Disqus - Latest Comments for jefftunn

Re: Making Flash The Console For The Web

jefftunn — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:17:32 -0000

One of the main reasons PushButton Labs chose to use Flash as our first platform this time around was its ubiquity. I think it is proven that it is good enough to make great games, and they are getting better all the time. I love the fact that we can make a game one day, then release it to a world wide audience of a billion or so users the very next day. I have done a presentation on this, and that is more than ALL of the gaming consoles audiences in history COMBINED! I love that.

On the other hand, if Adobe were to include some form of hardware acceleration, there are new ranges of games that could be made. I am a game designer that just wants to make FUN games, so I do not care if we have enough 3D power to make uncanny valley, sweat rolling off the football player characters, but I would not mind enough power to make a decent flight simulator.

I think a nice compromise would be for Adobe to provide a level of hardware support that might reach 50-70% of the installed base. Since Adobe can keep stats on the players, they would be able to tell developers how big the installed base is. Then, as we are creating games, we could make the business decision to go for 1BB people or something smaller, say 500MM.

What I don't want to see is an arms race of technology that is a constantly changing bar requiring tons of QA and product testing for many different hardware configurations. We've all done that in the PC market, and actually still continue to do do today. I don't want to go back.

-Jeff Tunnell, PushButton Labs, Managing Partner

Re: Flashbang Guys Getting It Right

jefftunn — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:46:04 -0000

The advertising market will not always be in the toilet. In my article I was looking a few years out. The first step is getting a lot of fans to love you. Once you have that, you can make money from direct sales, micro-transactions, ads, and even subscriptions. Without an audience and community, you can implement all of that stuff you want, but you won't be able to make it.

Also, taking your best games to XBLA or other paying platforms is a viable strategy. They don't seem to have a lot of desire to do so, but if they keep going, odds are they will create a game that becomes a huge hit. At that point, they will get approached by publishers willing to pay them to take their IP's to other platforms.

Doing contract work for a few years while playing this strategy out is not such a bad thing. It looks to me like these guys are having a great time.

Re: Flashbang Guys Getting It Right

jefftunn — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:44:34 -0000

I have some more ideas for Indies Doing It Right. I'll post a now one from time to time. I am open to getting suggestions from the MBG community as well. If anybody has any ideas for successful Indies doing great things, let me know.

Re: Flashbang Guys Getting It Right

jefftunn — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:42:40 -0000

1989 was a hard year. We were working vary hard on our two Affiliated Publisher products, A-10 Tankkiller and David Wolf: Secret Agent, as well as a bunch of Activision products like Mechwarrior. It is kind of funny to think that 30+ developers could create 8 AA products in one year, but we did. In addition, a bunch of those games got great reviews and were very influencial. For instance, A-10 was one of the very first game to support 256 colors! Sound funny now, but it was nearly the equivalent of being the first to support 3D graphics cards. Going to 256 colors was one of the biggest visual differences in games ever.

Re: One Way To Divide Your Company Equity At Start Up

jefftunn — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:05:02 -0000

This article is about how to divide ownership of your company, not your product. Those are two very distinct and different issues. Usually, the company owns the copyright on the projects that it funds and develops.

Re: One Way To Divide Your Company Equity At Start Up

jefftunn — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:17:51 -0000

Are you a publisher or a developer? A 300K units sales projection is very, very far from modest. I am not a fan of taking investor money for starting a development company. How are you planning on paying your investors back? If you are going to take investor many, why not just sign with a publisher? They understand the risks. Most investors do not. If you take investor money, you no longer own your company, so you are not really Indie. You owe it to the investors to pay back the money at a great return since this is such a risky business. I simply do not think anybody in this business can make those kinds of promises.

Re: PushButton Engine Open Beta Launched

jefftunn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:32:43 -0000

We are going to accept contributions. The code is currently hosted on Google Code. Ben will have to write more about how we are accepting changes, etc.

Re: Five Realistic Steps To Starting A Game Development Company

jefftunn — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:29:42 -0000

Uuuh. Well, the eBook about how to get started in the games biz is still coming soon now :) Seriously, I really do want to finish it up, but with selling GarageGames to IAC, working on Instant Action, and now starting up PushButton Labs, getting PushButton Engine out, and working on Grunts: Skirmish, something had to go. The eBook didn't make the list. Maybe it'll become the Duke Nuke'm of eBooks :)

Re: Risk Assesment: Don’t Put All Your Games In One Market

jefftunn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:37:47 -0000

I think that trying to get pay back in the first week of release of your game is the wrong way to look at things.

If you have followed my advice of finding like minded people to team up with you to make games, then you don't really have a budget. You have a programmer and an artist that are both part of a team. If you need to make a living, you should have some form of steady income "day job" that will pay the bills while trying to build up your multiple streams of game income.

I certainly don't have exact answers to any of these questions. My advice all comes down to my ways of combating falling prices and rising competition. It is very difficult to put actual numbers to these types of ideas. I do think that a budget of $500-1,000 is way too low. I can't imagine making something good enough for people to pay for with that kind of a budget.

I would always release the free version first and try to find an audience, the figure out how to convert a small part of that audience to paying for something. In our case, we will have a free version and a for pay High Definition version (as well as some other bells and whistles, but you will have to wait to see all of it). The free versions are your marketing.

Re: Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes you Nothing

jefftunn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:39:53 -0000

Nice article, Marsh. Like I commented on your site, I think the iPhone App Store would be much better with a Web interface similar to the way Amazon does it for the Kindle, i.e. let user browse and purchase apps on the website, then push them to the iPhone. The sales of apps would sky rocket.

Re: Risk Assesment: Don’t Put All Your Games In One Market

jefftunn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:37:18 -0000

Dan Cook's freely available graphics are awesome! People should be able to have a lot of fun combining his graphics with the PushButton Engine.

Re: Risk Assesment: Don’t Put All Your Games In One Market

jefftunn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:36:08 -0000

Release of the PushButton Engine is getting closer. Check out this screen shot of Tim Aste's website design: http://www.scrnshots.com/users/timaste/screensh...

Re: Risk Assesment: Don’t Put All Your Games In One Market

jefftunn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:32:47 -0000

The Pangaea guys have been working hard for a long time to finally be in the right place at the right time. Congrats to them on the success of Enigmo selling 810,000 units. I hope their success on this one product turns into success on their follow up products. A lot of my base assumptions for building a successful company are based on this being true.

Re: Risk Assesment: Don’t Put All Your Games In One Market

jefftunn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:29:46 -0000

I think it is a lot more work to come up with a new idea than to get your old idea out to as many platforms as possible. Ideally, I would look for diversification across both platforms and games. In my articles about starting game companies, I advocate building a portfolio of products that each bring in a small amount of "annuity" type revenue. A bunch of small streams of income is a better source than one large one, and making sure the risk is spread among IP's and platforms is the best.

Re: Game Pricing, Look Out Below

jefftunn — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:54:06 -0000

I didn't say there not be hits. There will be. How do you make hits? I don't know, nobody does. There are things you can do to improve your chances, but it is too much to put in a comment. Most of my blog is about what you can do to improve your chances.

Re: Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes you Nothing

jefftunn — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 11:54:01 -0000

Tower of Goo came out of the free side of the Internet and was ported to WiiWare with updates to become World of Goo.

Re: Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes you Nothing

jefftunn — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 10:06:00 -0000

I don't think these people are lazy. I believe they are misinformed. I also think they are being terribly elitist, i.e. if they have made a small amount of success, and feel that others should not be given the chance to succeed. As far as I can tell, there have not been any break out, great games fostered int he WiiWare market, but I know for a fact that there are many break out games that have some from the free markets.

Re: Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes you Nothing

jefftunn — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 10:02:58 -0000

I don't think there will ever be another video game crash like the one in 1983. That crash was caused because there was really only one very under powered system on the market that could not allow for enough variety in the types of games that could be made. A flood of look alike games could not all be profitable.

That said, game sales can dip. The market does not have to grow like all game companies seem to assume it will. That is why I would not buy stock in the large game companies because they are doing essentially the same thing, i.e. flooding the market with a lot of look alike games. This intense competition is also why I believe the price of games is heading lower.

Re: Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes you Nothing

jefftunn — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:57:58 -0000

Great response, Jeremy. I agree there are many. many positive reasons for using the App Store. I think one of the reasons these types of memes get spread is because the press likes to amplify any perceived "cracks" in Apple's armor. They are essentially "the sky could be falling" types of articles.

Re: Putting Your Game On OS-X and Linux is Not Enough

jefftunn — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:04:57 -0000

You used Torque. Don't you have it on OS-X?

Re: Putting Your Game On OS-X and Linux is Not Enough

jefftunn — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 02:02:37 -0000

I don't really understand how using somebody's game engine or library gives them a share of the ownership of your work. I would never use any technologies that required me to pay a back end royalty or have any ownership over my product. Maybe you can explain in a little more detail?

Re: Putting Your Game On OS-X and Linux is Not Enough

jefftunn — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:59:47 -0000

Here is Jeremy's reply before he edited it:

It's tough attempting to disagree with you ;) Initially, when I read this blog I was just going to post something agreeable (it is after all excellent advice) but I decided that wouldn't be any fun.

For the bigger picture, I think this comes down to starting out vs. maximizing your game. If you're just starting out then you need to focus on the most profitable platform first and foremost and make the best possible use of it. If you're trying to maximize something which is already successful then I say go cross platform.

I think the question to ask is, which platform should a developer start with? Flash is cool, but with Mochi Ads paying only $0.35 CPM's you need millions upon millions of games played to start making any money. Some guy posted his monthly totals on Indie Gamer and he got $214 for 620,000 plays of his game. On the contrary Martin Schultz (who had done some Torque stuff in the past) put up a fun but simple game (approximately 1-2 months dev time) for the iPhone and sold 915 copies on day 1. This isn't iShoot mind you. This is a guy who's done up 4 or 5 apps and has improved sales with each new one that he puts out there.

I don't know if that Mochi Ad report was correct but if it is then it means you'd need 2,000 people to play your Flash game to equal 1 sale of a 99 cent iPhone app. By that measure, I say go cross platform but pick the hottest platform first and maximize the heck out of that one before shifting your attention elsewhere.

Back on the spiritual level I think it's safe to say that you should also support the platform you're personally most excited about. People can throw numbers around all day long but there's no substitute for an inspired piece of work.

Re: Putting Your Game On OS-X and Linux is Not Enough

jefftunn — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:18:15 -0000

Jeremy, did you edit a post here? I got an awesome response from you in Disqus email, but on the site there is this shorter one. I don't think we are disagreeing at all. I would like to put up your longer response which is one of the best comments ever. I'll wait to see if this comment system flushes it out.

Re: Putting Your Game On OS-X and Linux is Not Enough

jefftunn — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:52:42 -0000

Jeremy, I guess you can focus on just one platform if you don't feel you need to make a business of your Indie game development. That is what is great about being Indie though, you can make choices that fit your needs and lifestyle. It is my belief that if you really want to control your own destiny that focusing on just one platform, especially a closed system like the iPhone would be a mistake. What if Apple decides tomorrow that they will half the royalties paid to developers? What if they simply decide they don't like your game and will not put it in the store. I realize these things are not probable, but they are possible. If your risk is spread across a bunch of different platforms, the odds of all of them going bad at the same time are very low.

Re: Putting Your Game On OS-X and Linux is Not Enough

jefftunn — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:59:12 -0000

Torque is still a great way to go. In fact, our "heavy client" version will still have something to do with Torque. For most people Torque is the only way to go because you get the source code for a decent price.