Category: business

Here is a crazy idea for a website that I wish existed.

Say you had a small business, probably a one-person affair.  A corner-shop, or maybe a hot dog stand, or anything where there is just one or two of you. An indie dev would be fine, actually.

Imagine a website where you could go, and anonymously (in terms of not saying exactly where your business was, or what it was called) you could lay bare ALL of the facts about your business, in terms of finances. Every day, you would upload your current sales figures. All your expenses and bills would be online (anonymized).

the site would have forums, and you would need an account to post. The idea, would basically be to help run peoples business. You could comment on their sales, and their plans. You could suggest new pricing strategies, refer them to data on other businesses you thought appropriate, and the owner could decide whether to take people’s advice or not, optionally awarding karma to people who provided decent feedback.

What’s in it for the business owner? It’s like having 1,000 varieties of the ‘bloke down the pub’ who has an idea on how you could do better. This time you get advice from all over the world, from all kinds of people. On the whole, people will be genuine and helpful, and if they aren’t they will get modded down anyway.

What’s in it for the forum posters? Entertainment. There are a lot of armchair experts and business-obsessed stats geeks like me. I’d love to wade through the sales stats for my local shops. Maybe I’m sad, and unusual, but I bet I’m not the only one. It’s a big internet.

What’s in it for the website owners? Money. A site like this would be a magnet for small business owners. High-value advertising screen-estate for people flogging business books and accountancy / marketing services.

Why isn’t there a site like this?

I just read about an indie games bundle where one of the main ‘selling points’ of the bundles was that you can get six games for just $5.

That sucks.

The implication is that the games are worth a dollar each (or less!). I get the idea that people try and make an offer that you’d be mad to turn down, and for a limited time, as a one-off way to grab some press that you can’t get any other way, maybe there is some merit to that, but increasingly it seems to be the case that people think that charging more than $5 for a game is ‘cheeky’ and that indie games should be $0-$5, and of course half of it goes to charity, but even if we get $0.01, we really thank you for your payment etc etc…

Lets just get this out in the open right now:

Indie means ‘independent’. It means you dont’ work for a publisher that controls your output. It means self-funded, with total control. It does NOT mean *cheap* or *low budget* or *desperate* or *hobbyist*. Granted, there are a lot of hobbyist indie devs, but that doesn’t mean some indies don’t employ a bunch of people, have nice offices, spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on development, produce high quality content, and you know what…. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a lot of those indie games to sell big numbers, and *shock horror* for the developers to make some decent money without being made to feel like they are worse than osama bin laden.

A lot of indies give me a funny look because I have an advertising budget, as though indies are not allowed to advertise, because we have to do ‘guerrilla marketing’ or beg for coverage on hobbyist-blogs rather than run our business like anyone else. Some gamers flat out refuse to buy GSB because it’s more than $10, despite paying £34.99 for ‘non-indie’ games.

I know quite a few indies that make very good money. Better than anyone I know with a mainstream games industry job. I know a lot of them who run their businesses extremely seriously. They shouldn’t be ashamed of having a successful business or feel ‘too corporate’ because they have a marketing budget and use a PR firm. I can just see the howls of hatred and cries of ‘sell out’ the minute minecraft pays for some adverts somewhere, or refers to notch as CEO.

Most indies make no money. We get that. Lets not try to force all of them to stay tiny and huddled around a begging bowl though. There is nothing wrong with success, even in indie gaming :D

There has been a fair bit of controversy lately about a new tactic by mainstream games publishers that involves only releasing marketing assets (videos, screenshots etc) when a certain threshold of social media activity is reached, such as encouraging people to ‘like’ them on facebook, or retweet a news story.

Personally, I believe it’s a silly marketing strategy. If you have a video that will encourage me to buy Battlefield 3, and I am a potential customer, why on earth have some barrier preventing showing me the video? And who are you kidding anyway, we all know I’ll see the video before the game goes on sale, so don’t patronise me…

However, having said that…

I do find it interesting that people are suddenly getting super-irate about companies asking, or even encouraging them (with benefits in return) for doing something like retweeting a link or liking on facebook / reddit. I udnerstand *why* people feel that way, but I think people forget you do this already about a HUNDRED TIMES A DAY.

Right now, sat at my desk, I can observe without turning my head that my keyboard is by Saitek, my router is a Netgear one, my monitors are iiyama, and my office phone is made by Doro. I can just about see the Logitech microphone and the Bose headphones. That’s 6 logos within my current field of view. On my desktop I can see that Google supplied my clock, and this blog comes courtesy of WordPress. This is ALL advertising, it is ALL marketing, and if you think about it, it’s the equivilant of a forced facebook ‘like’ with no opt-out.

I bought a new car recently, and there were dozens and dozens of options, most of which were hugely overpriced. Do you know the ONE option that was not available at ANY price? It’s removing the car makers logo. Never in a million years. Have you ever seen a car without the makers logo on it?

When a company, even a humble indie games company like mine asks you to retweet something, or ‘like’ it, it might seem a bit pestering, and a bit cynical and a bit ‘markety’, but remember that you are being forced to do this hundreds of times a day anyway. My last car was a Peugeot and it was pretty crap, but I drove up and down with the equivilant of a big ‘+1 peugeot’ advert whether I liked it or not. Games portals also do this all the time (your friend is playing GENERIC SHOOTER #3 right now!)

If you enjoyed this post, why not retweet it, or facebook like it, or submit it to reddit :D

I guess it’s generally considered desirable to promote a product for what it *has* not what it does not have. This is unfortunate because I can see a lot of ‘features’ that would enhance a product purely by their removal. My pet hate is the new squeezy nozzle on heinz ketchup, but putting my personal table-sauce related jihad to one side, and thinking purely about games, I can imagine several features, whose omission that would pique my interest…

• Now featuring absolutely NO startup movies or publisher logos!
• Now featuring a total lack of cheesy voice acting and macho quips!
• 100% free from sexist and racist stereotypes!
• Absolutely no grinding or filler!

All of these would get my thumbs up, yet nobody ever markets a product that way, even though I’m sure there are games that omit all these annoyances. There must be something about good marketing practice that means it’s a bad idea to promote a negative? (although ‘non-bio’ and ‘no sugar’ come close)

Take a game like portal. It is apparently short. I’ve never played it to the end, so I don’t know. I’m sure a lot of people would panic if a game was announced proudly as being short, but I also suspect a lot of people (middle aged, with kids especially) would welcome a game that was high quality fun, condensed into a reasonable length of time. I don’t care about ‘finishing’ games, but I find myself losing patience with any movie over 2 hours long. My time is limited, get to the point.

I spent a day playing Halo in the office at Elixir once (I was ‘on call’, not there to do work…) and was enjoying it right up until a bit where the next mission involved backtracking the last 15 minutes. This was clearly filler, to make the game feel longer. It was like a really tedious scene that any decent editor would crop from a movie.

Even from the Fellowship Of The Ring.

And yet, big budget games are full of that stuff.

I make sandbox games, so they don’t lend themselves to being marketed this way, but it would be great if some games did seek out the ‘time-poor’ gamer. I know there are lots of us. Aren’t there?