Over the years, Ive talked to a number of folks who are jumping into the game industry, and theres one thread of conversation that always comes up. Why are you doing this? Less so recently, but a few years ago, most of the people Id talked to in this regard were Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who saw that games were hot and wanted to get in on it. Maybe they saw a confluence of trends (Zynga + Foursquare = $$$!) and they thought that theyd be able to make a ton of money. (FYI - every single time someone came to me with a hot idea, Id either had it, or heard it, dozens of times before. A great idea is absolutely valuable. Hugely so. But theyre also very, very rarely actually *unique*. What you need to understand is that on almost anything you can think of, someone out there is already doing it. Thats *fine*. No one will execute on it exactly like you will. But it also means you dont have to keep your ideas secret. Talk about them with people. No ones going to steal it. If they end up making something similar, and you havent beaten them to the punch and/or made something significantly better, the problem is you, not them.) These were always difficult conversations to have, because it was always like talking to someone in a foreign language. They wanted to know what the tricks were to making a successful game. They wouldnt ask in those terms, but it was always What is the shortest term thing I can work on right now to achieve immediate success? The problem is that there is not now, nor has their ever been, a short-term path to (what Id consider) success in game development. The problem is simply that a fun game that appeals to a large/passionate audience is really, really hard to make (unless youre fast-following something else, in which case, you should be driven out of the industry with torches and pitchforks). If you are not a *game developer* first, its a very difficult thing to wrap your head around. Fun isnt something you can easily focus-test. Its not something where if you smash together enough bulleted features, it will just appear. Game development is about trial and error. About iteration. Yes, a HUGE part of game development is seeing something in another game and thinking, How can I apply that in a different context? But its rarely, if ever, just formulaic. Its also astonishingly difficult to forecast or predict. If youre working on a game, almost every part of it to varying degrees is R&D. R&D doesnt work on a clock. Many things fail. Many things are black holes that take completely impossible to predict amounts of time to work through. With a team thats worked together a long time, I believe you can *start* to make useful estimates that will only be 300-400% off. But until youve built up a long and storied track record with folks, your estimates and forecasts and business plans are *worse than useless*, because they commit you to something that everyone knows is BS. Which is hard for a lot of business-first folks to understand. Its even hard for more traditional AAA/console-style developers to understand, because theyre forced to be that regimented about scheduling (even though theyre just as wrong). With mobile development in particular, everything is moving all the time. The platforms are changing. The players are changing. If you have a game that you designed two years ago, worked on diligently for the last two years and youre releasing it today, its *already obsolete* and worse, has been for more than a year. The trick for success is to build things in a way that lets you iterate, live, as fast as possible. Thats it. Everything else is peculiar to your situation, and no decision can be made without context. Anyone whod sell you on anything else is a charlatan. Its tremendously difficult to do, and it impacts every element of your development process, from how you spec features to how your business has to try to account for itself, because traditional predictive modeling is useless. Everything is its own unique problem, and there are no answers to anything. So why are you doing this? If youre doing it as a cash grab first and foremost, youre in the wrong business and you will get eaten alive. If youre doing it because you are dedicated to make something that players will absolutely love... then youve at least taken the right first step towards success.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 06:18:09 +0000
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