Freemium Is Growing In Games

The counterintuitive move of giving away apps — or games — for free seems to be gaining ground. The trick is to charge power users for more features or goods:

Game Makers Give Away ‘Freemium’ Products - Brian X Chen via NYTimes.com

Natalia Luckyanova and Keith Shepherd, a husband-and-wife team in North Carolina, learned this lesson when, in August, they released a 99-cent iPhone game called Temple Run. In the game, players must stay a step ahead of angry apes while avoiding booby traps and collecting coins. The game had some initial success but soon started losing traction.

In September, the couple began offering Temple Run free and promoted it through Free App a Day, a Web site that features free games. The game immediately had a spike in downloads and quickly soared in popularity. To date it has topped 40 million downloads, and about 13 million people play it at least once a day, Ms. Luckyanova said.

“When you tell a friend about it and they go to the App Store and it’s free, they download it without thinking about it,” Ms. Luckyanova said. “Then there’s stickiness and the addictiveness and people talking about it.”

But how does the free version of Temple Run make money? Inside the game is a virtual store to buy new characters, different backdrops and power-ups, or special boosters. While players can use the virtual coins they collect inside the game to buy these bonuses, a dedicated few use actual money to buy virtual currency and get them faster.

Ms. Luckyanova declined to say how much money Temple Run had earned, but on Sunday afternoon it was No. 14 in Apple’s top grossing chart, a list of the apps that are making the most money in the company’s App Store.

Freemium has apparently become more lucrative than charging for apps, according to Chen. And now, conventional game publishers — who charge as much as $50 for console games — are taking a long look at the casual/mobile marketplace, although with any revolution the upstarts are more likely to leverage new business models.

19 March 2012 7 Permalink

Why Everything Shouldn’t Be A Game

Margaret Robinson, of Hide&Seek, the game designers, on why everything shouldn’t be ‘gamified’:

Margaret Robinson, Can’t play, won’t play

Games offer fail conditions as well as win conditions. They are able to deliver the high levels of emotional engagement they’re famed for because they’re also adept at delivering the lows of loss, humiliation and frustration. The world of user experience design from which the concept of gamification has arisen has spent the last twenty years erasing loss, humiliation and frustration from its flows. A world of badges and points only offers upwards escalation, and without the pain of loss and failure, these mean far less. And when this upward escalation is based only on accumulation of points, rather than on expressions of my choices and my skills, then this further strips out the sense of agency and competence, so crucial to the emotional and neurological buzz we get from gaming.

It’s crucial that we stop conflating points and games.

Firstly, because it devalues points. Points are great. So are badges. Everything you’re reading on the pro-gamification posts about how powerful they are as motivators and rewards is spot on. Game designers resort to them – I resort to them – so often because they’re fantastic tools, and as with all tools there is real art and science behind deploying them well. They deserve to be studied, refined and adapted on their own terms, with their own vocabulary.

But secondly, because it misrepresents games. Gamification is an inadvertent con. It tricks people into believing that there’s a simple way to imbue their thing (bank, gym, job, government, genital health outreach program, etc) with the psychological, emotional and social power of a great game. And when their gamified thing doesn’t deliver on that promise, the only rational thing for them to do is to turn round and say ‘Games don’t work! We gamified the dickens out of this thing, and it still didn’t make as much money/reach as many users/generate as much social heat as World of WarCraft/Farmville/Minecraft’. Any game designer looking at their gamified thing would say, ‘Of course it didn’t do what those things did! Those things are all games and your thing isn’t!’ But they won’t be heard, because they won’t be in the room, since – and this is very telling – the gamification process rarely involves any actual game designers.

Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither.

It’s important that we make the distinction between the two undertakings because, amidst all this confusion, we’re losing sight of the question of what would happen if we really did apply the deeper powers of game design to more everyday things – if we really did gamify them – and that question is a fascinating, exciting and troubling one. I really hope we get a chance to explore it properly.

I have been making a supporting argument, badly: puttin badges and points into every social application trivializes what they proxy in social tools, which is reputation. Instant reputation is like instant coffee: at its best, it’s still ersatz and inferior to the real thing.

So, games are fine, just like money and sex. But we don’t put money and sex into every social app either.

Source: hideandseek.net

17 December 2010 8 Permalink

Zygna Isn’t Playing Around

Turns out that the exploding game industry isn’t all sunshine and flowers: after all, billions in revenue is at stake and that tends to not bring out the best in people.

It seems that Mark Pincus’ Zygna is a hotbed of idea theft, stealing ideas from competitors, and crushing them with the company’s reach. Just like Elvis Presley knocking off all the old ‘Race Music’ and repackaging it as rock’n’roll.

But Zygna may be reaching the end of that streak. Pincus has apparently been telling his employees to forget about innovation, and simply appropriate competitor’s game ideas:

Peter Jamison, FarmVillains

As the former senior employee who listened to Pincus rant against innovation recalls, workers at Zynga were fond of joking (albeit half-seriously) that their firm’s unofficial motto was an inversion of Google’s famous “Don’t Be Evil.”

“Zynga’s motto is ‘Do Evil,’” he says. “I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I’ve run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach. I’ve tried my best to make sure that friends don’t let friends work at Zynga.”

The derivative nature of Zynga’s high-grossing games isn’t just an ethical liability. While the company has recently enjoyed a spate of bullish mainstream media coverage, some industry experts say that its star could soon be on the wane. The audience for its signature application, FarmVille, has collapsed by 26 percent from its high of 84 million monthly users. As a new generation of social gamers demands more sophistication in online entertainment, some observers — including at least one of Zynga’s founders — question whether the company can adapt.

“You can’t make the cheap little viral games like you used to,” says Tom Bollich, an early Zynga investor and former lead engineer who owned more than 400,000 shares of the company in 2008, and who has now divested completely. “These games, it’s like pouring water into a bucket with holes in it. You can get a lot of people, but they don’t stick around.”

We’ll have to see if Zygna has reached some limit in its growth, but I doubt that its business practices are known to users, or that it would make any difference if they did know.

Umair Haque twittered today ‘I don’t know what these guys are so upset about. That’s what business is all about.’ with regard to this story. After all, stealing the best ideas is Silicon Valley lore, isn’t it? But maybe there are still lines that can be crossed, even when unbridled capitalism is held up as a societal good.

9 September 2010 2 underpaidgenius Permalink