How Innovation In Game Design Breeds Success

When you’re looking for innovation in game design, one of the more successful startups is coming from longtime game veteran Cory Jones, formerly business development and international licensing manager for Blizzard. Clearly he’s using some of the same skills he brought to that position in creating and marketing Hex: Shards of Fate. As the game web site states: “HEX combines the amazing community and roleplaying aspects of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMO) with the compelling collectible and strategic gameplay of a Trading Card Game (TCG) to create an entirely new category of a game, the MMO/TCG.”

The realms of digital trading card games (TCGs) and massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) are both highly competitive, and to attempt a blending of the two genres would seem overly ambitious from a game design standpoint and akin to stepping into a free-fire zone from a marketing standpoint. Still, the potential for such a genre-blending game is huge if you can attract fans of both genres, and that’s what HEX appears to be achieving. HEX: Shards of Fate founder Cory Jones spoke with [a]listdaily about the marketing challenges inherent in creating this ambitious game.

What’s the journey been like since HEX released, and where do you feel you are now?

The great news is that we are at a point now where the game is very accessible, very polished. We just celebrated the second anniversary of our Kickstarter. That’s a big milestone for us — it’s bitter and sweet, as they say. The game is not as far along as I would like in two years, but what we do have is very, very good. I come from Blizzard and the desire to make a quality game trumps the speed component at times, because I just don’t want to put out something that isn’t what I had envisioned. You talk about putting out an alpha, which we did, and I joke it’s like you have a brand new baby and you’re taking it to the playground, and it’s squirming and pooping and that’s all it does, it’s very embarrassing. I’ve finally now got a two-year-old that can go run and play with the other kids, and actually has some skills. We have a full-featured auction house, we’re about to launch our third set of cards, we have all kinds of tournaments, it’s a full-featured TCG that’s incredibly polished and incredibly fun to play. When it comes to all of the experiences we outlined, that stuff is in the game.

You had a very ambitious vision for the game. Do you regret having started with that broad a scope?

If we had just said “we’re going to make the best digital TCG possible we would have been done a year ago, but that’s not what our plan was. Our plan was to make this MMO/TCG hybrid and create something brand new, do something no one’s done before. The reality of inventing is there’s a lot of trial and error, and there’s a lot of unknowns. We paid the price for innovating. The upside, of course, is as the TCG market heats up with Hearthstone, I am so far ahead of what anyone is even thinking of doing that I have created a space for us to be successful and not really feel the heat of competition. What I’m doing is different, it’s very different from what anyone else has done.

You have a solid base of players now, and Hearthstone has greatly increased interest in the category of TCGs, but how do you leverage that to increase your base?

The big focus for us is that we’re lucky in that we’ve built an actual free-to-play model, not an exploitive free-to-play model. For me , free-to-play means “I have designed a game that’s very enjoyable to begin with, but then becomes increasingly less fun to play until I convince you to spend money to go back to the place where you liked it.” That’s what the free-to-play model is. What we’ve done is to create something which on its face that says free to play but is actually very different. When you enter in to our game you a starter deck, you get to play through some starter deck trials, you win some extra cards. From that point forward you’re sort of own your own. You can play in our Frost Ring Arena, which is free, and win cards, win equipment. We’ve got any auction house that works on both soft and hard currency. What we allowed to occur — and I worked with an economist for six months — is our players determine value of elements and and allow them to freely exchange earned and bought currencies.

So what’s happened is the very rare stuff is valuable. We’ve allowed through that free-to-play player to earn things and turn that into currency through the auction house. So playing our game, you earn about 90 cents to $1.20 an hour playing our game, if you turned all the stuff you won into currency. There’s no other game like that — most are about 5 cents an hour. TCGs monetize just fine, I’m not worried about it. I feel like if you play our game you’ll see how awesome the value is and eventually you’ll want to buy some packs. I’m not worried about wringing a dollar out of our consumers.

Do you have a marketing strategy for HEX moving forward?

We’ve been having that conversation. Our focus has been on making the best game possible. I feel like it’s a wildly underserved audience – when it comes to real, full-fledged digital TCGs you don’t have a lot of options. Yet TCGs are a multi-billion dollar a year industry. You have tens of millions of people who play TCGs, so my goal was to make the best possible game to give them something to gravitate to. That’s been playing out pretty well so far. Starting in July we are actually putting together a much larger marketing budget. More traditional marketing to get the message out is something we’re focused on. The great thing about TCG players is they are a community. Once you start to influence parts of that community, it has a tendency to spread to the rest of that community.

Some of the stuff that we can do that’s really about the game, we have our first big eSports event that’s coming up. This patch puts in the back end for tournaments to allow us to do eSports. The prize pool is $100,000 for this televised eSports event. We think this will help get some eyeballs on it and gain the attention of some serious card game players.

How important has streaming been to spreading the word about the game?

For us it’s been great. We have a pretty reasonable number of dedicated streamers, their audiences range from a hundred to four hundred people pretty consistently. We’ve been lucky, we have some very passionate people in our community. It seems like we’re getting bigger and bigger, but the spirit of our community is persisting. We aggregated with our Kickstarter a number of like-minded people, typcially people who were a little older. They wanted to play TCGs in the real world but they have to do it digitally, a lot of them are very created and they could see the vision and believe in the dream. A certain type of person ended up in the Kickstarter, and the great thing was they ended up being an amazing community.

Atari’s Tony Chien And Peter Banks Discuss Marketing ‘Alone in the Dark’

“With the latest incarnation of the company, we’re looking at what our really great brands are and how to explore them,” says Peter Banks, Seniro Product Lead at Atari.

One of those franchises is of course, Alone in the Dark. We caught up with the team at E3 to chat about the marketing efforts around the game as Atari has been leveraging Steam for its global PC gaming userbase and focusing on YouTube and Twitch to build hype.

Twitch And Xbox Team Up For Minecon

People certainly love Minecraft. How could they not It celebrates the ability to create (and destroy) terrain on a wide-open scale, while at the same time enabling players to work together through co-op. The game has already proven to be an immense best seller, and, for a few years running, it’s gotten its own convention where Minecraft-ites get together and discuss everything about the game. Now, the world will be able to see what it’s all about.

Microsoft, in partnership with the streaming channel Twitch, has announced that Minecon, which takes place this weekend in London, will be live streamed across four channels all weekend long. This includes a variety of events from the show, including Minecraft related panels, gameplay sessions, keynote speeches, building and costume contests, and exhibits.

The events will be broken across four different channels, as follows:

First there’s the main Minecon channel, where most of the events will take place. Mojang’s official Twitch channel will also take part, along with specialized channels that will focus on the main stage and the main panel room.

However, there’s a catch. Since the event takes place in London, the show will be getting an early start for those viewing here in the United States. Twitch posted the schedule, which is as follows:

Saturday

2:00am PT Streams Live

2:30am PT – 3:30am PT – Opening Ceremony (Main Stream and Stage Stream)

3:30am PT – 11:00amPT – Day content from Studio, Main Stage and Panel rooms throughout the day (all streams)

11:30am PT – 8:30pm PT – Re-stream of content from the day for US audience (all streams)

Sunday

2:00am PT Streams Live

2:45am PT – 3:00am PT – Welcome! (Main Stream)

3:00am PT – 9:00am PT – Day content from Studio, Main Stage and Panel rooms throughout the day (all streams)

9:00am PT – 10:00am PT – Closing Ceremony

10:30am PT – 05:30pm PT – Re-stream of content from the day for US audience (all streams)

it may be a bit demanding for true Minecraft fans, but Minecon presents a unique opportunity to see what goes on at a themed convention such as this, while also getting inside the heads of the developers that help put the multi-million selling game together to begin with. The re-streaming opportunity will also enable users to see what they missed live – in case they don’t feel like being an early riser.

It also presents another key opportunity for Twitch to appeal to its growing game audience, as it’s done in the past with live tournaments and special gameplay sessions, including ones with sponsors like Coke.

It’s looking like a true party for Minecraft-ers this weekend – and yes, that includes those who love the Creepers.

Android Shows The Impact Of One-Second Video

In case you missed it, a “leap second” event took place this week, where a one-second time adjustment happened worldwide to keep the Earth’s rotation completely in sync with timekeeping. Obviously, nothing bad happened technology wise (just like that Y2K bug years ago), but something significant did emerge from the event – a new program by Google on its Android platform that celebrates life, one second at a time.

Titled Leap Second 2015, the popular mobile manufacturer asked users to submit quick one-second clips to its mobile app, asking them how they would spend that short amount of time – celebrating, exploring or whatever else happened to pop in mind. The results are pretty surprising, as you can see from the short (but sweet) video posted below.

A number of the one-second clips can also be seen on the official Leap Second page, where users can browse and simply watch them in any order they see fit.

There was more to this program that just community getting involved, however. With the one-second format, Android is able to show just what kind of creativity can be put together into smaller clips – something that both publishers and ad networks can use to their advantage when it comes to finding a program that runs at just the right length, according to Adweek. That’s not to say we’ll be seeing one-second advertisements for, say, Coke or Nike, but it’s something that companies may be taking under advisement to get the word out quicker.

The clips not only show people in action doing things (like enjoying a day in the park or hitting a “no” button on their desk), but also showing off beautiful sights around the world, such as a city landscape or a walk along the beach. Again, all these videos can be seen here, separated into categories like “#selfie”, “#together”, “#play”, “#nature” and others. They can also be shared with ease through a number of social networks, through convenient clips at the bottom of each video.

Sometimes, a lot can be done in a single second – and Google just proved it.

 

Facebook Isn’t Done With Monetizing Video Yet

YouTube may have the video monetization game down, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t ready to play.

Per this report from Re/code, Facebook is working out a new program where sponsors like the NBA, Fox Sports and Funny or Die will be able to place ads alongside videos put together by creators. As such, a revenue split will be introduced, where said creators can make money via “suggested content.”

This is the first time that Facebook is diving into the ad-revenue based video market, putting it in direct competition with YouTube. With it, Facebook hopes to garner some of  the millions that Google’s video-based site makes with ads on its site, with a similar revenue split between creator and company – 55 percent to 45 percent.

Facebook, however, believes it could have a better program in place when it comes to finding video content, as there will be fewer search terms – and no requirement to be following a certain page to view this content.

“A lot of (our partners) have said this will be a big motivation to start publishing a lot more video content to Facebook,” said Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships for Facebook, speaking with Re/code. “That’s exactly what we’re hoping for.”

The company has already boasted big daily viewing numbers for its site, with over four billion and counting on a daily basis. “Partners say they’d publish a lot more if they could get benefit of distribution but also make money,” Rose added, speaking with Forbes.

Such a deal would be beneficial all around – Facebook would attract more creators, thus getting more attention from advertisers, thus creating a huge revenue flow that benefits all parties.

Facebook added this regarding the testing of the program, per MarketingLand: “We’re running a new suggested videos test, which helps people discover more videos similar to the ones they enjoy. Within suggested videos, we will be running a monetization test where we will show feed-style video ads and share revenue with a group of media companies and video creators.”

It’s too soon to tell just how successful the video program will be – it won’t launch nationwide until this fall – but advertisers and creators are sure to keep a close eye on the results. YouTube as well, for that matter.

Report: Nintendo Could Be Releasing Its NX System Next Summer

Hints about Nintendo’s next piece of gaming hardware have been dropping since earlier this year, indicating everything from the company transitioning to an Android-based platform to a mobile tie-in with its partnered titles with DeNA. But a new report indicates that the system could be making its way to market as soon as next year.

Taiwanese site DigiTimes has reported that the console, code named NX, could be making its way to release as soon as July 2016. The site reports that Foxconn has already obtained the manufacturing rights for the machine (with Pegatron pitching for some of the work), and pilot production could begin as soon as October.

According to the report, orders could be finalized as soon as February or March, meaning that full production could push forward during May or June, so that everything is prepped for the July 2016 release date.

The report also states that Nintendo has high hopes for the console, hoping to ship 20 million units in the first year alone. That’s a pretty high number to reach, given that previously released consoles like the PlayStation 4 took 17 months to sell 22.3 million units, and that’s the best-selling console launch of this last generation by far. Achieving that level of success would mean Nintendo has to have great hardware at a great price, with great software and terrific marketing — and plenty of units produced in a timely fashion, as well. That’s a tough order, but Nintendo is one of the few companies capable of succeeding at all of those things.

Considering that Nintendo hasn’t confirmed any of these details, they’re best taken as rumors at this point. Also, there are a few things worth pointing out regarding the “quick” production of the NX.

First, Nintendo is still providing a healthy push behind the Wii U, with games like StarFox Zero and Yoshi’s Woolly World coming in time for the holidays. Secondly, Nintendo has stated it will first announce plans for the NX well ahead of announcing any sort of release date – and the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo, which takes place in June, seems to be the right time for such an announcement. “We’ll talk more about our next system, code named Nintendo NX, more in 2016,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America.

There’s also the question of rushing a console to market, as it doesn’t always produce the most effective results. Back in 1995, Sega rushed its Sega Saturn game console to market, shipping it to retailers the very same day that it was announced. Unfortunately, it backfired, not only with poor communication with retailers, but also with Sony announcing a lower price on its competing game console, the Sony PlayStation. Since that time, no game company has “rushed” a system release to market, instead taking its time and putting months of planning into the launch.

Nintendo’s CEO seems to be fully aware of what Nintendo needs to do in order to make the NX a success. “The platform business can sometimes be referred to as a ‘momentum business’,” Iwata said to an investor. “Thus, it is ideal to have a jump start and drive momentum. Looking back at some of Nintendo’s past platforms, this ideal launch has been achieved 100 per cent by perhaps only Wii. Even the Nintendo DS launch had areas in which we could have done better. I cannot disagree with your indication that Wii U is experiencing the most unfavorable situation.” Clearly Nintendo will need to have some solid games available at launch — could the next Zelda game see a launch on both the Wii U and the NX Whatever the case for that title, Nintendo will no doubt strive to have one or more of its key brands appearing on the NX platform from the start.

Whatever Nintendo has planned, it should represent an improvement in Nintendo’s performance in the game market, given the Wii U’s struggles. And it appears that a build for the system is already in place, as it was demoed to a number of the company’s partners last month, according to MCV UK. That would lend credence to the idea of a 2016 launch of the NX, as the hardware would need to be quite far along in order to launch in quantity next year.

We’ll see what Nintendo has planned soon enough.

Social Video App Beet Isn’t A Snapchat Rival; Its Goal Is To Save Moments

by Jessica Klein

At first glance, social video app Beet, created by Sean Thielen and Jonathan Miller while they were still attending university, looks like Snapchat. It lets users take quick videos that they can share with their friends in the form of “stories,” a montage of all the footage taken throughout the day. However, Beet comes onto the social video app scene with a much different goal–that is, to save these moments in a photo album-like collection (many of its users are new parents compiling videos of their children). Thielen and Miller describe how Beet users aren’t exactly after amassing a huge following, but about capturing meaningful footage for themselves. They took the time to tell us a bit about their vision and how they set out to fill an empty social video niche, one that isn’t focused on gaining fans.

What is the main idea behind Beet—what’s the point of the app How are people meant to use it

Sean Thielen: The idea behind Beet is to offer a more genuine and authentic view of someone’s life. We noticed that there is a lot of disconnect between who people are in real life and the personalities they present on social media. It’s hard to portray a real picture of yourself on social media, just because the nature of those platforms encourages people to pick and choose only those moments that will get the most likes, and we often miss out on sharing the things that matter the most.So we made Beet to minimize the distance between our real selves and our social personalities. By compiling all of these candid clips into an ongoing video montage, Beet shifts the focus away from just individual moments and instead shows your journey.

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

Capturing The Fantastical Tone And Humor In The New ‘King’s Quest’

The next chapter of King’s Quest, called A Knight To Remember, is coming July 28 for PC, PS4, and PS3, with Xbox One and Xbox 360 being released the following day, July 29. We met up with producer and VP at The Odd Gentlemen, Lindsey Rostal, to talk about the mechanics, excitement and promotion of the game while at E3.

“A lot of people didn’t grow up playing King’s Quest, or a lot of people did– we want to give people an entry point in how they can do that,” said Rostal.

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Zynga’s ‘CSR Racing 2’ Races Past Console Graphics

While PC and console games are forever pushing the envelope of graphics, so have mobile games — and they started from a place well behind other platforms. Still, the relentless pressures of advancing mobile technology have meant rapid progress for mobile game graphics, and one of the companies on that cutting edge is NaturalMotion (now owned by Zynga), known for top games like Clumsy Ninja, My Horse, and CSR Racing. Now NaturalMotion is speeding past console-quality graphics with CSR Racing 2, which boasts graphics that surpass what you can see on even the latest consoles.

This really marks a milestone for mobile games, which have become the largest single sector of the game industry judging by both revenues and audience size. Now the graphics quality difference is being erased in many ways, and this has huge implications for the future of gaming. “CSR2 lets players experience the thrill of attaining not just one, but a whole garage of the most desirable cars on the planet, and it feels as close as possible to the real thing. That’s because each car, down the stitching on the seats, is built without compromise to its real-world beauty, integrity and authenticity,” said CEO Torsten Reil on his blog. The game not only provides you with the ability to collect cars, but to drag-race them with similar graphic fidelity, and adds multiplayer and social features to the game as well.

NaturalMotion CEO Torsten Reil spoke with [a]listdaily about this accomplishment and what it means for mobile games. The game is entering soft launch soon for both iOS and Android.

With CSR Racing 2, do you feel you can be competitive with or even surpass console games in some respects with mobile games?

I think so. We’re now at the level where we are at the same quality as console, but actually in some ways we’re going beyond that. We are running at higher resolution than even a full HD next-generation console — 2.1 megapixels on a next-generation console at 1080p versus 3.1 [megapixels] on an iPad Air 2, and that’s with all of the graphic techniques going on. So we don’t have to compromise. We actually have multiple cars on at the same time, no compromise in frame rate, level of detail, nothing. That’s a testament both to the team that’s working on this and also just to the sheer processing power that’s now available.

The techniques we know from console we can now apply on mobile. I think that’s pretty exciting. We don’t have to say “Looks great for a mobile game” we’re now saying “this looks great, even for a console game.” I think we’re going to see that trend continue. Partly because the frequency of generation updates on mobile is way, way higher than it is on console — every twelve months, versus every five years on console.

Aside from the graphics of CSR Racing, have you advanced the other aspects of the CSR2 design as well, particularly for muliplayer and social features?

Today we’re not talking about that yet. But there are all kinds of things we wanted to do with the original game that we can now do with this game. I think it’s fair to say that the social side is very important to us, not least because we’re part of Zynga and we don’t want to compromise on social, and it’s very important to us that people can play cooperatively as well as competitively. We’ll have more to announce about that further down the line.

The market has changed even in the relatively short time since CSR Racing came out. Has anything changed in your approach to monetization in the game?

Some things have stayed the same, other things have changed. The way we approach monetization, in terms of making sure that people don’t have to spend money, you should be able to enjoy the game for free without feeling the pinch too strong. That’s really important for us. We’ve said that about CSR Racing, Clumsy Ninja, and other games. That’s our number one rule. At the same time, CSR Racing was a game that had monetization at a basic level with very high volume, but we didn’t necessarily give people the opportunity to really invest in the game at a very deep, meaningful level — which other games, obviously in the action-strategy genre, are doing. That’s something that is going to change in CSR2. It will allow us to give players who really want to have a deep investment experience in CSR2 that experience.

There are players, we call them VIPs, who want to invest in the game. They like the experience, they want to find a way to invest, buy what they want and build what they want. Restricting that is not good, because you’re not giving players what they want, and you’re also restricting the monetization potential.

Are you trying to attract racing game fans, or people who like to collect cars? How big an audience can you reach?

That’s an interesting one. This is a racing game, but this is also a game for car lovers. The people who love cars, that number is even higher than people who like racing as a sport. That was the trick of the first CSR Racing as well. If you have a mobile phone, chances are that if you like cars you’ll find that CSR or CSR2 will serve that.

They are a lot of people who love cars that are not racers, it’s not for them about how to hit this apex perfectly. That’s a subset of that group. It’s exciting, but it’s not really the biggest part of the market. With a game that’s about cars, you have to make sure the cars are beautiful. We’ve been able to make this big visual leap, and I believe that’s going to help us in the believability of the cars. It’s also true that a good-looking game helps with downloads. We knew that from CSR Racing just the visuals helped massively. With Dawn of Titans, we launched the trailer for that game not too long ago and it now has over one million views on YouTube, which is organic — and it’s all gameplay footage. Visuals attract people, and I think that’s great. Visuals need to work for the game, but just visuals for visuals sake are of no use.

Most mobile games are treated as ongoing development projects rather than the model of regular sequels we see in console games. CSR Racing 2 is a sequel, which is something rare in the mobile game business. Why did you create a sequel to CSR Racing, and do you think sequels will be seen more often in mobile games?

That’s a very good question. This is the reason — the game is really quite different from the first one. It would have been difficult to sell to the player for the same app that this is the same thing, since it really is quite a big jump forward. There’s a second, pragmatic side to it, and that is there are a lot of players still playing CSR1, and they have invested a lot in that experience. We need to be able to let them still play that. We are of course thinking a lot of players will move to CSR2, but we also now that a lot of people have big garages in CSR1 and we want to make sure they can keep it.

Will there be more sequels in the industry Possibly. It depends. Wherever it’s possible to make a big leap in the experience, that has a new game design and maybe a completely new engine and visuals, a sequel makes sense.

Mark Zuckerberg: Here’s Why Facebook Invests In VR

There’s no question that Facebook is a powerful tool in the world of social media, but the company has also been expanding into other areas, with a growing interest in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. One look at its $2 billion deal with Oculus VR indicates that it’s quite serious about this research, too. But one question has always lingered: “Why ”

During a recent Q & A with users of the social network, Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was happy to answer, as reported by VentureBeat. When asked about the interest in these fields by user Jenni Moore from Ireland, he responded with the following:

“We’re working on AI because we think more intelligent services will be much more useful for you to use. For example, if we had computers that could understand the meaning of the posts in News Feed and show you more things you’re interested in, that would be pretty amazing. Similarly, if we could build computers that could understand what’s in an image and could tell a blind person who otherwise couldn’t see that image, that would be pretty amazing as well. This is all within our reach and I hope we can deliver it in the next 10 years.”

The company has been hiring a number of researchers to look into work on artificial intelligence, with Yann LeCun heading up its own Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research unit. With this team, a number of technologies are being worked on to analyze videos, answer questions, identify objects and people in images, and generate image samples. Even with competition from Google and Microsoft, Facebook is heavily interested in the subject.

But then there’s virtual reality, tying back in with Facebook’s purchase of Oculus tech, to which Zuckerberg was quick to respond:

“First, we’re working on spreading internet access around the world through Internet.org. This is the most basic tool people need to get the benefits of the internet — jobs, education, communication, etc. Today, almost 2/3 of the world has no internet access. In the next 10 years, Internet.org has the potential to help connect hundreds of millions or billions of people who do not have access to the internet today.

“As a side point, research has found that for every 10 people who gain access to the internet, about 1 person is raised out of poverty. So if we can connect the 4 billion people in the world who are unconnected, we can potentially raise 400 million people out of poverty. That’s perhaps one of the greatest things we can do in the world.

“Third, we’re working on VR because I think it’s the next major computing and communication platform after phones. In the future we’ll probably still carry phones in our pockets, but I think we’ll also have glasses on our faces that can help us out throughout the day and give us the ability to share our experiences with those we love in completely immersive and new ways that aren’t possible today.”

More of Zuckerberg’s responses to user questions can be found here. There’s no word on when the artificial intelligence initiative will take place, but the Oculus Rift is currently set for an early 2016 release to retail. No price has been given just yet.