Three weeks ago iQ212 released Emoticons^TM, our first game.  As part of our multi platform launch strategy, Emoticons is on PC, web/facebook, and soon on mobile.  There are big differences between launching a PC or mobile game, and an app for the web.    Fortunately iQ212’s experience comes from diverse platforms.  Here is a bit of our recent experience releasing Emoticons on Facebook.

The best advice for launching a game on Facebook is to not launch it.  Retail and mobile games launch.  An online game does not need to launch, it can continue to live and grow tied to the umbilicus of the web.  Too often, traditional game companies outsource their online version (often as a Marketing expense) and and paste the delivery up on a server.  Fire and forget. A good online game requires a different way of developing and launching.

Emoticons was on Facebook a day after we started development.  At first the build had no game logic, scoring, animation, or server calls, but it was up on the Fb canvas page and the entire team could poke at it.  By building it online, in the setting the users would be playing it, we were able to tweak and plus as we developed.  Every day we would add features and polish, and we would also slowly add real users.  The iQ212 team at first, then family, then friends. 

There are no ads in Emoticons for facebook, yet.  The game is the message and we didn’t want to clutter it with random advertising.  For now we want players to download the PC version, learn about the upcoming mobile version, and invite friends to the facebook version.  Once the Emoticons brand is more established we will incorporate ads and make the shift from retail revenue towards ad revenue.

As Emoticons rolled out to a wider Facebook audience, we watched our stats and honed the experience to ensure a quality gameplay experience, as well as the viral potential.  We have received good advice from smart people, especially RockYou (they KNOW viral and facebook).  After a few weeks we are now up to almost one thousand daily players, and five thousand total. We look forward to a big ad push to expose Emoticons to a wider audience and hasten the viral spread.  Though our focus is now on new games, we still come back to Emoticons as Facebook unveils new features, and to enhance the experience for our players.

So the take-away is that to take advantage of the power of Facebook, you need to take time to craft your game using Facebook as you develop.  Copying a flash file to a webpage will not cut it.  Learn the APIs, adapt to the changing platform, and listen to your players as you roll out.  The benefits will result in a better game, happier players, viral spread, and ultimately more revenue.

Wow! I found this on the web today and had to share it.  Brief History of Match Three Games  Some guy wrote a long paper on the history of match three games.  Feel free to pass it along.

Who knew?  I thought Gamehouse invented the Match Three game in 2001!  Turns out that Match Three games have been declared “old fashioned games” because they really ARE!

Great news for Tuesday, Emoticons is available today!  We had one minor setback: as a cute, innovative, mass-market, puzzle game, no game portal would carry it.  But yesterday we redesigned it into a Hidden Object game and TODAY it is live on every game portal!  Check out the screenshot of the new Emoticons below.

iQ212 has been in business for a year and we have finally launched our first game, Emoticons^TM.  It is an original puzzle game that is now available for PC and web/facebook, and will soon launch on mobile carriers.  Hopefully you will be seeing and hearing lots more about Emoticons as it spreads to new game portals and platforms.  Please try it out and let us know what you think. www.EmoticonsGame.com

Gary Gygax co-created Dungeons and Dragons in 1974.  His obituary today got me thinking and reminscing.  I was in elementary school in the late 70s when D&D made it to California.  I recall my fourth grade teacher having to explain to me the difference between chain mail and postal mail! 

As kids my friends and I played with army men, and occasionally would incorporate dice and rulers, and impose rules.  When we ran around the hills and fields of pre-Sprawl Bay Area, we role played as knights, and soldiers, and cowboys.  Just as we were about to cross from kids to adolescents, along came Dungeons and Dragons, a game with imagination, and heroes, and monsters, and that was OK for big kids, and even adults to play.

Gary Gygax made it OK for grown ups to keep dreaming, playing, imagining, and inventing.  I’d wager that MOST of us in the games industry over age 30 got our start playing DnD back in the day.  Back then there was Atari and DnD, and you could not buy Atari for a week’s allowance.

One thing in his obit by the AP made me smile, they perfectly described DnD: “Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters for themselves and describe their adventures with the help of complicated rules and unusually shaped dice.” 

Who else credits Gary Gygax for their lifelong love, creation, and play of games?

GDC was fun, informative and productive for me and iQ212 this year.  I think my GDC Mobile lecture accomplished its goal of getting people thinking and talking about casual and mobile design and the issues that even good games face when entering the mobile gauntlet.

My talk was called “Tetris: the Best/Worst Mobile Game Ever”.  Nice coverage of the talking points is here. 

In short, I declared Tetris as the best game ever.  Then I deconstructed the game, to look at the design elements and to see why it was such a great game, and how its play transferred to mobile. 

Slim Jim brand beef jerky was used as an example to illustrate the shelf space problem on mobile carrier decks.  A supermarket has all kinds of beef choices: filet mignon, short ribs, and prime rib roast, etc.  They have the shelf space for it.  But a convenience store only sells one type of beef, Slim Jim.  Small footprint, long shelf life, broad appeal, always in season, and in snack size portions.  It is because of this shelf space issue that carriers feature Tetris and that Tetris is a perennial best seller.  So Tetris is not beef jerky, but carriers are a bit like 7-11.

At the end of my talk, I asked the room, “If Tetris were invented today, how many of you think it would get published by mobile carriers?”  Exactly one guy in a room of 75 people raised his hand.  It is a telling indictment on the state of mobile when the best game in the world would not get published today.

GDC is right around the corner.  iQ212’s Rick Marazzani is speaking at GDC Mobile on Monday Feb 18th at 4:15pm.  The topic is Tetris: Best/Worst Mobile Game Ever.  It will cover a bit of Tetris history, design, its dominance on mobile, and how to build a mobile game to beat it.

Also at GDC, we will be showing off our portfolio of games, and demonstrating a beautiful new puzzle game for potential mobile and PC casual distributors. 

Ping Rick to book a meeting.  Be sure to catch his talk. See you at GDC!

There is no such thing as a casual gamer.  They are not the teens on NewGrounds, or college kids playing Jetman on Facebook, or old ladies playing Slingo. Everyone is a casual gamer.

The meager casual games space has tried to fracture itself, segment into target markets and demographics.  Frankly, why carve out such small pieces of the game pie?  Why not go for EVERYONE?

Time, attention, platform.
Every person is intrinsically aware of how much time they have available, how much attention they want to pay, and what platforms they can use.  Whether gaming or cooking or exercising, we all consider these factors. 

Please consider that…
• Avid hikers don’t take 50 mile backcountry treks every day.  More often they just stroll through the local park.
• Golfers don’t play 18 holes every day, more often they putt into a cup in their office.
• Chefs don’t cook themselves five-course meals every night, more often they have a sandwich.
So why do we assume that “gamers” will only play long, intensive, high-end games?  The result of that broken logic is that “casual” games are made for old ladies, thereby alienating the rest of the world.

The same considerations above apply to all people seeking interactive entertainment.  They are aware of the constraints to their time, attention, and the platform.

• WoW takes lots of time, lots of attention, and a connected high end platform.
• Monopoly takes lots of time, not much attention, and several friends around a table.
• Sudoku doesn’t take much time or attention, and can be played almost anywhere.

People play according to their time and attention available. Furthermore, people know what their platforms are capable of.  Folks can imagine whether or not a game is right for a platform.  They won’t play Solitaire on their Xbox360 anymore than they’d play Halo 2 on their Moto Razr.  It seems that only games industry insiders think they know better than the masses.

A real world example.  When a major portal launched a games channel a few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that teens would want to play arcade and extreme sports web games.  New twitch games with more youthful appeal were launched, and the kids didn’t play them!  The most popular games were and remained puzzles and traditional card games.  These kids already had Playstations and Gameboys; they played twitch games on the platforms that were best for twitch.  Online, on the family PC, in the browser, they played the same games as their Grandma because they were right for the platform.

The wisdom of the masses continues on mobile, where the top selling games are predominantly casual games.  It is not as if only old ladies are buying mobile games!  Mobile is definitely a casual platform.  Tetris, Poker, PacMan and Trivia are tops because the masses are aware of limited Time, limited Attention, and limited Platform whilst mobile.

To be a mass-market hit, games need broad (not old-broad) appeal.  Tetris is a great game, but if it were called “Molly’s Fashion Magic”, it would not have taken over the world.  On the other side, if Diner Dash were called “The Operational Art of Culinary Service”, it would have flopped like a medium rare steak dropped on the kitchen floor.  The best casual games cast the widest demographic net.

There will always be markets for all sorts of games: short and long, light or intense, and simple and intricate.  The most money potential comes from applying casual game thinking to mass-market theming.  You are better off with your target market being EARTH than AARP.

Casual games are any game that takes up small snippets of time, do not command undivided attention, and work on a wide range of platforms.  Likewise, a casual gamer is anyone with a moment to play, any amount of mental bandwidth, and any platform.  We are all casual gamers.

The way to make a mass-market game is by making it FOR the mass-market.  Tautological, isn’t it?  Too often, though, the people making games are not aware of what the Average Joe is watching, the typical Soccer Mom is reading, or what’s “playing in Peoria”.  Most Game developers make games from their frame of reference.  As a result, most games are by and for 30-something, Sci-Fi watching, Slashdot-reading, iPod-listening, Gap-shopping, guys who grew up playing D&D and Nintendo.

How can we get a different perspective? One way to gauge a game’s mass-marketness is to consider how your Mom would react to it and use it.  Odds are that your Mom has more in common with the Average American than the typical game developer does. 

Consider this: when your competition makes a game, they are constantly thinking about your Mom.  Don’t blame me, it’s true, I am just the messenger.  Your competition is obsessed with pleasing your Mom, her likes and dislikes, and how to get her to buy their game instead of yours.

Below is a snapshot look at the Average American, drawn from the US Census, surveys and market data.  In it I have substituted “Your Mom” in place of “The Average American”.  Let’s see how we do:

Your Mom has a household annual income of $48,201 and lives in the state where she was born.  She listens to CDs by Carrie Underwood, or Daughtry, or some other American Idol.  She watches four hours of TV a day, and her favorite shows are Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, CSI, Grey’s Anatomy, Wheel of Fortune and Oprah.  Mom drives a white or silver Japanese car, but almost half of her friends own big American trucks or SUVs.  She saw most of the Spider-Man, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean movies in the theater.  Odds are she is Christian, owns a Bible, and prays almost once a day.  She reads Nora Roberts, James Patterson, Mitch Albom, and anything Oprah suggests.  Mommy talks on her Motorola cell phone about 25 minutes a day, but has never downloaded a game to it.  (By the way, did you know her ringtone is “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas?) Her favorite restaurants are Outback, Red Lobster and Ruby Tuesday.  Your mom shops at Walmart, Sears and Costco.  She websurfs 30 minutes a day on her dial up connection (though she uses broadband at work and will upgrade to broadband at home next month) and visits Yahoo, Ebay and Pogo. She has no idea what a WoW Guild, XBLA, Free BSD, BlueRay, or Podcast is.  Oh yeah, she wants you to call her more.

So as you consider the gameplay, theme, platform, difficulty level and marketing of your game, consider your mom as a mirror of the mass-market.  Don’t ship without observing your mom playing your game cold, and seeing what she finds fun, rewarding and challenging.  Doing so could expand your market reach, and the average American represents a potential market of 300 million people.

Note to the guys making “Panzergruppe Tactics 4: Eastern Front”, you already identified the 59 people who will buy your game, so good luck with that. 

For the rest of us making games for the mass-market, we’ll keep thinking about your mother.

The casual game sector is poised to burst into the virtual world ranks of EA and Blizzard.  VC firms are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the makers of games like Pam’s Pie Palace and Jewel Jammer, entrusting them to create massive persistent scalable interactive universes. It is hard to walk down Sand Hill Road and say “It’s like Ultima meets Seinfeld” without getting hit with a sack of cash.

The formula is self evident: First step, blend together the engineering of WoW with the casual publishers’ 2% of the shareware for Women 35-54 market; Next do step two; and then profit in step three from your Casual MMO.  To that end I have compiled an exhaustive and comprehensive list of all the casual game publishers who are NOT working on a casual MMO (see below).

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