Step 2: People should have a clear view on what to expect from the game. “Who does the player represent? What will the player be doing? How does the player measure success or failure? What are the first fifteen minutes to be like? They may be critical for acceptance.
With Age of Empires, people were enjoying themselves and wanted to know. The Wallstreet Journal reviewed the game and referenced to it as ‘digital cocaine’.

Step 3: Your game is great, because? “Get engaging compelling gameplay,” Shelley suggests. He referred to how Sid Meier sees games as a series of interesting decisions. “In your game concept, what are the interesting things that the player will do?”

Step 4: Make a competitor analysis. According to Shelley, more than 53 Strategy games were being developed during the first Age of Empires. Because most of them featured fantasy and sci-fi settings, Shelley explained Age of Empries stood out because “we were the only ones doing a history themed game.”

Step 5: The business case. “We’re making commercial art, not fine art,” Shelley reminded his audience. ”Repeat how your game is comparable and recognizable, but different, innovative, and a good value,” he suggests. “Show sales figures from competing games to support your case.” According to Shelley, the addition of an own marketing plan, though unusual to be made by game developers, shows potential publishers that you are devoted to the project. He also recommends developers to think of how to create a brand, opportunities for sequels or expansions, multi-platform deals, expanding upon another existing brand or any online functionalities. “Place your game into a larger strategy,” Shelley emphasized.

Once Castle started programming as a job, his perspective changed again. “I had to be an entrepreneur,” The environment in Las Vegas, Louis explained, had a bad reputation. Game studios had apparently taken a lot of publisher for a ride. “They had rented office space and had a couple of empty rooms with a sign saying Top Secret,” Castle said. “We had to form our own company that had certain values and was concerned with the products. We forcefully had to build Westwood. If you really feel like you had to do something and you can’t find any way to do it, do it yourself but only as a last resort.”

When Virgin’s Richard Branson and later Ken Williams from Sierra offered to buy the Westwood studio, Castle once again faced a difficult decision. Even though Sierra was offering 6 million dollars to Castle and his partners out, they had chosen the Virgin deal instead. “They gave us a piece of the business,” Castle explained.” Always bet on yourself. You can either go with the short run, or take the longer view and try to get a piece of the action. We thought we could build a business and it turns out we were right.”

Closing the Virgin deal, Castle suddenly found himself becoming the company’s CFO. He found himself mostly working out of a check. Still, it required him to reinvent himself once more. “I was CFO with 250 people,” Castle said. “I grew in that position and we never lost the value of the fidelity of the systems. I stopped counting how many times I had to reinvent myself.”

Working a lot with other people’s intellectual properties, the final reinvention Castle faced in this time at Westwood was that of a licensor. “If you have a studio, it’s rare that you’re really good at one thing,” Castle said. “It’s nice to have projects to work with more junior people on it.” Castle and his team would later ship Virgin’s most successful platform game, The Lion King. “We built that with 13 people in seven months,” Castle admitted. “The one thing I have to boil it down to. We were the biggest fans and dorkiest people who loved these properties. It comes down to being the number one fan. If you’re not the biggest fan of a property, you need to be. If you don’t get it right, they will crucify you.”

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“Size does matter,” IGG’s chief operating officer Kevin Xu told a slightly giggling audience. “The smaller the better.” IGG’s mixed strategy has them currently publishing both browser and client-based games and according to Xu, the latter’s success has been influenced by their download size. IGG’s most successful client-based game is Godswar Online, which cost 800.000 to developer and has a download size of around 150 megabytes. According to Xu, the game had a 60% download completion rate, generating an average of $ 1.2-1.3 million US dollars a month. “With 1.5 Gig games, we had so much trouble converting with only a 15-20% download rate.”

“We are a publisher ourselves, so when we develop the game, we know it has to be small. There’s a lot of developers trying to go into the f2p space. They come out with games that are gigantic of 2 3 gigs. It doesn’t help us with publishing.”

“For core gamers, less than 2 gigs is fine,” Gamigo’s Patrick Streppel added. According to gamigo’s research, the preferred download size varies per demographic, with racing gamers being the worse. A150 megabyte tennis game in Germany apparently wasn’t an advantage for his company at all, but “for a core game everything under 2 gig is fine.”

Why they did it
Cage continued to explain his opinion that games be art and not toys. Cage went on to call adult gamers an untapped market that is strongly interested in emotion and narrative. “Games do not have to be challenging to be entertaining,” he argued. “That’s fine, but as an adult, I have little time.”

“The market is ready for new paradigms,” Cage also suggested. “Our industry is about technical innovation, but very little conceptual innovation.” Accordign to cage, the game industry should stop doing the same things over and over, while the few people who want to innovate often do not have the opportunity to do so. Over a year has passed since Cage and his team had worked on Heavy Rain. Both Sony and Quantic Dream apparently did not expect the game to be such as a success.

How they did it
Cage went on to describe the biggest challenges his team had faced. “You need a very clear idea you want to achieve,” he explained. His team first had to face the problem of creating new paradigms that made Heavy Rain into more of a journey than a challenge.”What you see, what road you take, what you’re experiencing or feel, makes the difference.”

The second problem became the interface, with any average game controller limiting the animation of the protagonist to a number of buttons. This required Cage’s team to invent a new interface that supported strongly contextual interactions. “This is a big change and it solved many problems when people have to tell stories and create emotions in games.”

The third problem was hitting the right strings of emotion and meaning for the player. ”We wanted you to have something that resonates with you, that gives you food for thought.” According to Cage’s findings, many players reported that it really made them think about the relationships they have with their own family and friends. “I wish more games would explore this direction,” Cage admitted. “It is still unfortunately very rare in games.”

Heavy Rain also posed a lot of narrative challenges and required Cage’s team to invent a new language to convey the game’s story to the player, with no real reference material to work with. The team had adventure games and movies to work from for puzzles and dialogue, but that clearly wasn’t enough. “We could borrow the visual language from movies, but the interactive language had to be invented.”

Failing certain parts of the game had to become usual while playing Heavy Rain. Cage admitted that he was always against the fact that failing has always been a big punishment in games. His team found that some testers would fail pretty much ever single action scene. “When we asked them about the game, they answered it was easy,” Cage explained. “When we told the guy that he basically missed every single action scene, he was surprised.” It dawned on the team that the tester thought he couldn’t actually succeed in the game’s scene.

The 2000 pages of script for Heavy Rain took over more than a year in writing, but Cage highly doubts he could pull it off again. “The bad news is that there is no recipe,” Cage admitted. “If you ask me how you did it, I don’t have a clue.”

After they did it
Cage ended his talk by sharing some numbers on Heavy Rain. The game got a total of 4475 reviews with a 90,1% average worldwide. The game also sold out with 600.000 copies in the first two weeks and has sold over 1,5 million to date on full price. The title also won numerous awards, including Develop’s best new franchise and best independent studio. Though what Cage was personally most thankful for, was the support and respect he’d received from both journalists and game developers.

Why online is going to be big(ger)

Wang explained the growth of the online game market as something that originated in 1998 in Korea, when “people didn’t have a lot of money to spend, but did have a lot of time.” This combination, Wang argued, is the origin of the play style that the Asian market has become known for.

Wang also criticised the speed at which big western publishers such as Sony and Microsoft are moving toward the online space with more and more community features. “In our view, they’re not moving fast enough.” Wang’s main argument against these console manufacturers was not only that they are not moving fast enough, but that the traditional game pricing scheme is flawed. “The user of online games no longer has any pressure anymore. The idea is that the basic service is free.” In general, Wang praised the PC as a more accessible platform in combination with online games as a much larger and profitable market. ” We eliminate the marketing expenses, we don’t need to pay retailers, or a 10 euro royalty per disc at Microsoft or Sony,” Wang explained. “We can use that money to deliver the best experience to the gamer and in the end we’re all going to profit.”

Wang used the example of Nexon’s Maplestory to address the power of a more continous and long-term investment that online games can offer. Running for over a decade since its original release in 2000, the casual online game broke their PCU in Korea this summer with a number above 400.000 simultaneous users. “That’s 1% of Korea’s population,” Wang noted.

The Chinese market

Wang also shared Sharing his knowledge from the Chinese market. In 2009, China accounted for 40% of the online game market. He also noted that at ChinaJoy last month, figures showed the annual growth rate for the Chinese game market to slow down to 30 percent. While people were feeling a small cooling effect, Wang still sees major opportunities.

While the disposable income and game penetration rates have always been low, Wang considers the value of even 50 cents per user. “That’s the way of thinking while doing business in China,” he suggests. He continued to address the fact that the Chinese market has several things in common, but is generally very diversified, with many new possibilities for catering to younger players. “Particularly for the younger generation, it’s becoming a life-style,” Wang explained. “The hardcore gamer typically are more mature, over thirty [years old].” He also warned the audience for the very scattered population distribution of their online gaming market. ”You attack Beijing and Shanghai, that accounts for a very small percentage of the market.”

Wang also addressed how the Chinese are a different kind of players, with very different requirements. He gave the following examples:

- The Chinese hunger for replayability. “A typical MMORPG requires at least 1000 hours of content in Open Beta,” he remarked.
- Community Setting. “Help the gamer to have more fun,” Wang explained. For the Chinese, multiple in-game relationship circles matter a lot. Social ties such as girlfriend/boyfriend, master/apprentice and clans are an important matter. The game must also be made sustainable as sustainable as possible. “This requires a steady amount of developers to create new content,” Wang added. “But that’s not enough, you need to encourage the gamers to play against each other.”

- Easy to Enjoy. The entry level has to be very low as always. The Chinese need to be attracted and engaged from the beginning. “Gamers are reluctant to master complicated play controls.”

- Fair-play, systematic anti-hacking and anti-bots are a must. You have to block all that hacking. “Unfortunately, the Chinese are very creative, so you need to constantly find solutions,” Wang admitted. “We have seen so many games fail, just because of the hacking”

The One-Stop for Online Life Services

Wang ended his talk with a detailed explanation of Tencent’s current strategy to not only dominate the Chinse online game market, but what Wang calls ‘Online Life Services’ as a whole. “Tencent tries to be the one-stop shop for all the online population in China, particularly for young Chinese who access the Internet for the first time,” he explained.

Tencent categorizes their offer in four groups: communication, information, entertainment and commerce. The first involves their role as the number one e-mail provider in China and the largest instant messaging system in the world. As for information, Tencent owns the number one search portal in China as well. ”We’re also making our own search engine,” Wang added. “Hopefully, we can catch up in that business too.”

The third part is entertainment. Or in Tencent’s case, a full fledged focus on online gaming. Even though they are currently offering other services with video distribution and streaming, games remain the biggest part in Tencent.

The final category, that of commerce, is something Wang says Tencent uses to invest in the future. “The Chinese economy is less developed,” Wang explained. “In the long run, we definitely see China catch up with the western world. We want to be well positioned when our market takes off.”

Wang continued to explain the uniqueness of the Tencent model. “The majority of Google and such their revenue comes from business. Our revenue comes from the user, which we see as a competitive advantage. We continue to have a sustainable revenue stream and in the business world, we have plenty of room for future business opportunities.”

According to Wang, Tencent also has the largest gamer community. Their tactic is to introduce potential gamers with casual games first. “We try to build a portfolio that enables us to retain any kind of gamer,” Wang explained. “The portfolio is quite diversified, we have the racing, dancing, shooting, action and rpg. This attracts different kinds of people.”

Gaming has become the the biggest business for Tencent. Wang’s gaming department account for over 50% of the entire Tencent revenue stream. He also noted his expectations for a strong performance this year as well. Tencent gaming is divided in two parties handling in-house development and licensing. “We have partners from Korea and US, but not from Europe yet,” Wang hinted. “We know the tricks and the challenges and also we can do publishing and have the instant contact with our user.”

Wang cited a recent success with their license for Nexon’s Dungeon Fighter Online in china, which now has 2.2 simultaneous users (140+ registered accounts) in China and their license for the Korean first person shooter CrossFire with 2.3 million simultaneous users (130+ registered accounts).

Both games demonstrated Tencent’s strategy to innovate instead of attacking the established traditional MMO market in China. “We don’t go into crowded markets of traditional MMOs, but have introduced action games and other genres into the market,” Wang explained. The combination of Tencent’s other activities in instant messaging, e-mail and web portals has definitely contributed in the growth of their gaming department and strong position in the Chinese game market. Wang also concluded by mentioning Tencent’s first office in the US and their ongoing interest in finding more partners and expanding their licensing activities in both the U.S. and Europe.

If you’re interested in applying metrics to your own game, Valadares recommends that you first and foremost align the results you want to find with your goals, business or otherwise. Keep it simple by only picking a couple of metrics that are easy to understand. They might not be perfect the first time, but give you a good enough picture of what you’re working with.

In the case of intuition and metrics, Valadares said any developer best uses both. ”People might think that because they’re a creative company, you can’t be lead by numbers. There’s a time and a place for everything. And if you get good at using both at the same time, you’re going to have a big advantage.”

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According to Spector, games are not about magic moments but about the repeated actions. “Our job is to change the context around repeated actions that we offer player,” he argued. “You can do something a thousand times and still have a unique experience.” Spector also addressed the similar need to break out of many conceptual and narrative stereotypes, fearing that “we’re going to be marginalized as comics have been in the USA.”

“It’s never too late to change a decision, always be true to yourself and always plan to be iterative,” Schmitz suggested. “Make quality management a top priority. At Anno 1404, we had a very strong management principle. We knew from the get go what our players were expecting from us.”

Grindel offered some of his personal experience, telling the audience to “never underestimate the power of your words.” With the Settlers Online, Grindel once found himself reporting a small bug to one of the team’s programmers. “It was just a small reminder to work on the bug, but it wasn’t important. Because I was his boss, he perceived it as an order and completely dropped all his other tasks to work on that bug.”

Grindel also recommended never to work on anything without a clearly defined plan. “Game production is not only an engineering thing,” he argued. “It has a lot of creativity and art involved. When you work on something, things will change. But I’ve seen people work without any change. This means something is going wrong.”

The duo then went on to talk about integration management and the pivotal moments of cutting features, adding some or having to hack up quick solutions to keep a game working. “In the final Settlers 7, there are still areas of code with ‘Someone has to do this properly later’ several times,” Grindel admitted. ”You can do this in some situations, but be very very, very careful about it.”

Discussing multiple quotes and advice from colleagues and game professionals on other topics of management, Schmitz and Grindel also shared more of their own personal challenges, both having shared the experience of dealing with the ‘prima donna’ of the team. “Sometimes you have this prima donna, where someone has such a strong opinion that others are afraid to go against him,” Grindel explained. “If people lose their trust in you, you don’t have a team anymore. That’s integrity, very important.” Schmitz added.

Support from both top management and their own team were pivotal to both Schmitz and Grindel’s own success in game production. “Clear commitment, adequate funding and relevant goals. Top management needs to stand behind you, they should like what you’re doing and need what you’re doing. You need this support or your project will suffer a slow death,” Schmitz suggested. “You as a manager are nothing. Your team is everything. Always demand high quality standards from anyone and don’t allow any slackers around. Sustainable development of staff. Align the project’s objectives to their personal objectives. Avoid the kind of prima donnas.”

Though Schmitz and Grindel admitted that their talk would sound familiar to the seasoned producer, they also acknowledged a producer’s weakness to sometimes do too much project management simply for the sake of project management and not the progress of the project itself. An important reminder and a handy silver bullet for any producer to carry around.

[Photography by GDC Europe]