Ted Howard

I’ve been having an email conversation in which I was asked, “I’m curious, as I don’t have a traditional games background, whether you saw the same drivers that web devs follow coming from the executive/business teams of traditional games?  I would have thought that there would always have been that pressure from the "accountants"?”

I happened to already have notes on that thought. If my hypothesis that the motivation and business model of funware tend to drive funware to be metrics-driven for more revenue, why haven’t the same forces driven the games industry to be driven entirely by monetization metrics? My answer is that it has, but the metrics are very different so the outcome is very different.

Funware may live on measures such as virality and eCPM. Games live on measures such as review scores, retail and franchise lifetime sales, regional breakdowns, marketable features, and more of course. Look at the Wikipedia page for Baldur’s Gate regarding whether it was successful. It was a success, and you can tell that because of how well it was reviewed and the number of awards it received. The page does not mention sales, but you can be sure that the studio and publisher tracked sales. Baldur’s Gate is a franchise so the value to both studio and publisher extends beyond the first version to the full list of sequels, ports, box sets, and future possible franchise releases. It likely does better in some regions and cultures than in others and that matters a great deal to a publisher trying design a game portfolio that spans regions and then investing in games based on that portfolio.

How can someone predict game sales? One input is reviewer scores. How can someone plan a product to have a high reviewer score? That’s hard, but you definitely need some innovative features for marketing to push. You also have to have an aesthetically pleasing game. If you have characters or plot, they have to be well-done just like the visuals. For some games you need certain ‘next-gen’ and genre-specific features, such as 60 frames per second for a racing game or every standard multiplayer game type (capture the flag, king of the hill, …) in an FPS.

At one point, I was at a Microsoft Game Studios internal technical meeting. We were asked to have breakout discussions on the topic of “What is next-gen?” People talked about HDR effects, animation blending models, AI, and multiplayer. Essentially everyone was guessing what feature a game set to release next year would need to have to not get panned by critics for lacking that feature. At the conclusion, I turned to a coworker and said something like, “Isn’t next-gen just the bulletpoints on the back of the box?”

The motivations that drive developers to create games are hard to define items like fun, art, and vision. The success metrics for games are reviewer scores and retail sales, which are hard to predict and hard to target. Funware to me seems more motivated by revenue than by fun, art, and vision. The success metrics for funware are the same as any website – monetization metrics. That’s my current perspective, no more or less valid than any reader’s perspective.

Related Links and Commentary

On Andrew Chen’s blog, there was a short comment thread about  game teams “catching up” to web teams. (I assume that ‘catching up’ here is just referring to fast iteration and being metrics-driven and not about the lack of ESRB ratings and realistic HDR in funware. ) Under my hypothesis that over-optimization of funware for the purposes of revenue removes fun, art, and emotion from funware, the comments could be viewed as ominous. If Blizzard could tweak WoW to squeeze out all possible money from users, would the game suffer in terms of player pleasure? Could Blizzard justify paying artists to build majestic landscapes and developers to build atmosphere models for prettier sunsets when those same team members could be assigned to creating swords that are highly-optimized as high profit margin virtual goods? This can become an open-ended argument, which is something I don’t enjoy, but I’m just stating it as something to be considered.

I ran across this post recently. I think it shows the same development model phenomenon from a non-game/funware perspective. In particular, I like the comparison of how Dell designs computers versus how Apple does it. Dell iterates fast, optimizes, and the results are good but not very interesting. Apple may release a product that is a dud or a hit but due to their release cycles they may not know that until its sitting on or flying off of retail shelves.

I have many more notes on the differences between funware and games: delivery and revenue models; consequences of the culture clash; what can funware and games learn from eachother; etc.