Jan 28
Benefits:
Cost of upgrade? $40, from Toronto to Ottawa.
Best goddamn travel upgrade EVER.
Jan 25
Okay. So.
ISA 2011: Facebook Announces Buy With Friends and Frictionless Micropayments
tl;dr – FB has a few aces up their sleeves yet. Two neat features they’re rolling out alongside FB Credits are “Buy With Friends” and “Frictionless Payments”.
“Buy With Friends” means that you can post your purchases to your wall, and if friends decide to duplicate your purchase, they can do so at a discount. The developer can choose that discount. This could be an excellent conversion tool.
“Frictionless Payments” is even cooler. If your purchases are less than 20 or 30 credits, the payment can simple be processed with no separate, in-your-face confirmation step. So again, an excellent conversion too. (Contrast “Add to Cart” to “Checkout” on our big board, for example – a lot of people never complete purchases.) If we can build in a steady stream of 1-credit purchases into our apps (buy missing crafting ingredients, travel for credits, credits for potions, etc), and get users trained into clicking the “okay, whatever, it’s only a credit, just let me play the game” button, we’re SET.
If FB can keep following ideas like this up with more, then FB Credits could *really* turn out to be a bit winner for everyone. I still don’t like the courtesy credits nonsense, but clearly there’s some smart people working on this and trying to figure out how to make Credits more appealing both to devs and players.
Jan 25
It’s been a while since my last post, but in my defence, I’ve kept busy. And yet, I couldn’t let the following news slip by without commenting on it:
Facebook to make Credits mandatory for all canvas games
The short of it is that Facebook is going to be enforcing Facebook Credits as a payment method for ALL Facebook canvas games. Those better-connected than I seem to have it on reliable sources that this means that FB Credits will need to be the SOLE payment method for all Facebook canvas games. Paypal? Social Gold? Everyone else? Gone.
The suspicious “we are not requiring developers to use Facebook Credits as their sole in-game currency” apparently is supposed to be read as meaning “You can still have things like FarmCash in-game, but people will need to sped FB Credits to buy it”, which makes sense, though feels pretty ominous.
I’m of mixed opinion on this one.
A common currency pool for micro-transactions can easily benefit all FB game developers. Lord knows, I’ve had leftover FB Credits I had from buying SUPER|brie+ that I spent on Ravenwood Fair or the like. The more FB Credits people buy, the more they are likely to spend.
And apparently Facebook handles them very well. Early adopters are reporting much less customer contact over payment problems. Reducing support costs is always a plus.
Facebook takes a 30% cut. 30 percent! This is insane. Mad. Incredible. Consider that with PayPal, you’re losing out maybe 7%, and that’s if you haven’t spent any time signing up for programs designed to lower that transaction fee.
Facebook is taking the same cut that Apple takes on the app store. They’ve said that they’ll have app store-style promotion for the early converters to FB Credits, which is nice and may offset the incredible fee increase, but what about long-term? What about once everyone’s converted to Credits? How does Facebook decide who gets promoted then, and will there continue to be an offsetting benefit? Time will tell.
One of the neat things that Facebook can do to promote the use of FB Credits is to “comp” people free “Courtesy Credits”. However, instead of taking the hit themselves, they pass this cost along to developers. Check it:
Facebook comps Bobby Beauregard 50 free FB Courtesy Credits. Bobby thinks this is pretty neat and goes and spends it on SUPER|brie+. Sold on the usefulness of FB Credits, Bobby buys 100 more and spends them on CityVille. At the end of the payment term, CityVille gets paid the going rate for those 100 credits, while HitGrab gets nothing – Courtesy Credits aren’t paid out. At all.
So the first terrible part about this is that Courtesy Credits can push your “take” of FB Credits down below even 30%, which is just more bad news. More frightening however, is this gem from the FB Credits Ts&Cs. From section 3-11: “We may however permit you to re-issue courtesy Credits (e.g. expiration or other limits) at anytime for any reason.”
So hold on – we accumulate 500 Courtesy Credits in a month, and can then re-issue them out to whomever we want, say as a promotion? This is neat, except it means that Courtesy Credits will never leave the system. We re-issue those, and people will re-spend them with us, and we continue to get no money. Over time, you can expect the population of Courtesy Credits to rise, and the actual value of the FB Credit to plummet FAR below the currently-advertised 30%.
Now that’s scary.
Not much. Facebook is the platform, and what the platform wants, it gets. Many big names (Zynga, Playfish, Lolapps, if I’m not mistaken) have already gotten on board here, too, so the chance for organized protests is long past. This is going to happen, and all we can really do on the canvas side is watch it unfold.
Companies can start aggressively advertising their FB Connect implementations (i.e. Load the game from www.gamename.com instead of from apps.facebook.com/gamename), though. You can’t use FB Credits off-canvas, so you can happily stay with whatever payment provider you were using there. Your reminder emails, referral links, etc. could all push people to the off-canvas page. You could probably even offer people an incentive to play off-canvas.
But that may not even work out to your benefit, either. People are going to get used to seeing FB Credits everywhere. It’s going to become accepted, and if your “Facebook game” doesn’t let people pay for it using Facebook’s currency, there are going to be a lot of people who just won’t buy.
It’s really hard to know what’s the smart play to make about this. The long-term effects of this are hard to gauge right now. Could be very good, could be fantastically bad. In the short-term, however, it doesn’t look like there’s much more folks can do but convert to FB Credits, tighten their belts, and get ready to see a 20% net revenue drop.
Jan 14
Seeing as I now work at HitGrab, I figure it’s time to get serious about games. And much like how you must read a lot to become a good author, you must play a lot of games to become a good game designer.
I play plenty of games these days, though they are typically either indie PC games (Altitude, Mount and Blade, VVVVVV), or big-budget console/PC crossovers (Batman: Arkham Asylum, Just Cause 2, Alpha Protocol). I’ve generally avoided social games because they all tend to run on Facebook, and well, I’ve already made my feelings on Facebook pretty clear.
But social games are doing some fantastically interesting things these days, to the point where even I can’t seem to avoid logging in on Facebook regularly to continue playing. (Though I check my Facebook feed about as often as I visit the dentist, fair warning.)
I’ve decided to blog my experiences playing these games, and make a series out of it – every week (roughly), a new couple of games reviewed. This week, I start with a new game from some long-favourite designers, and the current Big Fish in the social game space.
I’ve been following Brenda Brathwaite on Twitter for some time now, ever since I heard of her mindblowing game Train. When she started tweeting about her new social game she was working on alongside fellow game design luminary John Romero at LOLapps, I knew I had to check it out. I just didn’t expect it to be so… cute.
For reference, Romero was behind the primal gorefest that was Doom. Brathwaite’s Train has you unknowingly sending Jews to Auschwitz and breaking down into tears when you realize what you’ve just done. Ravenwood Fair on the other hand is about as hardcore as Jello pudding.
In Ravenwood Fair, you play as either an adorable teddy bear or racoon lady, clearing the spooky forest; building fair games and buildings; and inviting other adorable woodland creatures to come and sample your hard work. You earn coins, experience, and items by cutting down trees, bopping scary monsters, and by having guests play your games and visit your stalls. Occassionally, one of your guests will see something in the forest that scares them and come running to you to be calmed down. Without you intervening, they’ll cower pitifully for ten whole minutes before going back to playing games again.
Once I got over the shock, it made a lot of sense. The average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman, and more women play social games than men. DoomVille – while a neat concept – won’t go over too well with Your Mom. Ravenwood Fair on the other hand, is perfect.
And all the little things are done super-well as well. When you cut down a tree or bop a monster, the experience (little stars) and money (little coins) explode out like a pinata was just broken. You can have brief conversations with the forest creatures, and it quickly becomes apparent that they have a little life of their own going on, with unique crushes and aspirations.
The monetization is also done very well. Building a game or other fair building requires coins and items. Coins are relatively easy to come by, but to get items, you must chop down trees and bop monsters (or engage a viral channel and beg some from your friends), and you NEVER have enough of the required items. Never not EVER. In specific, I’ve been short on Vitalin since I started this flipping game. You can buy each item for 1 Facebook Credit each (about $0.10), or in 5-packs for 4 credits. OR, when you click on the structure of a building to check and see how much of what you need to finish it, they quickly total up the cost of the remaining items and offer to just sell you the rest in one transaction.
All this adds up to a fun, exceptionally well-targetted game that is paying off handsomely. As of right now, Ravenwood Fair has over 500k Daily Average Users, and close to five million Monthly Average Users. Ravenwood Fair just finished its winter seasonal event, and released a new version of the client with guest-based quests. Honestly, I was really prepared to set this game aside, but LOLapps has kept interesting updates to this game flowing at a steady pace.
CityVille from Zynga is huge right now. Like just shy of 100m MAU and nearly 20m DAU huge. It would be downright irresponsible of me to start reviewing social games and gloss over this one.
However, aside from the theme (which Zynga wasn’t the first to do anyhow), there’s not much that feels particularly new about the game. I came from Ravenwood Fair directly here, and I didn’t feel like I really had much to learn about how the game worked. Sure, decorations in Ravenwood increase your Fair’s “fun” which draws more guests who play your games and make you money – but in CityVille, they add a direct percentage to the collection values for nearby property. The mechanic may work a little differently, but it has pretty much the same end result. And god help you if you came here from FarmVille looking for something new.
That said, it doesn’t look like people were looking for something new. CityVille has the charm of SimCity with the comfortable, familiar mechanics of FarmVille (and countless other social games). The quests system is spot-on, always serving you up new things to do that are just outside of your current reach. The characters, animations, and sounds of the world are all super high-quality and welcoming. CityVille does so many things right, that the fact that most of its mechanics are simply refinements of already-explored systems is fairly moot.
For example, when a friend helps you in CityVille, you log in and see a small marker above a building with your friend’s profile picture on it. You have to manually accept their help, and then you get to watch as the marker moves across your town, collecting rent and sending tourists. This is an excellent improvement, since for many social games, you never get to see the result of your friends’ assistance at all, and it doesn’t feel like you’re playing with your friends at all.
I do have to take issue with the monetization, however. There are buildings and decorations that you can buy for CityBucks – in-game cash that you either accumulate slowly or buy with real money – but generally they are only vague improvements over things you can buy for regular coins, and are ignorable. Instead, where you’ll be spending most of your money is on community buildings.
See, in order to build certain businesses, you need to have a certain population. However, your population is capped by the quality and quantity of community buildings you have. Businesses and houses are built with coins and energy, but community buildings require those and staff as well. You can either send requests to your friends to have them staff your buildings, or fill the slots with an NPC for CityBucks.
Now, I don’t have a lot of friends on Facebook, since I tend to try to keep my friends list to people I know personally and hang around with frequently. I also can’t stand it when people spam their feeds with app requests, so I refuse to do that myself. For a game like CityVille, which very quickly has buildings that require up to ten friends to staff, this means I have to blow CityBucks to complete my community buildings.
I’ve spent a few Facebook credits on items in Ravenwood to complete the last couple hard-to-find item and not felt bad about it, but I begrudged every single CityBuck I spent on completing a community building. For refusing to spam my friends, I was penalized by having to shell out cash.
When I spend money on a game, I want to do it because I feel like I’m getting something out of it – that I am spending money to add to the fun. In CityVille, I felt like I was spending money as a penalty because I value my friends and their feeds. Definitely not cool.
Still, the basics are right, and I have no doubt that many, many people will choose to purchase the slightly-better buildings and decorations, and fill their community buildings with friends and NPCs. CityVille is absolutely monstrously popular right now, and I’m sure it’s making Zynga some incredible money.
I’m going to go both new- and old-school next week. I’m going to bust out the original superhit: FarmVille. It’ll be interesting playing it after CityVille, in exactly the opposite order of most of its players. I’m also going to be trying Monster Galaxy – one of the new breed of “battling” social games (read: Pokemon with your friends) that are becoming very popular these days.
Again, these updates aren’t guaranteed to be the same days or times each week. I’m pretty busy these days at HitGrab, working on our fantastic and fun social game: MouseHunt. We just pushed out a new update bringing back a favourite recurring character and adding a whole new gameplay mechanic to the game. As cool as that is, we have so much more planned for the coming months that I don’t know when I’ll have time to get all the game playing in I want to.
Jan 09
I almost didn’t make it.
An early-morning tragedy left us cold, hungry, and alone on the streets of Ottawa. Desperate for food and shelter, we roamed – finding nothing. Our safe haven, our final shared moment was brutally taken from us in the most horrific way imaginable: Cora’s was closed.
Cora’s, for those of you who don’t know, is the finest breakfast chain anywhere. Think Denny’s, but classier, and it is only open when it is reasonable to expect breakfast, not all damn night. You go to Cora’s when you want a fine breakfast, not when your drunk self wants late-night snarfles.
Our final breakfast in Ottawa was to be in Cora’s – a place with many fond memories. But with Cora’s operating on holiday hours, it wouldn’t open until shortly before my train’s departure. We couldn’t go. Plans were ruined.
We walked – tired, hungry, and cold. Under overpasses, across strangely empty intersections, and through deep snowy patches. Morale faltered, to say the least. But then, finally, in the distance – a sign! “Perkins”, it said.
Inside was breakfast – french toast, eggs, waffles, the whole nine yards. Breakfast, and thus the mood, was saved. The day was already hard enough to take without our final breakfast being ruined, too.
In the Via station, we were both allowed into the First-Class lounge, which was a nice way to spend our final few moments. We chatted – small talk mostly, since actually facing up to the larger issues was too much to bear. Eventually, my train arrived, and I had to go.
I don’t think you can ever appreciate how hard it can be to say goodbye until you have to say it to someone who is crying, and you cannot be there to comfort them. You can’t tell them that everything will be okay, and that it will all get better, because that would be lying – it can’t get better, because what’s wrong is that you’re leaving, and by definition you can’t stay around to be of comfort.
I almost stopped right there, dropped my ticket to the floor, and stayed. I wanted very badly to be there, to stay there, to make it all better. There was a moment of hesitation, but it passed, and I was strong again – strong enough at least to walk through the pain, to get on the train.
I got on the train, eyes damp, throat aching. I stowed my luggage, then spent the rest of the time in-station looking at the windows for a face. It was a very hard thing for me when we started moving and my vigil hadn’t been rewarded, but I don’t blame her at all – I don’t think things would have been better at all if we had spend that small time crying at each other through the windows.
The train left Ottawa, and I swallowed past the ache in my throat. After all, it’s only three months. A long three months, for sure, but only that. It’s not forever.
Attempting as best as I could to put that from my mind, I focused instead on the first-class service. The difference in price between Economy fare and First Class was fifty bucks, and the difference in service is worth AT LEAST that.
Cereal, Yogurt, fresh fruits, and freshly-baked bread. Neverending, decent coffee. And they brought the drinks cart ’round at eleven-thirty AM. When I asked for whiskey, they has Wiser’s Special Blend, and without hesitation, the stewardess dumped three pours into a glass with a few cubes of ice.
Before long, I was feeling no pain, and we had arrived.
In Toronto, I had a three-hour layover that I spent looking for a laptop bag to fit my new laptop. No luck, however. Everyone and their dog makes a nice-looking laptop bag that fits a 15″ laptop, but nobody seems to target the 17″+ crowd, which is silly, since we are the crowd who is clearly cool with forking out the dough for a fancy laptop in the first place. You could make a really nice bag and charge a premium for it and we would pay.
Finally, my train arrived, and we departed for Oakville.
Oakville and HitGrab.
HitGrab and MouseHunt.
I had expected to enjoy my work, yes, but I had not expected to enjoy it this much. The HitGrab offices are full of wonderful people, all working on wonderful things. They are all intensely passionate about what they’re working on – you won’t find a single person there “phoning it in”, even on their bad days.
And they’re razor-sharp, too. If they have a suggestion, it’s for a reason, not just because it would be cool, but because it would help the economy, or make a certain difficult task more understandable, or make the game more fun. They can quote studies and reference statistics from the tops of their heads. They know who is doing what in the industry, what lessons have been learned, and how to incorporate all this into current and future projects.
The people at HitGrab are silly and fun, and they are smart and deadly-serious, and they are gamers and they are businessmen. They love what they do, and they love the people they are doing it for.
I’m making some excellent friends in this office, and making friends of their friends, too – all fantastic people. Heck, I just got home from a snowball fight followed by warm cocoa not long ago.
It’s taking me some time to get used to Oakville the city, but it feels like I’ve known the people of Oakville forever – it’s only the formality of not having met them yet that was getting in the way.
I am really, really liking it here, and I am very much looking forward to my new job and life. 2011 is going to be a good year.
Jan 04
This one is more of just a reminder for myself, but also a bit of help to the community.
If you want to run Memcache on Windows 7 using the latest version of xampp (1.7.3, with PHP 5.3), you’ll need the following extension:
php_memcache-cvs-20090703-5.3-VC6-x86.zip
It’s surprisingly difficult to find, too. The first page of Google is useless, and I had to follow through comments on blog posts that I arrived at through comments on Stack Overflow.
Many thanks to my source:
Jan 01
It’s that time again! Time to review last year’s goals, and set some new ones.
Looks like I’m one for four, same as last year.
1. Lose 30 lbs. This one I’m carrying over, since it’s pretty worthwhile.
Nope. Didn’t do this at all.
2. Develop Bill On Site into something at at least pays its own bills.
Not this one either. Turns out that there wasn’t a big enough market for this kind of app.
3. Pay off my PC Financial Mastercard. Again, I’m carrying this over. Hopefully this year I won’t be laid off halfway through it and I can afford to throw money at it until it’s dead.
BAHAHAH. I lost my job twice this year. Now, I had a truly excellent job for most of the year, but losing it (and going to PAX – a long-held dream finally realized) cut this goal off at the knees.
4. Have a playable demo.
I’m going to say I accomplished this, actually. While not the same game, I built an indie web MMO that is a tiny, tiny bit off of alpha status. You can definitely play it, killing monsters and gathering STUFF. It just lacks depth, at this point. Whether I pursue this further or not depends on a whole lot of other factors, though.
It’s kind of an awkward time for setting goals just now – a whole lot is up in the air. I’m starting a new job in a new city in a new industry in two days. Hard to tell what my priorities are going to be in thirty days.
But let’s go for broke.
Let’s see if I can do better this year than the last two years. If I can just get two goals down, I’m doing twice as good as I ever have before!
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