m not happy. My biggest concern is related to passive income. We have not yet found a way to have a steady passive income and the rest simply has too many variables, plus taxes…

Yes, 2010 was good, but we are growing and in a very decisive year in VGS, so we need to really be less dependant of overall market… stuff…

VGS Most Valuable Player

I bet we are the only company in the world with more than two people where 50% of the people are named Pedro Santos. While none of ‘our’ Pedro Santos are in fact and legaly employees of Vortix, both of them have the same spirit of the three guys that started up Vortix: they put their effort into something and make it happen, which is a rare thing nowadays. In my opinion ‘The Pedros’ share the MVP place in 2010.

The Flash Game Space MVP

I really have to make this special note here… There’s this Ben guy better known has benologist. He bootstrapped something we know as Playtomic, which is pretty much awesome and that I won’t describe because you either know it or you should follow the link. When devs were bitching and whinning about blocked links he put pressure on portals and created Portal Blacklist.

And still managed to release games… no doubt, my personal choice for Flash Game Space MVP.

And one last word

Marco, my partner, friend and brother. You are one in a million mate. If we find the other 6000 that are like you, we’ll rule the world! Keep up the good work!

I’ve been present in some discussions in the FGL chat about the whole Programmer VS Artist war, and it annoys me every single time.

The reason for this is that there seems to be a very amateur approach to game development in the flash community. The very simple act of dividing people into different parts makes it look like one side wants distance from the other.  The point is exactly to put TOGETHER the two or the three or as many parts needed to make a game.

This is of course an old habit from the old “one-man-show” format usually associated with flash development.

There’s obviously a lot of young developers who are just starting out, but there’s also some people that have been doing this for some years and have actually already sold some games. The insistence in this “war” will not only deprive some good developers from creating long lasting bonds with other developers, but it will also keep the production value of flash games very low.

One of the problems of this discussion is that its set to die at its birth. It’s always the “programmer” vs the “artist”, which I come to find that in most of the situations it stands for the “Coder+Idea owner” vs the “Graphics designer”. If we were to call people by their occupation it would put the discussion on a new light. Suddenly, the “artist” which is a generic figure, is now the guy that does the graphics. But the artist could also be the SoundFX guy or the Musician or even the Game designer. The same way the programmer could be the Coder, or the producer, or the Game designer as well. This will usually have people cheering for one of the sides because they understand the hard work it is to do one of the parts of the game, but they neglect to see the other part.

This also leads to the second problem with this discussion which due to a simple statistical fact, most people will assume “programmer = idea owner = game designer”. This is true for a big chunk of the reality, but it’s not a rule. It’s not an indicator. It’s a consequence of most programmers being able to do a complete game on their own without the need of external help. A programmer, who wants to be a game developer, will in most cases start developing on his own, and as he does, he comes up with ideas for other games, and when the time comes to collaborate, he will have a pocket full of ideas to use. This in itself will put the visual artist in a dependency position. He will work under the direction of the person whose idea it is. He’s just doing the art, while the programmer is doing the code AND the design. This however is not a RULE. It just happens to be like this frequently.

So again, people tend to overlook the fact that along with the production itself, either it be graphics or code, one person may also be accumulating the work of designing the game.

And this takes us to the third problem I tend to see in these discussions. The one I heard recently was “He never complained about how much money he got, he just started complaining after seeing how much the game sold for”.

I’ve worked on titles that have sold for quite a lot. I’m happy to say that whenever I work with Ben Olding, for instance, I know I’m going to get huge visibility, because he usually makes very popular games. He’s also known to sell his games for a very good amount. It would be ridiculous, not to say unethical, to be knocking on his door saying “Right, you made more money then I though you would make, where’s my share?”

The reason the game sold for a specific amount may not be even remotely related to the graphics. In the specific case of Ben, he usually has really awesome game ideas. And those turn into good sales.

The programmers reading this will probably think “yes cause a good idea will always be a good idea, even if the graphics are crap”. And I say “True, but aren’t the good graphics and good sound the difference between a really good game idea and a really good game?”.

But before you start thinking that I’m saying that an artist should set his price, get paid and let the game sell, I have to say one thing. I do believe graphics have a huge impact on sales. Graphics may not be the single most valuable feature of your game, but they will get you views. They will get interest both sponsors and players. And even if the player tries the game just once to realize its “just graphics” the sponsor has already made some money out of that. Sponsors know this, and even FGL has stated that you should put an effort into making better graphics for your game. They will sell for more. And artists should know this. They should know their work can have a huge impact on the figures a game sells for. But they should know this going in. Not wait for the game to sell and say you want a cut. If you want a cut, say it right away. Say you charge $$$ plus a cut. Say you will only take a cut, or say you want to get paid and not have to worry about if it sells or not. Some programmers won’t give you the option of a cut, so figure out how much you think your work is worth for the overall value of the game.

Now if you’re an artist on a collaborating format with a coder, then both are, in my view, worth the same cut as long as they both work at their best abilities. Maybe the graphics won’t be the best, or the game won’t have as many features or the sounds aren’t perfect as expected, but the point is that all the team did their best.

Programmers should realize that graphics can make a game a completely different experience, and game artists should know that there a good chance their creations need some code to actually turn into games. AND they should BOTH realize that the best creations come from collaboration, from sharing of knowledge and know-how and from being a development force.

Programmers will most of the time have the upper hand, because they can code. That means they can make games. Doesn’t mean they can make a good game.

I’ve seen mediocre programmers make huge sales, and I’ve seen people bored to death with amazing graphics. It’s not the graphics that make the game, it’s not the code either, and it’s not just the idea. It’s the game that makes the game.

So, on a final note, if you’re a developer, looking for people to work with you, be fair. Sure, it’s nice to get more money than the other person. But is it really worth it in the long run? How many people will want to work with you? How many times will you have to resort to inexperienced cheaper people, who will not be able to deliver content that is above par?

And I don’t mean just art. We’ve hired a programmer to make a game. He’s good. We want to work with him again. We have to make sure that all parts are satisfied.

In the game development community, there seems to be an ambient of symbiotic relation between the logic and the art. But I’ve never seen so much discussion about it as in flash community. Probably because most programmers have to pay for their art. Its like it’s a war. And as Sun Tzu said: “There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.”

Pre is a great coder and a great example of a entrepreneur. We met him and two friends of his when they launched Orion’s Belt, a MMO browser game. The game got some visibility and won a some accolades and it resulted in getting the three of them contracted by a company to proceed with the game development of version 2. Marco did the graphics for the game’s 2nd version already as a Vortix Games gig.

I think everyone felt that sooner or later something would happen that involved people from Vortix and Orion’s Belt. It just did. Pre decided to make a big change in his life and pursue his own goals and business and started a project with us that has nothing to do with anything that anyone has seen from us. It is highly inspirational and motivational to find people that embrace risk, just like me, Marco and Diogo did and go for it. It is even more motivational because what we are trying to achieve is the original plan that brought Vortix Games together in the first place.

So give your warm welcome to Pre and wish him and us luck for the project ahead of us.

I’m a fan of Newgrounds. The principle behind it, the motto “Everything, by Everyone” is absolutely brilliant from a creative and sharing person point of view and let’s face it, Newgrounds is simply different from the other portals. One of the most satisfying aspects of Newgrounds is that a author’s work is judged and commented by other authors… or at least that’s the idea…

Newgrounds due to its size and history packs a great deal of business also. If your game scores big on Newgrounds, it will probably spread easily and give you a nice change of getting some non-exclusive deals in case you are allowed to.

The problem with this is that the scoring system in Newgrounds is tricky. As many may know there are a lot of crews on Newgrounds. Most (I hope) are quite legit and base their presence on doing collabs. But there are a lot of crews (let’s just called them mafias) that simply exist to uprate votes of their members and downrate votes of other submissions. If you are “lucky” and low-life enough to be part of more than one of these mafias you can get a bunch of 5′s while other submissions get 0′s. This happens until the daily prizes are announced.

This issue is way more serious than developers might imagine. For starters, many portals base their selection on NG score so if your game is lost in the mess of down voting, you might have a setback because of it. Second,there are portals that base their choice for non-exclusives and the money they offer on your prizes and scores.

Your game can go from 4.1 to 3.1 in a couple of hours and loose a daily prize and exposure… shouldn’t that be extremely serious? I think it should. But don’t trust my word for it, read this thread: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1198036

This is happening for a long time. It’s been either subtle or amazingly obvious and many, many, many developers are not aware of it and there is no official voice that I am aware from Newgrounds, which is sad. Remarkably amazing games can escape this because they will be up voted almost instantly, but if you have “just a good game” against a submission from one of this mafias, your game is going down.

No excuses can explain the silence. It is not valid to say that it could happen on other portals because other portals have a higher ratio of non-authors so competition does not strike you that obviously. It is not valid to say that it is just how it works because that means the best and brightest can’t compete with untalented yet organized mobsters.

I want Newgrounds to be better and I want their system to be taken seriously. It’s pretty much the place where author’s matter the most, but this is seriously hurting all legit authors.

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.

1. We determine cost, scope and time frame. Only once we were given a budget and it worked alright, but we prefer to determine the cost ourselves.
2. Cost to the prospect client is directly related with scope and time frame. If we assume we do the contract it is because we have the skill to do it and it is not our content, this is purely engineering/design work, nothing else. This means that any other related factor is irrelevant for us. We don’t care what is the content or entertaining value, we don’t care if we are considered cheap or expensive and we don’t care if anyone thinks we are having too much profit.
3. We care about the end result and will not charge extra if any requested change or additional feature is within scope and time frame.
4. Larger projects will be paid by milestone while smaller projects will be paid on delivery.
5. Payments on delivery are not dependent of anything, like developers getting their game sponsored. We delivered, if it is accepted we expect immediate payment.

Sounds a bit harsh doesn’t it? That’s because our core business is creating our own games. A client-centric company needs the clients to survive since they are dependent of contracts. A flash game developer creates (or should be able to create) its own content, therefor its own value. If we have an agreement, we will do the project as if it was our own, the client is not treated as a client (in a bad way), but as a partner, unless of course they treat us as supplier (in a bad way also). The problem with a couple of contracts or contract discussions was exactly this: some clients (or prospect clients) tend to consider flash game developers as a lesser entity, like they were amateurs. Our experience says that this is more evident in the flash game space where prospect clients started the discussion by saying “I don’t think you are good enough”. Great, find someone else that is…

Bottom line is that contracts, if not done with the right people are problematic. The right people are the ones that are don’t consider to be in a higher position because they pay but that consider hiring us as an added value to their project. These are the clients we want to deal with, the ones that the points raised above are “nothing special”.

Still the worst part of contracts is getting started. We feel that announcements (blog and forums mostly) served very little for getting new contracts. On the other hand, word of mouth was what brought us more contracts. I think I won’t be far from truth if I say that all contracts started by either our games being known which led to good collabs or by speaking with people directly thus creating network. I can recall a couple of emails we got from our forums, but those never left the proposal stage.

Now you know how the activities of our business model work to us. I’ll finish this series by wrapping it all up, drawing some conclusions and babbling on how you can adapt your own reality to your own business model.

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.

And that is the main problem… the activity is documented, but usually on the upper end of it. Meaning that what developers find when they look around is the success stories, from slight success to major success. I wonder what is the success percentage in the whole Sponsoring and Licensing activity. I’m betting, lowish… developers get information from these sites and blogs and until they face the hard truth and get themselves into the statistics.

Flash Game License has promoted a lot of data sharing about their system. The data FGL provides is a very important tool but it needs to be put into context. For instance, we can look at a $2000 average sponsoring value and everyone jumps into the idea of making a game in a week and getting those $2000 average. By doing so most developers neglect several facts:

1. A small percentage of games sell for much more than the average
2. A high percentage of games sell for much less than the average

What percentages are we talking about? I don’t have enough data to know that, I do know that (again looking at FGL data) the 100th most successful developer at FGL (and that has paid commission) is now Market Level 4, so that developer made something between $5000 and $10000 and paid commissions for it.

That’s the 100th most successful… there are thousands of developers registered there. I spoke with many developers that say they don’t do what they expected from Sponsoring and Licensing. Most developers also say they slack and that they are not good enough and that they don’t care about improving.

So?… What is our take on it? What does our experience say? I’ve said many times that from the revenue point of view, sponsoring and licensing is potentially the highest paid type of activity we have. Like I also say keyword is “potentially”. The risk, as showed before, is huge, so some factors must be met:

1. All games must sell. We hope that all games are profitable but to lower the risk, all games must at least sell.
2. All games must have the highest possible quality for its cost. This is the hard part.
3. All games must be a step forward in terms of partnerships, visibility and IP value.

By doing this we try to position ourselves in the upper tier of developers. Until now we have been able to do that, except when we are not actively selling licenses. Right now… it’s been a year or more since the last one and I bet we are still in the mid-top tier in terms of revenue. So it’s not that bad as it seems. It’s a matter of understanding risk and cost.

What do we know about the revenue streams? Some stuff that boils down to this… the better the game, the higher the revenue! We need some indication about how good the game will be.

The higher offer is usually a good indication of how good the game will do. Our decisions are usually based on that and a lot of number crunching. For instance, we if we get a $100 bid on a game, we don’t expect much from it, so what’s the point in forcing a discussion around using advertising or not? If you have a $150 offer with no ads, it will probably be better to take it even if no ads are allowed.

On the other hand if a game is having $1000 offers, that usually means we will get at least 3 million plays. After that, it depends on the eCPM of the countries the game gets played the most.

So you can say that our business model activity based on Sponsorship and Licensing is all about:

1. Creating value for us (through our IPs) and for portals (through entertainment).
2. Creating strong relationships by being available to do everything that doesn’t mean loosing money.
3. Be consistent in our offer. All our games have sold, all our games have beat the 1 million mark by far. This is sort of our seal of quality.
4. Be visible, through our blog, our Twitter, our engine, our games, our contacts and so on.
5. Make every game the best game possible, make every game a stepping stone in terms of development, market and networking.

The weird part is that we learnt all this by not doing games to license. Talk to you all soon.

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.

Projects

We are now in the final ‘meters’ of a long race. This race was a nice and big contract project we are just just just about done with. As it is approaching the end we have more opportunities in front of us.

Less than a week ago all we had was this current project, the japanese themed game being coded by Pedro that Marco has spoke about lately and Mechs and Drones in a full stop. It was only natural that our option would be to pick up where Mechs and Drones was left, but suddenly another possible contract landed on our hands and the doubts start.

We’ve passed the startup phase with no investment capital but our own work, which is a huge victory. I wonder what we could have done with venture capital… We are currently in the consolidation stage, so these crossroads are always a doubt. Go for the stability of the project or the chance of a game like Mechs and Drones?

Bold Pixel Engine

A lot of stuff planned for v2. We’re implementing Box2D in it, plus camera and more and more behaviors. We will migrate all time based stuff to Greensock’s Tween Platform.

With this a lot of questions appear also…

Will the engine stay modular? By this I mean, right now I’m not dependent of the blit engine, but to implement Box2D I have to decide if only the blit engine will be served by the physics wrapper. I want to write a simple collision system. Should I implement it with sensors in Box2D? Or create a separate one?

I can even go backwards… should the current animation of the blit engine be able to be applied to MovieClips? And the list could go on and on…

I know what will decide all this: simplicity and minimalism. Whatever makes Bold Pixel Engine be more simple and minimalist will probably be chosen.

Sorting it out

Monday marks the beginning of March. I’m betting it will be a defining month for us this year. For starters the japan game will walk the extra mile in terms of content, quality and so on. Then, depending on what we will be doing, a lot of extra effort is needed… that’s what I think right now. We’ll see how it goes.

By the way… thanks for reading