Category: business

So how was 2015 for Positech Games and err…me? Well it was pretty busy I guess… Lets see…

I released Gratuitous Space Battles 2 to thunderous indifference, although enough sales to justify making it. I didn’t have the ‘best’ launch ever, and launched it amid so many space strategy game releases I cannot even count them all, which was extremely bad timing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed making it, and I’m very proud of the engine I built for it.

We published ‘Big Pharma‘, our second published game, and that was a bit of an indie hit. It proved to me that publishing games by a very select few other indie devs was something I enjoy and makes sense for me to do. Champagne all-round!

I bought a very silly toy.

I then bought an even more silly toy.

I made the decision to publish shadowhand, a very interesting ‘card battling’ game, which is outside my normal genre, but I think has huge potential. So thats kept me busy.

I also decided to publish another game that I have not publicly announced yet…

Positech also started work, together with Jeff From stargazy on Democracy 3:Africa, which I’m very excited about.

Positech also funded the construction of a school in Cameroon.

Thats enough for one year surely? I’m taking next week off :D.

Gamification. Either a word that fills you with dread, or with I guess…maybe…love? Probably not, but actually I love it. I find that some things, such as steam trading cards and emoticons just pass me buy. Why do I care what ‘badges’ I have crafted on steam? I mean seriously…why? But then other stuff I get obsessed with. I quite like achievements, but I REALLY like scores and leader-boards and stats. Overall, I like gamification.

I think I have one of those brains that is just hard wired to stats and numbers and evaluating things that way, even non-numbery things. I am not autistic, but I exist somewhere on that spectrum, I suspect. I even made a game that reduces relationships between people to numbers. It was used to teach social skills to autistic kids, as well as being fun.

So its no surprise that I actually quite like it when things in my life get gamified. My local cafe/pub/farm-shop has a ‘reward cards’ system where you get 10% of your spend stored as points you can redeem. They have had this for months. Every sausage or coffee or glass of wine I’ve had there has been racking up points…more points…more points.

Someone less mad than me recently persuaded me to spend those points when ordering Christmas stuff. So I did. And it was SO WEIRD. I actually felt a small sense of ‘loss’ spending my points. And then, I suddenly realized there was a DOUBLE sense of loss, because not only did I just *reduce* my points balance, but I actually spent ‘money’ there and did not gain new points. Double the blow! Don’t get me wrong, I dealt with it. I wasn’t all…

But it *is* interesting. I wonder if people get a lot MORE affected by this. How many people have >$1,000 stored on some loyalty card that they can’t bare to spend?

 

 

This may not be popular, but its how I feel. First, some background and disclaimers. I run a small games company making games for the PC, strategy games with an up front payment. We don’t make ‘free to play’ games or have micro transactions. Also, I’m pretty much a capitalist. I am not a big fan of government regulation in general. I am a ‘get rid of red tape’ kind of guy. I actually oppose tax breaks for game development. I am not a friend of regulation. But nevertheless.

I awake this morning to read about this:

Some background: Star Citizen is a space game. Its being made by someone who made space games years ago, and they ‘crowd-funded’ the money to make this one. The game is way behind schedule, and is of course, not finished yet. They just passed $100,000,000 in money raised. They can do this because individual ships in the game are for sale, even though you bought the game.  I guess at this point we could just say ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, but yet we do not do this with gambling addiction. In fact we some countries have extremely strict laws on gambling, precisely because they know addiction is a thing, and that people need to be saved from themselves.

Can spending money on games be a problem? Frankly yes, and its because games marketing and the science of advertising has changed beyond recognition from when games first appeared. Games ads have often been dubious, and tacky, but the problem is that now they are such a huge business, the stakes are higher, people are prepared to go further. On the fringes we have this crap:

But in the mainstream, even advertised in prime-time TV spots we have this crap:

And this stuff works. ‘Game of War’ makes a lot of money. That ad campaign cost them $40,000,000. (Source).  Expensive? not when you earn a million dollars A DAY: (Source).

Now if you don’t play games, you might be thinking ‘so what? they must be good games, you are jealous! But no! In fact all the coverage of games like Evony and Game Of War illustrates just how bad they are. They earn so much because the makers of those type of games have an incredibly fine tuned and skillful marketing department bent on psychological manipulation. You think I’m exaggerating? Read this. Some choice quotes:

“We take Facebook stalking to a whole new level. You spend enough money, we will friend you. Not officially, but with a fake account. Maybe it’s a hot girl who shows too much cleavage? That’s us. We learned as much before friending you, but once you let us in, we have the keys to the kingdom.”

Lets think about this for a minute. A company hires people to stalk its customers and befriend them so they can build up a psychological profile of each customer to allow them to extract more money. This is not market research, this is not game design. This is psychological warfare. Lines have been crossed so much we cannot even see them behind us with binoculars. We need to reign this stuff in. Its not just psychological warfare, but warfare where you, the customer, are woefully outgunned, and losing. Some people are losing catastrophically.

You know how much you hate those ads that track you around the internet reminding you of stuff you looked at but didn’t buy? That is amateur hour compared to the crap that some games companies are pulling these days. The problem is, we have NO regulation. AFAIK no law prevents a company stalking its customers on facebook. We live in an age where marketers have already tried using MRI scans on live subjects to test advertising responsiveness. You think you are not manipulated by ads? Get real, read some of the latest books on the topic.We are only a short step away from convincing AI bots that pretend to be our new flirty friends in game that urge us to keep playing, keep upgrading, keep spending.

Modern advertising is so powerful we should be legislating the crap out of this sort of thing. How bad do we let it get before we get some government imposed rules? We are in the early days of mass-population study and manipulation, the days where us, the gamers describe a game as ‘addicting’ as a positive. Maybe it isn’t such a positive after all. Maybe we need to start worrying about if a game is actually good, rather than just ‘addicting’. Maybe we need people to step in and save us from ourselves. We are basically still just hairless apes. We do not possess anything like the self-control or free-will that we think we do.

Like alcohol, gambling, smoking or eating, most of us do not find gaming addictive. Thus we fail to see the problem. it depends how you are wired. See this ‘awards screen’ in company of heroes 2:

To most of us, thats just silly, and too big, and OTT. But if you suffer from OCD, that can be a BIG BIG problem for you. They KNOW this. Its why it is done. it works. Keep playing kid. keep playing. KEEP PLAYING. This sort of thing doesn’t need to work on everyone. If it works on just 1% and we can get them to spend $1,000 a month on our game (who cares if they can afford it?), then its worth doing.

I hate regulation, but sometimes you need it. Stopping a business dumping waste in a river is a good idea. Stopping companies treating their customers like animals that can be psychologically trapped and exploited is a good idea too. This stuff is too easy. Save us from ourselves.

I’ve always known this, but it hit home recently, for various boring reasons. I’m a bit of a maths and stats and numbers geek. I’m actually not that good at pure maths, but I do love spreadsheets and statistics and so on. Can you tell from my games? I thought so. Anyway, because of that, I do a lot of planning, and strategizing, and thinking and extrapolating about business. The holy grail of course, is to think you have found a ‘formula’ that means you can make something for $X and sell it for $X+1, and thus earn billions and be a success. yay!

The trouble is, although it never seems it when you look at spreadsheets, nothing is reproducible in a linear fashion in the world of business. Say my ad campaign costs $0.40 a click and I estimate (through complex formula) that I get $0.44 value for that. That doesn’t mean I should double or quadruple my ad spend. Not vaguely. It just means that I am making money in these exact circumstances right now today. Doubling the ad spend widens the market and dilutes the targeting. it could then *lose* money.

In the rare circumstances where there is a huge market for generic product X, and the market is unfulfilled by others, and nobody else is looking to enter the market, and you can double your output of X with the same cost per unit, and currently X earns you money, then that is a done deal, but this NEVER happens.

Gratuitous Space Battles was a huge hit, back in 2009 or whatever, so a sequel is a no brainer in 2015. Although it isn’t because the market is totally different, the game has to (by definition) vary from the original, so the product is different. The economy is different, and so on…

This is why Positech is basically just me, in terms of full time game production people. Expanding sounds easy. I would like to expand. I have the capability to expand and make more games, definitely not short of ideas. But that would ideally mean cloning me, and sadly thats not possible yet. I have to find someone who likes the same kind of games as me, is VERY good at C++, speaks English, is looking for a job, is willing to work for someone else, who is affordable, who I get along with,  who is trustworthy, who works hard, who is reliable and will do what they are employed to do.

If you think there are lots of those people, you have never tried to hire one.

Business is messy, messy,messy. People are unreliable, or they decide to quit and work elsewhere, or they get ill, or divorced messily and lose focus, or they win the lottery, or their partner gets a promotion and they have to relocate, or they are argumentative, or they are less experienced than they claim or…one of a billion things.

If when running your games studio you think ‘omg this is a nightmare, why am I dealing with all these crappy problems that you never see Elon Musk or Steve Jobs moaning about’, don’t panic. Business is always really messy, and fiddly and frustrating. Thats why most people take jobs with someone else.

I was watching a UK chat show last night on TV, with Johnny Depp and Benedict Cumberbatch on, and it struck me how ‘freaked out’ JD seemed at the way the crowd would whoop and holler at him, for seemingly doing very little. it was like he had suddenly realized how crazy fame was, and wondered what the hell was wrong with everyone. Fame sure is a weird thing. it always has been, and always will be. Am I wrong to think its getting *worse*?

Let me explain…

There is this buzzword out there called ‘attention marketing‘. Its basically a way to describe the way people and brands use social media to try and grab peoples attention, but I think its linkable to the phenomena of everyone seeing themselves as ‘a brand’ and the idea that attention is the new currency. Online, the chances of you earning any actual money are minimal, but if you can generate enough attention, then apparently that leads to fame and thus money in some nebulous way. It sure worked out for pewdiepie, and people who own amusing cats, or that woman who makes youtube tutorials about how to put on makeup.

And in a nutshell, the whole ‘makeup tutorial fame’ thing is about the pinnacle of what I’m writing about. After all, what does everyone want? ATTENTION. How do they get attention? well for women, there is some belief that makeup will get them attention, so what could be more ‘meta’ than getting attention for a ‘how to get attention’ video. And here I am, giving that whole concept much desired attention…

The trouble is, we as humans can’t cope with this in 2015. In 1800, getting attention was easy, and yet mild. You stood in the town square with a red hat on and said ‘listen to me!’ and everyone in the village listened. You were recognizable, its you! the red hat dude! hey, what is that you are saying?”

But in 2015 the village is the internet and its population is mind boggling. Not only that, but everyone in the crowd has realized that the dude with the red hat did very well out of his attention, so now everyone has red hats, and some people invented pointy hats. Then some dude realized he got more attention because he had impressive teeth, then everyone got impressive teeth. Then you needed an unusual name, because everyone was called ‘John’. And then before you know it, you have to be called Benedict Cumberbatch or PewDiePie or Yngwie ‘J’ Malmsteen. Be honest, list all the famous John Smiths you can think of. List all the famous Mark Johnsons. Show me the actual famous people who look and behave normally. I spend a non trivial part of my lfie worrying my teeth are not white enough, because they are the color of teeth, not bleached white foglamps which have become the norm. How did we get here?

These days you have to dress ridiculously, act outrageously and basically push the limits of decency/sanity/coherence before people will even glance in your direction and go ‘meh’. There are exceptions out there. I’ve never seen pop star ‘Adele’ do or wear anything especially nuts, but she is the exception in a land of Grace Jones and Lady GaGa and whoever else I am too old to know the names of. Not that this is a new phenomena in pop music. behold the Crazy World of Arthur Brown:

…anyway…My fear is that this is ‘leaking out’ from the world of popular entertainers into…everyone. It seems like you cannot play a game any more, you have to record yourself doing it, and upload it to youtube with your ‘hilarious’ commentary track over the top. You then need to beg your friends for hits on the video, and likes, even though you won’t get any because they are too busy doing exactly the same thing.

We have a generation of kids who think ATTENTION is what they need, even though its harder to get it now than it ever has been. Fame is considered desirable with no caveats, even though there should be many, not least the fact that failure and poverty are almost certainly the truthful outcome of desiring nothing but fame. This is a betrayal. It’s a betrayal of the young to teach them that they must aspire to something that few will achieve and is almost certainly fleeting and unsatisfactory in any case. I don’t have kids, but if I did, the LAST thing I’d want for them would be fame or attention. Success, sure, but success based on achievements and skills, and doing good work, and learning things, not just fame because you star in a tv show where other people watch you watch tv. (yes really, and it won a BAFTA.).

This desire to be noticed affects everything. David Starkey is famous, not as a historian, but as someone who gets angry in TV politics debates. Scientists on TV have to have quirky appearance or be good looking, and spend a lot of time being photographed on mountains wearing sunglasses. Whatever you do, try not to look ORDINARY. Look like an exaggerated scientist!, like these:

I’m pretty sure all three of those dudes are actually respected scientists in their own right, so why the desire to dress up like children’s TV characters? isn’t getting a phd and becoming a professor good enough any more?

I find myself now finding ‘outrageous’ people to be paradoxically boring. Every youtuber sounds the same because they are all trying to be zany. Every music video is the the same because they are all ‘shocking’. In the desperate bid to get noticed, everyone has become predicable, fake and ridiculous.

And yes..I get the irony here. I have a nickname that is this blogs domain name (cliffski.com) and there is a posed photo of me at the top. Somehow, long ago, I started a blog before it was too fashionable, and I am now better known for this blog than my actual games. This is kinda weird, and yes, I feel very strange when strangers know who I am. In my defense, in my photos I am not dressed up as a chicken and I don’t deliberately exaggerate my ‘personality’ to make myself more ‘interesting’. I never care what I wear when I go to industry ‘events’. In fact, I find it encouraging that an average looking forty-something dude from England with no real distinguishing features can still even be noticed. At least for now. If not, I’m hiring a twenty year old model to run Positech and naming him Zackslicer Thunderpants. He will wear a Fez and have a strong mexican accent. Wish me luck.