Thanks again for joining me for part four of this exploration into the life of Hogrocket; from inception of the company right through to the release of our first game: Tiny Invaders. If you haven’t read the first three parts of this series you can do so here, here and here.

We were a few months in, and team Hogrocket had pretty much finished our first game, Tiny Invaders, by this point. We’d taken the original prototype, a game based around steam trains moving around tracks and collecting sheep, and worked with a talented team of artists to turn it into an epic story of microscopic alien invasion. All in all we were on the right path to launch. However, before we took that giant step we had to ensure the product was solid. Was the gameplay good enough? How was the difficulty curve? Were there any bugs we hadn’t found in our own testing? We were self-publishing Tiny Invaders, and couldn’t rely on a publisher to track down these issues for us. It was time to put on our testing hats.

We needed feedback, and lots of it. The team had already reached the point where we had lost objectivity on it… we’d been working on Tiny Invaders for too many months to realise whether it was too hard or too easy. We were all super class A hackers at the game; how could we tell whether it was accessible to first-time players? There was only one answer: get a bunch of new players to give it a try.

We decided to hit the road and do a massive tour of the country. It coincided nicely with the Develop Conference in Brighton, allowing us to try the game with our fellow game developers. We also hit a couple of house parties in the home counties, and travelled to Cambridge for a bit of additional testing. Good times were had, and lots of objective usability testing was achieved. The youngest person to play the game was five, and the eldest were in their late 50’s. We found a whole bunch of issues that were quickly fixed, and redesigned part of our tutorial based on player feedback. All in all it was a great thing to do.

If you’re thinking of running your own usability roadshow, be careful. It’s all too easy to become impatient with first time gamers, especially when they don’t play the game exactly as you intended. It’s very tempting to say “Oh give it here” and show them how to solve a puzzle, or proceed in a menu. DON’T DO THIS! The entire reason you’re doing this test is to try and achieve an unbiased view of somebody playing your game with no external involvement. Even the fact that you are there with them will naturally bias your view, but as an indie with limited budget we have to take this on the chin. However, that means that you have to be even MORE concerned with running these usability tests correctly.

You must remain silent - let first impressions and difficulties shine through naturally. Make sure you choose a variety of different types of people: gamers and non-gamers, male and female, young and old, etc. Oh and while it’s useful to have other game designers play your game, don’t rely on them for particularly constructive feedback. In our experience you’ll find that designers naturally try to change your design to their own vision rather than comment on what’s in front of them. Of course there are times when this is incredibly useful (i.e. when you are brainstorming), and times when it is less so (i.e. when you’re trying to ship a game)!

This is lesson number 4 for indie game devs: Play test your game a lot, with a variety of people and a variety of devices.

Once we were convinced that we had done enough testing and iterated on the feedback sufficiently, we finally took the decision to…

…ship the damn thing! We bundled up the final version of the game and sent it off to Apple for approvals. Meanwhile we penciled in a worldwide launch date of September 1st, and started working with key press behind the scenes to build some pre-launch buzz. We also started courting Apple as much as possible, sending them builds of the game and sharing plans for our PR push. Luckily enough this paid off for us, and Apple chose to feature Tiny Invaders in several App Store spots at launch. This was unexpected but certainly helped our sales, and overall had a very positive effect on downloads.

We took quite a strange approach with our pre-launch marketing. The intention was to not tell the world about our game AT ALL until it was available to buy. We didn’t see the point in doing any PR to the public when they were unable to actually buy the game. After all, the App Store is impulsive. People buy their games in the heat of the moment - it’s incredibly unlikely that people will plan a purchase ahead of time. Pre-orders are simply non-existent, and that’s the main driver of pre-launch marketing in the console world (where our experience was).

That said, we weren’t staying silent. We were talking to the public about our company and generally building the profile of Hogrocket: blog posts/guest posts/podcasts all helped contribute to some really positive momentum behind us. We were also working hard behind the scenes with key press to queue up coverage for the launch date of September 1st. We were lucky enough to have good relationships with several main players, and this led to a decent amount of exposure for Tiny Invaders at launch.

We also ran a large private beta test, not only for testing the game (remember that we had already done our big test roadshow) but also to generate interest and play time with some additional members of the press and industry friends.

At launch we did a whole bunch of things: an official website, poster art release, a mail shot to 800+ industry/press contacts/followers, promo codes to key press, a launch trailer on YouTube, guest posts to various websites, a release of the soundtrack, and a few other things too. The idea was to take over as much of the core mobile press as we could for a day, and get as much exposure as possible.

However, doing PR for your game doesn’t end when it launches like it did in the console world. Nowadays we can update the game at any time, adding new features and content. We quickly added iPad support, iOS 5 native Twitter support, and also localised the game into three more languages (French, German and Italian). We visited a few events across the UK, and did even more PR to try and push the game into more people’s hands.

Overall the feedback was good:

…and that leads us on to our fifth and final lesson: “Find what makes you unique, and talk about it. If nobody knows about your game, they won’t play it”.

We’ve always focused on our story here at Hogrocket and I think that resonates with people. Being made redundant from our previous employer (Bizarre Creations) and deciding to form our own company has been quite a journey and hopefully pretty compelling for people to join in on. We were the console guys making a fresh start in mobile; that was our USP. The press and community that followed this journey deserved a great game from us in return for the positivity and belief shown toward us. We delivered on this as much we could to give ourselves as big an impact as possible when Tiny Invaders finally hit the virtual shelves.

In Summary

If you’ve been following all four parts of this series of blog posts you’ll remember each of these key points to remember:

I hope you have enjoyed reading these posts, and that it has given you lots of insight into how we run Hogrocket and make our games. If you haven’t played Tiny Invaders yet you can download it today for free! Feel free to let me know what you think of the game or these blog posts in the comments section below. Speak to you soon!

Word to your mother. This post is part 3 of my write-up of a presentation I gave at the Develop conference in November. The presentation gives some of the background to our indie games company, Hogrocket, and also provides some advice to developers who might be thinking of doing the same thing. If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 yet, I suggest you do so before tackling this one. Thanks for reading!

So, we’re about 3 or 4 months into our story. Hogrocket was still a brand new company at this stage. We were about half way through the development of our first game, a little prototype we had tentatively called Trains. The game was looking nice, but after a while we found a bit of a problem with it…

We noticed that there were a whole bunch of train-based games on the App Store already. It was a very popular theme, and a genre which we might have difficulty putting a dent in. Our art style was similar-ish to other games that had already launched, and we were starting to think that it might be difficult for this game to differentiate itself in an incredibly busy marketplace (the iOS App Store).

The reason we chose the trains theme initially was purely mechanical. We found a game mechanic which was well suited to the touchscreen (path prediction and high-speed tapping in multiple areas), and the most obvious theme was one that had fixed-size objects moving along a path - like trains along a track. That reason alone probably accounts for the large number of train-based games on the App Store I would imagine!

We also had other concerns about the theme. Would countries other than Britain be interested in this kind of theme as well? Obviously steam trains and sheep are well understood by a British audience, but how about the United States (up to 50% of the App Store audience). Or Asia? Or elsewhere? To have a success on iOS we really needed universal appeal, and we weren’t really confident that this theme could do that…

After quite a bit of discussion, we decided that we could find a better theme for our game. The mechanics were great, but visually we needed something that made us stand out from the crowd. That said, we wanted to ship a high-quality product and we knew that we would need some professional help to hit the quality bar we required.

We eventually found some artists who had the kind of credentials we needed. Two chaps, Ben Wright and Will Milton, worked as a duo to deliver broadcast-quality animation to the likes of Nickelodeon, the BBC, Channel 4, and more. They had even won a BAFTA for their work; a huge honour. This was the calibre of artists we needed, and luckily for us they were just as eager to get involved in video games too.

We explained the situation to Ben and Will, in that we had a game design that was pretty solid and we wanted a visual wrapper to maximise it’s appeal. We showed them the Trains prototype to give them a firm understanding of how it all worked, and explained the limitations of the hardware and the differences between making art for games and making art for broadcast. The chaps then went away for a couple of weeks to work up some pitches for us…

The first pitch was called Steamland. You played as a Steamboy-esque character in a steampunk world, facing off against all sorts of Victorian-era enemies in a train-based race. The character design was awesome and we loved the theme, especially the way it expanded on the steam train idea and turned it into a full game world. However, the in-game artwork (a paper map-style area) was a little sparse and, in our opinion, didn’t solve the problem of standing out in a crowded marketplace.

Despite some excellent plus points, we ultimately decided against taking Steamland any further. Whilst it was an interesting concept, it was the second pitch which really took our interest…

Viruz was a radical departure from the original Trains concept, and one which we believed had the ability to solve our problems. Ben and Will explained it to us: instead of train tracks, you’ve got the blood vessels inside the human body. Instead of trains, you control microscopic alien invaders. The theme is about a tiny alien invasion, presented in 1950’s b-movie style, with the aim to infect the President of the United States!

We freakin’ loved it. We could see the potential for the aliens to be worked up into recognisable characters, and the infected “hosts” to also have personality in their own right. An impromptu brainstorming session quickly kicked off, and we were discussing alien motherships, glowing “body essence” orbs, animated cutscenes, and a user-interface inside the alien’s craft. You didn’t just choose a level from a list, you tapped on a glowing monitor on which the aliens were planning their invasion. It all came together nicely in our minds, and we all quickly agreed: we had our theme.

Lesson #3 for aspiring indie developers is this: Let your experts be experts - if you can’t achieve the quality bar yourselves, find someone who can. We realised our limitations as a team when we decided to put the Trains theme to bed. It wasn’t hitting the visual quality bar we required, and we didn’t necessarily have the expertise on our team to achieve that goal ourselves. We needed to bring the likes of Ben and Will onto our team to achieve our shared objectives. Looking back, I can honestly say that it was a great decision and one which made Tiny Invaders what it is today.

Stay tuned for Part 4!

Good day to you! This is part 2 of my write-up of a presentation I gave at the Develop conference in November. The idea is to share some of the experiences we’ve had in creating Hogrocket, and (hopefully) give you some pointers if you’re thinking about doing the same thing. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, you should definitely check it out first.

Up to date with part 1? Cool, then let’s continue…

So we had started our company, and spent a month or so doing a lot of homework on exactly how we were going to build Hogrocket. We had figured out our target platform, a publishing strategy, and a rough idea of how long we were going to take to get our first game to market. Now we had to start executing the practicalities…

Firstly, an office. We initially assumed that having an office would be a necessity, so we went “shopping” around several different places. We visited start-up hubs (full of equally enthusiastic embryonic businesses like ours), sponsored office space (which was free, until you realised it actually wasn’t), and some other places too. We spent a lot of time finding somewhere that would suit each of us, and then even longer crunching the numbers to work out the finances. We eventually made the decision that having an office was just too expensive. We couldn’t justify the cost when we knew that Hogrocket wouldn’t be generating any revenue for at least 9 months yet. So we decided that we’d be a company of bedroom coders, at least for a while. It’s a strategy which has actually worked pretty well, and saved us about £400/month minimum.

We had to register the company with Companies House (in the UK), and also do boring things like setting up a bank account. Neither task was particularly difficult or taxing, but they still took up a couple of days (meetings with accountants/bank managers etc.). Make sure you account for this time in your planning.

Finally, once we had announced the company we spent an awful lot of time meeting with “randoms”. These were companies and individuals who weren’t directly related to our core business, but had got in touch and seemed like interesting people to meet with. We got on the phone with many publishers, distributors, advertisers and syndicators, and met in person with what seemed like hundreds of additional people too. Programmers, artists, other start-ups, etc. etc. The list of people who wanted to chat with us was effectively endless, and eventually we had to start saying “no” to people. Despite these meetings being interesting and potentially useful in the distant future, for now they were only serving one purpose: stopping us from building our first game. We quickly learned that in order to be successful, Hogrocket had to focus on getting shit done.

With that said, we figured it was time that we actually did something productive. No more business-related distractions - it was time to get on with making our first game. We just had to figure out what it was going to be…

We initially looked at several different platforms to support. As you may have guessed, we settled on iOS as our lead platform. The hardware is interesting, the costs are relatively low, and the market size is large. We knew we could make a bit of money on this platform, and that’s essential for a start-up. The same can’t be said for many other mobile platforms, and unfortunately the cost of console development was just too high for us considering we were entirely self-funded.

So what makes a good iPhone game? We played a whole bunch, and sketched out many different mechanics which we thought made good use of the hardware. It wouldn’t do to just take our console mentality to this new device - it was so different that we needed to change our thinking and form new opinions. This wasn’t just in terms of gameplay, but also business. How can you effectively monetize a 69p game? What sort of return can you realistically expect? How much time and effort (and money) should you spend developing it in the first place? These were all questions we had to seriously ask ourselves, and come up with the answers too…

After a week or two, we moved on to prototyping. We came up with countless game designs on paper (that’s the easy bit!). We had games that were puzzlers, adventure games, physics titles, and even some location-based designs too. We brainstormed around almost every genre, and generated a butt-tonne of cool concepts. We then moved ahead with some of these prototypes and turned them into fully playable games. We put together four test games in all: Rings, Crashers, Physics and Trains.

After MUCH discussion (and several arguments!), we picked Trains as the winner. That would be Hogrocket’s first game. The reason it was such a tough decision was because of the time pressure we had put ourselves under. It’s tempting to prototype forever, trying to find that “perfect” project. Unfortunately for all of us, “perfect” doesn’t exist. You’ll never find it. We had an concept that was 99% awesome, and that had to be enough for us. We would have to rely on the expertise of our team to find that extra 1% during development, as we simply didn’t have the time to spend any longer trying out ideas.

Some people will balk at the previous sentence, but my personal opinion on this is that the game isn’t really a game at this stage - it’s a signpost to a potential game. That signpost is going to change direction about a million times during the full development stage, so don’t fret too much at the start. As long as your concept is solid and your team is capable of executing it you’ll find that it all comes together. Just make sure your quality bar never slips, and the rest will work itself out as you go. After all, not even the best designer in the world can plan out a project 100% on paper. When design and code meet, things change. It’s inevitable.

So Trains was our winner. The game was viewed from above, and tasked the player with changing junctions of a train track, slowly directing the locomotives around the screen as they picked up collectibles (in this case, sheep. Don’t ask). You could tap the train to make it go faster, and soon the whole thing became a race against the clock to pick up the sheep as fast as possible on each level. It was already pretty fun, but it had a long way to go before it was a shippable product. With that in mind we tried to standardise our development period:

Our production phase looked like this:

1. Tech development, engine and gameplay.
This is where we built a lot of our initial tech. I built a UI system and (several) level editors, whilst Steve built our core tech for the backend including things like font renderers, save game stuff and sprite-sheet loaders. After a few weeks we had enough to make a game with, although the process of building this tech never really ended…

2. Adding game elements: time, medals, level progression.
Pete and I then worked on getting some more depth to the gameplay. This is when the gameplay became timed against the clock, and we came up with the concept of giving the player medals based on their speed. I also built a nested level progression system, where the player could pick their route through the levels of the game. The flow of the game changed quite a bit in this period.

3. Trying out some different control mechanics.
We tried out a few different mechanics for controlling the train, specifically the speed boost. We had “tap to boost” as our first mechanic (funnily enough this is what the game ended up shipping with), but we also tried a “hold to boost” mechanic both on the train itself and also on a separate button. We tried “flicking” the train to boost (which, unfortunately, didn’t work at all), and also discussed using this flick input to change junctions too. Unfortunately the latter didn’t actually make it into the prototype for whatever reason, which is a shame as with hindsight I think this would have improved the final game no end…

4. The great 3d distraction.
Then we made our first big mistake as a company. We were playing a little Train Conductor, which is a fantastic iOS game with similar-ish gameplay to ours. Their art style combines 2d backgrounds with 3d train models. We fell in love with this merging of 2d and 3d, and thought we could give it a go in Trains too. The initial thought was to get a 3d train moving over the existing graphics, and then evaluate it’s appearance against our current game. We found an excellent 3d artist to work with, a chap called Chay Hawes, and tasked him with creating some assets for us. This process involved interviewing Chay and explaining the game to him, then building a list of assets which he would deliver back to us.

It was at this point that our ambition got the better of us, and the great 3d distraction began. We figured that there was little point just asking Chay to make a train model - we’d have him knock up some trees, some sheep, and a few other little 3d things too, just in case we wanted to use them in the future. After all, he was a great artist and we didn’t want to miss an opportunity by not using him to his fullest.

Steve then went away and created a full 3d engine, and then proceeded to push it to it’s functional limit. Our game was suddenly full of 3d stuff - trees and trains and animals and flowers and everything, all rendered in 3d. Pete actually built a few models himself too, and before we knew it our game had transitioned from a purely 2d to a completely 3d game. This wasn’t really planned properly, it just kind of spontaneously happened.

At that point we threw on the brakes and took an afternoon to evaluate what we had here. Whilst the 3d looked kind of cool, it had many negative knock-on effects. The load times were much longer, and our memory footprint was much bigger. For a mobile game this is a huge negative, and was already leading to crashes on the older devices. Also, in order to maximise the effect of the 3d we tilted the camera so that it was slightly at an angle. This meant that the touchable hit zones varied in size depending on where they were on the screen. This led to a negative user experience, with an inconsistent control mechanism. Finally, moving ahead with the 3d version would have a big impact to our schedule - we’d need more time, more contractors, and more money to pay them. We eventually made the decision to scrap 3d and go back to 2d, having wasted almost two months on the experiment. That’s almost half a man-year of work across the team… a huge slice of time to waste.

Here are some screenshots of the Trains prototype - both in 2d and 3d. This game, as you may have already guessed, went on to become Hogrocket’s first title: Tiny Invaders. Hopefully you can see the origins of Tiny Invaders, even in these early screenshots?

All in all, this early prototyping phase taught us many lessons. The most important of these, and the one which constitutes Lesson #2 for indie devs, is this: “Don’t get distracted - have a clear plan and execute it”. We fell short of this rule during our great 3d distraction, when we were having meetings with randoms, and we could have also remembered it when we were deciding which prototype to develop into a full product. We lost a lot of time debating and squabbling amongst ourselves, with no forward motion. Don’t get me wrong; constructive debate is definitely a good thing and you’ll get a better game because of it, but don’t get caught up in the argument. Make sure your discussions always have momentum, and you’re always leaving the meetings with concrete action plans and resolutions. Don’t get tempted to embark on great distractions (like we did) - make sure you define your goals and your deliverables, and constantly evaluate them against your biggest enemy: the ticking clock.

Stay tuned for part 3!

Howdy howdy howdy! Ben from Hogrocket here. If you’re a regular reader of the Hogrocket blog you might have possibly seen some of my posts recapping the marketing presentation I gave at the Develop Brighton conference in the summer. I had lots of positive feedback both from the presentation and the accompanying posts, so I thought I’d repeat the process for my latest presentation given at the Develop Liverpool Indie Dev Day.

Here’s the elevator pitch for the presentation:

Launching Hogrocket: How to Create Your Own Indie Games Studio

• Starting a new company from scratch can be tough, especially in today’s hyper competitive world of digital games. Join Hogrocket Co-Founder Ben Ward as he shares his experiences, from initial announcement right through to the launch of their first game. An essential session for those thinking of making the jump to indie themselves.

Got it? Good. Now let’s get started shall we?

As you know, Hogrocket is a brand new company. We registered the business in Feb 2011, and announced ourselves to the world a little less than a month later. Since then we’ve not only built a brand and community, but also built and shipped our first game: Tiny Invaders. I think we’ve made pretty good progress considering we knew one third of half of bugger all about business before we started this venture. Hopefully by sharing some of our experiences and lessons learned we’ll be able to help out other people who are in a similar situation…

So, who are we? The core Hogrocket team is formed of three chaps, each of which previously worked at AAA console developer Bizarre Creations. We were lucky enough to work on a whole bunch of brilliant games, including the Project Gotham Racing series, The Club, Geometry Wars, Blur, James Bond 007: Blood Stone, and others. Brilliant times, and an honour to work with such a fantastic team.

Unfortunately, Bizarre was closed down by parent company Activision at the start of this year. This resulted in over 200 redundancies, and a exodus of talent away from the UK. We have colleagues all over the world now, but relatively few chose to stay in Liverpool. However, the three of us did exactly that, choosing to start a new company and have a bash at this “indie thing”.

The three of us covered a wide variety of disciplines at Bizarre. Pete was Senior Level Designer, and so had a broad view of the design and production process and all the experience this brings. Steve was a Senior Programmer, and able to turn his hand to almost any technical task. I was what they call Studio Communications Manager, meaning that I had experience working with publishers, the press, and community building. I was also lead of the Web Dev team, meaning that I can find my way around the technology side of things too.

This spread of knowledge was absolutely vital for us, as we had made the decision to self-publish our titles. Being a developer is one thing, but handling both development and publishing duties is quite another. Having this broad range of skills was essential to bring our plans to fruition.

So why start Hogrocket now? Well, it was a good time for the three of us considering we were out on our bums with a bit of redundancy money in our pocket. However, truth be told I’d been thinking about this for quite some time before that closure of Bizarre. The last couple of years have been a brilliant time to start-up this kind of business, and there are opportunities all over the place.

The games industry itself is changing at a rapid pace. This isn’t just due to the introduction of new platforms: iPhone, Facebook, etc. - although that certainly helps! A major factor in this change is because of the shift to digital distribution. Games are becoming cheaper to manufacture, which means that more people can do it. If more people can do it, you’ll get a more varied set of titles which take more risk. If they take more risk then new ideas get born quicker. This cost reduction is good for everybody, from consumers through to developers.

These new platforms I mentioned earlier are also just plain cheaper to develop for. The cost of making an XBLA or PSN game will be in the thousands before you’ve even begun. You need to buy dev kits, office space to keep them in, submission and certification fees, etc. Not only that, but you need a lot of people to work on the game for it to be competitive on those platforms. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Limbo had 15 guys or so working on it. That’s the level of investment you need to make a success on XBLA or PSN…

In contrast, being competitive on iOS or Android will cost you $100 for a Apple developer contract (or nowt for Android), and the price of a phone (which you probably have in your pocket already). With a bit of time and effort, almost anybody can be competitive. In fact, many of the most successful games have been made by one-man-bands or micro-teams.

Not only that, but these platforms are really exciting to work on! Touch screens are an interesting new challenge for us (we come from the console world where touch screens don’t exist yet!). The fact that they are always connected to the net is an interesting thing we can take advantage of. Everything is digitally distributed, and the freemium business model is a really interesting challenge too. There’s a lot of really cool stuff for game designers to play with right now, so it’s a really exciting time to be working on these new platforms.

As I mentioned earlier, we’d chosen to self-publish at Hogrocket. There are several reasons for that. Firstly, as we’re digitally distributed we are actually able to publish our own stuff in the first place. Taking this route is now an option, whereas if we were selling at retail it probably wouldn’t be.

The reason that digital distribution is so much cheaper than selling at retail isn’t just down to the fact that you don’t need to print discs and manuals. There is a whole lot of other “hidden” costs in selling to retail. I spent a lot of my time at Bizarre preparing for retailer meetings and presentations, and we had to allocate quite a bit of our time to creating screenshots, trailers, etc. for these behind-closed-doors events. Our publishers have to hire account managers to build relationships with the key retailers, and these chaps and chapettes spend all day every day convincing buyers to pick up our product. It’s a huge process, and is expensive both in terms of money and time spent.

Don’t get me wrong - you still need to spend time maintaining certain relationships in the digital world too if you want to be successful. However, it’s a fraction of the time and effort required to sell at retail.

Another great reason for self-publishing is because it lets us define our own messaging. We get to decide what Hogrocket stands for, and everything we do and say can reinforce that fact. If we want to change pricing, change our messaging, update the game with some “edgier” content, or whatever, then we can do that. We don’t need to ask permission or gain approval from a third party. Owning the entire process, from game design right through to post-sale customer support, is key for us.

As you can tell, we did a lot of homework before we started writing any code. The planning for Hogrocket was a big task, and we devoted a lot of resources into it. That’s really the first lesson to be learned from all this: “Respect the business side - do your research and know what you’re getting yourselves into”.

Don’t think that simply making a good game will be enough. It won’t. If you want to self-publish, you’ve got an awful lot of work ahead of you. If you want to run your own business then you’d better get your head around the fine details. The best advice I can give is if you don’t have the knowledge you’ll need, either change your plans or partner up with somebody who does. Don’t go in blind, otherwise you’ll get burned.

Read part 2 here!

I was recently asked to submit my “playlist” of favourite gaming music soundtracks, along with a brief write-up of why I like them. So here’s my submission… how does it match up with your favourite tracks? Read More »

Over the past few months of running Hogrocket I’ve discovered that running a business is a full-time job. By that I don’t mean 9-5 - it’s more like 24 hours a day. If you’re not sat at a desk actively working, you’re on conference call or scribbling notes or just thinking about the business. If your mind isn’t struggling through the latest programming problem or game design issue, you’ll be thinking about whether you’ve got enough in your savings to make it to the end of the year. Money is a big one, and I’ve spent far too much time implementing cost-saving measures throughout all aspects of my life to be as lean and mean as possible.

Anybody who’s run their own self-funded business before will be like “well, yeah. Duh”. It’s something that’s obvious to people who have done it, and it’s likely that everybody has their own way of compartmentalising or marginalising the stress. It’s an important thing to do, because if you have no downtime then it’s extremely difficult to relax. Many of the things that will stress you out will be self-inflicted pressures, and you’ll find yourself saying something like “if I just worked a little harder I’d be more successful/make more money/have more downloads/get a better margin/whatever”. This isn’t hard to dispute… in the early days of a new business success is largely reliant on a butt load of hard work.

This isn’t a new thing - business has always been like this. However, there are probably a few modern day twists that make it a little more complex to achieve a decent work-life balance nowadays. The main one for me is that introduction of smart phones into both work and play. More specifically it’s the convergence of these Internet-enabled devices, and the prevalence of the Internet in general, that makes me connected to my work all the time. I can now do my job whenever I need to and from almost any location, and if something important and urgent happens then I’m only 30 seconds away from reading about it. All of my e-mails, my appointments, my Twitter feed, and everything else I need is now in the palm of my hand. Oh and if it’s not in my palm (Xcode, for example) then it’s on my laptop and only about 20 seconds away in my backpack. In business terms we live in a world of instant access to everything we care about. It’s pretty cool.

However, there’s quite a lot of overlap on these devices. I don’t just use my iPhone to read my e-mail, I also use it to play games in my spare time. It’s not just a device to book meetings, it’s also a vital way of staying in touch with my friends. I don’t just read my Hogrocket-related XML feeds on my iPhone, but also use it to read fiction books or look up hockey fixtures or get directions to a national park or any number of other recreational activities. You get the idea - these devices aren’t just for work… they’re for everything.

The down side of the self-inflicted stress I mentioned earlier is that it begins to taint everything on the iPhone, or at least it does for me. Whenever I’m only a finger tap away from my e-mails I develop a strange obsession with checking them whenever I pick up the phone, even if I know there’s nothing new to read. If I try to play a game I’m often distracted by work-based things, and it makes it difficult to lose myself in the entertainment. This is something that’s made even worse with notifications and pop-ups (the iPhone e-mail and Twitter clients are notoriously effective at pulling you back in). The temptation is always there to get pulled back into work, and it’s happened to me hundreds of times. Usually I don’t even realise I’m doing it.

I guess my particular situation is a little worse than most, as I also create games for these devices. Sometimes when I’m playing games for pleasure on the iPhone it feels a bit like I’m debugging, or doing some research on competitors, or being motivated by something other than pure enjoyment. This nagging feeling makes me feel guilty for trying to relax and unwind with a game. The bad side of my brain says it’s a waste of time, and unproductive. This is completely untrue though - if there’s no disconnect from work then there is no downtime, and no rest period. If we don’t rest then there’s a good chance we’ll get stressed, and then lose objectivity, and ultimately make poorer decisions when it matters.

All of these things aren’t a deficiency of the device - the iPhone is one of the greatest things ever invented - but it’s more a deficiency of our thinking. As the world converges and our work/play times become intertwined it’s going to be harder for our generation to make that separation in our heads. Mentally we need to compartmentalise our thinking, and put a firm barrier between work and play. Of course working is important, and of course we need these tools to be better connected and more agile as we work. However, we need to remember that play is important too, and trying to work 100% of the time will only lead to stress and burnout. Having a constantly connected Internet device is a powerful tool, but (as Spiderman’s granddaddy says) with great power comes great responsibility.

We had better start getting this balance right, because new generations won’t have this problem. It will always have been like this for them, and they’ll grow up in a world where being connected has always been the norm. They’ll learn to balance their own lives in spite of the looming menace of infinite distraction: the Internet. And they won’t even think of it as a thing, because it’ll be completely normal.

Looking toward the future, wouldn’t it be interesting if we discovered that the human race was more productive doing it this way? What if the next generation (or the one after that) actually gets more done by dipping in and out of work as and when they need to, rather than sticking to rigid working hours? In a world of instant communication and instant feedback, wouldn’t it be better to work when you need to, and play whenever you see fit? In one hundred years will technology enable some of us to be more agile in our working hours, and be better off for it? It’s an interesting idea, and food for thought…

This article is a recap of a presentation given at the 2011 Develop Conference in Brighton. If you haven’t read the first or second parts of this article, please do check them out first!

In this final part of the indie marketing series I’ll be analysing some hands-on ways to get the word out about your game. The first two parts have been about analysing the existing marketplace and building your message, but this one concerns actually talking directly to the public.

Blogging

The first tactic, and the one which will seem the most obvious, is blogging. Both Pete and myself blog regularly, about a wide variety of topics including game design, business strategy, marketing, and more. We try to be as honest as possible with our blog posts, writing things that other authors sometimes tend to shy away from. We talk about money and how we are financed, the mistakes that we make, and also changes in our strategy as they evolve. Some teams think that changing their minds will brand them as inconsistent, but at Hogrocket we embrace the fact that we’re not always going to be right. We might as well talk about it!

We also have a Hogrocket company blog which not only has original content, but also “reblogs” some of Pete and my personal posts. We also try to get our content syndicated in a few different places to maximise the audience, such as AltDevBlogADay, GamesIndustry.biz, Gamasutra, etc.

We use a combination of Tumblr and WordPress to operate our blogs. Like most things at Hogrocket we opt for a managed approach rather than doing everything ourselves. When Tumblr writes the software THEY are the ones who provide a decent admin suite, keep their servers secure, guarantee uptime, and all of the other things that we shouldn’t need to care about. Pete and I just need to worry about providing good content, and we can let somebody else deal with the details of provisioning this to the masses. In fact if it were up to me I’d get Pete onto Tumblr as well, but he’s stubborn. :-)

Video Blogging

Something we are trying to do more of is video blogging. We’ve filmed a couple of short videos on Youtube, but the original plan was to have much more video content by now. The reason for this emphasis is because video goes a long way to reinforce the aim of being honest and transparent. It’s a bit embarrassing and low-budget, but people are more likely to absorb the content and understand your message if you tell them verbally, using video to get across your attitude and body language. Text can be (and frequently is) misinterpreted, but this doesn’t happen nearly as often with video.

Our videos were filmed using a Panasonic Lumix G10 DSLR camera on a tripod. This camera was relatively cheap to buy, and provides a decent picture quality for the low cost. The videos were edited in iMovie on a Mac, and then uploaded to YouTube. We selected YouTube rather than Vimeo because it has a greater footfall, although either service would work. In fact, it might be worth using both.

Mailing List

We use mailing list software to keep a list of our contacts and associates (like a massive address book), and also to send out e-mails in bulk. At Hogrocket we try to post exclusive content to the mailing list that we don’t mirror anywhere else; we figure that if somebody has signed up to receive our spam then they at least deserve something a little special! Rewarding your most dedicated fans is good practice, and sending personal and interesting e-mails fits the bill.

While it’s possible to maintain a mailing list yourself (either in a spreadsheet or using bespoke software), it’s harder to send out e-mail in bulk to thousands of people. Many ISPs have limits for the number of mails you can send in a day, not to mention how efficient services like Gmail have become in filtering spam. Also if you do everything manually (like I’ve done in the past) you also get the headache of manually removing mails that have bounced, and manually searching for duplicates. This doesn’t sound too bad until you get about 200 of them all come through in dribs and drabs many weeks after you sent the initial e-mail!

So I’m an advocate of using specialist software to handle all of this for us. We use a site called YourMailingListProvider, which is a decent, feature-rich website which won’t break the bank. You can add a whole bunch of people to lists, and split them up according to groups which you define. For example, we have separate groups for games press and games industry, so that we can target each subset individually if we want to. YMLP also provides a service for website forms, so we are able to provide a sign-up box on our website which hooks up directly to our mailing list. The site also automatically removes bounced e-mails from your lists, and automatically deals with duplicates. You pay per user per newsletter sent out, and all of your old newsletters are hosted on the YMLP servers for public reference. All in all a great service, and one that’s worth the cost in my opinion.

Twitter & Facebook

Obviously you should be using Twitter and Facebook. There are millions of tutorials all over the Internet on how to do this effectively, so I won’t repeat it here.

Events/conferences

Going to various specialist events and industry conferences can be a fantastic way to meet new people and forge new business relationships, and it’s also nice to get out of the office for a few days. However, they can be expensive to attend; both in terms of money and lost time. At Hogrocket we’re not great at attending conferences, mainly due to the fact that we’ve been so heads down on Tiny Invaders over the past few months. We’re hoping to improve in this area in the future though.

One thing that’s worth pointing out is this: it also makes sense to attend conferences outside of the games industry. Of course we should all try and get to GDC, Gamescom, Develop, etc., but in my mind a smart developer also has his eye on the bigger picture. Our universe has expanded massively over the past few years, and games developers are seeing interest from not only the likes of Hollywood, but from all sides. Attending conferences for the music industry, the publishing world, or even further afield can only help us as our work becomes more accepted worldwide.

There are other tools which no self-publishing game developer should be without.

• Google Mail/Calendar - in my opinion this is the best online productivity suite. If you’re not using it already then you should be. Gmail’s features for filtering/sorting/searching e-mail are excellent; this is essential when you consider the amount of mail you’ll be sending when self-promoting. By the way - don’t delete any e-mails, ever! Use Gmails archive function to move it out of your inbox, but don’t delete! You never know when you’ll need to refer back to conversations, even if it’s just to dig up the mail from some guy who didn’t seem important at the time.
• Skype - needless to say Skype is great for meetings between your team, but it’s also a good tool to help you spread the word on a 1-to-1 basis. Use Skype to meet with important clients and leading community figures, and try to use video chat when possible. Face-to-face communication is always best. See my blog post on remote working, titled “The First Mistake”, for more information.
• Google Docs - obviously this is useful for collaboration between team members - being able to remotely edit the same document at the same time (and see each other’s changes!) is pretty cool. However, we also use Google Docs to share some documents publicly with the word. For example, we published our company announcement press release using the service.
• Dropbox - Again, Dropbox is great for inter-team collaboration. It’s also great for sharing assets/documents/whatever publicly using the built-in “Public” folder. Whereas Google Docs is great for documentation, Dropbox is better suited for larger static files like trailers or demos.
• Google URL Shortener - It’s often useful to shorten your large URLs into snippets, especially in the Twitter universe. There are many companies which provide this service; my favourite is goo.gl. It’s really easy to shorten a URL (it takes about 2 seconds), and after that you can track some pretty decent statistics about the usage of your redirect. We use this for App Store links, mailing list links, and important things on Twitter. The only beef you might have with goo.gl is that the generated stats are publicly accessible, so if you don’t like the idea of that then feel free to use one of the hundreds of competitors instead.
• Flurry - This is mainly a development tool used to gain insight into how people play your game. However, with the combination of developer and publisher duties it makes sense to build marketing-related analytics in right from the start.

Here are some great books which provide a much greater insight into some of these topics than I could hope to cover in a single blog post. Check ‘em out.

• The Long Tail, Chris Anderson
• Free, Chris Anderson
• Tribes, Seth Godin
• Know me, Like me, Follow me, Penny Power

Summarising an entire presentation (which you’ve read in the three quite varied blog posts) was a difficult slide to write! I chose to pick three things that you should remember if you decide to embark on the self-publishing quest yourself.

Firstly, think about your message. What do you want people to think about when they hear your company name? For Hogrocket we’ve chosen “what’s it like to start an indie games studio?”. Yours will be different, but just make sure you play to your strengths as an indie. You can do things that the big studios can’t, i.e. talk honestly with your customer base, change strategy at the drop of a hat, etc. Choose your message and play to your strengths.

Think about your schedule. Who are you going to talk to, and when are you going to talk to them? If targeting press, which ones should get a personal e-mail? Which ones should get a promo code? Which should be added to the mailing list? If talking to the public, how (and when) do you accomplish this? If you’re using Twitter be mindful that you’ll only be talking to people in your limited social sphere, and in your current timezone. Can you find a way of talking to everybody in all timezones, all the time? Generally our approach to scheduling our messaging is to “always make time to talk about the studio, but only talk about the games when people can buy them”.

Finally, think about how you’re going to reach these people. Which tools will you use? We use the Internet every single day in a variety of ways in order to reach a wide span of audiences. There are hundreds of fantastic tools available, some of which I’ve listed above, which can save you time, money, and energy. If you’re a programmer remember that you don’t have to write absolutely everything yourself.

Thanks very much for making it to the end of this three part series. If you’d like to read more about Hogrocket please check out our website at http://www.hogrocket.com. You can also visit my personal blog at http://benjamesward.tumblr.com. Finally, please do take a look at our first game release! It’s called Tiny Invaders, and you can download it from the iOS App Store here: http://itunes.com/apps/tinyinvaders

Thanks again!

Ben Ward
Co-Founder
Hogrocket

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this article, feel free to take a look at it here.

So, in the last part of this article I was discussing the how and why marketing is different when moving from selling at retail to selling digitally. In summary, it’s not as important to have a long campaign ahead of launch to achieve awareness. It’s so cheap and easy to keep your game available for sale that you can build your promotions based on the actual sales of your game, rather than projections.

Some small developers confuse the act of “self-releasing” with the discipline of “self-publishing”. Anybody can release a game now… just click through a few dialog boxes and BOOM - your title is on the App Store. However, actually supporting and promoting your product, growing the business, and achieving greater overall success is something that requires way more than a few clicks of a mouse.

At Hogrocket we like to think that we’re taking the publishing side of our studio seriously. We have connections with platform holders, worldwide press, conference organisers, traditional publishers, QA services, freelancers of various disciplines, and most of the other kind of people we need to in order to achieve our publishing aims. We’ve planned the promotion of our games over time, and we have a budget put aside to support this. We have pricing strategies defined, and all of the analytics we need to get a clear idea of what’s actually happening in our market. Of course we’re small enough to turn on a dime and throw all of this planning out the window if the analytics differ from our predictions.

So let’s talk tangibles. What is Hogrocket’s strategy?

Impulsive Market

Firstly, it’s admitting that we’re selling our games in an impulsive market. We’re competing for attention all the time, so we want to minimise the friction of people buying our game. If they hear about it and like the idea then we need those people to spend their money on it as easily as possible. They shouldn’t have to wait several months for the game to be released. They shouldn’t have to drive to the shop. They should be able to buy it right there, right then, for a decent price. Accepting the fact that you can’t change people’s purchase habits is key. You can’t change the tide, you have to go with the flow.

Recognising that impulsive behaviour is a key part of our strategy. We haven’t announce anything about our game publicly, not even it’s name, and we will continue to be cagey until release. We want people to hear that initial buzz on Twitter, perhaps read a feature on TouchArcade, and then immediately go out and buy the game. The price we’re selling at is so low that it should be relatively easy to convert a lot of those people into customers, and ultimately get better sales out of it. Of course it would be even better to release for free, but that’s a different discussion… ;-)

Oh and it’s important to add: we’re being quiet about the game, but not the company. We still need to build a fan base, we still need to establish relationships, and we still need to build buzz in the key press. We straddle the line, for instance we ran a private beta test of the game and involved several key industry and press figures. Their feedback was incredibly important, but I hope it’s helped to open doors and raise awareness too.

Metrics Driven

As I mentioned before, metrics is also really important. In our first game we use a combination of sales/download data and in-game statistics recording to paint a picture of who is playing the game, and how they are playing it. Before we get into the nitty gritty it’s important to stress that ALL of this data is anonymised. To be honest we don’t care what your name is or what telephone numbers you have stored on your phone, and we certainly don’t collect this data. What we’re interested in is things like:

• Which model of phone do you have?
• When did you download the game?
• How many levels did you achieve three stars on?
• Which language do you speak?
• How fast did you complete the game?
• Did you turn the music off?

If we multiply up all of this anonymous data, it becomes pretty useful for both game design and marketing. For example, let’s say the game suddenly spikes in downloads in Brazil. Perhaps a Brazilian magazine ran a feature on the game or something like that. Well we might not know about the feature itself, but we could certainly detect the spike in downloads. We could decide to jump on this, and localise the game into Portuguese to further maximise the audience in Brazil. We can roll out this update in less than a week. We might decide to hire a Portuguese-speaking PR in Brazil who can push the game to other local publications. We might take out some Google Ads which specifically target Brazilian Internet users. And we’ll do all this in increments, measuring our success and investing our time and money in campaigns that work.

Of course, localising into Portuguese will help downloads in other territories, which opens more doors. It’s not guesswork, it’s iterative marketing.

Adaptive

Another advantage that Hogrocket has over traditional developers/publishers is that our processes are combined. There’s no such thing as “the Marketing department”… our main marketing guy is also a programmer. This means that we can combine techniques to achieve maximum success. We’re not just limited to running advertisements on websites - we can change the game itself to leverage promotions. One obvious example would be to cross-promote future games from within our own titles, possibly providing incentives for users to download our whole catalogue. This is good for gamers, and good for us too.

We can also run integrated campaigns, such as combining a temporary offer like Free App A Day with the release of a new piece of content available via In App Purchase. This isn’t impossible in the traditional model, but it requires a lot more organisation.

Honesty

Finally, the most important part of our strategy is probably the simplest. Just be honest.

The games industry is full of agendas, and a lot of the time people don’t talk about much of the stuff that happens behind the scenes. There’s a lot of fear about making a mistake or looking bad, and while that is a concern I think it’s crippling to many studios. That’s a mistake - the industry is full of really interesting people solving fantastically complex challenges every day. The world should know about what they do. There’s a tendency to hide behind logos and branding, but the human element of the industry is what is the most interesting to many people.

That’s why I write posts like this one. Some of the things I’m saying might be wrong, and I might acknowledge that in a few months time when that becomes apparent. But the most important thing is not to bullshit, as people can see it a mile off. As a group we should be humble about our successes and failures, but never stop giving insight into what we do. Ken Levine sees it when he calls for developers to go on The Daily Show to get their personalities across. We need characters and story, not just brands and logos.

Hogrocket is an interesting story for many people because we are following a trend: experienced developers moving from AAA to mobile. We’re talking about it a lot because it’s a huge transition… a few months ago I sat at a desk inside a 200 person studio, and now we have our meetings on a sofa in my living room. What hasn’t changed is the quality of our output, both in terms of the core team and also our freelancers. In fact, we have been working with some ex-Bizarre Creations staffers who are going through the same transition. It’s an interesting story, and one which we’d like to do a better job of telling.

There will be one more part of this article, this time focusing on some of the tools and techniques you can use to get the word out. If this article was “what do you say”, the next will be “how you say it”. Speak to you soon!

I was lucky enough to be given a speaker slot at the Develop Conference this year. If you haven’t heard of it, the Develop Conference is a yearly gathering of game developers from the UK and aboard. It’s based in Brighton, so it’s a good chance to not only meet with our peers but also eat some ice-cream and perhaps go for a paddle in the sea. Good times. :-)

It was difficult to choose a topic to speak about this time around, as we’ve launched Hogrocket and I’ve been doing literally a bit of everything. I submitted quite a general presentation topic, but the organisers suggested I narrow the focus to just indie marketing. I was more than happy to do this, as there’s so much to talk about in there. As I’ve got a bit of experience in this kind of thing on the AAA, big studio side of the fence I thought I was in a pretty good position to draw some comparisons between the two approaches.

The talk itself is called “Indie Marketing: How to tell the world about your game”. I’ll try to give a brief synopsis here.

Firstly, some background for those who don’t know me personally. Before co-founding Hogrocket I worked as the Studio Communications Manager at a large studio called Bizarre Creations. The company was responsible for some really excellent console games including Project Gotham Racing, Geometry Wars, The Club, James Bond 007: Blood Stone, and Blur. I handled a lot of Bizarre’s community strategy, I ran the web dev team to build the required software, and when Bizarre joined Activision I spent a lot of my time working closely with their Marketing and PR teams.

We made the decision early on with Hogrocket to self-publish our games. This doesn’t mean “we’ll release it and see how it does” - we’re taking the publishing side of things very seriously. We have Marketing and PR plans, pricing strategies, promotional events lined up, and a budget set aside to support this. In this brave new world it’s easy for smaller developers to think “yay we don’t need publishers any more!”. That might well be true, but you had better be ready to perform their functions yourself. Just because the publisher isn’t there anymore it doesn’t mean their workload suddenly vanishes. Those jobs still need doing; self-promotion is absolutely essential.

Think of your audience. Gamers have precious little time nowadays, given that there are more games than even before, on more competitive platforms, with a wider demographic. But it’s not just games - we’re competing with all digital media. There are more movies, TV shows, Internet-based distractions (i.e. websites, Facebook, browser games, Twitter, Skype, etc.). The games industry is competing for eyeballs with everything else, all the time.

In fact, in my opinion the biggest risk to indie game developers right now isn’t a bad review or some other games company competing with you. Of course it’s better to avoid that negativity, but remember those things only affect a slice of your potential audience. The biggest risk is getting lost in the noise and not appealing to anyone. If nobody plays your game then you’re not a game developer, you’re just exercising some self-indulgence.

That said, now is a great time for smaller devs to think hard about self-promotion in a big way. The Internet has enabled choices that haven’t existed before. Never before in history has it been cheaper and more effective to roll out a high-impact plan. You just gotta be smart about how you do it.

If you’re self-publishing then you should be spending 50% of your time promoting your game. If you spend 100% of your time programming then it’ll be wasted effort, as nobody will play it and you’ll die poor and lonely. Remember that, and get talking.

So, the AAA studio method. This is what we employed at Bizarre Creations, and most other big console game developers do things the same way. The main aim is always to inform and enlighten people ahead of the launch of your game. Why bother telling people about your game before it’s released, i.e. before they can spend their money on it? Well, it’s because it’s so expensive to keep your game on that shelf. When selling to retail you don’t JUST have to spend money on things like manufacturing and shipping, but also on all of these other things: box and manual artwork and localisation, account managers and events to schmooze buyers, point-of-sale design, manufacture, shipping and maintenance, and the precious time of your developers. We spent an awful lot of time at Bizarre working on trailers, screenshots, presentations, exclusive in-game content/artwork, etc. all in the name of retail marketing. This is all absolutely necessary when you are selling at retail - you need all of it.

So you get the idea - it’s expensive. There’s also limited inventory (shelf space). That means there’s only a small window of opportunity before your newly released game is pushed to the back of the store and under a pile of pre-owned. When selling at retail you need to make sure your game is purchased by as many consumers as possible in the short few weeks whilst it’s in prime shelf position.

This forces marketeers to have extremely long lead times on their campaigns, as it’s vital that all your fans know everything about your game the second it launches. Ideally you want them to be chomping at the bit to get their hands on your game as soon as it arrives in the shop. If they’re not then you risk losing your sales window. The problems with this are obvious though. How do you work out how much time and money to spend? It’s all based on predictions and past performance. Publishers have got very good at this, but it’s still not based on hard facts and up-to-the-second data. How can it be?

This is also a bit of a pain from the developers point of view. Game features are added to a big PR plan in order to get this long lead time. Week 3 we might talk about car A, week 5 we talk about track Z, and in week 10 we talk about multiplayer. It’s tough for a developer to showcase the game and hop, skip, and jump around some features without mentioning others. As the features of most games are so supportive of one another it can sometimes give a bad impression to split up announcements like this.

Times have changed though. At Hogrocket we’re selling our games completely digitally, with no involvement at retail. This not only means that it’s cheaper for us to setup everything initially, but it costs less overall too. The ongoing costs of distribution are so low they are effectively free, so we can leave our products “on the shelf” forever. This means that (hopefully) we’ll have a long tail of sales which continue to come in many months after we launch the game. This isn’t the case at retail.

As sales will continue over time, our user base will increase over time. All of a sudden there isn’t a huge pressure to make a big launch. We don’t NEED everybody to know everything about our game when we launch it. Instead of carpet bombing the planet with information on our game we can instead be a bit smarter. We can build awareness of our game cumulatively over time, spending smart time and money where it makes the most impact.

In the next part: How Hogrocket are tackling this new era of indie marketing. Coming soon!

As “traditional” video game developers, we’ve all got our opinions on Farmville, Pet Society, and the countless other “social” games which have become popular as of late. You may not like their game mechanics, the use of in-game micro transactions and sign-up “offers”, or even the 2d graphics and simple sounds. It’s become popular for many developers to lambast these titles without a second thought – “how could something that runs in a web-browser contend with AAA console games?” we say. Well, my friends, there’s an elephant in the room. They’re not only contending, but they are stealing mindshare at a rapidly increasing rate. As free-to-play games become more and more popular, the traditional games industry will have to find more and more value for the consumer in what we do.

Having said that, this article isn’t all doom and gloom. We need to accept that companies like Zynga and Playfish are successful whether we like it or not. Let’s get over ourselves, and start figuring out how we take the best of their new industry and apply it to our own.

Before founding Hogrocket I worked at a console developer called Bizarre Creations. Whilst there we spent a lot of time analysing social games. In fact, we formed a small Social Team within the company who worked across multiple projects to identify and capitalise on social opportunities in our AAA console games. The idea was to identify the underlying reasons why these games are popular, and why vast numbers of people come back to them again and again. Once we figured this out we could possibly build some of these new mechanics into our games and make them better as a result. Unfortunately we didn’t get the chance to properly stretch our legs before Bizarre closed, but we still did some interesting research in this area.

Firstly, why bother making our games more social? Well, the benefits are obvious – having more eyes on your product will lead to more sales. Encouraging people to play your game for longer will help keep our games out of the pre-owned bin. Providing a more positive and friendlier gaming experience will make people happier that they spent their cash on your game. But we think it’s more than that. The Internet is changing our world at a rapid rate, and the idea of traditional marketing and PR is becoming less relevant. Back in the 50s marketing was very direct, i.e. “you must buy this, it’s the best”. Then in the 80s the way marketers told consumers about their products became more of a lifestyle choice, i.e. “if you buy this, it makes a positive statement about you as a person”. In the last 5 years the balance of power has shifted completely… now it’s the consumer who decides which products are the most interesting and worthy of their (limited) attention. Marketers scramble to make more and more attention-seeking statements to break into the public conscious, but the fact remains: consumers can communicate with one another easier and faster than ever before, and they are MUCH more likely to listen to their trusted friend’s opinion rather than your TV advert. Sorry.

That’s an important concept, so let me repeat it: gamers are smart now, and we can’t simply tell them which games to buy any more.

Oh, and have you noticed that the market for video games is expanding more than ever? It’s not just us twenty-something males playing games any more – World of Warcraft has knocked down huge barriers for adoption, as have high-quality casual games like Bejewelled. Women are playing games in larger numbers than ever before, and people of all ages are beginning to get involved too. Let’s not forget the excellent work the Wii has done in opening up new markets and introducing video games to a new audience. Have you heard that there are over 100 million iOS devices out there now? Free-to-play portals like Kongregate and Facebook are available everywhere, and are vastly popular all over the world. We haven’t even spoken about the vibrant emerging markets like China and India, and the unique style of gaming and distribution mechanisms that are beginning to get introduced there. It’s a huge industry, and it’s getting even bigger every day…

So what is your game’s target audience? What do they like to play? If you’re targeting the traditional 18-30yr old Western male then you’ve probably got an idea, but if you’d like to engage any of these huge new markets then you likely won’t have a clue. Will a 40yr old Indian mother of three care that your game has the most vibrant hair shader? Probably not. Will she prefer realistic characters, or exaggerated ones? Will she even want characters in her game at all, or is she more comfortable with another form of messaging? You get to a point where quality, from our point of view, is effectively random. The only way to figure out whether something works is to try it and measure the results.

Let me clarify what I’m trying to say:

• The Internet is changing how people discover our games.
• New audiences are a challenge: we don’t necessarily know what they want to play.

These two factors are hugely disruptive for game design and understanding how they affect us is, in my opinion, something that will steer all of our collective decisions over the next 10 years. These two factors are the two main reasons why “social” games are having so much success right now. There is nothing especially magical about them, they just pay lots of attention to discoverability, do huge amounts of A-B testing to figure out what works for which audience, and then make sure that when people do talk to their friends about the game they do so in a positive way. We can do all of this stuff too… let’s work out how.

Thanks for reading!