We’ve been doing some experiments recently to help nail down exactly what determines the number of sponsor views your game gets. There are a million variables — everything from genre, to market level, to day of the week, to — well, who knows what else? We here at FGL have always had our strong suspicions, but we decided to get more scientific about it. (Why did we do this all of a sudden? Actually it was because of the recent Developer Survey. One of the biggest requests was more information and statistics on how to sell your game.)

First up, we examined the importance icons by themselves. People chose which icons they found “hottest”, and then we correlated that “hotness factor” with how many views the game got. This correlated surprisingly well: it’s very important to have a good icon for your game! But what makes a good icon? Well, you can see the results, along with the actual best and worst icons, here.

We’re now onto the second experiment, and here’s where we need your help. This one is broader: it covers both game icons AND game titles. To get good results for this one, we need a lot of votes! We’ve also incorporated feedback from the first experiment to make this one much more robust and (hopefully) accurate. Have you got a few minutes?

Please go vote on some games!

It’s kind of addictive, and it’s helping gather really useful data!

You don’t need to be an FGL user to vote on icons, so please feel free to spread that link far and wide! After the experiment we’ll crunch the numbers and post the results here on the blog.

Thanks for your time!

I’ve actually been thinking of this for some time now.  But I’ve been way too busy to write anything about it.  And I actually think it is ironic that at this time, probably the busiest time ever in my life, I feel it necessary to finally get my thoughts on this out.

Through the years I’ve read about how companies and products are slowly implementing gaming features so that users will be 1) more entertained and 2) more easily tracked/mined/advertised too/etc… And lately I’ve seen a video of a presentation at DICE by Jesse Schell titled “Design Outside the Box” garnering a lot of attention.  The presentation is a good one and here is one of the many sites you can view it at.

I agree with the core of what Jesse says.  It is unfortunate that most of his speech is either a comical recount of social gaming emergence in the past year or a satirical story of what we can expect in the future, but I do like his main point which is this: Gaming mechanics are finding their way into all aspects of life.  However, I wasn’t quite sure if Jesse had any call to action about what to do about this.  He had a very short bit at the end basically saying it is in our (the game designers’) hands, but I wish he would have gone into the meat of it more.  What are the ethical ramifications?  What leads us to believe we will be better people with these systems in place?  I think I would have even enjoyed an extreme position: maybe a rant about how this is big brother 2.0, or how we should be happy that our society is on the cusp of transforming into a superior transhuman collective working toward common goals structured originally through game design.

It is possible that the point of the talk was not to focus on ramifications and our personal influence on the future, but I find it glaringly missing.  Not only do I find it missing from this talk, but from many other discussions I have heard.  Honestly, I don’t even know who agrees or disagrees with how I feel about the subject.  That’s why I felt the urge to post this and start a discussion.

So, assuming these sorts of game mechanics continue to trickle into our everyday lives, what should we be thinking about?  As both game designers and users of “the system” what should we worry about and what should we start to change, now, to make sure these mechanics end up bettering our lives?  Or should we throw the whole thing out the window?

I’ll start with some of my thoughts on the matter.

Firstly, I am acutely aware of the ethics gap that new technology often creates.  An obvious target here for argument is that on the back end of these gaming systems are corporations who want to make money off of users.  Or utilize user data to make more money.  I’m not sure this is inherently bad, but it can obviously be extremely bad if not used properly.  I often think about the gowalla’s and foursquare’s out there: The geotargetting programs that track where you are… no, that you TELL where you are… and award points for doing so.  Obviously this data is very interesting to companies.  And they surely keep people engaged and connected, in a way, which is their other intended purpose.  But what evil can be done when the whole world knows where you are, and where you’ve been.  Even if the companies themselves don’t misuse the data, others could.  There was an interesting article on techcrunch about this, to a degree, but it focused on the fact that you are letting others know you are out of your house. I actually think this is a little silly, but still it shows people have it on their minds.

Now, I don’t want to focus exclusively on the horrible things people can do to you with all of the information easily available to anyone on the net.  That is a different discussion.  I want to focus on issues with game design, but I DO think it is important to realize that these dangers do exist and we need to have them always at the forefront of our minds when designing and implementing systems.

And really, that is what is at the root of my fears; that designers and developers do not think of the good of the end user, and user flow, before pumping out systems with game mechanics.  This is another thing I wish Jesse would have covered.  He pointed out that we game designers could have a phenomenal impact on the effectiveness of these systems, but he did not point out that we could also have a similar impact on the ways they truly improve life for people and furthermore, do no harm.  And by this I don’t even mean personal harm by giving away user information, but indirect harm by being so narrowly effective they actually damage a process they are trying to improve.

Let me use an example.  Microsoft recently released an Office add-on called Ribbon Hero. Basically it turns your work into a game.  You get points for writing documents or filling out spreadsheets etc… Basically the thought behind it is by introducing game mechanics you can increase your productivity. They even brought on some game designers to help them, which I think is great.  I have to admit, I have not tried the product, but from what I’ve seen from several videos and heard from a few sources it seems to be a really cool system.  And I would bet it is effective in many cases.  However, I have one main issue with this, and it holds true to almost all other systems that implement game mechanics.  Any system containing game mechanics to reward users will be gamed by the users.  This is crucial, so let me emphasize it: Any system containing game mechanics to reward users will be gamed by the users. Now, you may be thinking that there are cases where this doesn’t fit.  Surely you’d only be cheating yourself to game a system meant to increase productivity in your work.  But think back.  Remember the days you were in high school or college and your teacher/professor would assign a paper that had to be 5 pages long.  What did you do?  You triple spaced the document and increased the margins and did everything you could possibly think of to get that 2 page paper to be 5 pages.  And if you didn’t, most of your classmates did (and you don’t need game mechanics to improve your productivity!).  So, using Ribbon Hero, let’s create a hypothetical scenario.  You run a company and you have all of your employees run Ribbon Hero so that they all can compare their scores to each other and have fun as they do their work and the hope is their productivity goes through the roof.  At first this works great, but then Bob (oh that Bob), finds a way around the system that lets him do half the work, but get the same score as everyone else.   Soon, Bob is half as productive as he was before.  Eventually, he lets his little secret leak and others in the company do the same.  Now, I could go on with this, but the point is to show the issues with putting game mechanics in places they weren’t originally.  If you don’t keep in mind the end goal things could work out counter to what was intended.  And in this case, you can’t even blame the employees.  What happened is that you, the boss, gave them an incentive and they worked towards that incentive.  If anything, the problem was that you gave them a flawed incentive! Even if you stressed that the points didn’t mean anything, by merely introducing the mechanic you changed up the atmosphere and created a new goal everyone was working towards.

I believe this will be one of the biggest, non-obvious, issues with introducing game mechanics into systems.  Influencing actions in ways not intended. I often think about a calorie counter program I have on my iPod touch.  Not only does it count calories, but you can record activities you do and it subtracts those calories.  One of the actions is “sexual activity.”  Now, the first interesting thing about this is I wonder how many people would truly be accurate with this if they knew there was even a possibility of the data being viewed publically, but another thing I think about is that if this system had a point system (I know of other calorie counters and health programs that do) how would that activity choice influence people?  If it were worth, say, 10x what other activities were worth, don’t you think there would be a great new pick up line for guys at bars?  “Hey baby, how about you and me go and score 500 points?” Or excuses for adolescents to pressure their significant others? “But, babe, we HAVE to do it… I’m only 50 points from level  5!  Would you keep that from me?” Humorous, yes, but with a sliver of truth. The main point is that gaming systems are intended to influence behavior, not merely track it, and if we are the ones responsible for implementing these influential systems, shouldn’t we be thoughtful to their impacts?

I sometimes joke that it is sad that I can easily find the player who scored the most goals at the game last night, but I can’t find an easy to view list of who the top brain surgeons in the US are (but if you’re interested in the band, you’re in luck!).  So why don’t we create a point system and a leaderboard for surgeons?  Now, this is meant mainly as a joke.  Of course there are huge ramifications in doing something like this, but that is exactly what I am concerned about.  How can we accomplish both things?  Or can we?  Can we create a system to appropriately reward the best surgeons without causing ill effects on other surgeons and patients?  Would such a system truly make surgeons perform better or would they do worse feeling the constant pressure on them? To challenge Jesse’s suggestion that these mechanics, when added, improve us as people I ask: “Are we more likely to be better people, or make it look like we are better people by doing whatever is most highly rewarded through these systems?”  And on that note, but to discuss another time, does that mean hackers will be our future idols?

Jesse’s closing remark is something I’m on board with.  Game designers, though I’m sure they will go by different titles, will have a great impact on the future of the world and how we interact with it.  We should seize on this opportunity, for sure.  However, we should not do so without careful thought and consideration of the impacts beyond short term gains.

-Chris
FlashGameLicense.com

Recently, Mochi released the results of the Flash Game Market Survey that we participated in, and I have to say I am a bit disappointed.  The number of responses was so low that I’m not entirely convinced the selection of respondents is indicative of the larger community.  But ultimately, for that, we can only blame ourselves. We have nearly 10,000 registered developers on FGL, and around 4,000 true unique logins a month, yet with us, Mochi, JiG, and Newgrounds participating we only got around 1,000 developers to participate?? Well, for now at least it is what we’re stuck with.

I did like that Mochi sliced and diced the data a number of ways, but I would have liked to see the data sectioned out into different categories.  And there were some other statistics I would have loved to see.   Luckily, since we helped with the survey we got access to the raw data.  So we can look at it any way we want.

However, there is a lot of data, and it is a bit daunting to just dive in and dredge through it all.  What I decided to do was to pick a couple of data points and look for some interesting bits of information, then post it here (and I have, below).  Then I want to ask all of you to give me some suggestions on what types of metrics/data points you’d be interested in seeing.  So, feel free to comment below.

First, I need to give some disclaimers for the following info.  For the age data (and only the age data), I only selected the group of people who entered an age, so those who didn’t are obviously left out.  For the averages I just selected a middle ground on all the age groups and then performed the average calculation (for example, the age group of 25-34 I assigned as “30” to perform the average).  I also think that some of the averages would change drastically if there were an “under 18” option for users to choose, but the data I have starts at age 18 and goes up from there.  Unfortunately there weren’t options for developers to choose “Which services do you use” instead the question was “which forums do you use” so I used that data point to decide if a user was an “FGL user”, “Mochi user”, etc…  Not the most accurate, as many members of all the services do not frequent the forums, but hopefully it is close enough.  The data is also focused on three sites: FlashGameLicense, Mochi, and Newgrounds.  The only reason for this is because they are the closest to a significant sample size to mean anything.  If people want me to section it out differently I can do that.  I should also note that I took out some data that seemed highly suspicious to me, like a user who claimed to make more than $25k a month only using in game ads only.  I actually would have left that one except that the user also said they made over 9million in sponsorships in the notes section (not in the data section). So, with that said, here is some interesting facts:

-          Average ages of users are similar for FGL and Mochi (27), NG crowd skews younger(24) (and remember, no below 18 option)

-          28% of FlashGameLicense users say they work on games full time, 22% of Mochi users say this, and 18% Newgrounds users

-          36% of Newgounders only visit the NG forums

-          14% of users use both FGL and NG forums

-          12% of users use both Mochi and NG forums

-          25% of users use both FGL and Mochi forums

-          64% of respondents only visit one of the three forums (this surprised me)

-          Only 8% of users use all three forums (this one surprised me too)

I realize that there is nothing earth-shattering here, but I just wanted to dip my toes in first.  I started looking at some money stats and that looks much more interesting. Like, on average, developers who get their games sponsored make approximately $1,000 more a month than developers that do not.  But, again, I’d like to hear your suggestions before doing much more.

Here are some ideas I thought about:

-          Money stats broken out by top 50% of earners, top 10% of earners, bottom 50% of earners, and bottom 10% of earners

-          Earnings average by age

-          Earnings average by years of experience

-          Earnings average by number of games released in the past

What else?

Chris

I was inspired to write this blog post after a number of recent events that really got me down, and after talking to some developers who helped to lift me up. I doubt that the developers realized that they had any such impact on me, as I didn’t let on, but I am deeply grateful. I won’t go into too much detail on the events that I mention above, but I’ll explain a little bit of the back story in order to set the stage for the true purpose of this article: to say how awesome the Flash game community is and how it has affected me.

As many of you know, we have a new system called GamerSafe (www.GamerSafe.com) that aims at enhancing the gaming experience for gamers and also allow developers to better monetize games through in-game payments. You also probably know that there are an abundance of other players in the microtransaction business. When we first released GamerSafe we went to many of these other companies with a saying: “We don’t have competitors, we only have partners who aren’t working with us yet.” We had built our system to integrate with other payment platforms and “play nice” with other systems. We thought this was a great idea, this is the same philosophy we’ve had with FlashGameLicense… to work with everyone and to advance the Flash gaming space by helping each other out. It was sure to work out in the microtransaction space too, right? Wrong. Sadly, not a single company took us up on this offer. Many of them tried to get us to replace our system with theirs, some even offered to buy out GamerSafe altogether. We created GamerSafe to improve the lives of Gamers and Developers, and we put a ton of thought and work into it. We knew we’d come up with a great resource for developers, and so we really didn’t want to sell it or replace it. We also had (and have) great plans for the service.

So, in the end we found that we had entered a space that wasn’t as friendly as the developer space. No problem, we would just keep working on our product and continue to work with publishers and developers since we already do that and know they are all great to work with. We should have known better, but it didn’t turn out to be so easy. Even though we focused on our own product, and focused on working very closely with developers and publishers/sponsors to make sure GamerSafe worked right for them instead of focusing on working with or against other companies doing similar things as us, we still had conflicts and confrontations. I do think that many of these incidents were unintentional, but the result was that developers were emailing me and asking me to take a particular position. Then I started to worry that this was widespread, that there were many developers that had a bad impression of us due to things being said behind our backs. I brooded over this.

I recently had a chat with Greg Wohlwend of Intuition Games about getting burned out, and how it is so easy to get so sidetracked with the work and pressure of making a game that you lose sight of everything that got you into making games. I also read many of his articles at http://mile222.com which touched on this and I think were great. It made me think back to when Adam and I started FlashGameLicense.com. Adam and I started FGL out of a love for games and a vision of enabling developers to get their fair share. We were developers ourselves and saw that changes needed to be made, and that in fact they could be made in a way that actually improved the situation for Sponsors as well. This started FGL, but it didn’t keep it going. What kept it going were all the amazing people we worked with. Some people think it’s sad – and a bit ironic – that I have less time to make or play games now than I did before FGL was around but to me it’s not a huge deal because that time is replaced with working with some of the most innovative, fun, creative, and smartest people I’ve ever met. But now… now things had changed. GamerSafe started off in the same thread. But then, after all this time, the emergence of micropayments in games, and the slew of companies entering the market, had finally started to segregate the Flash game developer community.

When this hit me, I felt very down. I knew that I couldn’t give up on GamerSafe, it has the stains of my blood, sweat, and tears and I still believe it to be the system with developers most in mind. But I also felt like it was a big part of the problem. That it was at the core of this anxiety eating away at my insides: that I was contributing to a cause that was hurtful to the community I so loved.

I now realize this was utterly stupid. The true answer was nestled in with the problem I thought I had. You see, as I was brooding and worrying that developers were thinking negatively of me or of FGL or GamerSafe, they were actually all around me supporting us. From all of the developers that visit our forums daily, to the ones singing GamerSafe’s praises before even trying it out, to our very own FGL admins who are some of the most awesome developers around in their own right and for some reason work for FGL for WAY less than they are worth. All of these people see what we’re trying to do and are working towards the same goals… and I had been so distracted that I took it for granted.

We’ve had a few games in the works for a while that are integrating with GamerSafe, so I’ve been communicating with those developers quite a bit lately. A couple of them include Simon Lachance of Berzerk Studio and Ben Olding of Ben Olding Games and though we talk about the games and how they will best integrate with GamerSafe etc… I find that more often we talk about other things. Life, our families, other game ideas we think would be cool, etc… and it reminds me that this is why I kept doing this in the beginning. We made almost nothing in the beginning. And Adam and I still make less than we would if we worked at a sporting goods store or a restaurant. GamerSafe is growing very nicely, but is still a money dump for us as we spend money building it out. But none of this matters. We didn’t start this thing to get rich, we started it because it needed to happen and we saw that if we did it we would have the developer’s best interest in mind. In fact, we don’t even claim to know that we personally know the developer’s best interests. We work with developers to find out what is needed, and even have an entire “suggestion forum” set up so developers can vote what we work on. We have currently helped indie developers make nearly $2.5 million. I think that is more than any other group, or at least close to it. We are extremely proud of this, but what we are even more proud of is the fact that we helped developers get what is fair and right for them in a way that is fair and right.

So, this was a very long winded (thanks to those of you who stayed with it this long) way of saying that we plan to focus on what needs to be focused on: the developers. I owe that to all of you since you are what keep me sane and keep our jobs fun. One of the best times I’ve ever had was at GDC when I actually got to meet many of you, and I look forward to that opportunity again.

What this means, though, is that there will continue to be negative remarks aimed at us, and we will ignore them. Also, it means that our business will continue to be run in an “indie” fashion. This will mean hiccups and delays in the “bonus” features of our systems, but that has never hurt us in the past. If anything it has been extremely useful in preventing us from building out features that nobody wants. It makes us prioritize what we hear people want. I hope everyone will forgive us for these limitations. I personally think it’s rather appropriate for an indie business like ours to work alongside the indie game community.

I also want to encourage all of you to be cognizant of the changes happening in the industry and how they are affecting all of us. These are exciting times, but it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this is a very rare situation we are in where there is such a large, supportive community all working toward similar goals. Sustaining this environment as long as possible is one of our main goals at FGL, even if it means being a thorn in the backs of those trying to make as much money as possible at the expense of others.

So, with that said, I want to thank you all for being supportive and allowing us to be a part of this crazy, and amazing, industry. Without you and your games none of this would be possible (or fun!).

- Chris Hughes, Co-Founder FlashGameLicense.com & GamerSafe.com