 Let's play money making game. Oh yeah. I'm assuming people would get the reference. I hope so. I wonder how many people actually read the descriptions of what these panels are or just look at the title and think, oh, money making, monetization, something like that. I'm just going to go to it. Yeah. This panel is actually all about how this money making game was coded and how to get the plus 50 every single time. So if you don't want to hear an hour about NES assembly, this isn't a place for you. No, what is this panel really about? All right, so this panel is about the fact that, look, I forgot the panel. I forgot the slide order. You forgot the slide order, captain. All right, so money making game. You know, some people, most people, who play games or enjoy any sort of media, at some point you feel like you want to make that media. You do, right? Even if you were to succeed, but everyone has the idea, right? You have some vision of some game you've imagined. That's why that, like, picture game idea panel is so popular, even though those guys just sit up there and are like, okay, we're making these people happy. We're just going to sit here and smile for an hour. Yeah. Right? But, you know, you have some vision of some game. You want to make it, right? But you also have to eat food, right? Or you will die. And it won't be fun. And, you know, coming to the BCEC makes it really hard to eat food. Right? There's pretty much none around here. It's like, where is that dude selling that meat on a stick? I need to get past the grumble grumble guy. All right? You know, and people are always talking about, all the time, especially recently, you know, how to make more money, right? What's the best way to make the most money? Which, you know, way should you do this? You know, should you do some micro transactions? Do I go free to play the head-based economy that's very popular now? Right? And it's all about how to make more money, right? But we don't care about making money. We care about playing games because we don't make them. We just care about playing, right? And the fact is, is that depending on how you choose, how you're going to make that money, the game gets affected. Sometimes you're ruined, sometimes not ruined. Often ruined. And we want to talk about that, all right? So, but first, all right, we have to talk about what is a game. So, you know, I bring this up in every lecture, every panel, but it is important because what is a game? I mean Angry Birds is a game. So is Farmville. So is Petty Cakes. So is Tic-Tac-Toe. So is a pheasant. So we're not going to argue at all about what game is, what kind of game is better than some other kind of game. We're not going to really quibble over the definition of game. Because in this case, we're talking about what you want to do. Give me that clicker. You're not going to slide. I'm sliding. Here we go. I'm sliding now. All right. So you have to think about what is the game you're trying to make? Do you care if it's a fair competitive test of one or more skills, one definition of a good game? Do you care if it's a series of interesting decisions? Maybe you're trying to make Petty Cake the game. That is what you want. But you have to think back to what type of game it is you're trying to make at all times. Because every monetization model, it's not just that it messes with your vision, but it'll mess with the fundamental core of what your game is. If you want a hardcore competitive, we are fighting a fair test to see who is smarter or who is better. A competitive game, a major league game. Haku, Counter-Strike. Something that's going to have tournaments and winners and prizes. It can't be. It won't be fair. It wouldn't be fair if you were playing major league baseball and one guy gets to use a metal bat because he spent a million dollars on it. That's BS. Now they can try to hack with the cork bat. I guess. So you have to make sure you don't compromise on that or what's the point of even making your game if you compromise on your fundamental thing. So think back to this slide. Think about those kinds of games. But first, we have to talk about revision. Because every lecture about money making games or games or money is the same. And people talk about how to make the most money, like Scout was alluding to. You're probably wondering why when we talk about a vision there's a poison mushroom up there. Not a very nice vision. No, a very bad vision. See, we used to play Mario Party hardcore in college. We had a championship belt that was official. You would pass it to the current champions or contest for the belt. So we were in a battle for the tag team championship and one of our opponents had this vision. A row of nothing but poison mushrooms. All the way leading up to the beginning of the map. So anytime anyone got a poison mushroom they would always put anyone just this giant line. And he said it, he believed it, he knew he could make it happen and he did make it happen. Every turn he's like, come on guys, the vision. And by concentrating on that vision, keeping it in mind, keeping it in focus, row of poison mushrooms. And there were like 20 poison mushrooms in a row. Like when you hit that spot, the game slowed down to a crawl. It was like one, one, two. It was the worst. You were going so slow, you got so many more turns. The odds of getting another poison mushroom to add by the end of the row was pretty good. But despite the vision being so painful, people wanted it. They fought for it and he did not compromise. That's right. But you gotta eat food. So what if the vision is your game? You want to make a game because you're passionate about gaming. You have this idea of I want to make a game just like Dota. But there's all these things differently because I hate the way Dota is. I want to get rid of the channels. I want it to be like, I don't know, like you're mining through and you're building structures. I want to make this, I have this specific game and I want to make it. My dream is just to make this game happen. But if you can't eat food while you're making that game, then the game's not going to happen. So this is the biggest thing, the core of this entire panel, that if you are designing a game, because you have to eat, the design of the game is fundamentally linked to the monetization model you choose. You can't pick some game freely of the monetization model of the leader. Because if you do, you could theoretically pick any monetization model with any game. You could. But a lot of the combinations, if you don't have the game and the monetization model paired up correctly, you're going to make zero dollars or negative a lot of dollars. Now a lot of business people think you can do this. They think of it in terms of investment. I want to invest X dollars in this game company. I don't know what a game is, but they make them apparently. Oh, you're making a game? Well, I want it to be a subscription game. They don't care what your game actually is. That's right. And then when it actually comes, you see a lot of times, people change the monetization model of a game if it's not succeeding. No one's ever done that without also changing the game. You don't just leave the game alone and just be like, oh, okay, we're going to, right? They always do something to the game because you can't just change the money part without changing the game part. So this is the other thing that no one talks about. Everyone's focused on the after-money. I've made a game, how do I sell the most? But that is actually the least important part because you have a vision. You just want the game to happen. Your main goal, right, is to get that game out there. So you need to get the funding and everything to make that game and eat food at the same time before the game ever hits a press, ever goes gold. Yeah, it's get before-money and you got after-money, right? The before-money is the money you use to make the game and the after-money is the money you get after the game is made by selling it to people who want to play it, right? The before-money might be $0. Maybe it's you just work a job to get all the food and then while you're working the job you make the game at night. That's still a source of before-money. That's your job, right? But already this affects the game. Look at Dwarf Fortress. That guy is working pretty much by himself, hardcore making this game originally with his own resources all the way. So the game is taking an infinite amount of time to finish. The game has progressed a great white distance in the time he's made it but think about how much farther it would have gotten if he'd had any amount of like real funding or if he had a dev team or if something had gone differently. So even if you say, oh, I'm not going to monetize my game, I'm going to work by day job and I'm going to make the game and I'm going to give it away for free. Well, your day job is still funding the game. You're tired after your day job. What if your day job is something that's similar like you're looking at the screen all day, you go home, you look at the screen all night, coding your game, you're going to burn out, the game might not finish or you'll start to fall off from the vision. That's right. Even the seemingly non-monetization models, like Freeware, Open Source game, those are still monetization models of before or after money. They're just ones that tend to have very, very low numbers associated with them. But they're still choices and they still affect your game. The most fun way to make a game is to already have the before money. Either because you're Gabe Newell or because you're in a company, you might have a budget, some angel investor might have said, here's five million dollars, make a game I want to see it in a year. Whatever it is, they've given you money, but there's always strings attached to that money. I don't know if you people know the basic story right behind Valve Software. They made Half-Life 1 and it was in video game magazines for a long time and it was incredibly delayed before it finally came out and it was awesome. But the way they were able to do that and take forever and not worry about meeting a deadline or compromising their vision was because the people who started Valve Software like Gabe Newell they were previous Microsoft employees who made mad money at Microsoft and they just carried their monies over and so they were able to just keep working and keep eating all the live long day until the game was finished. And because the game succeeded, all that after money carried over and now we have Portal 2. Now I know many of you are already thinking but what if I'm independently wealthy? I'm a millionaire and I can just make my game. Can you name a millionaire who is independently wealthy from like an inheritance or something like that who just decided to make games and the games were good or even just anyone who decided to spend their money on games and didn't care how well they did? Is anyone here independently wealthy? You don't have to tell us. Just meet me after. My point is that doesn't happen. So you could say yes technically you could and yes technically you could but really no. So there is a new option. This is the new hotness. There's a Kickstarter room at this con because Kickstarter, gaming and Kickstarter are going hand in hand to a degree that is amazing. Look at how many games are being Kickstarter. Kickstarter gives you the before money with very few strings attached. You pick what strings you want attached to your money before you ask for the money. How great is that? But there is a little bit of a catch, right? You think oh I'll just put my idea up there and it'll succeed or fail but only certain kinds of ideas will succeed on Kickstarter. Things that pander to a nostalgic intellectual property license, right? Or a thing that has a very flashy and catchy demo or idea? Or really good video or something that's made by a famous person who has a strong following. These kinds of things are much more likely to get lots of before money from Kickstarter, right? My crazy idea for a game that only I will like is not going to get a lot of before money from Kickstarter, right? It's gonna get money from me and that's it. It also necessitates the ability to make rewards because no one's gonna kickstart you if you don't get any goodies. So even then now you're considering all right get the game is probably one of the things in the Kickstarter. What are all the other things? Now you have to spend time on those too. Here's something people also don't think about, right? When you make a Kickstarter one of those options is probably going to be and often is you get the game, right? You're basically pre-ordering it, right? But that pre-order becomes the before money and is used up to buy food. Then when the game is done there are less people to sell the game to because you used that money as before money. When you pre-order a game at GameStop even though you're pre-ordering that's after money. The game was developed using money from the publisher or whatever, right? So if you make a game on Kickstarter that has a million fans they give you all this before money. You spend all that before money developing the game, right? Because that was the funding for the budget. The game is out. You give the game to all those people there's no one left in the world who wants the game. You have zero dollars. It hasn't happened yet but the math works that way, right? It's just how it is. So you build up a sort of debt and you get back to zero. So you can still get other forms of after money like social currency. Now your game was popular even if you didn't make any actual money after the fact on it. You made just enough money to make the game. Yeah, look at like Angry Birds, right? Okay, they make a dollar per Angry Birds which is a lot of after money. But let's say they didn't make that after money. Well, they're selling movies and cartoons and toys and all kinds of other nonsense, right? So just because you've kick-started and given away a bunch of goodies there's still other ways that you can maybe make after money if you are, you know, incredibly popular. So the poster child of all of this, the game that kind of kicked this entire conversation off that made everyone start thinking about this was Team Fortress 2. Of course. Because Team Fortress 2, one, how many of you know the history of Team Fortress 2? The decade of waiting for this game to come out. I was in high school when Team Fortress 2 was on the horizon. There used to be a website, right, where you were putting your name and then you would do dot is waiting for TF2 dot whatever, right? And what would happen is you would go to that website and it would play this animated gif of, like, all the, you know, the announcements that have been made about TF2 and all the screenshots that have been posted. George Bush was elected to office. Yeah, it's like this whole timeline, right? And then it's like, rim waits, da-da-da, rim waits, you know? And it's like, it shows just how long rim has been waiting for Team Fortress 2. It rivaled Duke Nukem. It had such this, like, huge pre-memental that the game finally came out. And they brought it out in an interesting way. They just sold it. Standard model, the basic after-money model. I have my game. Here it is for X-FACE dollars. But it was a little crook slightly so, right? The price was low. It wasn't $50. It was like, what, 20 to buy it by itself originally? Something like that? And the primary way to buy it was part of a pack, the Orange Box. A lot of people bought Team Fortress 2 and never played it. They were buying the Orange Box to get some other game. I bought the Orange Box just for Team Fortress 2. Alright, two minutes. So, you don't remember where you can save it, do you? Right, we're still talking about Team Fortress 2. Yeah. I'm sorry, I do have half-packs box. I'm not kidding about that. He's been complaining to me for, like, the last hour before we got here. Like, I think I'm sick of him. I don't know what to do. I think I'm dying. I'll make it. I'll make it. Alright, so Team Fortress 2. So this model, just selling. You think it's the simplest model when really it's not. For example, they already come in with, like, a bundle package or they sell the game by itself. And you all have learned that the price of games drops precipitously after the first few weeks. I mean, the game of the year edition of a popular game within a year or two is $15 and is fully loaded. And there's a whole game theory thing behind this that we'll really get into, but the Steam Summer sale is pretty much the core of, like, what the problem is here. Even if you think you're just going to sell your game, you have to worry about price discrimination. You want to sell the game to the dude who's been waiting for ten years for it for $1,000 because he'll pay any price. Right. Like, if you're going to maximize the amount of money you make, right, you need to get the most sales for the most dollars per sale. If you could just set one price and keep it at that price forever. Right? But there's some guy out there who is willing to pay $1 for it. You know? But if you set it at $50, you're never going to get that $1. Well, what if you set it at $50 from the get-go? All the guys are willing to pay $50. Pay it. And then later on, you set it to $1 and then you get all the ones. We have more money in total. It's pretty simple. The problem is, right, is that, you know, some games, you know, they're like single-player games. People play them and they're done with them. Right? And that's cool. Right? You could just sell the game once and that's it. But other games, for example, Team Fortress 2, multiplayer games. I mean, Counter-Strike is still played today by thousands and thousands of people. Go to Steam, right? Think about all the games that have come out. Call of Duty's, Skyrim's, all these games that have come out. And since Counter-Strike has come out, you go to Steam and you click on what's the most people playing right now. It's Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike. Right? One in point six and Source are up there. You know, when Skyrim comes out, it goes to number one temporarily and then it goes down and Counter-Strike is always there. Well, that was the case. They were number one and two until the free-to-play model came for Team Fortress 2. Until Team Fortress 2 said, we are going to move from a just-sell-it economy to a hat-based economy. They made something like 12 times the money they made in total sales and the whole time it was available in some number of months after they went free-to-play with this model. Like, it was ridiculous. Just think about it, the price was already so low, right? That anyone who wanted Team Fortress 2 and was willing to pay money to just play it had already paid that money. Go back to price discrimination. If they had sold Team Fortress 2 for $5,000, 15 square teams would have bought it. If they had sold it for $5, a ton of people would have bought it, but they might have made less money. So they put it at a price point to where they knew the hardcore people would pay any price. They tried to pick the point where they get the most money right away. It's almost like they planned this whole thing. We don't know if they planned this whole thing. The other thing is that it's a game, it's a multiplayer game. They keep updating it all the time, right? It costs them money for this game to exist, but no new people were buying the game, right? It's just people who already owned it were playing it and in fact, less and less people were, it was still fairly popular, but less and less people were playing it that were going back to Counter-Strike or going back to whatever other hobby they had, right? So they were spending all this money in Team Fortress 2. It was still popular. People still played it, but they weren't getting any more revenues from it. It was just a money sinkhole. They had to find some other way to get money out of this game that was still existing and still carrying on. So they sold hats. And the thing is, they did it in a very elegant and interesting way. I mean, it's very easy to say, all right, I'll have a free-to-play game, but spend a dollar and get a better sword. Spend a dollar and get a better, you know, whatever. But if you do that, it's fundamentally changing the game. So let's talk a little bit about game theory. People who see our lectures at other concerts at this con know that we like to bandy out scary game theory all the time. We're a game by itself. Fine, we're going to play a game. Theory, we got like gravity. We got particle physics. That's fun, but you put them together. Game theory is not fun, and it's barely about games. But I'll try to skip the math. There are some intuitive things. Actually, I do know this one because it's fairly simple. So you think if you're going to introduce this meta-mechanic of buying things in a game, this external structure, I can pay a dollar to get a thing, a League of Legends or a Dota S game where I can buy unique heroes that not every player will have access to. The game will become unfair in one sense because not everyone has access to the same options. But there is a way to make those options be still effectively fair in one fundamental sense. The colloquial or simple way to explain this is that you got to give something up to get something. Right, you know, pretty much every game you think about that has, you know, is an asymmetric game, right? A symmetric game is where everyone has the exact same stuff. Think combat for the Atari. My tank is the same as Rim's tank. An asymmetric game is where you have different stuff, right? Starcraft. Well, yours isn't because I always give you the crappy controller. That's true. Or Street Fighter, right? I'm Gile, he's M. Bison. We have different stuff going on. That's an asymmetric game. How do you make an asymmetric game fair? It's pretty simple. Everyone knows, right? One guy is the fast guy who does a little bit of damage, and one guy is the slow, strong guy, right? And it balances out, you know, the different characteristics and stats, you know? Okay, the wizard can deal a lot of damage to an area from far away, but he's mad weak. The warrior can get up close and, right? But then he takes a lot of damage, but he has a lot of hit points, and everyone is sort of equally effective in a different way. So, you know, this famous example, I remember as a kid, I saw a friend of mine. I was, I was, I don't know, eight, seven? I was a little kid, and I'm hanging out with my friend Joe Ogilvy. Maybe he'll see this, and he'll be like, oh my God, rare. And he gave up the heart container, and I slacked him. So, but imagine if this choice were give up a heart container or give up nothing. Well, duh, you're gonna give up nothing. What if it was give up a heart container or swipe your credit card in the Nintendo and give up $5? That feels really bad and really unfair, doesn't it? That feels like crap. Because then Bill Gates is the best at Zelda. So, we'll do some scary math, but notice how there's no numbers on this graph. I see F1 and F2. This might seem a little counter-intuitive. People traditionally draw these things this way because it's easier to visualize what's going on. Yes, so this is backwards, right? In the bottom left corner, which is normally the nothing, zero, zero, that's actually the fastest, strongest guy, right? He's got the speed and the strength totally maxed out in the bottom left. And the far top right, that's the guy who can't move and can't even lift his finger off the ground. So, this could be any number of factors. This could be any number of dimensions. We can do this in three, four, five, a million dimensions. It's all a matter of processing power. The idea is that mathematically, if a character gives something up, they have to get something else, but they can't get something else without giving something up. It's called Pareto efficiency. Pareto is a famous mathematician and game theorist from a long time ago. There's this cool idea that I learned about from Dr. Hazard, who did ACRON, the time-traveling RTS. Who's a real game theorist and a real doctor. Whose name is Dr. Hazard? How cool is that? And then he told us the word Pareto frontier, and then we read about it in Wikipedia, and that's why we know what we know. The idea of the Pareto frontier is that if you have a number of options, pretend those are all characters you can pick in a fighting game. Every character who is not on that line, that Pareto frontier, is fundamentally, mathematically, objectively worse than any character that is on the Pareto frontier. Because you can get better without giving up anything. Right, character A and character B. Okay, one guy's a little faster, a little weaker, one guy's a little stronger, a little slower, right? But they're both on the frontier. There are no characters closer to the bottom left than they are. To get any strength, you have to give up at least some speed. Alright, but character C, he just sucks. There's no reason to ever pick character C, because you could just pick character A who is just faster and isn't any less strong. Or character B who's just stronger, but isn't any more slow. So there's no reason to ever pick character C. Because it does not guarantee that all the characters are fundamentally, universally fair in all possible senses along the Pareto frontier. Yeah, one character might be better in the mountains and one might be better in the water. Or one might require more player scale or less player scale. There's other measures of fair, but you at least have to get this type of fair right. Now, to bring it back to Team Fortress 2 and monetization and your vision, always bring it back to the vision. What did we do that? What if I sell a heavy who just is a little bit faster? If I do that, that heavy is outside of the Pareto frontier. I've moved the Pareto frontier. So now there's two Pareto frontiers. The one for people who pay money, and the one for people who don't pay money. Daddy two. How is that fair? Now the game is fundamentally unfair, because you've got two completely different sets of players. The players who have access to those characters have fundamentally better options in your game. Now, if your vision is a competitive test of one or more skills, you have ruined that vision. That's right. If you wanted to make a game that was a fair game with tournaments and winning and made the best man win or best person or whoever, the most skilled person is the champion at the end. Like hockey. Then you need to have this non-moving Pareto frontier where everyone gets access to all the same stuff. Like I said before, if one major league baseball guy has metal bats because he paid a million dollars for it and that makes him break the rules, then suddenly he has this huge advantage and if he wins the World Series, that's PS. So Team Fortress 2 did the same thing. We'll keep this nice dandy graph up. So they have all these items they add into the game. You can grind for some of them, you can pay for some of them. They make their money with people buying these things. Some of them have no game effect. They add some color to the character, whatever. Yeah, my sandwich looks different. Does the same thing. Or some of them give you a power. A gun is different. You have to give something up to get all those weapons. The weapons are all fundamentally different and there is no item that is absolutely better in a Pareto sense than any other item. And if you add options, like if I give you in a Dota clone more characters you can buy and they're all along the Pareto frontier to paraphrase Dr. Hazard, the only unfairness I'm introducing on any fundamental level is that I'm increasing the cognitive load of the other players, but they don't get the benefit of those extra choices. You have to worry about these 10 other sandwiches I have access to and I can pick among them, but you don't have access to them, but you still have to take them into account when you're playing against me. But that is a much more fiddly definition of fare that doesn't rank on your sandwich. All his sandwiches are still equal to the 5 sandwiches that I have, even though he has 20 different ones. So none of them are just better than any of the ones I have. But I'm sitting there and I'm like which sandwich did he pick? Because I have to make a different move and pick a different stuff depending on what he picked rock, paper, scissors kind of situation. So I have to think about 20 different sandwiches and what I would do if he used each one. He's only got to think about 5 because I've only got 5 and he knows I didn't pay any money. I guess I'm cheap or I'm poor, I'm a little kid. So there's another monetization model, a very popular one, a very unpopular one. The subscription model. Hey, you want to play my game? 20 bucks a month. Yeah, the subscription model is actually pretty old, right? There was the relatively, you know, none monetization model, right? Academia pays for the game and you just play Space War in the lab, right? And then it was, you know, you buy the game and you put quarters in the arcade for the game. And those were pretty much the two for a while. Subscription was pretty much the third one, right? I think some of the first subscription games were MUDs in the 80s and things like that. You know, you'd pay a subscription and then they would let you dial into the MUD and you could play it, right? And that carried over to MMOs. Because some games, you know, network games, multiplayer games required centralized servers as opposed to distributed servers, right? Now think of this, we talked about after-money. What if your vision, your game, requires infrastructure? Now, you need after-money just to keep the game going or the game disappears and you have failed. So already you are forced to have a business model that gives you money forever. Or at least as long as anyone is going to play your game. Yeah, it's almost not even before or after-money but during money, right? So you have to keep getting money all the time or else the game will disappear off the face of the earth, tribes do. So if I want to make... If I want to make an MMO like World of Warcraft, I was like, yeah, 50 bucks, here's access to the game. World of Warcraft would not have been around by this point because I don't think many new people are getting World of Warcraft accounts in the volumes necessary to pay for all those servers. Right, you'd have to have new sign-ups every month of millions and millions of people to pay all those servers, right? 50 to 50 dollars, then what? Now think about how this model changes your game. What if you're trying to make a game like Mario 1 like a simple, a Super Meat Boy-style platformer or something? Who's going to pay $5 a month for access to a game like that? A single-player test of skill. Right, well they might if it's a really good platformer that's worth $50 to you. But it's subscription. You might pay $5, play it for a month and try to beat it in that month. And if you do, just stop paying or maybe it takes two months to beat it so you'll pay $10 and then you'll cancel. So it's not really going to work out and it gives you incentive to make the game much, much harder to take longer for people to beat it so they have to stay subscribed for a longer amount of time and now you're destroying your vision because you've already made your game harder and done all these other things to it to get people to keep playing longer. So how many of you have played World of Warcraft or a game like it and you didn't really want to you felt obligated to or you played it but you weren't necessarily enjoying it but there was perhaps external social pressure. You are I need you to go under the rain, yo. If you're making a game we're not going to make it without you. With the subscription model we have no friends and the only healer we know. You're pressured into making your game have these elements into having a game into forcing your friends to keep paying for your game by making them feel bad if they quit or the sunk cost you want it to be stateful maybe you have a character you wouldn't want your character to die what if Nintendo's was a dollar a month would you stop paying ever or would that dog be in your will and your grandkids are like what is this So already your vision has this pressure on your vision but one specific one this is where ethics and gaming get in not to get into all the details of this graph but there's the idea of reinforcement Pavlov kind of stuff I want a rat to figure out to push a little lever and a food pellet comes out well what if I make the food pellets come out not all the time only 80% of the time what if there's all these different ratios of reinforcement it turns out that if you give someone a reward reliably they become more invested in the thing it triggers addictive behavior in humans we're trying to get that rat to pull that lever as many times as possible as frequently as possible the rat is addicted to pulling the lever if we just give him a food every time he pulls the lever well he'll get kind of addicted to it but he might also get bored with it because it's so predictable there's no excitement there there's no underlying subconscious psychological thing going on you go there, you buy food they give it to you all the time you're not addicted to the grocery store you're not like oh man bananas you could also come out and be like ok it never works you pull the lever and nothing ever happens no one's going to pull that lever but what if you pull the lever and sometimes when you pull the lever goodies come out and in fact sometimes you pull the lever 100 goodies come out and sometimes nothing comes out like a slot machine and the thing is casinos and lottery boards have studied the ever-living crap out of this and many of you, especially if you're in a city you go to a bodega or a little deli somewhere they always have these scratch off lottery tickets there's almost always the little old lady or the dude buying like 10 of them and scratching them all off right there if they made those tickets different to where you didn't have to scratch it off it might not scratch the same itch the science of making the payoff matrices just enough to make you addicted is very well refined they could just make a thing think about it, they could just make a thing where you put a dollar in and it goes you lose, put a dollar in you win $2, $2 come out and it just tells you immediately there's no lever pulling there's no scratching there's no doing part right and it's just you put the money in and it tells you if you want no one would do it, it would be boring as hell now maybe there are ethical concerns maybe you don't want people to get addicted to your game you don't want these things to happen you want it to be that kind of game these things will happen in the course of game design whether you realize it or not we did a lecture a couple of packs ago about this sort of thing but the whole panel was about that and afterward a couple of Blizzard employees came up they're like yeah that was awesome but we didn't do any of that analysis when we made World of Warcraft it was mostly trial and error right now here's the thing right beforehand they say how can we get the most people to sit at that slot machine for the longest and they figure out scientifically they do math in the lab and they do tests and all these experiments and they figure it out beforehand video game companies very few of them with exceptions like Dr. Hazard even Zynga doesn't do it they don't have this sort of game theory knowledge scientific knowledge experimental resources but they still succeed because what they do is trial and error they use statistics in the olden days with arcades they would look at how many quarters were in the thing and that's how they knew we made the guy shoot more bullets faster and there were more quarters in this week so imagine World of Warcraft nobody making that game in the early days but that was the secret project was thinking let's try to get everyone addicted to the game dangerously addicted to where they hate playing our game but keep paying us anyway what they did is they looked at that subscription number chart that was up on the wall email every week of how many new subscribers there were and they looked at what they had changed in that time period since the last report and they were able to figure out over a very long period of time with a very large set of data and very large number of players that guy played the longest and he really liked doing the PvP so I guess whatever we changed in the PvP really made him like it more so those are good changes let's try to make changes like that in the other parts and see if those work that'll happen even when you're just developing a game on your own you're doing something that oh people are more interested in the game I'm making the game more fun you are but you're also going in that in that direction of the slot machine and you have to think about whether or not that's what you want your game to be if your game is a subscription model game you are really pushed in that direction or you're not going to make enough money possible so let's talk about some more examples here of games that have done this because Dayer's Next Human Revolution I paid I think $12 for it I didn't pay it zero because I didn't pay it play when will you buy it? when it's like a dollar so you know we talked a little bit about steam and the summer sales but steam and these sorts of summer sale things are starting to cause a problem for the game industry because people know they have trained us I bought Fallout 3 for like $60 me too and it wasn't that long until the game of the year edition came out and I could have bought it for like $30 with all that DLC they skipped they trained me to never buy a game until a year after it comes out I only buy game of the year editions so prices drop off rapidly so we're really at this point to where if you're going to just sell your game you're almost forced to consider doing DLC consider doing expansions consider other means of monetization that aren't actually just selling the game and look at the rise of things like on-disk DLC that is a huge push think about conceptually there's stuff in this game where the developers might have been thinking for example they had this thing you could throw it at a lock from a distance and it would auto-hack the lock that's pretty cool right you only got that if you pre-ordered at particular stores they turned that item into monetization now it's a single player game I'm never going to argue that a single player game has to be fair because the computer doesn't have to have fun but the developer might have been thinking whoever's working on it said hey that's a cool idea and then someone thinks wait a minute that would be really good for the DLC and they don't put it in the original game even if no one has any ill intent they're just trying to make the best game they can you might be influenced in your decisions in game making if you know that DLC is part of your model down the road and there are studies with doctors doctors think that they are not influenced by drug companies giving them gifts they think oh Pfizer gave me a million dollars I'm not going to subscribe to drugs more often than anything else I have medical ethics it's the whole thing where you're corrupt and you don't know it you wonder how can people be so evil this doctor took money from that pharmaceutical company and then he gave all his patients prescriptions for those companies drugs even if they didn't need them the doctor doesn't know he's doing it and there's actually scientific evidence and a lot of experiments to prove this they go to the doctors and they see who gave them money and over a course of many years how many drugs the doctors prescribe per company of different things and it turns out you go to interview the doctor and they say hey doctor do you favor company X when you're prescribing drugs and they say no I give patients exactly what they need but then they look at his prescription records and they showed you I saw a video you gave prescriptions for company X drugs 50% more than the average doctor they showed these results to doctors and the doctors were flabbergasted so back to your vision this stuff is going to influence you even if you don't realize it you're thinking I'm not ruining my game by being evil and putting stuff in DLC I'm not going to make this game evil at all I'm such a good guy and then you need to make money you're hungry and then it happens and you'll justify it to yourself somehow or not even realize you did it and it'll be done or subtle ways like you might think of a cool concept and you would normally discard it but because of your monetization model you might force it to stay in the game like little subtle changes about whether or not the game should be 20 minutes long or 40 minutes long all that little stuff is going to change in subtle ways so there's another interesting problem this is a graph I stole, there was a lecture a couple of packs Westpac and the idea was that it turns out if you have a game on Xbox Live or the PlayStation market and you have a demo you're going to sell on average far fewer copies than if you have no demo demos kill the sales of your game compared to trailers which greatly increase the sales of your game this is one graph among many people are really looking into this topic if you can't see the lines the bottom line is purple, that's no demo no trailer the line above that is red which is demo only the line above that which is blue is demo and trailer the line that sold a ton of copies way up above all the others is trailer only now I like to call this Black Bastard Syndrome because Black Bastard, many of you have seen Black Dynamite an excellent black exploitation like callback film, I enjoy it there's a comic that is like that we were at the, what was it it was Wizard World Philadelphia and we're walking through the artist alley and there's a guy in a full pimp costume it is unbelievable, it is the greatest pimp I've ever seen even better than the pokey pimp and he's like check out my comic Black Bastard and I'm looking at the comic and I'm like alright I don't care what is in the comic there's almost a Stephen Colbarian instance of never breaking character now the idea is very strong and you look like wow that's awesome I gotta read that you flip through the first few pages and you pretty much get the deal so unless you're hardcore about like particular black exploitation media and then it is your thing, your number one thing you don't really need to own the comic you just need to see that it exists, get the gist of it and you don't really feel like you gotta pay money for it another example is Teen Boat I like Teen Boat it's like a werewolf but he's a wereboat it's really good it's funny but that's pretty much it for most people I like it Scott's gonna read the next ten volumes but most of you are not, you're gonna read one page and go oh I get it he's a wereboat he has high school troubles but then you know he turns into a boat so all his friends can have a drunken party on him so how many times are you even playing a demo of a game and you think oh I get it it's like a mashup of Super Meat Boy and Acron, okay cool well that was fun I'm done with that I got that, I figured that out and because you played the demo you got everything you were gonna get you saw the cover of Black Bastard and you don't need to read the inside or pay $5 for it and that's what a demo does it gives you everything that you needed to know and now you don't need to buy but if you have that appeal in the trailer but you don't give them the demo then they're gonna think oh Teen Boat I can just see what that's about and they're gonna buy it this is why you might be thinking all these companies out there it's like how come you guys only show these trailers with bull shots in them how come you don't show me the gameplay that's not doctor or anything like that because it's scientifically proven the statistic show sales way way up with just a bunch of bull shots these are the trailer it makes people go ooh and ah and then they have to find out what the game is about but the only way to do that is to actually buy it so everyone buys it and then they play it for 5 minutes and then it's in your stack just like when you buy a bundle on Steam and it's in the list and it's installed taking up space in the hard drive so this too can mess up your vision because for example now if you know that a demo will hurt sales you can't try to sell a game that it isn't obvious what kind of game it is Catherine imagine if no one had any idea what Catherine was does anyone know the game Catherine ok they know what we're talking about you know the demo like I got it oh I get what kind of game this is there's a lot going on in there to show whatever kind of game they wanted from what that game was so you're very tempted to make a game that has very good trailer appeal but you're not tempted to make a game where someone would actually have to sit down with a demo to get it because if it's one of those really unique concepts that needs a demo the demo alone is going to tank your sales in many instances so one option with just sell it is the UGC, the user generated content now if that's already not a part of your vision do you compromise on your vision if you're adding this or letting your users add content to the game yeah it's obvious Minecraft is obviously number one example but other things like a little big planet there are tools that allow you to make something and if people can make something with your game Mario Paint maybe the first then they can spread it around on the internet and people will want to make things like that thing that someone else made in that game so they'll buy the game instead so having a game with any sort of UGC or user creativity ways for the players to express themselves and share those expressions on the internet is going to get big sales so there's a huge incentive for anyone just selling a game these days to do those things simply because the internet exists but as soon as you want to do that imagine if they got a MMO like a World of Warcraft if they wanted to let you just straight up import your own character model you can model whatever you want can you imagine how much work it would be for them so already they need more money for it but if you're just making your vision you're going to have to change how you get your money maybe increase your budget if you want to add user generated content but if you're just selling your game you have an incentive to have a user generated content structure because otherwise you might not be able to monetize too well go just sell it for a dollar yeah and it's like you think of just sell it as like the most basic way to get your after money you pay money you can get the game end of story but it's sort of different when the price is so ludicrously low that it enters this different territory I bought Angry Birds Space you know why because it cost less than a bagel it's like I buy a bagel for $1.25 and that's a street cart bagel Angry Birds is going to help me out giving me something to do when I'm on the crapper for like at least a couple weeks that's worth more than the 30 seconds of pleasure I'm going to get from that bagel so I can pay the dollar for it but what kind of you know influence does that have on the game of Angry Birds right you know it has to be you know they have to do something to that game to make you want to pay that dollar right and they also right well you know it's not just make you want to pay the dollar it's make as many people as possible pay the dollar right if you have a game with a high price it's okay if you only sell it to a few people you can have like a niche game just for the hardcore people and sell it for a hundred bucks and you know steal battalion kind of situation big joysticks you don't need to sell that many and you're going to be good with Angry Birds at a dollar you need to sell a bagel because you're only getting a dollar but now the game has to be small it has to work on a phone because that's the only place you're going to sell games for a dollar and a volume and as soon as you have to be on a phone you're constrained in these technical ways now you have to worry about what platforms you're going to support what platform you're going to use to develop it all that other stuff is the only thing that affects your game design right it's also you know the platform the technology and they're all tied together right but the effects the money has are probably the least explored it's always the reverse that people inspect what effect does the game have on the money not what effect the money has on the game one of the oldest models in the book put in a quarter play for ten seconds because the game is balls hard yeah you know you play Ninja Turtles right you can't beat it that W's in the dragons game that red dragon kills you guaranteed at least once there's no as anyone played that one yeah oh you've never played D&D arcade game oh my god I feel really old now yeah I would always be the cleric because wait a minute wait a minute turn on dead infinity time so anytime skeleton shut up I just like oh it's just like twice in the whole game they shove a lot it's not really the north road through the cave no he don't go through the north screw that here I'll make us feel old how many of you have been to an arcade that wasn't at a convention okay all right never mind it's not dead yet it's not dead yet so I think the ways that this model affects your game are obvious you can't let someone beat the whole game on one quarter there's physical constraints if you want to put it in a real arcade the game has to be such that that tiny speck of play you get for the first payment is enough to challenge you and yet make you want to play more and not be so easy that you're not going to have to pay again and not be so hard that you put in one more quarter and then quit you've also got to make the cabinet of the game really attractive so that people walking by will go what is this thing and they'll just want to sort of investigate it even if they don't like it it turns out to be a crappy game they still put in one quarter and like you know like one of the submarine games a lot of those are pretty crummy there's only a couple good ones right but it's like what's in there so everyone who walks by puts in one quarter plays it and goes ah but it still gets a lot of quarters if a lot of people come in the arcade you know now this is a model that I think hasn't been explored recently people have not really tried to do the arcade model of Pays You Go like this well all they do with crane games crane games are real big these days in arcades where's the Pays You Go MMO that isn't actually a free to play game I think the Xbox I don't know if they still have it but for a while they had a thing where you could go in and like pay like a quarter and they had a main emulator you could play an arcade game on your Xbox once as if you had put in a real quarter there's not a lot of appeal in that no not really so we're going to share one of our visions with you because we have a vision we share this vision we're never going to make this it's just an idea well one, Neil Gaiman said this to paraphrase ideas aren't worth anything on their own so anyone who thinks you have a great game idea if you haven't made it that idea is worth nothing yeah any idea for anything that you have a lot of people keep their ideas secret no one might tell you my idea because you might steal it no your idea is worthless if you have an idea you should tell it to as many people as possible so that they can help you refine it and bounce things off you they're not going to make your idea it's your idea which is why you care about it rim doesn't care about my idea and if he does team up now if any of you if any of you make our vision go for it I think there's money there this is a great example of how the monetization model has to be tied at the beginning during the conceptual process to the game itself or else it wouldn't work this is a game that can't be monetized in any normal expected reasonable like currently used way so I'm going to tell you my pure vision we're not worrying about any money so imagine this game close your eyes it's an MMO it's actually an MMO as in there is one world and everyone is on it there's no instances, there's no nothing every person is on the same server on the same thing in the same place when something changes it changes permanently someone blows up the house is gone someone digs a hole, it's a hole someone fills in the hole, it's filled in get your dirt out of Voskine's ditch in addition the world is wicked dangerous crazy dangerous because it's the terminated world there's 100 killers everywhere or illegally similarly unlicensed equivalent it's the it's the Berminator the future terminated world you walk out of the human area and it's just like oh hell no you're dead forget it in addition it's an action game it's not some level up game it's not some got magic powers game in this game it's skills you control your dude in real time you push buttons to hit, you push buttons to jump you control your dude fully you get better but no stateful character stuff you're not gonna like level up this character and it gets better over time because you played more no you find like fallout you find a flamethrower you got a flamethrower you die no flamethrower there won't be levels but there will be equipment you find some body armor somewhere out there or maybe you destroy a robot he's holding a big minigun there if someone manages to take him out good luck you can take that minigun maybe if you can pick it up I want this game to be where people get together and they may like the humans all get together with their lives and they build like a little fortress and try to hold out and like expand out and build a little city build a little citadel so the game will be completely about the people playing it having to cooperate with each other because you're not making it anywhere on your own other than the meat grinder you gotta go out there with a team of people all these other real players you have to organize completely on your own there's no guilds or anything it's just up to you it's up to us you get a bunch of people together so that when you run out someone's gonna make it somewhere where there's some stuff maybe you can set something up and get some defenses going and maybe eventually the terminator that looks like a person sneaks in and then you're in trouble again but it'll be like that now we want it also to be a game that can end you can destroy a sky knight and that's it game over just turn it off forever or maybe we started over we're not sure but we want it to be a game where everything you do matters or doesn't get you to dive right away but it still changes the world and eventually if you gang up enough you can beat it you can change the world and win and everybody celebrates right the other thing about the game right is that of course when you die you're dead right it's just forget it you need to make a new everything right there is no oh go and get my corpse no no no you can go ahead and get your corpse maybe the minigun will still be next to it if you're lucky if someone else didn't take it or you know who knows what but you're dead everything is reset back to zero back to the beginning of the game wherever that may be some cave or something how the hell do we make money off of this game or even have money to make this game subscription it's an MMO MMOs are supposed to be subscription models right oh but look how many went free to play because they couldn't scratch it in the subscription world well and those are ones that were trying to get people to you know be addicted and keep playing right we're not even trying that you're not addicted to this game you're gonna play and say this is too hard I'm dead I don't care anymore and that's it right no one's gonna keep paying and we purposely do not want look at how we're constraining this already we don't want levels we don't want to level up so there's and your characters are gonna be they die easily so you're not gonna have that some cost no one will ever say I want to keep my 60s level dude they're gonna keep say I want to keep my 45 minute dude I mean it'll be on the high score table maybe of like how long you made it or how far you got away from the safe area if there is one there won't be right but it's like other than that dead is dead right really not too many people other than me who actually want to play this game right you might think that my idea is cool it's just my crazy idea but really you're gonna play you're gonna get frustrated as hell because it's gonna be balls hard right and you're never gonna play it again maybe try the demo and that'll be it we need staff we need servers we need infrastructure there's all this stuff so why don't we make an arcade monetize MMO we could we could make it to where you pay for every life right and that this might actually work right it's similar to an arcade game you play you keep going right because if there's a high barrier to entry you know 70 bucks and then 40 bucks a month no one's gonna pay the 70 bucks to start playing the game that's so hard and so crazy that doesn't even have critical mass and you saw what happened to Team Fortress 2 you want to have a lot of people playing a game like this Team Fortress 2 isn't fun if there's nobody on your server to play with you this game sucks if you're the only dude on the server it's impossible we gotta get a ton of people in it's okay if they're meat shields and we don't want them to feel bad for having to feel real bad because he spent 25 cents being a meat shield better than spending $70 to be a meat shield that's true but he's only gonna spend that 25 cents once right even if this game is really impressive with the graphics which I would like it to be as part of my vision right people might really think it's a great idea at the beginning so we get tons of quarters pouring in in the first few weeks and then now the point of all this is that you know we've talked about this game a lot on our own as we design this you can see how we found a model that fit on vision and the two are affecting each other our vision is already being affected by the model but we've chosen a model that meshes with the vision it's almost mechanism design which is the idea that the designer of a game is interested in how the players play the game it's used in like regulation in the stock market it's used in some games you play you know the game affects the players you want to control that now we're picking modernization models that while they change our game they push it in the direction we're going anyway yeah but you know you see that no matter what might we pick any of the before or after monies right no matter which ones currently exist in a really popular and successful right I've come up with this vision and really this is my legitimate vision I didn't just come up with it as an example for this panel right I've thought about this for a while none of the existing modernization models will work and make any money with this game even if the game is really cool right in the current landscape of humanity and gaming culture and society right you need to come up with something new or you would need to change the game and destroy the vision in some way we could go free to play you can pay for better characters then Bill Gates can just destroy Skynet and that ruins my game it's over I mean I can't even come up with one right if we if we kickstart we got to spend all our time making rewards but who wants a reward that doesn't do anything like hey your guy's pink great he stands out and then he's we can't give a guy a better sandwich to start with that's not fair right I want this to be a fair and skill based game and most people don't like skill based games so let's in the remaining five minutes we've got let's try to monetize a vision that is so ridiculous that the constraints will prevent you from making anything even close to a realistic modern game packs enforcer the game it's real time it takes three days to play this game out of that way actually it takes like a week and four days because you got to start at the bag stuffing I want this to be a top down like Sims kind of game you're controlling all these enforcers and you have to manage packs but it's real time and there's some games that did real time there's a game called I think D are you ready for the game that takes 90 no whole hour and all you do is sit behind a booth and watch two morons right you want to play this game really boring sit me and Scott sit down to play this game on Friday of Thursday night and we play non-stop we sleep in shifts it's like do you want to play you know the Expo hall game where you sit there and it's you just look and if anyone's doing anything bad you go hey now we haven't decided how to monetize is that bad real okay so how do we monetize a game like this well all right we can't really sell that because who's going to play that more than once if ever and even then I use it for enforcer training packs will buy it and that will be it right so the way to use it right to train new enforcers we can sell it the way they sell like airplane simulators right only one customer they pay a zillion dollars for because it's so good and that's it it's not a bad model but it's also kind of risky it is because your case probably like we don't need this this is stupid and they're gonna trade an enforcer for like if we made it that way they're gonna want to add all the secret stuff like all the money stuff and all you know to make it a real simulation now we can't sell it to the public anymore that ruins my vision I can't sell it unless I take up the black maybe they use it as a recruitment model you want to play this game it's going to make everybody not sign up it kind of turns into Ender's game what if that was controlling the enforcers we don't have the technology for that yet but we will alright so maybe okay so maybe we try to sell it how about we could do something like you know what if we made it coincide with packs for the people who can't go to packs so we get a feed from packs of you know crises or maybe it's a pseudo-random set of crises panelists didn't show up a projector caught on fire naked guy and you're playing you know the head of packs and you're a robber coup whatever you're like enforcer fix that you've got like this live streaming packs that you're running you can walk into a panel room and watch one of the panels or something well that is even crazy to monetize so maybe we meet somewhere in the middle there's the EA model of you know I've got a sports game and make a new roster every year so maybe you buy a subscription and every year you get the updates from the previous packs and you know man I can then everyone will know that he quit enforcing that jerk right he was the best guy last year he had all these high stats now I've got to use this noob who's never enforced before just trying to get a free badge that would be an interesting model maybe you're trying to do it with advertising you know the expo hall is the only part where the ads change based on who's buying ads but now you're not getting your authentic packs experience that was part of your vision right if you wanted to be authentic you would have to have the same exact ads as the expo hall but all those companies will sue you as soon as you put their stuff in your game right so you have to sell ads maybe you only can sell ads you know and when the game is new you can maybe sell an ad or two but when the game is old no one's going to buy any so it'll just be this big gray expo hall with nothing doing except a bunch of fake games right and maybe when you first sell it only one sponsor will buy it so my homework for you if you want to think about how monetization models will affect your game try to come up with a way to make money off of this crazy packs idea come up with any just you know sit there and think of if there was an enforcer game right what you would like it to be don't worry about anything else right just what game would be the awesomest packs enforcer game right it's all the only idea that you have to keep in there is the idea that there's a packs enforcer in the game afterwards figure out a way to make money off of that game before and after money right without compromising or in any way changing that awesome idea that you had and it will be very difficult really think about it because as you do you're gonna go down all you know we could we could have talked for four hours about you know different visions how to monetize them and all that but we got an hour and in exactly 50 seconds we're gonna leave this room and get on a car portal train bus something to animate Boston so we've got flyers here we cannot take questions as we said but we've got flyers here you can take that will link to probably the video of this panel and the video of many other panels we've done at previous packs and if you email us we will probably respond one too many times we also have a few our codes if you don't want to take a flyer you can just take a picture of one of these with your phone it's an experiment yeah the vision