Bringing a Retail Franchise into the Social Gaming World Caryl Shaw Sr. Producer Maxis/Electronic...

From the Box to the ‘BookBringing a Retail Franchise into theSocial Gaming World

Caryl ShawSr. Producer

Maxis/Electronic Arts

Demetri DetsaridisExecutive Producer

Area/Code

Who are these people?

• Maxis is a wholly-owned studio of Electronic Arts.

• Number of employees at kickoff: 9,920 (EA)

• Known for titles Spore, SimCity and The Sims

• Based in Emeryville, CA

• Area/Code is an independent game developer.

• Number of Employees at kickoff: 16

• Known for titles Parking Wars (Facebook) and Drop7 (iPhone)

• Developers of location-based, mobile, web-based and social games

• Based in New York, NY

• PC Game • Designed by Will Wright &

Maxis• Released in 2008• Metacritic: 87• Over 3M copies sold

Facebook circa 2008 had…

• Slightly more than 100M users

• Games like Lil’ Green Patch, Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, Friends for Sale, and Who Has The Biggest Brain? were surging toward the 5M user mark.

What is this stuff?

• Spore is more “casual” than the typical boxed PC title.

• This fits Facebook’s userbase and EA’s efforts to diversify its audience.

• Spore was always supposed to be multiplatform.

WIN!

Really???

• Create a new Spore game for the biggest social platform

• Begin learning how to develop for Facebook

• Stay true to the key concepts of Spore• Generate microtransaction revenue• Minimize costs by outsourcing to a

team with relevant experience

What were our goals?

Goals

What were our goals?

• Develop a successful Facebook title with a AAA publisher

• Prove indie-style dev works on huge “franchise” games

• Bring real multiplayer into the single-player Spore experience.

• Make a fun game, worthy of mention alongside Will Wright’s name.

Goals

• Social Games – expanding into an area where we had little experience

• Delivering a true “Spore” experience• Will it make money?• Can we capture a new audience for

an established franchise?• Would the developer be able to keep

up?

What about the risks?

Risks

• Area/Code’s 1st traditional publisher collaboration – would cultures clash?

• EA was new to social games – would they listen to the lessons we’d learned?

• Spore never quite captured core gamer hearts – could we count on them as early adopters?

• EA and A/C both wanted a more hardcore game than Facebook’s norm – was it just us?

Risks


• Proposal• Contract Negotiation• Design• Project Schedule Planning

• Or um… should Design come first?

Before you do anything…

Kickoff

As we got started, we were also reminded of one other very important reality…


Risks

Relative Sizes* of the Spore Islands Partners

Area/Code!

Top 10Spore Islands

Lessons

Do user testing – and believe it!

We did focus groups, but their lessons sometimes pointed in scary directionsWe addressed most issues in Open Beta, but we could have started sooner!

#10

Lessons

Spore PC promised to let you see your friends’ creatures on your home world.Facebook seemed made to deliver on that promise – and this became our #1 design goal.

We wanted players to:• Build their own life-forms• Place them in an environment• Evolve them to thrive in their surroundings

Designing Social Spore

Design

Ultimately, our discussions came down to one central choice: are we building a “sim”?

If so, this slightly scary stuff would be true:• Build-tweak-repeat is the game’s core loop• User actions don’t give prompt feedback• We’d need big time server infrastructure• No role models on Facebook to study


Design

We really struggled with going the sim route.

Pros:• Leaning on Maxis’ skills and experience in the genre is kind of a no-brainer.• The Sims showed there was such a thing as a mass market simulation game.• Doing a sim would allow us to be deeper, cheaper via procedural content.

Design


We really struggled with going the sim route.

Cons:• What is a multiplayer sim anyway?• We wanted competition, but PvP and sims both skew hardcore. Too much for Facebook?• Given hardware demands, persistent real-time was impossible. But without it, creating player agency is difficult.

Design


Those are some big challenges.

But we decided to go for it. As indies, gameplay innovation is the way we succeed. It’s scary and risky, as it is elsewhere in the industry, but this is iterative game development. It’s also how the bar is pushed on Facebook: before FarmVille there was Farm Town.

Design


Risky– Lessons learned on Spore PC–Worried it was the wrong platform

for a hardcore sim–What would the second-to-second

gameplay look like?

Design


• Waddaya Want?– Stay true to Spore PC– But be appropriate for Facebook

• Creativity, creativity, creativity• Area/Code’s pre-conceived notions– Had a great knowledge of past Maxis

titles– Not trying to make SimEarth, guys…

Design Requirements

Design

We called it Spore Ecosystems and it would be Facebook’s first “on demand” sim:• When users want to see their creatures’ progress, the server looks at creature and environmental stats and generates results.• To avoid boring text, we would show the results of those “on demand” sessions graphically as mini-cartoons.


Design

Building the Game

We used Spore creatures as character portraits with “toy” versions in the result animations.At this stage, it looked like a cross between an X Wars game and a casual PC title.While our Art Director worked on the UI, we play-tested a prototype internally with promising results.

Development

At the Alpha external playtest, though, gamers liked it…but non-gamers were having a hard time connecting with their creatures.This was partly UI, but partly game design – players spent lots of time watching creatures interact without doing much themselves.Not too different from X Wars, right?Click, then see your results. But the complexity made it different enough.

Development

Building the Game

Taking game design risks is an important part of competing on Facebook.But novel designs make social gaming’s nimble development practices hard to follow. Early user testing, taken seriously, lets you act quickly on potential trouble spots.

Development

Building the Game

Tutorialize the game experience

We didn’t leave time to create dynamic help and instead delivered more standard click-through text boxes.It wasn’t ideal and it cost us users.

#9

Lessons

We all know Facebook users aren’t hardcore gamers, but sometimes we forget just how much that matters. Cramming a tutorial in late in the cycle is nuts when your players don’t even know the basics of the genre.The tutorial must be ready for user tests, so start it at prototype. Explain the game to your users asyou figure it out for yourself.

Development

Building the Game

Agile works…especially for high-speed, rapid-iteration projects.It gives partners excellent visibility and eases planning.But you have to use silly words. Not that big a deal.

#8

Lessons

Area/Code was switching to Agile Development when we began Spore Islands. The new process created a few hiccups, like getting used to the intentional transparency.It also took us some time to adjust to shared task lists and weekly client builds.

Producing the Game

Development

There were eight staffers on the Spore Islands team: mostly veterans, most full time. Maxis added another 1 ½ full-timers.One of us had used Agile before.Uptake difficulties aside (and you will have them), we recommend Agile heartily for Facebook development. It helps keep you nimble and, as wesaid…you need that.

Building the Game

Development

Total brand fidelity is unnecessary

We spent lots of time worrying about confusing users by diverging from Spore PC

They… didn’t care.

#7

Lessons

• What to do? What to do.• Art style deliberations• Executive oversight

Producing the Game

Production!

Metrics are your friendWe learned a huge amount from data collection, from purchase details to UI usage

Track as much as you can…then track more.

#6

Lessons

• Make them a priority• Shared between Dev & Publisher• Process to take action

• Identify required reporting early• Take Action!

Metrics

Production!

Metrics came late to the party for us, as our studio-wide stat package wasn’t ready until after launch. Open Beta is when it should have been ready…but creating reusable code was vital.Metrics, like user testing and Agile, help you turn faster. We can’t stress enough how important that is in making socialgames.

Building the Game

Development

The high road leads nowhereYou are in business to make money, especially with a big publisher.

Don’t scam your users…but if Purple Cows work, use Purple Cows!

#5

Lessons

Our plan was always for Spore Islands to be supported by microtransaction revenues. Early in the design phase, we started talking about how to integrate MTX opportunities wherever possible.Even so, revenue generation should have been a greater focus, earlier in the dev cycle.

Island Microtransactions

$$$$$

We studied the Facebook microtransaction market and saw that there are two basic tracks to MTX revenue: • Customization: Allowing users to pay to personalize their experience in the application (aka “dollhousing”).

• Convenience: Giving users the option to pay to cut down on time spent grinding (i.e. automation of repetitive tasks).


$$$$$

We spent much time and trouble assuring balance between paying and free-play customers in the system.

Area/Code and Maxis/EA saw this as a vital part of maintaining the integrity of the brand, on a par with avoiding “scam” offers.

WE WERE WRONG

$$$$$


It turns out that our player base, at least, had caught up to where Chinese gamers were five years ago.When we made it possible for players spending more real cash to get ahead in the game faster, they were fine with it.Don’t ignore potential revenue streams unless you’re sure they’re poisoned.


$$$$$

• Only used one form of currency when most other successful games were using two

• Cut a “dollhousing” feature that could potentially have been a good MTX feature (Island customization)

• Didn’t allow players to Buy Observations at launch

MTX Gotchas

$$$$$

• Choosing a vendor

• Setting up accounting in EA• Hosting and stuff

Boldly Going

$$$$$

Don’t change all of the rules at once

Innovation drives success in growing markets like Facebook, but can confuse mass audiences.

Small changes to known systems make new experiences easier to swallow.

#4

Lessons

As designed, Spore Islands had no levels, at all.We were avoiding Facebook RPGs’ tedious treadmills and their 20-year-0ld problems.But in our Open Beta, players begged for some kind of leveling – anything at all.We quickly implemented a system that would let them level up their titles from one island-themed rank to another.Development

Example: Grindcore?

But even then, the players wanted more. They wanted to increase their stats.Our elegant zero-sum system was designed to trade grinding for subtle systems mastery, but the average player didn’t understand it. We resisted “making the game more ordinary” but missed that players were just looking for a familiar hook in a sim genre brand new to Facebook.

WE WERE WRONG

Development

Example: Grindcore?

When we first started on Spore Ecosystems, it used Spore artwork for player-created creatures.We moved away from this quickly, however, as it risked confusing players of the PC title……as well as alienating the more casual Facebook audience with its very “hardcore” 3D looks.

Example: Creature Look

Development

Over several revisions, we pushed the creatures and illustrations in a much more Facebook-friendly direction.With customization part of our business plan, we needed a familiar art style that Facebook players would love to look at over and over.Between the Agile process and an early start on art, we were able to make huge changes in response to research, testing, and publisher requests.

Development

Example: Creature Look

WE WERE RIGHT!

Competition is ToughWe took a risk on true competitive multiplayer, but learned this: if there are five players and one winner, there are four losers.

…and losers don’t buy cowboy hats.

#3

Lessons

After launch, we addressed the hardcore nature of competition by building in some treadmills that eased the pain of losing.At its core, though, Spore Islands was at its most fun when played against – rather than with – friends.Hardcore competitive games, like Scrabble, have “made it” on Facebook, but it’s not easy or common. Keep this in mind if your design (or brand) is all about the PvP.

Competitive Balance

Development

#2

Lessons

Advertising worksIf your game’s not going into a huge social gaming network (and if you’re an indie, it’s not) than you or your publisher needs to buy ads. LOTS of ads.

Facebook is a platform – your game is not an ad, it’s a product and it needs its own campaign; luck is not a strategy.

Before Spore Islands’ Open Beta, we carefully planned out our Facebook touchpoints, User-to-User, and App-to-User messaging. We cribbed from Parking Wars and designed the game to reward players organically as they added friends for their creatures to prey on.We didn’t think hard about our ad plan or about newly popular virality methods – we had a system. Virality

Planned Virality

We were…• Proud of our design-based virality solution• Concerned about our Spamminess rating• Suspicious of “hard sell” Feed-spamming• Wary about giving EA another Spore-related customer service black eye after DRMgate So we erred on the side of caution.

CAUTION DON’T SELL

COWBOY HATS!

Virality

Planned Virality

• Advertising budget was small• Social gaming network was not

available

Marketing Plan

Production!

#1

Lessons

Life begins at launchBazillions of people are going to play your game. They will discover things you didn’t know and find problems you didn’t think you had.You must respond to things you only learn after the game goes live. If you can’t, your players will leave as fast as they arrived. It can’t be said often enough: launch is the starting gate, not the finish line.

• Timing– Production ran long– Beta ran right into Spore Hero for

the Wii launch date– But needed to get out before any

other major corporate announcements

Planning for Launch

Production!

As social gaming matures, AAA properties will increasingly enter the space, but they’ll need as much love as on any other platform.Innovation is important, and that means sometimes things aren’t going to work out as planned. Be prepared, and roll with it.With a full toolkit and full support, a strong brand can and will bring the same power to Facebook as anywhere else. But, of course, it it always needs to be a good game first.

The Bottom Line

Lessons

From the Box to the ‘BookBringing a Retail Franchise into the Social Gaming World

Caryl ShawSr. Producer

Maxis/Electronic [email protected]

twitter: caryl_s

Demetri DetsaridisExecutive Producer

Area/[email protected]

twitter: detsaridis

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Bringing a Retail Franchise into the Social Gaming World Caryl Shaw Sr. Producer Maxis/Electronic...

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