Funny, and as it turns out it seem to have some bearing. I went to the social gaming seminar with the title “Are social games the new black”, which the panel was sure of. There was a discussion that started with a statement that there is a difference in the way the sales graphs look for product games and social games. Sales in the former start in a rush around the launch with marketing actions and then turns down and if you’re lucky you get a long tail. Whereas the other start slow and grow and grow.

Social game development is about deploying new versions and to constantly iterate. Instead of working on a product for long time and then release a “final product”. That makes up for similarities with web development. Where it is usual to release a beta, get feedback from users and develop from that.

And it goes deeper than that. Jarle Snertingdalen, Funcom, said that  ”social games success comes from web people because they are used to do products that are supposed to being updated continuously”. Meaning that game people have a lot to learn from web developers. Working with iterations needs a different mind set to be successful.

Martin Walfisz from Planeto stated throughout the session that social gaming is here to stay and that eventually all games will have social. Having that said he was fast to make it clear that ”you need to take the social functions seriously and involved it in the beginning of the project, adding it at the end won’t work.”

I can see future cooperations here and it’s clear that the game industry will see a bunch of new guys being experts in a field were the old game business is lacking of knowledge.

This was the statement of Jakob Høgel from New Danish Screen, a two year experiment funding  fiction, documentaries and games – owned by the Danish broadcasters and the Danish Filminstitutes.

Sharing the stage with Ene Katrine Rasmussen (MEDIA Desk Denmark), Klaus Hansen (Producentforeningen), Nils Stokke (NRK), Dustin Chodorowicz (Nordicity) and Erik Robertson (Nordic Game Program), Jakob discussed the barriers in the excisting public funds for media production.

Inspired by Chodorowicz presentation of the new, 2,5 billion SEK cross media fund, the panel agreed on the need for politicians to  rethink the mandate for the public funds, and that taking cross-media production seriously demands more funding.

Where is that golden cross-media case?
Nils Stokke replied to the demands from Robertson to commission more independent game production by expressing his wish to produce stories and universes for children, not platform-bound content.
-  The risk of cross-media production is high for a public service provider, Stokke explained, and there is no defined ‘cultural value’ in such projects, as opposed to children’s television content.

Jakob Høgel also stressed the need for a golden case – one that is both commercially successful and displays artistic excellence and can demonstrate the potential in cross-media projects.

The need for a quality discussion was a returning subject in the media convergence track, starting with the morning discussion on Defining cross-media. How do we define quality when it is the user experience that is central, not the artistic expression?

Quality is key
As hard as it is to conclude on this topic, I think the quality discussion is an important clue to what the different media expressions can learn from each other, and a clue to how one can nourish the cross-media field.

The games business can teach film and TV to radically re-think their view on the audience /users, as co-authors of content and as the starting point of creativity and innovation. And the game developers should be inspired by the power of an artistic vision and from the film business’ daring to articulate creative excellence, not only focusing on numbers of users and revenue.

Of course, this development has been on it’s way for a long time, but the hinders for cross-media dalliances and marriage is not only the barriers in the funds and organisational structures.

As Klaus Hansen pointed out, the cultural differences between old and new media are so big that it’s like people of different languages. His wish for intermediaries – cross-media guides that can translate and mediate in this landscape is an interesting one for sure. I think an important task for such guides would be to start a common discussion on the outcomes and qualities of what we do and why - based on both artistic and user-defined definitions. That is the foundation for the discussion of how we should tell stories and create experiences in brand new ways.

Jason Della Rocca is a consultant at Perimeter Partners that works with creating game industry clusters and he agrees with Playfish’s Kristian Segerstråle that there is too much money wasted in game development. And the reason is that there are too few ideas. The idea become to precious. Makes you care too much. He made a comparison with the Hollywood model where tons of scripts and ideas are tried and tested before a movie or tv-show is ordered.

But there is, of course, people in the game industry trying to create more structured idea work. A couple of examples from the talk:

• It’s better to have ten teams building a concept each and then killing all but a couple than take a few teams and start building games. The concept phase is cheap and the build phase is expensive. So do lots of concepts and fail fast where it’s least expensive.
• Alex Seropian, one of the founders of Bungie and later Wideload, Games bought donuts for the whole team and had idea meetings every friday morning.
• Another way is to do like the team behind Tower of Goo and set up very strict rules just to produce lots of games. Their rules where:
  1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
  2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
  3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. “gravity”, “vegetation”, “swarms”, etc.

But what I was most fascinated by in his presentation was his use of Sketchbook Pro as a presentation tool. It looked like it would give him a more natural way of presenting and a more improvised feel of the talk. I have embedded a short recording I did at the talk earlier today.

We learn that all these success stories are different and people find money in different ways, their ideas are different, the teams behind them are, they live in different countries. So the out come have to be to find your own way and just do it, but as we learned yesterday, think it through first.

investors panel

The investors in the panel after today’s lunch was picked to be there because they are passionate about games and have already invested in games for years. Again, its great to hear what they like to see; predominantly a good business opportunity where the company looking for founding know what they will make the money and return of investment of.  They do not have to see the story of the game, or what the characters will look like. They see the team behind the proposal as the insurance, so it has to be a well put together team behind it as well, one that is not only programmers or idea makers, there has to be business sense in the company as well.

But I really would like to hear from investors that has Not invested in games before since there is all this talk about that the investors has to be educated to games to be able to invest in the branch.  We should invite them instead and ask  them what it is they need to know  and what would make them invest in this for them new media/culture/branch.

“I asked a developer who their customer was, and they replied that it was the gamer, the end consumer. But that’s wrong, it’s the game Publisher! I then asked who the publishers customer where, and the developer tried again with the end consumer, but again wrong, the distributor! Remember who is buying your game when you pitch the idea!” a good point made by Siggi Kogi .

But some of the learning’s from the panels where: All the money you get should go to the product not marketing – if the product is good enough it will do the marketing for you.  Know whom you talk to – find the proper partner and do not tell them what they like to hear to get it sold.
When you have an idea – go for it – pitch it to get feedback on what to change and what to elaborate more!

Can the games industry learn anything from other branches here? Have the movie industry any answers that they can steal, or is this a problem in all types of cultural and media business in the search of founding?

Pitfalls when films becomes games
The idea to make a game often enters the picture late in the process which make up for impossible time constraint for the game developer. Sometimes movies just aren’t suited for a game because ”there’s absolutely no game play in the original story”. Games (see the Matrix example) often only have one element from the movie, read action, the point of the movie missing in the game and “that’s why they not sell”.

Pitfalls when games becomes films
Often there’s just no ground for a movie in a game since there’s no story to tell. Sometimes the involved persons have the wrong preconceptions. ”Film people doesn’t understand why people play games, people like the game because of the game play”. There also seems to be a bit of an identity thing going on because “games aren’t recognized as an art form”, which leads to a unbalance when the different kinds of creators are about to discuss a project.

Lessons to learn
- learn from past failures (Top 10 Worst Video Game Movies, by Times Magazine)
- entrust your franchise only to people passionate about your IP
- don’t forget what makes a good movie and what makes a good game
- never rush to bring it out there
- better not do any game/movie than create another disaster
- think outside of the box and invent new ways of collaboration
- how about developing from ground-up a joint movie/game project?
- do truly complementary experiences
- share talents across the board
- cross-sharing revenues, so all are invested in the success

And, a suggestion from me, focus on the successful cases. Lara Craft – Tomb Raider (2001) the movie made 250 million US dollars in gross revenue. I’m sure they did a lot of things right.

Social networks changes the game. That’s a not very surprising overall image of Segerstråle’s speech. Playfish after all is all about social games. The company’s most successful property is Pet Society which, according to Crunch Base, has about 11 million active users every month. Last year Playfish was acquired by Electronic Arts for 400 million dollars.

It’s all about the barriers to entry. Make it cheaper, more social and more immediate (no more going to the games shop to buy a plastic disc) and you will expand your potential audience significantly. From Play Station 3 via Xbox 360 to Iphone and social gaming.

Kristian Segerstråle underlined the ease of iteration in game development online with the comparison of Fifa Soccer, that had 21 generations from 1993 to 2010, with Playfish’s Pet Society that has gone through hundreds of generations in only two years.

If you don’t have some one in your organisation who loves numbers and finance models you’ll probably not make any more games. You as a game creator don’t have to be that person, but find one.

One key difference between traditional game releases and social games is that you often need a large sum of money for the production of the game. And if you’re lucky you’ll sell loads of games at the release. The sales will slow down considerably when new games gets released. And the initial profits needs to be used to finance your next release.

But it’s cheaper when you work with games as a service, because you don’t have to present a finished game. You can add levels, characters and so on after the game has been released.

But whether or not you make large games or social games you shouldn’t waste money. So you need to learn when to kill products. Kristian Segerstråle told the audience at Nordic Game that Playfish has a kill ratio of 30 percent.

Playfish collects a billion data points every day. And he recommended all game creators to start collecting the data even if they hadn’t found the right rocket scientist to analyse the numbers. It was also important to look at actionable metrics instead of vanity data. It isn’t interesting to know how many people has used your game ever.

One important method that Kristian Segerstråle talked about was the funnel. That’s a model where yo measure a couple of important metrics along a users path. The example he used was a sale. The first path in the funnel might be how many users entered the shop, another how many added an inventory to the shopping basket, the next how many proceeded to the checkout and finally how many actually finished the purchased and gave you some money.

The numbers in the funnel isn’t as important as whether or not you can get them to increase, and by how much.
Kristian Segerstråle also recommended all teams to have a meeting every morning when every one took a short time to look at the data and discuss what could be the reason behind changes in behaviour.

Join forces with media companies
“We have over over 1000 distribution partners that bring us 100 000 of our 250 000 daily new users come from third party partners”

Use performance based marketing
“We work with Search Engine Marketing, Search engine optimization and affiliate networks. We are the biggest spender on Google in Europe. We use 80 000 keywords! The least expected is working really well, such as ‘life suck’ and ‘I hate school’. Be creative!”

Be viral
“Viral will not work if the users will have to pay to play, the more you give away the more users come. But at the same time it’s a kind of trade off, to make it work you need to get people to pay within the game. We get 90 000 of our daily new users thru viral campaignes”

Good advices for game developers, good advices for other media businesses.

A location based game uses geographical position or positioning technology as a feature in the game design or as part of the game play. Any theme, story or genre will do, all graphics and imagery is possible. The game could be built on indoor positioning or on mapping up the world – as long as position and location are central features of the game concept.

The contest will start on May 5 2010, and the winner and the best location based game concept, will be announced on November 17, 2010.

Find more details, information, rules and regulations on the website that opens on May 5.

Karin Ryding, Ozma Speldesign, did a nice one sentence definition “for me cross media is the use of different media formats at the same time”. Meaning you need to have the whole picture in mind when you are working out your idea, not first do one media and then at some other time do the same thing on another media.

Later on in the discussion Lars said that “we need people that know how to write for different media platforms, at least people that are good at one and know about all of the rest”. I think this is where we all are moving right now, or need to move. We are becoming some kind of renaissance people, that are great in different areas that we before used to separate. But as those areas merge it becomes easier for us to be good at many of them.

Maybe the cross in cross media has played out it’s role? Maybe all media is more or less using different medias to express them selves, meaning that all media today is cross media. The prefixes we tend to use when something new comes along has a meaning in the beginning to say “hey, listen, this is something new”.

I suggest we say we do media and focus on the unique ideas, characteras, engagement we create and talk only secondly about which category to put it in.

Am I onto something? Or do we need prefixes and categorizing to understand what we discuss?

After Pia Kinhult from Region Skåne welcomed the crowed with the Swedish national hymn “Helan går!”(classic schnapps song) in the opening herring lunch, the afternoon was filed with discussions around agreement signing, how to become successful, broadening and interconnectivity among other things.

Some bullet points that came out from the discussions where; Stop looking at games as products and loot at them as services, react on the changes in the business, have a long plan on business development, know your customer, your ideas might be great (no one cares though) but where is the business model and of course – send less then you earn!

Per Strömbäck from Dataspelsbranschen summed up the day and ended it with saying; The gaming industry do not have to look up to the movie industry any more, we do not have the beat them in storytelling, we let the players make the story for us.