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.
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.
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.
Our first meetup event, “Money Talks”, was a great success. With over 75 attendees, we had a packed house full of game developers itching to learn. Our three great speakers gave our audience great insight into game monetization:
The first speaker was Roxanne Gibert, whose game monetization and product strategy background comes from years at premier social game companies including Zynga, Playdom, and Playfirst. Now running her own company, Spyra, Roxanne presented a great overview of game monetization and the framework that you need to implement to make impactful decisions to move the needle on your CLV and ARPPU.
