Dude, I have been on the crumbs end of the scale plenty, and STILL not going to throw my common decency in the toilet for a few bucks. Nobody's perfect, but I would like to think most people would rather not be parasites.
Did you forget or just conveniently ignore that there are real people involved?
Just remember: there are real people on both sides of the fence and while consumers can buy what they want and opt out at any time (for a tiny loss if they buy a crappy product) the people who work for those companies depend on them for their lives. Yes they are probably being exploited, but that's the only option they have.
Do you think everyone out there subscribes to the same ethics that applies here, or in the western world, or even your own personal code? I hope not.
unfortunately there's good intentions, and then there's the real world
The two are not mutually exclusive.
while the vast majority of the world is still just trying to survive on crumbs
It strikes me as hideously amusing that you should say that when you're the one condoning exploitation.
A cynical approach to the good intentions of society does absolutely nothing to encourage good intentions in society. We don't need more cynics in that regard and we don't need more people advocating things like this re-skinning business. Just because something is, doesn't mean that's how it should be - what the guy in the OPs linked article is doing is inherently exploitative and by its very definition unethical, and attitudes like ' let those to whom it is be' is a self-fulfilling prophecy that will lead you deeper into your 'real world' where people care less and less about the well-being of their fellow humans. The way forward is not to become better at 'survival', it's to change the playing field.
Dude, I have been on the crumbs end of the scale plenty, and STILL not going to throw my common decency in the toilet for a few bucks. Nobody's perfect, but I would like to think most people would rather not be parasites.
I'm struggling with this comment. This really gives the impression that it's not clear how far down the "crumbs end" of the scale really stretches...
It strikes me as hideously amusing that you should say that when you're the one condoning exploitation.
You do know that "exploit" is not an exclusively negative term? It also means "use", "profit from", "take advantage of" etc. If I use those words instead, could you please be less hung up about it?
A cynical approach to the good intentions of society does absolutely nothing to encourage good intentions in society. We don't need more cynics in that regard and we don't need more people advocating things like this re-skinning business. Just because something is, doesn't mean that's how it should be - what the guy in the OPs linked article is doing is inherently exploitative and by its very definition unethical, and attitudes like ' let those to whom it is be' is a self-fulfilling prophecy that will lead you deeper into your 'real world' where people care less and less about the well-being of their fellow humans. The way forward is not to become better at 'survival', it's to change the playing field.
I agree. But complaining about it on online forums with comments like these does not really help either:
I'm not advocating that money be your own personal prime motivator (it's most definitely not mine) - I'm just saying let those to whom it is be, and lead by example.
Discussion has been a huge part of whatever the hell it is I've managed to build since 2005 and randomly starting a game development community forum. Places like MGSA wouldn't exist without the discussion and idealism that got other people helping and ultimately making much cooler things than I could alone. A big part of whatever "leading" that was, was calling out stuff that wasn't helpful or worse, was insidiously destructive.
@dislekcia: unfortunately there's good intentions, and then there's the real world, and while I agree with you on a high level - I also think your point of view is slightly naïve and not conducive to survival. Not wrong, just not realistic. It's funny how the most well-off members of society can afford to so easily and sweepingly comment on altruism and virtue, while the vast majority of the world is still just trying to survive on crumbs.
I'm curious, what do you consider naïve? How is being aware of our cognitive biases and evolutionary history and having perspectives informed by both not conducive to survival, not realistic? Do you think it's not a considered position I adopt given an understanding of the world that I've used to guide myself to where I am now? (And yes, I'm honestly asking because part of my perspective is evaluating it and learning to do shit better)
I'm also entirely confused by you suddenly talking about well off members of society and crumbs. I'm afraid that point doesn't follow for me - where is it going?
P.S. A lot of the reason people are upset with the original link at the top of the thread is because what the dude in the article is doing is dishonest - he's selling people's confused eyeballs and duped interest to advertisers, not selling players a game they'll enjoy. That's simply dishonest to both the players AND the advertisers (who I'm sure want engaged, interested views over duped ones). Then, to top it off, the article is about selling source code to you, the reader, as a get-rich-quick scheme from a site this dude just got paid by. That's slightly less dishonest, but the real reason people read it and get annoyed is because it advocates spreading dishonesty. We don't like that, we want to punish the cheat, people can't do that directly, so they get annoyed.
But complaining about it on online forums with comments like these does not really help either:
Blegh. Yuck. Ew. What a c**t Ewww.
Right?
Wrong. Of course complaining online can help. What if someone reads that article and gets conned by it into wasting their time trying to clone and/or re-skin games? Seeing a backlash against the practice, a vocal and vehement backlash, might have an impact.
It's like dealing with rape-culture (I apologise for going there, but it's the best anecdote I have to explain this type of thinking) - for every rape joke or off-hand comment people don't react to with distaste, a rapist thinks you're just like them and agree with rape. Now, we're not at 1 in 4 levels of game cloning, but a reaction is still worth having.
Ye olde "But I made a difference for *that* starfish" parable and all that, right?
@dislekcia: idealism by itself is actually not a constructive concept. But... when used to measure current state, and to define a next state on the way to improvement it can be effectively applied.
If I detect that kind of blind idealism, my natural tendency is to remind the speaker that the world is far from that and more focus should be applied to something that can actually be achieved. If you get offended by that, then I will not further partake in this discussion.
edit: btw bitching about something never ever helps. Actual debate is the only way to effectively highlight and work through an issue.
@dislekcia: idealism by itself is actually not a constructive concept. But... when used to measure current state, and to define a next state on the way to improvement it can be effectively applied.
If I detect that kind of blind idealism, my natural tendency is to remind the speaker that the world is far from that and more focus should be applied to something that can actually be achieved. If you get offended by that, then I will not further partake in this discussion.
That last sentence implies that you're not seeing idealism being used here in the way you first described. Is that what you meant?
Is that what you consider naïve about my initial post here, or was that something else entirely?
@dislekcia: I'm saying that while I support your intent, you're too idealistic - and that line is drawn through my whole argument. Idealism creates little coccoons that protects the people inside it, bit it also blinds them against obvious opportunities for improvement. I detect a lot of that here, especially when people get so quickly offended.
With respect... if you were to re-trace your last 5 years (in this scene) again with what you know now, do you not think that more dedicated smaller initiatives rather than a vague "ideal end state" would have brought things a bit further by now? Hind-sight is awesome, and I would not have been able to do it any better myself - that I can assure you. I have been following in the shadows since the old gamedev days and have never felt the need to really get involved. But I am now, and I would be remiss if I don't apply the skills that put food on my table here as well.
@farsicon This is just my 2cents, but what you're advocating as realism sounds to me like fatalism. (I'm not trying to say you are fatalistic, I'm trying to make a point that calling someone idealistic or fatalistic is super duper subjective and unarguable. i.e. I can't prove that you are fatalistic to you).
(Though I'd mention that the best evidence we have points to the re-skinning-app-creation-method NOT being a viable money making scheme, and this suggests that those who are against the method probably have a firmer understanding of the underlying rules.)
@dislekcia: I'm saying that while I support your intent, you're too idealistic - and that line is drawn through my whole argument. Idealism creates little coccoons that protects the people inside it, bit it also blinds them against obvious opportunities for improvement. I detect a lot of that here, especially when people get so quickly offended.
With respect... if you were to re-trace your last 5 years (in this scene) again with what you know now, do you not think that more dedicated smaller initiatives rather than a vague "ideal end state" would have brought things a bit further by now? Hind-sight is awesome, and I would not have been able to do it any better myself - that I can assure you. I have been following in the shadows since the old gamedev days and have never felt the need to really get involved. But I am now, and I would be remiss if I don't apply the skills that put food on my table here as well.
Oookay... Um. Right, starting from the top:
I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of idealism as a negatively useful trait. But yeah, I can accept that someone might be "too idealistic". What I don't understand is how you've decided that applies here and specifically, applies to me. What criteria did you use to judge that?
What are people being protected from by this idealism? I'm not sure I understand what relevance that concept carries here - lots of people have been talking about very topical and real issues in this thread - I'm loathe to judge those comments as lacking reality or the result of isolation, what makes you feel the opposite?
What's the use of asking if I would do things differently? That's only relevant if you believe that I somehow made poor choices driven by some untenable level of idealism... So, I believed that I could make games enough to try and then got better at doing that? I had a series of impossible dreams that I knew were impossible, but eventually made real anyway? What's the actual problem there? Why have you assumed that an "ideal end state" exists or that I've actually communicated that here in any way? I've gotta say that I find the assumption that I'm somehow not rationally picking goals and working towards them just a tad patronising, what evidence do you have for that?
(Though I'd mention that the best evidence we have points to the re-skinning-app-creation-method NOT being a viable money making scheme, and this suggests that those who are against the method probably have a firmer understanding of the underlying rules.)
So much this, BTW.
Every "this is a successful game strategy imma copy that" business model is suffering from survivorship bias so hard it's not funny.
Every "this is a successful game strategy imma copy that" business model is suffering from survivorship bias so hard it's not funny.
I find survivorship bias fascinating.
I'm not really convinced there is *exactly* a survivorship bias relevant to the article in question. I don't see why the author wouldn't outright lie about the level of financial success the method in question produces... Though maybe it counts as survivorship bias even if it is based on a false survivor?
Though maybe what @dislekcia meant was that we can look at the AppStore and see a ton of crap games and assume that there must be money to be made in producing crap games. Whereas in reality, as far as I can tell, all the developers making those games are making just about zero money.
Though more generally (and maybe closer to what @dislekcia meant?): if there is a simple set of rules that can be outlined to reproduce a success, then almost certainly the market will be flooded with entrepreneurs attempting to follow those rules, and, unless you get in early, the competition will make it vastly less likely that that set of rules will work for you.
I'm not really convinced there is *exactly* a survivorship bias relevant to the article in question. I don't see why the author wouldn't outright lie about the level of financial success the method in question produces... Though maybe it counts as survivorship bias even if it is based on a false survivor?
Though maybe what @dislekcia meant was that we can look at the AppStore and see a ton of crap games and assume that there must be money to be made in producing crap games. Whereas in reality, as far as I can tell, all the developers making those games are making just about zero money.
Though more generally (and maybe closer to what @dislekcia meant?): if there is a simple set of rules that can be outlined to reproduce a success, then almost certainly the market will be flooded with entrepreneurs attempting to follow those rules, and, unless you get in early, the competition will make it vastly less likely that that set of rules will work for you.
I hadn't thought of the second two under that label, but they make sense. The last point is basically the Tragedy of the Commons in full force.
Although I'm mostly using the term as it was introduced to me reading The Black Swan, I could also use "false attribution bias" in that we're looking at the few apps that do well in an utterly overwhelmed system and attributing magical efficacy to their makeup that must be the cause of their success. You see it with stockbrokers all the time, gamblers too (and evolution, heh) in a system with so many participants, one of them will eventually produce a long success streak through sheer randomness.
In the case of Flappy Bird or many similar games, it's probably just luck (although the same blog that's linked in the OP actually seems to thing Flappy Bird was botted up). The survivorship part is that we're not examining the thousands of games that are exactly the same as whatever success story is out there, so we're only examining the survivors for lessons instead of trying to avoid being a failure.
In that regard, actually putting out a ton of no-investment games is a better strategy than any of the alternatives, because you can then keep doing that for longer until one of them randomly hits and you end up with a name to trade off of. Rovio didn't have to get lucky for their games after Angry Birds, for instance. I advocate a similar strategy for indie game success, although the rules are slightly different in the PC space because it's not as oversaturated just yet and there's a much stronger press multiplier effect. There's actually a value to game quality after a certain point of visibility ;)
I actually believe that most people have more than enough intelligence to see through an obvious scam and move on. I also believe that the market flooded with crappy games is not due to the malice of scam artists, but simply because it has become that easy for anyone these days to publish games on any platform. App Stores have almost become the software/games version of photo sharing in an increasingly social-media oriented world where it's ok to just share regardless of who sees it - it's simply comes down to how low the benchmark for entry is.
Sure some more shady elements would exploit that - and some are actually very successful at it - but even if you had the power to instantly remove all the ill-intentioned games you will still be left with a marketplace that has more than 90% redundant user generated content - and there lies the true problem - not cheats or criminals.
It's also a problem that you will not be able to solve here (regardless of your best intentions), because the copanies that run these app stores actually have seen much further than we would think - and they rely on their user base to use these stores as a social medium so that these companies can sell their devices and ecosystems.
@farsicon the point about the number of applications and saturation is going to be true either way. But that's not the issue here. The issue is a business practice that clearly muddies the waters. As I mentioned earlier the free market system considers people been scammed into purchasing something they didn't actually want a failure of the system outright.
I don't think anyone here expects this forum to suddenly resolve the global issue (but really would it be so bad if it could). Your assertion that people have enough intelligence to see though shady practices is clearly mistaken. If they could we would need no laws to prohibit such practices in the first place. In fact this very article is about how to perform exactly that a shady practice that people don't see through until its too late and you already have the net shady product out. The anger welling here is as much about the practice as it is about the gloating and promoting of such practices. Its gotten so bad that people actually feel comfortable enough to come out in public and make a proud statement of there achievements. And remarks about how there practices are bringing honest participants in the market down financially as a joke.
Its not far different from bragging about assaulting some retired people because it got your kicks and you could steal there food stamps.
The person doing this lives under the very rationalization you are repeating here dog eat dog etc. Life is not fair there is nothing you can do about it. I don't feel comfortable with the idea that anywhere in this community we would encourage or even condone such a business practice. Its harmful to the very things we wish to build.
I'm not rationalising the practice - guys, seriously, why do you keep putting words in my mouth. Read my posts instead of just glossing over it and attaching your own misconceptions to it.
I'm not rationalising the practice - guys, seriously, why do you keep putting words in my mouth. Read my posts instead of just glossing over it and attaching your own misconceptions to it.
Which is most likely - that somehow everyone here is misreading what you're saying, or that you're just not explaining yourself well? We think you're rationalising the practice because that's what you're telling us;
"What's wrong with exploiting"
"it's called good business"
"there's nothing actually wrong with it"
"They are not hurting anyone"
"don't judge because someone else is making a buck"
"Exploiting a market is good."
We're just reading what you're writing. All you've done is rationalise it.
Try again. What am I rationalising? The fact that some guy is scamming, or the fact that your reaction to it is blown out of proportion because damage/impact is minimal when weighed against other issues and that getting worked up about is not worth the effort.
So I think it's great that this discussion is happening. I think it's especially great that farsicon and others are engaging with contentious points, because that has served to create an interesting debate. But I don't think it's great that the discussion has begun to diverge into an ad hominem tennis match punctuated by the odd semantic disagreement
And that's disappointing, because I feel that there's still a lot of ground to cover here. The mobile market is poorly understood at the best of times, largely because it consists of many consumers that are very different from us. In a sense, catering for it is almost a completely different industry from building the games we all grew up with. I think discussions like these help us all understand it better. So I hope we can keep this thread going without everyone being at everyone else's throats about it. We're all in the same boat here!
You were rationalising it before I got involved on the thread. No need for me to 'try again'.
Wow. It's really difficult to keep a straight face when faced with such pure hostility.
Read my first post again. Read the article again. In no way was there been any mention of stealing, copying or doing anything immoral. The article is about buying and re-skinning pre-built apps and loading them with ads. And while this may be crappy practice it is not wrong - and it is simply irresponsible to compare this to rape and hurting old people.
All of you just read bits and pieces here and there, jumped to conclusions, and then jumped on the band wagon of the person before you. Way to go.
@farsicon - The whole thing IS about copying, it looks like YOU are the one who is confused.
As for whether it's wrong/right/immoral is what seems to mostly be debating about here, with you on the "not wrong" side of the debate. And for some bizarre reason you keep stating things like "it is not wrong", and then denying it immediately afterwards. Are you Wackhead Simpson??
@Chippit The best way to understand the mobile market is to take the Gautrain from jhb to pta and back every day for 6 months with nothing but an iphone to keep you company. Then imagine you need to take a 5min bus ride to the station and switch train twice before reaching you destination. Basically, you need something to distract you from the commute but not so much that you miss your stop because the train lines of developed countries are a spaghetti network that is tough to navigate even when paying attention. This is the reason that arcade puzzle games have evolved to have moves instead of time and why strategy games are doing better than shooters, to allow the player to stop anytime during play and make his move to the next train. Other than that people are playing on their phone waiting for a partner to get ready, while watching tv or just before bed. so the only meaningful time that this person can play a deep engaging game that takes concentration and time is in the last 30min before they go to sleep.
If you want to get a hit game, this is what you do. First You take a look at app annie for the games doing well, then using your library of games, or searching the history of the app store, you find the origin point, they all have one. There is nothing new, only original implementations and variations. Once you have found the base inspiration, distill it down to its root appeal, for instance, Dragonvale was a combination for Pocket Frogs and Tiny Zoo, Why are these games popular? Uncertainty and exploration. If you use the barte model to assess them you will find that they are heavily Achiever(Tiny Zoo) and Explorer(Pocket Frogs) driven games with just a little bit of Socializer. Why is this important, because socializers retain well, achievers and explorers pay well, and both are retained well by socializers. So now that you have this distilled version concept and you understand who is looking for it, you can create something new with their needs in mind.
However, knowing your own limitations are super important. Remember that cloning is apprentice work, 90% clone 10% innovation is journeyman work and new concepts are master work. Based on where you are in this ranking, decide how much you need to follow existing norms. Even Sid Meyers failed trying to enter the f2p space, not because he is not a master, but because he is not a master of f2p. So judge yourself based on how well you know and understand what you are looking at. If you don't wanna clone and release, then clone and don't release, but do it to understand it before you go for the 90/10 or the new idea.
@rustybroomhandle: I have not changed position on any of my points. Why does this this confuse you? Tell me which "thing" you're talking about that I'm denying. Surely you noticed that I made a clear distinction between "things".
Wow. It's really difficult to keep a straight face when faced with such pure hostility.
What hostility? I'm just pointing out that you were rationalising it before I joined the thread, and you're the one who told me to 'try again' - if you think that language is hostile, and don't wish to be hostile, don't use hostile language :)
farsicon said:
In no way was there been any mention of stealing, copying or doing anything immoral.
The person doing this lives under the very rationalization you are repeating here
You said,
farsicon said:
I'm not rationalising the practice - guys, seriously, why do you keep putting words in my mouth.
I pointed out where you'd previously rationalised what's going on the original article - irrelevant of whether or not you or I believe that's stealing, copying or doing anything immoral. You rationalised it.
farsicon said:
And while this may be crappy practice it is not wrong
It's crappy but it's not wrong? If it's 'crappy' then isn't it by definition something bad?
Chippit said:
But I don't think it's great that the discussion has begun to diverge into an ad hominem tennis match punctuated by the odd semantic disagreement
Communicating online is difficult at best, when you don't have tone of voice, gesticulation or any opportunity to flavour your text with your emotional response. From where I'm sitting, there's a difference of opinion going on here. That difference of opinion is being confounded by semantics, but in order to progress with the debate, we've each of us got to understand where the other is coming from. If I'm arguing against something that I've misunderstood, it renders it an entirely moot argument - so I'd rather spend time pointing out why I've interpreted something in the way that I have to help facilitate clarity before the debate can continue. Sure, it'd be lovely if we all understood each other perfectly, but the point we think we're making in our heads when we're writing is very often not the point that our words make when they're typed out. Almost any online argument is going to involve some time spent clarifying points and having slanging matches over misunderstandings until they're resolved - or until it becomes perfectly clear that both parties are unmovable on their respective fence-sides, at which point there's little to do but agree to disagree.
It seems I've long since reached that point, anyway. So I'm agreeing to disagree, and bowing out of this thread before the dent in the wall gets any bigger. Adios :)
Guys, as @Chippit said you are all fighting semantics, you said x, I said y. it isn't contrastive and with a bit of insight we can all understand what the others are trying to say. Lets drop the flaming and just discuss what we can take away from all of this?
@farsicon: If you're complaining about being misunderstood, maybe you should devote a little bit of time to answering the questions you've been asked to try and understand your posts better. This "you're not getting what I'm saying, so I'm going to assume you're hostile to me" is a stupid, useless tactic.
If you want to get a hit game, this is what you do. First You take a look at app annie for the games doing well, then using your library of games, or searching the history of the app store, you find the origin point, they all have one. There is nothing new, only original implementations and variations. Once you have found the base inspiration, distill it down to its root appeal, for instance, Dragonvale was a combination for Pocket Frogs and Tiny Zoo, Why are these games popular? Uncertainty and exploration. If you use the barte model to assess them you will find that they are heavily Achiever(Tiny Zoo) and Explorer(Pocket Frogs) driven games with just a little bit of Socializer. Why is this important, because socializers retain well, achievers and explorers pay well, and both are retained well by socializers. So now that you have this distilled version concept and you understand who is looking for it, you can create something new with their needs in mind.
I dunno about this approach. The last part about understanding what people are looking for is useful, but it's not differentiable - everybody's trying to do that, right? I hate the "there's nothing new" argument for a whole host of reasons that I've gone into elsewhere on this forum, so yeah, bleagh. Yes, inspiration and reworking mechanics to work on touch is a thing, but that's more to do with the following point: Don't look at the games on the top of the app store, they're all there through either luck (because there are loads of games that are exactly the same that didn't get lucky and can't understand why) or they were cheated up through bot-voting (this seems to be how Dungeon Keeper is being so well rated around the globe, might be how Flappy Bird and Nguyen's other games all got popular at the same time). Luck you can't duplicate and botting you can with enough money, so those are both non-useful noise compared to good signals.
What you want to do is look at the games that aren't doing well at all. Especially games from studios that routinely do badly, or games from big "successful" studios that aren't doing well. Those games are the place to learn what assumptions they're making that aren't useful, that's where you find the real gold. Yes, you might also find a mechanic you want to explore yourself, but that's up to you and your creative process - at least you won't be cloning it upfront because 1. The game didn't work the first time around, so making it exactly the same is stupid and 2. The only reason to clone it exactly would be if you had enough budget to cheat it up, and nobody making games here has that sort of spending going. There's a lot of other stuff you can learn from the games that aren't doing well - stuff not to do with UI, how not to do a tutorial, how not to pick fonts, etc.
So, don't copy, fix. Your solutions are going to be new ideas. Produce those ideas as cheaply as possible first, testing them like crazy on the way, then when/if you get lucky, monetise.
However, knowing your own limitations are super important. Remember that cloning is apprentice work, 90% clone 10% innovation is journeyman work and new concepts are master work. Based on where you are in this ranking, decide how much you need to follow existing norms. Even Sid Meyers failed trying to enter the f2p space, not because he is not a master, but because he is not a master of f2p. So judge yourself based on how well you know and understand what you are looking at. If you don't wanna clone and release, then clone and don't release, but do it to understand it before you go for the 90/10 or the new idea.
Agreed completely. There's really nothing wrong with copying a game to learn how it works and how people made it. That's great experience... The wrong part comes in when people try to release someone else's work as their own and make money ;) Knowing your own skills along that continuum of production is super important AND the only real way to move along it and get better is to be making stuff.
One thing that popped into my mind after all this is:
Person A starts making a game, 6 months later person B releases/announces and alpha/beta and its very similar to yours. Neither of the two knew about each other, but to the community it could come off as B copied A?
@iPixelPierre Well imo at the end the better design will win. HayDay was not the first farming game and many competitors came out at the same time, but they were the best, despite being from a then unknown and unproven supercell, they rose to the top because the graphics were good enough to spark interest, the mechanics were deep enough to be interesting and the gameplay was casual enough to allow players to play on the fly. This was not by chance. Supercell built it self on success, they took one of my predecessors from monster world flash, a proven farming game success and asked them to do what they did well but with all the experience they had gained over the last few years. I believe that the community doesn't care who is copying who, and if you look at the FPS genre it is all too clear. Who was first who was better, battlefield or cod. who cares, they appeal to different gamer expectations and both do well. (Maybe a bad example because COD was built on the stolen code base of medal of honor, which is the kind of thing that started this discussion off but on a really immoral level, lol)
But I believe the point remains, if you make the best game for the market you will win the race.
(Maybe a bad example because COD was built on the stolen code base of medal of honor, which is the kind of thing that started this discussion off but on a really immoral level, lol)
But I believe the point remains, if you make the best game for the market you will win the race.
How so? There are loads of good games for the market that haven't succeeded. Or is "for the market" a thing we can only know after the fact? (In which case I'd say that's not a very useful thing at all)
For the market, well, Actually, the games that failed and were good games were not good for the market. Can you give an example of a game that perfectly fit the specific demographic of player that owns a smart phone so we can look closely?
Of course I will be able to rip it apart with 20/20 hind sight, but the point is to have some reference and explain not only what works but what doesn't work right :)
Interesting. I didn't know that... But that seems to only apply to what Spark was working on, not Infinity Ward's CoD, which that link says was already in production before Spark actually existed?
CoD was always based on licensed iD engines, which is why saying that it was stolen MoH sounded really strange to me. Spark's early console version seems to have been a completely separate product, especially given the whole Renderware angle.
For the market, well, Actually, the games that failed and were good games were not good for the market. Can you give an example of a game that perfectly fit the specific demographic of player that owns a smart phone so we can look closely?
Of course I will be able to rip it apart with 20/20 hind sight, but the point is to have some reference and explain not only what works but what doesn't work right :)
Okay, why didn't Piou Piou vs Cactus the game you linked in the image above, reach success levels like Flappy Bird? (it was on iOS until recently, from the looks of it)
Then there are great games like GasketBall and Punch Quest that are well received, but didn't do the whole viral success thing.
Then there are any number of random social-style IAP games that never take off, yet are functionally identical to so many other games out there (you'd be better at pointing these out than I would, I'd literally just trawl the lower end of the app store search results). I very much doubt that there are individual reasons why each game didn't break the bank, it's much more likely that they simply didn't get lucky enough.
But my bottom line in that if the thing we're measuring is "how well a game does in the market" by, well, putting that game out in the market and assuming that the results indicate quality or a lack thereof, something is broken. That's not measuring quality at all.
But my bottom line in that if the thing we're measuring is "how well a game does in the market" by, well, putting that game out in the market and assuming that the results indicate quality or a lack thereof, something is broken. That's not measuring quality at all.
Yeah, in the ideal world one would assume this should be true by default, but I don't think it ever was or ever will be. This isn't something that's new or unique to the mobile market either. There are, historically, tons of examples of games that were toobloodygoodtofail that did (to varying degrees) anyway. It's not to say that each of these examples necessarily inherently deserved success through some magical measure of quality, but it's also clear that market success and product quality don't necessarily correlate. The success of a game in any market seems to be as largely affected by timing and luck as much any other product is.
@dislekcia I heard a much stronger version from someone who worked at infinity ward, but as the broken telephone effect is very much a thing every where, I would not put my head on a block to fight an anti COD war. Lol.
As for the games you list, I will play them all again and try to point out the problems, off the top of my head, punch quest is a live action game that requires constant action making it a weak game for the market and it had no massively wow art giving it no word of mouth effect. But with 1.6 mil a moderate amount of downloads in the last year and only 50k revenue in the US it is clear monetisation and long term retention was the issue. For success in long term retention you need content that can be generated faster than the community can consume it or player generated content. But pq is an easy example of how great design does not mean great market based design.
However what many companies do to test the water is unbranded very rudimentary games with ab tests that they put out on android, because then you can already see if your rapid prototype has potential. If 1day retention is above 40% and 3day above 30% on a rapid proto, you can be sure you are on the right track, even 30/20 is still ok but risky.
EDIT: but i am not saying that luck is not also a factor, as in all markets. It is true, but don't focus on it so much that it cripples you? It is not that big of a factor.
And as @Chippit said timing plays a role. As they tell ufc fighters, be first.
Okay, why didn't Piou Piou vs Cactus the game you linked in the image above, reach success levels like Flappy Bird? (it was on iOS until recently, from the looks of it)
Piou Piou is foreign sounding. It isn't as culturally accessible. It could never have had Flappy Bird's success.
Punch Quest is brilliant, but it appeals to retro gamers (a much smaller demographic than Flappy Bird's appeal), and so could never have Flappy Bird's success. Monster Dash and Canabalt both have appealed to retro gamers and have been successful... but Punch Quest has more of a spectacle of violence... which is why people like me love it, but casual gamers don't as much.
I'm not too sure why Gasketball didn't get as many downloads as they thought it should get, but I'm still not sure what the game is, and I've actively tried to figure it out and have watched all their advertising.
Obviously hindsight is 20/20. I could never have predicted Flappy Bird, but I would have predicted that its potential was higher than those others. This isn't even the first time than a tap-to-fly-upwards endless runner has been #1 on the App Store.
(Obviously I'm not analyzing these games from the same perspective as Bladesway, I'm not really that familiar with player-retention strategies, but I think I have an okay grasp of demographics and game appeal)
So, is looking at these games more useful than looking at Flappy Bird?
We could never hope to be like Flappy Bird, but we could make sure our games don't sound foreign to the US. We could never hope to be like Angry Birds, but we can make sure that our games explain what they are emphatically at a glance. We should learn to focus less on graphics and more on being approachable... etc. I dunno, I'm just drawing from the critiques I'm hearing here.
I'm sorta just tired of looking at "top games" and going "well, that got lucky" without having useful comparison points.
Approachable yes, very important, names that are searchable rather than good. Top 10 hits has rarely been brand new mechanics, masterwork is too foreign to most players because they like what they know. Usually it is the second itteration on mechanics that are successful. Direct cloning is also less likely to hit due to the industry now being service orientated, so a player can just stay where he is for more than the clone offers. 90/10 is where the potential is. And yes, free maybe hard to break into, but I don't buy that only big companies can get in with heavy advertising. Supercell was a noboday and now are huge and they came into what looked like an already saturated market as well. The samething is being said about facebook and Pretty Simple broke in with a super hit from nothing last year with Criminal Case.
Scan the appstore for moderate successes, play them and figure ou the reason they didn't work and then fix it if you can. That will give you the best odds of success.
I am really serious about the gautrain thing by the way, to design for a market you should walk a mile in their shoes so you can understand their needs.
@dislekcia on your look at failures idea, good yes, but you have to compare with successes to understand where they failed as well. But there is also another school of thought that says look at companies that never do well who suddenly do better than they have done before. This means they have hit a cord with a market that exists and can be designed for.
Yeah I just saw the red bouncing ball with spikes things too. Incredible, really makes me wonder if there are somethings that're worth thinking about that I'm not seeing. Or we're not seeing.
There's that quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", well any sufficiently complex form of causality is indistinguishable from luck.
I like the analysis that we're getting out of some of this, I hope that we may pool brains together to extract more possible lessons of causality to rely - or to assign less value to - luck.
Talking about hindsight and analysing failures. Do any of you actively play test lots of games with your developer hats on to see things differently than from a gamers perspective?
@Tuism@Dislekcia Lets wait and see what Red Bouncing Ball Spikes is doing in a week or two before we throw all rule books out the window and stand in shocked amazement on why they are so great. to be fair we are talking about 57k downloads world wide so far, I would not be calling it a super success just yet but lets play it to see why it has reached this spot. It can probably teach us something.
Things they are doing right imo, Short session lengths - short session lengths are great for tram/train ride. Challenge with a clear reason for failure - giving the understanding of what you could have done to be better. Retry and die is part of the mechanics - allowing an action game to be train friendly, you are not being punished and you do not lose lots of progress for failing. Intuitive controls - it takes about 5 seconds to get that tapping makes you go up and spikes are bad. 1 finger with timing, it is actually a twitch game with a continuous runner packaging.
So Simplicity. It is not really that weird people are enjoying it seeing as Flappy bird is in the same "trend" and jet pack joyride filled that need before them. imo this is just the runner genre changing faces.
Comments
Do you think everyone out there subscribes to the same ethics that applies here, or in the western world, or even your own personal code? I hope not.
A cynical approach to the good intentions of society does absolutely nothing to encourage good intentions in society. We don't need more cynics in that regard and we don't need more people advocating things like this re-skinning business. Just because something is, doesn't mean that's how it should be - what the guy in the OPs linked article is doing is inherently exploitative and by its very definition unethical, and attitudes like ' let those to whom it is be' is a self-fulfilling prophecy that will lead you deeper into your 'real world' where people care less and less about the well-being of their fellow humans. The way forward is not to become better at 'survival', it's to change the playing field.
Blegh. Yuck. Ew.
What a c**t
Ewww.
Right?
Discussion has been a huge part of whatever the hell it is I've managed to build since 2005 and randomly starting a game development community forum. Places like MGSA wouldn't exist without the discussion and idealism that got other people helping and ultimately making much cooler things than I could alone. A big part of whatever "leading" that was, was calling out stuff that wasn't helpful or worse, was insidiously destructive. I'm curious, what do you consider naïve? How is being aware of our cognitive biases and evolutionary history and having perspectives informed by both not conducive to survival, not realistic? Do you think it's not a considered position I adopt given an understanding of the world that I've used to guide myself to where I am now? (And yes, I'm honestly asking because part of my perspective is evaluating it and learning to do shit better)
I'm also entirely confused by you suddenly talking about well off members of society and crumbs. I'm afraid that point doesn't follow for me - where is it going?
P.S. A lot of the reason people are upset with the original link at the top of the thread is because what the dude in the article is doing is dishonest - he's selling people's confused eyeballs and duped interest to advertisers, not selling players a game they'll enjoy. That's simply dishonest to both the players AND the advertisers (who I'm sure want engaged, interested views over duped ones). Then, to top it off, the article is about selling source code to you, the reader, as a get-rich-quick scheme from a site this dude just got paid by. That's slightly less dishonest, but the real reason people read it and get annoyed is because it advocates spreading dishonesty. We don't like that, we want to punish the cheat, people can't do that directly, so they get annoyed. Wrong. Of course complaining online can help. What if someone reads that article and gets conned by it into wasting their time trying to clone and/or re-skin games? Seeing a backlash against the practice, a vocal and vehement backlash, might have an impact.
It's like dealing with rape-culture (I apologise for going there, but it's the best anecdote I have to explain this type of thinking) - for every rape joke or off-hand comment people don't react to with distaste, a rapist thinks you're just like them and agree with rape. Now, we're not at 1 in 4 levels of game cloning, but a reaction is still worth having.
Ye olde "But I made a difference for *that* starfish" parable and all that, right?
If I detect that kind of blind idealism, my natural tendency is to remind the speaker that the world is far from that and more focus should be applied to something that can actually be achieved. If you get offended by that, then I will not further partake in this discussion.
edit: btw bitching about something never ever helps. Actual debate is the only way to effectively highlight and work through an issue.
Is that what you consider naïve about my initial post here, or was that something else entirely?
With respect... if you were to re-trace your last 5 years (in this scene) again with what you know now, do you not think that more dedicated smaller initiatives rather than a vague "ideal end state" would have brought things a bit further by now? Hind-sight is awesome, and I would not have been able to do it any better myself - that I can assure you. I have been following in the shadows since the old gamedev days and have never felt the need to really get involved. But I am now, and I would be remiss if I don't apply the skills that put food on my table here as well.
(Though I'd mention that the best evidence we have points to the re-skinning-app-creation-method NOT being a viable money making scheme, and this suggests that those who are against the method probably have a firmer understanding of the underlying rules.)
I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of idealism as a negatively useful trait. But yeah, I can accept that someone might be "too idealistic". What I don't understand is how you've decided that applies here and specifically, applies to me. What criteria did you use to judge that?
What are people being protected from by this idealism? I'm not sure I understand what relevance that concept carries here - lots of people have been talking about very topical and real issues in this thread - I'm loathe to judge those comments as lacking reality or the result of isolation, what makes you feel the opposite?
What's the use of asking if I would do things differently? That's only relevant if you believe that I somehow made poor choices driven by some untenable level of idealism... So, I believed that I could make games enough to try and then got better at doing that? I had a series of impossible dreams that I knew were impossible, but eventually made real anyway? What's the actual problem there? Why have you assumed that an "ideal end state" exists or that I've actually communicated that here in any way? I've gotta say that I find the assumption that I'm somehow not rationally picking goals and working towards them just a tad patronising, what evidence do you have for that?
Every "this is a successful game strategy imma copy that" business model is suffering from survivorship bias so hard it's not funny.
I'm not really convinced there is *exactly* a survivorship bias relevant to the article in question. I don't see why the author wouldn't outright lie about the level of financial success the method in question produces... Though maybe it counts as survivorship bias even if it is based on a false survivor?
Though maybe what @dislekcia meant was that we can look at the AppStore and see a ton of crap games and assume that there must be money to be made in producing crap games. Whereas in reality, as far as I can tell, all the developers making those games are making just about zero money.
Though more generally (and maybe closer to what @dislekcia meant?): if there is a simple set of rules that can be outlined to reproduce a success, then almost certainly the market will be flooded with entrepreneurs attempting to follow those rules, and, unless you get in early, the competition will make it vastly less likely that that set of rules will work for you.
Although I'm mostly using the term as it was introduced to me reading The Black Swan, I could also use "false attribution bias" in that we're looking at the few apps that do well in an utterly overwhelmed system and attributing magical efficacy to their makeup that must be the cause of their success. You see it with stockbrokers all the time, gamblers too (and evolution, heh) in a system with so many participants, one of them will eventually produce a long success streak through sheer randomness.
In the case of Flappy Bird or many similar games, it's probably just luck (although the same blog that's linked in the OP actually seems to thing Flappy Bird was botted up). The survivorship part is that we're not examining the thousands of games that are exactly the same as whatever success story is out there, so we're only examining the survivors for lessons instead of trying to avoid being a failure.
In that regard, actually putting out a ton of no-investment games is a better strategy than any of the alternatives, because you can then keep doing that for longer until one of them randomly hits and you end up with a name to trade off of. Rovio didn't have to get lucky for their games after Angry Birds, for instance. I advocate a similar strategy for indie game success, although the rules are slightly different in the PC space because it's not as oversaturated just yet and there's a much stronger press multiplier effect. There's actually a value to game quality after a certain point of visibility ;)
Sure some more shady elements would exploit that - and some are actually very successful at it - but even if you had the power to instantly remove all the ill-intentioned games you will still be left with a marketplace that has more than 90% redundant user generated content - and there lies the true problem - not cheats or criminals.
It's also a problem that you will not be able to solve here (regardless of your best intentions), because the copanies that run these app stores actually have seen much further than we would think - and they rely on their user base to use these stores as a social medium so that these companies can sell their devices and ecosystems.
That was a mis-click - is there any way to unheart something? ;p
I don't think anyone here expects this forum to suddenly resolve the global issue (but really would it be so bad if it could). Your assertion that people have enough intelligence to see though shady practices is clearly mistaken. If they could we would need no laws to prohibit such practices in the first place. In fact this very article is about how to perform exactly that a shady practice that people don't see through until its too late and you already have the net shady product out. The anger welling here is as much about the practice as it is about the gloating and promoting of such practices. Its gotten so bad that people actually feel comfortable enough to come out in public and make a proud statement of there achievements. And remarks about how there practices are bringing honest participants in the market down financially as a joke.
Its not far different from bragging about assaulting some retired people because it got your kicks and you could steal there food stamps.
The person doing this lives under the very rationalization you are repeating here dog eat dog etc. Life is not fair there is nothing you can do about it. I don't feel comfortable with the idea that anywhere in this community we would encourage or even condone such a business practice. Its harmful to the very things we wish to build.
"What's wrong with exploiting"
"it's called good business"
"there's nothing actually wrong with it"
"They are not hurting anyone"
"don't judge because someone else is making a buck"
"Exploiting a market is good."
We're just reading what you're writing. All you've done is rationalise it.
And that's disappointing, because I feel that there's still a lot of ground to cover here. The mobile market is poorly understood at the best of times, largely because it consists of many consumers that are very different from us. In a sense, catering for it is almost a completely different industry from building the games we all grew up with. I think discussions like these help us all understand it better. So I hope we can keep this thread going without everyone being at everyone else's throats about it. We're all in the same boat here!
Read my first post again. Read the article again. In no way was there been any mention of stealing, copying or doing anything immoral. The article is about buying and re-skinning pre-built apps and loading them with ads. And while this may be crappy practice it is not wrong - and it is simply irresponsible to compare this to rape and hurting old people.
All of you just read bits and pieces here and there, jumped to conclusions, and then jumped on the band wagon of the person before you. Way to go.
As for whether it's wrong/right/immoral is what seems to mostly be debating about here, with you on the "not wrong" side of the debate. And for some bizarre reason you keep stating things like "it is not wrong", and then denying it immediately afterwards. Are you Wackhead Simpson??
If you want to get a hit game, this is what you do. First You take a look at app annie for the games doing well, then using your library of games, or searching the history of the app store, you find the origin point, they all have one. There is nothing new, only original implementations and variations. Once you have found the base inspiration, distill it down to its root appeal, for instance, Dragonvale was a combination for Pocket Frogs and Tiny Zoo, Why are these games popular? Uncertainty and exploration. If you use the barte model to assess them you will find that they are heavily Achiever(Tiny Zoo) and Explorer(Pocket Frogs) driven games with just a little bit of Socializer. Why is this important, because socializers retain well, achievers and explorers pay well, and both are retained well by socializers. So now that you have this distilled version concept and you understand who is looking for it, you can create something new with their needs in mind.
However, knowing your own limitations are super important. Remember that cloning is apprentice work, 90% clone 10% innovation is journeyman work and new concepts are master work. Based on where you are in this ranking, decide how much you need to follow existing norms. Even Sid Meyers failed trying to enter the f2p space, not because he is not a master, but because he is not a master of f2p. So judge yourself based on how well you know and understand what you are looking at. If you don't wanna clone and release, then clone and don't release, but do it to understand it before you go for the 90/10 or the new idea.
:)
It seems I've long since reached that point, anyway. So I'm agreeing to disagree, and bowing out of this thread before the dent in the wall gets any bigger. Adios :)
What you want to do is look at the games that aren't doing well at all. Especially games from studios that routinely do badly, or games from big "successful" studios that aren't doing well. Those games are the place to learn what assumptions they're making that aren't useful, that's where you find the real gold. Yes, you might also find a mechanic you want to explore yourself, but that's up to you and your creative process - at least you won't be cloning it upfront because 1. The game didn't work the first time around, so making it exactly the same is stupid and 2. The only reason to clone it exactly would be if you had enough budget to cheat it up, and nobody making games here has that sort of spending going. There's a lot of other stuff you can learn from the games that aren't doing well - stuff not to do with UI, how not to do a tutorial, how not to pick fonts, etc.
So, don't copy, fix. Your solutions are going to be new ideas. Produce those ideas as cheaply as possible first, testing them like crazy on the way, then when/if you get lucky, monetise. Agreed completely. There's really nothing wrong with copying a game to learn how it works and how people made it. That's great experience... The wrong part comes in when people try to release someone else's work as their own and make money ;) Knowing your own skills along that continuum of production is super important AND the only real way to move along it and get better is to be making stuff.
Person A starts making a game, 6 months later person B releases/announces and alpha/beta and its very similar to yours.
Neither of the two knew about each other, but to the community it could come off as B copied A?
This is both a statement and a question.
But I believe the point remains, if you make the best game for the market you will win the race.
For the market, well, Actually, the games that failed and were good games were not good for the market. Can you give an example of a game that perfectly fit the specific demographic of player that owns a smart phone so we can look closely?
Of course I will be able to rip it apart with 20/20 hind sight, but the point is to have some reference and explain not only what works but what doesn't work right :)
CoD was always based on licensed iD engines, which is why saying that it was stolen MoH sounded really strange to me. Spark's early console version seems to have been a completely separate product, especially given the whole Renderware angle. Okay, why didn't Piou Piou vs Cactus the game you linked in the image above, reach success levels like Flappy Bird? (it was on iOS until recently, from the looks of it)
Then there are great games like GasketBall and Punch Quest that are well received, but didn't do the whole viral success thing.
Then there are any number of random social-style IAP games that never take off, yet are functionally identical to so many other games out there (you'd be better at pointing these out than I would, I'd literally just trawl the lower end of the app store search results). I very much doubt that there are individual reasons why each game didn't break the bank, it's much more likely that they simply didn't get lucky enough.
But my bottom line in that if the thing we're measuring is "how well a game does in the market" by, well, putting that game out in the market and assuming that the results indicate quality or a lack thereof, something is broken. That's not measuring quality at all.
As for the games you list, I will play them all again and try to point out the problems, off the top of my head, punch quest is a live action game that requires constant action making it a weak game for the market and it had no massively wow art giving it no word of mouth effect. But with 1.6 mil a moderate amount of downloads in the last year and only 50k revenue in the US it is clear monetisation and long term retention was the issue. For success in long term retention you need content that can be generated faster than the community can consume it or player generated content. But pq is an easy example of how great design does not mean great market based design.
However what many companies do to test the water is unbranded very rudimentary games with ab tests that they put out on android, because then you can already see if your rapid prototype has potential. If 1day retention is above 40% and 3day above 30% on a rapid proto, you can be sure you are on the right track, even 30/20 is still ok but risky.
EDIT: but i am not saying that luck is not also a factor, as in all markets. It is true, but don't focus on it so much that it cripples you? It is not that big of a factor.
And as @Chippit said timing plays a role. As they tell ufc fighters, be first.
Punch Quest is brilliant, but it appeals to retro gamers (a much smaller demographic than Flappy Bird's appeal), and so could never have Flappy Bird's success. Monster Dash and Canabalt both have appealed to retro gamers and have been successful... but Punch Quest has more of a spectacle of violence... which is why people like me love it, but casual gamers don't as much.
I'm not too sure why Gasketball didn't get as many downloads as they thought it should get, but I'm still not sure what the game is, and I've actively tried to figure it out and have watched all their advertising.
Obviously hindsight is 20/20. I could never have predicted Flappy Bird, but I would have predicted that its potential was higher than those others. This isn't even the first time than a tap-to-fly-upwards endless runner has been #1 on the App Store.
(Obviously I'm not analyzing these games from the same perspective as Bladesway, I'm not really that familiar with player-retention strategies, but I think I have an okay grasp of demographics and game appeal)
We could never hope to be like Flappy Bird, but we could make sure our games don't sound foreign to the US. We could never hope to be like Angry Birds, but we can make sure that our games explain what they are emphatically at a glance. We should learn to focus less on graphics and more on being approachable... etc. I dunno, I'm just drawing from the critiques I'm hearing here.
I'm sorta just tired of looking at "top games" and going "well, that got lucky" without having useful comparison points.
... Edit: no.2 paid iPhone app right now “Red Bouncing Ball Spikes” is a GameSalad template
I mean, really?
Scan the appstore for moderate successes, play them and figure ou the reason they didn't work and then fix it if you can. That will give you the best odds of success.
I am really serious about the gautrain thing by the way, to design for a market you should walk a mile in their shoes so you can understand their needs.
There's that quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", well any sufficiently complex form of causality is indistinguishable from luck.
I like the analysis that we're getting out of some of this, I hope that we may pool brains together to extract more possible lessons of causality to rely - or to assign less value to - luck.
Things they are doing right imo,
Short session lengths - short session lengths are great for tram/train ride.
Challenge with a clear reason for failure - giving the understanding of what you could have done to be better.
Retry and die is part of the mechanics - allowing an action game to be train friendly, you are not being punished and you do not lose lots of progress for failing.
Intuitive controls - it takes about 5 seconds to get that tapping makes you go up and spikes are bad. 1 finger with timing, it is actually a twitch game with a continuous runner packaging.
So Simplicity. It is not really that weird people are enjoying it seeing as Flappy bird is in the same "trend" and jet pack joyride filled that need before them. imo this is just the runner genre changing faces.