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I had the privilege of being part of an OUYA event in Austin this past Friday with OUYA founder Julie Uhrman. She graciously took the time to answer questions from Austin developers about everything from the reported yearly hardware updates to parental control guidelines. Most notably, the issue of storefront curation came up.
Her response was in line with this Michael McWhertor article on Polygon from Friday. I believe Julie Uhrman cares about curation, so let’s get that out of the way. My issue with their plan as a whole is the focus on what is referred to as “real metrics of engagement..” She posits that sales charts and download numbers don’t properly curate -- something on which she and I agree.
Her granular plan right now, as I understand it, is to take metrics like how often a game is played among its download base and whether a certain game is played first when the player turns on the OUYA and use them to create “engagement” charts that will serve to curate games on this incredibly open platform. Those metrics, to me, are a couple of versions of a curation story most players I know could tell.
Games are becoming so diverse -- often indescribable -- that the idea of taking quantitative measures of engagement seems like only part of an equation. Let’s lay out a very specific scenario that shows the importance of tweaking OUYA’s current curation strategy.
A few weeks ago, I bought all five episodes of Kentucky Route Zero at once for $25 instead of $7 for each individual episode. That’s not really an important detail aside from telling you what a good deal I think that is and you should jump on that train. I played the first episode in one afternoon. Without spoiling anything, I could easily play it again and make different choices to see how they play out, but I’m not going to. Do you know why? It’s not because I didn’t like the game. On the contrary, I loved it. I’m not going to replay it because the choices I made felt personal and going back to undo them seems like a disservice to how I imagine the remaining four episodes will play out for my personal protagonist.
That’s a special feeling and a special game. I imagine many who play it will feel as I do regarding staying true to choices.
I won’t speak for Cardboard Computer (developers of KRZ), but as the head of another independent studio making games that don’t necessarily fit the mold of “high engagement metrics” as Julie Uhrman describes them, the current plan scares me. If KRZ or a similar title comes to OUYA and the only curation on display is informed by the engagement metrics, lots and lots of people are going to miss out on something important.
That drives me nuts.
I know Uhrman says they’re kicking around additions to the current curation plan, which may be totally true and will fix everything and this will be a non-issue. My hunch, though, is that they’re attracted to Valve’s current model of not paying for any kind of curation whatsoever and letting the public decide the fate of what makes it, what doesn’t make it, what gets promoted, what gets buried, etc. I see the attractiveness there for a company trying to stay lean. I wish I had their restraint in terms of lean operation, but that’s another blog entry.
Might I suggest a quasi-free alternative? Another Austin developer and I were discussing things on Friday and he mentioned that having 3rd party critics (note: a critic and a reviewer are not necessarily the same) create lists either weekly or monthly and having OUYA promote them along with the engagement metric lists. An easy candidate would be Austin’s own Brandon Boyer, founder of the brilliant Venus Patrol. He already creates lists of awesome, often-easy-to-miss gems that even people like me (someone super plugged-in to industry goings on) see slip through the cracks. Recruit him (or people like him) and cross-promote their lists. Lots of very smart people are already curating online, so just make it an official OUYA curation squad and drive traffic to their causes.
That’s how they can stay lean and tweak the metrics system in one fell swoop. I just wish Steam Greenlight would add that functionality. When OUYA adds more curation than engagement metrics, they can consider me a total believer. Until then, I remain a healthy skeptic.
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My hunch is that Julie Uhrman and the rest of the crew have done and will continue to do a good job listing to players and devs and coming up with solutions that benefit everyone.
All the stuff like recommendations, reviews, user (or critic) created lists and the tools to help users actually find stuff in the store is all great, and I think it'll probably come. But not right away, because all that stuff takes time to code, whilst metrics are relatively quick and easy to implement and tweak
I think also it is worth saying that no matter how good a store is, developers can't rely on it for all their marketing. It can't be just a case of throwing it on the store and expecting to kick back and watch the downloads rack up. The store that benefit one gameplay style or game genre might not favour another, so game devs should assume it won't work for them and still pursue those other channels
Devs will (and should) explore other channels, but isn't it the platform holder's ultimate goal to get developers to jump head first and not have to worry about other channels? I'm not in hardware manufacturing or platform building, so I have no idea, I guess. Just a feeling I have about "the ideal" success of a platform.
This system is interesting, but limiting, which seems to be the kind of thing they're trying to avoid.
But more to the point, I wonder if these engagement metrics (tracking playtime, length of time the game remains installed, and so on) would even do a good job of representing how the audience feels about games with more of a focus on "gameplay" (however we distinguish that from "story"). I can't count the number of times I've seen people in forums and discussion threads make comments like "I played Skyrim for 20/50/100/250 hours [or WoW for 6 years, or whatever] before deciding it was crap."
A game's ability to draw players in via the stickiness of its systems, in other words, doesn't always seem to correlate very reliably with those selfsame players' evaluation of how much they enjoyed the game. It makes me suspect that human curation really is incomparable with metrics-tracking, but that's a much larger subject.
1) It requires approval merely to be included in it at all. (even in the case of Greenlight).
2) Games are featured in many curated positions, including the Store home page slideshow, Daily Deals, and "Specials."
The more automated lists that Steam produces also have a lot of variety:
1) Games your friends have spent the most time playing recently.
2) Games your friends have recently purchased.
The point being: In the end, EVERY digital storefront starts off simple and adds more ways of getting quality games discovered. OUYA's solution sounds like it improves on the standard 'charts' offered by Apple and Google Play, and will probably work well for most of the games out there. Even in the situation you described, a 1-hour game that is played to completion by most of its players will appear much higher on the list than a free-to-play game that most players drop in the first five minutes.
There's nothing wrong with that for many players and that's cool with me. My issue is that Valve used to have a person (and it was apparently a single person) sorting through emails and unofficial applications and buzz looking for games that stood out and fit the Steam mold. When Greenlight was created (much cheaper than curation), they threw out that up-front curation entirely except for existing Steam developers and publishers. What they do with their storefront is a type of curation, yes, that's true. However, Greenlight feels like a barrier of entry for many new or young developers who see what makes it in (i.e. The War Z) and can't help but feel a little helpless about their chances of even making it on the storefront.
It's their platform and they're not hurting. I understand that. They've built an extremely successful business that people like me can only dream of at this point. Your assessment that OUYA improves on the "sales" model of curation is apt -- I do think it's better. What's OUYA about, though? Openness. Dialogue between players and developers. I think adding qualitative curation -- even free outsourced curation that takes place every day on the internet -- help add value to OUYA as a platform for developers and players alike.
Because I always get the impression some people think it is a magic pill. You just need good curation and all good games will find their way into the hands of the public and be successful and everybody will live happily ever after.
No matter the sheer numbers of games or how similar they are to each other.
Maybe I am just reading that into the opinions of some folks. But I always get that vibe.
That's crazy, though. I know that. Just like solutions to any complicated problem there will always be gaps. Even great titles will fall through the cracks and land outside of Engagement Box and Curation Box and that sucks. I guess my hope is that OUYA (or any open platform) will at least build that second box.
If that's where you stop your analysis you're going to conclude that all curation systems are equally unsuitable.
That's not ironclad, but quantitative plus qualitative equals a pretty well-rounded view of what's worth playing, don't you think?
(Obviously ask for examples of publications aimed at gaming in general, not indie/dev specialized things)
etc.
Not dissimilar to Pandora Radio where you pick some of your favourite artists/tracks and it recommends similar artists/tracks and adds them to your playlist, and you can either leave them or remove them.
Obviously it has to be better than the Steam Recommendation system which keeps recommending things that you've opted not to be recommended in the past.
1) As Steven C mentions above - analyze game playing behavior and recommend games based on similarities - most of the web and mobile analytics companies have plenty of data to support promoting your game to people they know will like your game... app stores can do the same
2) Recognize that the business model effects the curation method. In fact the business model should be highly dependent on the kind of game you make. Not every game should be F2P, choosing wisely is key to a games success - F2P games should be curated based on conversion, and engagement - Pay games should be curated based on player satisfaction ratings - Episodic or Subscription games should be curated based on ratings and repeat business (number of episodes purchased or months on subscription) - there are kinds of games that would do best with ad-based revenue, curating them should probably be based on audience size.
You only have to look at the Amazon model, verses YouTube model, verses F2P App Store model to see that people consume content in a variety of ways. Even just comparing music on iTunes to Spotify shows that the same content can be consumed in multiple, profitable, ways.
The eternal arguments of indie games as art and retail games vs F2P games shows that there is no one size fits all solution to making, discovering or enjoying a game. So your curation system has to account for the business model when it ranks competing apps.
The app stores need to have video trailers and promotion graphics (icons and screenshots with ad copy) - we've seen from the recent DICE talk by Jesse Schell that try-before-you-buy is only hurting sales so skip trials altogether... unless you find a kind of game that breaks that rule too. This is an iterative process.
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