Blackburst Game Development

It seems that there is no way to fail if you have all the right things in place, right? After all the research and careful planning, your game is destined for success, yes? That isn’t really the case. There are endless games out there, especially when you are looking at Facebook, and an uncanny number of those games are rather large scale collection style games. Farmville started a boom in the production of these games where everyone and their brother saw the raging success of Zynga’s flagship game and figured they could do it just as well. The sad fact is, even with so many gamers out there, there are only so many hours in a day to be devoted to farming, shopping, cooking, animal care and building a better island.

Companies like Playfish, Crowd Star and Hidden Pixel have all climbed aboard and had varying levels of success. Those companies are in the top 25 (based on monthly unique visitors)  and there are literally hundreds of other developers out there working hard to scrape the bottom of the barrel. What is it that keeps some of these games from climbing the ladder? Why can’t they keep their heads above the water?

For one thing, many of these games are just not marketed well enough. Facebook ads are surprisingly lucrative. They have a much higher click rate than many other ad locations simply because the majority of the long term facebook surfers are bored out of their minds and clicking on everything with a splash of color on it. I know I have found myself looking at a targeted ad on the right of my screen and thinking “Why yes, I AM tired of running a farm. I think I WILL take your advice and click on you so I can rev up my life by testing my chops in the island tourism industry!” Simple steps like creating a fan page and telling your buddies about the game are never enough unless the game is truly amazing. The titles that succeed without having a huge studio name backing them are often the ones with developers that take advantage of the ad services like Facebook and Google ads.

Another thing that spells doom for a game, and many times, the whole studio, is the faliure to understand the tangled web that is Facebook’s rule book. Rules like “Thou shalt not advertise for anything that links away from facebook,” and “Whomever does not make it easy to contact the developer will feel our wrath,” cause trouble for developers more often than one might think. Follow the rules and guidelines to the letter and don’t push your luck and you may survive the flaming sword of Social Media long enough to find success!

these rules were roughly translated from two tablets passed down by an ancient Sumerian torture god.

Another pitfall is the “I can just hire a cheap team and bang out a little game a rake in the dough,” mentality. Yes, these types of games are getting lots of buzz and yes, there is grand potential for money making and game popularity out there, but that doesn’t mean that a quickie off the cuff game will succeed. Users are savvy, discerning and highly judgemental of their games these days. The days of riding a popular game mechanic to success with minor effort are gone. If you want to compete with big flashy apps and games, you have to have the pizazz to throw a punch or two of your own. Take the time to find a budget and put some real effort into your game and it may just hit the charts!

A truly crappy low budget game indeed

In this ballooning world of social games and collection driven titles, it is important now more than ever to take stock of everything you have at your disposal to help you compete as a developer. It takes every ounce of ingenuity, creativity and marketing to get a game off the ground. All of this conjecture and concept only addresses the details important to gathering and maintaining an audience, and there are a hundred more problems to solve after that. How do I monetize my game? How can I get players to spend money within my game? Without outside advertising available to me on Facebook, how do I passively earn from my users? … There is so much to think about when creating one of these big collector titles that in the end, only the strongest will survive.

The human need to feel ownership and control has driven the direction of a lot of things in this world. The American dream of having a house and a yard, the desire for new cars, fancy electronics and a collectibles industry that continues to make money across the world are but a few examples of how this aspect of human nature has driven industry and product development for countless years. This need has also become applicable to the games industry, and I don’t mean the console games that require hardware and disc purchases, I mean the online casual side of the coin. The trend in online social games to present the player with a personal space, a “shop” or “apartment” or “yard” where the whole point of the game is to endlessly accumulate virtual items and objects to display for all to see has spawned a landslide of game titles on the social scene. Some of the most popular titles include “Pet Society,” “Restaurant City,” and the ever growing “Farmville.” In the face of such a massively popular and potentially lucrative trend, the question must be “What sets the successful games apart from the short lived near misses?” In this article, we will look at features and qualities that have driven players to return and invest time and in some cases, actual money to the game. We will also be looking at certain things that, in my opinion, have lead to lack-luster or poor performance in this extremely important social game space.

The qualities of success

When one looks at a game developer like Playfish or Zynga, one must wonder what secret juju they learned to drive their games to be so powerful. It’s not a magical power, nobody paid a warlock a hundred pounds of gold to weave a spell over the audience, it is simple quality control, cleverness and the willingness to take advantage of the tools at hand to engage an audience. The first important thing these companies have done is focus on originality. Now you may be saying to yourself “But my good sir, I must object! These games all have the same concept at play, they are nigh identical!” and to that I say “TRUE!” But there is one thing that sets the successful games apart. In general, with few exceptions, there is only one farm game, one cooking game or one pet shop game on the high end of the charts. I know the practice is the same from game to game, build a space, buy some junk, perform a task that lets you buy more junk, rinse, repeat. These games could have all stopped on the farm front, but the wrapper you put your sweetest candy in is just as important at the ingredients of the sweetness itself. If Zynga made a smash hit with a farming game, then all other games with a rake and a bag of seeds that follows may be seen as clones. Quality, art, ease of play, all these things take a back seat when a player says “Oh, this is just like that other game that everyone plays in stead!”

Another big item that clearly defines the popular games nowadays is visual quality. With so many collection games out there, nothing with sub-par art will pass the test. Gamers are becoming increasingly more discerning when it comes to the quality of their games. Where once the simple act of collecting a few little items was enough, now it’s all about who has the COOLEST items and the PRETTIEST outfits for their characters. When you look at a game like “Restaurant City” and compare it to something like the old “Vampires” games, you can see why the more lush and visually compelling of the two has taken the lead.

When it comes to success in a social games market, taking advantage of the endless ways to pester your friends is unfortunately something one must do. People say “I hate it when I get five million invites and gifts from people on facebook games!” but the fact is, numbers show that these invites, touts, challenges, gifts, notifications, events, page suggestions, likes, comments and everything else in that area work. They work wonders in generating traffic, even if it only drives a one time visit, people will click on these things, visit the page and play for ten minutes JUST to find a way to make it stop! The key here is to find a way to make these things seem fun, different and engaging. Making these gifts boost a new player or give items only available through gifting are a couple of the many creative ways to make these notices a little more interesting. There are nearly endless ways to add a little spice to your game’s invites and notices, and if you do it right those one time frustrated clickers can become long term players.

And alas, for the purposes of this article, we reach our final and possibly most important point. New items, new items, new items. Most of these games have new items for sale and to earn coming out weekly, if not almost daily. The trick here is to make enough of them limited time offers and enough of them permanent additions to the catalog to avoid overcrowding the game with stuff while still growing the overall game. Farmville, bless their little heart, has over crowded their game in my opinion. When you go to that game, especially after a long time of inactivity, you are inundated by so many “new item” touts and “new functionality” blurbs that it makes your eyes bleed.

The next part of this article will address the other side of this topic, and talk about how a collection game can fail, even while taking advantage of the drive to collect. Be sure to come back for “The Drive to Collect Part Two: Closing Shop“

Blackburst Media started in 2004 to develop online and casual games a cut above the rest. There are so many mediocre games on endless numbers of web sites that are so mundane and poorly designed we determined there was room for a company that could do better. Much better. We started with Zam BeeZee and we are going to move to new heights with some new concepts in design as I write this. Stay tuned.