(Update Wed, Aug 31 2011: this post is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to share this content or adapt it in any non-commercial work as long as you attribute me as a source. See the license for more details.)

Setting goals

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m directing New Game, a conference about HTML5 game development. One of my goals for New Game was always to have a good gender balance in terms of speakers — namely, I was hoping for somewhere between 5 and 7 of our 12 speakers at my technical game dev conference to be women. Sounds like a pipe dream, but it was an early goal of mine. Because I’m not going to run a talk that isn’t good (regardless of gender of the speaker), I knew that I needed to make sure that I had a bunch of women apply in order for me to achieve my goals. (Note that my definition of “good” is not “has lots of speaking experience” — rather, I’m looking for awesome topics. I’m willing to give a new speaker a chance, otherwise I’m pulling from the ‘experienced speakers’ pool, which is, not suprisingly, mostly men. This rule applies to newbie male speakers too, though. It’s just good practice, IMO.)

Also, in case anyone bothers to just read the headline of this article: this is not about ‘affirmative action’ (or whatever you want to call it) in any way. This is about encouraging more women to apply to speak at New Game — what I tried this year, and what I might be able to try next year to allow this to happen. With more women applicants, I’ll have more awesome sessions led by women to choose from.

What I tried, and the results

While I put out the call for speakers through the normal channels, I also posted on the IGDA Women in Games mailing list encouraging people to apply. I personally reached out to 5 female HTML5 game devs I knew (or knew of) to apply to speak. I also reached out to women in tech that I knew who I suspected might be able to introduce me to women HTML5 game devs that I’d never met.

In the end we had 72 submissions. Of those, 5 (6.9%) were women, at least as far as I could tell by their names, and attempting to verify via their website or twitter account if they had a bio there. Of the 5 women who applied, 1 was one I invited personally, so I had 4 ‘organic’ applications; i.e., women who submitted just because they saw my posts through normal publicity channels. (I was tracking invitees from the WIG list, and I had no takers there.)

Of the 5 women who applied, 4 did not rate highly enough by our advisory board to get on the schedule. This is to be expected: with 10 slots (plus 2 invited keynotes) to fill out of 70 applicants, you’d expect 13% to make it into the top 10, which means either 0 or 1 talk out of a pool of 5 women, maybe 2 if you account for some serious variance in there.

So I was left with one female speaker to put on my schedule. I ended up with 2 male keynotes, 8 male speakers, and 1 female speaker. I ended up holding one slot because I really, really wanted to have at least 2 women speakers. I reached out to more women developers, people who I could be confident would do a good job, using as a guideline my best discretion as an experienced conference organizer and someone who’s attended and spoken at dozens of game dev conferences over the last decade. I’m currently finalizing the speaker for that last slot — assuming everything works out, we’ll have 2 women speakers on our roster of 12.

One other thing that I’m trying for the conference itself is that I’ve instituted an official New Game anti-harassment policy, which is an idea that I learned about from female developers I follow on Twitter. It seems like a good idea, not just for women, but for everyone. I figure that if I make the conference a safer place for women (and avoid talks that use sexist language and/or imagery), I might attract more women to attend next year, or at least avoid repelling women from attending in the future! The language I use in the policy is based on the excellent template available at the Geek Feminism Wiki. I encourage other conference directors to follow suit.

What can I do better next year?

So, 16.6% women speakers is not horrible — it (sadly) is closer to gender parity than many tech conferences out there, but I know I must have missed some steps here. What can I do next time to encourage more women to apply? What are some groups besides IGDA Women in Games that I can reach out to to promote the event? For that matter, how could I encourage more diversity overall? I’m not just trying to reach beyond male speakers — I’m trying to reach beyond the straight white male speaker (of which I am one) who typically dominates tech industry events.

Again, my goal is to have a more diverse group of people apply to speak at New Game next year. Consider me naive if you want, but I’m pretty sure that a diverse group of applicants will provide a diverse group of awesome talks that I can put on the schedule.

On finding women speakers for New Game by Darius Kazemi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at tinysubversions.com.

Every year for the last four years I have co-run (with Scott Macmillan) an unconference in Boston called GameLoop. It’s a self-organizing conference where there’s no set agenda: everyone shows up and figures out what to talk during a one-hour organizational session at the start of the day. I could write a whole post about how we organized it, but for now I want to collect the notes from the sessions that I attended.

The "big board" schedule for GameLoop 2011. Click for giant, full-size, readable image.

What is an outsider game?

This was the session I ran. There are a bunch of games that I really like, but don’t have a word for. Things like The war of the end of the days, which is an objectively bad Xbox Live Indie Game that is made by someone who is clearly learning how to make 3D games. Because this person doesn’t really understand things like texturing and shading, he accidentally causes the player to experience mind-bending vertigo at times, which is super-interesting to me and one of the reasons why I like the game so much.

I am tempted to call these things “outsider games” as in “outsider art,” but the phrase “outsider games” doesn’t really sit well with me for any number of reasons. I organized this session to help myself get a better handle on whether it’s a valid label or not. Some notes from our discussion:

• A lot of this hinges of awareness of convention, in terms of both design convention and technical convention. For example, Xbox Live Indie Games, although they are not reviewed by Microsoft, are reviewed by a community before being placed on the service. The community will not allow games that have console-crashing bugs. As a result, a game like The war of the end of the days is not buggy, per se. It just has an overall bad user experience — which is mostly design convention. When it eschews technical convention, you get things like the untextured single color flat polygon labyrinth that is incredibly confusing and interesting to navigate even though the labyrinth itself is only the size of a 20×20 room and could be completed in seconds were it textured and lit properly.
• Some asked whether there was a bias in the medium: in order to make a game that even runs you need some level of technical competency. Compare it to painting, where even a child can perform the basic mechanics of putting pigment on paper. The argument was something like, “Bad games are hard enough to make that game creators are by necessity not outsiders as they’ve had to do some research and be aware of conventions.” I don’t buy this at all: I’ve seen 10-year-olds create perfectly playable stuff in GameMaker. Also, technical competency does not mean it’s not outsider art: many outsider and folk artists show very high levels of technical competency.
• Can someone be “outsider” if they’re making money off their product? The answer to that was a firm “yes,” particularly if you’re looking at the model of outsider music.
• Clara Fernandez-Vara pointed us to this article by Joel Goodwin about the game programmer Bill Williams, who had a terminal diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, and whose disease informed every game he made until his death in 1998.

Mental health

This was the highlight of GameLoop for me. This was the highlight of any GameLoop I’ve ever put on, and indeed, probably the best conference session I’ve ever attended.

The session was hosted by Ray Merkler, who is one of the GameLoop Philly organizers. Ray (who gave me permission to talk about this) is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and opened the session talking about his experiences with trying to be an employee, develop games, and manage his mental health.

It was a small group of people: about a dozen of us, maybe five of whom I’ve known for years. The discussion ended up touching on a few topics:

• People’s own experiences dealing with their mental health issues and the workplace.
• How workplaces (particularly the in game industry) can exacerbate mental health problems.
• Ways in which employers can help create a work environment where employees are able to manage their mental health.

We heard from people who can’t conform to a traditional 9-5 work schedule. For example, they can be extremely productive 2-3 days a week, but the other days they just can’t do anything. They get all their work done on time, but because they’re not always “looking productive,” they’re often targeted as bad workers.

One developer said that he absolutely needs physical exercise at 7pm every day or he’ll start to spiral down in terms of both his own health and his productivity. During crunch, while everyone is staying late to work, he gets up and leaves for 90 minutes and comes back to the office sweaty to keep working. Fortunately, he’s talked to his employer about this, and they understand that’s it’s just something he has to do. But I can imagine that it must have been difficult to have that conversation, and I know for a fact that there are employers out there who would not stand for such a thing.

My main reason for attending was to hear how employers can create better environments for employees. My big takeaways:

• Make sure the healthcare plan you offer has a mental health plan, and communicate that very clearly to new employees. Remind current employees periodically. Some healthcare plans can provide you with brochures that you can distribute to employees.
• Create an environment where employees spend time with each other. Something as simple as a culture where people eat together, rather than at their desks, can help employees forge relationships and provide each other mutual support. For one thing, as an employer you can’t say to an employee “Hey, we think you have mental health problems, you should get that checked out,” but a coworker and friend may be able to talk to them about it.
• Also, don’t stop at lunch. There can be other activities, and they should be diverse. Just because your company has beer on Fridays doesn’t mean that activity appeals to everyone. Mix it up. Try a picnic or a movie or a game night.
• If you can be flexible on work hours, that can be an enormous boon. For example, certain medications like antidepressants can screw with your sleep cycle. Being able to work a shifted schedule is a huge benefit. In a similar vein, you should consider allowing employees to work from home if possible.

What was most interesting about the session was that it ended up being about quality of life issues, but not in the tired “do we unionize or not?” sense. It was a far more personal QoL discussion, and I think as a result it was far more effective.

I also loved this session because it’s exactly the kind of thing that you would never, ever see at GDC.

Jeff Ward teaches people about Google Native Client.

Making and porting games to HTML5

This was a nice session in that most people in the room had already at least done a little bit of HTML5 work. As a result it ended up as a technically deeper discussion than the usual “what is HTML5 and how do I use it?” stuff. I don’t remember much, though I did talk through a lot of the performance metrics I’ve been taking on our WebGL port of Fieldrunners. I also introduced people to UglifyJS (web version here) as a really great JavaScript compressor and obfuscator.

Uncomfortable games

The last session I attended was organized by JP Grant. We began by going around the room and talking about uncomfortable moments in gaming. There were about 30 people in the room, so it took a while, but in the end things seemed to boil down to a few categories of discomfort. The most prevalent one was what JP called “body horror” — things from disturbing Giger-esque images to experiences like suffocating in your own gas mask in Metro 2033. There was also a lot of social discomfort: griefing someone and feeling good about it (and feeling awful about that), noticing that a friend playing GTA4 is maybe a bit more of a sociopath than you had expected, and “any interaction with a guild, ever.” I didn’t take great notes, but I know someone took a picture of the whiteboard. If it gets posted somewhere I’ll link it here.

Thanks to Dan Silvers, for the following image of the whiteboard:

I’m proud to announce that I’m directing New Game Conference, an HTML5 conference for game developers. It’ll be in San Francisco on November 1st and 2nd. The conference is presented by Bocoup with Google as our major partner/sponsor. Please keep an eye on the website and our Twitter feed for more info in the coming weeks!

Last week I attended the IGDA Leadership Forum, which is an excellent conference put on by the IGDA that is focused on production, management, and leadership best practices. I won’t provide a full review here but I agree with everything in Brett Douville’s review. You really ought to go next year.

Anyway, one of the evening events I attended was the IGDA Foundation’s charity dinner to benefit the Romero Archives. It was a can’t-miss chance to listen to John Romero interview Will Wright about his own history and his development process. Towards the end they opened up the floor for questions.

I asked, “When you’re building a prototype, a lot of the times it can exist purely as numbers in a simulation. But at some point we want to show that prototype and get its point across so that another human being can understand it. Is there a sweet spot in terms of the level of art assets in terms of the minimum amount needed to aid the understanding of the other person?”

Unfortunately, Wright didn’t seem to understand the question. He seemed to think I meant the amount of art you need to show a prototype to an executive to get a green light, and his answer was (correctly, given the question he thought he was answering), “Don’t use a prototype to sell to an executive. There are better uses of your time.” What I really wanted to know was how much art effort he puts in to get an idea across to someone on the dev team, so that they understand what it is you’re prototyping.

I actually approached him after the talk and was waiting in line to clarify my question, but then the student in front of me shook his hand, introduced himself, and then literally said (I’m not paraphrasing): “I need a job.” Needless to say, Wright came up with some quick answer, grabbed his jacket, and got the hell out of there.

I figured I’d never get the answer I wanted. Later that night I was chatting up a really interesting guy who turned out to be Benjamin Taylor, the Art Director at Stupid Fun Club. As in: he works with Will Wright every day. He graciously offered to give my question a try, and when I repeated it to him, he lit up:

“Oh, I know the answer to that one. See, it’s not really about figuring out the minimum amount of art that’s needed to get the point of a prototype across. It’s about figuring out the maximum amount of art you can add to a prototype before it stops enhancing the prototype and starts detracting from it.“

Wow. Ben gave me exactly the answer I was looking for, and it was an answer just a bit outside of my own mental model of the solution space to my own question.

It’s quietly mind-blowing moments like those that are the reason I attend small conferences like the IGDA Leadership Forum. (In fact, you can read about a similar moment that Jamie Fristom had at the same conference.) Small conferences allow you to have fairly long, in-depth conversations like the one I had with Ben that lead to brilliant little a-ha moments. The hustle and bustle of a giant conference like GDC makes that a lot less likely, though it certainly does happen from time to time.

I’ve been running an unconference called GameLoop with my friend Scott Macmillan every summer for the last two years. If you’re reading this, you should totally come to this year’s GameLoop on August 28, 2010 in Cambridge, MA, USA.

GameLoop is a day-long unconference. If you’re not familiar with the term, it means that it’s a conference where there’s no set agenda until the day of the event. It’s self-organizing: we show up and spend a couple of hours figuring out what the topics of the day are going to be. It generally goes like this:

• 9am-10am: We gather up in a big room, introducing ourselves by name and listing three game dev topics we’re interested in.
• 10am-11am: We informally vote on proposed sessions and put those up on the big board.
• 11am: The conference begins!

We had some amazing sessions last year. Some of my favorites were Designer/Player Trust Building, Illusionary Gameplay (audio), Meaning in Games & Interactive Metaphor (audio), and Procedural Story & Emergent Narrative (audio). We cover topics besides game design, though: I led a session on the future of the Boston game industry, and a session on the IGDA. There were sessions in marketing and business models for indies (video), diversity in games, hardcore iPhone programming (shaders, 3D), music, subscription models, project management, hiring, and more!

Not only do you get a chance to learn, but you’re encouraged to participate as well! Most sessions end up being about 10 minutes of setup by a moderator, and then 30 minutes of discussion. It’s a really great way to dig into a meaty topic.

At GameLoop you’re likely to meet any number of AAA devs, indies, bloggers, journalists, and so on. It’s not even limited to people from the Boston area; last year only 60 of our 90 attendees came from Boston. The rest came from NYC, Albany, DC, Philadelphia, and even Los Angeles!

The $40 to register gets you breakfast, lunch, and a T-shirt. (It also helps me and Scott support ourselves as broke-ass indie freelancers.) Trust me when I say it’s completely worth it. You can register here. I hope to see you at GameLoop in August!

What follows is the notes I took on Corvus Elrod’s panel discussion on indie obstacles at LOGIN 2010. Any mistakes are my own!

–

Corvus Elrod, moderator: We have four panelists who are extraordinary in their own right. Andrew Stern of Stumptown Game Machine, released Touch Pets Dogs and also worked on Facade. Charles Berube has released an extraordinary number of quality Flash games, storytelling games, shmups, sidescrollers. Dylan Fitterer produced Audiosurf, available on Steam and on the Zune. Brian Green kept Meridian 59 alive for 9 years, bought the rights to an MMO that was being shut down and kept it alive for almost a decade.

CE: Andrew, what are some obstacles you’ve faced?

AS: one obstacle is the idea of staying indie in the first place. Actually my studio is in the process of being acquired so that’s an obstacle I’ve failed to overcome. There’s a whole host of challenges trying to make indie games. I began in the industry at PF Magic working on Dogz, Catz, in the 1990s. I learned how to develop games in a small startup kind of environment, and in 2000 I quit and went indie, self-funded, it was an ecstatic experience. Developing indie games and watching your bank account drift downward is an emotional roller coaster. One big obstacle for me was how to be able to fit indie dev into your life. I did a blend of consulting work as well as my own indie work. How you pay the rent is important.

CE: How does being acquired present challenges?

AS: One of the reasons we went along with the idea of being acquired was that it would give more resources to the group to build more stuff. Now the group is going to have to grow. I’m a designer/programmer DIY person. The idea of managing a team and being more hands-off is going to be a big adjustment for me. It remains to be seen how much freedom I’ll have although you definitely lose freedom once you start taking funding. It comes down to the relationship you have with the people who are funding you. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to keep going in that indie mode.

CE: Brian, you’ve done development under non-indie positions at 3DO.

BG: It was different from being indie, although when I was at 3DO I was on a small team of one or two people. Since we were such a small team we were kind of ignored, but there’s still the hierarchy and the bosses and being given resources. It was a learning experience working for a publisher. When I went on my own I didn’t have a safety net. I know how things are supposed to work but there are lots of business details that I have to know about: taxes, payroll, etc.

DF: I had an acquisition offer before Audiosurf was released, and it was a good offer, but I didn’t take it. I didn’t want to be a manager and I needed to see the project through.

Audience question: So the acquisition offer was more than you expected to make on the game and you turned it down?

DF: Yes, but I knew that there was the possibility that I could have made more money.

Audience: Did you get advice from a lawyer on the music IP issues around Audiosurf?

DF: Yes, I did.

BG: Not that I encourage anyone to break the law, but a lot of times people get paralyzed by legalities. On some level you need to barrel forward and hope for the best. You run some risk but risk is part of running a business.

CE: Charles has done a lot of Flash games and has tried to turn that into a living.

CB: The whole thing is one long terrible obstacle. I want to focus on the terrifying pressure that’s happening in iPhone, indie, etc. There’s a pressure to not cost any more than $0.99 or be free, and to be the best game out there, and to provide new content every week, and customer support, all financed by NOTHING. I’m concerned from a point of view where I’m trying to make a living, but also from a philosophical point. It troubles me that games are considered less valuable than a cup of coffee. I don’t know yet how to overcome that. I think microtransactions are an option.

Audience (Kim Pallister): What pressure? If you’re indie you set your own price.

CB: It would be nice to believe that you can set your own price but to compete in the app store you need to sift through an enormous number of cheap apps.

Audience/KP: Differentiation is hard, but a majority of the top grossing iPhone games don’t sell for $0.99 so it seems like the price drop is a last ditch tactic.

BG: Well the race to the bottom is about getting more sales to get on the top selling list. M59 was one of the first monthly subscription fee MMOs. The going price for a lot of games was $12-13/month. We went for $10.95/mo and we had continuous feedback from players that it was too much. I think there is that pressure that if you’re making a game that isn’t AAA you should charge less and somehow magically make money.

Audience/KP: I get the pressure to make that top 10 and not be below the fold. But all the guys dropping to $0.99 aren’t magically appearing on the top 10 list either.

CB: I agree with that, some of this pressure is perceived and may not be real on final analysis. But it’s a difficult thing to overcome when your bank account is hang gliding towards 0 and you see a community discussion that nobody is going to get something for free. And that I’m deleting an app without a weekly update.

Audience/KP: The latter part of your argument sounds like an issue people haven’t been talking about enough, that you’re selling once and acquiring a relationship that you need to turn into a business model.

Audience: Hi, I’m an independent developer, me and my boyfriend are the two people in the company. We released our first app and it was successful but it’s on Facebook and customer support alone is a full time job. Has anyone found a solution for this?

BG: Yeah, that’s a big obstacle for indies is turning something into a real business. We hired a co-founder’s brother to work for cheap on customer service. You have to find people who will work for you. Find interested game developers at your local IGDA meeting who want to get into games or are tired of the corporate life.

CE: This is an uneven playing field. We have individual developers who see the potential to make quality apps on iPhone or portals, who are competing with companies that have venture capital and full staffs. They’re putting 10 $0.99 apps out there and supporting the ones that do well. It’s both remarkable and terrifying that a two-person team can compete with Zynga. I know an iPhone developer who’s developed a great puzzle game and can’t even get people to review it. It’s tough to get over that barrier of perception.

AS: Even though the iPhone app store lets you self-publish, these perception problems are still there. Innovation plus promotion are what you need to do to get noticed.

BG: Or just dumb luck. A friend of mine sent an email to Rock Paper Shotgun and the person who read that email happened to like it and get front page featured. For indies sometimes you can get in on the ground floor of a new platform and find success. Timing is really important, sometimes good or bad things happen to you that you have no control over.

AS: My motto is I’ll try and make stuff, work part time as needed to fund it, can’t worry too much about whether the game will make any money.

CE: Touch Pets Dogs was one of the biggest budget iPhone games. It was featured in the OS 4.0 announcement.

AS: Our marketing was handled by ngmoco, so we had a big venture funded company trying to capitalize on the same marketplace indies are trying to compete with.

CE: In the day when games were all PC-based there was a variance in price. With consoles there are only a few tiers. Is there some psychology where people on iPhone will want to see a flat tier?

CB: You have set values you can choose for most distribution channels, not the same flexibilty where you can charge $17.98 or whatever. You have to pick a price point which defines everything you’re going to compete with.

BG: There’s a whole field of pricing psychology. One example from M59 was we came out with a daily/monthly/weekly subscription thing and little CDs that you put next to the checkout at game stores. When the CDs were free nobody touched them. When we started to charge for them people actually decided to pick up the CDs.

CE: You were one of the earlier indie games on Steam. Now there are tons of indie titles there. What light can you shed on your price point decision?

DF: They advised me to sell for $10 when I wanted to do $20, and convinced me on that price point.

Audience/KP: It’s interesting that you say they’re probably right, because you might have been an experiment to see how you would have worked at $10.

DF: I think everything with Valve is an experiment!

Audience: Our game was free and we made tons of money. We gained a loyal community of people we know on a first name basis who like to throw in $5 or $10.

CE: You leveraged the culture of being indies to play on that ethos.

Audience: We are very active on our discussion forums, it’s worked really well with the personal relationship aspect.

Kim Pallister: There’s a book called This Band Could Be Your Life, about how SoCal punk bands created their own distribution channels. All the zines and so on were fans they enlisted to market their games.

Audience: I’m curious as someone who’s a complete newbie here. What do the panelists think is the importance of festivals? Any tips or war stories around this?

AS: Festivals are a great place to meet other indie developers and potentially get your game noticed.

Audience: Have you been to PAX? The Behemoth sells so much merchandise directly to fans.

BG: One problem I’ve found on the indie side of things is that it feels more lonely. There’s no office for you to hang out in. The more opportunities you get to talk to other indie people, the better. I have a blog that I keep at psychochild.org that’s a great opportunity to talk with people.

CE: I know several people who have been IGF winners. It’s more than just submitting your game to a festival. There’s a culture around people who submit to IGF and you have to be a part of that culture. You need to not just design a game, but also talk about your philosophy of design, etc, so that when your game gets to IGF people know the developer and what you stand for. You’re building outreach to an audience beyond the game itself. The indie games that go on to win IGF are invariably people the community already know about who have an awesome game.

Audience: How do you incentivize people who are working with you?

CB: You offer them giant boxes of endless ramen noodles.

BG: I had a terrible time with that. I had M59 and wanted to work on my own projects for a while. I tried to incentivize people to work on my stuff. You find people, everything looks great, they’re part time, you ask them to not drop off the face of the earth. Two weeks later you just don’t hear from them ever again.

CE: I know some small studios who use internships and work with local schools. But you want to find someone who will seriously benefit from being in your creative culture, so you need to enrich volunteers or interns.

BG: You need to be careful about volunteers, you can be sued for minimum wage pay if the work is intrinsic to the company.

What follows is the notes I took on Osma Ahvenlampi’s talk at LOGIN 2010 about the last two years of running Habbo Hotel. Any mistakes are my own!

Most people know us from Habbo which is an international community, 32 countries in the world. We’ve been around for 10 years and gotten a lot of traffic. 172M registered characters, 16M unique browsers/month, 2M visits/day, 45M hours of play/month.

I’m going to talk about a combo of: basics on why we’ve focused on one single product for 10 years, a technical transition we made converting between platforms, and measuring player economics and secondary markets. Mostly will be talking about years 8 and 9 of Habbo.

Habbo is an environment where teens create their own environments and meet there to play with each other. Centered around “social play” which we coined before the big social game rush. It’s something other than goal-oriented gaming.

Two years ago I was talking about how we converted the company to do Agile development. Continuous reinvention on tech, design, and business. There was one major problem: we required Shockwave Player at the time, so we had to switch technologies. Exactly two years ago we started the project to switch platforms. We evaluated platforms based on easy-access, easy-play, had to browser based. We also looked at developer productivity and labor available. Finally we did care about performance of the platform on modest computers.

We considered Java (which is our serverside), Unity, and others, but in the end we went with Flash because of its install base and penetration. Certainly two years ago Flash was the only really viable platform.

Then we asked: are we going to do something else or are we going to continue with Habbo? We decided to replicate Habbo Hotel with new tech and convert our userbase. But aren’t we just risking our entire business by switching away from something people are already happy with? At the end of the day we figured that improving what we already have will be a much bigger payoff even though it would take a while to develop. In the first year, sticking with Habbo has the best results since we don’t start with 0 users and high risk.

We measure conversion rate, retention rate, and monetization rate. Conversion rate is “new returning users / new traffic.” Typical conversion for a new user to becoming returning traffic is 10%-40%. This metric is simple to measure.

Retention rate is a complex metric to measure because it’s not a ratio or a rate, it’s a flow metric. Superficially speaking it’s “of the people that visited your service in the last month, how many visit this month as well?” This helps you determine how many new users you have to get every month to replace who churned out last month. If the retention rate changes in a good or bad direction even a little bit it will make huge changes in your revenue. We expected to see a higher retention rate with Flash.

Monetization. We have ARPU which is average revenue per player, or per paying player (ARPPU). The bad thing about ARPU is that it reduces a number to an average, which hides the shape of your bell curve. In a free to play game your median player spends $0. Average revenue is higher than $0 since some people are paying. Anyway, changing the tech platform did not change our revenue distribution, but we didn’t expect it to.

Simple math: new traffic x conversion rate x (retention rate / months) x monetization rate = revenue. This is our forecasting tool for how much we need to spend on traffic acquisition. 2009 was a better year than 2008 for us in terms of a 21% traffic increase year-on-year. Our blog on sulake.com will have some numbers on revenue but 2009 was worse for us until we introduced some new monetization-focused features.

Transition to new tech was difficult. We had about 10 man-years on the client only, so we estimated about 6 man-years to write the new client. We usually only planned for a few months out so it was difficult to estimate for a year-long project. We had to do a new core client with a basic architecture in place, but it wasn’t so bad since we could copy the architecture from our old client. We had to write every feature again, create new tools for testing, a new asset pipeline that was compatible with our old assets, and a new deployment pipeline with new tools there. We expected to gain significant production efficiencies down the line from tool development.

We had a very small team for the core client, 3-6 people. Then we transitioned people out of the shockwave teams into developing more features in Flash. We left a small maintenance team for Shockwave during the transition period of a few months.

We decided to use the same server and protocol for both clients, which meant that we needed to rewrite part of the old Shockwave client. This wasn’t obvious at the beginning. There was seemingly a lot of waste in having to rewrite both clients just to ditch one, but the payoff was in testing. We had players in house testing on both clients playing on the same server, and we could verify that both groups of players could play with each other and that the clients looked the same and it didn’t make a difference which client was being used. We were able to test the Flash client against the live server as well.

Finally we decided to make no new features during the transition. Only UI improvements and some performance improvements (rendering scaled in high resolution). But no new game features.

Schedule-wise we were expecting 8-10 months of dev and launch in Q109. We shipped in 13 months launching in May 2009 on an invite-only beta launch. Open beta in June/July. At the end of October 2009 we shut down the old client. 18 month transition. At the end of the day it was the new features for the Flash client that sold things to the customers. We still do get complaints that people want the old version back. But they’re still playing and complaining, so that’s not all bad!

The final evaluation is that even though it took longer than planned it was a resounding success. This was due to deciding to do it iteratively and not planning it via waterfall, which allowed for many reprioritizations during development. We pulled devs off the Flash project onto Shockwave several times for needed work. Also, parallel development was very helpful. Of course, we had a skilled team as well.

We did another platform shift in addition to our tech platform shift.

What’s a social game in the FB context? People don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook — even if you have 100 friends logging onto Facebook every day you’re still likely to miss them. Successful social game on facebook is the parallel single player experience. You never see friends playing or play with them, you see the results of their play.

Habbo is a social structure with games created by the users. Showed us this Habbo room. Our users come up with the weirdest stuff. The cinema thing is extremely popular in Brazil and nowhere else.

Habbo was a walled garden, so we started taking steps to connect Habbo to the social graph. We have a Habbo FB application, but what we are doing on FB right now is really primitive. Most of the game companies succeeding on FB are way more sophisticated than we are. We’ve been focused on merging our international communities together into common language services so we haven’t had enough focus on the FB application. It does seem that FB is reaching a saturation point. We have about 400k-500k MAUs which makes us mid-sized, and even the big games aren’t growing much anymore. Also, if you’ve been following the news it seems like tying your game to someone else’s platform is not the best idea.

The real question is not how you host your game on FB but how you use the web to support your interactive experience? The most important thing to me is that you no longer need to register to play a game and play with your friends and have an identity. Games that use SNS identity responsibly are going to be better than games that don’t.

Economics of Player to Player Markets

In the early years we allowed people to transfer items between accounts. At first it was via premium SMS. Then we introduced Habbo Coins, but it wasn’t possible to move Coins from one account to another. What happened was people would invent their own currency. Some common item would become the currency of the world. We had a subscription feature that gives gifts to members where you’d get a sofa every month if you were a member. Players started trading for stuff using our subscription club sofas. It happened early on — google “habbo furni values” for some player economic analysis of furniture markets!

We introduced a marketplace where you can post for-sale notices and allow for unattended trades, so we’re training people to run shops. I hope that at some point we can publish enough data to even train commodities traders among our users.

There are business implications of a secondary market. The player-to-player trading volume is several times larger than our direct sales to players. We estimate that US$0.5B in goods are exchanged between players of Habbo yearly, internationally. Items stay in active inventory even after an owner quits Habbo. If traffic growth slows down, then the world “fills up” with old abandoned items that people can use instead of buying new items. This means we need to do some design tricks to account for this.

Three ways to deal with this: 1) don’t allow trading. But then there’s no economy. No collectible value for items, makes items less interesting. We do use this in very selective cases. 2) Make items wear out after use. Essentially renting items to players, destroys trade value. We use this a bit, we basically rent clothes to players. 3) For most of our items they are durable and ageless. We created a system that gets tiny fees out of the secondary trading. It could be a cost on a for-sale notice on the marketplace, could be a comission for secure trading. We take 1% of the value out of the system on every trade, and also manage inflation which is the really important bit. Now there’s friction moving items from account to account so we stop the “filling up” that happens.

We’ve found that your high-spending customers spend the most amount of time in game by far. A very small percentage of your player base does most of EVERYTHING in your game, not just spending but any activity you look at. Again, this is why averages are not good to look at.

Conclusions

If you’re doing big changes on your tech base, do parallel deployment and iterate.

If you’re doing a service model game, focus on conversion/retention/monetization.

If you have a secondary market in the system, try to model it and understand the economics of who your big spenders are. Look for emergent behavior you didn’t think of when you designed the system. Invest in analysis resources!

Q: Is there a correlation between number of friends and amount of money spent?

A: Not a strong correlation, but there is an interesting correlation between number of friends and a person’s influence on what their friends purchase.

The LOGIN Conference is consistently one of my favorite conferences of the year. It’s held in Seattle each May and I’ve been speaking at it every year since its inception in 2007. It’s an online-focused conference — it started out as mostly an MMO conference but it now encompasses social, mobile, and browser games as well. I enjoy LOGIN so much that last summer I accepted an invitation to be on their Advisory Board.

And in the interest of disclosure, in addition to being an Advisor for LOGIN, we’re running a friendly contest to see which Advisor member can make the most referrals (I get an iPad if I win). Hence this post. If you want to attend LOGIN, I encourage you to:

use my discount code
KAZE001955
for $100 off registration

So as a good Advisor, this is where I tell you why LOGIN is the best show of its kind.

1. Great business environment. Because of the scope and size of the show (a relatively narrow topic with about 400 people present) it is very easy to get business done here. The attendees tend to be mid-to-high-level people at their companies and many people have the authorization to make business decisions. In fact, something like 75% of my clients in the last three years have been people I met at LOGIN!
2. World-class content. LOGIN features some of the best talks I’ve ever attended. A few that come to mind: in ’08 Todd Northcutt of GameSpy gave a fantastic talk titled “7 Cool Things You Can Do With Buddy Lists” (slides at the link), and Joe Ludwig’s augmented reality overview (slides and audio at the link, thanks Joe!) was the highlight of the 2009 show for me. And 2010 has some great content lined up, including Brenda Brathwaite discussing the move from AAA to social game development, and Corvus Elrod’s indie all-star panel discussing the obstacles that indies face in the online space.
3. Lunch keynote format. I usually hate keynotes. They’re often little more than veiled advertisements. And even when they’re good (like sci fi author Charlie Stross’ vision of the future at LOGIN 2009) I also hate being forced to see something. Fortunately, LOGIN does the lunch keynote: you get to eat lunch in a big room at round tables while watching the keynote. This does several things: it gives me something to focus on if I’m not interested in the keynote, it makes everyone have lunch at the same place and time, it forces people to sit together in a more social environment than a lecture hall, and it gives those people something to talk about (the keynote itself). It’s a nice way to format a keynote but even more importantly it’s a great networking opportunity!
4. Amazing food. I know the organizers of LOGIN are tired of hearing people talk about the food, but holy cow do they offer great food to the attendees! Far and away it’s the best I eat at any conference. Lunch is always amazing and even the snacks between sessions are wonderful. (I just about fell over when I saw them roll out the ice cream bar one year during the afternoon break.)
5. Beautiful setting. Seattle in May is about as good as it gets. It’s not rainy or overcast, it’s pretty much gorgeous outside the whole time!

So, yeah. You should attend LOGIN, especially if you’re an online game developer. Doubly so if you’re looking for clients! And let me know if you’re coming, we should hang out.

]]> http://tinysubversions.com/2010/04/why-you-should-attend-the-login-conference/feed/ 3 http://tinysubversions.com/2010/03/casey-monroe-on-gdc/ http://tinysubversions.com/2010/03/casey-monroe-on-gdc/#comments Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:11:51 +0000 Darius Kazemi http://tinysubversions.com/?p=1518

Casey Monroe wrote up a nice overview of GDC, themed around the difference between T-shirt and sport coat types. In particular, he talks about a dinner we had which was kind of a sequel to last year’s dinner that I recorded on video. I met Casey’s brother Will at last year’s dinner, and this year Will brought along Casey too. In Casey’s words:

One night, something strange happens.  My brother and I are attending a dinner at a nearby wine bar, with some (old and new) friends in the game industry.  We sit and talk with Adam, an old bandmate who now does iPhone/iPad development.  I finally meet Daniel Cook of Lost Garden, and Darius Kazemi of Tiny Subversions, as well as five or six other designers, developers and game industry professionals sitting around the table, and the conversation is…different.  We’re not networking—we’re just talking.  We’re talking about our ideas, our love of the art form, our belief in the potential of the future of gaming, the insight that games offer into the human condition.  We’re just sitting and talking about games—and it feels good.  After days and days of making contacts, suddenly I am making friends.  It feels relaxed.  It feels natural.  It feels, in fact, just like changing out of my sport coat and back into a t-shirt.

I think he does a good job of capturing the feeling of what I love about GDC. I think that dinner lasted about three hours and I missed a bunch of parties as a result, but it was worth it.

I would take exception to one thing he says: making friends is networking. In fact, it’s the most effective kind.

Speaking of T-shirts — Matthew Wasteland and I have a few new shirts available at the store. I’ll post about them soon, but you can check them out here.

I got some great comments on my last post about business cards, and I’m going to highlight them here in case you missed them. But first I’m going to subject you to a little rant that I’ve given at conferences.

Corporate vs. Personal Cards

There are two kinds of business cards. There’s the card that represents you as the employee of a company, and there’s the card that represents you as a person. The key difference is that the company card puts the identity of the company over your own identity. Here’s an example of a corporate business card:

Notice how much space the logo takes up, and how small the font is for the person's name.

The logo and the address of the company take up most of the non-white space on the card.

Now don’t get me wrong: this is a fine corporate business card. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. But it sets a bad example for personal business cards. I often see students (and even professionals!) emulate the design of corporate cards on their personal cards, sometimes going so far as to design a logo and make that the biggest thing on their card.

Your personal card should reflect who you are. I don’t mean that in the warm and fuzzy sense: it literally needs to tell me who you are so I can remember you. This means your name should be the biggest thing on the card by far.

Here’s an example of a great personal business card.

It's memorable because it's funny.

The card above is from an excellent article about business cards for musicians (although the advice applies to anyone). There’s nothing fancy about it in terms of card stock or font or color. It’s completely unremarkable except that it’s well-designed and memorable. The guy’s name is the biggest single information band on the card, and right under that it tells me what he does. There’s contact information below, and then in the corners there are some tongue-in-cheek descriptors of the guy’s services. (This is a great technique for someone to use — provided you remember that this card has a context. Specifically this is a card that will be given to other musicians. “Bad attitude” and “always late” are things that will make a fellow musician laugh. If this same musician were trying to get booked to play weddings, the joke would completely backfire.)

Anyway, remember: you are not an anonymous drone. Your business card needs to reflect that.

Comment Roundup

I got some great comments on my business card post.

While I recommended Scribus for those designing their own business cards, Noah Kantrowitz pointed out Businesscardland, a website where you can design a card from templates for free. It’ll even render a PDF that you can take to a print shop.

Jeromie Walters asked whether he should put a head shot of himself on his card. Brenda Brathwaite once told me that she tried putting her head shot on her card, and the only thing it did was make her feel like a real estate agent! Bottom line: don’t put a photo of yourself on your card. Consider a cartoon or an abstraction of your face. It’s what I do.

Ian Schreiber talked about the backpack he always brings to GDC.

As for running out during the day, personally I always carry my backpack with me. In it I have:
* All of my cards, so I can “restock” in a few seconds rather than having to head back to the hotel;
* Notebooks and pens, both to take notes myself and to offer to the people sitting next to me if they need it;
* Laptop computer and power cord, also for taking notes and in case anyone needs one to show a software demo or something;
* Emergency snacks and drinks, so that I’m never in a session where I’m distracted from a brilliant speaker by something mundane like bodily hunger signals (and likewise, headache medicine in case my skull picks a bad time to vasodilate);
* Board games, because I want people to think of me when they’re trying to find the fun 
* Any swag or random stuff I pick up along the way.

My shoulders are usually sore by the end of the week from walking around like a pack mule, but the convenience of having everything I need in reach at a moment’s notice is too great to give up.

Alex Forsythe asked how a student should communicate their area of expertise on their business card, since a student can’t really claim to be a level designer if they haven’t really designed many levels. I responded that “Aspring Level Designer” or “Student of Level Design” would be fine. Ian Schreiber gave the following response:

I’ve seen some pretty clever student business cards. Darius wrote his tagline “a generally useful guy to know” which, aside from being accurate, was more memorable than “aspiring game programmer/designer” or whatever.

I saw one student card, I still have it somewhere, that introduced the person as “the mythical female programmer”… again, more memorable than “aspiring.”

I suppose you need to be careful with this, though. It’s easy to cross the line from “memorable” to “cliche” or “cheesy”. So maybe that kind of thing is best for your second year at GDC, after you’ve already seen what other cards are out there.

As always, thanks to everyone who commented for their good questions and helpful answers.

Update, June 2010: Erin Hoffman has additional advice:

Ian’s point is a great one. It’s the one thing I would add to Darius’s advice… I suspect for first-timers the words on the card are actually more important than the card’s visual design, though it’s certainly possible to excessively advertise non-pro status by having a business card that looks out-of-date, is too busy, or has poorly printed graphics. The worst one I saw from a student was glossy and black with a grainy graphic of something on it — I’m not even sure what. A classy but plain non-glossy white card with Times New Roman on it is much safer.

When I was a student I had “Creativity for Hire” on my card, which got comments from most of the people I handed it to. I didn’t really even expect that reaction — I just had an assortment of things I wanted to do and needed a broad phrase that would capture them. And I didn’t have that card very long. :) If I had to do it over again I would stick to the same — keep it simple, put your web address on the card, and aim your thought energy at a memorable (unique) phrase that encapsulates what you have to offer