Plan for MrPhil (Philip Ludington)

Things I learned at IGC Day 3

- There is a weird battle between "Attach rate" and "Conversion Rate" going on because the consoles are measuring their "downloadable games" by game sold per console instead of sales per download
- Apple claims "$500 million of 3rd Party sales (non-apple stuff)." (I think they meant a year but it wasn't explicitly said.)
- developer.apple.com
- Developing in Linux is so mean streets difficult, it is now is referred to as "Ghetto Linux"
- Dual core systems are the future, so learn more about multi-threading
- I have no idea what "vectorization" really means
- Maybe I should think about buying Apple stock, oh wait... I need that money to make my game
- XCode is free
- Shark is the greatest dev tool ever (it is a profiler)
- Chris Crawford thinks about stuff that make my brain wish is was having a beer
- Interactive story telling is such a weird wild concept that I... *fate intervenes and the narrator's brain explodes*
- *destiny intervenes and some how the narrator's brain was saved from exploding using a lame plot gimmick involving a time machine and coke bottle*
- Casual game will be a $2 billion space by 2008
- Top 10 Causal Game developers:
...spend $50,000 to $150,000
...Have 1 to 3 programmers
...Have 1 or 2 artists
...Develop a game in about 6 months
- Royalties are a fuzzy science:
... Developers get 20% to 40%
... Publisher get 10% to 25%
... Distribution services get 10% to 20%
... Portals get 40% to 60%
... Money appears and disappears between 80% to 145% (Attention, that was humor)
- Causal Games are sold at $19.95 to $24.95
- Some games sell better at $24.95 than at $19.95
- Causal Games sell 5000 to 20,000 units
- Try Media loves Torque
- There are (can be) 11 milestones for a Causal Game Title
... Pre-Production
... Prototype
... Code Complete
... Content Complete
... Alpha
... Friends and family beta
... Beta
... Soft Launch (putting a game out on a small portal and testing different changes effect on conversion rate)
... Launch
... Post-Launch Updates (some portals like Yahoo will take months to put up a patched version of your game if ever)
- Portals are dieing for games and it makes their life easier if you have 12-24 Prototypes to show them (I was kinda of confused on this point but what is meant is that Portal's don't have the staff to deal with lots of developers and would prefer a handful of developers with a lot of games)
- Get a Mentor
- There is a great book out there called "Refactoring"
- There is a great testing company called "Testing Testing 123" and they aren't over priced
- Get feedback using "Survey Monkey" it is free
- A self-funded games royalty rates are considered low at 15% and high at 42%, average is 30-35%
- Tools you've gotta check-out: Jira, JotSpot and Ning

Game on,
MrPhil, Owner
Mr. Phil Games

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