I had an interesting conversation based on last week’s article about the meta-worse. Someone asked me to review a very interesting technical demo and see if I could offer them some assistance bringing it to market.
I was quite impressed with the technology and feel like it has some great potential. It is extremely early augmented reality technology. The only thing I could reasonably do is add more conversations about technology to an already technology-rich environment.
One of my biggest problems is that I am generally two to seven years too early professionally. I start making products and platforms way before someone with better investor relationships writes “gib munnies” on a napkin and slides it to his friend over breakfast somewhere near Sand Hill Road. I also do not have the phone number of the person who can give me a Hasbro board game license. These are things I am okay with. I accept that I did not yet sell a company for a hunnert million dollars in order to raise another five million dollars. We can obsess over the biases at work there at a later date.
What I did do is outline where these fine technologists should look in order to get their product better positioned to be successful.
Let’s rewind twenty years or so.
When you had really cool technology prototypes there was a high likelihood you could add some goblins or some spaceships and start marketing your gimmicky gadget to the Hardcore Gamer. Does it have cool spells? Are there amazing laser blasts? Someone will throw a couple hundred dollars at that and talk about it during their tabletop gaming night over pizzas and Jolt cola.
In looking at their technology demo, and thinking about what I would do in their shoes, I thought about my first failed attempt to raise venture capital in the early-to-mid 2000s.
I had some reasonable success in the early 2000s making little mobile games for feature phones. The more games I worked on, and the more phones that were released, the more it was becoming clear to me that there was going to be a transition to a higher-end phone that would be a genre buster. Keep in mind this is 2004 to 2005 or so.
I reasoned that we will probably see this device in a few years and that there was an opportunity to create franchises that players would love if we can get someone to co-fund the development while we were generating revenues off of the existing feature phones. That is right. I was trying to “pivot”. I heard that is what all the cool kids are doing.
The idea was reasonably solid. The iPhone showed up pretty much around the exact time that I thought it would. Unfortunately, I raised zero million dollars because no one believes Al Gore invented the internet. I am okay with that comparison because he has really nice hair.
I told this woeful tale because there were some interesting shifts in the marketplace happening and I was not really processing them fully.
The consumer barriers for owning fancy gaming hardware were falling and the price for phones was on a downward trend. Admittedly it leaped up when Steve Jobs started peddling his touchable surfaces, but if you inflation-adjusted that a little and squinted it at it, somehow people felt that it was a cheap-enough price that everyone should now go out and buy one. The smartphone revolution (evolution? iVolution? whatever) had arrived.
There were a few other things happening at the same time that are noteworthy.
The first is the creation and subsequent demise of the casual games downloadable business. Companies like Popcap and Pogo created awesome little casual games (“Easy To Learn, Difficult To Master!”) that became exceptionally popular. These were pretty easy targets to migrate to cheap feature phones and eventually to smart phones. The casual games downloadable marketplace subsequently ate itself due to the tulip-bulb phenomenon. Everyone released a dozen hidden-object games and stopped making every other genre. It is ironic that they could not see the problem that was created by shipping too many hidden object games.
The second is that these games became very popular on mobile.
I was not the only person to realize that there was awesome stuff happening in the world of mobile. I was also not the only person to come up with a terrible plan to Make Money Fast.
Let’s talk about the first seven years of instant overnight sensation Rovio.
Rovio was a company founded by former Digital Chocolate alumni. The word is finnish for “bonfire”. I will let other historians provide context for why they needed to start a bonfire after leaving Digital Chocolate—it is not my story to tell.
They created the company to create seriously cool stories and deep experiences for the mobile audience. They published deeply interesting, super serious IPs like “Darkest Fear” and attempted to engage core gamers on mobile devices. This is pretty much the same playbook I was attempting to use, but I was several million dollars less successful in raising money for it.
I had chances to meet the leadership from Rovio over the ensuing years as they pivoted repeatedly through fifty-ish games and wandered around in the wilderness until they threw one last thing at the audiences.
Welcome to Angry Birds, and one of the first genre-defining experiences for the smartphone era.
So what does any of this have to do with anything?
Let’s go back to that technology demo I was talking about. Without getting into too many details, it showed off some elements you might expect to find in a really cool RTS game. The problem with their demo was that we are many years away from the last successful RTS game coming to stores near you. You could make the argument that Clash of Clans and its subsequent Nanostars Siege derived variant game are essentially distilled from the core RTS mechanics.
They actually share something in common with Angry Birds and also with recent mass media sensations like Among Us, and to a lesser extent, Fortnite.
If you are paying attention to the trends in gaming and also in gaming investment, you might find that there are some strong correlations that are worth thinking about.
The first is that you are seeing more and more funding available for games that are midcore-to-casual. In the extreme case, you could go the hyper-casual route and essentially just zero out your art budget (As A Hyper-Casual Game Developer I Will Buy All My Assets For Ten Dollars In The Unity Store), but that does not endear you to creating a sustainable defensible business because all of the hyper-casual publishers are ultra-cannibalizing their own market to death.
The advice I gave to these really swell technologists is to go back to the drawing board with their technology demo and to revamp it to take into account the consumer aesthetics that will attract mass-market attention and subsequently investment dollars.
If you look at the aesthetics of Angry Birds, Among Us, and to a lesser extent Fortnite and Clash Royale, you will notice they do not go deep into high poly counts or edgy, real-life, 3d graphics.
In order to succeed in the games marketplace today with new technology, you need to pair it with an aesthetic that delights mass markets, which will also be more likely to attract investor dollars.
I suggested they take a page from these games and reduce their characters to simple blobs and focus on finding a game designer who will craft an experience that accentuates the technology’s benefit. Angry Birds did this quite well with touch screens. Among Us did this quite well with group-voice-inspired play.
These games did not require high poly counts to become successes. In fact they were pretty much just shapeless blobs on the screen, which is why I advised that they should consider removing the edges from their prototype characters since they are already on the cutting edge with technology.
It sounds pretty clever doesn’t it? I sure thought so.
If you are in the business of creating mass-market content, I recommend you take a look at your art direction and desired audience.
You might find that you need to remove some edges too.
