For the Love of Games

Growing up playing Pong and Atari games on the old family TV, Sean learned to love games early in life. When Atari released a Basic Programming cartridge, he immediately began learning the language and realized that programming consisted of a series of logical instructions. He discovered that building games could be an actual job.

Still, he did not plan for a career in the games industry. He graduated from Sonoma State University with a degree in Computer Science knowing he liked building things in software, especially games. LucasFilm Games (later LucasArts) happened to be hiring junior level programmers at that time. Up to this point, Sean had only created games as a hobby, but this sounded like the perfect opportunity for him. He was right: it turned out to be a great time to join the company.

Sean Clark at LucasArts

All of a sudden, he was working with a group of people just as passionate about games as he was; real artists, musicians, programmers– talented professionals who could bring unique creative elements to the product. “It was a blast!” Sean says. “It was also an experience that has helped me through my whole career, right up to today as 3^rd-party Director at Big Fish, working to bring fun game content to the company.” In all the roles he’s done, he’s always shown his love of games. He looks for the same passion and excitement for a game from developers, both internally and externally.

Point and Click Adventure Games Anyone?

Having been involved in multiple projects in a variety of roles, Sean has a soft spot for point-and-click adventure games. While at LucasArts, Sean helped develop The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990, a popular point-and-click adventure. It was a great experience, but problems always arise, and the solutions were often unique. Sean learned a lot about problem solving and creatively mitigating issues during this project.

However, point-and click adventure games started to slip into the background. In an interview with adventuregamers.com, Sean stated that the popularity of point-and-click adventure games would return. When we asked why he thought they had fallen to the background in the first place, his answer was emphatic. “I blame it on 3D. At the time, real-time 3D was such an amazing new capability that the faster computers and video cards enabled, it became the sexy new thing.” While 3D opened new areas of design, it also started a graphics arms race. Everyone focused on 3D graphics, with a game like The Dig being compared to Dark Force or TIE Fighter. But eventually, people realized that adventure games were a different genre to other games, like first person shooters.

He points out that in 2002, Big Fish took advantage of the 3D distraction and built a successful business recognizing and catering to the adventure gamer audience. Even Escape from Monkey Island still managed to do well in the “Adventure Games are Dead” era. Although there are not many classic 3^rd person point-and-click adventure games coming to market, there is the very successful line of Hidden Puzzle Adventure Games that Big Fish is so well known for. These, Sean asserts, are a modern version of adventure game storytelling, similar to those he started his career with.

Another reason adventure games seemed to go dormant was the fact that retail space is both limited and competitive. Because attention was so focused on 3D games, it was challenging to interest retail chain buyers in adventure games. The big factor in changing the situation was the internet. Brick and mortar stores were no longer the only way to purchase games. Sean attributes Big Fish’s success largely to its creation of an online place to find and purchase great casual content, including adventure games.

Adventure Game Evolution

This new cycle of adventure games has evolved, bringing lower-priced games, which are also shorter in length, and tend to tell stories in chapters or episodes. According to Sean, these new games are still high-quality, well-polished games with great artwork, and compelling stories, although the format is different.

Big Fish created a new format for adventure games, brought them to new audiences, and gave consumers a way to try the game before committing to a purchase.

Sean believes Big Fish has been instrumental in bringing more attention to adventure games in a number of ways. They created a new format for adventure games, brought them to new audiences, and gave consumers a way to try the game before committing to a purchase. They figured out how to make adventure games easier to find and consume, at a time when retailers had all but abandoned support for the genre.

Sean is just as excited about the future as he is about the present. “We expect 2013 to be a year of innovation in game, content, and delivery, with games on almost every device and in nearly all casual genres,” Sean says. “In March alone, Big Fish launched 2 highly acclaimed mobile games: Fetch for the iPad, an adventure about a boy on the search for his dog; and Match Up! By Big Fish, the first iOS game to have real-time, 16-bracketed tournament play. Add to that the world’s largest interactive streaming casual game service and continuing franchises like Mystery Case Files, which has been downloaded more than 100 million times, and you can see how there is something to excite all types of gamers.”

Sean reminds us that Big Fish is an incredibly talented and creative company, with exclusive partnerships with more than 140 developers all over the world. He expects Big Fish to continue bringing fun and innovation to the games industry.

The ability to fail without fear of consequence is a skill earned through loss; it’s the sound of pages ripped from design documents, the shadow of deadlines long past due, the smoldering smell of money burned. But it’s a skill we should all acquire, as it builds character and prepares us for even more difficult roads ahead. We recently sat down with Mike Gale of Disaster Cake for a sobering discussion of what happens when things don’t go as originally planned.

Gamesauce: So tell us a bit about what you’ve been working on.

Mike: Soul Saga? It’s basically inspired by the “Tales of” series, a long running series of role-playing games published by Namco. I grew up with the “Tales of” series, so I really wanted to capture its essence. It’s a very immersive experience powered by a procedurally built storyline.

GS: Something built from the ground up to feel organic?

Mike: Yeah, that’s kind of what I had in mind. And as I was developing this story, I fell in love with what I would call “easternized western” games. Games like Oblivion and Skyrim. Specifically the way you could choose how you interacted with the individual characters and how the storyline evolved based on the players choices. I love what Bethesda is doing in that space.

I realized that it would be too difficult to pull off a game where the storyline evolves based on the players choices. So the concept evolved. If I’m going to put my name on a game, I want it to be complete.

GS: Yeah, they are doing great things.

Mike: They are, but over time I realized that it would be too difficult to pull off. Those games require teams of hundreds of writers. That’s a lot of pages to test. Too many for a team of my size.

GS: I can definitely see where it would be overwhelming.

Mike: It was. And if I’m going to put my name on a game, I want it to be complete. I want it to work. I don’t want my storyline broken because I didn’t have the manpower to test all of those variables.

GS: So your concept evolved?

Mike: Well, I started to play a game called Catherine, a puzzle-platformer psychological horror adventure game published by Atlus, and while it wasn’t necessarily too much about a branching storyline, being mostly visual, it was still a procedural story.

GS: It had an interesting approach, yeah.

Mike: I liked that the character used his cellphone to communicate with his girlfriend. He’s doing it while all of these supernatural things are going on. He was a social creature. We all are. Look around right now and you’ll see people texting more than anything. I wanted elements of that – a storyline where fantasy meets reality – and in the middle of it all, you’re building friendships and inviting people to join your party.

Soul Saga is perfecting the perfect blend of sweet Eastern art styles with awesome Westernized gameplay.

GS: Your project was initially a 2-D game, right?

Mike: That’s right. Unfortunately, when I first started, I was just learning about game design in general. I mean, I had developed some apps while I was at Microsoft, but it wasn’t anything quite on the level of game design. I knew I wanted there to be an element of character customization, but when I ordered the art assets – and I was doing all of this on a paycheck to paycheck basis mind you – I realized that changing the sprite’s appearances was going to be very problematic.

GS: In what way?

Mike: Let’s say, I wanted my character to equip a new sword, and I wanted this change to show up visually. Well, with the 2-D artwork, I couldn’t do this without a redraw. The shadows and lighting were all baked in.

GS: Sounds like an expensive lesson to learn.

Mike: It was an expensive one but I wasn’t about to cut that customization feature from my design document. If I cared about money I might have said “Screw it. I’m just going to finish this.” but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because when I’m on my deathbed, I don’t want to regret that I didn’t follow my passion to the fullest extent that I could.

App Annie is an industry leader in app store analytics and market intelligence supporting iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Google Play. As Director of Business Development, Junde Yu manages business development and sales in Asia for App Annie.

What made you interested in entering the mobile apps industry?

I first became acquainted with mobile in 2008 when my company was contracted to build an online app store (www.mobilehotdog.com) for older-generation phones. I started playing with apps, and when the iPhone and its army of apps arrived, I saw it was time to fully enter the industry.

What past career experiences have helped you in your current position?

I was always involved in startups, which has helped me in my current role at App Annie. My first job in mobile was in business development for Scoreloop (a social gamecenter-like SDK). While at Scoreloop, I traveled widely in China, meeting and pitching the SDK to developers in all major Chinese cities. That experience quickly brought my knowledge and connections up to speed. Subsequently as an independent mobile consultant, I worked with several companies over the span of a year that educated me on the various other segments of the mobile industry. I even released my own game on the Android Market. Finally, my gig at Tapjoy got me deeply involved in the mobile advertising industry.

Can you tell us more about App Annie? What impact do you feel it has had on the mobile apps industry?

App Annie is the leading provider of app store analytics and market intelligence. We help publishers analyze the performance of their apps in every country and category of the app stores. This understanding powers their strategic, marketing, and content decisions to achieve the best ROI.

We’ve had a tremendous impact without spending much marketing budget to date. This is because there was a market need, and no other product available that matched the quality of our data and rich analytic capabilities. Today we have more than 50,000 users for our market analytics products, including 80 percent of the top 100 worldwide grossing publishers. Some of these companies have more than 100 staff using our products, so we’re pretty sure it has helped them make money

Why is it important for a business to gather intelligence regarding the market?

Market intelligence has always been provided by players in other industries – you have companies like Nielsen, comScore, GfK, etc.

Market intelligence helps answer questions such as: Which product should I invest in building? Which countries should I put my marketing budget in? What are my competitors doing? And so on.

An agency guy once told us that people buy market data because they simply cannot make a decision on gut.

What new trends have you seen emerging in the mobile apps market?

While iOS is still the dominant platform for app publishers in terms of revenue, we’re seeing the growth of Google Play downloads and revenue exceeding that of iOS in some sizeable markets such as Brazil, Russia and Japan. We recently published a detailed infographic on iOS vs. Google Play called Game of Phones: http://www.appannie.com/game-of-phones/#.T-iavPXhe7I

Which market has the highest potential? Why do you think that is?

The Japanese market, because the top apps there can make almost as much money as the top apps in the US. This result is mainly driven by the existence of many high spending (high ARPU) consumers, especially in some specific game categories. Today, the Japanese iOS market is still one dominated by mainly Japanese publishers, so it would be interesting to see the big Western publishers as well as indies enter the market with the help of the huge platforms like GREE and DeNA. When that happens, it will be exciting to see how high mobile app revenues in Japan can soar.

In which market are there growing opportunities for publishers?

Developing economies in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe represent a huge opportunity for publishers. Not many companies are localizing apps for these countries yet. But those who are have seen very positive and undisturbed revenue generation.

What predictions do you have for the current industry?

I see more companies targeting the developing economies globally instead of the biggest Western markets, and eventually getting acquired by some of the biggest publishers.

What new ideas can we look forward to from App Annie?

You can expect to see more free features for publishers to analyze their sales and marketing data across all the existing platforms we currently support as well as some new ones. In addition, be on the lookout for a lot of new infographics with original market insights drawn from the highest quality app store data in the industry.

Great games can come from the most unexpected corners of the globe, sometimes years in the making before finding their rhythm. Brazil’s D’Accord Music Software started ten years ago. “We were doing music education software,” recalls chief executive Americo Amorim. The company made mostly PC-based downloadable products, which were very successful in schools.

By 2007, he says, “We got bored with only doing educational stuff.” So, the company created a division called MusiGames. It started with ten people, hired more along the way, and has reached thirty people so far. Amorim reports, with a touch of pride, that almost all of his company’s current development efforts are in games.

Legacy of games

The original idea for Drum Challenge came from one of the D'Accord's own software engineers.

“In Brazil, we had a lot of experience with SEGA consoles,” says Amorim. “But our team’s background is PC development and mobile development studios, like traditional J2ME development.”

Before making a game together, they started with research, attending developer conferences, and meeting publishers. “We weren’t sure what platform we were going to work on,” says Amorim. “Of course, the team wanted to do Wii games, Xbox games, PlayStation games. But it didn’t really make sense for a start-up company at that time to do those kind of things,” he says.

They found the smartphone market to be open in 2008, and there were even fewer music games on the market.

Proof of concept

D’Accord’s first game was Drums Challenge for the iPhone. When they released it in June of 2009, it managed to sell 500 copies in the first three weeks. “With the public we drove to the game,” explains Amorim. “And what really happened was that Apple started promoting it. So when Apple started promoting it, the sales skyrocketed.”

The initial price was $2.99, and is $0.99 today. “What our experience says, what really matters, is Apple promoting your iPhone game,” Amorim reveals. “If they promote,” he laughs, “you’re successful.”

“And, of course, they don’t promote crappy stuff.” Amorim says that Apple doesn’t have room to promote everything that is great.

“On our side, we’re focusing more and more on the quality.” Last year, the company produced five games to create a portfolio. “For this year, specifically, we’re focused more on quality. So we’re doing only two games, and we’ve been developing them for six months.”

“Right now, we are focusing on smartphones: iPhone, iPad, Android, Symbian, and Facebook.” says Amorim. When asked about budget, he replies: “It’s usually $50,000 to do a nice music game.”

For MusiGames, both iPhone and Android development are done with the same budget. “That’s where we are improving,” Amorim points out. “It’s not a very high budget, but it’s a complicated budget for a small developer.”

Key learnings

Released right after the iPad launch, Drums Challenge became the bestselling iPad music game in its release month.

Some games, Amorim’s team promotes on their own. On others, they’ve tested distributors like Chillingo and I-play. “Some of those guys have more access to Apple, and that makes it easier for us. But, of course, they get a share of the game. So it’s really a decision that depends on the game we are talking about.”

The company decided to aim for a global audience, because the game market in Brazil is still growing. Amorim reports that the marketing is “starting to happen right now. Two years ago, it didn’t make sense to do smartphone games in Brazil.”

Today, they’re developing a title for Google-owned social-network Orkut. “Orkut is the Facebook of Brazil,” Amorim explains, adding, “Our first experience in Brazil will be this Orkut game. I really have high hopes for it.”

Playing social

The idea for iMusicPuzzle came from one of the company's artists.

While social games have been a strong trend in recent years, Amorim says: “We are really trying to focus on music games — because our expertise is in this. This social game is really musical,” he adds, about their upcoming product.

It could mark the first cross between the music genre, and a game for the social network platform.

When asked what a music game on a social platform would look like, Amorim smiles. “You’ll see in a couple months.” And that raises the question of whether it’s even possible. “Yeah, it is. The challenge is to get the friend’s interactions. You have to interact with the music, and you have to interact with friends.”

Amorim considers the question of whether music is universal on a global scale. “It really depends on the songs that you have in the game. So as we try to do games that you can play with any song: that makes them universal. So if you have ten-thousand songs in your library, you can play with them: that’s great.”

Market growth

Something they’re investing in more and more is letting the user play with their own songs. It saves the hassles of licensing, and the company had developed chord-recognition tech from their education software days. “We have a very good technology and we started applying this to games,” says Amorim.

This year, the company managed to get some VC funding. It allowed them to grow their development capabilities, and as Amorim adds: “We grew our marketing team, which we didn’t have before the VC guys came in.”

Amorim says the strategy for MusiGames is to position themselves as “the big independent music game studio.” Beyond that, they want to have a strong position in Brazil. Amorim reveals: “We’re seeing the market grow a lot there.”

Which is why they’re investing in that growth. “We want to be known as the music games studio, and the Brazilian leader.”

Sound advice

The MusiGames team celebrating the company's anniversary with some freshly printed t-shirts

And when it comes to what other developers can do to achieve success, Amorim has a few pieces of advice: follow game-business news, follow the market, and try something different with your game.

MusiGames’ best successes weren’t radically different, he says, but all “had something really unique.” And having a specialization is a great way to keep from losing good ideas along the way.

“What’s our guideline? If it’s a music game, we’re interested,” Amorim says. “And if it’s a platform we already know how to develop for, we can even study the idea. If the idea’s really good, we may do it. But, on the other side, we try to keep the focus.”

MusiGames is currently working on a music game for the Orkut social-network.

Ben Cousins

In the first part of his interview, EA’s general manager Ben Cousins looked back at his career in digital, turning an experiment into a separate business unit, why he never ever wants to go back to retail and shared some very valuable wisdom from his time as a producer. In this second part, we continue to talk about his lessons learned as a producer, building a career in games, the sacrifices needed to gain more control and the opportunities of being first.

Avoiding disaster

A glimpse of the marvelous view over the city of Stockholm from the Easy Studios office.

Cousins has had his share of both good and bad projects in his career, but found one returning element that marked all the bad ones. “The bad projects were ones where the leaders of the team were changing their minds,” he argues. “You need to pick the right goal, communicate that goal very clearly and stick to that communication all the way through the project.” According to Cousins, the trick is to stick to those initial decisions with a “real laser focus” and not let yourself, your team and even your boss be distracted by anything else. “You have a lot of responsibilities as a vision holder to maintain that focus,” he adds. “Make sure that the team implements and perform based on that end-goal rather than what they want to do or what the latest flavor of the month in the industry is.”

Another point of advice that Cousins stressed throughout his own career, is the need to make sure all the key players on your projects are very generously rewarded for helping the project and team stay focused enough to reach the project’ s goals successfully. “People need to understand that they get rewards for their work,” he argues. “That’s kind of the loop I like to see.”

Leveling up

No game studio can go without the all mighty power of the Post-It.

The early start of Cousins’ career might look  familiar to many producers in the industry. In 1999, Cousins started out as a QA tester on several N64 and Playstation titles at Acclaim Entertainment. He later ended up as an artist on Sabrina the Teenage Witch: A Twitch in Time by Asylum Entertainment, followed by his first job as a lead designer on a canceled prehistoric action-adventure game at Lionhead studios. “Between being a tester and then being at Sony in charge of a project, that felt like a really fast journey,” Cousins recalls. “Then it felt like it slowed down, but it probably hasn’t.”

One of the key moments in those early days came when he was unexpected laid off from his QA job after Acclaim Entertainment was closed down. “It’s generally when you move companies when you see those key moments,” Cousins recalls. Me might have ended up staying in QA much longer if he hadn’t been forced to look for a new job. “There wasn’t any QA work or any good QA teams around in London at that time, so I was forced to take on a junior production role instead,” he explains. This change was completely unexpected, but not unwelcome either. “I haven’t been on a career plan, it just happened,” Cousins says.  “When I entered the game industry, I just wanted to be a level designer. That was my end goal. I hadn’t been driven by anything other than helping out and filling the gaps where I saw them.”

Nevertheless, Cousins embraced the change of direction. It happened again after the project at Lionhead studios that he was heading eventually got canceled. The following move to Sony gave his career another upwards swing. “One regret that I had was not leaving Lionhead earlier,” Cousins admits. “If I had left Lionhead after one year instead of two, I would’ve gone to Sony and I would’ve been involved with the EyeToy much earlier. That would’ve been a better learning experience for me.”

While addressing this, Cousins wanted to share a similar piece of advice with our readers on the matter of personal judgement and timing. “If you trust your judgement and you think you won’t be very good in the company you’re working at and you don’t think you’ll be able to change that, you should just leave,” he suggests. “There’s always a better opportunity somewhere else.” The promotion to a GM came as a pleasant surprise, but didn’t require Cousins to apply any pressure from his behalf. “The main thing I would say is that, I have never specifically asked for a promotion,” he admits. “I’ve never asked to change my job title or get more responsibilities. It’s always been offered to me. Either the person above me had too much work to do or they sucked and I think I can help out that person or in that situation, I’d just do the work. I don’t even ask permission, I just start doing the work.”

Cousins’ methods, modesty and openness to help his peers seem to have worked in his favor, making him quite popular within the EA ranks. “I don’t ask for a promotion when I take on more responsibility, I just take it on,” he says. “I’ve always said yes to people when they staid ‘Ben, can you deal with this’? That has hopefully given my bosses a fair amount of faith in me. That’s probably why I’ve been promoted several times.”

GMing is like playing the guitar

The Easy Studios recreational room. Note the fancy carpet.

Becoming the general manager of Easy studios wasn’t an easy task for Cousins and required quite the amount of learning new tricks and reinvention on his behalf. It demanded the greatest sacrifice of all: giving up the tight involvement he enjoyed as a producer. Cousins offers a simple analogy to explain his experience with this change. “I used to be a musician and play the drums. I gave it up, even though I loved playing the drums. Drummers never get their songs listened to by the band. If you’re a drummer and you come to the band with a song idea, they never listen to you. You’re just the drummer. So I gave up playing the drums and started playing guitar so I could have my ideas heard better and I could have more control.” This is what Cousins also did with his career.

Though game design was always a passion for him and he’d always wanted to be a game designer, he quickly I realized the position would not give him what he wanted. “I quickly learned that the game designer didn’t really make the decisions or had enough control in order to really follow through on a complete vision. In order to take up that responsibility which gives you complete control, you have to learn more about the business. You have to think from a total leadership, rather than just the design.” So once again Cousins gave up what he loved in order to be able to make a bigger impact on his projects and have the degree of control he’s always wanted. “The business knowledge is not naturally where I excel,” Cousins admits. “I have to make an effort in doing that.”

For Cousins, the recent years as a GM have forced him to learn that and many other new things. But as he says himself, “It’s the learning and growing that is most rewarding.” With his creative nature, Cousins does not have a hard time have fresh ideas come to him naturally. Even though he has things come to him naturally, the river of creative ideas had lost its shine over time. “What is rewarding is understanding metrics, a business plan or creating a change which increases your profitability, because that’s all new for me,” he says. “I think that sometimes you need to walk away from what you love in order to grow.”

The Next Challenge

The outside view of the Easy Studios office building located in the center of Stockholm, Sweden.

During his last four years at EA, Cousins decided to leave packaged goods behind him and fully devoted himself to free-to-play and digitally distributed games. In that time, his team’s efforts behind Battlefield Heroes paid off, showed EA that the market for this type of games had grown tremendously got him a promotion in return. “We’re stepping out of the exploration stage now and moving into the growth stage,” Cousins says. “The next step in my career is going to be about exploiting this knowledge from the research and development stage I’ve gone through and really use that to grow and turn this into a really big business. I may not have changed job title, or the kind of work I do, but there’s going to be more games, bigger games and a more mature organization.”

The freedom Cousins and his fellow colleagues enjoyed while pioneering this new business model within EA was not a given, but an unexpected treasure of opportunity. According to Cousins, this was caused by two reasons.

“We were always the guys in the icebreaker,” he recalls. “We were first and had more knowledge than anybody from day one. The first time I sat down with Johny Mang, who was our business guru for our games, we knew more than anyone else in EA about the Western world’s free-to-play business. If you’re always the first, you’re the guy with the most knowledge and experience.” The second reason for the freedom Cousin’s team enjoyed was that EA didn’t have a structure ready to operate online games. “So we had to build our own structure,” Cousins says. “If you’re doing something typical, which is standardized, you’re within the confines of an existing organization in terms of publishing, legal, finance, marketing, etcera. But because EA couldn’t offer us any support. We were doing something so new that we were forced to create our own organization. And when you have your own organization, you have more freedom to design it as you see fit.”

Cousins and his team over at Easy Studios are still making good use of that freedom while hard at work with the closed beta of Battlefield Play4Free, the newest addition to EA’s Play4Free brand. Cousins will also be speaking at this year’s Casual Connect Europe about the topic of getting EA ready for free-to-play gaming.

From Interactive Stage to Interactive Screen

The idea for flOw came from Jenova Chen's MFA thesis on Flow psychology, developed by psychology professor Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

Kellee Santiago comes at the games industry from a unique approach, theatre. After receiving a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, she went on to pursue an MFA in Interactive Media at the University of Southern California. Initially, she took the program because she thought it would give her a unique skill set on which she could build a career in creating original performance works. However, she quickly shifted her direction. “In our second semester we took a class on the history of play and game design throughout human history. I had always played games, but never made them. I was hooked,” comments Santiago.

During her time at USC,  Santiago’s dream was realized when she got the opportunity to work with game designer Jenova Chen. Their company, thatgamecompany, was born out of a desire for innovation and creative expression in games. While working on Cloud (an action flight game where players manipulate clouds and weather), Chen and Santiago realized that they had similar ideals for the games industry. They wanted to create a company that innovated at every aspect of game development, from content to team structure to business model. “Our goal is to make video games that communicate different emotional experiences the current video games market is not offering,” Santiago emphasizes.

Charting Creative Territory

Cloud was originally about aliens that indirectly controlled Earth's inhabitants by manipulating the weather.

Santiago and Chen’s games have received notoriety and critical acclaim through venues such as the Independent Games Festival and Spike Video Game Awards. After Cloud was so well received, Santiago continued to pursue working with video games. Santiago shares: “There are very few rules about how to make game, so you can decide for yourself how you want to do it. I discovered that video games had so much uncharted territory when it came to creative expression through the medium, and that really enticed me.”

Santiago considers her games to be “core games,” ones that appeal not only to existing hardcore and casual gaming markets, but also to mature gamers and even non-gamers.
Chen and Santiago’s exploration further led to flOw for PlayStation 3, a game about piloting an aquatic organism through a biosphere and consuming other organisms. Flower, for the PlayStation Network, challenges players to pick flower petals and consider the environmental changes. Now, the pressure is on as they develop Journey for the PlayStation Network. The game will demand the player to set upon an unknown voyage with little but their own intuition to rely on.

Journey Ahead

Journey will be focused on making the player tiny and weak again, removing the powers we’ve acquired in our modern-day lives.

Journey, an online adventure experience, was inspired by Chen’s “feeling that in the modern world where man has so much power, we have lost an integral aspect of the human experience—awe towards the unknown,” explains Santiago. In this sense, Journey also fits into the core game model. Santiago stresses that core games reach these new markets because they are easier and less time consuming, and yet possess emotionally rich and powerful gameplay.

While each project has brought different challenges and successes for Santiago and her team, on Journey she is working with their biggest team yet (a team of ten). “We are pushing ourselves as a company and as game makers,” Santiago remarks.

Santiago concludes: “Doing something no one has done before is our constant challenge. Despite our independent spirits, Jenova and I have a lot of respect for the wisdom of game developers who have been there before. Unfortunately, at a certain point, it always comes back to the fact that in some aspects we actually are the experts in what we do, which is terrifying!”

Santiago is working away on Journey and dreaming on the next of thatgamecompany’s creative expressions.

At the front of free-to-play

EA Phenomic's free-to-play RTS and card game Battleforge was one of the first titles under EA's new Play 4 Free brand.

“Franchises have their own financial goals, but they’re generally not as explicit as a business unit,” Cousins explains about his position as a GM. “Because I’m a separate business unit, I can look at all of the money coming in and out of the studio and I’m driven by profit levels on that. It’s much more like running a business.”

Two years before his promotion, Cousins found himself working at EA during pretty interesting times. The big publisher had just gotten interested in the [free-to-play] business models in their dealings with a Korean company called Neowiz. EA ended up buying a portion of the company in early 2007. Starting working in 2006 with Neowiz on a version of Fifa Online for Korea.

“EA was probably one of the major publishers who had the most mature relationship with Korean companies,” Cousins recalls. “EA being very aggressive about growth always and Activision in particular had managed to buy themselves quite a bit of insight into the free to play market in South Korea. Then this quickly transformed into an experimental phase within the company, where they started to think ‘maybe we could do free to play versions of our games in the Western worlds’ , which was at that time completely unheard of and completely exotic idea.”

As a result, several products were started up to test the waters. The earliest two being Battleforge and Battlefield Heroes. “But then very quickly, as the virtual goods business started to kick off in the Western world around 2009, we went from being an experimental group of people kind of messing around with a business model, to being something quite important to the company,” Cousins says. “That was an interesting transformation to go from being kind of a skunk works style research and development organization to being something that was completely a key way of EA to learn how to operate in this digital age that we’re in.”

Nice timing, Ben

According to EA, Battlefield Heroes ended up having 3 million registered users six months after it's initial release.

Finding a place within DICE as a senior producer for Battlefield Heroes, Cousins had already had his taste of working on digital products. “I had come to EA from Sony and the last project I’d worked on at Sony was Playstation Home, which is obviously a free virtual world monetized by both advertisers and a micro transaction element,” Cousins explains. “When I moved to EA, there was an opportunity to work with Neowiz on [Battlefield Heroes]. So I kind of chose to continue that path in digital distribution rather than packaged goods. Maybe I was in the right place in the right time, but I also made a conscious decision that I didn’t want to work in packaged goods and I got no interest in entering that space again.”

The choice to remain on digital was quickly made after the huge success of Battlefield Heroes. When Cousins saw the opportunity to remain at the vanguard of EA’s move in the digital space, he was quick to take it. “I think long term about my career and there isn’t going to be very many interesting jobs in packaged goods in a five to ten year timeline,” he argues. “I think that people who have experience in digital distribution early are going to be the guys best prepared for future. I would characterize it like this. In 1998, who would you rather have been working for, iTunes or Warner Brothers Music? One of those is growing very quickly and the other is declining. We’re in that similar reflection point in the game industry now. Do you want go digital or do you want to be part of the old guard?”

Close customers

The Easy Studios development team knows how to take group pictures. We also salute the man who made the effort to bring his shotgun to the office for this picture.

One of the most rewarding aspect for Cousins has been the direct connection with the customer. Working on the Battlefield franchise, blessed with a very active and enthusiastic community of players, a digital title such as Battlefield Heroes only brought him closer to his customers. “People talk about this a lot, but it’s a generational leap from what we have with packaged goods,” he argues. “You never really meet the customer, you don’t know anything about them. The only time you really learn anything about them is when you do very specific market research.”

With those vibrant communities in all of the games, Cousins found a great source of what players say and are thinking. “My e-mail address is also public to all the users of our games and they can contact me directly,” he adds. “I have several key members of the community that I talk to on a regular basis.” When Cousins and his team decided to change the prices behind the microtransaction payment model of Battlefield Heroes in late 2009, many players were outraged. Cousins ended up receiving up to 200-300 e-mails in the course of a week. Though the game’s community was in uproar for quite some time about this, the changes eventually worked in favor of the game and resulted in a substantial growth in revenue.

Part of making sure these changes were effective was the result of the very quality focused culture of DICE. “It’s actually a culture where everyone in the company wants to produce the right quality,” Cousins explains. “There’s a sense of innovation and risk taking, which I haven’t seen in others companies. They’re willing to take their chances and really think big.”
Cousins also has some pretty good advise from his time at DICE. “Don’t be scared of the competition. Don’t be intimidated by the competition. Just work towards your goals and don’t get rattled by happenings in your market.”

Producers as leaders

Easy Studios has currently started the closed beta with Battlefield Play 4 Free after starting work on the project in early 2010. Go check it out. It's free!

With a career spanning from QA jobs to becoming executive producer on DICE’s Battlefield franchise, Cousins has traveled an all to familiar path for many game professionals these days. Looking back at his time as a producer, he recounts some of the most valuable lessons he learned in the trenches himself.

“The first thing you have to do is you need to be honest of what your capabilities are and where the edges of your capabilities are,” Cousins argues. “As a producer, I was terrible at planning and really bad at task tracking, dates and organizing the team. I always delegated that to a good project manager. The way EA is structured is that development directors do the organizing of the team, the tools and the technology. Producers work in much more of a leadership role. That worked very well for me. So I was able to hand off large portions of responsibility to various members of the team.”

The structure Cousins encountered at EA made it a perfect fit for him. Equipped will all this self-knowledge, it enabled him to focus on the stuff that he believed he was best at.

“What I try to focus on as a producer is first of all, hitting the right strategy,” he adds. ”Making sure that you, from the get go, create the right game and that you take into account all of relevant information to make that decision correct. So, consumer data, knowledge of the market place, knowledge what the company is good and bad at. You need to get all the right information and then make some seriously well informed decisions of what you’re doing and what’s important about it.”

X marks the spot

Lord of Ultima is launching a huge update this week, which will include the game's dramatic endgame.

In his first months moving over from Great Britain to Sweden, Cousins started out as a creative director at DICE working on several new concepts for the studio.

In the years that followed, Cousins was also able to devise a formula with his team that kept them focused on achieving a high grade of quality by concentrating on only the most important elements of their projects. “So you start out having an ‘X’,” he explains. “The ‘X’ is a one phrase description of what you’re doing, which everyone can rally around. Then you pick key areas of focus, which are the things that really matter in your game. Once you pick those, you have to stick to them.You have to just trust that you made the right decisions early on. If you waiver from those initial decisions and statement intent, then disaster ensues.”

The second part of Cousins’ interview will be published next week, including tales about preventing projects from going wrong, him looking back at his early beginnings in the game industry, picking the time to move companies and moving from development to business.

In the meanwhile, everyone is invited to check out some brand new updates and holiday specials in Battlefield Heroes and Lord of Ultima.

Hi5’s CEO Alex St. John hopes to change the world a third time. Once would be enough for most people, but St. John is boisterous, larger than life, sometimes outrageous, but always gregarious. We sat down with him to talk about his thoughts on game technology, avoiding becoming an accidental game platform and figuring out how to make the most of social games.

Technology at play

He claims a certain influence on game graphics, working on the first five versions of DirectX whilst at Microsoft. And he claims that WildTangent, the publisher he founded, reached the top of its game.

And now, he wants to have a real impact on the social networking boom. Last November, St. John joined a social network, hi5, confident that he had created gaming platforms twice before and could do it again.

“You have these companies that are accidental gaming platforms,” he begins. Facebook makes a great target, but St. John adds: “To be fair, Yahoo a decade ago is another example of an accidental gaming platform.”

“As a result of entering the search business, they woke up – overnight – with a huge number of people who wanted to play online games,” recalls St. John.

But that’s only natural: whenever people get some new technology, they want to play a game with it. Or, as St. John says, “Interactivity is the native media of computing.” People have the urge to fiddle with things, and when things react, “that’s amazingly compelling.”

Brave new market

There’s a notion that social gaming has created a whole new market. But St. John is ready to refute: “No, it didn’t, not a single one.” He remembers Microsoft in 1992. “Microsoft adamantly believed…that spreadsheets and word processors were the dominant use of the PC, because every time they did a survey, that’s what people said they used them for.”

“I said, ‘You know what, we should do a survey where we don’t ask people, we measure it, find out what they really spend their time on,’” remembers St. John. “And when that survey came back, the number one use of the PC, in terms of time spent, was playing games. Everybody. It was the usually dominant use case.”

“But when you asked people what their dominant use case was for the PC, they said, ‘Oh, I use it for work.’” The conclusion that St. John draws is that people love playing games. “But they’re not eager to admit it — or weren’t, in that era.”

Accidental platforms

If you look back a decade ago, companies like RealNetworks and Big Fish Games and WildTangent were the Zyngas of that era to Yahoo’s social networking, says St. John. “We were the first companies making casual downloadable games for Yahoo when they were the dominant game destination. We were pulling those audiences away, until we ourselves became the publishers, the game audiences came to us and left those sites, and we became very advanced – not just at producing games, but monetizing them effectively.”

“So when you see a phenomenon like Facebook come along and form an accidental game platform,” St. John says, “One of the surest bets I’ve seen over the years, is that they’ll fail at it. They will screw it up. Because it’s not their native business. It’s not in their DNA.”

“So as valuable as that business is — companies that aren’t native to gaming usually aren’t very successful at it over the long run,” emphasizes St. John. “And that means they’ve created an opportunity they themselves can’t take advantage of fully.”

The power of purpose

But that’s looking at accidental platforms. What would a platform-on-purpose be worth? As ever, St. John has opinions on the subject. “At Yahoo’s peak in online game publishing they were maybe – with the world’s biggest gaming audience – doing $32 million a year,” he estimates.

He refers to the financials of three companies that used to publish their games on Yahoo, saying they “represent $500 million in revenue, from a fraction of that audience.”

“So the leaps in monetization and efficiency over the years from selling games to the same audience were dramatic.” Yet many people speak of Zynga’s success as unimaginable, unattainable, and unchallengeable. But St. John has no difficulty thinking big. “You know,” he responds, “Online gambling in the United States is illegal. But it’ll be $6 billion in revenue this year.”

St. John estimates those illicit online gambling revenues are five times the revenues of World of Warcraft, which he says does $1.2 billion in revenue a year, and is the most profitable game in history.

“I know that half-a-billion sounds impressive,” he says of the growth casual games experienced in the post-Yahoo world. “But we know there’s a market six-to-twelve times larger.”

There’s enormous demand for gameplay, says St. John, and social gaming is, relatively speaking, just a tiny blip. “So I think there’s potential for tremendous growth.”

When you see an accidental platform, St. John says it’s very useful to recognize that some of it is secret sauce, and the rest was thrown in for other purposes. “And what people always do is confuse those,” he says. “They can’t tell the difference between the thing that made it successful and the thing that’s in the way.”

If you look at social networks, you might agree with St. John when he states, “Real identities are actually a burden to gaming.” He continues by saying that spamming your friends, business contacts, and co-workers with news that you got a new cow is annoying. “That’s why Facebook cracked down on it. If you look at very successful MMOs, virtual identities work great.”

Taking the socio-path

St. John and his hi5 team at GDC Online

Now that St. John is responsible for a social network of his own at hi5, those observations led to the creation of their Sociopath Platform aimed squarely at developers. “It’s our anti-social network architecture,” he says, only half joking.

It lets people play on the hi5 network without login, account, or registration. “You can go play the same social networking games you find on Facebook on hi5 with no registration,” says St. John.

What’s fascinating about social network games, says St. John, is that a segment of games no one wanted to play on Miniclip or Kongregate, magically become successful inside Facebook. “What that tells you is that there’s some pixie dust that the social network is adding to games that make bad games good all of the sudden.”

When you add the social graph characteristics, it becomes popular. But that limits the audience. St. John had another revelation: “Why don’t I get my fat social portal out of the way, and let the games do messaging, importing, contacting, inviting, and gifting directly to the users?”

That architecture had been reserved for the social platform, but hi5 hopes to open it up to any game that would use it. And to make things easier on developers, hi5 has cloned compatibility with Facebook APIs, so games developed for his network can be used there, too.

Although it’s too soon to say, St. John hopes that hi5 will prove to be a platform that makes the most of social network games, instead of being an accidental platform.

The hi5 Developer Portal is currently open.

While PopCap was known for extremely successful titles like Bejeweled, the offer came as something of a surprise. Says Vechey: we didn’t start PopCap to make money, we started it to make games. They declined the offer, ultimately feeling that it didn’t value the capacities of the team that had been assembled.

But the offer did serve as a wake up call. After having been offered millions, and refusing, Vechey says, “We knew we had to change, we knew we had to grow.”

Today, the company is 375 employees, still privately held, and as Vechey says proudly, focused on great games. “We get to control our destiny,” he adds.

“But even with the success, there were a lot of mistakes,” he continues. Alongside an influx of new people was “a lot of firing.” Vechey says that while some people were incompetent, some were great — but not a fit with the company, even during the times of change and transition.

Vechey says that PopCap helped create the business of downloadable games, but that his company has changed enough that they’ve become irrelevant to the company today. “We have to look at how games are made,” he says of the future, adding that there’s a way to improve. “If you take advantage of the social graph and the friends list, every single game will be better.”

World of Warcraft, states Vechey, would be a lot better if he could log into Facebook and see which of friends were playing.

Social games, he continues, isn’t about spamming your friends on Facebook, but something Vechey calls “social relevance.”

“Every game can get more social relevance inside it,” he stresses. “And it’ll be a better game.”

He also suggests a strategy of experiences that are more connected. In future, Vechey says, “Whenever you’re playing a Pop Cap game, it’s like you’re playing an MMO.”

Vechey further encouraged an audience of senior developers and production leaders to rethink the correlation between purchase and fun. “Item buy can be fun. Buying a $60 game in a store isn’t fun,” he says. He discusses ways that gameplay mechanics and rewards make the spending of micro-payments a pleasure. “You can actually make the act of buying your product be fun.”

But the one constant that Vechey sees is change. He concludes: “If we’re successful, in the next five years, PopCap will again be unrecognizable.”

Soccer with friends

It all started when Heiko Hubertz and a friend developed a soccer game; the idea was to invite friends to play the thing together. It wasn’t supposed to make money nor get built into a business. “It was more a kind of fun project,” explains Hubertz.

“The problem was,” smiles Hubertz, “All of these friends invited their friends, and so on, and so on — and in the end, our server crashed.” Investing more money in servers just to be able to play their own game wasn’t part of the plan. “It was also clear that we couldn’t charge our friends five bucks a month just to play this crappy game.”

“So we said, ‘Hey, let’s just sell them better soccer players for a couple cents, and if some of them pay, great, then we can pay our servers,’” recalls Hubertz. But the result was more successful than they imagined. Users bought so many in-game players at fifty Euro-cents that it generated tens-of-thousands of Euros a month in revenues. “We said, ‘Hey, that’s a business model.’”

Micro-markets in play

While Hubertz says that microtransactions came about by coincidence, the company has become an expert in the field since then. He explains that the Asian market is different from the European market, and the European market is different than the American market. “All three markets are totally different.”

In Europe, few players will actually spend money in the game, but those that do “spend a crazy amount of money.” In the US, notes Hubertz, a much broader user-number spend money, but less. And that impacts the design for a US-market game.

“What we have seen is that games we have developed in Europe are quite successful in Europe, but not that successful here in the US market,” reveals Hubertz, adding that games which are developed in the US market are quite successful back in Europe. “You have different budgets here. You can invest more money, because you have a bigger market.”

Genesis of the strategy

“In 2002, we were the first company in the western world who started microtransaction item selling,” Hubertz says, thinking back to when the company first started. “No one else did this at this time.”

While Bigpoint started with mainly sports games, from soccer to ice hockey to Formula One — they made a big shift in 2005, thinking at the time was that sports games are great, “But maybe there’s a bigger space for these browser-based games with microtransactions.”

With that strategy in mind, they launched their first mafia game and their first pirate game. “We were quite successful,” says Hubertz. So successful that, in 2007, the company launched into other European markets beyond Germany.

Monetization is the message

“We were quite successful in Europe, because we were working with all the different TV stations,” explains Hubertz. TV stations were promoting Bigpoint games on-air, and the company would do a revenue share based the exposure.

“The interesting part for them is they can promote games, and can monetize…because up to this point, all the content they had on their portal was casual related.” Old-style casual games were hard to monetize, but the new business model paid off for the television stations. “And it was so successful for them, that they really promoted our games on-air,” continues Hubertz.

After working with every television station across Europe, they sold a 70% stake in the company to a joint venture of NBC Universal and a private equity firm in London called GMT. That would prepare the company for its next step.

The land of opportunity

In 2010, Heiko Hubertz moved to San Francisco to open a new office there, because, he says, “The next market we want to enter is the US market.” He adds: “And we want to do it with local content.”

Hubertz reports that he’s pleased with the quality produced by the team in San Francisco. The strategy has been to hire senior developers to make content specifically for an American market.

“Next year’s our big US year – that’s the goal,” he says. His view of America revolves around the number of unique cultures blended together. When that comes to games, Hubertz believes if it will resonate in the US, “it will resonate across Europe, which is why we’re developing more and more games in the US market.”

The future is different

What makes Bigpoint different is their commitment to browser games that are high-quality and fully 3D. In Europe, they operate a game called Farmerama, with some 15.8 million registered users. Hubertz boasts it’s larger than Farmville, but that few Americans have heard of it.

Development was inexpensive, and Hubertz terms it a huge success. But he says that so much of the casual and social game markets focus on an audience that is female, and older. “The entire market focus is on them,” he states.

“We think there’s a market for young and male.” But these users expect something different, because they’re already playing console games. And that’s where production values comes into play. “We want to offer high-quality games for them.”

The final frontier

In addition to that, the company is bolstered by its access to intellectual properties like Battlestar Galactica and The Mummy, courtesy of NBC Universal. According to Hubertz, the use of a recognizable property “helps people to stay longer in the game.”

“One big problem with microstransaction games have is the churn rate,” Hubertz explains. The games are easy to get into, “Players can also leave very fast.”

With a franchise, reports Hubertz, “They take more time to try to understand the game.” There’s clear intention, the carrot of story, and trust of the brand. “And that’s very important for a microstransaction game.”

“That’s what we believe,” concludes Hubertz. “We’ll see what happens next year, when we launch.” With that admission that this is all just an experiment, he smiles, saying: “But we’re always pioneers in our markets.”

Bigpoint is at work on browser-based free-to-play games featuring Battlestar Galactica, The Mummy, and Ruined, an original IP.