Mare and Raigan recently did a controversial interview on Gamasutra that seemed to have sturred a reaction among the press and gamers. The heart of the controversy is that Xbox LIVE Arcade has, by majority, very low rated games. This in turn hurts the developers who are making gems because:

1) Players are turned off by the mass and not bothering to go through every game there is.

2) Developers’ ideas are turned down because there’s already an (allegedly crap) game of that genre in the pipeline

Fair enough. But really, lots of shitty games isn’t the problem. Metanet’s problem is one of control and visibility.

Control

What I mean by control is that platform holders hold the keys to the channel, and choose games based on some formula that they’re not showing. One of the criteria is a minimum quality bar, to make sure the developer can actually finish the product. Others are presumably based on their portfolio range, whether it will annoy retail distributors, and other means that could be perfectly reasonable but which we know not of.

Visibility

The problem with visibility is that all the games are lumped under one huge long list. If you do not have a recent update, the chance that your game is seen is largely based on the first letter of your game name. So, if there is a huge number of games that you don’t particularly like, you’re not going to see the ones you do. Okay, there is also some categorization of games, but it’s not exactly ideal.

Solving Metanet’s Dilemma

I think it’s clear that every platform will have a fair share of good vs. poor games, and that one persons treasure is another’s dog poop. That is, unless, you run the platform like Steve Jobs. Although even that’s wrong now that the SDK is out.

So saying that a platform holder “shouldn’t release bad games” isn’t the answer (even if we all know some of the games out there are indeed simply bad, in every sense of the word). The problem is that the platform holder is trying to control the releases based on more than simply the fact that they can indeed finish the game without breaking any laws. Indeed, they are basically saying that they know what’s best for their customers.

Instead, if Microsoft opens up their platform, and does not discriminate based on portfolio, an interesting thing happens. All sorts of games come in and you basically have a free market in the ecosystem. This of course creates an even bigger diluge of games, making your game even harder to find. So the obvious next step is to create as many ways to find the games you want as possible. Ratings is one. Tags is another. Recommendations is another. Suddenly, if you made a good game, visibility isn’t a problem any more. This is saying that the customers know what’s best for themselves.

Really, coming from the Web 2.0 side of things, this is all common sense and has been done over and over again. In fact, it’s being done on the hobbyist, community XNA games, so it’s unfortunate that they’re not doing it for professional game developers.

We don’t know the Truth

One thing is for sure — there’s a reason for all this not happening, and the reason is not that the people running Xbox LIVE Arcade are stupid. It may be that their priorities are different than ours (retail will kill us if we threaten them), and it may be that if they implemented these features they’d have a break through product.

But we don’t know what reasons they have, and it may be that in 6 months we’ll realize why they’ve been holding off, or that they’re already implementing it. Well, we know that they’re certainly implementing something for Xbox LIVE — it would be naive to think they’re standing still.

Anyway, looping back to the beginning — good job Raigan, on speaking your mind. And N+ is both dog poop and an amazing game. I prefer to think it’s the latter.

Gamespot has a great write-up on how games get pitched — both internally inside a publisher and by independent developers. I’ve now personally done more than a dozen pitches, and I have to say that I’m probably masochistic because I actually like the process; I suppose it’s the thought of going after something for the chance to create a product you’re passionate about. I’d probably loathe it if I was forced to pitch a match-3 game.

My first experience pitching was, technically, a complete failure. After building a PC prototype, I flew to a half dozen publishers to pitch our game as a PS2 / Xbox 360 / PSP / DS game — in reality, we were grasping for whatever we could get. The only reason we had these meetings at all was thanks to our agent I was working with for this product (incidentally, Warren is also the agent for N+ and Everyday Shooter). I believe our failure was justified — we had a polished demo, but an incomplete team and the market was such that a game like Eets was highly risky. From my point of view, however, this first product was a launching pad for the company — and indeed that’s exactly what happened. We continued to self-publish the game for PC online, secure a European retail distribution deal via Warren’s prowess, and we continue to sell the game online to this day.

Since then we’ve successfully pitched and signed three new games (Eets: Chowdown, N+ and an unannounced project), and each time it gives me a great sense of accomplishment in formulating the pitch and preparing the delivery. Going through the process so many times, however, has definitely altered the way I think about a pitch.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m using our decision to want to make a game and to pitch it synonymously, and in general, this is indeed what happens. I believe the vast majority of game development start-ups do one of two things:

1) Create a game and then find a market for it

2) Develop an idea you think could do well in the market, determine how much it’s going to cost to develop, and then try to find funding for it.

The first is obviously flawed, but it’s certainly understandable. Most independents, us included, started by making the game they wanted to make — economics be damned. For the record, I love this style of development — I just wouldn’t recommend anyone to depend their livelihood on it The second happens all the time, but in my experience it’s almost always an uphill battle. The thing is, without starting with the constraints, the idea always balloons to include everyone’s favourite features, each one pulling down the chance of the game actually being financially successful, and thus pulling down the chance of a successful pitch. Also familiar is taking that idea, and applying an aggressive schedule and lowering the costs to meet it. As one colleague once said “You’ll always find a buyer if you keep lowering your price, but at what cost?” This ends in the familiar massive overtime and feature cuts which burns everyone out.

Instead, I believe more and more developers are following the third path:

3) Start with the constraints, and then develop and idea from it.

My decision to create a game now starts with the resources constraints and then expands to how we can make the best possible game out of those constraints. That is, we may start with a pool of game ideas we’d like to explore, but for the most part they are totally undeveloped. Then, for each platform we’re considering, I give a narrow range of budgets and minimum expected ROI, and then ask “what can we build to achieve this result?”

Obviously, underlying to all of this is the notion that we’d be proud of the game, and that we won’t simply go for the cash grab. However, by starting with the constraints, I believe we actually build better games. This is because we’re forced to focus on the strengths of the game, and ignore everything else — creating a purer, better play experience. And guess what? This method has a way, way better chance of success in the pitching channel — and in the market place.

I realize I’m still only grazing the surface here, but if anyone wants me to delve into this in more detail, feel free to contact me or simply comment here.

Recently, I had a conversation with Nick about the business of console download games. As you know, I like the business model, especially for the developer starting out, but I began thinking more about commonalities between the three console offerings, and what I believe would improve the experience for the consumer, and in return, benefit the developer. The following are my conclusions.

1) Better support for user-generated content

Microsoft does a great job at supplying robust libraries and a tight platform for development, but as far as I know, all three consoles have no unified way of supporting user-generated content for their downloaded games. The usual answer is for the developer to supply their own server, but considering the security and authentication requirements to do so, this is simply not an affordable approach for a small budget game. I don’t believe the blocker here is the cost of hosting on the platform holder’s side — all Xbox LIVE users have a small amount of user space online, for example; you just can’t use that space to share content readily and easily.

Instead, the issue is legal and political — how do the platform holders protect themselves from offensive user-generated content? The answer is the same way any other online networking site does it — via EULA’s, and easy levers to report and control offensive material.

I’d like to see a simple way for downloaded games to be able to post even a small amount of data for sharing in the game; available even when the owning player is offline. If any platform supported that, I believe you’d see incredibly creative games flowing directly from that — in the meantime, only games that have a large budget (and probably a different agenda than a typical arcade game) have the luxury of such a feature, and all other games with user-generated content use crippled features such as sharing levels only with friends, and only when they’re online.

2) Less focus on retro games and advergaming

Let’s be honest — when you download a game that’s twenty years old, you had great memories of it and are expecting to be thrust back into the nostalgia. Instead, the game is incredibly difficult, and man do the graphics suck. When your new downloads page is filled with these offerings, or poor quality advergames, you’re going to be skeptical about coming back to try new games; you may even miss that great original indie title you’ve been waiting for.

In a nutshell — the poor quality games are drowning out and hurting the very games that the platforms are trying to push.

To be fair — I think the Virtual Console is making great use of their awesome back library, and WiiWare is a nice separation between retro and original games (although in general the Shopping Channel is pretty clunky and slow).

3) More focus on instant play value

Even though I understand Microsoft and Sony’s strategy of promoting their download offerings as a source of creative and “new” types of games, I somehow feel they’re doing at the expense of certain potential. New styles of play on an old interface (the controller) often necessitates a learning curve, and this learning curve creates a barrier for customers. Instead, I think they should be focusing on games that are instantly fun — exactly as Microsoft’s name calls for — consumers want arcade games!

I believe that Sony and Microsoft have a captive audience begging for more games that are instantly engaging, regardless of the genre. They do have an appetite for the unconvential, quirky game, but those games need to be interspersed with arcade racing, fighting, sports, puzzle (etc) games. I’m not talking about Project Gotham Racing — I’m talking about Rock N’ Roll Racing. Less depth — more fun.

So, in my humble opinion, combining these three factors would create a download service filled with fun titles that everyone in the family would want to try out. They are high quality, instantly fun, don’t require a deep knowledge of old games to enjoy them, and every once in a while, incredibly creative. As an owner of a next-gen console, you’d be encouraged to show these games off at parties and play with your friends — after all, there’s almost no learning curve to most of them. What’s not to like?

Thoughts?