The State of Game Journalism

In this article, author Jason R. Rich reports on the growing presence of social media in game journalism and its impact on game developers.

Just as interactive entertainment has evolved dramatically in recent years, so has the way consumers are able to obtain the latest gaming news, reviews, game play strategies and gossip. For game publishers and developers, this now means having to take a multi-faceted approach to sales, marketing, advertising, public relations and promotions.

While printed, special interest gaming magazines, like Game Informer, and printed strategy guides (from publishers like Prima) still exist, their importance to gamers has somewhat taken a back seat to the vast number of online-based gaming websites, blogs, YouTube channels and special interest Facebook pages, for example, that are now populating the Internet.

Marc Saltzman, a longtime video game and interactive entertainment columnist for the Gannett newspaper chain and USA Today, explained, “Over the last five years, we have seen a lot more mainstream media interest in gaming, but far fewer specialty publications focusing on gaming. There is also a lot more opportunity for bloggers and online social media to cover gaming.”

Today, the success of a new game title no longer depends on positive reviews appearing within a few key printed gaming publications. Instead, word of mouth among consumers via the online social networking services can quickly make or break a game. Plus, news, game play strategies and other content related to new games can be disseminated almost instantly thanks to the Internet.

Thus, game developers and publishers need to continue working with the few remaining printed game magazine publishers to coordinate reviews and share game-related content in order to cater to the wants and needs of hard core gamers. However, it’s also necessary to reach consumers by working with the growing number of mainstream media outlets that now also cover gaming.

Meanwhile, having a strong online social media presence to promote word-of-mouth hype about games is more essential than ever, as is reaching out to the influential bloggers and YouTube channel hosts that cover gaming. Many of these individuals have larger and more dedicated audiences than traditional media outlets.

Andy Eddy, the editor-in-chief of @Gamer magazine (the official games magazine of Best Buy), stated, “Video game journalism, like other forms of journalism, has expanded quite a bit, so there are a lot of different ways for a gaming enthusiast to get information. There are still reliable game magazines, such as @Gamer, and game-oriented websites, but the Internet has enabled other forms to proliferate, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The ability to easily publish game-related information on the Internet means that there's now a lot of content, from reliable and not-so-reliable sources, to be had.”

He added, “As a result of there being numerous methods for enthusiasts to gather information and news, I think there's less loyalty. Instead of relying on one or two sources for content, gamers are able to do a keyword search on Google, and instantly be taken to a number of sources with the exact information they're looking to get. And along with that, there's a desire for instant access to news stories.

“Consumer tastes vary. There's no single or definitive source to tell you whether or not you'll like a game when it comes out. Simply put, I think it's now much harder for a developer or publisher to bring out a bad game and blow it past the buying community, given how quickly word-of-mouth opinions and media coverage spreads via the Internet,” said Eddy.

Word travels very fast about new video games thanks to online social media and blogs. “If a game gets a lot of positive buzz, starts trending, and word on the street is that ‘You’ve got to play this,’ a game is going to do very well,” added Salzman.

“Recently, we have seen games from small publishers come out of nowhere, that did not initially receive attention from the gaming or general media, become the next big thing in gaming. Look at Minecraft, for example.

“If there are two things that have changed the face of gaming media, it’s blogs and online social networking. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become very important tools to game publishers for spreading the word about new games. It’s widely accessible and instantaneous. It also provides a way for gamers to share their own gaming experiences and opinions,” said Salzman.

Game developers and publishers should still rely on the traditional gaming media to help them reach serious gamers. However, it’s important to understand that the gaming media is now segmented, with various publications and outlets covering specific aspects of interacting entertainment, such as online gaming, mobile gaming, console gaming or computer gaming.

“Game developers and publishers need to do their homework. Target the gaming media that caters to the genre of gaming that’s appropriate to their titles,” said Salzman. “Next, target the specific journalists at those outlets who cover the type of game you’re trying to promote. Otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.”

Today, when it comes to promoting a game, utilizing the traditional gaming media and mainstream media, along with reaching out to bloggers, game-oriented YouTube channels, and utilizing online social media, are all equally important.

Jason R. Rich (@jasonrich7) is the bestselling author of more than 55 books, as well as a frequent contributor to numerous national magazines, major daily newspapers and popular websites. Beginning in the late-1980s, he spent more than 15 years covering interactive entertainment. Most recently, he wrote the Pottermore Secrets and Mysteries Revealed: The Unofficial Guide To Pottermore.com strategy guide for Que Publishing. His own blog, which covers iPhone and iPad apps (including games), is called Jason Rich’s Featured App Of The Week.

How not to sound white: Exploring my culture through a video game

In this article, game producer Angel Inokon recalls how the struggle to connect to her Nigerian American culture led to the creation of her very first video game.

“You Oreo!” Of all the names the bully could have called me, I kind of liked Oreo. My round belly and chubby sixth grade arms made no secret of the fact that I enjoyed dunking chocolate cookies in milk until they crumbled into a mush of goodness. Yumm....

But it was intended to be an insult. I was a brown-skinned little girl with nappy hair who spoke like a white person. An Oreo is black on the outside and white on the inside. This is the story of how a video game helped bridge my cultural identity as a Nigerian Black American.

I never felt like I belonged – not at home or at school. My parents ate funny food, wore funny clothes and spoke a funny language. We were forbidden to learn their native tongue, Ibibio, one of Nigeria’s 400 plus dialects. To make matters worse, they had a British education so we were hopelessly out of place at school.

We weren’t Nigerian enough to speak our native language and not American enough to sound black. I would beg my parents to teach me Ibibio. I fantasized about how awesome it would be to have my own secret language – I could talk about people in public, understand jokes that seemed funnier in Ibibio or eavesdrop on my parents.

They would laugh as we mangled sounds that don’t exist in the English language. For example, 'akpan' means first son, a common name for men. The ‘kp’ pops from your lips like a hard bouncy b. My parents wouldn't teach us because they feared discrimination if we spoke with an accent. Assimilation meant survival. Therefore we had to sound white. I’ve gone through cycles of acceptance around this fact – indifference, annoyance, anger, self-pity, resignation and back again. Hungry for power, I ordered books on Ibibio from Amazon. Books suck. They don’t speak to you. You can’t easily learn a language from a book.

Books weren’t the solution. So I created a video game.

What I was trying to accomplish was darn near impossible. I wasn’t a programmer. I didn’t know the language. My parents wouldn’t teach. And we were the first generation to speak full English. Undaunted I opened up Macromedia Flash 8 and designed my first game – Ibibio Hangman.

It was a bilingual hangman game where you selected the mode - Green for Ibibio or Blue for English. If you selected English you saw a blue screen with spaces and letters to guess the secret word. If you clicked the hint button you would see the translated word in Ibibio. When you got the word right in either mode you could hear a pronunciation of Ibibio. One problem – I can’t pronounce these words.

So I cornered my mom and got her to say a couple words into my cheap microphone before she escaped. I felt sorry for my mom. She had a geeky daughter. I was not interested in being in the kitchen learning to cook fufu soup or wearing a lace buba dress. I wanted to code. At my computer, I converted her voice to wav files using Audacity and put them in my game asset folder. In the end my game had an external dictionary of about 10 words. If you failed to guess the word a bomb would explode which somehow made sense as a lose condition for Hangman. It was a game, it worked and it was mine.

Now almost ten years later I make games for a living. Video games can act as a time capsule capturing experiences we can relive again and again. There will be a day I’ll want to hear my mother’s voice. I’ll wish I was able to hear her speak our language. While I no longer have the source code for the original game, I have the memories. Now as I’ve started my own mobile gaming company my wish is to rebuild Ibibio Hangman and invite you too to become an Oreo.

Angel Inokon is a game producer, entrepreneur and a member of the IGDA living in Oakland, CA. She is creating That's My Move!, a mobile game for shy wannabe dancers who want to have fun doing flash mobs with friends. Follow her at @angelinokon or @thatsmymove.

August 2013: Spotlighting Trends

When I wrote the feature article, The Social Network Game Boom, for Gamasutra, in 2009, I guess it was so early that the editor had to add that the potential of social games to dominate the market was "according to her."  I had been lucky enough to have been there at the beginning of social gaming (even witnessing it firsthand in China!) and I was also there at the debatable end, as social game companies shifted their focus to mobile gaming.

I worked at several social gaming companies.  They all faced inevitable change in the market and strove to make that shift from Facebook/Web to iPhone/tablet games.  Of course, no one wants to be at the tail end of a trend.  After 20 restaurant Diner Dash type games in the marketplace, is the 21st going to be any better?  Even with the short production cycles for social and mobile games, companies wanted to do some trend forecasting so that they didn't end up with last season's now-boring flash-in-the-pan.  The business people had meetings to decide if 9 months from now, would a girl-centered shopping game do any better than a vampire-themed shooter?  They were trying to forecast trends and "likes."

This month, I'd welcome articles about the science or intuition of forecasting trends and also any trends that you've noticed in our industry.  What changes do you think will impact us in the future?

If you would like to submit an article, please read the submission guidelines to the right first.  Thanks!

Narrative Analysis of Way of the Samurai 3

In this video, game researcher Arthur Protasio describes how "narrative reincarnation" in Way of the Samurai 3 represents a series of branching narrative paths.

For an in depth analysis of the game’s narrative structure, click here.

Arthur Protasio is a writer, narrative designer, and game researcher. He runs the Rio de Janeiro IGDA chapter and believes in the equal importance of studying, criticizing, and developing games as means to understanding them as a medium of expression. His essays and games have been internationally praised and you can find him online at LudoBardo, his web series focused on game narratives.

Top Ten Tabletop Kickstarters: How They Do It

In this article, novelist and game designer Matt Forbeck weighs in on why tabletop gaming Kickstarters are outperforming video game crowdfunding campaigns.

Over at ICv2, they’ve posted a list of the top ten tabletop gaming Kickstarters of all time (um, four years now, in Kickstarter terms). They don’t offer up much in the way of analysis there, though, other than to say “tabletop game projects are among Kickstarter’s most successful categories, with five projects at over $1 million, and three over $2 million.”

All true, but why is that? Why are tabletop games outdoing even video games, which are far more popular in general?

It has to do with the economies of scale of plastic miniatures.

(If that sentence put you to sleep, move on. Now. I’m going deep here.)

Every one of those games on ICv2′s list is a game or product that features lots and lots of plastic figures or terrain. Most of them started out with a decent amount of plastic in their boxes, but as each Kickstarter grew, the producers tossed in more and more plastic bits until the drives went from “cool stuff” to “awesome bargain on cool stuff!”

The Reaper drive for their Bones figures line is a perfect example of this — and was also the top-grossing drive, raking in more than $3.4 million. Their most popular reward came if you backed them at their $100 Vampire level. At the start of the drive, that got you a total of 67 figures. By the end, you racked up 240 figures, plus a number of other neat things, like a copy of my Hard Times in Dragon City novel, which unlocked at the $3 million mark.

So how did Reaper manage to nearly quadruple the number of figures they offered while keeping the price the same? The secret’s in the plastic.

Casting metal miniatures is a labor-intensive process that involves pouring molten metal into a spin-casting machine that distributes the metal into hollow cavities cut into a vulcanized rubber mold. The molds wear out after a while, and you have to make new ones. The metal’s a little pricey, but the rubber’s cheap, so it’s a great way to make miniatures if you’re making a few thousand or less.

However, if you can sell more than that many miniatures, you should make your figures in plastic instead, as the molds for these last virtually forever and the figures only cost pennies apiece. The trouble is that the injection molds for plastic figures are cut from steel, a process that costs thousands of dollars per figure rather than dozens. A small company can’t afford to make hundreds of these molds at once, at least not without a huge cash influx.

And that’s where Kickstarter comes in. If you can get your backers to pledge enough money to cover your steel molds, then you can give them lots of figures for their money. Better yet, if you bust through your initial funding goals, you can set stretch goals for new figures and toss them into the mix for either little cost (as low-cost add-on options) or bundle them in for free.

When the Reaper drive started, the per-figure price of their Vampire level was $1.49 each, shipped to your door. That’s a phenomenal bargain when you consider that most metal fantasy gaming figures cost around $5 each — or much more if you’re into a game like Warhammer. By the time the drive was over, the per-figure price fell to under 42¢ each.

Every time Reaper’s backers broke another stretch goal, the bargain got better and better for them. That gave them lots of incentive to tell their friends about the deal and rope them into joining the drive, and the effect snowballed with each stretch goal knocked down. By the time the drive ended, it was such a fantastic deal for anyone who’d ever pushed figures around a table that it became nearly irresistible.

All of the other miniatures-based triumphs follow this same kind of model. The recent Dwarven Forge Game Tiles drive, for instance, (on which I did a little consulting) followed this to the letter, and it brought in over $1.9 million.

Most other types of Kickstarter ventures cannot pull this sort of thing off. If you’re Kickstarting a novel, for instance, it’s hard to offer lots more novels in a time frame that makes sense for most readers. Evil Hat managed something close to this by bringing in lots of authors for its Spirit of the Century novel line Kickstarter, and the strategy made that the #5 fiction drive ever. (By my count, it’s actually the #1 straight novel drive, but that’s a separate post.)

The nature of minis, though, means you want to have as many of them to play with as once as you can manage, and with enough money a producer can manage this in a reasonable amount of time. It makes it a natural niche for a top Kickstarter — if it’s run well. It’s not something just any company can pull off though. There’s a lot of hard-won knowledge, skill, and expertise that goes into running and producing a successful line of plastic figures, and Kickstarter makes for the perfect way for the people who have that particular combination of things to capitalize on it.

[This article originally appeared on Matt Forbeck's blog, Forbeck.com] 

Matt Forbeck has been a full-time creator of award-winning games and fiction since 1989. He has twenty-six novels published to date, including the award-nominated Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon and the critically acclaimed Amortals and Vegas Knights. His latest work includes the Magic: The Gathering comic book, the MMOs Marvel Heroes and Ghost Recon Online, his novel The Con Job, based on the TV show Leverage, and the Dangerous Games trilogy of thriller novels set at Gen Con. For more about him and his work, visit Forbeck.com.

In Russia, Game Play YOU!

In this article, game designer and producer Chris Keeling takes a detailed look at the Russian video game market.

The Russian-speaking audience of today is very similar to the Western market of the 1990’s. Since most people reading this are already familiar with the current Western market, I will focus on the nuances of the former-USSR (mostly Russia, being the largest and best example) rather than the Western player base.

Technology

The penetration of technology in general, and the internet in particular, especially for games, is much lower in Eastern Europe than in the West, although it is growing rapidly. While broadband connections are available to nearly 100% of Americans and over 80% of us use them, only 43% of Russians are online at home, up to about 50% when you include mobile devices. The rarity of games and consoles affects their price as well, and they cost about double here what they cost in the US. PC ownership is still fairly high, although Russians typically keep their computers longer and lag behind the West in early adoption of technology. This tends to focus games in Russia away from consoles and toward PC and online games, particularly games that can be downloaded and that don’t have high system requirements.

Disposable Income

The average income in Russia is around $790 per month (over twice what it is in Belarus!), which is less than a third of the US average. Although food costs tend to be fairly low, finished goods are expensive, including clothes, cars, and other goods considered necessities in the West. Even with the low prices for food, the proportion of income spent on subsistence remains quite high – around 35% of total income (vs. about 6% in the US). The combination of high prices and low income leads to a lower standard of living in general, and widespread dissatisfaction with work and life. For the game industry, this leads to increased popularity among free to play (F2P) games and extremely high levels of piracy for retail box games.

Gamer Profile

Unlike the West, where we are finally seeing more and more female gamers, the Russian gamer is still 95% likely to be male. They typically play for socialization, to experience consumption, and as an escape from their hard lives. Russians visit social media sites like Facebook and vKontakte far more often than any other cultural group in the world. For many, their connection to the outside world through the internet is their lifeline. Because of this, games that include a social aspect are popular, especially those that include competition and cooperation as primary features. Russian players are natural clan-builders. Also, unlike the West (where sports games are cool, shooters are mainstream, and everything else is shunned as nerdy), Russians see historical and strategy games as more acceptable, while Americans see these genres as even geekier, on practically the same level as fantasy MMORPGs.

Gamer Culture

The crux of the matter lies here, where player expectations are vastly different. The combination of high cost, low availability, and piracy mean that Russian gamers are more tech-savvy, used to playing games made for other markets that have been hacked and are run from an ISO on a virtual drive. Even after they manage to get the game, they have to figure out how to play it, with no manual and no way to contact support. They’re true hackers – and once they find a game they like, they stick to it, play it with their friends, and pass it around. They take their gaming seriously. The hardcore gamer drives the Siberian Express over here, and prospective publishers should keep that in mind. On the other hand, the growth of F2P and online games means that games are becoming more accessible to (and less pirated by) more players in this region, reducing barriers to entry.

So there you have it. The Russian audience has limited access to current technology, internet penetration is relatively low, money is tight, prices are high, life is hard, and they are willing to crawl across broken glass to play good games, as long as they’re cheap. As I said at the beginning, this is very much like the Western market of the 1990’s. But at least we know exactly where this market is headed, and it won’t take them 15 years to catch up!

[This article was adapted from Chris Keeling's blog, A Connecticut Yankee.] 

Chris Keeling is the Director of Product Vision for Wargaming.Net in charge of the the design and production in the Americas, and occasionally lends his design sensibilities to Wargaming.Net's awesome free-to-play online games made in other countries. For more excitement, see his woefully outdated portfolio at www.chriskeeling.com.

July 2013: Social Impact Games

Last month, I attended the 10th anniversary of the Games For Change Festival in New York City. It's hard to believe 10 years have already passed since idealistic game developers came together with the idea that games could promote social change. There was so much variety at G4C13, so many different topics, and lastly, so much excitement from funders!  The National Endowment for the Arts is currently seeking worthy game projects to support, as it did for the Half the Sky Movement Facebook game.

In my book co-authored with David Michael, Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform, we discussed social impact games briefly under the category of Political or Art Games.  On GDAM, we have touched upon this topic while discussing Mature Games and Game-Based Learning.  Asi Burak, Co-President of Games for Change, even contributed to GDAM with this article on the topic of No More War Games?.

So I find it surprising that GDAM has never had a topic about social impact games.  Call them games for good, games for change, "earnest" games, serious games etc. -- these are all about games that strive to better the world and bring about social change.

As noted at G4C13, there are myriad issues of concern:  measuring impact, reaching out and finding unheard stories (much like Half the Sky Movement did), funding, accessibility, as well as design concerns.

Do you have a story to tell about social impact games?

I invite readers to submit an article on this topic.  Please read the submission guidelines first.  Thanks!