James Gwertzman (PopCap Games) - Not so casual anymore

What is a casual game? That is the question

James has been around the industry enough to have picked up the feeling that casual games, as most people think of them, aren’t quite so casual anymore. His most provoking example was from his frequent visits to China, where they feel that anything not an MMORPG is considered a casual game. Other views on casual games fall under descriptions such as

• Short play sessions
• Less emphasis on technology
• Broad appeal
• Very addictive
• Short play sessions
• Low commitment
• Small development budget
• Simple controls

Casual games are growing up

Just this past summer, EA announced the formation of a new division for casual gaming. According to James, PopCap was contacted by lots of press wondering if they felt threatened by the move, but PopCap was thrilled to see a major publisher recognizing the impact casual gaming was having on the industry, that games were no longer “just for geeky 14 year-old boys anymore”. Which James finds rather interesting because back when the game industry started, we were all playing casual games like Pac Man, a game so simple all you needed was a joystick and was enjoyed by both men and women. Then by the 80s or 90s the gaming demographic had shrunk considerable, and James believes the Internet is what brought the industry back to its roots by freeing it from the publishers that had until then strangled the life out of casual games.

So as casual games continue to grow, what exactly can they teach the rest of the industry?

Applying various business models

The one thing casual gaming has done and done well is to exploit as many as a dozen various business models to achieve profit, and James discussed a number of them. This is an area where casual games have made the most impact, and where the core industry is just starting to catch up, moving from retail shelf space to online distribution with services like Steam.

Download Try and Buy

This is by far the most widely-used form of business model out there on the Internet today; mainly because it was one of the first models to be introduced when casual gaming first reappeared. The player downloads a free trial of your game that is locked after a certain play limit, such as 60 minutes, three levels, etc. If the player decides they want the full game, they return to the website to purchase it, after which they download it to their computer and it’s theirs forever.

The actual economics of this model comes from the conversion rate, which is the “magic number” in the casual games industry. The conversion rate describes the number of people who actually buy a game out of all the people who downloaded the trial. In this model, a conversion rate of 2% is actually considered to be very good. However this means that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table by letting people download and try your games for free without purchasing them. However the flipside is this easy access to your game play produces a ton of viral marketing. People trying your games will tell other people about them, even if they don’t buy them. This can be a great way to increase your marketing without directly spending more money. However be sure that your game is fun. Very fun. There’s absolutely no room for bad games using this model as people will only pay for what they enjoy playing. Even big brand names won’t help sell a crappy game. You may see more downloads, but that conversion rate won’t leave the sub-cellar.

Advertising Sponsored

Here you’re giving out free games that generate ad impressions, which are then sold to advertisers. When dealing with an online game, in addition to banners on your site you can also place ads in three different locations, although it’s not recommended you use all three for a single title. Pre-roll ads appear at the start of the game session, with either a link to say “no thank you” if it is static or a message saying the game will launch in 20 seconds (for example) if it’s a video or other animated ad. During actual game play, interstitial advertisements can appear between levels. PopCap however has a rule along the lines of not showing two interstitial ads within 10 minutes. So even if you finish a level in 5 minutes, if it has only been 7 minutes since you saw the last ad it won’t show you another. Finally there’s the post-roll ad that appears when the user exits the game session. In the case of a downloadable game, interstitial ads that appear should do so within the game, meaning they should be encased in artwork that doesn’t eject the player from the game’s environment. If a player wants the ads to go away, they can pay for the title. Another way to insert ads is to wait to do so after a certain length of play time, in which case the player again has to pay for the title to disable the ads.

The benefit to using advertising in games is that it creates revenue from users who otherwise wouldn’t have paid to play the game. Not only that, but players who do decide to pay for the game will create an increased revenue from both the actual sale and the ad impressions. On the flipside, people who pay to remove advertisements also cut off that extra source of revenue from a total in exchange for a fixed one-time sum. This is why it is important that your advertisements do not disrupt the game in any way – people who play your game because it is fun and aren’t bothered by the ads will create the most revenue vs. people who play your game because it is fun but hate the ads and pay to have them removed and keep playing the game, but you no longer earn a profit from them.

Subscriptions

The idea for a subscription model is to allow players to pay a single fee (usually per month, sometimes with discounts for 6 and 12 month subscriptions as well) to have access to an entire catalogue of games versus paying for a single title. PopCap has found that their average revenue per user (ARPU) is about the cost of a single game, as they find that’s how much the average user buys per year. It’s not great, but it’s better than a $10/mo subscription service right? $10 is after all less than $20. But PopCap finds that people usually subscribe for 6+ months, so immediately your ARPU jumps to $60, which is a significant increase. However the subscription model can be hard to get people to sign up for, as not only do you need your games to be fun, you need a lot of fun games for people to want to subscribe and play a majority of them. Per-Session Pricing

This is the “arcade” model that was pioneered by Wild Tangent, where players are basically buying tokens, which they can then use to start gaming sessions. The immediate downside of this model is having to set up the system of buying tokens, you can’t be charging players $.25 on their credit cards, so you have to convince them to buy a bunch of tokens at once for say, $5. But once you’ve assigned a value to a token, once you have the whole micro-transaction system in place, a cool thing you could do is, for example, go to Coke and say ‘here, by a token for $.05 each and place them on the bottom of bottle caps’. Additionally, you earn money off customers who wouldn’t have even bought a game after trying it, since they had to pay at least a certain amount of money (we’ll say $5 again) to try that game and others. So while $5 isn’t as good as the full game’s $20 value, it’s better than if the player had tried a free trial and didn’t like it, earning you nothing at all. Again, having lots of games to choose from makes it easier to convince people to buy tokens as well. Additionally, most models ‘cap’ the expenditure of players at the cost of the game, essentially allowing the player to work their way to completely owning a title if they’ve sunk enough tokens into it, otherwise people may simply stop playing if they find their spending more money than what the game is valued.

Free-to-play, Item-based Games

If you remember back to the beginning and the comment about China’s stance on casual games, you may have wondered why they think that way. Well the fact is with piracy so rampant in China, they’ve been forced to adopt a unique business model. These games are MMO server-based games, which makes them much harder to crack than a normal client based product. Given away for free to encourage an initial player base, the real money comes from items within the game that people buy to enhance their experience. One example is a basketball game that exists over in China, where people can buy clothing like shoes that enhance your avatar’s speed or clothes to make your avatar unique. Abilities that allow your player to, for example, hook shot or dribble behind the back are also up for purchase.

On the economics side, only a small percent of people actually pay for items in the game, but they can pay a LOT of money. Over time thousands of dollars can be sunk into these games, hundreds of dollars from just an individual person. Non-paying players also play an important role in attracting the big spenders, as the spenders will always need people to lord over and give them reason to purchase more so they can continue to remain at the head of the pack, which means small purchases by users continue to drive big purchases of the people ahead of them. Not only do you have to have a fun game in this model, but you also have to focus on the sale and marketing of your purchasable items in the game, as it is such a widely-used model over in China and being just fun won’t attract people to purchase items. Finally, careful tweaking is needed in releasing items for purchase so that the game balance is not upset by players who can afford to spend more money than others.

Leveraging multiple platforms

PopCap has discovered the incredible value of making their games available on separate platforms, including:

• Retail
• Online
• Laptops
• Desktops
• Mobile phones
• iPod
• PDA
• Console
• In-flight entertainment
• Lottery card

PopCap hates the word “port” and prefers to “adapt” games to various platforms, meaning that each platform version of the game, while looking similar, will seem to have been designed from the ground up for that platform. So Bejeweled on Xbox Live Arcade actually has co-op play and Bookworm on the mobile platform enables T9 text input so the phone auto-completes words for you, letting normal texters pick up the game quickly.

The catch however is that your game has to be simple at its core to adapt to so many various platforms. Obviously we’re never going to see Half Life 2 on the mobile phone.

Attracting a broad audience

PopCap recognizes that it’s not focusing on a small, single group of people when it’s designing its games. The ability to remain open to multiple audiences greatly increases the potential sale of a title. PopCap’s typical customer is a female age 35+ who plays about 2-5 hours a week and mostly to relieve stress. So they’re obviously looking for an enjoyable game to relieve them, but designing games for women while still maintaining their broad appeal isn’t easy. “A bunch of guys sitting around trying to figure out what a game for women is going to look like is not always going to work out.” PopCap introduces people early on into the concept stage to make sure they’re heading in the right direction, in this case that means bringing the games home to their moms, wives and girlfriends.

Taking time to polish

PopCap has the luxury of being able to take time to really work on polishing their games until they’re just right. They prototype constantly and iterate over and over, keeping the good and tossing the bad until they have a solid concept, which they then produce with no budget, no schedules, deadlines or milestones, and no design document. They simply continue until they look at a game and consider it to be done. How is this possible? Well they break down each project into very small 4-5 person teams, and each member is highly experienced, especially the producer in charge of the project. It may seem like an arcane concept among the bigger developers out there, but there is one that operates similar to this, and that’s Blizzard. By their track record, it’s a solid concept if your company can support it.

Simplifying game controls

James showed a diagram of a PSP control scheme for a racing game, where almost every button on the PSP was in use and in most cases had dual functions for walking around on foot and driving in a car. This is compared to the typical casual game control scheme, which is a single mouse button. While this is mostly necessary for complex games, James still asserts that more thought can be put into control schemes to simplify them, using the context of the player’s action in the game to dictate what a button does. If the player is standing near a door, Button A opens it. If he’s running, Button A jumps. If he’s walking, Button A crouches. Just because there are 12 buttons on a controller doesn’t mean you should find ways to use them all.

Takeaway

The following lessons learned above to apply to mainstream games are:

• Experiment with alternate distribution
• Check out what’s going on over in Asia (item-buying, micro-transaction, etc)
• Apply iterative development – more prototypes
• Reduce scope and scale – more time to polish
• Be ruthless in simplifying your controls
• Avoid unnecessarily alienating potential players

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