Traditionally, limited shelf space has been one of the largest hurdles to selling a product – there’s only so much room to display so much product. For a time, it was assumed that the Internet would be free from this problem. However, we’re constantly being reminded that unlimited space comes with other, less obvious, limitations.
In today’s market, and perhaps more importantly, in tomorrow’s market, what is a game developer supposed to do to have his or her game connect with the people who want to play?
It’s no longer about simply getting your game out there and selling the product. More and more, the gaming industry is discovering that to maintain healthy growth, they’ve got to build stronger, more complex relationships by developing services that keep players returning.
Microsoft serves a wide variety of customers across its Xbox LIVE Arcade, Windows Live Messenger, and MSN Games platforms, has an enormous amount of experience in the casual games arena, and delivers a number of services or is developing a number of services that are designed to keep casual game players coming back for more.
With the myriad of services that are available, we hope that having a look at what Microsoft is doing will give you a better idea of the range of options that are available to you and will allow you to better educate yourself for making choices about what's good for your business.
Global Warming in the Gaming Environment
The casual games industry is heating up at tremendous speed. Rather than narrowing and defining itself, growth in this industry covers ever-broadening demographic strata across a variety of platforms as the business pushes the boundaries far beyond the single storefront – whether we're talking traditional retail storefront or virtual storefront.
While we’ve consistently been warned about the dangers of trying to be everything to everyone, the casual games market seems to be doing just that as platform options extend from online and download play to instant messaging platforms, consoles, handhelds, cell phones, and portable music devices. In a world where these kinds of opportunities exist, game developers are left with tough choices about what opportunities they deem the most strategic.
Developers are currently being asked to answer a key question with regards to the future growth of their businesses: How wise is it to increasingly spread yourself thinner in an attempt to be everywhere at once, which may result in being lost in the vastness of the available space – or is it a better strategy to lay down some key wagers about where the market is going to go in order to grow and strengthen your business by fostering more growth in fewer places?
For some, the question may be stated in starkly practical terms: Do you put yourself on 100 portal sites that serve the exact same demographic – or do you go deeper with a select number of partners?
The Services Model
The value of building services into a business model has been proven again and again across a wide variety of industries to keep bringing customers back for more. In a typical sales transaction, a person buys an item once and the transaction is completed – but services provide the recognition to say, "What can we do to better encourage your trade and keep you coming back?"
From collecting frequent flyer miles, to using a rewards card at a local grocery store, to having a queue of waiting-to-be-watched films at Netflix, services have become an integral part of the business landscape.
And services are becoming an increasing part of the gaming landscape as well. As a developer, it’s important to understand what this shift in service in the gaming industry means and how you can build your games to take advantage of it.
What Does a Service Look Like?
Services can take a variety of forms depending upon the needs of the consumer. For example, the service of a portal site may be the implied guarantee that there will be new games added so often that you’ll never get bored or have to play an older game, or that games will meet a given quality level or set of capabilities. Or it may be simple recognition, such as knowing a player by name when they sign in and suggesting new games based upon their history.
Different players look for different things from their services: some customers are looking for discounts, and some want access to unique content, rewards, or offerings. Some simply want to feel special. Some want to make friends or measure progress. Some want to express themselves. Some do it for bragging rights, and some do it for a sense of community. Some want to stay in touch with friends, some want to make friends, be matched for games, or join leagues. Given that any games service may opt to offer a mix of these capabilities to varying degrees, a wide spectrum of service offerings is possible.
The variety of services that can be offered is staggering – as a developer, you have a unique opportunity to create games that can exploit the service offerings that are out there and thereby build a stronger more robust business.
In order to understand the ways in which specific services can be incorporated into a platform environment, let’s take a look at some of the ways that Microsoft is using services across its casual games offerings.
Communities
Each Microsoft platform currently has its own discrete community of players that adheres to a given set of demographics. These communities are distinct, but there are also areas of overlap. As well these communities can interact and share information in a variety of ways.
The Friends Lists in Messenger and Xbox LIVE Arcade, as well as the forum areas in MSN Games, allow their participants to connect with and develop full-fledged communities within their respective platforms, which bring them back again and again to engage in social practices that can be both complimentary and independent of the game platforms.
"Windows Live Messenger is not a single games community – it's roughly 250 million communities because each person has their own community, which is their Friends List," said Kim Pallister, Business Development Manager for Microsoft Casual Games. "Our job is to provide gaming experiences that they can layer on top of their relationships with people and enrich them. That's the promise that service provides consumers: in exchange for viewing some advertising or paying a subscription fee – we'll give you something that lets you enrich your relationships with friends and family."
Increasingly, these communities are starting to interconnect as players in Xbox LIVE Arcade, for instance, can contact people on their Windows Live Messenger Friends List via their Xbox 360 console and ask them to join them for a game.
Matchmaking
“On Xbox LIVE Arcade, almost all of our games have a live, multiplayer component. To the extent that you're alone, you can go online and play with your friends, or meet new people that you want to play online,” said Brian Trussel, Group Manager in the Casual Games Group responsible for Xbox LIVE Arcade and MSN Games. “It's a nice way to either play with friends that you've established or to meet new people.”
Each of the Microsoft game platforms offers some version of matchmaking. “On the multiplayer front at the MSN Games site,” Trussel continues, “we have several communities of multiplayer games in our architecture that allow you to matchmake with anybody who happens to be on the site – or to matchmake with your Messenger friends, anyone who’s on your Friends List.”
“We've also found a lot of success with the Xbox LIVE Vision camera – the games that use the Vision camera in Xbox LIVE Arcade get very high populations because it adds another level of interaction and social dynamic to the game. It's a much stronger affinity that people have with each other when they can see the individual – so games like UNO have been very popular because of that.”
The Achievement System
“The Achievement system in Xbox LIVE Arcade has been phenomenally successful by giving gamers the ability to compare the Achievements they've earned on their games to their friend's earned Achievements,” said Brian Trussel.
The addition of mini-goals within Xbox LIVE Arcade has created a thriving social dynamic that keeps driving players deeper into the system. “I can go and find anybody I want,” said Trussel, “I can have a look to see what games they've played that I've played, and what they've done that I haven't, or vice-versa. It's all keeping with the pick-up-and-play, very quick, very fun, very social element that is the hallmark of arcade games.”
Gamerscore
Gamerscore is a quick, quantifiable way to capture all the Achievements a player has earned playing games on Xbox 360. For many gamers, it's an enormous competition-driver within a player's community, as each player is motivated to achieve the top score among their friends for bragging rights. It's like a meta-game that's played on top of individual games. While competition may not be the motivator for all players, Achievements and Gamerscore provide the means to measure progress using a common language.
Virtual Badges
Within the MSN Games site, virtual badges are offered for meeting gameplay goals based upon points scored and number of games played. Each week, special badges are featured for selected games on the site, as well – and these badges are kept in badge albums on the site for users who have created an account.
Virtual badges have been proven to drive site visitors to play new games in order to acquire the badges that are currently being offered. They have become a hit deeper within the community as players have recently driven initiatives on the MSN Games forums to create a “1000 Badge Club” to honor the players who have acquired 1000 or more virtual badges on the site.
The Value of Services to Developers
Understanding the wide array of services that exist in the marketplace and how they work for you and the customer will help you design games that operate as key elements in a thriving eco-system rather than one-off standalone items.
Next-generation successes will come to the titles that embrace, design for, and utilize the services on which they will ship. Well-utilized services enable your customer to develop new levels of engagement with your game while providing you with new design, sales, and marketing opportunities.
Increasingly, games need to be tailored to fully utilize the spectrum of capabilities that services can provide. At the same time, services create new opportunities for developers to consider as they package games for delivery.
Moving forward, “How do I add elements that encourage interactions between community members?" and “How do I use Friends capabilities to encourage the viral marketing of my game?” and “How do I use achievements or badges or other meta-game elements to drive different play behavior?” and “What will my players talk about at the water-cooler?” are all valuable questions that that developers should be asking themselves.
In the end, these are the elements that will drive your future success as a developer.
The Future of Services
Looking ahead, the games that are most likely to get major attention at Microsoft aren't single platform games, but games that can be played across the variety of platforms –games that will build, extend, and deepen relationships, and enrich the offered services. It won’t matter whether players are on Windows Live Messenger, Xbox LIVE Arcade, a PC, a cell phone, or a Zune player – they’ll be connected and ready to play with rich services that make sense for the platform that they're on.
"The future of LIVE is the bridge across them all," said Brian Trussel. "This will be an ongoing process for a long time. And there are many interesting pieces that fit into that vision, such as going deeper into the relationships between the PC and Xbox 360 users. There is room to explore more deeply the relationships between Messenger users and Web users. There are richly complex issues and challenges that involve advancement on the social aspect in terms of teams and clubs and tournaments."
"I think that as we evolve the future of LIVE implementation and vision, you’ll find more and more profitable business models for developers who participate in that to leverage their original IP against to make more and more profitable businesses against that."
For Microsoft, the future of services is clear – services are, by definition, relationships between the provider and the customer. To the degree that services can utilize the bridges that are being created to support them and connect all of a player’s games across all of their game platforms, those services – those relationships will become the defining customer proposition. And that's exactly as it should be.
Microsoft Platforms at a Glance
MSN Games |
Windows Live Messenger |
Xbox LIVE Arcade |
Number of Players: More than 14 million each month
Number of Games: More than 600 games Demographic
Business Models Key Services
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Number of Players: More than 16 million each month
Number of Games: 24 games
Demographic
Business Models
Key Services |
Number of Players: More than 25 million downloads (as of March 2007) Number of Games: More than 65 titles Demographic Business Models
Key Services |
