Free Video Games News

• The problem with short form games
• A new definition of value
• The game mechanics of retention

The problem with short form games

• Players fall in love with the portal:  Players start thinking of Addicting Games or Newgrounds as a go to source of entertainment, not NinjaKiwi or Sean Cooper. 
• Little long term love for the game: Games are treated as disposable moments in the broader experience of wasting an evening surfing a game portal.  Some may provide brief burst of joy, but this just reinforces the appeal of the portal.   
• Dominant aggregators exercise editorial control. The terminology is ‘portfolio management’ or ’selecting titles that match our audience’.  The effect is the same.  Dominant aggregators often apply effective pressure to developers to make what the aggregators desire and in turn disconnect developers from the real needs of the customers.  Though well intentioned, editorial efforts typically results in a reduction of consumer choice, an elimination of innovative outliers and a suppression of disruptive business models.  Currently Flash portals are quite open, but these behaviors are beginning to creep into practices of some like Addicting Games and MiniClip. 
• Lack of trust in the game developer:  When the developer asks directly for money, the customers runs away.  It is like the clown at the circus asking you to pay after you already paid an entrance fee.  The customer doesn’t know the clown is starving.  They naturally assume that they are just part of the show.  Clowns asking for money = creepy; Flash game developers asking for money = creepy. 

Note on payment services and trust
The concept of paying for Flash games is still new to players. Payment services like HeyZap or MochiCoins see this as one of the major issues to creating microtransaction games. They attempt to solve the problem of developer trust by creating heavily branded and marketed payment services. The implicit message is “You don’t trust the starving clowns, but you can trust us!” 

Game developers currently judge the success of their games on several poor metrics:

• Game ratings on portals: Players on a particular portal rate the game usually on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Highly rated games are given more traffic by the portals. With this particular rating system, games with overly long introductions that deliver value late in the play session are at risk of being bailed on by easily bored players. Inevitably these players rate games with a 0. This creates a natural incentive to deliver as much easy value as possible in as short a time as possible. It ends up being cheaper to produce a 3-minute ‘complete’ experience that earns a 5-rating than it is to create a 60-minutes experience that earns the same rating. 
• Number of ‘plays’: The other metric developers care about is how many they serve. This metric over emphasizes the importance trial players who click the link, but don’t play the game. The metric spikes up when your game spread throughout the various portals and drops off rapidly there after. Again, there is no incentive to make games with depth. Instead you want a new title with a catchy intro that gets people watching that ad. Putting effort into anything longer doesn’t improve your numbers. 
• Weekly and Daily Top 10 lists: Portals put up list that highlight the best new content for the week or day. These acts as a means of letting games bask in the public gaze and are highly coveted both for their traffic and their implied status. However, games quickly fall off these lists and the only way to get back on is by releasing a new game. This encourages developers to release often in order to get as many shots at the spotlight as possible.

These are horrible feedback systems.  They provide an incomplete and inaccurate views of player behavior. They have little to to do with whether or not players love your game.  They have little to do with you creating a long term engaging experience. A mildly humorous 30-second animation about ninja bunnies is just as likely to garner a coveted high rating on Newgrounds as the next Fantastic Contraption.  The first is disposable content.  The second is a viable indie business.  The current Flash ecosystem does not differentiate. 

I initially couldn’t imagine that developers were optimizing their games based of such anemic and poisonous feedback. It is the equivalent of going on a diet because the fun house mirror makes you look fat. And yet…

One of my more shameful habits is to lurk on forums and watch how developers react to one another’s game statistics.  I’m not proud of my voyeurism, but I find the display of implicit cultural values fascinating.  Developers who have a large number of plays (over 10 million) are lionized.  Other developers are constantly fixated on if their game will score a 4 or higher on the portal ratings.  Any Flash development forum you visit has the same conversations happening again and again.  Even worse, smaller portals robotically copy the top ten lists of larger portals, putting poor filtered products on pedestals throughout the distribution system. The result is that new developers find that there are both benefits to their reputation in the community as well as (meager) financial benefits to focusing on short form games. 

If you put a man in a dark room and place a candle at the other end of the room, he will walk towards the candle.  It matters not if there are bags of gold off to the side or poisonous snakes lying in his path.  If developers could have a brighter source of information, they could see how many opportunities they are missing in their blind pursuit of short form games.  

1. Fun: Are players having fun? Do they love your game?
2. Retention: Are players sticking around and coming back for more?
3. Money: Are players willing to pay you for your game?

If you build a game where you can objectively answer “Hell, yes!” to all those questions, you’ve got a game that will pay the bills and delight your players.     

• Narrative, story, and cut scenes exhibit “rapid burnout”.  In other words, player see them one or twice and then are bored when they see them again.  Games that rely on such content have generally low retention metrics.  You can mitigate this by releasing new narrative content on a regular basic to keep the product ‘fresh’, but this has a high cumulative cost. 
• Linear levels or solvable puzzles also exhibit rapid burnout.  Game systems that can be completed or conquered are usually one shot activities.  You can layer additional challenges within each level, but often only expert players will be motivated to come back for a second play through.             
• Some handcrafted content like text or static images can be refreshed cheaply:  The type of handcrafted content you include makes a huge difference on the slope of your increasing costs.  New text-based questions in a trivia game are relatively cheap compared to creating new God of War levels.  An hour of text-based content is likely several orders of magnitude cheaper to build.  
• Social content is low burnout: People will keep interacting with their friends for years.  Mechanics that can tap into this often have very high retention rates.  Anything that allows players to chat, share and form social identities in a community is pure gold.  
• Grinding results in burnout, but it slows the process. Techniques like leveling or purchasing upgrades can dramatically increase the length of the game for very little development and design costs.  Think of grinding as method of stretching, but not adding to your content.  Grinding techniques only delay the inevitable.  They can result in lower fun scores as people feel obligated to play, but aren’t enjoying the process of playing.  Since you want people to fall in love, such a reaction can be counter productive to your goals. 
• User generated content systems are low burnout: User generated content is ultimately a social system that encourages users to create consumable puzzles.  The puzzles themselves may be short lived, but the community of creators can thrive for decades. This solves the problem of the linearly increasing cost of more handcrafted content by apply large numbers of people working for free. 
• Algorithmic content has low burnout, but is hard to create and balance: Evergreen mechanics like Bejeweled or random map generation in Nethack keep people playing for hours.  However, they are tricky to invent and balance.

An example of a high retention game is one like Puzzle Pirates that has social (avatar, chat, guilds), grinding (levels) and evergreen algorithmic content (puzzles).  There is some light narrative in the form of periodic events and very little in the form of conquerable level design.  Most games have a mix of all these various types of content and successful services almost always put a portion of their reoccurring revenue towards a steady trickle of low marginal cost handcrafted content.  However, a high retention game designs tend to emphasize content with less burnout. 

Within these new constraints on your game design lies an opportunity. In my humble opinion, algorithmic and social content lies at the heart of what makes games such an amazing media.  If the goal of creating a game that players fall in love with requires that developers are constrained to exploring these two thrilling topics more deeply, so be it. 

I personally find it exciting that there are strong financial justifications for encouraging game developers to invest in areas of expression that are wholly unique to games. Games that rely primarily on plot, graphics and disposable levels are bad business in a world where games thrive as high retention services. Now you have justification to say, “Sorry, that cut scene you wanted is a high burnout feature. We’ll make more money by improving our game mechanics and investing in additional community features.”

• Are you ignoring bad metrics like portal ratings?
• Are you measuring the holy triumvirate of value: fun, retention, money?
• Are you collecting real customer data?
• Does your game score 4 out of 5 on the fun scale?
• Do players return after a week?
• Is your game design amendable to high retention play?
• Are you iterating on your game and improving your game as measured by internal metrics?  Have you figured out the big levers that affect player experience?
• Do you know when you are done? Do you know when you’ve reached the point where your game has proven value to your players? 
• Are you willing to bail on the game if it doesn’t show signs of improvement?
• Are you striving to be the primary provider of value to your customers?

Take care

What this tells me is that other business models involving selling games on the Internet are several orders of magnitude more effective at making money from an equivalent number of customers. When your means of making money is 1/100th as efficient as money making techniques used by other developers, maybe you’ve found one big reason why developers starve when they make Flash games.  

Time gates	Players can play for some period of time and then they are locked out until until they pay.  For example, players could play for 45 minutes – 1 hour (effective free trial times in the casual space) and then pay to play longer.
Content gate	Players play an initial teaser portion of the game for free and then pay to unlock access to additional content. For example, players could pay to unlock all the levels in a game.  This is how many shareware titles worked.
Aesthetic items	Players purchase non-gameplay additions that increase their identity or status.  For example, players could pay to give their character a cool outfit that they can show off to their friends.
Abilities	Sell unique abilities that let players experience the game in a new way.  For example, players could purchase new jumping boots that let them fly through levels in a way that let’s them re-experience the game all over again.
Bundles	Virtual items can be bundled together to create additional value.  For example, if people love buying food for their virtual pet, let them buy a 10 pack of food for a 30% discount.
Consumables	Some abilities can expire after a period of time or after a number of uses.  For example, you could buy a potion that increases your strength, but you can drink from it 3 times.  Also known as “item rentals.”
Subscriptions	If certain abilities or bonus are a valuable long term, consider charging a reoccurring fee.   For example, you could offer extra storage for advanced players, but charge a monthly fee.
Stackable subscriptions	If certain abilities are additive(such as an experience or currencies multiplier), let players buy multiples of the same thing.
Rare items	Limit the number of items available so that players feel special when they purchase it.
Time limited items	Offer some items for short periods of time so that players feels that they lucked out finding the product in time.
Sale items	Set a standard pricing system for items and then offer some items for sale.  This works great with time limited offers. Again, players love to get deals.
Gifts	Players seek to maintain social bonds by gifting other players with items or abilities.
Accelerators	Many games have a ‘grind’ that artificially lengthens the game. Players with little time are willing to purchase items that let them reduce or eliminate the time consuming activities in the game.
Physical goods	T-shirts and other branded items

Some things to consider: 

• Margin: How much does the payment service take?  The payment company is providing you with a service and deserves to be paid.  However, you’ll find that some companies take 10% and others take upwards of 75%.  Companies pitch various bundled services such as storage or fraud protection as justification for their increased fees. Some companies will also share some of the margin with portals in return for them carrying the games. Shop around and be honest with the trade off you are making.  Remember you’d need to get 5 times as much traffic to makes the same amount of money if you pick a service with a 50% margin vs a 10% margin. 
• Processing fees: Most Flash payment systems are simply a repackaging of non-Flash payment services with a pretty UI and a bigger margin tacked on top.  The existing payment services already takes a chunk of the user’s money in the form of ‘processing fees’  Ask if the advertised payment company margin is inclusive or additional to the existing ‘processing fees’.  A 30% margin seems reasonable, until you realize that it is on top of an existing 50% margin for a mobile provider.  I like to ask “If the customer pays $10 on their credit card or phone, how much cash ends up in my bank account?” 
• White box or branded?: Some services like Super Rewards can be reskinned so that they are transparent to the end user.  Until the player enters into the actual payment portion of the process, they feel like the stores and such are part of the game.  Services like Noboba and MochiCoins are heavily branded with the payment company’s logo.  Their goal is to get the customer to invest their trust in them, the payment provider.  The downside is that customers don’t invest as much trust in you, the game developer. 
• Customer registration?: In order to track customers and their purchases, you’ll want a secure login system.  Some payment services let you build your own.  Others require you to use theirs so that they can control the primary relationship with the customer.  Often these services will not release customer lists to the developer.  This becomes a problem long term if you release multiple games and want to run cross promotions. 
• Storage support: Once players purchase an item or feature, they’ll want to have access to their stuff when they sign back in.  This means your game will need online storage and a server back end.  Some payment services offer this as part of the package, which is great for the common situation where the developer doesn’t know much about back end programming. 
• Lock-in: Do you have the ability to easily switch to another payment service?  In general, the more comprehensive solutions with customer make it more difficult to switch.  With some comprehensive services, capturing customers is more valuable than your money.  You only provide cash for a single game, but a customer can be sold and resold dozens of times to dozens of games.  Run far, far away from such companies since their best business interests are not aligned with your best interests. 

We are in the early stages of the Flash payment market.  Often new game developers will unthinkingly jump on the first service that they happen across.  In this low information environment, payment services can charge unreasonably high margins and very few developers will complain. Many will be excited to give away 50% of their money because they weren’t earning any money previously. 

A payment provider should be a reliable commodity service, not a major business partner. Over time, I predict we’ll see more transparency and competition which should drive down prices.  The ideal payment service is one with low margins, low switching costs, no branding and APIs that let you cheaply and easily tie into generic, developer controlled login and storage services.  This will come about as a competitive market works its magic, but until then the opportunists are out in full force and Flash developers will pay a premium for their ignorance.  By asking, comparing, and publicly publishing information about margins, developers can encourage payment providers to compete openly and honestly. 

The good new is that some generic payment systems are cheap to hook up to your Flash game and allow for experimentation.  On one project, we used SuperRewards and reskinned their front end to it fit nicely into our game.  They charge 20% margin on all purchases, but we can now transparently swap in primary payment provider for credit cards, mobile etc.  By mixing and matching we can build a payment front end that makes us more money.  We own our own virtual currency and we own our customer data.  

This was accomplished with one programmer in 2 weeks of work and can be reused across multiple games.  Such a path isn’t for everyone, especially if you lack web programming skills.  However, with a little elbow grease, you can tap existing, proven, generic payment services to roll your own with very little downside. 

• Bad reputation: Many Flash game developers are not in it for the money, but to be part of the indie community. The threat of a poor reputation can be frightening. The truth is that modest, self effacing developers that find financial success are worshiped like heroes. Just ask Colin of Fantastic Contraption how he was received at GDC.  If you are worried about your reputation, stop starving yourself into hipness.  Instead create great games and be generous to others. A good reputation follows naturally. 
• Players complaining: So what if you end up being hated by a few kids that feel entitled to free stuff?  It isn’t the end of the world. Usually the money and thanks from delighted customers more than make up for a few sour grapes tossed about on dark and skanky corners of the Internet. 
• Bad rankings: It is true that players will occasionally mark down paid games out of ignorance and spite. Luckily there is a solution.  If you offer real value to customers in love with your game, your fan’s rapturous applause will drown out whiners.  Players, in aggregate, tend to forgive great games, even if they need to pay for them. 
• Sponsors: Sponsors don’t want the game they serve competing directly with their primary source of revenue, ads. If you can promote that your premium game results in better player engagement and repeat plays, most portals will happily take their cuts of the resulting ad revenue and leave you to monetize your customers.  A smaller number will worry that your premium content will pollute their ‘free’ label.  An even smaller number will be greedy and ask for a cut of your hard earned customer revenue.  In the short term, you can ignore demanding portals.  The market is highly fragmented (30,000 portals!) and no portal owns more than 5% of the players.  At this point in the market, developers have the ability to walk away from the greedy minority.  Suggest reasonable terms where portal keep their existing ad revenue and you keep all in game revenue.  If they balk, leave the bastards to rot.