Tex Pine

This is why.

Virtual goods buyers are of all genres and ages, not only teens & tweens as many people think. Of course there are tweens-centric sites, but there is also a large chunk of 35 and older customers buying at other sites.

Since casual games are oriented towards a broad variety of customers, this is great for developers and publishers inasmuch as many kinds of audiences can be monetized.

But as Einstein and others said, every problem in fact presents a hidden opportunity. The fact that most business practices of major global market players can’t succeed on a hostile, piracy-filled environment, doesn’t mean the market itself can’t be successfully explored using new approaches.

So this article is all about how Brazilian companies are fighting back where Edge Online once called the Lost Continent.

Brazilians do play games (a lot)!

Brazilians do play a lot. In fact, Brazilians are amongst the more enthusiastic video-game players and web surfers. Even without official distribution of all consoles but XBOX 360, Tectoy estimates more than 2 millions Playstation 2 on Brazilian homes, and Microsoft estimates 500,000 console units of various brands are sold every year.

Consoles are popular considering their high price tags and have growing sales, even if nearly all units are black-marketed or gray-marketed. Tectoy still successfully sells SEGA’s vintage consoles Master System and Genesis with tons of games bundled.

Round 1:  Multiplayer Games + Micropayments

Social networks are incredibly popular in Brazil. Nearly 54% of Orkut users are Brazilians, the share of web time dedicated to networks and blogs is the highest of all countries, and the invasion of Brazilians in other social networks like Fotolog originated the term “Brazilian Internet Phenomenon“.

 Hence the success of LevelUp!. LevelUp! has been consistently offering new and classic massive multiplayer games over the last years, successfully monetizing with pre-paid credits system. Each credit grants a player an amount of gameplay time in any massive game.

A big launching during 2008 was Taikodom. A top level MMO project, Taikodom understands the public and the shifting market practices across the world, offering free accounts and monetizing the user base by selling premium accounts and credits to buy in-game stuff.

Round 2: Outsourcing & Exporting

Many game studios in Brazil sell game development as outsourced services to other companies and publishers. While some have broad spectrum, with projects for many platforms and markets, others are strictly focused and specialized. For example, Webcore Games on advergaming, Gestum for serious games and e-learning, and Interama for casual games.

Exporting is also very important for many studios. In fact, according to Abragames, the national association of game developers, 43% of all game production is exported.  Southlogic was a major exporter of products and services -  such a  good one that in January 2009  it was bought by Ubisoft.

Round 3: Zeebo

The platform have support from main publishers and their studios, and Tectoy Digital is one of the most important Zeebo developer.

Round 4 (Extra Round): Government support

Last, but not least, the official government support for the game industry through the Department of Culture and its BR-Games contest is key to trigger new studios and new products. Specially in a country where venture/angel investment money is a relatively new concept. Interama itself was founded with a sponsorphip from the first edition of the BR Games contest.

K.O.

2008 and those first few months of 2009 had good news for the Brazilian game industry. The Lost Continent has chances to develop and grow from now on. Many Brazilian game developers,  including myself, have turned from pessimists to believers. I hope many more will follow.

Yeah, “Games Produced’ page desperately needed to be updated. So I wrote about my other projects besides Lex Venture, including both Interama projects and Zeebo projects I’m doing for the past months at Tectoy Digital. Interesting stuff there now, and not the complete list – there are a couple more projects I can’t talk about .

Check it out!

And yes, I know I haven’t updated the blog for too long. But I’ve been preparing interesting articles that I hope to share with you all soon enough.

Today Tectoy is announcing a major breakthrough for the Brazilian game industry: the Zeebo game console. Zeebo is one of those rare systems released outside USA or Japan. This is exactly why it has a high chance of success.

Introduction to Zeebo

Zeebo is a game console based on Qualcomm technologies for high-end mobile devices. It has a nominal processing power somewhat equivalent to a PSP, OpenGL|ES 1.0 hardware compatibility over a dedicated GPU and is capable of 3G mobile network connection (HSUPA), scaling back at 2.5G (EDGE) or 2G (GPRS) where necessary. It features BREW 4.0 as the operational system, three USB ports for joysticks and accessories, one SD card port, and composite video output along with stereo audio. There is no media – games are downloaded through ZeeboNet network, making Zeebo the first of the forthcoming download-centric generation of game consoles.

Clearly the specs of the system aren’t designed to match the technology of the current seventh-generation. But this is not the point. The goal is rather to implement viable solutions for two major problems of the console business on developing countries – price and distribution -, while presenting good value for players.

The Problem on Price

As I once wrote Brazilian game market suffers greatly from piracy. The first major reason is price.

Due to heavy taxes and high logistical costs, an official console game costs around US$ 110 and PC games around US$ 70. Considering the per capita income is US$ 9k against US’ US$ 47k, one could argue that buying official games is not only 2-3 times more expensive in absolute price, but also 19 times more expensive when income is factored in!

But Zeebo games are downloaded using 3G networks. As a mobile service instead of physical units, taxes are much lower and logistical / manufacturing costs are non-existent. Therefore, games can be priced from US$ 4.45 to US$13.10.

Digital Distribution Is The Key

The other major reason for widespread piracy is the distribution aspect itself. In a country where logistics are expensive due to infrastructural problems and illegal street vendors are commonplace, one just can’t compete on regular terms. Black-market reselers nowadays can get new releases way faster and way cheaper than any regular, tax-payer CD reseler will ever be able to.

But a solid digital distribution model is a viable way to fight back for two reasons. First, new game offerings will be instantly available from ZeeboNet to all players of the country, which is faster than even the fastest black-market reseler. Second, the library available online will eventually feature much more game variety than a street vendor can carry on backpacks. (Also enabling a Long Tail-based strategy.)

Think Global, Act Local

Brazilians do like video-games and play a lot. Despite the fact PS2 never had any official representation in the country, Brazil alone accounts for 2% of all PS2 units in the world. Microsoft estimates over 500 k units of various game consoles are imported every year, and over 300k 3D video cards for PCs are sold every month. But strategies and models of traditional cardboard-and-plastic distribution of global actors have proved again and again to be completely inadequate for the country’s peculiarities.

The game industry needs products and strategies that adapt to local behaviors instead of ignoring them. It needs strategies that treat pirates as the competitors they truly are today and offer sound advantages for buyers of official products.

I firmly believe the Zeebo proposal is a viable business model option that can finally start to monetize and legalize a game market that already exists but is dominated by mafias. No doubt this is a brave move in a country Edge Online once defined as a member of The Lost Continent.

I’ve been working on Zeebo games production for 5 months now and it’s pretty exciting to be a part of this innovation.

UPDATE: also check out my latest post on Zeebo, How To Fight Back at The Lost Continent

The Critical Success Factors (CSFs) are those business aspects of utmost importance for your company survival. They must be considered on every single decision of the company, and if you fail on one of them for too long your business will fail.

CSFs always come in a number of 3, regardless the kind and size of the business. This is an arbitrary number small enough to force you to find and synthesize the very basic needs of your business, and large enough to allow for complex strategy considerations.

What are the most common CSFs?

A generic set of CSFs for most business would be:

• New product development;
• Good distribution;
• Effective advertising;

If any company doesn’t have some degree on those 3 it’s dead right? So why bother? Well, you could use them, but markets always have their own particularities that this generic set might not truly reflected.

What kind of company have a different set of CSFs?

For example, consider corporate attorney firms. Those firms are dealing with clients worth millions, perhaps billions of dollars. They certainly need good advertising (almost always by word-of-a-mouth) and distribution (prospecting potential clients), but the CSFs would be better represented by this set:

• Solidity
• Secrecy
• Trust

Solidity is the first factor: every aspect of the company must be (or at least look like) rock-solid – the office, the clothing, even the graphic design of papers must be very corporative and classicaly designed. Secrecy means details of clients must never leak, and media scandals will end the career of all partners and employees. Trust is the last and most important CSF, and it’s also the most difficult to tackle. Only a “battle-proved” portfolio and back history can truly increase Trust, and that’s why new firms are only founded when the partners bring clients they already have from a previous job.

What about a game development company?

Typically, the CSFs for a gamedev house are:

• Talent (Human resources)
• Capital
• Distribution channels

Talent is the most important factor. As of any software piece, games are a kind of product that demands an intensive intellectual/creative process, for an extended period of time. Without the right people and the right talent, you can’t go – period. So you must invest on finding those people, training them and keeping them excited about your company and your projects.

Capital is key for almost all gamedev houses. For start-ups or big actors, the capital need is of great importance to fund the very extended development and releasing period before any cash from sales arrives at the bank accounts. Hence it’s wise for a game studio to ensure investment streams to compete the project way before beginning the development.

However, there are cases of small studios and indie developers that operates with very few or no capital, and still pull out great games. For those companies, it is likely “Community & PR” would be a more important critical success factor to win with very few money.

Distribution is the last CSF. Final copies are cheap but development to get there is very expensive, so the company has to sell as many copies possible to reach break-even (paying investment). But as a non-essential, non-functional, emotional-appealing product, games need a distribution network that can also allow for impulsive-buying. Placing the box or the game banner at the right place, at the right time, is a form of art itself.

Further reading

For further research on CSFs evaluation techniques, check out this excellent resource. Also, check out these books of Talent Management, Capital Attraction and Digital Distribution.

It was a peasant surprise Tec Toy Digital was looking for a new game producer for their growing operations and projects. It was even better to know my skills could match the professional profile they were looking for. So that’s it, I got a new job, and I’m excited!

Since I’m now hired, I’m not that “indie” anymore, so I changed the subtitle of the blog for “Dedicated Game Producer”. But that’s a good change – being a part of such an important Brazilian game studio will certainly be a remarkable experience.

Also, moving from Vitória – ES to Campinas – SP will bring a whole new dimension and opportunities for me and my kids in the future.

Few of you might know but besides a game producer I’m also a professor of Entrepreneurship and Multimedia Systems at the Computing School of FAESA college. One of the subjects I teach is Business Strategy aimed at Computing business – not at MBA level of details of course, but to give students an extra to start their business right.

So I’d like to share with you what I know about it in a series of “Your Game Company” articles, always focusing on game development companies. I’ll start by the Core Values any company should have.

Core Values

To be able to live together members of social groups must accept a basic core set of values. Those values will provide the group an identity, a sense of belonging, and clear rules that will (or should) guide all activities. Common values of societies around the globe include: competition, religiosity, wealth, respect and honor.

A game company is usually a small social group, but even a tiny group of 2-3 individuals should share a core set of values in order to stick together and remain coherent. In fact, the more people share the same values, the more they are likely to succeed as a team. Hence the need to make clear for everyone, from day 1, what will be the core values of the company. If one disagrees with this very basic set, it would be better to look for another job.

Where do they come from?

From the heart of the company’s leaders. The real core values always come from people heading the group. By defining what the company’s core values are leaders should be wholeheartedly committed and faithful to them. When they do, values pervade every single aspect of the company and propagate naturally across all partners and employees. You can clearly see that on companies like id Software and Bungie.

When leaders aren’t really committed, the “value” will turn into mockery among employees. Such is the case of a company I know which “decided” eco-responsibility would be a “core value” – but kept wasting energy and water on the same old fashion.

Founders and leaders must be honest with themselves what their core values really are!

What could be core values of a game company?

Common ones would be: profitability, art, innovation, cost-leadership, meritocracy, hard work, quality, excellence, competition, cooperation, optimism, resilience, state-of-the-art technology, friendship, punctuality, ethics, creativity, fun, fairness, trust, focus on clients, accountability, integrity, hunger for learning, simplicity, market leadership, experimentation, storytelling, team work, passion, adaptable, empowering people.

How many values do I need?

5 at most, 4 would be better. A small set of values will be easier for people to live by, and you really don’t need more than 5. IBM, big as they are, only needs 3. At Interama, we picked these 4: transparency, meritocracy, market competitiveness and creativity.

What are they good for?

Core values should guide every single decision of all partners and employees, regardless of its magnitude - from big project roadmap drawings, to small, day-to-day operations on buying supplies.

Let’s say company A has a core value of “profitability”. It would draw the project roadmap based on the the profit margin (cost X value to costumers) every feature can add to the final product. Day-to-day buying would be based on how much productivity each one can add – for example, if a more expensive video card will save artists 3 minutes a day, the price difference from the cheaper option will be compared to the amount of money those daily 3 minutes worth through the lifetime of the card (2 years average).

If another company B has a value of “quality”, the approach could be different. A roadmap would be drawn aimed at a top-quality product amongst its competitors. Day-to-day buyings would be based on the quality of supplies and the quality added to products and services, even if more expensive.

Of course, a company could have both “profitability” and “quality” values. In this case, the leaders presumably believes top-quality on their market also means high profits. Decisions would be made based on either of them, or both of them if possible.

This is not a post of game design, basic mechanics or dynamics. Nor aesthetics, story or characters. This “Playing aspect” is a set of structures and practices all casual games should have on nowadays markets, regardless if it is a hidden object, time management or chain popper.

Loading Times and Start Menu

The game must load fast before the start menu, and after clicking the “Start” button. If the game features comics or intro videos, a skip button must be available. The player shouldn’t spend more than 3 minutes between “Finish” installation button and getting into the game.

So many casual games are out there, so many clones are made in no-time… The competition is fierce. If the game takes too long to start, why bother? Why not giving up and getting a similar game on the same portal?

Of course, players will have more patience with your loading time if they had to download the game in the first place. They invested time, had to install it, so they will be willing to wait a bit. If your game is a Flash webgame, however, loading times must should be really really fast. I’d say 10 seconds top – provided you make an obvious loading bar with the percentage loaded very clearly stated.

Controlling

Casual players don’t expect to use anything but the mouse. They are not used to first-person shooters WASD control schema. They are not used to map spells on keys like F2, F3, etc. They will try to use the mouse, and they will use the left button.

Should we never use arrows keys? Arrows are OK – if you clearly explain them, with BIG art of arrow keys on the tutorial screen before the game begins, highlighting the explanation with particles around! J I’m kidding, but really, players skip tutorial screens in a blink. So during the half of a second they look to them, you should explain arrow controls.

Everything else should be controls aimed to help advanced/dedicated players – not the core control of the game. Like PopCap says, it is not that your controlling schema should dogmatically follow the “left button of mouse” mantra. It is just that, if game can’t be played like that, game design probably isn’t simple enough for the casual audience.

Tutorials

The player must be taught how to play the game. Don’t be afraid of tutorial screens, but always make an in-game tutorial on the first game stage (even if you are doing one-more-match-3). Teach the mechanic basics with in-game tutorials. If your gameplay is more complex, you could extend the mechanics in-game tutorial to the second stage, but don’t go much further. Too many in-game mechanics tutorial will give the impression the game just takes too long to “really begin” (as the Shopmania team found out).

Use in-game tutorials again when the player gets new powers/items/spells. Always provide a “Skip Tutorial” button, so returning players who start new games won’t have to go through it.

Saving

On casual audience, gameplay sessions are short (10-15 minutes) but frequent over the day (5-7 sessions). The game should:

1. Save the player progression automatically during gameplay, without locking the game.
2. Load save games fast when returning
3. Restore games in the very same point the player left. Everything must be exactly the same.

Would that mean that checkpoint systems do not work for casuals? It could work, but so many casual titles have implemented the save feature as stated above that your player will probably be expecting for them – and get frustrated if you don’t have it. Avoid taking unnecessary risks.

Also, casual players won’t comfortably manage multiple saved games, which is the reason save files are connected to simple and straightforward “player profiles”. If possible pick the Windows account login as the default user name the first time the player runs the game.

After the “Download” aspect, let’s discuss the next step of the casual player: installing and running your game.

Installing

Convincing casual players to install anything is hard – they must reasonably trust on the site where they downloaded or on the friend who sent them the application. Above all, casual players hate installing things. Many fear viruses, spyware and trojans.

In fact, I suspect it’s one of the reasons Internet piracy hasn’t broke the casual industry: big portals are trustworthy, have privacy-compliance and virus-free seals, and some of them (Big Fish, Real Arcade) have their own trustworthy “client”, a sandbox to install and manage games.

That said, when casual players get to install something, they expect to get a “Next > Next > Next” wizard and it’s over. But how could one mess this up?

• If you are going to use Java or C#, and you require the player to install JRE or the .NET Framework to install the game;
• If you are going to use some fancy FX, and you require the player to install DirectX 9.0c or OpenGL 2.0 to make the game work;
• If you are going to build your own SDK, and you require the installation of any sort of run-time, DLL packs, media encoders, audio encoders, or anything but the game binary EXE itself;
• You released the game, but found a critical bug and require players to patch the game with an additional download.

Players won’t be happy to install other software than the game itself. They won’t update your game online. Anything besides a straightforward wizard is trouble. And they also NEVER get patches! Even a seamless auto-update function at the start of the game can be confusing.

Installation Scripts

When packaging the game on a setup file using tools like NSIS or Inno Setup the installation scripts should be very simple. The should be able to run with a simple file copy on the hard disk, without requiring any special procedures, registration or special code.

The reason is that when distributing through game portals, they will code their own installer scripts. Anything besides a simple file copy can be messed up. For developers, this is one of the key differences between core game and casual markets: you won’t code the installer.

Running the game

Pack every technology you need on the game binary executable or DLLs. Don’t require additional downloads / installations, and use what the OS provides you. It’s not about Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista – It’s about the very first version of Windows XP, with no updates. Or maybe even the very first version of Windows 2000 without SPs. I don’t think developing for Windows 95/98/ME will make such a big difference (according to ArcadeTown data, something like 2-3% of the Windows market). But if you can use DirectX 7 like Fairway Solitaire and still get a great game, why not?

(By the way, first WinXP version features DirectX 8.1, and first Win 2k version features DirectX 7.)

Don’t forget Mac - aim for the lowest OS X version possible. On development use a Windows/Mac multi-platform technology. Linux is still ignored on casual, but might worth a try, if your technology gives this option, but you will have to look for alternative sites for distribution, since major portals don’t support Linux.

The golden rule

Leave all your risks on the gameplay.

Casual games are usually made by independent developers, and as independent, you will have few space on main distributors/publishers sites. When you get a good spot, you must sell it to the broadest range of consumers possible. Anything you can do to get your game running even on old machines will get you more $$.

Let the user decide if she doesn’t like your game for its design, and not for her inability to install or run it. Conversion rates are already low enough (1%). So leave all the risks on the game itself. Play safe on the technology of the project.

Go for rock-solid, multi-platform, “battle-proved”, plugin-free, old-tech compatible frameworks! Like these ones: PopCap Framework, the Playground SDK, BlitzMax and PTK.

Long time without posting… It’s time to hit the road again. After the end of the Lex Venture project, it is time to review my past practices and try to get to (much) better game producing methodologies.

So, let’s start with the “Download” aspect of your game – it means everything related to the process of getting your game into the user machine. For the casual audience, it also means different issues for the two dominant distribution models available for indie developers: the Downloadable and the Online Models.

Downloadable Model

I would say, aim for 20 MB of download size. If you can’t, then for 25 MB. If it is needed, then 30 MB. More than that, either you gonna do an art-stuffed hidden objects game, or you are just taking risks. There is a point where the casual player just give up if download size is too large. Because there are so many games alike, they can pick what will arrive faster.

Sometimes, a different file format can save you a couple of MB on download size. We were using PNGs on the beginning but we switched to TGAs later on the pipeline. Even with a much larger file size on disk space – average 450kb on PNG against 4 MB on TGA – the compressed size after using LZMA algorithm on the setup package dropped to 400kb on PNG against 200kb on TGA.

Your SDK footprint on the game’s EXE should not be ignored also. For Lex Venture, we used the .NET Framework and it was a mistake – on the process of bundling the DLLs (to ensure execution even on systems without the framework installed), the footprint got to a whooping 7 MB! For the casual market, 7 MB could be a full game!

Also, consider that lighter versions of your game could be player on browsers –for example, the PopCap Framework browser plug-in or OSAkit technology. Both are ActiveX based and will allow you to distribute demo versions just like web games. When picking the technology and planning art, check if your basic assets and DLLs footprint won’t render web version impossible even with less art and levels!

Online Model

The future of PC (and Mac) casual games lies on Flash technology. More and more portals require Flash versions, and most of them will only publish Flash games (like Miniclip). As more the band broadens, Internet connection become ubiquitous, and the processing power increases to support fast software rendering, Flash will be increasingly dominant as a platform for PC games.

The “Download” issues on Flash games relates to streaming and browser cache. Flash has streaming capacities and you can implement in a way the player could start the first stage before the game assets are downloaded completely. But on the other hand, the user cache may expire before his next visit to the site, and the assets needed to start the game will have to be re-downloaded every time.