Life is Funny Sometimes

 Game Design  12 Responses »
Mar 292011
 

I remember way back in the day, when I heard about this awesome little game. It was made in a weekend and was a ton of fun. I registered the game in 2006 and played the hell out of it.

Later, in 2009, I would meet the game’s author at GDC, and he inspired me to start making my own games.

And now… Now, I’m officially developing the future iterations of the game!

That’s right! Phil Hassey and I have partnered to take the Flash version of the IGF-award-winning Galcon to a whole-new-level. I’ve been pretty much given free reign to experiment and develop as much as I’d like, for as long as I’d like.

This project is extra special to me – it’s like playing on the hockey team of your childhood hockey hero. Or perhaps like being Indiana Jones’ sidekick or something. I dunno how to express this feeling, but it’s awesome!

I have several ideas bouncing around in my head right now, and I’m not sure exactly what direction we are going to go with this. But we’ll be seeing something soon!

Posted by Andy Moore at 10:43 am  

In the spirit of sharing information…

 Game Design, Monetization  No Responses »
Mar 222011
 

A lot of people praise me for my open-kimono style, sharing all the data on my games and such.

I’m not the first (I learned from Brad Wardell, Daniel James, and other generous GDC-goers!), and I know I won’t be the last! Here are a few numbers-posts I ran across recently:

I’ll try to post things more frequently. :)

Posted by Andy Moore at 3:52 pm  

BlackListing: Never as Good as Content

 Code, Game Design  4 Responses »
Mar 202011
 

A few days ago, I posted an article about BlackListing Portals, and other circumvention techniques used in the creation of SteamBirds.

One thing I didn’t mention in that article: Content is the best prevention measure you can invest in. No matter how many prevention measures you put into your code, always ask yourself how long it will take someone to simply re-do your game from scratch.

You might recall that SteamBirds took me a single month to make. A lot of that one-month period was iteration, playtesting, and balancing. How long do you think it would take someone – using the game as a read-only template – to re-create it from scratch? They won’t have to go through all the R&D you did – they can skip right to the end! No waiting on feedback for weeks on your UI design, instant results!

I know from first-hand experience that the answer can be as low as 16 days. 16 days after the launch of the original SteamBirds last year, a clone appeared on the iPhone – with all of my mechanics, UI layout, and gameplay-balancing-tweaks duplicated. Not duplicated from ripping code or decompiling assets – duplicated from just glancing at SteamBirds and playing with it.

That beat the official SteamBirds iPhone launch by over 6 months.

Thankfully, in my case, they didn’t steal the title of the game – or any of the art assets. It disappeared into obscurity with very few sales – proving once again that you need a successful IP under your belt, or else you are going to have a rough time in the AppStore.

The only way to defend against these kinds of cloners is to make bigger, longer, or more complicated games (eg: having multiplayer servers). It’s also more difficult to clone a massive, supporting community (thanks DanC!) – or things like marketing efforts. Shy of patenting gameplay mechanics (which is a very expensive and not very lucrative industry), there isn’t even a legal leg to stand on against these guys.

Posted by Andy Moore at 2:22 pm  

Embedding Assets in AS3

 AS3, Game Design  5 Responses »
Mar 182011
 

Getting assets (such as images and sound files) into your AS3 project can be simple, but I ran into a few problems (and nice solutions!) that might help others out too. I thought I’d jot it down into a blog post!

How I used to do it

I use FlashDevelop, and I try to avoid using the Flash IDE for development. I found it incredibly handy, though, that I could copy any asset – even vector art – with a simple drag-and-drop into Flash, and export the whole bundle as an .SWC file.

FlashDevelop is awesome handling SWC files; a simple pair of clicks gives you full access not only to the assets, but any sub-classes and properties the assets may have (as imbued by Flash itself). It’s quite awesome, and it’s how I’ve done everything to-date.

The Problem

There are a few downsides to Flash’s SWC asset library:

  1. Porting to other platforms or languages (that don’t support Flash files) is a pain in the butt; without SWC support you have to re-invent your asset importing routines for each platform.
  2. Even when sticking with Flash, importing assets into Flash that you’ve already separated out into individual files can be annoying and tedious (as opposed to developing all your assets within Flash or Illustrator)
  3. You need to own a copy of the Flash IDE (the Professional version, too, if you want to make commercial projects)

The first item on that list is the one that bugged me the most. No other development environment has a standardized equivalent to the SWC Library; converting your game to any other platform or language suddenly gains an extra hurdle, and requires exporting of assets and all sorts of hoop-jumping.  I know this first hand; there was some problems creating the mobile editions of Steambirds.

When I look at various Flash blitting/game engines, such as Flixel and FlashPunk, and they tend to support sprite sheets, image file imports, and other such “industry standard” ways of doing things. Converting from these engines to – let’s say, iPhone – will be a whole lot easier.

There’s just one little thing standing in the way of me following in their path…

I hate SpriteSheets

SpriteSheets were invented by old console programmers that couldn’t manage their assets with the hardware they had. Instead of making large images, they’d break everything down into sprites – dump them all into a single crammed-in file, and re-construct environments piece-by-piece. This is what gives Super Mario Bros. that square look, and why so many games seemed to be built on a grid.

SpriteSheets nearly require you to make all of your assets the same size, and even if you don’t: Any time you save managing dozens of tiny files will be made up in creating a lookup table (or a map) to your spritesheet.

Alternatives?

Well, the standard way is to “simply” use three lines of code to “Embed” each graphic file – at compile time – to your Flash application. I’d love to do this, but I have over 200 files to import!  That’s a lot of typing!

Some helpful Twitterites suggested I might want to look into streaming the files off of a server – but that brings up bandwidth and offline-compatability concerns (but is otherwise a great idea).

Whatever am I to do?!

@ChevyRay to the Rescue

Chevy, the best thing to happen to GDC 2011, took it upon himself to whip up an AIR application that automatically generates all my Embed tags for me, and stores them into a centralized art asset file!

Download his quick-n-dirty tool here: chevyray.com/stuff/AssetBatcher.zip

It did exactly what I wanted it to, simplified a lot of work, and has made my future projects even more cross-compatible with other platforms (and easily portable to other languages).

Thanks Chevy!! <3

Posted by Andy Moore at 5:55 pm  

Thoughts on Mobile Platforms

 Game Design, Monetization, SteamBirds  7 Responses »
Mar 172011
 

I touched on most of this stuff, in a condensed form, in my SteamBirds Survival: By The Numbers post last week. It’s received a lot of attention, so I thought I’d expand on it a bit.

I only have experience with the two largest markets: iOS and Android.  I will focus on those two, but the same arguments can be extended to any other mobile platform.

The Allure of Mobile

I don’t believe that developing a “mobile application” from the ground-up is an easy task. As a port, or an add-on to an existing IP: maybe. But an original title? Scary thought!

Some developers are drawn to mobile platforms for technical reasons: The touch interface, the GPS functionality, or the gyroscopic inputs. For those developers, it can be an exciting new platform with excellent opportunities for innovation. Still, you have a hard road ahead of you, and you have my sympathy and support!

A good chunk of developers, though, want to make original games for mobile platforms purely because of the stories of Scrooge McDuck-style money-bins. I suppose this post is being made to dash those dreams on the reef of reality; I hope I’m wrong, and I wish you luck and success regardless, but I think it is a losing venture.

How to Succeed

To succeed in either the iOS or Android market you need to have one of the following:

  1. Excellent Marketing (buying a billboard in LA helps)
  2. Amazing, ground-breaking, innovative gameplay (you might think you have this, but you probably don’t)
  3. Be “featured”

Assuming #1 and #2 are out of reach for you (as they are for most Indies), I guess that means we’ll be sticking to the “getting featured” item. Why?

Most customers are lazy. They will buy games near the top of the charts. The few people willing to “dig” for a good game are (a) probably not going to find yours amongst the thousands of other titles, and (b) probably not going to buy it even if they do see it. Why would they pick yours over the ten apps on either side of yours? Remember: There are over 500,000 apps out there.

On iOS, the default chart-sorting is by “Most sales in the last 72 hours.” On Android, the default chart-sorting is by “Most sales of all time.” This is (IMHO) complete bullshit, and is why content-discovery is such a problem on mobile platforms (particularly on Android).

Being “featured” let’s you skip the catch-22 of “you need sales to make sales.”

Getting Featured

So how do you get Featured?

  1. Know somebody at Apple/Google and grease some palms (take someone out to coffee, meet them at a trade show, etc)
  2. Know somebody that knows somebody at Apple/Google (aka: Publishers. They will take a lot of your money for this advantage!)
  3. Prove your worth with hard facts (sales figures from other platforms, reviews, having a long successful history with the store, being a triple-A studio, making a game based on a blockbuster movie, etc.)

Note that there isn’t an option there that says “My game will do well, honest!!” or “Play-tests say it’s great!” The gate-keepers are only interested in solid facts, not speculation.

How important is getting featured? Well, most games that don’t get featured disappear into obscurity. Friends and family might be your only customers, if you can be so lucky; expect sales of less than $10-$200. If you get your entire extended family to buy your application, what rank do you think it will appear as? How far down the list will it be on iOS? How far down will it be on Android?

What if you ARE featured?

IF you get featured, what kind of sales can you expect? How do the markets stack up?

In my experience, and speaking with other Indie game devs: The Android market will get you somewhere between 10-20% of your iOS sales, if all other things are equal.

Yes, there are more Android devices in the world than iOS products. However, every single iOS device has access to the AppStore. Some Android devices don’t have storage capabilities, are regionally locked, or sometimes carriers themselves block out the AndroidMarket. I haven’t been able to find hard figures on this, but I estimate that the potential Android app-customer base is way less than half the size of the iOS market. 10-20% sounds and feels about right, and seems to fit evidence collected.

In terms of actual cash generated: Being in the top ten can keep you in the top ten for a long time. The rich get richer. So the higher your ranking, the more money you make. But it’s a very steep curve.

How about an example?

SteamBirds had a decent launch on the mobile market. Here’s some figures:

  • The game launched in early December on SteamBirds.com (flash version). This version linked to the mobile editions.
  • Mobile editions simultaneously launched on iOS and Android a week later.
  • A week after mobile editions launched, they were featured on both platforms (thanks to shout-outs from Penny Arcade, Rock Paper Shotgun, and our own connections)
  • After 3 months of sales:
    • $100K-ish from iOS (just about 50/50 iPad and iPhone)
    • $30K-ish from Android
  • On iOS, peaked at #12 (ipad/games section), #26 (top apps)

Android’s long-tail is roughly twice as thick as iOS, and I predict that – over the course of 1-2 years(?) – it might even overtake iOS sales.

Grain of salt time

Other than big-studio- or proven-IP-based- titles, I don’t know anyone that’s done as well as SteamBirds in the Android market [given my 3 months sales time]. I know a lot of developers with Android titles; some made less than $10, and nobody I know of  has been featured in that market.

That said, there’s always the chance you can get lucky. Considering how many entrants there are in the mobile industry, though: the odds are against you. Better luck playing the lottery, I think!

If you have any experiences with the mobile markets, please post them in comments! There’s not enough data being shared about this industry!

Posted by Andy Moore at 11:28 am  

On BlackLists

 AS3, Code, Game Design, Monetization  5 Responses »
Mar 132011
 

In the “by the numbers” post a few days ago, I mentioned SteamBirds: Survival introduced a new black-listing technology. There’s been a lot of interest in what exactly this is, so here we go!

First up, I’ll lay the groundwork so you can understand the reasoning here.

How the Flash Ecosystem Works

There are usually a few different “versions” of popular flash games floating around on the web:

  1. The Sponsored Version (primary).The sponsored version typically has no advertisements on it, and minimizes gameplay intrusions to the customer – the games are monetized via other means (such as pay-to-unlock, microtransactions, or placing ads on the website around the game instead). These versions are almost always branded with the Sponsor’s logos. Sometimes this version will have special/bonus content. (Note that you can “sponsor things yourself” by just posting them on your own website.)This version of the game is typically site-locked, so the .SWF can’t be downloaded and re-deployed elsewhere.
  2. The Scraps (secondary sponsorships).Savvy web portals will attempt to profit from a popular game by paying a premium to remove any branding or advertising that may be present. It is common for the fee paid to well exceed a developer’s expected profit for the site via viral advertisements (see #3), thus making this a win-win situation.This version of the game is typically site-locked, so the .SWF can’t be downloaded and re-deployed elsewhere.
  3. The Viral Version.This version of the game usually has in-game advertisements of some sort, and usually some kind of branding for either the developer or the primary sponsor. The game is then put up in various free locations (such as FlashGameDistribution.com) so that any portal may get the game for free.Because no sponsor is paying for this version, the advertisements provide revenue for the developer.

As a case-in-point, the viral version of SteamBirds exists on around 5,000 different websites, which account for around 30% of the game’s total traffic; that’s where I generate most of my advertising revenue (not that there is a lot…).

Arguably more important than the advertising revenue, though, is the branding. Getting your brand (in my case, a link to steambirds.com) in front of millions of people is potentially more valuable than a few pennies for ad clicks.

Which brings us to the big problem.

Evil Jerkwads

Some enterprising portal owners think to themselves:

  1. I see that game is doing really well;
  2. I want it on my site;
  3. I don’t want the developer’s ads on my game;
  4. I don’t want to lose my customers with outbound links;
  5. And I don’t want to have to pay for the game.

They will then grab the free, viral version of the game – and do some or all of the following evil, jerky stuff to it:

  • Remove the ads completely
  • Change ads or overlay their own ads on top of the developer’s
  • Prevent the game from opening links when clicked
  • Replace the links with links of their own choosing
  • Hack out the site-locked sponsored versions to illicitly grab the unique content
  • Replace any/all branding
  • Entirely eliminate credits screens
  • Put their own names into the credits screens

As Adobe’s Flash/AS3 language is an “open” language, there are plenty of decompilers out there. Asset protection is still difficult in the environment. Doing any/all of the above is a trivial process for most developers.

The original version of SteamBirds had around 4 million plays with various iterations of the above list implemented. Most often it’s ad-replacement and blocking of outbound links; I think only one site erased my name from the credits; other games aren’t so lucky.

Flogging with a Wet Noodle

The offenders here are almost exclusively based out of Asia, and most of my illicit traffic comes primarily from China.

Sending cease-and-desist letters from a lawyer, pleading via email, and making angry blog posts in English doesn’t work. Any attempts I have made have gone completely ignored; at best, sites will write back claiming they are doing you a favour by exposing you to a large Asian audience.

It’s hard to bring litigious action against these portals when the value of the traffic they are stealing is diminishingly small. 4 million hits across hundreds of sites? That’s not many visitors each. And it’s hard to put a value on branding, such as “name in the credits” or “outbound links back to my site.” Not to mention bringing litigation against a Chinese site is very difficult to do, thanks to differing international laws (nor would I want to go down that road).

It’s not that I want to shut a single infringer down, or that any individual company is harming me directly in a measurable way; It’s that there are so many of them. Stopping them one at a time won’t get me anywhere. I need a way to flip their entire table over, all at once.

Prevention is the Best Medicine

Because Flash is an open platform, ripping things off is easy. There are certain things you can do to make the whole process more difficult, though.

Simple changes in the way you code, for example, can result in corrective action. If you play SteamBirds: Survival on a site that blocks outbound links, I can actually detect the failure event in the code, and display a popup box that says “This site is being a jerk! Type this URL into your browser bar…”

Using metrics-recording platforms like Playtomic will allow you to track the number of advertising clicks on each site. If there is a lot of traffic with zero clicks, you can take dynamic (code-based-blocking) or manual (off-site blacklisting) corrective action.

And finally, you can use code-obfuscators to help prevent cracking/hacking of various kinds. These automated programs run through your code and change function names to things like ” ” or linebreak characters, amongst other things. I use Kindisoft’s SecureSWF Pro on most of my projects, and I believe it is the best in the industry.

No matter how much prevention you use, you can’t prevent all types of hacking though. With work, any obfuscated code can be reverse engineered; and there is currently no way to encrypt or obfuscate your art assets. Why hack out advertisements or branding when you can just relocate it to be off-screen, or re-paint it as your own?

Enter the Dynamic BlackList

Since I had a nice, long list of badguys from SteamBirds, I decided to put it to good use in SteamBirds: Survival.

Here’s how it works:

  1. I Include the entire list of the offenders URLs as a single XML variable in my code
  2. I then pull a stored GameVar from Playtomic‘s servers to update the list in my code. This prevents people from decompiling the game and just removing their URL from my internal XML (and is quite probably the biggest headache for would-be crackers, since it isn’t an obvious update).
  3. The game tracks ad clicks and looks for other “red flags,” and notifies me of potential infringers. I can then log in to Playtomic and update the GameVar if I believe the site needs to be added to the list.
  4. Upon execution, the game checks the hosted domain against the list. If the site is blacklisted:
  5. The game displays a nice, friendly, pre-made image saying that the game is – unfortunately – not playable on that site, and redirects the player to SteamBirds.com
  6. In case they hack-out the nice art asset I made for the offending sites, the game constructs a much uglier, nastier-sounding “this site is being a jerk!” message from pure code, using no art assets. This is much harder to hack.

It worked really well. The sites that used to be a big thorn in my side? Now very nearly zero traffic. I successfully put up enough barbed wire to discourage the dismantling of my game.

Right after I launched my game, Playtomic released a similar service that covers a lot of the basics: Portal BlackList. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of my system, but it provides all the code and integration you need to get a simple system up and running today. I recommend checking it out.

Portal BlackList also shows a list of currently blocked sites in the sidebar. My list is a subset of those sites, so instead of duplicating it here I’ll just direct you there! You can also check out the list on Free Our Games as a reference.

Still Failing

Unfortunately, there are still ways around all of my safeguards. Certain portals will link to your game on your own website, hosted in an iFrame on their own site. Your game then thinks it’s running on a proper domain, while the offending site can strip out any accompanying sidebar ads, branding, or whatever else you might have in place.

Thankfully the number of people doing this is quite small, and not a big deal (for me, anyway).

Posted by Andy Moore at 2:29 pm  

SpaceChem

 Game Design  2 Responses »
Mar 122011
 

SpaceChem is a new Indie game released by Zachtronics Industries. I purchased it on Steam, and I think it is an astounding game and love it to bits. But it’s not all perfect; far from it, in fact.

I was starting to think I was the only one in my peer group that had tried SpaceChem. Colin Northway (on his new blog, Northway Games) proves me wrong with a good analysis of its interface issues. I wanted to touch on some of the same things, but Colin beat me to it! That lets me limit my scope of this article and grab another proverbial beer.

It’s Awesome.

SpaceChem is an incredible game. The concept is quite simple: Move an object (atoms) from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen, using simple commands like grab, drop, and direction changes.

I kind of think of it like a mixture of electrical-circuit-design and simple-robot-programming. It whisks me back to memories of playing RoboRally and learning my first programming (BASIC on the C64) – which are happy bonuses for me, and not at all pre-requisites to play the game.

To help illustrate gameplay, here is an image that I think can best sell the game:

A simple shot of a simple routine, doing simple functions: Start, pick up a thing on the left, drop it on the right, in an endless cycle. If this was my game, I’d probably animate that image and use it in banner ads or something (seeing it in action really helps).

It doesn’t appear like much of a challenge now, but that screenshot is even easier than the first tutorial. As the game trundles on, you need to start building complex molecules, bonding various atoms together, destroying other molecules, and laying out incredibly complicated paths. Basically, you start getting more commands than just “Grab” and “Drop”. The game starts adding awesome new verbs to play with;

  • Trigger Inputs
  • Flush Outputs
  • Add chemical bonds
  • Subtract chemical bonds
  • Rotate Molecules
  • … and more I haven’t discovered yet!

Here’s the most intimidating screenshot I could find – do not linger on it for long:

I haven’t beaten this game yet, and I can tell you with confidence that I have no idea what is going on here. I think I see… can it be? IF statements? This is a very complicated structure, and studying it is quite possibly the best way to scare you off from ever playing the game. I recommend ignoring this for now; it is a mere glimpse of the wonder that awaits you.

But let me tell you now, so there is no doubt: climbing the path of success from the first to the second image is a wonderful experience so far, with pangs of joy as problems resolve at regular intervals. I played for a few hours last night and probably had six to nine “a-HA!” moments that made me want to clap my hands together like a kid.

The Sweet Spot of Challenge

Capturing the interest of someone requires walking a fine line between unbearable difficulty and boredom. Make things too easy, the player doesn’t feel challenged – and they want to try something else. Make things too difficult, and you start hurting the ego of the player. The band between these two extremes varies from person to person, and from skill level to skill level. But it’s really hard to make a perfect challenge, that – throughout the entire gameplay experience – stays within this band.

A game that starts off “just right” can easily get boring (if the player learns a new skill) and can easily get difficult (if you introduce new challenges too quickly), which is why we need lots of playtesting all the way through the game – with new players – and not just have the same 2 people testing the first few levels. SpaceChem appears to be riding my upper bound of challenge pretty hard. I’m not hating it yet, but I fear the game’s difficulty level is increasing faster than my skill is. It almost feels as if my skill is increasing at a steady pace, and the difficulty is accelerating beyond my reach.

Right now, this is making my victories all that much sweeter – but I don’t know how long I can keep it up. My brain was crumbling under the pressure last night, so I decided to turn it off and wait until morning to continue.

That there is a graph of the % of people that beat the various levels in SteamBirds. The top of the graph is 100% (everyone beats level 1, the tutorial!), and the bottom is 0%. This is the “Difficulty Curve” of SteamBirds, visually represented.

I love graphs like this because it can tell you a few things right away:

  • Level 3 is harder than Level 4, which is arguably a bad thing
  • The skill difference required between levels 4 and 5 is way too steep
  • Levels 5 through 9 were fairly consistent
  • Level 10 was probably too hard again

At this point you’d say “That doesn’t look so bad!”, but this trend continues for the rest of the game – with constantly diminishing user retention:

I learned my lesson: SteamBirds got too hard, too fast, and scared away a lot of people right near level 5 – not even a quarter of the way into the game.

I’d love to see what SpaceChem’s difficulty curve looks like. I’ll bet it’s even steeper than SteamBirds.

A Personal Joy

I think SpaceChem is an awesome puzzle game that rewards me well for the tasks presented. It has a lot of promise, and I can’t see myself getting bored with it soon. I’d say it’s the best puzzle game I’ve played in recent memory.

I’m unsure if I can recommend SpaceChem to other people. It’s got a ton going for it, but I’m afraid others won’t be able to see past its flaws. I’m worried it is going to lose a lot of audience, get critically panned, and fade into obscurity.

I hope I’m proven wrong. I want SpaceChem to succeed, so Zachtronics can make a sequel that fixes all the problems of the original. Because that game – that game might just be the perfect puzzle game.

Posted by Andy Moore at 12:09 pm  

SteamBirds: Survival – By the Numbers

 Game Design, Monetization, SteamBirds  35 Responses »
Mar 102011
 

Well! I’m back from the Game Developer’s Conference and the Flash Gaming Summit, where I spoke about how SteamBirds is doing and let all my cats out of their respective bags. I think it’s time for another by-the-numbers gig!

When I last left you, my very popular SteamBirds: By The Numbers article let you know that SteamBirds had made approximately $34,000 USD (gross).  This article was so popular it was copied over to Gamasutra and into two different magazines! (score!) I suppose that means you guys want more?

So let’s start by getting caught up.

SteamBirds: The Original

Since last writing, SB went on to make an addition $11K in various sitelocks and licenses, and to this day is still generating more business (did 3 sitelocks in January alone!). I’m fairly confident that the original SB is going to make money for a loooong time.

SteamBirds [the original version only] has now made approximately $45,000 USD.

Here’s a popular chart: breaking down the sources of all revenues for the original SB:

I really like this graph because it visually represents how much I loathe advertisements.

I say this a lot, but there’s no harm in re-iterating: I hate ads, I’m really bad at deploying good ads, and I have no advertising strategy other than “tack it on hastily.” You can see it really paid off;

  • Mochi ad revenue has paid so little, it hasn’t even sent me a cheque yet (they promise they owe me $78 though)
  • CPMStar sends me regular cheques, though the amounts are dwindlingly low
  • Kongregate’s revenue-sharing advertising model is about the only thing that pays out, and it pays out IN SPADES.

4-5x more revenue than CPMStar and Mochi combined?? Why does anyone even bother with advertising anymore?!

And even then: All advertising combined is hardly 10% of combined revenues. It might be worth it, but only in this larger-scale economy. I don’t think I’d bother with advertisements at all if I had a game that was expecting to make less than $30K.

As far as traffic and popularity goes:

 

(Click for Big)

It seems like traffic is dwindling off to nothing, but it’s been nearly a solid year of 50,000 plays per day (and trended up to 150K/day around the time of Survival’s launch). That’s more web traffic per day than I’ve ever hoped for with a personal blog, so I call it a success!

But that’s enough whinging on about the original SteamBirds. Let’s jump into the fun, new stuff!

SteamBirds: iOS

The wonderful fellows at SemiSecret Software (Eric and Adam) worked hard at making an iOS version of the game. They launched two separate SKUs – one for iPhone/iPod Touch ($0.99), and an HD version ($1.99) for the iPad.

The iOS version of the game was identical to the original flash game, except:

  • The game came complete with the “Bonus Missions” (previously only available at ArmorGames)
  • The in-game art was completely redone by hand by Adam
  • The game got a brilliant, awesome title screen (also by Adam)
  • Features all the original, epic, awesome music by DannyB (buy the soundtrack here, and support more awesome music from DannyB!)

Here’s a total sales graph:

(Click for Big)

The iPad sales were fairly consistently around half the volume of the iPhone sales, which was surprising – considering how many more iPhones there are in the world!

What was super interesting, though, was this zoomed-in portion:

 

(Click for Big)

(ignore the dip around Jan. 5th – error in the data – sales were consistent)

I love the big spike at Christmas time. Shows people reveling in proper Commercial Spirit! But even more interesting was the App was on an “introductory sale” for December. We bumped the prices up $1 on January 1st ($1.99 / $2.99), and there was no affect on sales at all! Interesting…

I have to say that the iPad edition of the game is, hands down, my favorite game experience. SteamBirds feels like it was designed to be on that platform, and I love it to bits. I bought an iPad just to fawn over it.

SteamBirds: Android

Victor’s team at FlatRedBall created an Android edition of the game for us. This version of the game was again, identical to the original SB, except:

  • The graphics engine was entirely re-done from scratch, and features really awesome 3D effects
  • Contains dozens of bonus missions and storyline, not available anywhere else
  • Contains MULTIPLAYER gameplay!

I don’t have a fancy graph of Android sales, but I know the performance was approximately 20% of the iOS counterpart in terms of gross revenue. I know Android has a vast install base, but not every Android phone has the Marketplace (as opposed to 100% appstore penetration on the iOS), so I have no good feel for how much of this is luck, how much is market, how much is user response, etc… It’s very difficult to feel out the numbers.

20% is still a big chunk, though – but much like the advertising revenue – only if you expect the game to push over $30K or so.

I have a huge problem with Android’s default “Sort by all-time sales” market, and content discovery is hideously broken, so that could be a huge contributing factor here. Hopefully Google will fix that.

The one huge saving grace here was the Android edition’s winning of the IndiePub Game of the Year award. The cash prize (and other perks) that came with that made it all worth while!

Mobile Edition Summary

Both mobile editions were “featured,” and both rose in ranks quite quickly. In terms of 72-hour sales, SteamBirds rose to a peak of #12 on the iPad “Games” category (#25 overall, if memory serves), which was really nice and super exciting. Sales didn’t hold, though, and tailed off rapidly.

Not hating on the tail at all, of course – it’s nowhere near launch-day-numbers, but they’re still generating cash. :)

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would target Android still – just because I like supporting the platform. Even with a featured, popular application with backing from Penny Arcade (two or three times now!), it hardly paid for it’s own development.

That said: Both mobile editions were done via contractors working for revenue split (50% each, which I think is generous!), and the resultant windfalls from both devices was, essentially, free money.

All in all, iPad/iPhone/Android split out to be a fairly even pie: around 33%/33%/33% each.

The mobile market has a fairly long tail, though – and that tail is pretty thick and lucrative, especially for Android.  I believe these figures will round out nicely in the coming year, but they were only launched near the beginning of December, so we don’t have a lot of data yet.

Let’s move on to the NEW game!

SteamBirds: Survival

SteamBirds: Survival wasn’t a gigantic technical change from the original, but it has very different gameplay. I’ve blogged about the specifics previously, so I’ll let you go read that (or just play it!) instead of updating it here.

Sponsorship

The game went up on FlashGameLicense.com looking for a sponsor. We were fairly open to anything, but being the Christmas season with an non-thematic game: we had a fairly poor turn out. Several sponsors said they’d be willing to pay more in the Spring, but we didn’t want to wait. Not to worry: in the end we got a really good deal.

Our primary sponsor ended up being AXE, the body-spray brand (pit, pit, chest). They paid just over $10K for the game. A hilarious conversation came out of this:

Me: “OK, I’m done incorporating your logos. Where should I sitelock the game to?”

Them: “Oh, uh, we don’t have a website. Can you host it?”

Me: “Y… yes?!?!”

You see, typically a sponsor is paying for the traffic redirection back to their site. In this case, Axe didn’t have a dedicated portal – they just wanted the ad space. This allowed us to retain and control our traffic, show our users exactly what we wanted to show them, place up-sell icons for the mobile editions, place our own blog and twitter feeds… That’s worth an extra $10K of value any day!

And again: Much like the Original SB, sponsor and licensing requests for Survival keep rolling in, and I expect it to make us money for a long time coming.

Advertising

This go-around I learned my lesson from the original Steambirds: no advertisments. We didn’t bother integrating with Mochi or CPMStar, and any revenue put forth by Kongregate was just a nice dollop of icing on this cake.

MicroTransactions

A new twist, however, was Micro-Transactions. To date, Survival has made an additional $10K or so in MTX – not too shabby considering there’s a maximum limit on how much you can spend (there are no consumables, by design).

The airplanes in SteamBirds: Survival are so different from each other, that unlocking/purchasing a new plane is like getting to play a whole new game. Some of the planes have fairly straightforward changes, but some themed planes – like the SolipSkier, Canabalt, and AughtNine planes – drastically change gameplay into something entirely different.

So here’s how we worked MTX:

  • The game contained a total of 24 planes
  • 16 planes were unlockable by regular gameplay
  • 8 planes were only unlockable with cash
  • The planes ranged from $0.75 (Cockroach) ->$10 (AughtNine)
  • Buying all the planes individually cost $20
  • There was a prominent “Buy ALL!” button in the game that only cost $15 (25% off!)

Let’s see how well each did:

Isn’t that interesting? 70% of all sales came from the “Buy All” button. It almost seems like we shouldn’t have put the microtransactions on the other planes at all! The vast majority of users would rather just hand us $15 than actually buy each individual plane… But of course, that was the plan all along: Tempt users with greater value. The “Unlock Everything!” button wouldn’t have done so well without the other plans to compare against!

I love that people would trust me with an investment of that size, you know? It feels really good when a flash game player drops $15. Gives me hope for humanity, and the industry!

Free Plane!

We wanted to bait people with a free plane – just give us your EMail address, and we’ll send you a free premium plane! Of all the total users that ever entered the game: 10% clicked on the newsletter signup button. However, only 1% actually made it through the signup process! Signing up for the free plane required you were already signed into a Gamersafe account, so we lost 90% of our potential email addresses because of this hurdle. BIG LESSON LEARNED!

Edit: As DanC pointed out – if 90% of people couldn’t be bothered to sign into gamersafe for a free plane… how many didn’t bother to sign in to PURCHASE a plane? I think the MTX really suffered because of the extra signup layer. Every payment provider requires a signup of some sort, though, so I wonder what could have been done to fix it?

The BlackList

One big problem with the original SteamBirds was certain shady sites (usually in Asian countries) ripping out my advertisements, breaking sitelocks, and preventing outbound links (and sometimes even erasing credits!) or otherwise hacking the game and posting it without permission. For Survival, I implemented a dynamic blacklist – that allows me to block any site from seeing the game on a whim.

Thanks to the first release, I had a lengthy list of ne’er-do-wells, and put them in right at the start of SB:S’s launch. I also put in metrics to see who was trying to defeat my locks!

6 sites in particular were pretty bad, hammering away at the game thousands of times trying to make it work, to no avail. In the end, I had some interesting stats:

  • In the Original SteamBirds, I had 4,000,000 plays from “banned” locations
  • In SteamBirds Survival, I had less than 60,000.

I’d say that’s a success! 4 million plays that generate zero revenue and zero fan love is 4 million hits I’d rather not have.

What was super interesting is how this has skewed my stats of plays-by-countries; the USA is always #1, but the rest of the top 5 were always Asian countries in each of my other games. In SB:S, Brazil, Spain, The UK, and Canada come into the top 5. Now I know where to localize my games to first!

Other Interesting Stats

I cranked up my statistics tracking in SteamBirds: Survival, and got a bunch of neat figures out of it. Here’s a few:

  • Avg. PlayTime of SB: Original: 24 minutes
  • Avg. PlayTime of SB:S: 30 minutes (improvement!)
  • 25% of all rounds end with the player clicking “More Tips” on the gameover screen
  • 25% of players quit the game manually (without dying or closing the window)
  • 15% of all players unlocked >2 planes
  • 11% of players hit Mute (up from 6% on the original SB, down from 80% on my crappy games!)
  • 10% of players attempted newsletter signup, 1% succeeded
  • 3% of players clicked on the Twitter/Facebook icons at least once
  • 0.9% of players clicked on the Credits button (this is sadly consistent from everyone I talked to in the industry)
  • 0.7% of players unlocked the AllUrBase (hardest non-pay plane to get)
  • 0.5% of players clicked on the “buy the mobile edition!” button in game

That last one is super interesting to me. Totally tells me that there is very, very little crossover from the flash to the mobile market. Maybe not worth ever including? (then again: if a single journalist sees it, it might make a huge sales difference)

Total Revenues

So how is the SteamBirds franchise doing, overall?

I estimate we’ve made around $200,000 USD so far, with all things included. Here’s how I break it down:

“Old Rev” being the Original Steambirds, “Flash” being SteamBirds: Survival. Note that the original SB has an extra year headstart on Survival, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Survival overtakes it in the long run.

A lot of people will look at this chart and say “Woah! There’s so much money in the mobile market… Why are you bothering with the flash version?!”

My response to that is quite simple; the only reason we made more than $10 on Android is because we got Featured by Google.  It’s a similar story on iOS.  The reason we were able to get featured so easily is because of the fame and endless praiseworthy reviews the Flash version got! If the Flash edition never existed, we would never have had an opportunity to get as much exposure as we did.

I fully plan on developing for Flash into the future. And I think what we have in store will turn the tables on where the biggest revenue lies. ;)

The Future

So what are we working on now?

  • SteamBirds: Survival for iOS and Android
  • SteamBirds: Multiplayer (working title)

I’ll keep you posted as long as you keep your eyes glued here!

Posted by Andy Moore at 9:55 pm  

SteamBirds picks up 2 more awards!

 SteamBirds  13 Responses »
Jan 152011
 

Most Original Design

Game of the Year

Wow. This was unexepcted! The original SteamBirds flash game has won two  awards from FGL!

“Best Game” of 2010 as well as “Most Original Design.”

I’ll be honest: These aren’t exactly IGF Awards, they don’t come with big publishing contracts or huge grand prizes. It is, however, the only awards that are handed out by my peers.

Somewhere around 2000 games sold on FlashGameLicense in 2010, not counting at least twice that many that never found any sales. Amongst all those authors, all those dev teams – SteamBirds received the most nominations.

So a big hearty thanks to the community I work in. You’re all so awesome.

Posted by Andy Moore at 11:20 am  

Space Squid: SOLD!!1!

 Monetization, Space Squid  9 Responses »
Jan 092011
 

I NEVER THOUGHT THIS DAY WOULD COME!!!

Fireworks! Explosions! OMG OMG

I finally sold my first ever game, Space Squid. After years of marketing and attempting to find a buyer, I was able to sell the full source code for the game for a whopping twenty big ones.

I still retain IP rights; I mainly didn’t have the time or effort available to do up a sitelock so I sold the entire source code and made the sponsor do it.

I’ll chart the game’s financial success:

Yep, launched back in May of 2009, the game has cost me approximately $2/month in hosting, but this recent payout was an astounding bump in the game’s history. Never before has Space Squid seen such profits!

Well, “profits” should be in quotes because I’m still around $20 in the hole for this game, over all.

You can play the [ugly, broken] sponsored version on Newgrounds, or you can play my original implementation at Space-Squid.com.

And to all those that said it could never happen:

HAHAHAHAHHAHAH

Posted by Andy Moore at 2:38 pm  
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