Newzoo/Overwolf: Top 20 PC Games For January 2015

BY

The Top 3 of the 20 core PC Game Rankings from December 2014 continue to dominate again in January 2015, with Riot’s League of Legends at Rank 1, followed by Wargaming’s World of Tanks and Mojang’s Minecraft at Rank 3. The only change in the Top 5 was the decline of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft to Rank 5, with Valve’s Counter Strike: Global Offensive taking WoW’s place at Rank 4. Perhaps the most noticeable decline for January was the 5 point fall of HiRez Studio’s Smite to Rank 12, driven mainly by a shift away from the title after the end of its recent World Championships. It remains to be seen if the title regains lost ground in the coming months, driven by the new format for their Pro League games that kicks off mid-February.

Freejam’s Robocraft appears to have lost much of the traction provided by its recent IndieDB “Indie Game of the Year” award, dropping 6 places to Rank 20. Arma 3, published by Bohemia Interactive, rose 3 places to Rank 7, boosted by a highly active and popular modding community and news of new expansion content. Blizzard’s Diablo III, which has been in a rankings decline for some time, rose 3 places to retake Rank 16, driven in part by the opening of their Season 2 in February 2015. The new entry on the Top 20 core PC Game Rankings for January 2015 is Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (which vanished from the Rankings in October 2014), which took Rank 18, bolstered by the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto V on PC in March 2015 and the impressive in-game bonuses offered by the publisher to consumers who pre-order the title. It will be interesting to see where zombie MMO H1Z1 places in the coming months as anticipation for the title builds. In January it entered the Twitch rankings at an impressive fifth place.

You can find the rankings here.

Four Key Trends over the past 6 months
An overview of the Top 20 core PC Game Rankings data generated over the last six months reveals four key trends that are shaping the core PC/MMO market segment:

1) eSports and Consumer Participation
eSports, like no other PC game innovation before it, has fundamentally altered {link no longer active} the PC gaming industry. The genre sits at a nexus of both industry and consumer trends, driven by consumers’ powerful need to experiment with, modify, and create their own content and share it with what has become a global audience. One need only look at Riot’s League of Legends, the reigning champion of our PC Rankings since we started publishing them, to see the lasting hold the genre as a whole has had on consumers. HiRez Studio’s Smite, driven by their 2015 World Championships and soon to be released XBox One release, pushed aside many titles as it ascended on a popularity wave driven by video sharing, social media and strong community engagement. Valve’s DotA 2 has never left the Top 10 rankings, remaining relatively stable despite many challengers by new games, holding fast by the sheer will of a passionate and engaged Steam community. eSports will only continue to grow, as the 89 million estimated eSports enthusiasts of 2014 is set to hit 145 million by 2017.

2) Free-to-Play
The vast majority of the titles dominating our rankings are free-to-play, ranging from MMO’s like World of Tanks and Star Wars: The Old Republic to MOBA’s like League of Legends, DotA 2 and Smite. In fact six of the Top 10 titles in our January 2015 rankings are free-to-play, giving a clear indication of the impact this financial model has had on the games industry, especially in destroying entry barriers to multiplayer gaming services. We envision that the term free-to-play will disappear in the near future as every game can be “tried” for free and hybrid models become the norm.

3) The Lasting Attraction of MMO’s
The MMO/MOBA genre continues to drive consumer attention (and high session times), with 5 of the Top 10 titles falling into that category. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has for the last six months remained stable in the Top 5, and NCSoft’s Guild Wars 2 has stayed strong in the Top 10. The two titles are distinguished from the dominating World of Tanks (Wargaming) by being subscription and pay-to-play based respectively, with World of Tanks employing the free-to-play business model, an indication perhaps as to why World of Tanks has continually been Top 3 in the Rankings since June 2014. It’s unsurprising then that MMO/MOBA games generate 70 percent of global PC revenues, totalling $17 billion in 2014, 85 percentof that being free-to-play.

4) Indies and Mods
As we have pointed out over the last 6 months many of the movers and shakers in our monthly PC Rankings have either been Mods or Indie published titles. Mojang’s Minecraft, which has continually been in the Top 3 rankings since June 2014, began life as a humble indie title. Driven by the forces of consumer participation and sharing (noted above), Mojang’s success culminated into its acquisition by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Many of the titles on our rankings (DotA 2, DayZ, CounterStrike, Team Fortress 2, Garry’s Mod) began life as Mods for games that soon eclipsed the title they were originally designed for. In fact DotA 2, CounterStrike: Global Offensive, DayZ and Garry’s Mod are all stand-alone titles, their success driven almost entirely by the same forces pushing the eSports genre to the heights it has now achieved. The power of community driven interest, lower barriers to entry through digital platform publishing and the reach of social sharing has empowered Indie publishers to compete with great success, as indicated by their continual presence in the monthly rankings. The sheer domination of Minecraft videos on YouTube is further testament to this.

Find more information on the eSports market and audience here.

About Overwolf
Overwolf is a customizable in-game overlay platform that has been installed in over 8 million PCs. This community of hardcore PC gamers are consistently making their own apps within the Overwolf platform and sharing them. Why Because it’s super simple and it enhances the gameplay experience of anyone’s favorite title in a personal way. From in-game chat systems to customized controls, streaming or video capture, Overwolf allows users to implement their own visions into these games and do so in a timely manner.

About Newzoo
Newzoo is the leading global market research firm focused purely on the games market. The company provides its clients with a mix of primary consumer research, transactional data and financial analysis across all continents, screens and business models. It is also known for actively sharing a variety of insights by means of free trend reports, infographics, blogposts and monthly rankings. Newzoo’s clients include Tencent, SEGA, Logitech, Wizards of the Coast, Nvidia, Microsoft, EA, Coca-Cola and Visa/PlaySpan.

Raptr: Top 20 Most Played PC Games January 2015

BY

If January’s Most Played PC Games list looks familiar, it’s because no games entered or dropped out of the top 20!

Highlights
League of Legends started off the New Year with a strong hold on first place with a share time of 19.97 percentamong the PC games played in January by Raptr members, nearly double the amount of World of Warcraft.

Though World of Warcraft ended 2014 strong with impressive gains after its Draenor expansion, it lost 5.28 percent of play time in January compared to December.

Both DotA 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gained significant play time (DotA up 23.18 percent, CSGO 37.23 percent) thanks in part to various updates to items and maps throughout the month.

Smite rounded out the top 5; play time was up only 1.00 percent, despite the release of a new god.

Hearthstone got a 23.73 percent play time boost, helping it rise a spot in January.

Diablo III play time increased an impressive 77.27 percent, and the game moved up five places in January’s Most Played. Patch 2.1.2 released in January and included major updates to classes and items, the addition of Season Legendary Items, and more.

Dragon Age: Inquisition fell three places as it lost 17.74 percent of play time.

Though World of Tanks, Battlefield 4, and ArcheAge gained play time in January, all three lost a rank in Most Played at the hands of Diablo III.

Final Fantasy XIV Online climbed two places, while Guild Wars 2 rose three spots. Final Fantasy XIV had an end-of-the-month free login weekend, patch, and new items and goods releases. Guild Wars 2 featured a double XP event that coincided with PAX South, as well as free access to Point of No Return, Guild Wars 2′s latest episode.

Warframe was the biggest loser in January, falling six places. It lost 17.89 percent of play time despite the addition of new weapons, skins, and a new mini-game.

Note: The Share number by each game represents that title’s gameplay time as a percentage of the total time spent on all the PC games played by Raptr members, and is useful for comparing the relative amount of play time between particular games.

PREVIOUS SIX MONTHS’ MOST PLAYED LISTS

December 2014

November 2014

October 2014

September 2014

August 2014

July 2014

The Art Of Marketing Without Marketing

BY

The rapid evolution of the game industry over the past twenty years has completely changed the platforms, the business models, and even the geographic origins of the revenue in the business. We’ve gone from selling console games in boxes at retail stores, mostly in North America, Japan, and Western Europe, to online games, mobile games, PC games and console games where most of the revenue is derived digitally with China being a major part of the market. The technology has undergone multiple revolutions, platforms are completely different in virtually every respect, and the audience demographic has gone from “teenage boys of all ages” to “anyone who can see the screen and activate the controls.” Is it any wonder, then, that game marketing has undergone equally massive changes?

Game marketing has moved from being mostly about placing ads in the right magazines and creating packaging to a dazzling array of social media, user acquisition, video, influencers, events, and a race to create ever more interesting and unusual ways to make an audience aware of your game and get them to spend money on it.

What is marketing in the classic sense The term does date back to 1561, after all, and its precise meaning has changed many times in the intervening centuries. Google, the source of all wisdom these days, tells us marketing is “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.” Merriam-Webster goes with “the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service” and “an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer.”

For the game industry, marketing in the 1980’s was a department well-separated from product development. Games would get completed, then thrown over the wall into the marketing department for the packaging, advertising and PR functions; the game would ship and basically be ignored by all thereafter, while the process repeated with the next title. Mostly the two departments didn’t talk to each other much. Product development thought the people in marketing didn’t know much about games, and marketing thought people in product development knew little about the realities of the marketplace. Both were generally correct.

Now, marketing is becoming an integral part of game development, as games move from fire-and-forget things to ongoing services that publishers would like to keep going for years. Marketers have to think about millions of customers and having an individual relationship with them, rather than doing things for a handful of retail buyers and never seeing or talking to an actual game-player. Where’s marketing You’re soaking in it, or you should be. Now it has become the art of marketing without marketing, to play off of the classic Bruce Lee riff from Enter The Dragon.

 

The fascinating thing about this evolution, to this veteran of both game development and marketing, is how some game companies don’t even think of what they are doing as marketing any more. Riot Games, for instance, generally refuses to admit that they do any marketing when questioned about it. It’s true in that what they do doesn’t fall into the traditional category. There are no ad campaigns for League of Legends. There are no brochures, no banner ads, no product placement or billboards. So are they doing any marketing at all

Of course they are, but it’s not perceived that way within the company. The company is focused on making the game better, which results in good word of mouth — that is, in effect, a marketing act while it’s also a product development activity. When the company creates new champions or skins, players get excited and talk about them. Riot posts about that on their blog, and releases some cool videos to show the world what’s new. Those are marketing activities.

The biggest expenditure for Riot Games in terms of marketing is the entire effort Riot puts into eSports. Try to tell that to Dustin Beck, VP of eSports at Riot, and he’ll tell you that you’re crazy. Riot spends a ton of money on eSports (they won’t say how much, but it’s probably north of $100 million annually) and it’s not something the company makes a profit on directly. The benefit of eSports, of course, is that tens of millions of people are engaged with it, it gets people excited about the game and encourages them to play more and to imagine that they, too, might someday become a pro player. That sounds like a terrific marketing activity, but it’s certainly unlike traditional marketing functions.

The massive community effort put forth by Chris Roberts’ team over at Cloud Imperium Games for Star Citizen is another good example of the art of marketing without marketing. The team has put tremendous effort into direct interaction with the community of backers, who have spent more than $70 million so far on this game that hasn’t even been released yet. What Cloud Imperium is doing with Star Citizen isn’t marketing in any traditional sense. They are making cool things that people want to buy, and making cool videos, and engaging the audience. Is there any doubt that Star Citizen will have a long life and generate a lot of money, and a lot of fun for its players

If you need another example, Minecraft was never marketed in the traditional sense, either. It grew explosively from the thousands of videos that were created and viewed, and the articles that were being written about it. Part of that was the nature of the game design impelled you to want to show other people what you’d done — and some of the things you can do are astonishing, like building a fully functional computer inside the game. It was also a deliberate act of marketing, though in an inverse way — Mojang never tried to shut down or control the videos that people were posting about its game. Yes, there’s probably plenty of objectionable things appearing in Minecraft videos if you look dark corners of the Internet, but Mojang didn’t care. And neither did the audience.

For an example of how not to do this properly, one need look no further than Nintendo, which is striving to gain control over YouTube videos about Nintendo products, and in the process essentially shutting down a valuable marketing avenue that the company could surely benefit from in difficult times.

The art of marketing without marketing doesn’t mean abandoning traditional marketing activities — not if they’re working, anyway. It’s a recognition that building a community, fostering gamer’s efforts to share content with their friends, enabling competition and cooperation among gamers, and helping your players become product evangelists are all part of the marketing effort — as is creating the best game possible, with features and services that are centered around creating a terrific customer experience above all else.

Marketers, you have to think not about marketing, but about your ultimate goals. Create a game that’s truly satisfying, and an environment around that game that nurtures and supports the best aspects of the game and the players. Or, as Bruce Lee would advise, “Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

 

Along Came A Spider: A Milestone In Hollywood Dealmaking

BY

Amy Pascal has ascended to the Throne of Nerdvana: as Co-Chair of Sony Pictures, she green-lighted The Interview, triggering a hacker skirmish between North Korea and the United States that reached the White House and sparked open talk about the future of cyber warfare. For her encore, she cut a deal that teamed her up with Kevin Feige of Marvel Studios to bring her beloved Spider-Man to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

What does Sony get

Years in the making, the deal is genius, and rare model of win-win in Hollywood. On the Sony side, Disney will literally get out of Spidey’s way, and has shuffled its release schedule to accommodate the next Sony Spider-Man feature. (Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther and Captain Marvel have each been bumped by roughly six months so the next Spidey can hit theaters on July 28, 2017.) That’s less competition for future Spider-Man releases, which can mean significantly bigger box office.

Contrary to predictions of her demise as a result of the hacker attack, Pascal fell “up.” Sony furnished her with a massive production deal, so that she can do what she’s always done best, cultivate talent and make big pictures. Note the subtle but important titling on the next Spider-Man: Matt Tolmach and Avi Arad, who were producers on the last two Marc Webb/Andrew Garfield Spidey movies (the second of which performed below Sony’s expectations at the global box office, though it earned nearly $709 million), have been bumped up to executive producers, while Pascal takes on the producer credit.

In Hollywood-speak, exec producers lean back, while the producer is the one who develops the creative, assembles the talent, pulls the production together and toils on it every day until it gets done. That puts Pascal in the driver’s seat with Feige riding shotgun on future Sony pics, and vice versa for future Marvel Studios appearances by Spidey.

Why did Feige (and the remaining Sony brass) concede to this Because Pascal doesn’t just love Spider-Man, she knows the character and his universe, and has guided the franchise since the original Raimi/Maguire trilogy, generating billions for Sony. A comic book geek dating back to her teen years, she understands how the franchise’s value can increase exponentially if she plays well with others. Pascal has studied the Marvel films closely and will likely welcome a few shakes of Feige’s sparkle dust on Peter Parker’s shoulders.

Finally, Spider-Man no longer has to operate in a vacuum, dependent on evil Oscorp to churn out his rogues gallery. Sony gets access to Marvel superheroes and super-villains for future Spider-Man features. Spider-Man’s New York will become Marvel New York. He can swing past Avengers Tower, Iron Man can do a flyby, or Spidey can even spend a whole movie teamed up with the Hulk, battling Venom and the Abomination. (Yeah, I’m a geek, too.) Supercharged with Marvel all-stars, rather than relying on villains with whom the audience is unfamiliar, each Spider-Man movie will be a major event.

What does Marvel get

Marvel gets what it’s been missing: its beating heart. For its first several movies, Agent Coulson sort of filled the role of the ordinary guy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With no super powers, he was responsible for wrangling the heroes, dealing with them with a dry wit and the low-key hero worship of a closet fanboy.

Coulson’s “death” in Avengers pulled the team together for the first time. But his departure from the films for the SHIELD TV series has given him a different role to play, and left a hole in the chest of the franchise—one that Spider-Man is now destined to fill.

The upcoming Captain America: Civil War would have been fine as a vehicle pitting Iron Man against Captain America in a battle over the place of superheroes in the eyes of the feds. But what made the saga a great story in the comics was that Spider-Man represented the everyman superhero stuck between two of his idols. Marvel can have that now, which will almost certainly make for a better movie.

To this end, there is the question of the future of Andrew Garfield, whom Pascal rightly championed. Sadly, but perhaps logically, Garfield will be recast so that Marvel and Sony can have a younger, scrappier and more wide-eyed Spidey, one that will hang onto this side of 30 for at least several more pictures.

While Sony will continue to make Spider-Man movies, Marvel Studios can have Spidey as anything from a cameo to a featured player in its own movies and live-action TV shows (they already have Spider-Man for animation). More than likely, that also includes Spidey’s supporting cast of over 100 heroes (Black Cat), villains (Carnage), and civilians (J. Jonah Jameson), plus OsCorp, Horizon Labs, and The Daily Bugle.

“Spidey has evergreen kid cred like no other comic book character.”

Finally, Marvel will at last have access to its premiere asset, arguably the most popular and recognized superhero in global popular culture. He will show up on the posters, in the previews, and find his way into the playsets. Spidey has evergreen kid cred like no other comic book character. Kids like Thor and Captain America, but they love Spider-Man! That makes him the jewel missing from Marvel’s crown.

What do both studios get

Money! And you can wager it will be more than just increased box office. Feige has been running the Marvel Cinematic Universe from a transmedia mentality. This means that he has been devising a consistent shared universe, each piece of which is telling a part of a cosmically greater story. Feature films, DVD shorts, network television series, streaming series on Netflix—what’s left to conquer Mobile apps and console video games!

Until now, if a game licensee wanted to put Spider-Man into an app or vidgame, the license had to be based on the comic books. You couldn’t put the movie Spider-Man into an interactive adventure that featured the movie versions of Marvel’s heroes. That has likely changed, and this can fuel a push by Marvel (with Sony tagging along) into much stronger, more story-driven MCU game licenses.

It’s no secret that Marvel games based on the comics have done okay, and the ones based on the movies have…left something to be desired. This has to be a sore point that Feige and Disney would like fixed. After all, blockbuster games can generate hundreds of millions in revenues. Spider-Man games (particularly the ones from Activision) have actually fared better on average, and if cleverly negotiated, Spidey’s arrival can turbo-charge a new wave of games across a variety of platforms that play better, tell better stories, and become big event expansions of the MCU as opposed to fleas on its back.

Of course, the same might hold for other types of licensing, possibly granting Sony access to licensing revenues that it didn’t have before. For example, Sony did not derive revenue from Spider-Man toys based on Marvel’s cartoon series, or the comic books themselves, just from products that fell under their motion picture branding. With Spidey now an active participant in the MCU, Sony will likely be given a taste under Disney’s significantly broader licensing scope. At the very least, Sony will see a significant bump in licensing revenue from its own Spider-Man movies, as more high profile Marvel characters find their way into the hometown action.

“The world has never really understood why Spider-Man is not in the Marvel movies and vice versa. Now, they’re going to get what they want, and they don’t have to be the wiser about who is controlling or communicating what.”

Both studios are likely to leverage a major marketing boost. Again, this requires quite a bit of cooperative play, but if Sony and Disney pull this off, assets, characters, even entire campaigns can move fluidly back and forth between them. The world has never really understood why Spider-Man is not in the Marvel movies and vice versa. Now, they’re going to get what they want, and they don’t have to be the wiser about who is controlling or communicating what. The totality of the experience will be like pouring through your weekly pile of Marvel Comics, which is as it ought to be!

This makes the arduous negotiation of sharing custody of Spider-Man—despite studios rivalries, big egos, insider naysayers, and a morass of legal bureaucracy on both sides—a win-win for both Marvel and Sony, and producers Feige and Pascal. That’s a rarity in Hollywood that bodes well for the future efficacy of rich, multi-platform story worlds.

Hey Wolverine, want to come out and play?

_______________

Full disclosure: Jeff Gomez and his company Starlight Runner Entertainment have worked as transmedia producers for Sony Pictures Entertainment in the past. This article is based on publically available information and is not informed by that work.

Jeff Gomez is CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, a New York based production company that consults with Hollywood studios on some of their most popular entertainment franchises. Follow him @Jeff_Gomez.

Five Hot Trends In Indie Gaming That AAA Game Studios Need To Learn

BY

Independent game development has gone from a rare, curious thing in the 1990’s to a burgeoning part of the game business in the 2010’s. The shining example of success is Minecraft, which began as a quirky game worked on by one creator, and ended up a few years later as the target of a $2.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft.

Indie developers have come into their own on platforms like Kongregate on PCs, the massive Steam digital distributor, and of course on mobile platforms. Even consoles, traditionally the bastion of high-cost game development, have welcomed indie developers with open arms. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are all embracing indie development on their consoles, making it far easier and less expensive than it ever was before to create games on consoles.

Indie games are still a breed apart from the traditional AAA development, though, even while some indie games are generating revenue numbers any AAA publisher would be proud of. There’s clearly some things AAA publishers can learn from indie developers, and here are five important trends among indies that AAA publishers and developers should seek to learn from.

Risk-taking
This is something that comes naturally to indie game developers, for whom the very act of becoming an indie developer is a risk. Many give up good jobs to seek their fortunes as an independent game, or leave positions at gaming companies to bring their own vision of a game into being. Everything an indie developer does is typically a risk, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that indie developers take plenty of risks in game design as well.

Certainly there’s plenty of me-too games being developed by indie developers, but those are the indie developers who don’t see a huge success. The indie game developers that have attained a measure of success have typically done so through taking chances with game design. Unusual play styles or game mechanics, off-beat subject matter, mixing genres of games — all of these tactics and more have been tried as huge numbers of indie developers strive to create something that fascinates enough people to generate an living wage.

The lesson for big game publishers and studios is this: The biggest risk of all is to take no risks. Eventually, that strategy leads to boredom on the part of the audience, who will wander off to find more interesting and innovative games. The most successful games are the ones that really pioneer a new playing style or genre, Could Minecraft have been the product of a big studio That hardly seems likely. Certainly it’s safer to create new versions of bestselling franchises than to create something new, yet eventually creating new versions of old games begins to lose steam (witness the gradual sales decline of Call of Duty from year to year).

Granted, spending tens or even hundreds of millions on a brand new game is a huge risk. But indies can try out interesting new concepts for a fraction of the cost. Large game studios and publishers are filled with creative people who must have plenty of ideas — why not let them build a few in-house, inexpensively, and try them out on digital platforms That’s the logic that fueled Ubisoft’s Child of Light, and it seems to have worked out well. Try out a new concept inexpensively, and if it proves popular then pour more money into it.

Graphics experimentation
While AAA games, by and large, try for the most realistic graphics possible, indie developers usually stay far away from that for one simple reason: Cost. It can cost tens of millions of dollars to create beautifully rendered 3D worlds, and more millions to make sure they animate at high speed. That’s simply not possible on the usual indie game budget, so they are forced to get more creative. The result is that indie games have an enormous variation in graphic style.

While it may get wearisome to see yet another indie showing its coolness by using retro 8-bit graphics, it’s also true that producing those graphics is a great savings. Those savings can be put into other areas of the game, like design, programming, marketing and more. The great advantage, though, comes in giving an indie game a distinctive look, like Transistor or Super Meat Boy or Botanicula or a thousand others. Once again, Minecraft stands out as being quite crude in its graphic presentation, te the game is so powerful it overcomes any thoughts of the crude graphics. Now Minecraft graphics are part of the game’s signature look, and have become a great marketing tool. If Minecraft teaches us anything, it’s that graphics are not the only thing that sells a game — and not even the most important thing.

Some AAA studios have given their games a distinctive, non-photorealistic look. Think Sunset Overdrive or Borderlands or (going back a ways) Okami, games that aren’t striving for scenes that look real. These games are creating a fantastic graphic style with a distinctive look, and it helps the games appeal to a wide audience. And, not coincidentally, aids in marketing as well.

Exploring new gameplay
Try imagining a game like the Binding of Isaac or Johann Sebastian Joust (part of Sportsfriends) coming along from a large developer or publisher… it’s hard to think of good examples. Portal, perhaps, which explored interesting puzzles. Certainly the Wii expanded gameplay, as did Guitar Hero and Rock Band. But if you leave aside hardware that promotes new gameplay, it’s pretty clear that if you’re looking for something different indie games are where you find it.

Again, it’s not to be expected that major publishers or studios will risk huge amounts of money on brand new gameplay ideas, not without some indication that it’s a sellable gameplay. Certainly watching to see what indie games are succeeding with unusual gameplay is something everyone already does. We’re seeing some of Minecraft’s concepts being built into major releases from big publishers, though as yet nothing has resonated in anywhere near the same degree.

It does seem like big publishers or studios could make their own low-cost gameplay experiments, and then be poised to take swift advantage if the idea proves to be popular. The tough part is for a large company to commit to this sort of budget, and not expect to make a lot of money. It’s not intended to be a profit center; it should be thought of as R&D that can partially pay for itself.

Doing more with less
This is something indie developers are always forced to do. It sounds painful and difficult, and it is — yet severe resource restrictions lead to amazingly creative solutions. If you can’t afford to build a huge 3D world, maybe the game will work in 2D. Not enough time and money to animate everything Design the game so fewer objects need to be on screen at once. Can’t work for months to create 40+ hours of gameplay See if you can get the essence of the experience in a couple of hours, and then charge far less for it.

Designing under constraints of time, budget, or technology can lead to interesting choices that may be popular. Shortcuts can lead to new and interesting places, and the journey may turn out to be lots of fun. But if you never constrain your development team, they may never be looking for unusual solutions to game design problems.

Open development
The relative openness of many indie games is perhaps the greatest difference, aside from budget, that separates them from big-budget products. Crowd-funded games are, by necessity, open projects that involve the community from the beginning. The fans who support a game become part of the design process, and this can lead in very different directions than originally anticipated. Chris Roberts will tell you that he thought Star Citizen was mostly going to be about ship combat, but after surveying the backers he found the exploration was the part of the game they were most interested in by far — and this led to a significant shift in development resources.

Big publishers and big developers are used to operating under a cloak of secrecy about titles in development, with very little known in advance except the title and the general nature of the game. Some information will be carefully released as development proceeds, with most of the info coming right before launch. The problem with this, of course, is that the audience may not really like the game’s ultimate direction, or major bugs may have crept in unnoticed. A quick look at the dismal launches of several very high-profile AAA games in 2014 should show the dangers of secret development.

Publishers and major developers should rethink the whole notion of utter top secret game development, and look at the advantages provided by an open development process. Chris Roberts has succeeded in taking an effort originally intended to raise a couple of million dollars and turned it into a $70 million juggernaut, rolling towards $100 million by launch time.

Opening up development becomes a terrific marketing tool, as well as validation of the audience size and interest. It also helps in finding the key parts of the design that resonate with the audience, and finding and fixing bugs. The danger has always been perceived that your competitors will be able to copy what you’re doing… but everybody is already doing that to successful games. That’s why there are so many FPS games, and RPGs, and MOBAs… and so on. Yet it’s very difficult and expensive to copy a big project; Electronic Arts ended up shutting down its MOBA game, for instance. Everyone knows what Grand Theft Auto is like, but it’s proven damn hard to copy.

Summary
Big publishers and developers have plenty of advantages, but they can profit by looking at what indie games are doing. Using some of the ideas and approaches of indie developers could revitalize a tired franchise, or help create a bold new one. Just keeping on keepin’ on is not a viable strategy when the market is growing and evolving so rapidly. The indie game market is a huge source of evolving ideas, and AAA publishers and developers should seek to add some of those new genes to their own DNA.

Wargaming’s eSports Surges Forward

BY

Wargaming has continued to expand its already massive audience worldwide, now reaching more than 100 million players. The company has now grown to over 3500 employees worldwide, and has expanded onto mobile with World of Tanks Blitz — that title has been downloaded more than 8 million times so far, and it’s just getting started. The Xbox 360 version of World of Tanks has over 5.4 million downloads and an impressive set of statistics, as the infographic reveals. World of Tanks has been joined by World of Warplanes, and soon World of Warships will continue to expand the array of Wargaming combat titles.

Mohammed Fadl

For Wargaming, eSports has been an important aspect of the gameplay and the community. The game runs on competition, after all, and there’s nothing like being in a group with other players to get you to play more often. The [a]listdaily caught up with Mohamed Fadl, Director of eSports Europe and North America, as he was on the road for yet another eSports competition, to ask him some questions about the importance of eSports to Wargaming, and its future.

How important has eSports been to World of Tanks?

For us it was actually the other way around. World of Tanks was important for eSports as our community used it to create their own eSports environment. We never planned to be an eSports game with World of Tanks when we first launched. Now having our league running for almost two years, things have changed tremendously. eSports became the highest level of gaming experience for World of Tanks, and our professional teams drive passion, skill and even new content creation within our game on a global scale. eSports became a crucial component in our end game and new content is growing with every battle played.

Do you think eSports will be equally important to World of Warplanes and World of Warships?

It’s hard to say at this point. We learned one big lesson with World of Tanks; the community drives eSports and activities like it. It must grow naturally by itself. If you try to force or control it with too much pressure you will break the momentum in your own game. That’s why we ultimately let the community decide if and when they want to drive eSports within our other games. What I can say is that we will be there, ready and waiting for them to give us the green light.

How are brands getting involved with World of Tanks and eSports Is this going to be more important in the future?

Brands and partners are and will be crucial for our eSports activities. Not just for Wargaming itself but also for all our pro teams. One major focus within our Wargaming eSports ecosystem team is helping teams to get sponsors and partnerships so they can establish their team as a brand itself and have a future within the eSports universe. Our goal is to make sure that these teams will stay and help the overall growth and sustainability of the eSports scene even if they decide to play other games.

How do you see eSports developing over the next year or two, both for World of Tanks and for the industry in general?

For World of Tanks, eSports will focus on helping the pro teams turn their passion into a lifelong career and not just a hobby. The other point we will focus on within the next two years is to create a strong eSports ecosystem which will guide our players from the first steps in the competitive world up to the stage of the Grand Finals. An important part of this ecosystem is to create an entertainment system which covers every single point within our ecosystem and makes it easy accessible, fun and rewarding; both as a spectator and a player.

For the industry overall, I foresee eSports finding its position in the general media/entertainment section within every household around the globe. It will most likely change and transform as what we call eSports today; this is just the beginning. We scratched the surface of something much bigger and it’s up to everyone now to make sure we are a positive part in the evolution of entertainment.

More publishers are trying to get their games adopted as eSports. What will take for them to be successful, both within the game and from the company in terms of support and organization?

What’s most important is that companies create the games they believe in and what they wanted to build in the first place. To try and create an eSports product without having the support of your community behind it is nearly impossible. If the players love your game and want to turn it into an eSport, then they will do it. What is important is to then be ready to jump in and to pick up the ball. So be flexible and open minded, and don’t try to force something on the players that you don’t believe in just because someone said it’s not an eSport. Someone within the industry once told me that the 7v7 eSports format will never be successful which is why no one else uses it. Fast forward to the current state of our eSports league and we now have over hundreds of thousands of players playing it… you always have to trust your own instincts.

NPD January 2015 Retail: Software Finally Wins

BY

January was a cold month in most of the U.S., and not just outside. “January 2015 retail sales data across hardware, software and accessories decreased by 6 percent from January 2014, with growth in software (up $12.4 million) and Accessories (up $5.4 million) unable to offset hardware declines of $54 million,” NPD’s Liam Callahan reported. For those keeping score, hardware sales were $185.5 million this January compared to $239.6 million last January, while software notched $235.7 million in sales compared to $223.2 million last year.

The engine of retail sales for the past year has been hardware, and that’s what took a sharp downturn in January. The older consoles (Xbox 360 and PS3) really slid, down 35%, probably because there were no price decreases or substantive marketing efforts for them. “Hardware sales declined by 23 percent as sales cooled off after the holiday season,” Callahan acknowledged. “Eighth generation console hardware sales were down by 22 percent while seventh generation console hardware sales decreased by 35 percent.”

Software was a bright spot for once, though coming off of a very down year at retail it’s not a very big increase. “Software spending rose 5 percent from January 2014 as eighth generation console spending outpaced seventh generation console software sales,” Callahan noted. “Eighth generation software increased by 74 percent, seventh generation decreased by 36 percent and dedicated portable software sales dropped by 12 percent.” This is not good news for Nintendo’s 3DS, as much of that drop must be attributed to the software for that device – because the PS Vita has been coasting along at a low level for months.

The top seller among software was Dying Light, followed by most of the usual suspects. Interestingly, Super Smash Bros. made the list, a bright spot for Nintendo which has all too often been absent from this list in recent years. Interestingly, Assassin’s Creed didn’t make the list, though Far Cry did.

January 2015 Top 10 Games (New Physical Retail only)
1. Dying Light (PS4, XBO, PC) Warner Bros. Interactive
2. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (XBO, PS4, 360, PS3, PC)** Activision Blizzard
3. Grand Theft Auto V (XBO, PS4, 360, PS3)** Take 2 Interactive
4. Minecraft (360, PS3, XBO, PS4) Microsoft (Corp) / Sony
5. NBA 2K15 (XBO, PS4, 360, PS3, PC) Take 2 Interactive
6. Super Smash Bros. (NWU, 3DS)* Nintendo
7. Far Cry 4 (PS4, XBO, 360, PS3, PC)** Ubisoft
8. Madden NFL 15 (XBO, PS4, 360, PS3)** Electronic Arts
9. Destiny (XBO, PS4, 360, PS3)** Activision Blizzard
10. FIFA 15 (PS4, XBO, 360, PS3, Wii, PSV, 3DS)** Electronic Arts

**(includes CE, GOTY editions, bundles, etc. but not those bundled with hardware)

One Exec’s Indie Game Journey Begins

BY

The rise of the indie game developers over the past few years hasn’t just been about kids coming out of college and starting game development. It’s also about veterans of gaming who have made the journey from large companies back down to small groups or even lone wolf status. One such journey has been taken by veteran Rod Humble, who released his game Cults & Daggers on Steam today for $29.99.

Rod Humble

Cults & Daggers is, according to the press release description, “a sprawling and complex turn-based strategy game created and developed exclusively by renowned game designer Rod Humble. The game delves into the tumultuous time between the death of Buddha and the birth of Christ when mystical cults dominated the ancient religious and societal landscape.”

“Without a doubt Cults & Daggers caters to a specific audience, one that enjoys complex and high chaos situations where you try and navigate your faith in a tumultuous world,” said Humble, CEO of Chaphat LLC. “This game is a passion project for me which I designed and built on my own. I’ve read quite extensively about the time period and thought that the subject matter, the rise of ancient religious cults and societies, was fascinating and worth exploring.”

The game deals with an interesting historical period, adding in fantastic elements and giving the players plenty of strategy to consider. The description provided is definitely different in scope than most games: “As Cults & Daggers opens, you learn that the Old Gods are plotting to destroy a planet they can no longer rule, and you are tasked with creating your own religious faith to fight a secret war for the soul of the world. You’ll have to recruit loyal disciples throughout the Mediterranean in order to spread your faith by preaching to the masses and converting noble families. Along the way, you’ll have to deal with spies, assassinations, martyrs, occult forces, prophets and blasphemers, all while battling the Old Gods and other rising cults for the hearts and minds of the world.”

Humble’s history in the games business is extensive. Prior to starting Chaphat, Mr. Humble served as the Chief Executive Officer of Second Life creator Linden Lab. Before Linden Lab, he served as Executive Vice President of the EA Play label of Electronic Arts and oversaw the best-selling PC game franchise of all-time, The Sims.

Humble’s 25-year career in game development includes work on more than 200 games and in 2009 he was ranked #2 on the annual list of the “Hot 100 Game Developers” from gaming publication, Edge. Prior to his work at Electronic Arts, Humble served as Vice President of Product Development at Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak Game Company) for one of the first successful, massively multiplayer online games (MMOG), EverQuest.

The [a]listdaily spoke with Humble to find out why he’s created this game and where he intends to go from here.

 

Why did you go from executive roles to hands-on game creation?

I wanted to make some games that I knew nobody else was going to make. Personal ones that I wanted to play. I was in the fortunate position that I could fund myself and do that. Taking some time to get back to hands on coding has been great fun!

You know how hard it is for games to get discovered these days. What’s your strategy for marketing your game to overcome the discoverability problem?

I don’t know the answer , I am not sure anyone does. The best thing I can do is make something unique and new and then hope like minded gamers will notice and seek it out. I will say, though, that Steam’s suggestions list seems to be very helpful when it comes to linking to games of the same genre.

Why this particular game, with the historical setting and strategy focus, and why this choice of platform?

I love this era and setting. It is fascinating to delve into this axial age when the world was teeming with change and chaos. When I read the words “ancient mystery cults” in the text books it was just begging to have a game made about it! The platform choice was easy, big complex strategy games natural home is PC/Mac I think.

You’ve gone with an up-front pricing model rather than some variant of free-to-play. Is that entirely due to the nature of the game design, or is it because you see problems with the free-to-play model?

It is the nature of the game. This is a big game and I want a customer to buy it and be able to play the whole thing. I will also be releasing at least one free expansion pack.

What’s next for you and Chaphat? Will you add on to Cults & Daggers in some way, or work on something new?

For a while it will be Cults & Daggers support and future content pushes. After that I have some ideas for other games I would like to explore. It is a joy just making games by yourself, I would like to do it for a while longer yet.

SuperData January 2015: Legacy Publishers Triumph

BY

Analysis from SuperData CEO, Joost van Dreunen, follows:

  • Legacy publishers beat market estimates with digital success
  • Mobile marketing around grows up, gets noticed
  • Valve doubles down on user-generated content
  • Heroes of the Storm is ready for prime time with 9 million users

Digital games reached $1.1 billion in sales in the month of January, driven by strong tailwinds of the end-of-year rush. Downloadable content on PC and consoles continued the market’s momentum, totaling $372 million in sales, up 18 percent from January a year ago. Capcom earned itself an important success with Resident Evil HD Remaster coming in third as top-selling full game download on console.

Legacy publishers beat market estimates with digital success
Digital revenue reigned supreme among legacy publishers during this quarter’s earnings calls. Electronic Arts reported $693 million in digital revenues over the last quarter, more than 25 percent above financial analyst expectations. Similarly, Activision benefited from a powerful digital combo of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the release of its Warlords of Draenor expansion and a reported 16 million registered users for Destiny. Finally, Take-Two reported a 64 percent increase in net revenue from digital content to $217 million as earnings from virtual currency sales, DLC and online games grew.

Mobile marketing around grows up, gets noticed
Digital marketing in mobile games is growing up. The combination of a lower than expected cost-per-install around the holiday season and not one, but three titles advertising during the SuperBowl are signs that the industry has changed from a year ago. The combined spending of Ucool ($2.25 million), Machine Zone ($4.5 million) and Supercell ($9 million) on their ads triggered a flurry of buzz both in the industry and among consumers. Following a record $405 million in mobile game spending in December, the segment slightly declined in January.

Valve doubles down on user-generated content
Valve launches the Steam Inventory Service beta and expands Steam Workshop. Steam Inventory Service will help developers create virtual items that can be unlocked or purchased and can then be sold or traded in the Steam Marketplace. Virtual items form the bulk of downloadable content revenue for digital PC, which earned $94 million in January and grew by 13% year-over-year. Steam has also expanded the Steam Workshop, a tool for user-generated content (UGC), to include third-party games Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Dungeon Defenders: Eternity. Since its 2011 debut, 1,500 Steam Workshop contributors have earned $57 million by selling virtual items for Valve titles like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Moreover, MMOs like Everquest Next, City of Heroes and Star Trek Online have since adopted similar UGC tools and markets.

Heroes of the Storm is ready for prime time
After a month of beta testing, Activision/Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm has garnered 9 million players, positioning it to become the second or third highest grossing game of its kind at launch. The upcoming free-to-play title resembles MOBAs like League of Legends and DotA 2, and could debut with estimated monthly revenues between $5 and $10 million. While the publisher’s subscription-based World of Warcraft is still going strong with 10 million current subscribers, the decision to launch another free-to-play title suggests even Blizzard is reluctant to pursue paid subscribers anymore. Free-to-play MMOs in the US grossed $137.2 million this January, a 13 percent increase from the same time last year. On the other hand, MMOs with paid subscriptions remain stagnant with only $53 million in US.

[a]listdaily Analysis
The relentless march of digital revenue shows up clearly, as EA transitions to making more money from digital than retail, and Activision looks poised to make that transition sometime this year. TakeTwo is behind the curve, but no doubt they’ll get there eventually as well. It’s still going to be a difficult transition to navigate for these traditional publisher, as van Dreunen points out in his open letter to EA’s CFO Blake Jorgenson.

While traditional publishers will still work hard to maintain good relations with traditional retailers, they will be aggressively pushing the digital part of their business. It just makes good sense, as Activision’s success with Heroes of the Storm shows very well. That title also shows the power of a well-established brand and IP, as the characters in Heroes of the Storm are popular because of Blizzard’s long history and huge audience. While the game is certainly a good one, it’s also much farther along than it would be if all of the characters in the game were brand-new ones. The popularity of Blizzard’s IP and characters from Warcraft and Starcraft and Diablo are paying off for the company in a big way. That’s one advantage that EA lacks, since the company’s longest-running franchises are either based on licenses (like Madden and FIFA) or they aren’t really character-based (Battlefield hasn’t developed iconic characters).

Hammer & Chisel: Forging Hardcore Gaming For 1 Billion Players

BY

The mobile game industry is moving out of its toddler years and into childhood, relatively speaking, and with that growth mobile games are getting more than just casual. A number of startups are betting their investor’s money on the belief that as the mobile game business grows and matures, more players will desire gameplay that’s richer, deeper, and more engaging. One of the startups dedicated to that proposition is Hammer & Chisel, the company started by OpenFeint founder Jason Citron, which today announced it has closed its Series B funding round from investors Tencent, Benchmark Capital and YouWeb’s 9Plus. Hammer & Chisel aims to be the first core gaming company to reach one billion players, with the fast-growing market of mobile devices reaching over 2 billion people soon.

Hammer & Chisel was founded in 2012 by Jason Citron, whose previous company OpenFeint was acquired by GREE for $104 million in 2011. With this latest round of investment, Hammer & Chisel has raised more than $8.2 million from top tier Silicon Valley VCs and investors like Tencent, Benchmark, YouWeb’s 9Plus, Accel, TWI, and IDG. Hammer & Chisel’s first title, the iPad only Fates Forever, was released last year, reimagining the MOBA genre on touch devices. Fates Forever has received awards such as “Apple’s Editor Choice” and “Best of iPad 2014.”

Jason Citron

“There are an estimated 100 million to 200 million core gamers right now – growing at a rapid pace. We think there’s tremendous opportunity to craft high end, respectful experiences tailored to the mobile play patterns of core gamers,” said Citron. “This investment paves the way for us to bring high end mobile games to emerging markets all around the world, which constitutes a substantial percentage of the future core gaming population.”

The [a]listdialy spoke with Citron about the investment, Fates Forever, and where mobile games and Hammer & Chisel are headed in the future.

How has the Fates Forever performed for you since its release? Has it met your expectations?

We launched Fates Forever last summer, over the July 4th weekend, and Apple gave us their Editor’s Choice award and we were featured on the front page. The project overall has really been an experiment for us. We’re a new company trying to bring a new type of hardcore gaming to mobile devices. The game has done well, but it hasn’t been a grand slam. On our journey of building an important gaming company, we started with something we thought would push the envelope a bit and we’d learn a lot from. If you look at other gaming companies that have been around longer and are very successful, the journey that all these companies take is they start by making games that are experiments to learn and grow on their way to building a massive success.

What size is your new round of funding, and what will it enable you to do?

The round of funding was led by Tencent. We met them a while ago, when we were doing the beta testing of Fates Forever. They are very interested in the MOBA space, and they are a huge distributor in China. They were interested in investing in us and building a relationship for high-end games on mobile devices. We’re not disclosing the size of the round, but it’s a multi-million dollar round that Tencent led.

The way that we look at the world is that mobile devices are just at the beginning of a multi-decade run. Who knows what will happen after that, but it seems conceivable in ten to twenty years every human being on the planet who’s not in poverty will own a smartphone. So we think there’s a tremendous opportunity to bring high end gaming to not only the current smartphone market,long term over the next twenty years. The money we’ve taken in this round will help us in our journey to bringing core games to a wider audience than we did with Fates Forever.

With tablet growth slowing, does this change your perceptions about the market opportunity or your strategy?

Sure it does. Fates Forever is tablet only right now, and when we started building the game a few years ago it looked like tablets were going to be the “next big thing.” That really hasn’t shaken out. We’re thinking of our next step more broadly in terms of mobile devices. The market conditions have definitely affected what we do going forward.

What lessons have you learned about multiplayer gaming on tablets?

The summary version of what we’ve learned is that the tablet gaming market how really high-end multiplayer games is still pretty early. The level of adoption and awareness of that type of content is very different than what it is on the PC. The PC people are used to sitting down and playing a game for hours, a really deep and immersive experience, and people don’t expect that of a tablet right now. Wone of the things we’ve found ourselves having to do is try and educate them people that they can get those kind of really deep experiences on tablets. The type of gamers that really enjoy high-end multiplayer games, it’s a different audience, and spreading that message is a big part of what we’ve learned we have to do.

What I really want to do with Hammer & Chisel is bring the kind of games that have had meaningful, deep impacts on us in our lives to the next billion gamers. Both you and I have spent the majority of our lives completely submerged in gaming culture, but the people who have smartphones and will be getting them in the next five to twenty years will have not experienced that. There’s an opportunity to bring the really meaningful, shared experiences we’ve had to them, and to make a first impression. Smartphone growth in the developed world has slowed, but in emerging countries it’s still 30 percent to 40 percent year over year growth. These are people to whom it’s their first computer, and this will be the first time they’ve experienced a videogame. That’s such a remarkable thing — it has an impact, and it’s great to be a part of that.

Where do you see mobile gaming, and especially tablet gaming, going from here? What is the biggest opportunity ahead, and what’s the biggest challenge?

The fundamental challenge over the next year is content diversity. As a player if you go to the App Store there is a ton of stuff. Apple and Google, every week, do a good job of promoting the new stuff for the week, but what usually happens is those games tend to not stick. On the top free and paid charts, for the last year and change, the top ten games have been relatively static. They don’t change. The ability for developers to get their content seen and played is so hard, it’s now going to affect the quality and the diversity of content. If you look at consoles and console gaming, and you map the trajectory over the last thirty years, the amount of diversity and experimentation in content from big-budget studios any more is nonexistent because it costs so much money to make something that stands out.

On the low end on console and PC you have the indie game phenomenon happening. None of those studios are successful in any measure similar compared to the ones at the top. Some of those indie studios have good lives, but if you look at the amount of money Call of Duty brings in compared to a hit game like Braid, there’s no comparison.

The bright light here is that because Apple and Google go out of their way every week to feature new content, that content does get pickup, and you will see games that come out of nowhere and do well. The trick is making a game that, from that pop, can sustain itself.