Make It Big In Games | Still Making Games?

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Make It Big In Games

Still Making Games?

I Was Invited To Help With a Crypto Start Up School Gaming Class Posted on June 13, 2020, updated on June 13, 2020 by Jeff Tunnell

Never Say Never. Back to Making Games! Posted on June 13, 2020, updated on June 13, 2020 by Jeff Tunnell

My last post, dated 3/22/2017 said I was throwing in the towel on a lifetime of game development. I felt that the locked down app stores along with Steam’s virtual monopoly on the PC market made game creation more of a roll of the dice than a business. I had three successful company exits with three game companies in a row, but I had sunk a big portion of the last payout into a bunch of different ideas at Spotkin as well as multiple angel investments. It was time to preserve my family’s money that I had accumulated over the years even though I wanted to keep going.

Even though I personally quit making games, certain people that I used to work with didnt quit. While I cant talk about it yet, they uncovered some incredibly interesting opportunities that allowed me to get back into the game game. Some day this will be a great story for this blog, but for now, just know that Im back!

The new company is called Monster Ideas, Inc.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker

Throwing in the Towel on a Lifetime Career of Game Development Posted on March 22, 2017 by Jeff Tunnell

I got my Apple II in 1981, made my first game in 1982, and started the Computertutor software store in 1983 in my bedroom. Then I met Damon Slye, sold Computertutor, and started Dynamix in 1984. blah, blah, blah. Fast forward 33 years, and its been a good run, with three big company exits, close to 100 products and games, and incredible interactions with 100s of incredibly talented employees and partners. It doesnt get any better than this.

Even though I love making games more than anything, its time to wind down my game development career. I have always surfed the latest trend or been ahead (sometimes too far) of what is happening in games, but this past round of consolidation of platforms into app stores and literally millions of games coming to market caught me flat footed, and Im out of ideas on how to succeed. We tried our hardest at Spotkin. I am extremely proud of Contraption Maker, and know that this iteration of The Incredible Machine will live on for a long time, even if it doesnt make enough money for us to make a living.

Kevin Ryans Top Meadow company will be officially taking over Contraption Maker, and Spotkin will go away. Kevin is an amazing programmer and game designer, so the product will be in good hands for many years to come.

Watch for me on jefftunnell.com or twitter.com/jefftunn. I am going to be working on farming, building, mentoring, investing, weed farming, mountain biking, motorcycling, staying in shape and having fun.

-Jeff Tunnell, ex-Game Maker

Review of Surface Pro 3 For Game Production Posted on April 4, 2015, updated on December 18, 2019 by Jeff Tunnell

TL; DR: The Surface Pro 3 is a great day to day computer that is working well for me as the producer of Contraption Maker. Although I use the browser for much of my work, it natively runs our game really well, and I LOVE the stylus for drawing up designs.

The stylus of the Surface Pro 3 works on Contraption Maker with no modifcations.

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All Incredible Machine Music In One Place For Marketing Posted on February 10, 2015 by Jeff Tunnell

I recently put all of the original Incredible Machine CD music up on Spotkins Soundcloud to preserve it for myself and future generations of players that may be interested in that bit of history. I then exposed the Soundcloud content in a blog post on our Contraption Maker site. In addition to saving the music, part of the motivation is obviously to put up evergreen content on Contraption Maker to get Google to send us traffic.

This technique is called Content Marketing, and can be very effective in the long run. Within the first couple of days, this post has brought over 100 visitors to the Contraption Maker site, which is peanuts. At our current conversion rate of 1.6% we have gotten maybe a couple of sales. This is definitely not worth the money, but over time this traffic will build on itself, and you never know when you may hit an article out of the park that bring thousands of people to your site.

What kinds of unusual things are you doing to promote your game?

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
Contraption Maker

Contraption Maker Launched on Steam Early Access Posted on August 28, 2013 by Jeff Tunnell

After Spotkins pivot from mobile games back to the warm arms of PC development last year, it feels so good to get our first game, Contraption Maker, launched on Steam Early Access. We have only been up for a few hours, but our sales have definitely exceeded our expectations.

BTW, Steam absolutely kicks both of the mobile app stores to the curb. I will write up a post later explaining why I think this.

Announcing Contraption Maker, Spiritual Successor to The Incredible Machine Posted on May 10, 2013 by Jeff Tunnell

I am so happy to be working on this game with all of the original team members, plus the incredibly talented crew at Spotkin. For more information check out Contraption Maker site and our devblog. Here are some teaser before you link over:

This is going to be cool!

Maker Lab: multiple contraptions, high def graphics, share to YouTube, layers, community sharing, etc.

Nine Things That Could Make the App Stores Better Posted on May 9, 2013, updated on May 9, 2013 by Jeff Tunnell

I have been on a rant lately, but I think this is really important. Instead of complaining about the app stores, I want this post to be a more positive approach of offering ideas that I think could make them better.

And the skies will part

First of all, I think the app stores are amazing. The original app store was particularly amazing four years ago, but I dont think anyone thought that apps would essentially become the primary method for people to obtain their information and be entertained. With that in mind, both Apple and Google essentially need to recreate many of the mechanisms that the Internet has had 20 years to perfect.

I think the basic flaw with the app stores is that Apple took what they developed for iTunes music and adapted it for apps. From there, Google basically copied what Apple created, so we essentially have two of the same approaches. The problem with this is that music has built in discovery via Pandora, Spotify, satellite radio, terrestrial radio, etc., so while you can browse iTunes, most people already know what they want to buy. Games do not have this luxury. With that in mind, here are my nine ideas for making the app stores better.

1. Allow the store listings to have analytics and A/B tests similar to web pages. Developers are flying blind and have no idea if their sales text is working.2. Sales Leaderboards are not the best measure of the best games. Top Grossing is an especially strange leaderboard that could be exposed to developers, but is not really relevant to players. I know people have a passing interest in top grossing movies or books, but I dont think that is the most relevant discovery mechanism for how people choose to consume those items. However, in the app stores, it is essentially the only mechanism for making decisions.3. Use analytics signals for leaderboards. This would be things like how many times a game is played during the day or how much time is spent on it. This would allow leaderboards such as what is the most played game, this instant.4. Create better game taxonomies, categories, and tags, so it is much, much easier to browse by clicking around. RPG, boom a bunch of games. Roguelike, boom less games. Pixel Art, boom, even less games. Wait, theres Heroes of Loot, that looks interesting.5. Allow me to opt in so I can see what games my friends are playing and so my friends can make recommendations to me.6. Have better Leaderboards, and back end support. Google does not even have this, and Game Center is not as good as it should be. This helps with virality.7. Confirm users that rate games own the game in a much more strict fashion so the ratings cannot be gamed. A simple solution would be to make sure the player has played X minutes or several times before they are allowed to submit a rating for review.8. As I mentioned before, run the stores as a backend distribution system so there can be many, niche stores. These sanctioned stores can be officially allowed on the phones. An affiliate fee would be paid to the stores and the money would come out of the 30% fee the stores are charging developers. Of course, Apple and Google could keep their stores, but having more options would be a good thing. For instance, a really great Educational/Family store or a nichy RPG store.9. Have a more Netflix like recommendation engine. I know that is not perfect either, but it is way better than Genius. When was the last time you used Genius?10. Once the sales leaderboards are not the definitive list of the best games (at least in Apples mind), then they would not have to worry about services like AppGratis. Those kind of curation services would be viewed no differently than how the Internet views Woot.com, with its amazing deal per day.

Anyway, these are the ideas I have off the top of my head. Do you have any more ideas? Also, the idea that you need to make a great game has already been thought of.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store Posted on May 7, 2013 by Jeff Tunnell

Last week I published what turned out to be a popular post, We Cant Make It Here Anymore, about how discovery problems in the app stores are making life hard for small Indie developers. Like I said in that article, Spotkin was started 16 months ago to make mobile-first games using Free to Play (f2p) monetization models, but at the beginning of this year we pivoted to become a PC-first, fixed price developer. We thought it might be helpful to the community to discuss our decisions, so you can learn from our mistakes.

After Making This, We Thought We Were Ready

After our successful exit from PushButton Labs making an Open Source Flash game engine, PushButton Engine, and a top 10 Facebook f2p game, Social City, for Playdom (acquired by Disney), several of us were ready to make a new game production company. At that time (late 2011), going mobile-first and f2p was not as obvious as it is now, and there were indicators of success that we thought we could model. We were quite aware of the crowding of the app stores, but we thought we had a plan to help circumvent those problems, so we set about finding technology, and creating the designs that we would back. Our plan to compete in the app store lottery, as we called it, was as follows.

Create a Cross Platform Game: Our thought was that Apple was too controlling, so we wanted to make sure iOS was not our only option for monetizing our IP. We chose Cocos-2dx so we could simultaneously develop our games for both iOS and Android (We had a lot of reasons for not using Unity which I will cover in a different post). BTW, this turned out to be an excellent technology choice, allowing us to build and test on both platforms throughout development.

RESULT: This was, and still is, a great plan. We are still very happy with this decision.Create a Network Effect: We did not want to go to market with only one game, so we started up three games. We were also working with some other developers to create a keiretsu where we could help each other promote our games. Our thinking was that a big discovery mechanism was the that people that liked one of our games would look in the store to see our others.

RESULT: As I explained, the results of our first release of Quick Shooter were not good enough, so we quit working on the other games even though they were nearly done. We still believe having a network of games is essential, but have not had a chance to prove it. Create a Social Backend: If any of the games ended up getting traction, we wanted to be able to get back in contact with the players, so we created The Spotkin Network, a mini-social network that allows players to compare high scores, make friends, etc.

RESULT: We did not do a good enough job advertising and selling this feature in the game, so we did not get a big percentage of sign ups. Had the monetization been better, we would have worked on this harder. We are extremely happy with the back end technology we created and are moving forward with that initiative and will use it in other products in different ways.Fail Quickly: Most of our original ideas were in the one year development range. We didnt want to wait that long to find out about the market, so instead of starting one of those we thought we should quickly create a free game to test out our technology, learn the release process, and get our feet wet in the mobile space.

RESULT: Our first game, Quick Shooter, was supposed to be this quick game, but it didnt end up being quick, so we failed on this goal. (check out Jons blog post about our failure.)

Fun, great art, obtuse, didnt monetize. Our fault.

Quick Shooter is an OK game that looks good, proved cross platform technology, got good reviews, and good engagement, but took too long to develop and totally failed on monetization. We felt we could probably work on it and turn it around, but none of us believed in the product enough to go through that pain. We know it is totally our fault that the product failed and we are not blaming app store discovery for our problems with this game. However, we are taking app store discovery problems into account going forward.

I know you are going to continue to try to win the app store lottery, as we are, but we decided to make a bunch of changes. First off, we put all of our games in development on hold, and decided to put all of our resources into one PC-first game that we could bleed on, i.e. a game that we believed in enough to go down in flames trying to make it. That game will be announced soon, but is not what this article is about.

In the past few months, development on our PC game has been going so well, that we decided to revive one of our on-hold games and roll the app store dice one more time. With that in mind, here are the changes to we are making in the release strategy. We have no idea if they will work, but they look good on paper (to us anyway).

Release on Android first: In our experience, we feel that Android is the far superior store for Indies. One of the biggest reasons is that you can release a game in minutes instead of days. Our Beta submission of Quick Shooter to the Canadian Apple app store took NINE DAYS for rejection because we missed a checkbox, then it took another NINE DAYS for final approval. Android takes 10 minutes, where releasing your game is essentially like updating a website, so you can try a lot of different ideas without waiting. We have heard that releasing on Android first will negate your chances of getting a featured slot on Apples app store, however we feel that trading one lottery for another is not worth it. Releasing on Android and making enough changes to the game to get reach and monetization optimized will allow you to release it on iOS KNOWING it will work. We believe that will make you a LOT more money releasing Android first than riding the Apple featured game glide slope to obscurity.Release With No Monetization Strategy: We do have ads in our game, and players can pay to turn them off, but that is not really a strategy. Creating a true monetization strategy is really hard. There are only so many that work, and you need to design and build your game around them. We dont know if we believe in the game enough to do this. If the game goes out, and gets great reach and engagement, then we will circle back and add monetization. The game design does have the correct bones to allow this, but we decided not to do the development yet.Use Asynch Multiplayer Competition for Virality: Similar to Bike Race Free, our next game is a multi-player first game with single player practice mode. Our hope is this gets us a lot more sign ups for the Spotkin Network, as well as getting us organic installs via word of mouth.Put Some Money In To Attract Initial Players: We have a benchmark now. For Quick Shooter we spent $1,100 in ads which was enough to get boost the game onto some of the leader boards, causing organic installs. For that amount of money, we got over 50,000 installs. If our next game does better than that, has great reviews, and the other metrics of reach and engagement look good, then we will consider putting more investment in. If it doesnt work, then we will not continue development or release it on iOS.

I hope that getting these ideas out will help you with decisions you need to make for releasing your game on either Android or iOS. We will continue to let you know what is working (or not working) for Spotkin.

Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

We Cant Make It Here Anymore Posted on May 2, 2013, updated on May 2, 2013 by Jeff Tunnell

Normally I take a pretty upbeat stance about the opportunities in the games business here on this blog, but this one is down a little more than normal. Ill try not to be too depressing, but as I was getting ready to write this article, the James McMurtry song of the same name kept popping into my head.

Last year when we were first starting Spotkin I was stoked about two things, Free To Play (f2p) and the mobile market. Having just come off the success of PushButton Labs creating f2p Social City (Facebook) and seeing f2p hits like Jet Pack Joyride coming from relatively small companies in the Mobile market, I thought that the future direction for our company and for others was clear. Unfortunately, a bunch of things changed during the past year and a half, so we have changed our direction by 180 degrees (in Silicon Valley parlance, we have pivoted). In this article, I will just address the problem with the mobile market, and talk about my views on f2p in another article.

I still love the mobile market, and Spotkin will continue to make games for it, but we are changing the way we go about it. Over the next couple of years there will be literally billions of mobile devices in the hands of people, but the App Store discovery system is so broken that the long tail barely exists. Your game is either a hit or it is not, and in fact, even most of the hits are not working out (see below). If you consider that there are literally hundreds of thousands of games in the marketplace and several hundred more per day entering the market, there is not enough room on the virtual shelves. Finding a game that is not in the Top 100, is nearly impossible. Even if you know the name of the game you are looking for, search is so broken you can barely find it. Put another way, hundreds of thousands of games are vying for about 200-300 slots that are readily seen when a player opens the app store on their device.

Of course, we have all heard the siren song of the unbelievable success of Clash of Clans, CSR Racing, and Puzzle and Dragons, but no self resecting Indie developer believes they will get that kind of success. However, they do think the next level down is attainable. Many, many Indie studios can make a game like Ski Safari or Plague, Inc., but even those games are incredible outliers with only a few coming each year.

So, instead lets examine a game like Color Sheep from my friend Tom Eastmans company, Trinket Studios. Color Sheep is a simple game with a nice play mechanic and great art. In spite of winning the two app store lotteries and getting featured by both Apple and Google along with stories in the New York Times and on huge traffic YouTube channels, their game has only sold around 50,000 copies, which has grossed $35,000 (after app store cuts). Considering that they spent $10,000 to launch and market their games at PAX, they have netted $25,000 before paying their wages. This is great because they do get to live another day (assuming Raman livability) and make another round of games, but what are the odds your game is going to do this?

Well, according to 148apps.com, there are an average of 126 games per day entering the Apple App Store, so that is 882 games per week or nearly 46,000 per year. Assuming Apple features five games per week, your odds of getting featured are .56%. The odds are actually a little lower than that because any time a popular company like Rovio releases a new game, it is essentially an auto-feature. So, Color Sheep could essentially be called a one in a thousand game. Do you have what it takes to make a game like that?

Now, back in the day (2009) when the Apple App Store had a whopping 25,000 games, I posted an article telling developers to quit whining, that the App Stores are simply distribution mechanisms and owe them nothing. It is your responsibility to market your game and drum up player demand. While I still believe that, apps are becoming so popular that many people are not even using the Internet anymore, so creating that demand outside of the app store is getting harder and harder. Apple and Google are doing little to help this problem, and the eco system is becoming unbalanced.

Just so I am not a whiner myself, I will offer a suggestion of what Apple and Google could do to fix this situation. The main thing would be to act like a distributor and create APIs that allow others to create stores around their content. Imagine a great RPG store or a thoughtful educational store that was free of all of the clutter of the App Store. This would open up discovery so much, and allow many, many more games to be found and sold.

As to making a living making games, it has always been hard. If you are in it for the big money, you probably want to get out. If you love it, you will find a way, and will make games in spite of the odds.

Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

I'm Jeff Tunnell. I make games and companies. Founded Spotkin where we developed Contraption Maker, the spiritual successor to our old game The Incredible Machine. Previously started Dynamix (Tribes, The Incredible Machine) and GarageGames (Torque Game Engine). In addition to making games, I am a farmer, musician, builder, and mentor. Follow these antics over at jefftunnell.com

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