The Flogging Will Continue…

I wrote this up at the request of Jonric of the Vault Network so I thought I’d post it here, too.

This year it looks like I am the most prolific speaker at the Game Developers’ Conference, or GDC. I don’t think I get a prize — perhaps buying drinks for Meggan and the other poor GDC folks who had to schedule the event.

Monday and Tuesday I’ll be haunting the Independent Game Developers summit and the Casual Games summit. I’m speaking at both, a mini-lecture at 2pm for the Indies (probably a summary of Three Rings’ approach to development and our tawdry corporate history) and a couple of panels on business stuff (3pm Mon, 2pm Tues) for the casual summit. Tuesday night the parties start in earnest — I think I have five to go to, that night! Capn better put on his carousing boots!

Wednesday the ‘classic’ conference starts. Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms and I are moderating a roundtable on Free to Play, Pay for Stuff’ or microcurrency-based games. We did this last year and it was a lot of fun; I love roundtables because lots of people talk and you get a real exchange of ideas. We had folks from Habbo Hotel, Wizards of the Coast and Korean developers, people with real, concrete experience of the wacky world of virtual currency. Unfortunately nobody from IGE turned up, but their ears must have been burning! The roundtable is at 2.30pm Weds, then repeats at 4pm Thurs and 10am (ugh! Thanks Meggan!) Friday morning. Weds afternoon I am also on a panel with Gordon Walton, Raph Koster, Rob Pardo, Marc Kern and Mark Jacobs about the MMOs Past, Present and Future. I like controversial panels, and we have a mandate from Gordon to get into a fist fight, so we’ll see what trouble we can rustle up. Wednesday night is less terrifying on the party front, but there is the Minna Mingle which is a big woo-hah for the casual games space at the ‘upscale’ venue, Ruby Skye. I will be sure to wear a nice stripey shirt. Fortunately we hope to be high rollin’ with a few extra dollars in our pockets, having swept the board with Bang! Howdy at the Independent Games Festival earlier in the evening. Wish us luck!

Thursday is the big one. At 2.30pm I throw myself into the fray with a panel on Burning Man and its relevance for game developers. We did a similar session at the Austin Game Conference last September, fresh out of Burning Man, and I believe it’s an interesting topic, especially for player-created and community-oriented worlds. It doesn’t stop; after the roundtable it’s the main event at 5.30pm; Michael Bayne, Three Rings’ co-founder and CTO, and I will be making our annual presentation on Three Rings’ progress and unveiling our new project. The talk is called Pirates vs. Cowboys vs… Ninjas? MetaSoy and Player-created Content. Last year we showed off an early version of Bang! Howdy, this year we’ll be talking about how that’s doing, how Puzzle Pirates is getting on, and giving the public debut of the new new thing. This may all sound like a big ole product pitch for Three Rings, but in addition to demos we’re all about giving out real data (like revenues and player numbers), useful information on our development process, indie business tips and hard liquor. I leave it to the audience to decide which is most important, but they’ve enjoyed themselves the last couple of years.

I should be exhausted after this, but the day is just a warm-up for Three Rings’ infamous late-night, hard-drinking GDC party at a top secret location. The theme this year is Meta Science, so bring a labcoat and ping me or find me at the show if you want an invite.

My brains (mmm, brains!) will doubtless be hurtin’ when I finish up the conference on Friday with the roundtable and most likely the first opportunity I have to really dig into some other sessions. This is my twelfth GDC and it is always an exhausting whirlwind, but it’s also some of the best fun I have in the industry and always makes me happy that I make games. It’s a rare joy to work in a business where you actually *like* your colleagues in the industry. My father worked in films and believe me, it wasn’t like that for him. So I count my blessings and collapse for the weekend a happy Capn.

Capn needs to watch his mouth when he is around journalists. This is something of a public apology to the Lindens for the quote from me in this Red Herring article on ‘The War to Build the Next Warcraft’; ‘Using Second Life is like having teeth pulled’ is not entirely fair. It’s a lot more fun than that (unless they give you the really good drugs at the dentist).

Linden continues to do really cool things. They open-sourced the client (Susan’s take) and just released some really great, detailed numbers (Raph’s analysis is useful). On the latter, my estimates of their revenue were higher than Raph (I probably booched the math) but given our relative concurrency user numbers (impressively they are up to ~4-5x us, vs ~2x in the summer), Puzzle Pirates and Second Life seem to have similar ballpark average revenue per user. The recent growth is fantastic; go Linden!

Back to the Red Herring arrrticle, I am also bemused by the authors implication that we have had ‘much more luck’ than Runescape. Our 30,000 paying customers (it’s actually a fair bit more than that, but it depends on how you slice it up over time; PP has had over 80,000 paying customers over its lifetime) by no means indicate more ‘luck’ than Runescape’s 900,000. I’d like a slice of their ‘luck’, myself.

I find myself a little baffled by the business plan of ‘Trion World Network’. It’s still in stealth, but what they do say is something like ‘top quality online games for broadband’. I am of course very much on-board with there being a big distinction between an online service oriented company and a packaged goods publisher, and I can forsee that Electronic Arts (the CEO’s former employer) may continue to acquire companies that succeed in this paradigm. However, EA aren’t all that bad at online stuff; after the EA.com debacle passed they’ve done a good job managing Pogo, and now they now have Mythic. They just bought SingShot, too; Sims Karaoke, anyone? I’m not sure what the big difference in experience (not distribution, which is important certainly) for a player is between a pure download game and the box-purchase with regular patches. I’m very skeptical of streaming solutions, as they mostly seem to produce a patchy (ha ha) experience that gamers won’t stand for. It’ll be interesting to see how Trion and competitors Multiverse, shape up in the field of battle.

Naturally the Capn remains aghast at the budget requirements of (presumably) Trion and Red5. Excuse the play on the name, but to an investor, to me it looks like this; if you’re okay with putting down $10M (out of, say, $40M) on red 5 then waiting four years or so to see if the roulette wheel comes up, great! You might win big (especially if you can do that scream thing like in Run Lola Run, ~6.40 mins in)… but this seems like a odd kind of bet for a venture investor to make. As Gus Tai says in the article, VCs have historically shied away from such content bets because they realise that they are not publishers and do not have the skillset to make judgements about what might succeed in the marketplace — let alone the marketplace four years away. Anyway, I’ve blogged about the insane competition in the MMORPG market before. We’ll see who is left on the battlefield… in a few years.

Finally, they end the article with a quote from me about a ‘ten year battle’. I believe that in this case I was referring to specifically the player-created content ‘virtual world’ space, not entertainment. I hope that entertainment worlds are not a winner-takes-all business. I think that would be a shame, although it certainly looks a bit like that right now with WoW. However, open-platform virtual worlds are likely to have some kind of network effect properties that lead one to dominate the landscape. I think that it will be a long and bloody conflict before a world emerges the winner, and I strongly believe that it will only a deeply open platform that succeeds. I think Linden agrees with me, which gives them a whole lot of legs in the struggle.

One of my favourite meetings ever was in Silicon Valley with a very famous and successful entrepreneur who was interested in buying Three Rings. He quoted Sun Tzu to me, something about taking the high ground and forcing your enemy into the swampy lowlands. I hope Three Rings can keep to the higher ground, if I can keep my feet out of my mouth we might just make it up the hill.

There appear to be similar sets of expectations surrounding startup companies and game developers; both relentlessly drive employees to tremendous hours and efforts, working them late nights and weekends. ‘Crunch mode’ is a common spectre for developers as they grind into the early hours in the hope of making a milestone. This excellent IGDA article on Crunch Mode by Evan Robinson makes very clear what a terrible idea this is, illustrated by decades of studies. Even that good old fascist Henry Ford believed in a forty-hour week! I’m with Henry on this one.

Electronic Arts’ regular practice of over-working its employees seems to have toned down since the EA Spouse debacle, but the practice remains commonplace. Indeed, I suspect it’s probably more common with smaller developers and startups, because they are often reliant on the income from the next milestone payment or funding event. Crunch time is also a kind of perverse ‘fun’, fueled by a machismo camaraderie. In many cultures it is inappropriate for an aspiring worker to go home before the boss. The late nights and weekends demonstrate commitment to the project and the team. The delirium of sleeplessness is akin to psychoactive drugs or the euphoria of sports.

I would rather get my euphoria and late nights outside of the office. Perhaps, as Nabeel’s fine post on startups as a lifestyle choice indicates, this just means I am ’slowing down in old age’. I don’t think it’s that, at least in my case; most of my colleagues are younger than me, and most of them have significant others to go home to (which is in itself interesting to me; we have a lot of ’settled 20somethings’, many of whom have moved from smaller towns to be somewhat anomalous here in the gamophobic Bay Area). Only one or two of the crew can begin to give the Capn a run for his money at carousing, not that I’m necessarily proud of my achievements on the tiles. Oh no.

Rather, having started a few companies and done the through-the-night thing plenty, I am convinced that people simply do better work when they are happy, relaxed, and have a life outside work. Three Rings has never mandated working weekends, or late nights. Sure, mates sometimes work from home, and sometimes I leave the office at 8pm telling one of the usual suspects to ‘go home’, but this is not something we encourage. This apparent luxury has a lot to do with our scrupulous avoidance of a deadline-driven project schedule, along with a fortunate lack of external partners who can enforce such deadlines. Our only experience with this was back when we shipped the Ubisoft Puzzle Pirates box gold master. It was rather surreal.

Strangely, as we grow we’ve found that a lot of our folks find our ‘when it’s ready’ culture baffling, and want a bit more goal-driven structure. We’re experimenting with ways to provide targets to work towards, but we’re adamant not to introduce arbitrary, immovable deadlines. Sometimes, however, they creep up on us. Right now we’re trying to get MetaSoy to alpha before the Game Developers Conference so that we have something to talk about.

So, mandatory 16 hour days and six-day weeks all round! Swab those decks, you dogs!