Monthly Archives: October 2009

Management By Perkele

You might be wondering what this word “perkele” means.

It’s a Finnish word. And “management by perkele” refers to certain type of leadership/managing. Let me tell a brief story that I heard from a friend of mine. After reading this, I’m sure you know what this type of leadership is all about. Friend of mine – let’s call him Tony – had a boss who was using “management by perkele” with… well, quite obvious results. You might have seen similar bosses (or even have one right now).

To make a long story shorter, I’ll take some shortcuts and try to describe things briefly.

Shortly put:

Tony (friend of mine) asked assistance from his co-worker Mark, who said “sure, I can help you”. Tony emailed Mark that “but you cannot code the module, since my boss said it wouldn’t be allowed… which in my opinion is quite strange, since you have been coding similar modules for other people. I’ll have to get confirmation for all this from my boss, and will let you know if you are allowed to help me.
Mark emailed company lead (the big boss, that’s upper in the hierarchy than Tony’s boss) about this.
The next morning Tony was doing a part of the application. Suddenly, his boss walked into his room shouting “Now you’ve crossed the line!! GODDAMIT, how can you decide to take Mark into helping you when I’ve specifically said that you must consult me first!!!
Shouting continued and Tony managed to say that “It was just a preliminary inquiry and I told Mark I would ask you. Nothing was decided” and “Is this about the fact that Mark forwarded the email to company lead – I didn’t know he would do that.” (which the boss of course denied) and also that “do you think it’s professional to come here and shout at me?”… and nothing helped. Tony’s boss was in rage (and in reality all this rage was because the email reached the Big Boss, it had nothing to do with Mark assistance).

The end results were quite obvious:

Tony was very near countering with the cartman technique.
Then of course the immediate result for Tony experienced a total drop in motivation: how the heck is he supposed to continue working the rest of the day.
And this of course affects all of the following work: how Tony is supposed to be effective at his work if there’s a (poohole) boss shouting at him?

The point is… if the boss has issues (like he is about to get a burn-out or is a total jerk)… then it like doesn’t help anything to go shout to people who are lower in the hierarchy. M’kay?

(Anyone have a boss who uses “management by perkele”?)

Potatomen

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Cliff Harris just tweeted about a blog post called Are you a potato or a rock band?. I think that has a valid point… No matter how you price your product, somebody will say “I’d buy it if it were cheaper”. An example to prove this: there was one guy who got sick of those bastard blaming that they need to spend like $3.99 to upgrade their iphone app (after the app got tons of improvements). So, instead he priced the app for $39.99 (it was a witty marketing campaign).

So the point is… if people are like ~~whining~~ giving constructive criticism over couple of bucks – they ~~whine~~ talk about any price.

So.

Cliff is right.

Pricing games & doing indie games means not being a potatoe.

It means doing some cool games like this. (Absolutely stunning game.)

I Finally Got It – The Ultimate Definition of “Indie Developer”

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There’s many different answers to question “what being indie developer means to you?”

Some guys say that being indie means “developing your own ideas”. Some people suggest that it’s “financial Independence” or “not having a publisher”. I recall somebody answering “incredible waste of time” (that sounds pretty accurate…).

But now I think I finally got it. I know now what indie developer or indie team is, and how it’s defined.

The definition of indie developer is:

“Indie team has only one programmer.”

I think that’s what indies are. Solo developers. Doing their own stuff. Perhaps collaborating with other non-programmers (who can thus be integral part of “indie team”) and possibly outsourcing asset creation.

But eventually it boils down to this:

Just one developer doing the programming. (Maybe occasionally getting few selected tasks done by some other programmer, but that’s gray area then). If there’s more programmers, then it’s something else – something non-indie anyway. Indie are solos with their own vision, thus bunch of indies makes “group of people who argue a lot”.

Now you can argue with me. Post your comment.

What Pringles Taught Me About Marketing (And Cross-Selling)

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When Pringles was introduced here in Finland, I remember myself thinking: “why on earth would anybody buy such expensive chips in such a weird packages?”

Ten years later… I only buy Pringles when I buy chips.

I guess the process went like this in my head:

New weird chips? I’ll stick to what’s familiar
(later…) Hmm, I guess I could try these new chips for once
(more later…) Hey, I could buy Pringles again, those were yammy
(more more later…) They actually are darn good together with goat milk cheese. I wonder why I first thought that these were weird chips..

So… something “weird” might get some time for people to get used to it. But… by doing same thing differently (basically Pringles chips were packed in a box, while other chips were packed in a… some thing) at least you get their attention.

By cleverly looking different, they totally got me.

The only thing they missed to do was to make a cross-selling deal with the goat milk cheese manufacturers. Since goat milk cheese + pringles is like awesome combination. They would have got me years earlier if they’d let me know that this is a killer combination.

I guess we all can learn something new every day…

Sometimes The Error Lies In The Most Obvious Place

Indie Xmas 2009 – Update

Indie Xmas 2009 (Let’s Beat Together Those Bastard AAA Games)

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I got this really funky idea this morning which could mean:

I want to get help generate tons of indie game sales. I want to build a huge hyped “xmas portal site” that helps sell tons of indie games this Christmas – all profits going to indies.

Here’s my idea in a nutshell:

We’ll register a domain that has “indie” and “christmas” or something like that in it (feel free to suggest ideas!)
The site will be bloody simple (think of something like this but a little more texts and download buttons and stuff)
The site will have Xmas colors and reindeers and bright xmas stuff (if somebody wants to help make layout, please feel free to show yourself!)
Only indies are allowed to submit their games
Each game’s position will be randomized with every page load – so every game has equal chance to being shown there. (It could even be an Xmas calendar type of thing where new game or games are revealed every day)
There will be images to click and links to click. Only images are hosted here, downloads must be hosted by you.
Payments go through your site. I collect zero pennies for this. 100% revenues go for indies and webhosting fees are on my shoulders (when the server crashes due too much traffic, we can ask for donations or something).
It would be good if there was a xmas special discounts (maybe something to be revealed in the calendar each day) as many games as possible. Ranging anywhere from 10% to 50% or more discounts. (To give customers more reason to visit the site)

As for promotion:

I will use my game release service to promote the site.
Naturally I’ll also use this and my own game sites to promote.
All indies who participate, if possible, should try promote the site some way (for example via their mailing list, blogs, twitter…)

Of course I’d benefit from this the same way as everybody else: I’d finish my game and put it available through this “indie xmas site” (in absolutely same manner as everybody’s elses game – not my game getting any bonuses or anything for being “owner” of the idea).

If you are interested, please reply in this blog post (or retweet or blog about this) and please suggest some ideas & improvements on how to handle this. Let me know if you are interested in participating or helping improve the design for this idea.

Basically the idea is to beat those bastard AAA games and bastard game portals the next Xmas. (Or at least give them a little nudge… and let *us* collect what’s rightfully ours.)

Viva la indie!

Xbox 360 Or PlayStation 3 – Hmm, I’ll Buy Neither One… But Perhaps a PlayBoxStation?

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I discussed with friend of mine about “getting either Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3″. I started making a point that I really have no time to play pretty much anything, so in a way I don’t really want either one. But then again, there’s some cool games that would be fun to test on consoles…

(So far I’ve relied on playing at my bro’s place)

Anyway, we discussed that it’s quite a wonder how games are made either for Xbox 360 or for PlayStation 3. And how it’s pretty expensive thing to handle. Sure, there’s many games that are done for both, but often you get games only for one of these. Xbxo 360 and Microsoft has nice game development community around XNA. Sony has Blu-ray, which is of course cool if you watch movies. Sony’s PS3 is black, which is also a plus.

But for games. It’s tricky. For example, Alan Wake is coming only for Xbox (not even for PC which is a shame). That’s an enough good reason to buy Xbox 360. But then for example Little Big Planet is only for PS3.

So… would I need to get both machines, just to be able to play something I want? Spending 300-400 euros for being able to play Alan Wake sounds pretty expensive.

From a gamers point-of-view, that’s quite tricky. Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are kind of close to each other in terms of games audience, so I wonder what could happen if these two would combine their efforts… and do PlayBoxStation IV or something (BoxStation? XPlay?).

That would mean:

They’d pretty get monopoly over (hardcore) gamer consoles
They could set the prices for games (they do this already, but I guess they’d have more power over this)
No console price war in hard core gamer audience (Wii is a different thing): nowadays if Xbox price drops, so will Playstation. New PlayBox would cost something and that’s the thing you must get if you want to play games. Spending 300 for Xbox and another 300 eur for PlayStation is like more expensive than spending 450 euros for the PlayBoxStation IV.
Lesser game development costs (I’m not an expert on how these things go in the publisher end, but from a developer’s point of view it’s always less expensive when you don’t need to do porting to different platforms…)

So basically, instead of 2 kids fighting, they could become teammates and start bullying others.

Hmm, actually I’m not so sure if this is a good idea after all. Maybe it’s better after all that there’s these 2 rivals in this sandbox fighting each other. Who knows.

The Reason Why I Love The Game Braid

1 Reply

I have this love-hate relationship with Braid game.

I pointed out earlier that (the hate/ignore part):

I don’t care about platformers, which means I don’t like Braid.
Even if I don’t like platformers, that doesn’t mean everybody else would think the same.

And then the love part:

The Braid developer has done an awesome job with his game.

I just love what they’ve done with the game (even though I hate it).

(In the next blog post, I promise to write something that makes sense. Something not about Braid.)

The Reason Why I Hate (Ignore) The Game Braid

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Before serving the meat of this topic, here’s a little background…

You know what happens if you are afraid to promote your game?

You would be quite screwed, since nobody will promote your game for you.

Here’s one guideline I follow:

“Be darn proud of the stuff you do.”

When I talk to some indie developers (developers who have far more experience than I do – my company is just an infant at the time of writing this post) and ask about their game I sometimes get shy replies where people wonder “if their game is good enough” or “if others have done better games” or whatever. It’s natural to think that way. After all, developing the game is not that easy thing to do – finishing a game is even harder (I’ve finished 3 games that have generated any revenue, and now doing my 4th one which is a much bigger project).

Here’s how I think about this:

Pieces of shit
Games are not “shitty!” even when somebody says so. If somebody comments a game saying “shit” that just means what goes between his ears. Shit. Or shitty thoughts. Or to be more exact: he just doesn’t like your game.

Why I hate Braid
It would be foolish to assume that everybody would like all games. For example, there’s this game called Braid that’s been praised and said how good it is and all that. I hated every moment playing it.

Does that mean Braid is a bad game, or that Braid sucks, or that Braid isn’t innovative. Nope – it just means that I don’t like Braid (and that type of games). Simple as that. I can honestly say that I won’t spend any more time playing Braid, but I do have a huge respect for how successful the game has been. It’s sold a lot and everybody is talking about it – so respect. I hate the game, but praise the developer.

For the record: I must say that I simply don’t like platformer games where you jump over things. Even if they have the go-back-in-time-and-do-stuff feature, to me they are still platformer games where you jump over things. It’s not Braid that I really hate. It’s any game that’s platformer game. I just don’t like them.

So, why I really don’t hate Braid and what people should do
But, anyway. So, in reality I don’t hate Braid – the truth is that I don’t like platformer games. To me they are just not fun. In reality, I don’t much care about Braid or platformers, and I think the crucial thing here to realize is:

Your game is not about you
Your game will be hated by many
Your game will be disliked by very many

But luckily:

Your game will be liked and loved by some

And that’s where the Holy Grail is. That’s where we gotta aim. It’s no use to try to get everybody to like your game (or you end up having this massively-multiplayer-singleplayer-cooperative-team-deathmatch-captureflag-roleplaying-strategy-action-racing-hiddenobject-casual game for hardcore gamers). Nobody would care (and you’d run out of budget faster than winter comes in Finland – and believe me, that’s fast).

What we can do is to pick our audience… pick the right audience and get those selected members who like our game. Then cater more for that audience.

I won’t buy Braid nor any other platformer where you jump, jump, jump. But that doesn’t make those games bad. They just aren’t for me. Maybe they are for somebody else, but not for me.

(Now, go buy that Braid – even if I don’t like it, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t at least check this game what many other people praise.

And if you read this far, go check out the next post: Why I love Braid game)

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I bake games. Indie style.