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.

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.

In the beggining there was darkness…

Most developers dream of adding multiplayer games to their portfolio and the less wise or experienced often run to embrace a multiplayer project from any tool that offers a tiny bit of ease of use and more than often they either fail or face the fact that their game is not half of what it could be and already took twice the amount they thought it would take.

A good idea: Nonoba’s MP API

Sometime ago Nonoba offered a great API for multiplayer games. We tried it and technically we loved it. It was easy to implement, server-side code was written in C# (which brought tears of happiness to our eyes) and we did a rather small but entertaining game in a couple of days. Enough to say that from a technical point of view, Nonoba proved its point.

Unfortunately from a commercial point of view this API was not interesting for developers such as us, that want to license games. All multiplayer games powered by Nonoba’s MP API showed Nonoba’s branding, which is only natural: they support the servers, they have the service, so if we want it, we have to stick with it, after all, it’s free! All in all Nonoba’s multiplayer API is amazing for developers that do it simply for the love of it with no commercial interest.

So I must say that for all this time we were on a strange position: we love the technology, we hate the branding! Good thing about Nonoba is that they have people that want to hear from developers and believe me I wasted a lot of their time explaining why that didn’t work for us, hoping Nonoba would understand that if it didn’t work for us, it wouldn’t work for many developers.

Player.IO: A Huge Step Forward

Someone once told me:

Do you know what really works? McDonald’s! Everyone can go home, make a big burger and eat it! But for $1 you can eat the burger, without having to cook it and without having to wash dishes.

Let’s translate this to multiplayer game development…

For a given amount of money I can code multiplayer games without having to setup and maintain infrastructure… makes sense? Good, let me present you Player.IO!

All I’ve mentioned above regarding the technical aspect of Nonoba’s API probably stands. I say probably because we haven’t done any code with it for a long time, but I believe that if it’s any different, it’s because it’s better, not the opposite.

The good part is that no branding is present, at least no portal’s branding. As we speak, the free version (yes, there is a free version) will show Player.IO branding, but that’s not competition for any portal, so it’s ok I guess. Moreover, if you sell a license for your game, you’ll probably should consider a plan.

We haven’t touched Player.IO, we just have an idea of what we’ll get from it because of what we tried from Nonoba’s API. What I really like about all this is not the technical part or the branding being gone, but the great feeling that someone was smart enough to hear from developers and take a huge step forward with a strong commercial offer that can fit pretty much any development need.

Player.IO looks very solid and promising, we’ll try it as soon as possible and hopefully confirm it.

I opened my email client and started to read what seemed to be one of the many “I love your work so much that you have to mention my work!” emails we receive. But as I was reading it, I felt it was something different…

You see, I’m a firm believer that one of the problems of the Internet is that everyone is looking for a special name, something that looks good and easy to read and retain as a domain name also, but few, very few, live up to the tag of their own name. This means that a site called Best of Online Games must be different. It can’t be yet another gaming site, it can’t be yet another script game portal. It has to at least try to be something different.

So I visited the site, noticed a nice article about us (which was the reason for the email we received in the first place) and noticed a fine philosophy behind it. Best of Online Games looks as a nice game portal, but features developers, news and other articles about this industry niche that is online gaming.

I really enjoyed it and I hope you all do to. After some months off, Best of Online Games is back and we wish them good luck! Go visit it at http://www.bestofonlinegames.com

You see… I have a dream, a dream I share with my partners, my family and my partners’ families. The dream of building a game development studio, big or small, indie or not, our work, fortune and future will tell. But a dream like this is built in large part of the people we work with, the people with whom we share projects, success and failure. A dream like this is built of risk, of honest discussion, of doubts… a dream like this is built of people that rely on us and people who we rely on.

There were times where the dream could end and I would face a harsh reality. One of those times we found a website called Flash Game License. Because of it we sold some licenses, we made a bit of a name for ourselves, but more important, we were able to keep the dream going one step after the other until we got to current day where there’s no time to make a game to put on FGL, but hey, no complaints here, after all, we are creating games! Would it be possible without FGL? Maybe, who knows? But the honest truth is that it existed and we found it when we need it the most.

But Chris wrote:

I do think that many of these incidents were unintentional, but the result was that developers were emailing me and asking me to take a particular position. Then I started to worry that this was widespread, that there were many developers that had a bad impression of us due to things being said behind our backs. I brooded over this.

I have no idea what really happened, but I felt that we should state our feelings towards FGL, so to Chris, Adam and everyone else there, you have our public and humble thank you. You know that we don’t always agree (oh well, Adam does at least, I’m always complaining to him!) but we have your back and as far as it is up to us, no bad impression will stick for long.

Don’t worry about it and keep up the good work because the indie flash development community needs you guys strong and focused.

/Vlad runs back to finish the damn project!

What is production failure?

Every time we don’t finish a game and let it die, there is a production failure. All developers faced it. The problem with failing to finish a game is that it can become the rule instead of the exception. There are acceptable reasons to cancel a game production, but there are a bunch of reasons that are just excuses.

Another production failure is to start something aiming high and then accomodate with a small version of it. Been there, done that, I’m guessing all developers have, but again, there aren’t any acceptable reasons to shrink down a project that I can think of. We shrink it down because you underestimated the effort needed. I really can’t imagine any other big reason. We either don’t have the knowledge, or the technology or the time, but we should know that before starting the project, no excuses.

So this leaves us basically with…

Cancelling a game

All the good reasons I can think are met very early on. Flash wise I would say… two weeks tops for a ‘common’ flash game. All the good reasons fall in the category “prototype does not kick in as expected”. If the game isn’t going to work out mechanics wise it’s better to stop right there, let the your brain do the background homework and pick it up later on. Back to the drawing board or to the drawer until better days.

In my opinion, patching it or forcing a solution is not a solution. Better have a canceled game than a bad one. Trick is, you must notice this early!

All the rest is excuses… often developers say that after coding all the mechanics, the game wasn’t being fun at all. If you already coded all the gameplay mechanics, you are heading for the non-fun part. It’s part of the job! It’s the 10-90 rule!

90% of the game takes 10% of the effort

this relates to gameplay… then you have to build the rest… and then polish… and so on… meaning…

10% of the game takes 90% of the effort

and these final 10% of game production that take 90% of the game production time are usually not that fun to do.

And back to Greg and Ryan

Flash game developers are still maturing and it will take a while. There are great examples of established studios that are way ahead of the others from my point of view, but the core developer base still isn’t able to adapt, to grow, to learn and to be bluntly honest: to create games and do business.

If this market was a mature one I would say that Ryan was dead right and Greg dead wrong. But it isn’t… developers are still a giant snowball of bad pratices and unrealistic demands. Developers don’t want or don’t know when or how to adapt. Like I mentioned on part I, what makes us different in the first place was to think out of the box, yet many developers keep their heads burried in a box of bad business and development pratices and still think they have the right to complaint about it.

All developers want a lot of cash for a little work… c’mon… did you think it would be that easy? Think again. Greg is right, no one asked us nothing so to get what we want, we have to be faster, be better and accept no excuses. Only then we are in the position to discuss our true position in this market.

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.