VideoGameInsider.net

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The most important aspect of your work life is keeping an up to date and easy to read resume. Yesturday I received a resume from a 3D Artist. The layout of the resume was fine: work history, education history, self-taught education history, summary of skills, and a little more information about him. The guy seems to have worked on some interesting stuff, but he forgets one thing - URLs! Even if you don’t have a portfolio provide some direct links to rendered pictures, hosted on ImageShack or some other provider!

An employeer won’t sit down and email over 5,000 applicants and ask where are your pictures. If you don’t want to put the direct links in your resume then at least include them in your email.

I was actually requested this topic by a reader named Robert: “I’ve always been very interested in exact figures developers have paid for art, sound assets. Maybe if you could ask some developers and post the info. The name of the artist or composer doesn’t have to be included…”

So I do ask you fellow developers - how much do you normally pay for all of these assets?

With my current game, The Divine, I’ve actually avoided paying any of my staff upfront. I’ve worked out a royalty system so basically they all have an incentive to make this game awesome.

In the commercial game industry you can see from the 2003 Developer Salary Survey (it’s the most current online edition, offline is already 2006) that paying your workers can cost a serious amount of money!

So as I asked above if you are a developer please post (comments section) some information to help Robert out.

Thanks!

I’m still asking this question to myself. After the sense of purpose and meaning the week of Malathedra gave me, I now have to go on and figure out what I’m doing next. it’s amazing how the marketing business is like being in a traveling circus. It takes planning, it’s hela-fun when you finally perform, and then you’re depressed when it’s all over. Right now I’m at that stage of depression and boredom.

Well that’s why I have this blog. I can now show the constant cycle of one side to my life. Doesn’t that sound fun?

Anyway you’re all starving for my reaction to how exactly the week of Malathedra went, right? Comparing the visitor count data from the first week that the Announcement PR was sent out to the week of Malathedra PR, lets just say it didn’t work out as well as we had hoped or did it?

For those of you who don’t know, Raymond Jacobs (head of EDI Games) and I planned out a week of marketing for Malathedra. We discussed what would be released each day and then I would send out a press release about it on the day of its release.
I would say that we did accomplish what we originally set out to achieve, regain the interest in potential buyers. When you’ve read multiple comments saying “I want to pre-order this game” there is a warm feeling that comes to the heart.

The Week of Malathedra Website Statistics:
Day 1 - 86 visits - Screenshots
Day 2 - 118 visits - Music Clips
Day 3 - 199 visits - Gameplay Videos
Day 4 - 179 visits - Wallpaper and Avatars
Day 5 - 115 visits - Trailer

Day 1 - Can we say screw up? From what I can judge not all websites that I expected posted this first PR initially. Why I have no idea. But it was on the next couple of days that the screenshots finally appeared.

Day 2 - When users listened to these clips they understood that Malathedra is first a true adventure game. Having a track that sounds similar to Monkey Island, allows gamers to hear that we know what good adventure games are.

Day 3 - The gameplay videos allowed us to build off of the sense that the players got from hearing the music. Visually they saw the comedic elements that have been developed throughout Malathedra. Comedy next to story is the reason why anyone plays adventure games.

Day 4 - Well we had to stretch things out a little bit here. Obviously after getting gamers excited we had to give them something to take back with them. What better way is there than wallpapers and avatars?

Day 5 - For the last day we found it appropriate to save the best for last. A trailer would be the ultimate thing (mainly because it’s too early to release a public demo).

So why were the stats not as stellar as theywere with the first Announcement PR? There are a couple of reasons for this. For the majority of the updates, users did not have to go directly to Malathedra.com in order to view them. Most websites published the materials on their own websites. Only the gamers with an actual interest in the game visited the homepage. The only day where users had to visit the homepage to see the update was on day 5 with the trailer, but I believe that the image quality of the trailer hurt potential coverage from these exact game sites that covered Malathedra for all the previous days. Why would anyone recommend their users to view a pixalatted video?

Even with all of this in mind, I commend EDI Games for being one of the few indie game development companies to think and execute a marketing strategy from development day 1. EDI is several months from releasing any sort of demo and already thousands of people know about the game. With EDI’s first game Morning’s Wrath, marketing campaign didn’t actually start until after the game was released! I’m 100% sure that this impacted sales to some extent. The question that has yet to be answered is: will marketing Malathedra this early in development improve sales? It almost seems as if gamers might forget about Malathedra and EDI will have to spend extra time reminding gamers over and over again when the game is coming out. Is this wasted time that could be used for developing the game or is this actually creating buzz? We’ll just have to wait till 2007 when the game is finally released! Sorry, I don’t know the ending to this story.

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Faster development cycles, cheaper budgets, creativity, innovation - that’s what the Wii brings. Does it make business sense not to support this console if you’re a commercial developer?

I predict that any developer who has games coming out on the launch for the Wii will make a serious amount of cash no matter the quality of their game. Gamers will be hungry from day one, they want the new experiences that all of these games bring. It doesn’t matter if the game is a port because graphics don’t matter. It’s the gameplay that makes the game.

Technically each of these games/franchises are starting off on a fresh start. It doesn’t matter if the series was bad on previous consoles because with the difference in gameplay, no one will be able judge, if the game is good or not, until the game is actually released.

Even if the game sucks, it still will be fun because you’ve never played a game like this before. It’s a fresh and exciting new experience. This experience will wane after sometime but for those that release a game within the first six months, their game will sell like gold.

The creativeness of each developer will truly show in the next couple of years. In the near future, sales charts will prove that creative and fun games will often sell more than games that follow previously designed gameplay mechanics for the Wii.

By the way, now is the time to invest in any game company stock, especially Wii developers. Sell come mid-January/early-Febrary.

It was only two and a half months ago that Ethereal Darkness Interactive Games (EDI Games) reduced the price of Morning’s Wrath from $19.95 to $9.95 (Download version). The month before the price sale reduction we sold three copies of the game. In July we sold seven copies. In August, we sold eleven copies. Almost half way through September and we have sold eight copies. Now keep in mind that the game is about to have it’s one year anniversary of release on October 1, 2006!

It was our hope that Morning’s Wrath could be a game that has longevity rather than a complete wipe out in sales over its lifetime. In the first few months of release we usually sold 20-30 copies.

There are a few key strageties to getting your game a healthy sales cycle.

#1 - Within the first month of release make sure that the press has reviewed your game! Give them tons of screenshots and movie files so your game stays on their front page for as long as possible.

#2 - Be aware of the time period that you launch the game in. With Morning’s Wrath EDI has had several different types of sales - winter, spring, and summer.

#3 - Be prepared to lower the price of the game if it isn’t selling as strongly as it did when it launched. Your first price reduction should be within 6 months of the launch saying that you currently charge $19.95+. The boxed version of Morning’s Wrath originally cost $29.95. It currently costs $19.95.

#4 - Add your game to portals and retailers. It has taken EDI a while to get Morning’s Wrath onto some portals but the game is currently selling on three portals along with one retailer.

#5 - Patches are a beautfil thing for games. After announcing the release of a new patch, your customers all come back and make the community alive again. Listen to your customers and add in the features that they want!

All of these points should be well planned out before you launch your game. Each of these are key strategies that will make your game continue to sell. Make sure that you announce all updates through Press Releases. You are more likely to reach your target audience if you get coverage from websites over the course of a year rather than the first week of launch.

Well at least more so than I thought.

Today I went to the Mountain Dew & Xbox 360 Game Live, a College Campus Tour, at my school and it felt like a minature-E3 - games were buggy, there was a DJ, hot girls asking player’s if they wanted to enter in a contest, etc.

I went around asking students what they thought about the games they were playing - Splinter Cell 4, Eragon, Madden 07, Need for Speed Carbon, FlatOut 2, DOA 4 - are the ones that I remember being there. Players actually weren’t impressed with buggy games. Buggy as in buildings were flickering from textured to non-textured. Crap like that won’t sell a game so why in the world would any developer show this to the public?

It’s different in the case of showing the media a buggy game. They’ll understand that the game might only need a few tweaks to fix the broken parts, but do consumers understand this? Somehow I doubt it. Seriously does any consumer, other than geeks, understand how games are developed?

What’s really sad is that consumers are forced to put up with mediocrity. Have you entered a game store recently? 1,000s of games on the shelves - how are they supposed to know which one is better than the other?

Do they know the hundreds of developers and publishers behind those games? Obviously not! They may know the top 8 names - Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, UbiSoft, EA, Activision, Midway, Atari - but after that…

There’s a reason why so many game companies fold and that’s because consumers are confused. No matter the company or the franchise consumers are not safe from buggy and low quality games. So I ask what will make them buy $60 games that have not been unrestlessly assured in quality?

If you are serious and want your game to sell, you have to make a high quality game. Major portals will not accept any game that has poor gameplay or graphics. With a good game, gameplay and graphics go hand in hand. Developers must balance the two.

When designing your game keep this in mind. It’s much easier to make a cartoony looking game rather than something that’s realistic.

When you’re done with your game, go back and look at things that could be polished. There’s no reason why your game shouldn’t be the best that it can be. Spend at least a month tweaking as much as you can. Beta test your game and get feedback!

Mediocrity is not an option in this day and age. There are too many indie games being released every week for your game to get noticed if it looks or plays bad.

Why would you want to waste months to years of your life on a project and not have it sell well?

I have jumped off the edge of the mountain. Over the weekend I made a deal with United Minds Games to publish their upcoming game Space Renegades: The Series. The deal includes me doing the same things that I do for marketing any game but as a publisher the game will eventually have a recognized name behind it. Names and brands go a long way with consumers. Normally they don’t like to buy things made by a company that they don’t know.

The other great thing about this if Space Renegades becomes popular I can created a boxed version and get the game into retail outlets.

So it is really going to be an interesting ride from here on out. I’ve wanted to publish games for years and now I’m finally here. It took me a while to learn the ropes and gain the knowledge that I needed so now it’s all a wait and see process.

My goal isn’t to grow at a fast rate. College is my first priority so I have to see how that goes and how much I can handle before it becomes too much.