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The Web
Some people may disagree with this statement, but frankly if there is one platform where most of the radical innovation in video game design is happening, that platform is the World Wide Web. For every innovative Wii game in the market, there are dozens of innovative Flash games.
It's not only because the barriers of entry and the production costs are lower, it's also a platform open for experimentation. You can throw something out there, discover that you wanted to change something, change it on your server, and boom, it's available for everybody else.
If you were at the Experimental Workshop at GDC, you probably have seen that a lot of the games shown in the workshop were made for the web.
It's pretty tricky to monetize those games, though. But there are some ways of paying the bills. Some people are going the way of non-exclusive licenses. Sites such as Miniclip, Addicting Games, and others have been paying for one-time fees for licensing games. Sometimes they'll ask for exclusivity, and they are willing to pay a premium for that.
Some developers such as Nitrome and Paul Preece (creator of Desktop Tower Defense) have been able to license out their content while keeping it on their web sites. They have amassed a good number of players per month on their own web site, and they run various kinds of ads around and before their games start. So, in other words, by licensing the game out they cover most of the development costs, and they also make money from their own audience.
Some of the tools to use to put ads in your games are Google AdSense, 24/7 Real Media, and MochiAds. Here is a nice integration of Google Video Ads in a game. With most of these services, you won't make tons of money unless you get a lot of traffic (and I'm putting a lot of emphasis in a lot).
MochiAds is probably the one to keep a close eye on. The technology allows you to embed your ad inside your game, so regardless if someone takes your game off your site and puts it somewhere else, it will still print ads from MochiAds inside your game, and you will still make money. They also provide MochiBot, a technology that lets you track all kinds of things, from where your game is played from, to how many people reached level nine.
Developers should also keep an eye on sites like Kongregate, which have been sharing ad revenue. Their traffic has already surpassed two million monthly visitors. Two projects to also have in your radar are Whirled and ourWorld. Three Rings, creators of Puzzle Pirates, is behind Whirled. It's a virtual world with social networking features, and I believe it will be a very solid platform, as those guys have been working on online games for years. ourWorld is made by FlowPlay. They have a great avatar and virtual world technology, and they were one of the few companies to be selected in the TechCrunch 40.
I'm also going to include Facebook and the other social networks in this category. Even though a lot of people will consider them a different beast, they are still games on the web. And I'm going to partly agree with those who are not that optimistic about this.
I believe that social networking is proving one thing: that casual gamers want to play against their friends (something that a lot of casual gaming veterans doubted), and that the shelf life of a successful social networked game is much higher due to its viral effect that helps it to keep momentum.
But if you are a game developer and you tie your game to just one social network, you are shooting yourself in the foot, as you are losing a lot of the potential audience that uses the other networks. Your best bet is to see how can you create a web game that can be either be accessed from inside a social network and out of it, and make use of the features a social network has...
...which is what companies like Zynga and Mytopia are doing. Zynga has created almost a dozen games that run on Facebook. But today in their Texas Hold'em game a Facebook user can play against a MySpace user. They have also created a "social bar" that any developer can add to their game. This bar sits on top of every game in the Zynga Network and tells a player what games his/her friends are playing. It's a good way of promoting games, as it's likely that you will play games your friends play.
In the case of Mytopia, they claim to have eight games (mostly parlor games) that run on the three major social networks, but at the time of this writing we couldn't check it out for ourselves as our access account has not been validated.
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You seem to imply that marketing cannot possibly be a source of innovative ideas. I'm an engineer, but I think this is an unhealthy attitude to have. A smart company will have a marketing department that recognizes the importance of innovation for sustaining their business, and they will actively make innovative games a part of the company's portfolio.
Sure, more often than not, marketing will want developers to make "Post-Apocalyptic Shooter 3: A New Gimmick." But if they're smart, they will also promote risky, innovative ideas. These days, with digital distribution, small innovative games can make economic sense.
I guess all I'm saying is, innovative ideas _can_ come from marketing :)
What hurts the most to me are our fellow artists in other art fields. You ask a photographer about art he likes and he or she will gladly give you examples from film, painting, architecture, literature as well as photography. I'm looking forward to the day photographers, film-makers, architects, writers and painters will start looking at games and think about them as an art-form. And I'm pretty sure they would prefer something like Rez over an interactive tutorial.
The point I was making though is told through your second paragraph: there is a lack of a vocabulary, a common vocabulary, with which people from a variety of circles can talk and discuss a game about. And even if there were, this vocabulary may still be very distinct between two or more groups as video games are a multimedia form of ... well, whatever you want to call 'em.
When you ask a player to describe their time and to discuss playing GTA, they will describe it very differently than a designer would; the former describing their experience while the designer would describe the game/game mechanics, use of physics, pacing of missions, etc. This would be distinct again from an artist who would probably describe it through the art (technical and artistic) - texture, building layout, ability to minimize pop-in, etc. Even the way a QA tester plays and views the game is distinctly different than a normal player of the game. The way the QA tester, the designer, and the artist abstract the game are very different. Everyone sees Rez through different colored glasses. This is, perhaps, somewhat a result of the immaturity of video games, the highly technical aspect of it, as well as pure social conventions, and the varied intents among other things. To boot, someone making a game to make a point (a game about Darfur) has different goals and intents and vocabulary than someone making Warcraft 3 - the former may not be all that concerned about actual gameplay while the latter will be very concerned - both will describe what they want differently.
With that in mind, my point was that the sort of vocabulary a psychologist wants to use with a game to deal with in terms of what they want out of it is different than the sort of vocabulary that a game theorist will want. I suppose, then, the ultimate point I'm suggesting is that there first needs to be an internal vocabulary with which we can talk with as other mediums and sciences have (contrast, saturation, pacing, long shot, etc and rules of how to form a good, say, action sequence from other forms) - vocabulary that is shared, common, and accepted no matter who is talking or listening. So when discussing story versus gameplay, however you feel, you can talk about it in concrete and meaningful terms. So that talking about player experience is as meaningful an abstraction to anyone of any game discipline as phat loot.
Once we have that, then we can attempt to merge that vocabulary as developers of games with the vocabulary of other fields. We can have someone talk about why and how a game works and everyone can nods in agreement even if they don't personally like the piece.
She couldn't recreate the experience the previous player had because Rez is a game that you can truly enjoy if you had previous experience playing a shooter.
When I first brought a Wii console to my house, and as most people, she was able to have a really good skill level in Wii Tennis in minutes. She truly enjoyed the game, but she wouldn't qualify it as an artistic experience as the game is based in a popular sport.
More people will be able to talk about games once they truly experience them. If they just watch, they are just simply espectators and they may use the conventions of the audiovisual field to describe what they see, without exploring the concepts of gameplay.
But confusing "innovative" with "independant" leads to false views. Actually:
- not every indie developper wants to make innovative game
- not every "dependant" developer is unable to make innovative game.
If you draw a table exploring the different cases (indy+innov, indy+not(innov), not(indy)+innov, etc..) it's probable that each cell will be filled with many games. A more accurate survey, with real numbers, would be interesting here ;-)
I think independance and innovation are quite different in theory. But only in theory, because lower development cost allows self funding. It would be interesting to study if it is "self funding" (allowing the creative freedom of single author) or "lower cost" (allowing more risk taking), which is the most favouring innovation.
Inversely, big funding can also favor innovation (eg: Nintendo), but it seems quite rare.
It's possible that innovation is actually related to some "skill or culture of innovation", that must be explicitly cultivated, refined and improved within the company.
Interesting studies for academics !! ;-)
I don't see where can I be quoted that innovation can only happen at independent outlets, although I agree it will be an interesting article to look at what makes an innovative environment.
You have to realize too that at some point we have to draw the line. If we consider that every game clone out there made by a 15 year old can be considered an "independent" game then we are putting the independent label to a load of crap.
Try going at Gametunnel and IGSource and JayisGames and count how many games featured there have not tried to be different or innovative in something. That's going to be a small table for sure.
But to your point, we probably need to make a semantic change in my definition, so we are inclusive of those who like to make games just different in themes or stories instead of game mechanics:
"An independent game is above all trying to innovate OR provide a new experience for the player. It is not just filling a publisher's portfolio need. It has not been invented at a marketing department. And it has not been designed by a committee."
Cheers,
Juan