Make It Big In Games

Before getting down to business here in 2009, I have a few small items to catch up on.

Congratulations to GarageGames’ Torque Game Engine Advanced for winning the 2008 Game Developer Magazine Frontline Award for Best Engine. Matt, JoshE, Ken, Debra, et.al. in the TnT group have been working their butts off bringing Torque to a new level of professionalism, and it is great to see their efforts recognized.

Ryan Wiancko over at Industry Broadcast has been taking blog post from developers like myself, Dan Cook, and Troy Gilbert and turning them into podcasts. So, load up your iPod for your next road trip and catch up on your neglected reading. Maybe now that I have mentioned Ryan, he will spell my name right on my articles.

Jeremy Alessi, of Alessi Games, just put up a nice article on Gamasutra about his experiences creating a game for the iPhone. I have worked with Jeremy since the early days of GarageGames where I encouraged him to finish Aerial Antics so we could publish it. Nobody works harder at game development, and it is nice to see him getting some recognition and success.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

As further evidence of my MBG post Why I Don’t Own Stock In Game Publishers, I present Take Two.

After fending off Electronic Arts’ hostile take over bid earlier this year, Take Two just announced a fourth quarter loss of $15MM, and their projected 2009 estimates have gone from a profit of $1.21 per share to $0 per share. Remember, 2008 was a GTA year, and they still lost money. What was Strauss Zelnick’s take?

“The Take-Two Chairman expressed marked concern about the economic climate, but urged investors that the company is well-positioned”

Sound familiar?

As an exercise in futility I did a few calculations to see if Zelnick was right in fending off EA’s hostile bid. Let’s see, EA offered $2 Billion in cash in March of 2008. Take Two’s ($ttwo) stock was roughly $15.85 per share before the bid, and the day of the bid, the stock shot up to $26.89, roughly the value of the offer. Zelnick, in classic Jerry Yang of Yahoo’s amazingly greedy style, said the company was worth much more. After several months of haggling, EA pulled out. Today $ttwos share price was $8.43 for a market cap of $654MM, which, for those without a calculator, is over $1.3 Billion less than the earlier ALL CASH offer.

There is no GTA coming out next year, and probably not the year after. If the $ttwo share price is worth a couple of Starbuck cappuccinos at the end of a GTA year, what will it be worth next year? Not $2BB. Good job, guys.

On the other hand, I bet EA is happy they didn’t shell out the $2BB in cash. They just announced more layoffs of up to 1,000 people and the closure of Black Box studio (plus seven others). They are going to need the money to get things turned around.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
Photo by Jarlhelm.

Winner of my 2008 Biggie Award for Best Future Way To Play Games, Instant Action is really starting to take off.

Check out the story here on Techcrunch: Gaming Site InstantAction On A Roll.

“For instance, InstantAction, a gaming site from IAC-owned GarageGames, has managed to cross the 1 million members mark only 9 months after we covered their launch.”

That is great news! Congratulations to the InstantAction team. Of course I have inside information that I can’t disclose, but 2009 will be a big year for this service. IA will increasingly become a great place for Indies to make money.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

I am proud to present the first annual Biggie Awards (BA for short), a list of products, in categories that I made up, that I think were the best of 2008. The methodology behind the awards was very scientific, if I got excited about a product, it was nominated. Now, the envelope please…

Best Indie Game: Tie- World of Goo, Castle Crashers
Congratulations to 2D Boy and The Behemoth for sticking to their guns and making the games they wanted to make and being financially rewarded for it. In case you haven’t been paying attention to my blog, this is the future of game development. Small, focused, creative teams making fun, inventive games. The key word is fun, not pandering to Marketing, not selling out, not shaders, Direct X 11, or HDR.

Best Product to Hide Massive Complexity: Wii Fit
There is more engineering in the Wii fit than in most consoles, yet it comes off polished, fun, and useful. I love the way it “talks” to you when you step on it or when you gain a little weight. Nintendo keeps hitting home runs. They know what is fun and they are not afraid to break out of the box to find it.

Best Editor: Spore
Contrary to many people I enjoyed the game, but what impressed me most was the editors and technology behind the game. I think the future of game development for big titles was shown in Spore. Editors and procedurally generated content are the only way we will be able to make large content games due to cost constraints. This kind of procedural content creation is what will allow the small “rock band sized” teams I advocate to make big games.

Best Single Button Game: Tower Blocks
Digital Chocolate made this fun tower stacking game that can be played anywhere, i.e. on a cell phone, in Facebook, etc. Integration with your true friends is an extremely important feature and is what drives you to keep playing.

Best Distillation of an old Game Mechanic: Eleven Blood
This Facebook game has many old game developers crying fowl. Why would people want to play a game that has so little interaction? Well, I think games like EB, Mafia Wars, etc. are really bringing a fun new approachability to role playing games.

Best Graphics: Little Big Planet
This is my idea of of how to use powerful shaders and high end graphics. No uncanny valley, no crap lip synching. Just cool little characters running around in a world that looks real, yet you know it can’t be. Honorable mention for the awesome UI on the level editor. There are so many interface breakthroughs on that editor that a book could be written about it.

Best Flash Game Site: Kongregate
These guys have risen from start up to the best Flash game site in less than two years. Clean, developer friendly site that has really brought Flash games to a new level of respectability. I could do without the chat window next to all of the games, so the game window itself had the option of being bigger, but other than that, these guys are on fire. Impressive!

Best Future Way to Play Games: Instant Action
Even though I was involved in the early days of IA, I have to mention this service. The more I get used to web based “cloud computing”, the more I refuse to download and install a game to play it. Too much hassle, and most of the time, it requires updates to drivers and other things I don’t have the patience to do. Instant Action is not getting the attention it deserves.

Quickies

Best Developer to Change the World: Harmonix
Best New Business Idea: Flash Game License
Best Business I Wish I Had Started: Mochi Ads
Favorite Game Review Site: Jay Is Games
Best Facebook Publisher: Playfish
Top Big Games I Don’t Care About Left4Dead, Fallout 3, Farcry 2, GoW 2 - shows how out of touch I am with the core gamer market.
Best New gaming Platform iPhone
Best Video Site That I Thought Was Going to be Crappy HULU
Best Old Internet Service That I Never Used Until Now Pandora
Best Web App FriendFeed

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

Welcome to the new digs of Make It Big In Games.  MBG is now running a Tim Aste design on our shiny new One Press Community (OPC) theme and Wordpress 2.7.  OPC is one of the first offerings of our new company, Push Button Labs.  While I don’t want to announce all that it will do here, it basically turns Wordpress in to a content management system (CMS) and attaches it to the popular Open Source phpBB forum system.  Look for more info soon.

For those of you in a RSS reader, here is a pic of the new MBG site:

I am still learning the ins and outs of the new system, and I am sure there will be bugs because the change over was a big project.  If you experience any navigation issues or have any suggestions to make the site better, please leave a note in the comments.  I am pretty sure I will be changing over from Disqus to the Intense Debate commenting system that Automattic recently acquired.  Disqus has made my life a lot easier since I installed it, but feel that ID will have the inside track to working better with Wordpress now and in the future.

Early next week, we will be turning on the forums for MBG.  My goals are to turn MBG into a destination site for game developers to learn about game development, design, business, and life style issues.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games