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May 15, 2013#

On Luck and Lightning

 ”Our only strategy was to get the game featured. There was no Plan B. It was ‘if this game doesn’t get featured, we have 0 money to market this; no-one will ever hear of it.’” - Barry Meade

That’s one of the co-founders of Fireproof Games, talking about The Room for GamesIndustry.biz. Earlier in that same talk Barry discusses how they created three prototypes in three months and picked the best to progress. So, a lot of focus on making a great game and almost none on marketing. It’s since sold millions and was Apple’s (and my) iPad Game of the Year.

The CEO of GungHo (maker of Puzzles and Dragons) was interviewed recently on PocketGamer.biz about the secrets behind their phenomenal success (their market cap now exceeds the actual Nintendo!).

“Any game we make, we expect it to be good, of the highest standard,” [Kazuki] Morishita says.

“We were very confident that Puzzle & Dragons was a good game, but the success was mind-blowing.

“It had a lot to do with luck,” he adds.

“It was intuition and luck,”

Rovio had famously made 51 titles before Angry Birds (source), and similarly OMGPop made over 35 games before Draw Something and their subsequent acquisition (source).

Lots of food for thought from the how-do-you-make-a-mega-hit point of view, which shares a lot with the let’s-make-a-viral school of missing the point. You can’t bottle lightning. All you can do is give lightning the best possible chance to strike, whatever kind of content you’re making.

And, yes it’s quite distorting to focus on these outliers, but I have much more admiration for craftspeople who start with a focus on quality than those who start from a cynical need to be popular, to be ‘viral’.

It’s the difference between building a skyscraper topped with a lightning rod, and running round on iron stilts in a thunderstorm waving an umbrella.

With the former, if you’re not struck by lightning you’ve still got a beautiful building. With the latter, whatever happens you look a right ninny and you’re probably going to get electrocuted.

By http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebehnken/5115137630/

Photo by Mike Behnken

May 14, 2013#

How to make a great branded app

Using gaming apps as examples, I’ve written a companion blog to this for a brand/agency audience.

These novelty apps fail because they’re treated like an advert, where the initial spike is all that matters. But no one wants an advert on his or her phone. We download useful apps, fun apps, apps our friends are talking about; and the few brands that understand this, that create not branded apps, but great apps, are getting phenomenal results.

Read in full at The Marketer: How to make a great branded game

May 10, 2013#

Making branded games – why everyone should win

On behalf of Best of British, I’ve written a piece for Pocket Gamer about my experience at Somethin’ Else making branded games.

Historically, a ‘branded game’ had some pretty grim connotations.

It was work-for-hire of the most embarrassing type – game mechanics glued to product placement and churned out as cheaply as possible (it’s Pac-Man with cereal. Or is it Fridge Tetris? No, it’s Frogger Road Safety!).

More recently there was the gamification boom, which had brands haemorrhaging money until they realised it was 99 percent snake-oil, 1 percent quite-difficult-actually.

Now, rather than sticking some badges on a thing and calling it a day, brands are commissioning increasing numbers of proper, full, credible games – games that aren’t plastered with product placement.

Read the full article at PocketGamer.biz: How brand power can turn your work-for-hire into something to be proud of

April 15, 2013#

Wine Whine: Banrock Station Colombard Chardonnay, I’m calling you out

Sometimes we cook with wine. Tonight, we nearly cooked with Banrock Station Colombard Chardonnay.

Also, on an unrelated not-at-all-foreshadowing note, I’m highly allergic to dairy.

Banrock Station Colombard Chardonnay - front

A tiny bottle of chardonnay. Utterly unremarkable and inoffensive at first glance, except, what’s that on the back?

Banrock Station Colombard Chardonnay - back

Yes, over there.

A label

Zoom, enhance.

Closeup: contains milk and eggs. Really. REALLY.

Is that…? Surely not. Milk and egg in WINE? Fruit of the vine with fruit of bovine? (And fruit of whatever hens are in Latin?)

Banrock Station: thanks to you, wine must now join the likes of couscous (dinner, 2006) and oven chips (lunch, 2008) in the ever-growing list of Food And Drink I Always Need To Check The Ingredients Of Just In Case They Contain Milk Or Egg Even Though It Makes No Sense For Them To Do So.

I don’t normally moan about my allergies, but honestly, I can’t be alone in my shock. This slow infiltration of cattle lactation and poultry ovulation feels like a violation.  Let this blog stand as my calcium deficient line in the sand. A proclamation against culinary obfuscation. This far, no further.

Banrock Station Colombard Chadonnay, I’m calling you out.

And I’m not afraid to use my rhyming dictionary.

March 27, 2013#

Storyplay: how publishers are making stories playful

The excellent digital publishing blog The Literary Platform kindly invited me to kick off their ‘Games and Stories’ season with some words about publishers, narrative and play.

At Somethin’ Else we work with publishers, as well as broadcasters, brands, record labels and cultural institutions, making all kinds of content, including lots of games. For publishers in particular, many of our conversations start with a printed book (“What can we do with X?”), and there is always a tendency when games are mooted to think of them as a ‘story game’. This makes sense – it plays to the strength of publishers (telling great stories) and should, if done properly, thematically link the game with the book in a way that feels right to audiences.

‘Story game’, though, is a very, very broad church.

Read the full post on The Literary Platform: Storyplay

Can’t wait for the rest of the posts in this season – I’m sure they’ll be fascinating.

January 22, 2013#

App vs iBook

For FutureBook, the inestimable Tom Green and I have been discussing the design differences between developing native book apps vs using iBooks Author:

“Somethin’ Else has just launched two digital book products for Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. While both are exclusive to the iPad, they were made in very different ways. One, The Plant Hunters, was created using Apple’s iBooks Author software. The other, David Nash at Kew, was built as a native iOS application.”

Read the full post at Futurebook: App vs iBook

January 17, 2013#

My Gluttony

Being a TV boxed-set glutton is so over. Waiting for a series to finish and then stuffing episode after episode into your brain in a disgusting Caligulan orgy of consumption until there is nothing left? Please. Keep your West Wires, your Breaking Mad, your Boardwalking Dead – I’m going elsewhere for my fiction binges.

Want to come with? I’ve got TWO (yes, two) delicious alternative tried-and-tested-in-2012 fiction feasts to recommend.

1) ‘The Wheel of Time’ books

Sitting on a narrative spectrum somewhere between A Song of Ice and Fire and Lord of the Rings, Robert Jordan(/Brandon Sanderson)’s The Wheel of Time series has been going since 1990. It’s 14 novels (plus a prequel) and runs at over 4 million words total. Which, it turns out, is a lot. I made a chartwizard.

*Silmarillion not included because ew

I started reading Wheel of Time in September 2012, and only realised part-way through the series that the final volume was due to be published in early January 2013. This led to a pathetic 48 hour sprint to reach the end of the penultimate book between receiving “Your Amazon.co.uk order of “A Memory Of Light: Wheel…” has been dispatched” and taking this picture.

Not pictured: my neglect of almost every personal relationship over the last four months

Anyway, I’ve now finished Book 14 and found it a fitting end to an epic (in the most honest sense of the word) story. I didn’t expect it, but the sheer quantity of prose has definitely had a qualitative impact on my enjoyment of the series. I feel like I know these characters to a degree that I only previously felt about massive phenomena like Star Wars, with the advantage that I’ve never seen a visual representation of the characters or their world to spoil the pictures in my head.

Get it down ya.

2) ‘We’re Alive: A Story of Survival’ audiodrama

Speaking of the pictures being better in your head, let me recommend We’re Alive, my favourite audio drama podcast thing ever. The premise is basically:

1) Our world as we know it (well, America).
2) Suddenly, zombies.
3) ArrrrrrrggghhhhbangbangbangPROTECTTHEGENERATORbangbangDIDYOUGETBITTEN? ………….heavy breathing………. YESarghhhhhhbangbangbang.

If you like that sort of thing (which I do) you’ll like this. If you don’t, you won’t. Now is a great time to get into it as it’s on haitus following the series 3 finale so you can binge AND get a satisfying-ish conclusion before the fourth (and final) season starts. I haven’t done a chart for this one, but there are currently 107 installments on iTunes running at about 36 hours of drama total. That’s not far off the total running time of the first four series of Mad Men (c. 40 hours) with the added bonus that you can listen while you’re doing housework. Yep. Zombies and hoovering.

For the hardcore fan, there’s an official wiki (spoilers!) and accompanying fan podcast featuring cast, crew, speculation, gossip etc, so you could always listen to that alongside the corresponding episodes.

And it’s free. FREE!

Anyway, all this talk of tasty media is making me feel peckish. Apparently there’s a light snack called Perry Rhodan, but I might have to learn German first…

December 4, 2012#

A Year in Digital Publishing and What To Expect in 2013

I’ll catch you in 2014 for the ‘No One Could’ve Seen *That* Coming’ Party.

Crystal gazing for 2013:

1. iBooks Author. This will be the year of iBooks Author, especially on the iPad mini. Apple are investing in the platform and as it improves we’ll see a corresponding increase in quality investment from publishers to justify a higher price.

Moving away from iOS we’ll be seeing some new premium reading experiences specifically targeted at the high-end Kindle stable of devices – they’ll now have the market share to justify the increased investment.

2. Data driven narrative design. As much as possible publishers will take control of granular analytics data (borrowing a page from game development) to inspire, improve and iterate certain titles. Books as a service. There will be mixed success, but some will be very good at it by 2014.

3. Blurred edges. The edges of what a publisher is and does will continue to blur. In response to yet more niche publishers and start-ups competing for attention on ‘their’ turf we’ll see a surge in entrepreneurial behaviour and collaborations from the major publishers. Large-scale, commercially successful digital hits will become far more common.

Read the full post with a raft of much smarter contributors on The Literary Platform: A Year in Digital Publishing and What To Expect in 2013