Game design is a unique combination of storytelling, engineering and art. Mastering game design can take a lifetime, so we wanted to jumpstart your education by putting together a guide of the 10 best game design articles we could find. Whether you are an industry expert or a complete beginner, all of these articles condense valuable lessons into a few short pages each. Check them out
As a part of Betable’s community outreach, we decided to ask indie developers on the IndieGamer and TIGSource forums to weigh in on how they balance gameplay with monetization. The response was overwhelming, and lead to some interesting insights into what game developers find to be appropriate versus abusive monetization.
Indie developer Nimblebit dropped a PR bomb on Zynga yesterday with it’s letter addressing the similarities between their hit iPhone game Tiny Tower and Zynga’s upcoming release, Dream Heights. This galvanized the gaming community, with thousands of people, from prominent bloggers to gamers on Reddit criticizing the company.
However, just after the new year, Atari ordered the removal of Black Powder Media’s Vector Tanks, a game strongly inspired by Atari’s Battlezone. This galvanized the community in a similar way, except this time, gamers were furious that Atari shut down an indie game company that made an extremely similar game.
There have been rumors for some time that Facebook will soon allow real-money gambling in the UK. Some would say that it’s a natural move for the social network, which makes a substantial portion of its revenue from facilitating purchases of in-game virtual goods. Considering that real-money has a significantly higher revenue potential than virtual currency, allowing online gambling could help Facebook boost its revenue growth before it’s rumored May IPO.
To lend credence to these rumors, there were two massive acquisitions of Facebook casino game companies within the last two weeks. On December 30th, Caesars Casino elected to purchase the 49% it did not own of Playtika, one of Facebook’s larger casino game makers with over 5 million monthly active users. But the announcement that turned heads was gambling heavyweight IGT’s $500 million acquisition of DoubleDown Interactive.
If you look at the numbers as they are now, there’s no reason for IGT to pay $500 million for DoubleDown. DoubleDown was rumored by AllThingsD to be making $140,000 per day, which equates to about $51 million in revenue per year. This puts the purchase price for DoubleDown at almost 10X their revenue, which is high even for the frothy social gaming market. Furthermore, DoubleDown Casino, their only game, has approximately 4.7 million monthly active users, which means that IGT paid over $100 per monthly active user. [Click to Tweet]
This purchase would only make sense if real-money gambling is coming to Facebook. Whether you view it as a land grab (DoubleDown Casino was the #4 game on Facebook by daily active users in 2011), or as a smart buy for the future (online casino players are worth roughly $1,800 over their lifetime), this acquisition is a sign of things to come. With social game giants EA and Zynga rumored to be looking into the real-money gambling opportunity, social game developers would be wise to stake their claim in the market as soon as possible.
[Image credit: TechCrunch, TeePeeGames]
It almost seems like overnight, social gaming became a $2 billion industry with over hundreds of millions of players worldwide. As we mentioned in our blog post, Exposing Social Gaming’s Hidden Lever, social gaming leverages the same game mechanics and psychological cues as slot machines to hook players. To us, it was no surprise when we found that social gaming is popular with the same demographics as slot machines.
Google YouTube PM Hunter Walk asked on Twitter Monday:
There are some serious competitive advantages that Zynga would bring to the table if they decided to pursue this idea and provide legal online poker to its Zynga Poker players. For one, Zynga’s poker game currently holds over 28 million active players, which makes it the world’s largest poker site of any kind.
Clearly, Zynga has the potential to be a real-money poker powerhouse
But what would that mean for them?
Last week’s Wall Street Journal article, “Gaming’s New Frontier After Zynga”, talks about how the future of games is new, high-quality massively multiplayer online role-playing games (commonly known as MMORPGs). The author alleges that innovative new MMORPGs created by companies like Trion and Tiny Speck will lead to a revolution akin to social games’ emergence over the last 5 years. While this article captures part of the trend, it misses the bigger picture.
The future of gaming is not immersive massively multiplayer games. People have been saying that MMORPGs were the “future of gaming” since back in the days of the original Everquest. To quote David Radd from his IndustryGamers post last week, “things didn’t quite pan out as planned”.
Today, the resurgence of MMOs is just one piece of the larger trend:
Earlier this month, Roger Dickey spoke at our Game Monetization meetup event. Roger is the creator of Mafia Wars, one of the most successful social games of all time, and also served as the GM of Fishville once his company was acquired by Zynga. You can watch the full video below, but we wanted to pull out one topic today that we found really interesting: mining the theme space.
Roger Dickey is the creator of Mafia Wars, one of the most successful social games of all time, and learned game monetization strategy during his time as a GM of multiple games and international product advisor at Zynga. At our Money Talks event in San Francisco, Roger dropped some serious knowledge that showed how the leading social game companies maximize their game monetization. You can watch the video below, or read our cliff notes to get a quick overview of the best social game monetization strategies he shared.
