GDC was a bit different for me this year. For the last few years, I've attended either as a freelancer or a researcher, and my primary objective was to attend sessions and hang out with friends. When I was with Unplugged, we had a few business meetings, but only a few, as we were not working with independent developers, few carriers attend GDC, and there weren't that many other companies that were of potential interest to us. And when I was a developer, well, we often had pitch sessions, but there aren't that many publishers, and so the meeting schedule was pretty light.

This year I was, in essence, on the opposite side of the table--not listening to pitch sessions, since we aren't funding development at present, but meeting with developers and nailing down some of the details of a potential relationship. And indeed, the conference was basically one meeting after another, scheduled by Bill Folsom, our energetic bus dev guy; as a result, I managed to attend only three events. One was an independent games roundtable hosted by Simon Carless, who runs the IGF (and is also Zonk on /.); I also got to Will Wright's keynote, which was brilliant, of course. And I did get to see the first half of the Experimental Games Workshop, having to cut out in the middle for another meeting; it seemed less exciting than on previous years, although perhaps the better stuff was in the second half. In addition, I attended an impromptu "Scratchware auteurs" meeting organized by Patrick Dugan about creative game development; among other people in on the meeting were Santiago Siri of Games Are Art, Chris Bateman of IHobo, and Jenova Chen of Cloud (which if you haven't tried out, you should). It was actually one of the best discussions I've had about game design in years, and I regretted having to cut out when I did, but our party was that night and I needed to get there at the start.

Manifesto was there in full force; Johnny, Eleanor, and Bill Folsom were all present. A priori, I'd wondered whether the expense of that was worthwhile, but in retrospect it clearly was; the result was to make it clear that Manifesto is something real, not just my own personal crusade.

For much of the show, we camped out in the back of the IGDA booth, making a table there in effect our conference room, a necessary expedient given our pre-revenue state. Thinking about it, however, I'm averse to taking a conference booth at future GDCs; I liked the sense of being in the open and being able to snag people, rather than being in an isolated private setting. Nor am I particularly concerned about having 'competitors' know who we're talking to; openness is supposed to be one of our values. To be sure, it probably isn't fair to the IGDA to continue hogging part of their area when we're larger, but we'll have to see if there's some way we can sustain that sense of openness in future.

One of our non-developer meetings was with Simon Carless, who is interested in working with us to promote IGF finalists and winners, which seems pretty straightforward. Another was with the Garage Games guys, with which I was quite pleased; essentially, we and they agreed that we need to work together to create more visibility for independent games, very likely coordinating on publicity efforts--and it seems likely also that we'll be able to offer some of their titles through Manifesto.

We all came away with the sense that things are coming together, and that we clearly have a high degree of visibility among developers, at least. In particular, I think both Eleanor and Johnny were pleased; this was Eleanor's first GDC, and she was a bit nervous at the prospect, while Johnny has been out of the industry for several years and wasn't sure anyone remembered him... A silly notion, as it turned out.

The next month will be hectic; we're planning on a May launch, and there is a hell of a lot to be done. Graphic design for the website--Karen is taking a month off from her work for the Sally Ride Science Club to work on the site. Final feature development and testing, complicated by the fact that James, our primary site developer, has exams coming up. Nailing down dozens of contracts, acquiring all the sales material we need, generating sell copy and reviews... Preparing publicity and marketing for the launch... And testing, of course.

You may not see a whole lot of me here in the near-term, I'm afraid.
posted by Greg at 12:42 PM

I recently received an "update" email from GameLab, a NYC developer run by Eric Zimmerman and Peter Taek Lee. It's interesting, although it's lacking details I'm interested in, but perhaps also the subject of a discussion.

GameLab has existed for about six years now, and at least until the founding of THQ's Kaos Studios, was the largest developer in New York--which isn't saying much, as there isn't a lot of development going on here. Originally, it was essentially an advergame developer, doing work for the usual suspects--Legos, Cartoon Network, and the like. But of course being an advergame developer sucks; it's pure work for hire, there's no possibility of profit beyond funding, and you're always scrabbling for the next contract. But Eric and Peter are highly energetic people, and they managed to keep the doors open and find enough revenue to grow.

A couple of years ago, they decided to move into the casual downloadable market, and landed a contract with PlayFirst, with Diner Dash and Subway Scramble being the results. Diner Dash was something of a hit, and was on the top ten lists of most of the sites that launched it. (PlayFirst also publishes two new GameLab titles: Plantasia and Egg Vs. Chicken.)

The casual downloadable market at least holds out the possibility of revenues beyond funding; companies like Playfirst basically work on a conventional game industry model. That is, funding is a recoupable advance, with developers receiving a royalty. But that model also sucks. Here's why.

These numbers are all hypothetical, as I don't know what GameLab's contract with PlayFirst looks like, but they're at least an educated guess. Let's say that the development cost of Diner Dash was $300K. Let's assume that all copies are sold through portals like Yahoo! Games and RealArcade, which today typically demand 80% of the revenues. (A few years ago, they were asking for 60%, but they control the traffic, and have demanded increasingly onerous terms from casual game publishers.) Diner Dash retails for $20, so the publisher's share of a sale is $4. (PlayFirst also sells off its own website, and presumably has arrangements with smaller sites that pay better, but we'll stick with this number for the sake of easier calculations.)

I don't know what GameLab's royalty is, but 15% is pretty typical for the conventional industry; let's say they got a slightly better deal, and get 20%. So their per-game royalty is 80 cents, meaning that GameLab doesn't see a dollar beyond development funding until 375,000 units have been sold.

That's a pretty high number; while some casual downloadable games (e.g., Bejewelled) have sold in the millions, hitting say, 400,000 units would be extraordinary. My guess is GameLab hasn't see any additional money--or if they have, that the amounts are small.

The solution, of course, is to become a publisher:

"That's right: Gamelab is becoming a game publisher. We'll be financing and distributing our own work. For a creatively-driven company, this is an important and necessary step in our evolution..."

Becoming a "publisher" in this space is a lot easier than in the conventional game industry. Publishers do three things: they provide dev funding, they do the marketing, and they provide distribution. In the conventional market, "distribution" means you need a warehouse and a sales staff; in casual games, it means you need to talk to a half dozen buyers at the portals that generation 90% of casual game sales. In the conventional market, "marketing" means spending a lot of money on advertising and promotion; in the casual market, there basically IS no marketing. Margins are small, you don't see a lotof advertising. Instead, you throw the game up on Yahoo! Games and what not, whine at them to give you some kind of prominent placement initially, and the traffic they generate exposes lots of people to your game, and if they like it, enough of them buy it to make everyone happy.

So becoming a publisher means you need to be able to do two things: raise your own funding, and make deals with the portals. The portals have limited business development bandwidth, and prefer to deal with a handful of publishers rather than hundreds of developers, so this is a potential bottleneck for most would-be self-publishers in the casual market--but GameLab has already had a hit, and can get their calls returned.

Which leaves dev funding; $300k, a typical casual game budget, is a lot less than the $10m needed in the conventional market, but it's still a fair chunk of change. Where has GameLab found it?

"Taking a page from the film industry, Gamelab is funding titles through project-based investment. Not a traditional game publishing deal and not venture capital, project-based investment has been bandied about the game industry for years - and now it's here. We already have one project underway funded through this model, a downloadable game about office life that we'll publish ourselves. More games funded on this model to come."

In other words, they've landed project finance, rather than equity finance. That is, they aren't selling a piece of their company to investors; they're selling a share of future revenues from a particular project. This is a common model in independent film, and it has some advantages from an investment perspective: You get your money out in a shorter timeframe (1-2 years) than you do when investing in a company (liquidity event in 5+ years, typically). Both sorts of investments are risky, of course, but the shorter time frame is a positive for some people.

GameLab doesn't tell us who their investors are, or how they found them, which is a pity; project finance is something the industry badly needs, and it would be nice to generalize this model for other developers as well.

In general, of course, if you're a small development shop you need to find money wherever and however you can, and you need to be creative about where to look:

The MacArthur Foundation is awarding a major grant to Gamelab and the Academic Co-Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The $1 million+ award will fund the research and development of Game Designer, innovative educational software that will teach junior high through university students about game design by letting them create and modify games. The Academic Co-Lab, headed by leading game scholar Jim Gee, will work closely with Gamelab throughout design and production. Game Designer is part of The MacArthur Foundation's ongoing support for research and innovation in digital media, youth, learning, and education."

Eric Zimmerman is, of course, an academic as well as GameLab's co-founder, and is therefore well positioned to look toward sources like this. The Serious Games movement looks for both foundation and government money in various regards--and there may be some opportunity for arts funding, for people with the right contacts into that world, too.

I don't quite know what to make of this one:

"Gamelab is teaming up with Curious Pictures, a leading NYC-based animation studio known for award-winning series like Kids Next Door and Sheep in the Big City. Curious and Gamelab are creating a narrative property that we'll publish as a downloadable game and bring to a variety of other media. Code-named BRENDA'S BRAIN, the project brings a Hello Kitty pop sensibility to the adult world of psychological quirks."

There's been a lot of talk over the years about creating properties that work both in games and other media, but mostly the result is, in essence, bad games based on movies created ostensibly with contribution for Hollywood dweebs (ala The Matrix games). Linear media and games are different beasts, and it's not easy to make this work. But whatever, given the industry's obsession with brands and licenses, this if nothing else helps elevate GameLab's profile.

All very interesting... Now let's see if GameLab produces something for gamers that might make sense for us to carry.
posted by Greg at 10:56 AM

I'm starting to get a tad excited, as things seem to be coming together now. Still a mountain of work, of course, but at least we've chipped away a good deal of it.

Most of the key features we need for the site are in place. There are certainly a lot of "wish list" items we won't have at launch, but that's okay, we'll deploy them over time. The priority at this point is getting the game pages feature complete and laid out the way we want them, so that we can start pouring content into the site in advance of launch. We're talking about 100+ titles at launch, so that's a lot of material to generate and get into the system in a relatively short period of time--we're currently aiming for May.

We also have a preliminary agreement in place with a provider for a demo-unlock solution; I won't mention the name until we have a signed contract, but it's pretty non-instrusive for users, and reasonably priced as such things go.

We have letters of intent from more than fifty developers or small publishers are present, and are working to turn those into actual contracts over the next couple of weeks. Not everyone I want, of course, but hopefully some of the people I do want will fall into line as well prior to launch. Naturally, we're in practically continuous meetings at GDC, which is okay; I've spent enough years attending sessions that I can do the business thing there fairly happily.

I haven't been pressing hard on fund-raising in the last couple of months, since my instinct is that we're likely to do a lot better with funding sources once the site is up and running--but I haven't dropped the effort wholly, and perhaps oddly, I'm getting better traction with institutional investors than angels at this point--three very positive conversations with VCs in the last two weeks. We may even wind up going straight to an institutional round, rather than doing a seed round--we'll see. In any event, we're putting together a "friends and family" round in the short term (probably by mid-April), largely because we're now starting to incur some more serious expenses: one of our developers was brought on full time for pay, to accelerate work on the site; our publicist is drawing cash; we'll have some software licensing fees to pay shortly; we'll have some costs pretty soon in terms of colo and hardware leasing fees; and even the party at GDC will set us back a couple of thousand. $30k committed to the round now, I hope to pull in another few people, but the round will be capped at $100k at most. $10k minimum investment. (And if you're interested in investing at this stage, let me know.)

I'd originally hoped to be live by GDC, but hey, you do what you can. And it looks like we're not far from that now, thankfully.
posted by Greg at 2:06 PM

Just a brief roundup of some items that caught my eye recently:

Whitedust interviews Elonka Dunin, community manager for Simutronics, not on her gaming efforts, but on cryptography; it's her hobby, and she's broken some pretty amazing codes. I can't believe the pic on the page is her, unless maybe they brought in a crack team of cosmetologists beforehand, though.

EA Changing Its Gameplan is about EA's efforts to develop its own IP (commentary also from Scott Miller) instead of relying on franchises and licenses. And about time. But of course, "original IP" doesn't mean "original game"; it could (and likely will) mean the same-old RTS, driver, FPS, whatever, but with a new and original title you haven't seen before without a digit following the name. Which is something, but not all that interesting.

I have a modest proposal. Instead, take the budget for one title, and fund ten titles at a tenth of the budget. Strive for original gameplay, not "original IP". Throw them out there, see what works, and take the one that sells best, and do version 2 at a triple-A level.

Do this five years runnning, and I pretty much guarantee you'll generate a hit at a Doom/Sims level. But no. That would be risky.

Keith Boesky says Hollywood is not the answer. Well, duh. But what was the question? (I'm being snarky--the sentiment is obvious, but few people in the industry seem aware of that. Good for Boesky that he's rousing some rabble.)

And Fargo has an excellent roundup of the IGF finalists.
posted by Greg at 5:18 PM

So if I were to start up a studio to do an MMO, what would I want?

People with unparalleled experience doing MMOs. Like, say, Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton.

Deep, deep pockets, like, say, those of Elevation Partners.

Wouldn't hurt to throw in some serious RPG experience like, say, that of Bioware.

And Austin, which outside of Korea has more MMO talent than any place in the world, would be a good place to put it.

Presto.
posted by Greg at 10:27 PM

Public health was one of the great triumphs of the Progressive era. Because of the way disease spreads, it is often worthwhile for society to invest in controlling disease at a higher level than individuals would do otherwise; if an individual can't afford the necessary drugs to control and cure his tuberculosis, for instance, it's very much in society's interest as a whole to ensure that he gets those drugs regardless.

Public health policy pretty much eradicated tuberculosis (though now it's back, largely via immigration from other countries as well as the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains), polio, rubella, smallpox, and innumerable other diseases. Today, public health policy is instrumental in controlling the spread of AIDs domestically.

However, partly becuase of past successes, public health policy today is in something of a muddle. Parents' resistance to having their children innoculated is spreading--an individual child runs a small risk of reaction to innoculation, so that it is in a parent's best interest to avoid innoculation, while ensuring that everyone else gets innoculated, so that the disease in question is unlikely to become epidemic and their at-risk child will not be exposed. This, coupled with alarmist nonsense from woo-woo alt health idiots, has led to increasing numbers of un-inoculated children, with potentially risky effects in future.

At the same time, diseases such as Lyme disease, West Nile virus, SARS, and a possible outbreak of bird flu among the human population, pose increasing public health risks that are not being adequately addressed.

While public health measures are mostly implemented on the state and local level, the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention is the national institution that coordinates public health policy across the nation. It serves a vital role in ensuring the nation's health, and given the dangers of emerging diseases, it needs to be better managed, and more focussed on its mission than it has been in recent years.

Thankfully, our nation's leaders are on the case, and are working today to ensure that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention focus on the single greatest risk to the nation's health: videogames.
posted by Greg at 10:41 AM

My first reaction to Bigfoot Networks $4m venture capital raise was, "Oh my god, they never learn."

The reason for that is simple; the first batch of venture-funded online game companies were TEN (the "Total Entertainment Network") and MPath. They were funded back in the mid-90's on the premise that they would "solve" the "fundamental technical problem" that was "holding back" the online games industry. That technical problem: lag. What they promised to do was to offer player matching and hosting services for games like Quake, along with speedier pipes, in exchange for a monthly subscription charge.

Both failed to succeed on that model. Turns out that online game developers built the expectation of 100-200ms latency into their games, so that the improvement in the player experience if you used TEN or MPlayer was marginal, at best. And it turns out that player-matching and hosting was widely available across the Internet for free, often from fans, and basically nobody was willing to pay a subscription fee.

Both companies transformed themselves from services for hardcore gamers to ad-supported casual game sites; TEN renamed itself "Pogo" and eventually sold to EA (for less, I believe, than the total venture investment in the company), and is now part of EA.com; MPath wound up having a surprise hit with a VoIP half-duplex chat solution, sold off its game service to Gamespy, went public as a VoIP solutions provider, and is now out of business.

In other words, the history of investment in "latency-reduction for games" is such that any reasonable person with a reasonable understanding of that history would say "dumb fuckin idea, get lost, kiddo."

But let's look a little closer. Bigfoot claims to have a hardware acceleration solution, and wants to sell cards to gamers.

Now, there are basically two sorts of online games: MMOs, and games involving a handful of players (RTS, FPS, racing, etc.). Lag is a big problem for MMOs, but hardware acceleration won't help you there, because lag happens primarily when there are a lot of people in a single area of the world. Lag happens because the servers are gasping, trying to handle all those objects moving around in a single area at once, and serving the necessary data simultaneously to a lot of people. In other words, hardware acceleration on the user's end is not going to make a piffle of difference.

With "handful of players" games, developers understand and expect that normal Internet latency is in the 100-200ms range, and design their games to handle latency at that level smoothly. It's not hard; people barely find latency at that level perceptible anyway, so you can do little tricks in terms of ensuring that critical game events don't have to be resolved any quicker than that ("the bullets take 200ms to fly to the target"), along with use of some predictive algorithms.

Lag does occur in such games, but mainly when the user has a sucky Internet connection--or is in "Internet Siberia." E.g., a Spaniard playing someone in China is going to have a lot worse latency than two people in California with good ISP connections to MAE West.

The traditional way of reducing latency on the Web has been "edge" services like Akamai. In essence, they replicate (cache) content from a central server on server farms all over the globe, so that when someone tries to fetch that content, they're drawing it from a server nearby in Internet terms, rather than from a distant server. This works; if you ping Yahoo, for instance, you'll find that latency is typically in the 20ms-50ms range, because Yahoo uses Akamai. This approach doesn't work for games, however, because game data is not cacheable in this sense--it changes rapidly, and has to be kept in synch across all players machines.

Bigfoot wants to sell you a card that sits in your machine and "reduces latency." But latency is a consequence of the configuration of the public Internet. Unless it connects to backbone fiber leased by Bigfoot that only carries game traffic, or somesuch, I don't see how this works. In fact, I'll make a prediction: It won't. Or if it does, the actual advantage will be minor.

But--when you think about it, they may actually be on to something here. Fast action gamers are willing to spend a lot of money to get minor incremental advantages over their opponents. A few tens of milliseconds can make a difference in an FPS, in terms of being able to notice and respond to an enemy before he notices and responds to you. Hardcore FPS heads are notorious purchasers of high-end machines with scads of system memory, because your box's speed of rendering can also reduce perceptible lag. And of course they all have broadband, because that actually does reduce latency--less because of the fatter pipe than because the process of encoding and decoding data over a dialup modem adds as much as 100ms of latency alone.

In other words--these kind of gamers might well spring a hundred clams on a card that claims to give them a minor competitive advantage. Even if that advantage is basically hype.

So yes, there might be a business here. But if so, it will be a business built largely on bullshit.
posted by Greg at 11:18 AM

1. If you don't approach, you don't score. Okay, the "three second rule" (don't hesitate, demonstrate your confidence and Alpha maleness by approaching within three seconds of noticing the target) doesn't apply--actually it makes sense to do some research on the firm first--but the basic rule pertains.

2. Always be confident. Needy guys are losers. Entrepreneurs who don't project confidence and passion in what they are doing don't get much beyond the door.

3. "Social proof" is essential. In picking up girls, this means they'll be more interested in you if other people in the social setting respond positively to you; it means they're getting a high status male. That's the idea behind using a wingman; even if no one else is making you look good, he (or she) will. In a VC context, this can mean a lot of different things; an introduction from an entrepreneur or associate of the VC is a lot more likely to spur interest than if you business plan comes in over the transom. Similarly, a lot of the things you do are essentially designed to increase your "social proof," a sense that you're connected and have good "domain knowledge"--having an impressive board of advisors, for instance.

4. Always be closing; always be working toward the score. Don't end a phone conversation or a meeting without a follow-up; if you can't bed the chick now, try to set up another meeting, or at least get a phone number.

5. Cut your losses. If it's clear you're not getting anywhere, don't waste your time. Find another target.

6. "Let's just be friends" is the kiss of death. It means she thinks you're a "nice guy" not the alpha male of her dreams; it means they want to pick your brains, not fund your company. However, if you do get LJBF, you may be able to use her as a wingman; her friendship provides social credibility with other girls. Similarly, if a VC won't invest but seems otherwise positive, try to get them to introduce you to other potential investors.

7. Mirror the values. With a chick, try to find out what's important to her (friends, family, work, whatever), and tell anecdotes that demonstrate that these things are important to you too. With a VC, try to find out what motivates their investments (trendy theories like Web 2.0 or the Long Tail; unfair competitive advantages that lock out others; scalability; branding; whatever) and tweak your pitch to appeal to their motivations.

8. Don't let the contact get stale. If you can't score tonight, get in touch ASAP and set up a meeting--not a "date" (that's scary) but perhaps coffee. If your first pitch doesn't get you a meeting, ping them in a week or two, with "new progress," and keep doing so as long as it still looks feasible. If you can pigeonhole them at a conference, do that too; don't drop off their radar.

9. Don't buy her a drink. That makes you a supplicant, not the confident, go-getting guy of her dreams. Similarly, project that you're offering a stellar opportunity, you will raise the money regardless, and they ought to be damn grateful to have the chance to participate.

10. For God's sake, shower, shave, and dress nicely before you go out hunting.
posted by Greg at 8:50 AM

A fair bit of web work today:

1. I added a page to the Manifesto Games site listing upcoming conferences and speaking engagements by Manifesto Games folk; it's also now on the blogroll at left as "speaking engagements." Mostly events I'll be at, though I expect to be adding a fair number from Johnny, who does a lot of speaking in the Atlanta area, in the near future.

2. Drastic changes to the blogroll, which was getting somewhat out of date. Links to Johnny's and Eleanor's blogs; the Paranoia blog now gets demoted from the top menu to a link there. (Sorry, Allen.) I also provide links to a couple of my sites (the SPI Compendium and the Manhattan address locator) which have been up for years, but I haven't linked from here before.

3. What used to be "indie games" is now "Heroes of the Revolution," and consists mainly of people who've committed to working with Manifesto Games, or in a few cases, who haven't yet, but whom we like a lot and have high hopes for. Here's someplace you can help out, actually: If you know of an independendently developed game that doesn't have a deal with a major publisher, and think we should be interested in carrying it, let me know. My first name (greg) with an at sign and "manifestogames.com" will get to me.

4. Used to have a long list of "game blogs," which I've now divided into "game developers' blogs," "game studies blogs," and "other interesting game blogs", which should give you an idea what you're getting into if you click on a link, anyway. I'm not trying to be exhaustive, here, incidentally, but just to link to ones I've found interesting in the past.

5. Similarly, it probably doesn't surprise readers to learn that I've been reading blogs from a number of VCs recently. Many aren't terribly interesting, but I've listed those I've found useful in the blogroll as well.

6. Oh, and I added The Underdogs to the "preserving game history list." The industry considers them a vile piratical abandonware site; I think this kind of effort is essential to preserving games that might otherwise disappear.
posted by Greg at 8:40 PM

So I'm a member of the Digital Games Research Association, since in a former life (like, last year) I was a 'games researcher.' But I've been corresponding with Bruce Whitehill recently, and he's made me aware that there's a whole community of what you might call game studies academics, but for non-digital games.

Vide:

International Society for Board Game Studies
Musee Suisse du Jeu

And slightly less relevant:

Association of Game and Puzzle Collectors

Tres cool. Now what would be even more interesting is to have the DiGRA conference and a Board Game Studies Colloqium work together and run in the same place at the same time. It would be fascinating to get these two groups talking to each other.
posted by Greg at 6:26 PM