Yeah, I went there.

Last night I read an opinion piece by a journalist for MCV UK complaining about stupid embargo tactics used by big game publishers. The gist of it is: Activision told a bunch of press about new Call of Duty information. As they usually do, they made the journalists sign NDAs saying “You don’t get to publish this until time X.” But (also as they usually do) they gave an exclusive to one outlet that got to publish early. The journalist complains about this a little, but it seems like they’re most upset that the exclusive was given to the Wall Street Journal and not to an enthusiast press outlet — such MCV UK, one presumes.

In particular, I want to respond to this paragraph:

“This [mistreatment] is despite the fact that we will slavishly report any and all information drip fed to us about the new Call of Duty. Despite the fact that, in the consumer sector at least, we will rave and rant about the game’s brilliance, securing it millions of sales in the process.”

The first sentence is obviously stupid; the second sentence is not stupid so much as subtly missing the point regarding some key business realities. To break it down:

1) Your slavish devotion is exactly why they give you nothing. They say “Jump,” you ask “How high?” There’s no incentive to give you anything more than exactly what is required to ensure your continued devotion. And as the author put it, that’s tiny drips of “any” information.

2) Yes, when the enthusiast press raves about how awesome a game is, on the whole that helps sales. But the WSJ is a different beast. You know who reads the WSJ? People on Wall Street. You know who is a publicly traded company? Activision (ATVI). Wall Street buzz is as important, if not more important, than their quarterly sales.

Why? As a publicly traded company, ATVI has one goal: to increase shareholder value. Yes, good sales numbers will generally cause stock value to increase, but so will Wall Street buzz. And Wall Street buzz can be bought at the low, low price of temporarily pissing off the enthusiast press! Remember that next week the same press will be back to slavishly reporting that you’ll be able to dual wield modified Mauser pistols for five minutes during a minigame in Call of Duty: Superfluous Ops. (“G-golly that’s awesome Bobby, what ELSE can you feed us poor saps?”) ATVI owes the enthusiast press nothing.

The thing is, the problem discussed in (2) can be solved by ceasing the slavish devotion outlined in (1). ATVI uses and abuses you and you keep coming back for more. I’m not without sympathy: I know it’s hard. You have to make ends meet, and CoD headlines rake in the ad revenue or the subscribers or the freemium iPad app dollars or whatever doomed monetization fix you’re jonesing for these days. But maybe you should stop reporting exactly what their marketers ask you to report. Maybe you should tell them to fuck off until they give you something worth reporting. You might lose a “friend” in ATVI’s marketing department. You might gain a little dignity as a press outlet.

Gamasutra recently published a good interview with Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky. But wait! This is not another blog post where I’m talking about how Spelunky is the best game ever. I wanted to draw your attention instead to the comment thread for the post. (Update Aug 19, 2011: looks like Adam Coate’s profile has been removed from Gamasutra, which nukes all his comments. 1) here is an archive of the original thread so you can read the whole thing. 2) Gamasutra, you should change your policy so that comments are preserved on threads when accounts are removed/deleted. 3) I have replaced every link in this article with a link to the archive, so individual comment references should hold.)

There was a fair amount of discussion about the thread on Twitter recently. It is a prime example of how to be an ungracious person and a how to badmouth people and be that guy. He’s an indie developer with serious entitlement issues. You should definitely read the whole thread, as it is equal parts entertaining and irritating, but I’ve included the gist of it here with some commentary of my own.

This guy Adam Coate posted the following comment:

[Being a suffering artist is the s]tory of my life right there. And once the game’s done, even more suffering comes from the lack of exposure certain gaming-related websites are willing to give us unknowns, yet are perfectly willing to run full-blown features on Boulder Dash clones, just because they’ve already been featured on TIGSource. Feel free to take a bit of a risk by giving some press to a game that actually deserves it, Gamasutra (oh, I don’t know, Flytrap, maybe?).

So he criticized the proprietors of the website he’s posting on (which is okay if a little dickish) and insulted the developer being interviewed in the article he’s commenting on (totally not okay). Kris Graft, who works for Gamasutra, responded by asking:

Maybe people would consider talking to you about your game if you had a better attitude? Or emailed editors of certain gaming-related websites for consideration, maybe? Don’t make yourself suffer more than you have to.

Adam went on to complain that he tried emailing the editors and didn’t get a response. Fair enough. There some more back-and-forth, mostly people trying to tell him that Spelunky actually isn’t a piece of crap, and then Michael Rose of Indiegames.com chimes in:

[J]ust thought I should throw a few words in here. I’m one of the editors at Indiegames.com, and I received your email about Flytrap about a month ago. The email contained a few paragraphs about the game, and 3 screenshots.

After reading what you sent me, I then went to check out the game more. Your email didn’t supply a website, so I went hunting for one, and came up with nothing. You hadn’t even supplied a link to the Xbox Live Marketplace page for your game, which was a little odd given this is what you were trying to sell to me. After Googling it and finding the page, I was presented with a ‘Content not found’ page on the Xbox.com site. Not a great start.

I then decided to hunt on Youtube for a video of your game, and yet again came up with nothing. Honestly, you are here complaining that no-one is giving coverage to your game, and yet the real problem is that you need to have a quick and very easy lesson in marketing. How is anyone meant to get excited about your game when all you give them is 3 measly screenshots which all look the same?

Unfortunately your view of gaming sites which cover indie titles has been skewed due to your feeling of rejection. This is completely understandable, but coming on here and spouting off about how your game hasn’t received the ‘deserved recognition’ it needs is pretty childish. Maybe you should instead be trying to work out WHY your game hasn’t taken off how you would have liked. As I said before, marketing your game properly would be a very good start.

Seems like case closed, right? Wrong. Adam posts a gracious thank-you to Michael, and Michael points out Rodain Joubert’s excellent indie game marketing guide.

“Miyamoto never had to work for press like this.”

Meanwhile, he’s been having a side argument with Brandon Sheffield, editor of Game Developer Magazine and writer for Gamasutra. Basically, Brandon chastised Adam for his poor attitude. Adam’s response was “Well, it got your attention didn’t it?” Brandon responded saying that yes, it got his attention but now he has a negative view of Adam and his game. Adam’s response is simultaneously heartbreaking and legendarily self-delusional:

I apologize for my negative first impression, but after having spent a year of my life struggling to survive while I create a game that even my girlfriend didn’t believe in (which changed once she saw how blind playtesters reacted to it), it’s a little disheartening to just be completely ignored by the world. Miyamoto never had to work for press like this.

Really? He didn’t? As later commenters point out, Miyamoto worked on many many titles before he received any kind of personal recognition from the wider gaming audience. Furthermore, Miyamoto worked and has always worked for a large game company with an entire marketing division. So while he personally didn’t do much marketing for Super Mario Bros., he had probably dozens of people doing it instead.

Later on in the thread, Adam takes back his remarks about Spelunky and admits that the Miyamoto comment was hilariously uninformed.

Best of all, as a result of the thread, Michael Rose was prompted to write up The Idiot’s Guide to Marketing Your Indie Game. It’s full of very specific advice on how to contact game journalists about your game and what sort of email you should be writing them. It reminds me a lot of writing a resume for a game development job: you need to stand out but also tailor it to your specific audience.

There’s a whole bunch more to the comments section. At one point Adam decides to break out some armchair evolutionary psychology, explaining that women love to shop and eat and consume while men like to destroy and it’s just a fact people come on don’t you get it. But that’s really more of a hilarious digression.

And finally, the title of this blog post comes from one of Brandon Boyer‘s two beautifully acerbic comments (1) (2) on the thread.

My friend Kevin has posted a brief lesson about failing to market software properly. In this case, he’s talking about audio software, but the bottom line applies to any downloadable game with a trial period: make sure the user’s first few minutes of engagement with the game are immediately gratifying and show what your game can really do.

This reminds me of one of the weird things we see in games sometimes: when games withhold the best stuff from the player for a while. Half-Life 2 did this; you don’t get the gravity gun until about an hour into the game. Now, HL2 was not exactly a “download and try this game you’ve never heard of” situation. I am certain that 95% of the people who played it had read previews or heard things, and already knew going in that there would be a cool gravity gun to play with and they’d just have to wait.

(If I remember correctly, HL2 originally gave you the gravity gun much later on in the game, and someone said, “Wait, why are we making our players work to get to the fun part?” So they moved it much closer to the beginning of the game. Still, I would have liked to see them give you the gun at the start. The guys at Valve are smart, I’m sure they could have made it work.)

Braid, on the other hand, gives you access to almost all of the game’s content, minus the last four levels, at the very beginning. It’s all about giving everything it has to the player.

Anyway, I have digressed. If you are building a demo of your game, make sure that the player can engage with your best stuff within the first minute of play. Lower those barriers to entry. Impress ‘em.

I’m going to have to write a longer post about the lost art of game demos…

So this morning I downloaded Song Summoner, the new tactical RPG from Square-Enix for the iPod! Yep, that’s right, it was a completely surprise announcement, kind of like Phase was. “Hey, we made a game. You can buy it and play it right now” was once an extremely rare marketing tactic for any major game company, but it seems to be par for the course in the world of the iPod. I wonder if this is because of Apple’s policies, or the fact that we don’t even know how to market an iPod game, or what?

Anyway, I’m a huge sucker for tactical RPGs, and having one on my iPod is going to kill many a bus ride.

Wow, Dead Space has some of the best box art I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a damn shame it has to have the stupid neon green Xbox 360 case border around it. Totally ruins the effect.

This is sketchy and gross.

Blazing Angels 2, an arcade WWII dogfighting/bombing game, is being marketed on the Ubisoft website with a 2D shoot-em-up where the longer you survive, the more you get to see a woman strip her clothing off. What the hell? I was actually considering buying the game because the demo was fun. Not anymore.

Now I just feel embarrassed for all my friends who work for Ubisoft…

So at last night’s Boston Post Mortem we featured a great talk by Ken Levine of Irrational 2K Boston, along with two of his leads. It wasn’t a formal presentation, there was no PowerPoint or anything like that. Just three guys and a mic. Yet it was not a hip-hop freestyle battle.

Ken and crew talked about how BioShock went from a basic idea, just a high-level concept, through its various iterations while the game was being pitched and prototyped, to what it is today. He also covered the way that they pitched the game to journalists early on, and how that changed over time as the pitch became less targeted towards a hardcore three-year-early preview kind of audience and more towards a hopefully multi-million selling blockbuster audience.

Here are a few tidbits I remember from the night. I kind of wish I took notes! (Funny hearing that from me, right?) Please correct me if I’ve mis-remembered any of this stuff.

• Early on, the team built a very small, 45-second, one-room demo that was super polished and conveyed the atmosphere of the game moreso than the gameplay. Ken stressed multiple times during his talk that building a shippable-looking demo of extremely small scope focusing on one or two things really sharply is way better than attempting to do an entire vertical slice too early.
• The Little Sister started out as a sea slug, but focus testers had no idea why the hulking Big Daddy would be protecting a sea slug. When they realized that this was a problem, they went through a whole bunch of different ideas (including a dog in a wheelchair!) before settling on the creepy little girl. Once they switched, people instantly understood the relationship. Big strong man protects helpless child.
• As many game publishers and developers do, they used GameSpot Trax, which basically measures how much hype (page views, commentary, etc) a given game is receiving. When they did their initial unveiling of BioShock including the 45-second demo (I believe this was the resulting article), they got huge numbers on Trax. When they had their awesome E3 demo in 2006, the Trax numbers didn’t change that much, even though everyone at E3 was talking about their game! To me, this seems to support the fact that even an awesome demo at the old E3 would get lost in a sea of game news.
• They made sure to focus test with random John Q. Popcorn off the street, the kind of person who owns an Xbox but only has Halo and Madden. That really helped them with the direction for their game.
• Ken Levine on pitching a game: “You don’t want to see yourself having weird sex, and you don’t want to see yourself pitching games.” Amen to that.