Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Median time played on steam for my games.

Something very interesting is happening with Democracy 2. because the game is now on steam, for the first time ever I am getting accurate figures for how long people play the game for. Steam tracks that automatically and gives you nice charts and graphs for it, which is very handy.

The values for Democracy 2 are staggeringly high. They won;t seem high, when i tell you what they are in a minute, but from chatting to other devs, and looking at my other steam games, they are disproportionately high.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Democracy 2 is a pretty complex strategy game, that is based around running a fictional country. It has a fair bit of text to read, but nothing like the backstory in a game like dishonored. It’s a game of balancing competing needs (which is essentially what all strategy games are), and it has a lot of variables to tweak, just like all my games do.

The median time played right now is 2 hours and nine minutes. Does that seem short? Trust me, it’s pretty long, because the values are massively dragged down by people who buy games on impulse in a one-day sale, and only ever play them once. (Steam only counts games that have been actually played for a minute or more). For those who love comparing stats, the average time played is 3 hours 33 minutes. The game has been on steam less than a month, so you would expect that value to rise over time, as people revisit the game (although D2 has not been in a steam sale, which might explain some of this)

That compares extremely well with Gratuitous Tank and Space Battles. The average play time per session for both games is pretty much identical, but there is a massive difference in the distribution of time played. GTB basically hooks everyone for at least 20 minutes, then there is a falloff downwards until you reach this massive spike at 200minutes+

With Democracy 2, everyone is playing at least an hour, then there is a smooth drop off to the eight hour mark. D2 doesn’t have this weird U shaped distribution like GTB does.

Which would imply…errrr?  maybe that GTB does a bad job of helping people through the mid-game, but if they manage it, they are hooked and play forever. I wonder if people get stuck on a specific level, and then either make it through, and keep having fun, or they give up? some aspects of the game design are based entirely around avoiding that situation, but they may be failing.

two things I definitely conclude are that a) it’s good data to have and b)Democracy 2 does very well despite it’s age.

Gratuitous Tank Battles website stats

I’ve been casting my geeky eye over the google analytics data for the gratuitous tank battles website. Here are some assorted stats…

Looking at data for the last 60 days, the site had:

Visits: 67,440

Pages per visit: 1.49

Bounce Rate: 74.78%

TBH, only one of those stats is worth caring about (the top one), and only then, marginally. Bounce rate and Pages per visit are horrendously skewed by the content of those pages. If you pack them with text and video, people will get their fill of data with just one page. These are not stats worth worrying about. The visits stats is marginally more helpful, but it massively depends where they come from, obviously. I’ve sponsored a few small flash games which brings in a TON of traffic, but most of it is pretty ‘low quality’, kids without credit cards looking for more free games. The sheer volume means it can be worth it though. I find it more helpful to concentrate just on highly engaged visitors, such as those spending more than 60 seconds on the site. That gives me:

Visits: 4,723

Which are the only site visitors I really care about. This means I need to know where they came from. In this case the two big easily identified source areas seem to be google adwords and google organic search, which are roughly equal. The problem is, this isn’t showing me my flash sponsorship traffic correctly, so I need to do some analytics cleverness to detect when the ?ref= parameter is passed which tells me which flash game sent me the click. when i look for those clicks I find they supplied…

Visits: 2,977

Which is clearly the lions share of those above. Of course, all this means is those visitors spent time on the site, unfortunately I don’t have any easy way to tell that they are the same people buying the game, especially if they drift off and buy it on steam, or next month. However, I am quite motivated by the long tail effect here. There are hits coming in from long forgotten sponsorship deals from ages ago. That doesn’t happen with banner adverts which are obviously immediate. This can be a pain in the neck, because banner ads can be scheduled and also ramped up and cut back to fit your budget, whereas free game sponsorship is a bit of an all-or-nothing, no-idea-when sort of deal.

Even so, I think I’ll keep experimenting with it. Unlike my foray into stumbleupon and facebook ads, I think this may actually have a reasonable (on a good day) Return-on-investment

Is social networking creating flashmobbed success?

This is a difficult concept to describe, or rather, a difficult one to describe without giving the wrong impression. I’m not attempting to criticise any content creators whatsoever here, just offering a perspective on how I see various marketplaces.
I think there is a relatively new (or to be more accurate, a suddenly hugely influential) phenomena of sudden, almost random, and fairly inexplicable popularity of individual pieces of media, which I’m going to try and call ‘flashmobbed success’.

I reckon there are basically three routes to success, and the flashmob version is the third one. Firstly, we have the traditional old school route to success. People who create something work hard, come up with a good product, put their name out there, and people like it. A combination of word-of-mouth, some movers-and-shakers putting in a good word, a little dash of luck, and some canny re-investing of profits from success into some decent marketing leads to a product that gradually builds up and sells well. Generally, there is critical acclaim for the product, and generally, people think it is a hit based on its merits.#If you’d like what I consider to be a gaming example of this, I’d say World of Goo, also Braid, also Elite, Age Of Empires, the majority of games… The film ‘Alien’ and for that matter ‘star wars’ (the original movie).

The second route is the money/hype/big cynical corporate route. This is where so much marketing muscle is thrown at a product that it becomes successful through inertia. The majority of big budget blockbuster movies go this route, also a fair chunk of the modern console games, which sell millions despite not being remotely polished or original in any way. The vast vast majority of movie-tie-in games follow this route too. Generally, these products are not considered to be critically good, and the assumption is often that the vast media budget is what enabled them to become such a hit. Sometimes, rarely, a huge marketing budget and hype does actually accompany something truly good which would have done well on it’s own merits such as Avatar, but I think that’s rare. I’d say the Godzilla movie, and most of the mission impossible movies and clones fit here. So does ‘Battleship’.

But now we have a new phenomena. The sudden rise to incredible popularity, stardom and sales/revenue which seems to happen for no discernible reason whatsoever. Like the gangnam style video, or a number of PC games. In these cases, nobodies motives seem sinister, but for whatever (probably very innocent reasons), a bunch of well-connected people with a lot of social connections all happen to like the same, slightly random thing. Very quickly, the popularity of it will spiral into self-fulfilling prophecy mode, where success breeds success which breeds success.


Why should we care?
The problem is that this phenomena is the absolute antithesis of the beneficial nature of the ‘long tail’. A system which encourages popularity amongst that which is already popular (and thus least in need of exposure) reduces consumer choice and narrows the range of entertainment available to all. If TV news covered my game ‘Democracy 2’ they could likely treble it’s sales overnight, but of course instead, they will cover the games people already know about, because they have already sold 10 million copies…

It’s frustrating from the POV of a small time creator of content because it both irritates and encourages despair. Realizing your product is not good enough to achieve market success is sad, but encourages you to work harder. Realizing that success is almost random encourages you to just throw more crap at the wall until some of it sticks.

So who is to blame? Maybe the media to some extent by perpetuating the virtuous circle of decent sales = free press coverage = more sales, but in their defense, the press wants to cover what people want to read, and generally, people don’t want to discover new things, they just want validation that what they already like is good.

Is it me that sees this as a new, and worrying phenomena? The extent to which social media connects the whole world so intimately seems to me to be making it worse. We have had annoying and inexplicably popular novelty songs before, but not ones from South Korea. How long before the whole world is truly one entirely homogenous marketplace, with no local variety and a single, all-knowing top-ten list for everything?
I truly hope not, but the signs are not encouraging. It looks to me like the long tail theory was dead wrong. People still gravitate to what everyone else is enjoying it’s just that a random selection of undiscovered media gets picked and thrown in there as the new blockbusters.

Expos and shows vs advertising

I was rambling to someone a few days ago about advertising and risk, and something hit me about indie attitudes to risk and promotion.
I know a lot of indies who never do any advertising. I don’t mean word-of-mouth promotion, tweeting, updating facebook and sending people press releases, that’s PR, it’s not advertising. I actually mean paying for banner ads, and search advertising, and even print or video adverts. For most smallish indie teams, the advertising budget is zero.

it’s easy to work out why. Advertising often seems to give a low Return On Investment (ROI). You can do your best to measure it’s effect, using tracking cookies and lots of charts and graphs. I do a lot of that myself, and just about manage to be sure that I am getting a small, but measurable ROI. The problem is that it only really works accurately for your direct sales. if you run $1,000 of banner ads on www.randomgamessite.com. and then track 500 visitors from clicking them to your site, and then witness 50 sales and calculate it as $1,000 then you know you got your money back. The problem is, if steam + impulse + gamers gate is 80% of your sales, you might be ‘losing’ a lot of those potential buyers to those sites, and be selling extra copies but not knowing it. All stats checking can do is tell you people left the site, not if they then bought elsewhere.

Theoretically, you can work out the proportion of your customers who buy direct, and use a multiplier that implies that the other visitors did buy. So if 80% buy elsewhere, and you got 20 sales, you can infer 100 total sales. You then need to take into account the publisher cut, so those 80 portal sales are really 56 or so direct sales. Plus you don’t get the email address, they are probably ‘worth’ 50 sales… I digress…

The point is, it’s complex to know if you are getting your moneysworth. It’s even harder when you consider tracking view-through clicks (people who saw the ad, didn’t click, but visit your site magically later), people disabling javascript, using 2 PC’s and seeing the ad on 1, the sale on the other, and the word of mouth that arises from the ad impressions. Plus there is the reminder effect (“That reminds me, I must buy that game…”) purely from impressions.

Now if you read this blog a lot, you will know all this. What I’m basically saying is ‘the ROI from advertising is difficult to calculate’. And on that basis we can all forgive all those indies who never advertise.

But hold on….

Most of the non-advertising indies are passionate believers in Expos, conferences and trade shows. They attend them all the time, with promotional T-shirts, big projection screens, multiple PC’s, lots of leaflets and demo CDs. I haven’t heard of anyone giving away home-made cookies on their expo stand yet, but they should do…

You can tell my argument from here I’m sure. Tracking a sale from a banner ad is really HARD, and vague, and ultimately you kinda have to ‘have faith’ in the power of advertising and be prepared to spend $10,000 on it before you can really tell if it’s going to work for you. Sound scary? Tracking a sale from giving out a free T-shirt at an expo is really ++++HARD v 2.0 with extra bacon and double cheese, and by the time you factor in your plane tickets, booth hire, pc hire, power surcharge, t shirts and cookies, you eat through $10k just as fast.

So why do indies, (especially the more hip and young indies) vastly prefer expos and networking over advertising? I think it’s down to the ‘feelings’ associated with them. Advertising is something big evil corporate people like EA do. Something old-school. Old-fashioned and for people stuck in the past. Expos and shows are for the young and trendy people who are undermining the system from within. It’s cool. Indie Game: The movie had some footage of fez at expos, it was cool. They didn’t show them setting the budget sliders on an advertising campaign. That would not be cool.

But I ask you, does it matter how a promotional technique ‘feels’, or does it matter how well it actually works?  Advertising is much more controllable. How many people from the UK have seen your game at the Expos you attended? How many from Spain?  Did you pick the date of the expo? And so on…