dwlt.thinksOutLoud

PopCap on Games You Happen To Play on Facebook

(aka what others might, on occasion, refer to as ‘social games’)

Nice write-up on a talk Jason Kapalka from PopCap gave at GDC Europe, centred around their experience of Bejeweled Blitz.

Key points:

• Those contests they run around the games don’t make any difference to player numbers.
• Bejeweled 2 just on iPhone has sold over 4,000,000 copies.
• Resetting the high-score table (of which there is only one) once a week is better than once every two weeks.
• Most games on Facebook are “kind of evil”, since they’re trying “any way to trick you into posting something on your wall that’s not really even of interest to you, let alone your friends.”

A Game Is A Game Is A Game

Kieron Gillen, interviewed by Blitz1Up:

I’ve touched on some of that up-thread in that we see it all part of the same fabric. The Facebook games are the same thing as the hyper-indie-art game are the same thing as whatever costs 400 trillion pounds. It’s all games and we want to help encourage people to think of it as such.

Sounds like a familiar refrain ;-) Anyway, it’s a great read, but this is the line that jumped out:

The games press is very good at [telling you more about things you already know about and are interested in] and awful at [telling you about things you know nothing about whatsoever].

This was brought home earlier this evening where it seemed like everyone was talking about Bioshock Infinite. That’s all fine and well if you like that kind of thing, but I don’t like that kind of thing.

I’ve discussed with people before about how games doesn’t seem to have it’s Pitchfork or Stereogum, and I know games have all those platform fragmentation issues going on, but unfortunately that’s how most review sites are split. Problem is I have 10 platforms for playing games in line of sight from me right now, and I’m totally open to suggestion on which to play at any given time.

I want a site that can recommend me a game from the Xbox Indie channel in the same breath as one for my iPhone at the same time as one for Facebook mere moments after telling me to check out a DS game and oh you should download this thing for your PC too.

Maybe it exists and I just haven’t found it yet [NB Please tell me if you have found such a place]. Or maybe it doesn’t and you’ll have to go build it for me. Thanks in advance.

Regarding Lonelysandwich

merlin:

Adam had spoiled me on the idea that sweating the details at the right points does more than just incrementally improve the quality of the product; it actually means creating a substantially different and better artifact. It means you’re trying, and it shows.

Read More

5 Things I’m Thinking Right Now

Following on from Alice and Kim and Dan, here are the five things I’m thinking right now:

1. The funding models for games are all there; the problem comes at the other end with actually getting something out there. Clearly this is partially about the platforms and forced scarcity, but as another example there’s no equivalent of the film festival circuit. And even if there was, the publishers are so scared of taking a risk on anything they’re never going to find the games equivalent of Blair Witch Project (insert your favourite low-budget/huge-earning here).
2. To anyone who thinks that Android is somehow “better” for developers, you’ve clearly blanked out/weren’t around for the first ten years of mobile games development.
3. There’s so much for the games industry to learn from the TV, film, radio, music or restaurant industries that it hurts my brain. If you think otherwise, I say you’re looking in the wrong places.
4. Nintendo do so many things so, so well, that it makes the things they do badly that much more annoying.
5. To paraphrase Greg Costikyan from a GDC rant a few years back, THE WORLD IS NOT A GIANT FUNNEL DESIGNED TO POUR MONEY INTO YOUR WALLET. Get over it.

You’ll notice none of those things involve food, but that’s more of an underlying constant thought rather than a specific one.