Does the Picture on the Box Matter?

I'm a big fan of what Nintendo is doing. I think their focus on Innovation and Fun is right on the mark. So, I rarely make any effort to note where they are missing the mark, but with WiiFit mania soon to come upon in the US, I can't help but think Nintendo has made a mistake.

The box on the right is what WiiFit looks like in Europe and Japan. I love it. It says so many things without cluttering up the box. The sense of exercise is quite strong, with a focus on silhouettes.

This box is the US Box. I think it is a disaster.

Why?

The box says toy.

I think a lot of the success that Nintendo has had in the US, which of the 3 regions appears to be where it has the most success, has been due to the Wii being purchased by many groups of people. This box tries to capitalize on that by putting many groups of people on the box. There is a problem with doing that. By putting everyone on the box, you for sure put something on the box that makes someone feel like they don't relate.

In this case I think the box makes the Wii less mainstream and more kid. It feels more like boardgame boxes from 10 years ago that had the family all around the game smiling. There is nothing wrong with that image, but it does preselect a specific group. In this case, it selects against people who want to pull the game out with their older friends. A group of all 40 year or 20 year olds doesn't want to pull out a board game at their party where on the box half of the people are kids. By putting faces to the box you've started selecting groups, which makes some people feel less inclined to be involved.

The Japan box doesn't have these issues b/c it skipped them entirely. The US box is likely to make Mom just a little more likely to refer to the Wii as a kid's toy...which is exactly the opposite of the message that Nintendo has been successfully conveying for the last 18 months.

I'm sure the US will still sell many copies of WiiFit, but I worry that if this approach continues, that the Wii will become a kid's toy in the US, which will ultimately keep it from reaching the marketshare it could otherwise reach.

The recent ads for Mario Kart Wii, only serve to make me more concerned that Nintendo of America may have lost its way when it comes to marketing their very popular console.

Casual Games & Manifestos

I read through The Casual Games Manifesto on Gamasutra today and I got all the way through despite wanting to respond immediately to some of what I saw. I guess I'm a little jaded and I'm sure it didn't help in my reading comprehension.

I do agree with one underlying point of the article, you should use the portals in the casual games market to create customers for you if you are a developer. I talked about it at length at the GDC last year, and it continues to be true! ...and there is a whole additional market-place that developers aren't taking advantage of...but should...and it's a topic for another day.

One of the issues that I had with the article is the difficulty in creating customers from the portals. The portals clamp down hard on anything that looks like a link to another website or a service running on another server inside the games they offer. I'd be surprised if you could find a way to get much traffic from them that way.

The other issue I have is an on-going one that isn't exactly in the article. So the above is officially the end of my critique, and now I'm moving onto an almost related rant...

That second issue I have is the assumption that it is easy to get traffic or build up a website. Honestly, I worry that most developers, since they don't do websites, presume it is easy to create a huge website...just because they don't have any experience.

It brings to mind a favorite Dilbert comic:
Dilbert's Manager says "I put together a timeline for your project. I started by reasoning that anything I don't understand is easy to do."
"Phase One: Design a client-server architecture for our worldwide operations."
"Time: six minutes."

I can see Dilbert's stunned look on his face, unsure of what to say next.

Let's consider this for a moment.
How hard do you think it would be to create and run slashdot.org?
How about msnbc.com?
How about espn.com?
How about bigfishgames.com?

According to compete.com and collaborated by alexa.com (except alexa groups espn with go.com...) bigfishgames.com is the biggest of those sites. Stop and think about that for a minute...

That amount of traffic and what it takes to create and keep up a website of that size is ANYTHING but trivial. Creating and keeping that up is amazing. The type of thing that teams of people spend millions of dollars on and fail at most of the time. I'm not writing this to build up BFG, who we compete and cooperate with, but to just point out how enormous the task is of building up traffic like the portals have. The middlemen are middlemen because they are good at it. I encourage everyone to take on the market to the best of their abilities of course, but I wouldn't under-estimate the task.

...and back on point, I strongly agree with the point that you should try to steal the portal's traffic and re-route them to you and that you should build up a reason for that traffic to stay with you. I don't know that you can build a service into your game, but that doesn't mean you can't create a community of games that can be broken into separate pieces and sold through the portals for some name recognition...and maybe include some reasons for players to go looking for you :).

Daikatana & Airport Mania?

The programmer who I've been working with on Airport Mania sent me the following image as a gag, which considering the light-hearted nature of Airport Mania contrasted with Daikatana's in-your-face approach only makes it all the more funny. I couldn't resist but to share :). If you're not familiar with Daikatana's famous ad, check it out here.

Incidentally, Airport Mania is set for limited release (meaning it's only available in one place - http://www.airportmania.com/) this Thursday April 10th, with a full release through Reflexive.com on the 14th and your favorite portal in the coming weeks! :)

The Indie Games Summit + My game

I'm at the GDC this week and will be hanging out at the Indie Games Summit Monday and Tuesday, and the IGF booth some of the rest of the time (Reflexive's own Axiom Overdrive is a finalist).

I kept somewhat copious notes of the first day of the Indie summits. There were some great presentations, including a very solid basic marketing presentation by Introversion. You can ready my highlights, responses and all my notes at GameTunnel (http://www.gametunnel.com/articles.php?id=673)

As well a sneak peak look at the game I've been working on is now up over on my Reflexive blog. The game is Airport Mania: First Flight, and I describe it as a mix between Aerobiz (one of my favorite SNES games) and Diner Dash. The game is more click-management than sim. YOu can see a bunch of not quite final pics of the game at Reflexive (http://www.reflexive.com/index.php?PAGE=Blog&BID=162)

Oh, and if you are at the GDC, be sure to say 'hi.'

Piracy and Casual Games

My latest article has been published over at Gamasutra, and it has create a good bit of stir. I'm actually pretty happy about that as I really hoped it would be the springboard to some good discussion.

I thought I'd put in some additional details here in my blog. I ended up cutting 3 pages from that article while writing, which is very abnormal for me, but it was just TOO dry a read to keep all the info in.

On Ricochet Infinity the 92% piracy again was comparing full version against full version.

Some more numbers on that game: (these thanks to James C Smith, who made the game)
43% of the downloaded copies (including demos) went online (which means we can't track 57% - they may have not installed or not gone online, but as I mentioned in my article we can't assume that those who didn't go online were less likely to pirate than those who did go online)

Full data of all the downloads (from Reflexive.com):
2.3% Bought the game
29% Pirated the game
14% Went online with the demo
57% Never went online

So the 92% is the percentage of the full versions used online that were pirated.

The encouraging piece of all the numbers, I suppose (other than the very high CR of RI) is that of the non-pirates, the percentage who bought the game was a pretty high conversion ratio. I've often stated that the XBLA conversion ratios are inflated due to the $300 barrier of entry...people had to have already spent $300 to get to XBLA, clearly they are people who spend money on games. Online we cater to people who do and who won't. Clearly, if you removed the pirates (who according to the Ricochet Infinity numbers may account for 67% of ALL downloads in the casual space) the conversion ratio of the entire casual games industry would increase a lot :).

Another piece of data that seems useful is when we made the Fixes to the DRM.
Fix 1 was 12/15/05
Fix 2 was 7/12/06
Fix 3 was 4/18/07
Fix 4 was 12/5/07 + 12/12/07 (there was a minor follow-up to this fix)

Ricochet Infinity was released on 7/31/07

I actually had wanted to write this article months ago, but with the recency of that last fix...which was being worked on obviously prior to November, I wanted to give us at least some time to get a feel for how the results went.

Notably, that first Fix had dramatic sustainted results. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but that change is CLEARLY visible in the growth charts that we keep here at Reflexive. (and incidentally, a modified version of one of those growth charts was in my IGS powerpoints from last year's GDC...(text video)

Two last thoughts
I had planed to talk about one potentially positive result of piracy that I found interesting, but couldn't fit it into the article well, so I'll mention it here. In Ricochet Infinity anyone can create a level set and upload it to the server and watch it become popular...or ignored :). We've found that a good portion of pirates created level sets. I find that fascinating myself and it may speak to some possibilities of using piracy to a positive end.

The 1000:1 ratio is really, I think, the key takeaway of the article. Several people have grasped that and started applying it to different numbers in the industry, and the results are very disappointing. Clearly if we could always have a big gain from a fix that maintains itself, it is worth spending the time to fight piracy. However, since that isn't always the case, it can sometimes (often?) be pretty discouraging to try and stop piracy. I don't think that means that we should be any least earnest in our fight, but the ratio is quite interesting. I'd love to see some other portals disclose their numbers publicly to further the discussion :).