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Opinion: The Personality Problem
by Brandon Sheffield [PC, Console/PC, Mobile Phone, Mobile Console, Indie, Exclusive]
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June 8, 2009
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[With crowds of newly minted iPhone games jostling for consumer attention, Game Developer EIC Brandon Sheffield looks at the iPhone App Store and sees it as a microcosm of the industry at large.]
A friend of mine recently released a game for iPhone by the name of Trixel. It’s a fine puzzle game, somewhat similar to Lights Out, in which you flip mismatched colored tiles to match an existing tile image. People who play it definitely seem to like it.
But visually, this game has almost no personality. Certainly, the tiles are large and colorful, there are power-ups and collectibles, and the audio was carefully attended to. But if you look at a screenshot and a description, you would likely not be compelled.
Another group of friends, the folks at Capybara Games, put out an iPhone game called Critter Crunch. This is a puzzle game as well, similar to Magical Drop, and starring a cute frog-thing that eats cutely animated characters. Now, I can’t really speak to which of these two games is more successful, but I can say that if I look at a screenshot of each, one compels me with characters and bright colors, whereas the other looks either a bit kiddie or a bit math-oriented, depending on how you feel about it (and in reality, the game can get a bit hardcore).
Taken as a microcosm of the industry, the iTunes App Store emphasizes some larger industry truths. In the case of something so impulse-buy-oriented as iPhone games, when a number of free titles already exist, one really needs a hook to succeed.
But then, hooks are necessarily oriented toward certain audiences. Some folks may really like the cute characters in Critter Crunch, but others may be completely turned off. Both Trixel and Critter Crunch are good, and both lie within the puzzle genre. So how do you get people interested in Trixel, when Critter Crunch is sitting next to it in the virtual shelves?
Looking at the bigger picture, console games are only on the store shelves for a limited time, before they’re shuffled away to make room for something new. They have very limited space in which to get the interest of the consumer who just wanders into a GameStop looking for something new to play, which happens more than most of us realize.
Someone like you or I will go to the store with a head full of previews, trailers, screenshots, story descriptions, and maybe a few behind-the-scenes stories. But the average consumer is just showing up at a store, looking to be entertained. These games need to grab consumers immediately as well, and have something the idle browser can latch on to.
Casual Consumers
I recently overheard a conversation in a GameStop—a late-teens customer walked in, and found the box art for Final Fantasy XII appealing. He brought it to the cashier and asked what kind of game it was. “An RPG,” was the response. “Oh. What’s that?” “Um, you know, a role-playing game. You have a group of guys, and you go on a quest, and you level up and stuff.” “Oh. Is that fun?”
This anecdote just shows that we can’t rely on the store itself to sell our products. Developers complain about releasing games on Apple’s App Store amidst a sea of other titles, with no way to distinguish a title other than getting featured by Apple. Well shouldn't we be used to dealing with that by now?
The same thing happens in retail. And indeed, isn’t it better than a situation in which your game drops out of the store entirely after a couple months, as with retail? And there are no used games there to cannibalize your actual sales (though one could argue that free games might take a chunk away).
So at this point it becomes a marketing issue. I wouldn’t say that independent iPhone developers need a marketer, but they do need to do some marketing themselves. I’m not just talking about sending out free review codes to folks you might know in the media, though that helps a lot. The reason a personality-free game like Sudoku is so popular now is likely because of this kind of marketing—the mom-oriented media got ahold of it, and it took off.
What I’m talking about is “marketing” in the actual planning phase. If you want the game to sell, realize you’re not just making it for people who innately get it, like you—you’re making the game for people like that GameStop customer. People who don’t understand your game, because they haven’t played it, and have maybe never played anything in the genre. For these people, you need appealing screenshots that make your game look like something. You need a compelling description, and possibly a demo.
That’s the kind of marketing I mean—marketing at the base level. Questions like “Who will this appeal to visually? How can I describe my game in three sentences?” should be at the front of your mind. The kinds of questions publishers would ask, if you had one. Show the game to your mom, or your kid, or your neighbor, and see what they think.
Market in Focus
A lot of companies and developers want to reach larger mainstream audiences, and the iPhone takes all the elements of the wider game industry and puts a greater focus on it. The game has to look pretty, but simple. The concept has to be easy to understand, but difficult to master. It’s everything we’re doing for AAA titles, but under a microscope. I think there are a lot of lessons to learn here, and the iPhone could potentially be used as a test market for larger concepts.
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It's very funny (and scary) to see this, and you can go to your local game retailer to see a similar situation. Unlike the movie/music industry, outside of a "Girls Games" and "Kids Entertainment" the games are not sorted by any kind of genre - blame it on the grey lines of 'genre' games are now-adays. Try imagining going into a video store where they just have a section called "DVD", "Blu-ray", "VHS", "Music" then everything is in alphabetical order for each categoy. It would be hard for me to find something I like.
Given how this is the New Releases section is, I don't ever bother looking at anything in the rest of the store, because everything on all the other shelves which are sorted by genre seems to be movies older than 5 years that I wouldn't want to see, because they can't sell the things at half price like they do with all of the other movies that aren't too new but aren't too old either.
It's essentially a movie store where you can't ever find anything you want, even though you know a bunch of things have just been released to DVD. Just thought I'd throw in that aside to point out that your last comment isn't just specific to games. It's a problem with the stores themselves, and I don't think it's new to just the iPhone. The iPhone would be just the latest major iteration of the problem.
This suggests that the problem is the utter illiteracy/ignorance of consumers, a total lack of awareness. Rather than continuing to pander to these apathetic people, we ought to start applying soup-Nazi tactics to beat some sense into their thick heads ;)
This gives me the idea to start each game with a questionnaire a-la Leisure Suit Larry: "Do you like Snood?"; "Yes" -> game deletes itself and/or formats the HD.
I'd like to point out that plenty of people today do not play Final Fantasy, even amongst experienced gamers such as myself, just as plenty of people did not play Phantasy Star or Ys twenty years ago when those franchises first started and were considered (by those of us who played them) to be the "gold standard" for RPGs (and still are, for some of us). No one should make assumptions about someone else, nor does having specific experience make someone superior to another person. We cannot expand the market if we make assumptions about those who are not currently part of it, and we cannot share our experiences with each other if we make assumptions about people who are currently involved (and have been for decades, in some cases).
Of course, this also means that the teen in question should not simply ask, "Is that fun?" because what is "fun" to anyone is subjective to that individual. However, the store clerk should be trained to explain this fact by asking what types of interests and activities the customer has, and encouraging the customer to share things they enjoy in order for the clerk to make informed recommendations.
- Tags. Your typical flashy puzzle will have a few different tags than the "serious" one. Tagging art works very well for music, and not badly for movies and books.
- Relating IPs. This is already part of the game design, and should maybe be more emphasized by press and retailers to help customers. Sub-themes can be used, such as "this game looks like, is played like, etc." IMDB does a pretty good job at relating movies and series between them ("if you like this you could also appreciate:..."), but obviously games need more detailed, sub-themed comparisons.
- Giving clues on most consumers behavior. You could sort games by "popular" (appeals to most people), "hardcore" (appeals mostly to fans of the genre or the IP), "female/male audience", and so on. True, some publishers would hate their game to be compared to others. Yet also true, customers need it. Added to the fact that most people don't strictly comply with such categorization, but feel reassured by its existence: "I'm going deeper into this genre, and this is not the usual-me, but at least I know it, I know I'm trying something."
I believe this kind of honest, blunt talk is what retailers and the press are here to provide for the customer. Publishers should not interfere in this process, rather it is in their interest to ease it, and help match the right customer to the right game. Trying to draw "anyone" is just plainly unrealistic and even worse on the long term: "anyone" includes few to (too?) many disappointed buyers (it's a matter of taste) that will see the publisher negatively just because they once took the wrong game for them.
As for AAA products, all this intell is just vital to their visibility on the market.
@Matt Ponton: Not every store organizes as such, though. For example, pretty much every HMV I've walked into organizes games primarily by platform, then their own form of organization, such as "Action", "Sports", "Family Oriented", etc. Just like their music, it works rather well (and I guess as a primarily music-selling store, they already have the organizational tools in place).
What you're describing as "marketing" is often referred to as "product management" in biz school. The idea that your product is not developed in a vacuum. Having customer interaction early on. Beyond focus groups and testing, it involves talking to customers and asking them open ended questions about what they enjoy (e.g. "What games do you like to play?" vs. "Would you enjoy playing a match-3 puzzle game."). This allows you to understand the customer's needs so that your game can serve them best.
I agree that the iPhone allows this process to be done quickly and at low cost. It should also employeed on AAA titles, but my experience has shown me that more people stray in the direction of making the game that they always wanted to instead of listening to the customer.
-- So many new gamers are unaware of the traditional classifications that seeing titles in what to them is just jumbles only confuses them. Confused shoppers don't buy.
and...
-- Retailers such as BB, WalMart and Target don't carry a broad enough selection of titles to make such sections viable nor are the clerks at such locations likely as knowledgeable regarding different genres and the games that would belong in each.