Freemium Games Growth & 2011 vs 2012
I’ve been reading this whitepaper on monetisation and freemium games:
As a result of the vast changes in the global games industry that occurred the last years we have seen big losses e.g. ‘TakeTwo’, ‘Nintendo’ and ‘Gamestop’ as well as huge gains for e.g.’RiotGames, ‘Mojang/MineCraft’ and ‘Wargaming.net’ in terms of revenue and profit. Online and mobile gaming have rapidly become very competitive. The amount of new high quality games is much higher than the healthy double-digit growth of consumer spending, putting pressure on game revenues. Asia’s total games market continues to grow at an enormous pace. Asian companies increasingly seek expansion ‘overseas’ and use their cash to set up offices in the West or acquire companies that will give them the ability to deliver game experiences tailored especially for Western gamers.
…
In the graph below, the result of the uptake of Free-to-Play and mobile gaming is demonstrated: a higher share and absolute number of paying gamers, but a lower average in spending. The overall result in Western markets is a modest rise in total consumer spending on games. The outlook is positive as average spending is expected to rise, especially amongst the many ‘first-time spenders’.
2011 vs 2012 Gaming Stats. From: Key facts and insights on Cross-Screen Monetization of Games in Europe and the US.
Commit Point Five
I’ve been playing this little gem by Daniel Twomey which is great fun:
Commit Point Five – Click on image to play!
As well as this I’ve also been messing with Pursuit of Hat and Too Many Ninjas.
Our Experiments in 3D Printing and Video Games
Over at Red Wasp Design, we’ve been messing around with 3D printing. First off was trying to create a special Cthulhu mug which we used in a competition (its closed now?):
Cthulhu Mug (3D Printed)
Now making the mug was expensive, though the results were amazing. So next we used one of the ingame models of a Dark Young and the kind people over a Exeter University’s Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing printed some action figure samples off for us. Here’s the results:
Dark Young Action Figures
Dark Young Action Figure Close Up (Clear, made using a 3D Systems Projet 3000HD 3D printer in UV curable resin)
3D printing is an area of increasing interest to me. There are going to be lots of crossovers with gaming – they key is to find those places. We’re mulling over what to do with these. I think of them as like action figures, but given the cost of printing them, they can easily be mass-produced this way. So should we be thinking of more unique creations (like player characters) to be printed? Not sure but interesting to ponder.
PS. We posted the images on Red Wasp Design’s Facebook page too and they caused quite a stir!
Dark Young Action Figure Up Close (White, made using an EOS P100 selective laser sintering machine in white nylon)
Horses for Courses, Platforms and eBooks
I was reading this article on a new area of interest for me: eBooks and ePublishing:
In 1997, crime writer David Hewson published a novel called Epiphany. A literary thriller with a time-shifting narrative, it got good reviews and sold well. A few years later he wrote Native Rites, a more conventional horror story with a straightforward plot. This sold far fewer copies and was remaindered within a year.
But Hewson had a soft spot for Native Rites and eventually decided to self-publish it as an ebook. He did the same with Epiphany. To his surprise, Native Rites has been the bigger hit, outselling Epiphany by three to one. Musing on why, Hewson posits a theory: is e-reading better suited to simple, linear narratives than it is to complex, more literary fiction?
We’ve seen some of these same ‘platform’ difference between console and PC and mobile where a game on one does well in one place and not another. For example Warzone 2100, which did well on PS1 and not so well on PC, though it reviewed well on both. There are also design/content differences that matter between platforms too, which links to how well it does.
US Gamer Profile Moves Towards Mobile
This is interesting, about the changes in the profile of US gamers:
The NPD Group today announced that there are about 211.5 million gamers in the US, which is down five percent compared to last year. The firm’s newest report, Gamer Segmentation 2012: The New Faces of Gamers, notes that of the six gamer segments outlined, only Mobile Gamers and Digital Gamers saw increases in the number of gamers when compared to 2011, with Mobile Gamers up 9 points to 22 percent and Digital Gamers up 4 points to 16 percent.
Importantly, Mobile Gamers now represent the largest gamer segment, ahead of Core Gamers, which was the largest segment in 2011. NPD also said that the Family+Kid gamers segment experienced the most significant decline of an estimated 17.4 million gamers.
Most outlets have gone on the drop of the total number of gamers in the US, which given how much the population has grown year-after-year is not that big of a deal:
NPD analyst Anita Frazier says these shifts in the gamer segments aren’t surprising, considering the longer life cycles of the current home console generation, and the increasing installed base of smartphones and tablets.
Gaming For Everyone & Game Accessibility
There is a great guy, Ian Hamilton, who’s been promoting the important idea about making games more accessible. I came across him during the last Global games Jam where we were encouraging developers to consider accessibility issues as they made games. Ian and others really pushed the issue:
With gaming becoming a more popular and pervasive form of entertainment, accessibility issues are starting to be recognised and tackled by the professional game development community. “There are four types of disability – visual, hearing, cognitive and motor,” says Hamilton. “By knowing and thinking about these groups upfront, game designers can easily avoid the barriers that may have prevented gamers with disabilities being able to enjoy playing.
“Even a simple thing, like choosing blue instead of green for a team colour, as Treyarch recently did with their colour-blind friendly mode for Call of Duty: Black Ops, can make your game playable by significant swathes of the population that would otherwise have had great difficulty. The red/green colourblindness that Treyarch addressed affects 8% of males, meaning they were finally able to tell their team-mates from their enemies.”
Hamilton reckons a big part of the challenge is helping developers to recognise that greater accessibility doesn’t necessarily mean masses of extra development time or resources. “Fully functioning and accessible games being produced in the space of 48 hours is a really powerful demonstration that accessibility doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult,” he says. “Also, the results are often great examples of nice simple design principles that can be applied across the industry.”
So at the Bristol event we were organising, we added a special prize for acessibility to spur the developers on; and there is more on the winner here.
Super Space Snakes in Space – an Accessible Game!
Building on this Ian has been developing more information for developers to help them understand the issue:
15-20% of gamers are disabled (PopCap). Other conditions that aren’t registered disabilities can also hit barriers. 15% of the adult population have a reading age of below 11 years old (NCES / BIS), 8% of males have red-green colour deficiency (AAO), and many people have temporary impairments such as a broken arm. Many more have situational impairments such as playing in a noisy room or in bright sunlight, and all players have different levels of ability – there’s no ‘typical gamer’.
This is all now stored at the resource: gameaccessibilityguidelines.com – we used these documents for Gamify Your PhD and will be including the information in all the game jams we run from now on. It’s also been great to see good media coverage of the issue, e.g. this from RPS.
My Article on GamesIndustry.biz: Store Wars
I’ve got another article up over at GamesIndustry.biz – this time looking at the ongoing battle for consumer and developer’s digital attention:
The business side of our industry used to be a fairly simple, if a little insular, affair. Developers made games for publishers who sold them in shops. Job done. However just as technology enabled our industry to exist, it also inevitably grows to complicate it. The business side of our industry has blossomed into a complex ecosystem of developers, publishers, platforms, stores and much more. This means that while overall the industry is growing in size, it also means it is growing in complexity too. The struggle for shelf space in shops like GAME or Virgin Megastore has been replaced by an infinite digital shelf of bewildering choice. Ironically it is the very success of these digital stores that powers our future which is also creating a new set of challenges. As a developer I feel it’s key to understand the store wars that are raging around us and how we will either be players or pawns in its future.
Gamers as Digital Scientists
I did a Q&A for new PC games site PCgamesN recently about my work at Wellcome and games and science in general:
I mean, ultimately, if you think about what a player does when they play a game they are using the scientific method, I mean they get dropped into a game on the first level, you don’t know the rules of this new world, so what you have to do is trial and error to figure it out, and by trial and error you construct a set of rules in your head “If I touch this object I die, whereas if I jump over it I’m OK” and ultimately they are constructing a series of rules to help them navigate that world. And really, that’s what science does. It’s by trial and error, by experimentation we construct a series of rules that allow us to understand and engage with the natural world.
This is really picking up on a fascinating bit of research about gamers, exploration and the scientific method:
A study by Steinkuehler & Duncan (2008) took a random sample of just over 1000 forum posts from an online discussion space devoted to the game World of Warcraft and subjected them to a rigorous analysis to understand what and how discussions unfolded. (Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game set in a Lord-of-the-Rings-esque world where players adventure in their tens of thousands.) Steinkuehler & Duncan were interested in what players were discussing on the forums and what methods they used in their discussions. Surprisingly, only 8 per cent of discussions were social banter – the vast majority were about understanding the virtual world and the player’s role in it. Analysing a sample of the posts, the researchers found that many of the posts fitted the descriptions of the ‘scientific habit of mind’.
–
Tech Blogging & Transparency
The Guardian has an interesting story up that raises issues of blogging and transparency:
The incidents have exposed a dark underbelly to technology reporting and blogging – in which companies offer rewards to bloggers, who often do not acknowledge that they are writing posts not for their news value to readers, but because they want to get free products and even trips. Not disclosing such motives is against Advertising Standards Authority rules laid down in 2009, as well as the consumer protection law, as shown by a 2010 investigation by the Office of Fair Trading against a company called Handpicked Media.
Quiqueré, who has been a “brand ambassador” for Samsung since 2010, was told she had won a competition to come at the company’s expense to the Olympics in London in August, along with a group of bloggers. She went expecting to be a guest at events, because Samsung was a major sponsor of the Olympics, for which it paid more than $100m.
Instead the group found that the six-day trip involved barely any visits to events. Instead they were meant to create promotional videos and photos, and fill out daily reports on what they had done. They were also instructed to upload videos of promotional events to their personal YouTube accounts – an instruction that Quiqueré resisted strongly. She says that by the end of the five-day trip she saw two events – a table-tennis semifinal and a volleyball eliminator. “We didn’t have the chance to see the Olympic stadium or participate [in] other festive events related to the Olympics,” Quiqueré complained. “The most embarrassing thing is the surreal feeling of being trapped.”
People blog for all sorts of reasons; fun, money, interest. Mine is a mixture of interest and work, in that my blog is a window into who I am and I use it to promote projects I do. I’ve always been very clear about that and I have a disclosure section at the bottom of the About page covering this. But regardless of what I’m working on, my blog is my voice. I only blog about what interests me and I’m the only editor of what I choose to run. I do get approached by companies and individuals asking me to run stories and my general policy is to turn them down, as this is my space. I have no problem with bloggers advocating for things they care about or like – indeed that is the point of much blogging I see.
The key however is transparency. Readers need to know where you are coming from and so understand what you write in that context.
Over at Red Wasp Design were were in the beta test group for Greenlight and so Call of Cthulhu:The Wasted Land launched with Greenlight as a game you can vote for. So if you want to see more Cthulhu on Steam (and who wouldn’t?) head over there and vote for us! (You need a Steam account, but they are free and well worth having.)
Support us by voting for Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land onto Steam! (Image: Cthulhu Awakening Front Poster by John F Sebastian)
We also made a new trailer for the game to celebrate the release!
A Great Becoming... 