James Gwertzman talk at Casual Connect is great. He provides a great Excel spreadsheet.
Model: Standard Recoup
Unit revenue: $8 per copy (to publisher).
Developer cost: $150,000
Royalties: 50% (not going to happen, but hypothetical)
Publisher cost: $225,000 (150% of costs)
Units for Publisher to break even: 28,125
Units for Developer to start earning royalties: 37,500
Add comment August 26th, 2007
In the “Secrets of Game Development” podcast posted by the Casual Game Association the first thing that is mentioned is the cultural difference between gamers in different country.
Each country is offended by different symbols and words, so each game needs to be customized per country or the game needs to be designed in an universal fashion.
Working in animation, I’ve know that pigs are offensive. Girls playing with boys is offensive. Kids playing semi-dangerous sports without helmets is a big no no. Nudity… fuggabout it. Violence? Not in Europe… Why? The North American market is big, but not big enough to support a smaller-budget animated TV show. The same issue confronts casual games. The casual market is big, but the global market is even bigger.
Some notes on the podcast:
Add comment August 26th, 2007
Looks like some great stuff there – I’ll be listening to the Catan XBLA podcast for sure. I read the GDMag post-mortem and was SHOCKED. Absolutely SHOCKED at the whole process…
Add comment August 26th, 2007
The RakNet creator talks about his space MMO game and all the good and bad in his blog. I always applaud those who try…
Metanet talks about Robotology and N+
Add comment August 25th, 2007
For developers looking to add speech into their games, there are two I’d recommend using:
CMU’s Sphinx (especially version 2)
And potentially a wrapper:
BTW Speech to visemes (i.e lipsync creation) is different task and their exists many more tools and APIs for that.
Add comment August 25th, 2007
An Ann Landers-like answer to a simple question “I just found out that my co-worker is being paid more than I am for the same job. What should I do?” bothered me.
Shannon Jackson said, “First and foremost, it is considered unprofessional to be discussing salaries with your co-workers. If a co-worker approaches you with a salary discussion, state clearly that you are not prepared to have that conversation, and that you understand salaries are expected to be kept confidential. Approaching your manager and stating you know your co-worker makes more than you may have serious consequences for both you and your colleague.”
I understand in North America, talking about salaries is even more taboo than discussing favourite sex positions in the workplace, but can we please stopping being prudes? The main reason for businesses keeping salaries private is to reduce wage inflation. If you find out your co-worker is making more than you (he or she is the boss’ pet), you’ll ask for a raise… Often, our egos are attached to the size of our wages. Not a good thing – to be honest.
Add comment August 25th, 2007
I recently read about this is in a local newspaper – crazy how mainstream Guitar Hero has become and how respectable game-playing is:
Add comment August 25th, 2007
According to Tim the God game designer…
So it wasn’t a complete bomb – but a huge financial failure on a great game with weird visuals (green, red, and black? barf).
$400k x $20 = $8 million in revenues for Majesco most likely… so they lost $7million at least not counting marketing and other expenses.
Now Boogie is the next turkey. Hyped like mad and selling like a toothless hooker on Christmas Eve.
32K in two weeks with all that marketing and promotion == bomb == good riddance to a poorly constructed game. Please close EA Montreal while you are at it and move it to Toronto.
And Madden 08 for the Xbox 360 is ripping it up – 900k in a week! Isn’t one Madden game enough for a few years?
Add comment August 24th, 2007
I listen to a lot of indie music and I’ve bought hundreds of indie albums (mostly from labels like Saddle Creek, Rough Trade, Matador, Elephant Six, etc.) but have yet to buy a PC indie game.
Why is that?
I’ve bought indie games on XBLA, but ZERO for the PC. I’ve paid for PC games – but mostly big-budget retail games or downloadable Yahoo games, but none were indie. And yet I’ve probably spent $2000+ dollars on indie albums and another $800 going to indie music concerts in the past couple of years.
I think indie music has the same production values as radio-friendly music. Rilo Kiley, Neko Case, Grandaddy, Polyphonic Spree, Lederhosen Lucil, Devotchka, etc. all sound like they could be artists signed by EMI or Virgin or Sony.
Guess what happens when you google “indie” – the first URL is “independent music” on Wikipedia.
And the fact that Death Cab for Cutie hit the mainstream is absolutely incredible to me. They were this obscure noise-pop band I heard in 2001 who I thought would amount to nothing… lots of better bands I discovered back then (Guided By Voices, Folk Implosion, Beulah, Superchunk, etc.) didn’t get anywhere near the same success. The Donnas, The Super Furry Animals, The Flaming Lips had some mainstream success in recent years but I suspected they were big record label bands…
I blame the OC for making Death Cub for Cutie hot. Where’s the OC for indie games?
But indie games are not there yet – they play and feel like amateurs.. worse garage developers. Is the OC going feature gargage games? No. Whereas, indie XBLA games look + feel professional as do games on Yahoo and BigFish, although they lack innovation.
We’re getting there – innovation + production values… that’s when the indie game business becomes respectable like the indie music biz.
Add comment August 24th, 2007
This site is banned because of its hardcore-ness… and yes, I also have problems with my e-mails getting thrown into the spam bucket. Oh well… maybe a name change is in order.
Add comment August 23rd, 2007
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