Casual games, Military Games, Indie Games

I got back from Casual Connect conference in Amsterdam on saturday last week (and proceeded to become ill for a week, but thats another story).

I wanted to write up a quick peice on the conference, my thoughts on casual games and to update everyone on our other games efforts.

Casual Games

It might seem from a lot of the things I say that I'm not a fan of casual games. But thats not entirely correct. For the most part, I feel that games are games, wether theyre indie games, casual games, or hardcore multi-million-dollar budget games. What differs between each thing isnt the creation of the games, but more the different views on the business side of things.

Casual Connect, a conference in Amsterdam held last week opened my eyes to the business side of the casual games market.

The casual market is a current favourite with many indies, because they see it as a viable market for smaller developers. Which is actually quite true, it definitely IS a market for smaller developers. However the market itself has some issues, namely:

- It is run by a few major portals, who collectively have a lot of power
- Those same portals are also developers much of the time
- The portals are growing increasingly stronger
- The portals pass through so many products, it's hard to leverage any relationship

The problems I see coming for the casual market, are that the portals themselves are starting to fight with one another. This means that they will stop taking each others content, start looking for exclusives and generally stop co-operating to grow the market. I hope this doesnt happen, but given the way things are heading, I'm not hopeful.

I also see that subscriptions are another very worrying move. Basically, each portal tries to lock its users into remaining on thier site and purchasing games though them, by allowing subscriptions with much lower cost-per-game. This sounds like a bad thing for the developer and I'm sure in some ways it is (I read a good description about why its not from a popcap guy, but I'm still not 100% convinced).

Then there is advertising. Again, most of the portals are starting to incorporate advertising into thier revenue model. Which means more money for them (as long as users stay on thier site), but not so much for the developers of the games they carry.

So what does the subscription and advertising changes mean? Well, it means the PORTAL owns the customer. They have the income stream the customer generates, trying to milk that as much as possible, which sounds great for the portal. For the developer? Well, its slightly better, in that they can get a tiny percentage of ad revenue and maybe extra sales revenue from subscriptions (maybe).

But I see a huge downside to the users. Because if there's one thing I've taken from being internet aware, its that I have a really low tolerance threshold for advertising or buying into something long term. I fear that as people become more aware of the choice available, those sites that decide to advertise slowly lose customers. My thinking being that I choose Google as my search engine because they DONT try and advertise to me on the main page (as opposed to what yahoo or alta-vista were doing at the time). I also think that google did a really good thing when they did thier advertising in that they made it far less obtrusive and much cleaner. Basically, if I click a google ad, I've "opted in" to that ad. Not been spammed it with a bunch of flashing banners or pop-ups.

I've almost given up watching TV because I hate watching ads. I will be very interested to see if something liek youtube will really thrive with ad revenue. I guess Youtube is a special case because the content on there is generally for kids by kids, so they arent as sensitive to advertising as I am.

So where does that leave me? Well, I think I'm convinced that casual games and the industry at large are capable of supporting a viable business. I think that that segment of the games industry isnt "sown up" yet, which means there are still opportunities. I do think that the bar to entry is high enough that most developers will fail to really make much of an impact in that market. I do feel that it will consolidate and get worse over time, as portals leverage thier position and slowly erode the market with ads and dodgy deals that turn customers off. I think that to be honest, portals dont really care about delivering great games to thier customers so much as milking each customer for as much revenue as possible.

I do think that as things consolidate, it opens up a new avenue for another player that deliberately goes outside of thier traditional portal model. But I'm not sure what form a successful venture like that would take.

As far as our own efforts go. I've got a number of casual game designs that need fleshing out a bit more before I put them out for contract. But I think I've found a niche for myself that isnt the typical match 3 fodder everyone tries to produce.

Military Games

It honestly wasnt by design that we seem to have ended up focussing on military games. I think its partly due to the hardcore background we have as games players. But honestly, if you look at our internal design wiki, we have a fair mix of military, casual, indie and other games sitting on there. As we work on more of the "Ace" franchise (I call it a franchise, but it really isnt :)) I think we'll have a reasonbly good portfolio of small scale online military semi-casual games. I mean semi-casual in that they arent "realistic" but are easier to control etc.

Look for more updates on that issue soon after we get some solid art completed.

Obviously, the military game genre has a rich amount of material for us to cover. Plus we have a growing list of military assets at our disposal (planes, tanks, ships etc). I do see us continuing to focus on casual combat titles though. So no hardcore turn based wargames for us I dont think!

Indie Games

These fall somewhere in the outside of both casual and military. These are perhaps either mechanically or visually experimental. For instance I've got a hankering to see what TGB can do with uber-high-resolutions. So for instance, what kind of game could you create where you have a 2560x1600 playfield.

I've got a great game concept for a really nice "indie" game that I'm hoping to get prototyped sometime soon.

Partnerships and recruiting

Thomas and I have discussed this a few times, how are we going to staff up for finishing games quicker. How to find the right partners and work with people who can complete. Its a hard thing for us, having had so many artists and others simply fall off the face of the planet. The one conclusion I've come to, is that we simply need to pay money and hire people full-time.

Both myself and Thomas are simply too busy to turn over the games ourselves, so we need partners. Typically we've tried finding partners who are contractors.

You would think that paying money would actually ensure involvement, but I think what happens with contracting, especially artists, is that they inevitably find a higher-paying or nearly full-time contract and essentially you slip off the "todo" list into the "todo when you have time" list, which essentially places you in the "never get to do due to lack of time" list.

So we're looking at ways of doing this. Maybe its finding someone to take on as an employee, maybe its just doing intensive contracting (i.e. six month full time contract). Essentially, we need to cut out the "spare time" thing, mainly by just paying for it.

If anyone has any tips for recruitment or partnerships, let me know. Also, if you know anyone with talent who wants to work with a small developer let me know also.

And finally, the obligatory image