Where are all the examples?
Where are:
1. The games made after people finished their own engines?
2. The documented general purpose game engines that so many people must have produced by now?
3. The epic stories that inspired sweeping local games?
4. The hugely successful advergames that went viral?
5. The popular digital re-imaginings of traditional african games?
I'm asking for local examples because, while there might be possible examples overseas, we can't talk to international developers as easily. It would be great to have solid advice from local developers, artists and designers that share our educational backgrounds and can speak to the situations we find ourselves in while attempting these goals. Second- and third-hand stories of international successes are too often open to massive misunderstandings and false assumptions, I think we could prevent that sort of issue by chatting to local successes instead.
After all, so many people have announced that they're doing one (or more) of the above - and there must be many more who don't announce their intentions quite so loudly - that we must have at least some success stories by now. I'd love to be able to offer different perspectives for hopeful locals to be able to choose from, it would be better than the pessimism many of them feel greets their announcements now.
1. The games made after people finished their own engines?
2. The documented general purpose game engines that so many people must have produced by now?
3. The epic stories that inspired sweeping local games?
4. The hugely successful advergames that went viral?
5. The popular digital re-imaginings of traditional african games?
I'm asking for local examples because, while there might be possible examples overseas, we can't talk to international developers as easily. It would be great to have solid advice from local developers, artists and designers that share our educational backgrounds and can speak to the situations we find ourselves in while attempting these goals. Second- and third-hand stories of international successes are too often open to massive misunderstandings and false assumptions, I think we could prevent that sort of issue by chatting to local successes instead.
After all, so many people have announced that they're doing one (or more) of the above - and there must be many more who don't announce their intentions quite so loudly - that we must have at least some success stories by now. I'd love to be able to offer different perspectives for hopeful locals to be able to choose from, it would be better than the pessimism many of them feel greets their announcements now.
Comments
Total Minutes played: 174002
Total Sessions played: 30243
Average Minutes per play session: 5
Number of times airtime requested: 2909
So, no.
It never went viral, it never paid us anything outside of the initial development contract fee, even though we built that in if lots of people started SMSing in to buy it. You should be able to play it here, just note that it's designed for phone screens, so it's low-res and some assets extend outside the bounds of the file because that space was never rendered.
The people we made the game for put it behind a competition entry that required a code, instead of just giving it away. It also never made it onto any marketing material or was otherwise supported, outside of a single SMS campaign they did, even though it was supposed to be a big push.
Article from 2007 about a competition result, seems like David Vannucci was a Wits student, maybe we can make contact with him during AMAZE?
The Mobiraba Facebook page talks about all sorts of cool things like being overwhelmed with requests and user numbers (over 100 000, sweet!) but goes silent nearly a year ago.
ItWeb article mentioning Mobiraba and some really, really strange stuff in the comments about joint ownership by the MSSA. Could that be a problem? ... Also, the MSSA, *shudder*
Thennnn...
*crickets*...
Having looked back over them, I'm honestly not sure that my suggestions do fit into any of them, my apologies. ^^;
I'll confess that I'm not sure of what you're asking after in the third category ("epic stories that inspired sweeping local games") -- do you mean games based on local stories?
One way or another -- and I'll confess that this might be a slight tangent -- it does remind me of a yet-unreleased game that I believe that Celestial is working on: Muti, which seems to be a survival horror based on southern-african lore.
What would Muti be an example of?
However, if 3 refers to games based on local stories or beliefs, then it looks as though Muti -- presuming that it comes to fruition -- might fit into 3. The "story" page on the site that I linked to is a little vague, but I believe that it mentions Johannesburg as the setting, and the title implies some connection to local beliefs. To quote their story page: You should be able to see a short "sound test" video on this page, by the way.
/Cynicism off
The goal here is to find successful examples of the strategies that new developers tend to devote themselves to. How else are they supposed to get useful advice?
Perhaps more on-topic, I wonder whether there's a source for statistics on the "Astros Incredible Space Race" game that Luma Arcade put out a few years ago? Where would one look to find out how well that did? I seem to recall seeing a fair few scores mounting, but it's sufficiently long ago that I don't remember with much clarity, and I doubt that I was aware even then of whether it at all went viral...
[edit] Sorry, I forgot to mention that it would be -- if it did sufficiently well -- a candidate for No. 4.
[edit 2] Apparently putting a hash in front of something on this forum turns it into a search-link?
I'm a little surprised there haven't been some very successful advergames... What seems strange is that advertisers keep pumping a lot of money into these things, and it seems like they must keep on getting burned...
I mean obviously an advergame *can* work, but the success rate seems staggeringly low.
(Of course, in most cases the game fails simply because it is not the solution to the problem the company is trying to solve in the first place, and hence all the fun and beauty gets systematically sucked out of the game. "Can we have that in our corporate mucus green?" "We don't want the player to shoot the enemies; it's against our values and kids don't like shooting" "Let's make the player register before she can play" "Let's put in survey questions everytime the player collects a star" "Yes! We can flash our slogan as a reward for the player!" "It does not have enough educational content... let's fill that space and that space with iiiiii n t e r e t i n g facts" "Let's make the player buy our product to play the game!" "Let's give away our product if the player reaches a score of 10000" [Note: the product is not an iPad]... geez I'm not running out of ideas yet...)
(Edit: Actually, I think the topmost reason an adver game fails is when a company makes it in an effort to be cool [or some other similar trait], when they are not inherently cool. One of the most fun projects I worked on was the racing game for Mini. They were extremely strict about following their policies and branding (maybe 500 pages of PDF?) - they even brought in paint samples for us to match the cars. Yet the game felt like a real game, because the Mini brand is inherently cool: not just the idea of racing around the city with a cheeky Mini, but their branding was very colorful and game-friendly. Of course, it is also a rare instance of where the product was extremely well suited for a game.)
I was simply implying that local developers need not explore the outer limits -AKA trying to push Africa down the throats of a paying international audience need not be explored. Imitation (which is the best form of flattery) of the popular (Dreamweb?) is more likely to reap the benefits. No? Maybe . I'm proud, but not that proud. Maybe I just don't understand the question, sir? So yes, SA. Where are:... blah blah.
So being able to talk about what doesn't work, and honestly evaluate those facts (rather than just stating that these things don't work and assuming correctness), may be quite relevant to that I assume.
This was exactly our experience with the advergame our company developed. (The one I showed you when you came round to our office)
The client suddenly realised after we had developed everything including a PHP MySQL leaderboard component, that the game had to be hosted only on their servers which didnt run PHP or MySQL. The servers were for a big corporate so they would never have modified them, and they refused to cough up the extra budget to rework the leaderboard component. Without the leaderboard there was no competitive point to the game and hence they canned it.
I'm afraid I haven't heard of Dreamweb, so I literally had no clue why you were suddenly talking about axes and pixelated nude scenes in a thread that's asking for rather specific things. That was weird ;)
@Nitrogen, @hermantulleken: We've had the exact opposite experience but the same result with the advergames we've made. The games themselves have worked out really well, it's just that their releases and subsequent usage has been terrible. I mean, take a look at the stats for the Colgate game I posted above, 5 min average playtime? That's like a million times the average feature phone playtime. Those players are coming back too...
We always made sure we understood exactly what the clients were looking for and that they understood what it was we were going to deliver. That meant educating clients quite often on what was possible and what wasn't. Our prototyping approach really helped make sure that process worked, every time clients gave us the go-ahead to prototype for a month, we ended up getting the rest of the budget for the game too. The biggest problem was that people didn't know what to do with games after we'd made them. If we did another one these days, we'd control the release process and the product integration as well, turn that into some sort of retainer.
I think most advergames end up getting made by in-house flash/web developers who've never made a game before but think it'll be easy. We actually got a lot of business after that approach had failed somewhere, I imagine places like Mann Made Media and Web & Circus (wow, those are some serious back-in-the-day names) got even more contracts that way than we did. Not really keen to go back to that sort of work TBH, even though we made some games that I quite enjoy still.
I remember being really excited by that Mini game back in the day - the idea of being able to drive around tracks based in CT and JHB was enough to get me to sign up and download the game
Successes: CT is still selling 18yrs later. It has buyers all over the world and is stocked in a handful of stores around the world. We have loyal/raving fans who help us translate the game, etc. We have not made a loss.
Some of the challenges relating to boardgames (all over the world) are that they are still a niche product - sport boardgames are a niche product within that niche! South Africans are not big board game players - most of our sales have been America, France, Italy, England (Russia has seen some interest lately!). Shipping is extremely expensive, and without greater volumes and mass distribution points, the consequence is the game is priced higher! But perhaps a big reason CT has never risen to greater things is because we have never marketed it. All our awareness and sales are organic.
That said, we currently have a fan who is adapting the game to a software version. We are hoping that greater ease of access to the game, coupled with some additional gameplay features could see the support and endorsement from our fans turn into some money.
Marco