follow me at E3!

OK, so Wednesday is my day at E3... I arrive to early and leave too late, such is the way of conventions.  I'll be taking pictures of course, and interviewing folks that are willing to talk... on the record.

But mostly, taking pictures!!  If you can't be there, you can follow along... even direct me a little by responding to my tweets. I'll play games and take pictures as directed... well, to a point.

So follow along!! (the link is at the top of the page)

Mac

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He's dead Jim...

Image via Wikipedia

I'm still happy with the latest Star Trek film, and I've had 2 weeks to mull it over. Yes there are tech problems with parts of it... to many to list here, but I enjoyed how it all fell together. We even got to hear some great old Star Trek lines... but one that we didn't hear: "He's dead Jim..". And I guess that's a good thing...

But when do we know a game is dead? Its easy to look back and see, yes, no sales... its dead! But when do you stop making content for a game that has some DLC? When do you officially move on?

In board games we only do an expansion when the expected sales, 1/3 of the original sales, makes finanacial sense. That's a hard thing to NOT do because as a designer and publisher, I think I can stir sales by subtley fixing some of the problems with the original. Also, it shows that as a publisher I support my products.

But at some point, its time to just hang it up. It doesn't mean your product failed or that you did a bad job... it just means that the microsecond of our attention span has moved on. Recently I used a phrase: "Throwing sauce on the pig", which means trying to dress up something that is not worth the effort.

As hard as it is, look at the sales and realize that a small percentage of those who already bought the game, will be buying the downloadable Content (DLC). If that number is not large enough to justify the production of the content, move on.

Comments? Need an example? Are you listening Germany?

Mac

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What does the "user experience" mean

When I get to the game I love it... but how hard is it for the user to get there in the first place?

As we take steps into a world where the digital download is the preferred method of video game distribution, the method becomes very important. I recently mentioned in a post about a download that wanted to take 9 days, of course that's ridiculous. I don't think we need to have just ONE system, but whatever the number of systems, they need to be under 5 clicks, and 3 is a sweet spot.

That basically means, 3 clicks, and 2 screens. I will admit here, I have never used Steam so I can't make any comment other than I have heard its a very good and clean system. I hope one of my readers will comment with details about Steam.

The "user experience" starts when they decide to buy your product, regardless if it will be downloaded or comes in the box.

I have seen some focus, rightfully, on the product but I have also seen to little focus on the delivery system. If you make it hard to get your product, then you'll scare away so many customers that your product will suffer before its seen. At Broderbund my boss there explained to me that they created some really good game affects starting at level 50... and realized that the game was so hard that only 1% of their customers ever saw all the effort they put into it. This same problem applies to digital distribution.

One of the products I worked on had a fixed ship date that the developer wasn't able to hit. The date moved around on them and there was some feature creep so it wasn't a developer failure at all. As the Senior Producer on the product it was up to me to offer solutions. We added "Updates" button to the main product screen. When the player pressed the button, the product looked for an update, verified that the player wanted it, if a "yes" was the answer then it would download and install it, and rerun itself. One button update bought us weeks of dev time. Had it merely loaded a web page and then started a long trail of downloading and saving files, we would have lost customers.

Think about the stumbling blocks between you and the player enjoying the product. How many of those can you eliminate?

Your thoughts?

Mac

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Going to E3

Every year that they've had a real E3, I've been there. I think most of you know that the last two years have been fake E3. They were press only events, invite only, and small. Although a few notable companies, Disney and Activision, had some really bad press events for the most part it was pretty boring and didn't create any buzz... which is the entire point of the show!

I have a large collection of autographs of famous people, and all from E3. I was so junior at SEGA that I couldn't secure a conference room to meet with developers. And standing in the booth was never a good situation... so I hit on the idea of standing in line to get an autograph and have our meeting. I would say to a developer: "Larry Bird is going to be at the Acclaim booth Saturday from 1-3, lets get in line at 12:30 and have out meeting". Without fail, they showed up and we had a great meeting.

I repeated this over and over and never once did a developer fail to show up, or even be late!

So I'm going again, for a single day. I'm sure I'll see old friends, and someone will ask me if I'm going to some big party... which I will say no because I have a flight back at 8. But it will be great to see the booths and how the companies struggle with the sound level and the women not wearing much.

(They could always do what Ripcord Games did, hire a beautiful woman and then put her in baggy clothes. I said: "Lets put a bag on her head and complete the picture". I insisted we find clothes her size and suddenly she had a crowd around her and was doing the job she was hired to do.)

I have a million convention stories, from both E3 and CES. I loved CES because it was twice a year, in Chicago and Las Vegas, two great cities. I miss going to that show...

I'll report back all of the vents of what will be a very busy day. But until then, I'll leave you with one of my favorite William Shatner quotes from the first E3.

This has been great, see you all next year at E4!

Mac

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I hate the monastery game Dev industry

I've been fortunate enough to have been a hiring manager at various times in my career. One of the first times was at US Gold, the men of the place had trouble making a commitment to hire a QA person. While I certainly agree that picking the right person for a QA job is important, lets keep in mind that it was an entry level position.

I firmly believe that this was a case of typical male's not able to actually make a commitment. I asked them to re-interview their top 3 and then we'd pick one 3 days later. We followed that schedule and when it came right down to it we had two very qualified people and it was a toss up. I finally said: "Lets not have a monastery".

We hired her and she worked out great. She has stayed in the industry and if recall from her last Linkedin update, she's an Executive Producer. I couldn't be happier for her. Since hiring her I have become sensitive to not only how hard it is to get INTO this industry, but how much harder it is if you're a woman. I have hired many women into the industry, some are still in it and others are not... but they had a chance, an equal chance, to make it or go into another field.

I found a great blog on women in gaming, you can find it here: Dame Dev

Your comments?

Mac

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Tools tools and more tools

Where would we be without the tools that give us the ability to make these great games? I remember playing Winter Olympics from Epyx on the Commodore 64, (we called it the Commode 64), and marveling at how they animated the figure skaters using multiple sprites. It was obvious that they had a tool to allow an artist to make the animations and then map them to the sprite definitions.

But do tools also limit us? I've been doing some iPhone development recently and I notice more and more that the SDK's that companies are coming out with are really easy to work with, almost to easy. If a tool or SDK is to easy, then the programmers aren't willing to dive deeper to see what is actually happening. In my iPhone game the player can switch screens with a swipe, pretty neat but its what I call an "automatic" function. Most of the iPhone SDK is like that.

In the waning days of the Atari 2600 I dreamed of coming up with the last great title. I borrowed the "black book" from a friend at Broderbund and sifted through it. In those old days nothing was done for you. As a matter of fact, I had to program my own screen refresh routines, something that even your most basic console has built-in.

While I applaud the great ease that we can now develop iPhone games, lets not be afraid to dive in deeper and write our own stuff.

Your thoughts?

Mac

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