Invite Model

[woo]

I posted (http://theoreticalgames.com/portal/Blogs/tabid/59/Default.aspx) a 3 part series on what I thought some of the challenges were to making a tabletop game into a fun video game on my blog... but in part 3 I hit on a different way to reach your audience and to build word of mouth advertising. I've included the text here from part 3, which, while it was based on my experience with tabletop games, could be useful for any time of video game that has an online component. Anyway, I was hoping to get some feedback on the idea to see what kind of holes people see in it and to offer it up as a suggestion in case anyone is looking for ways to get more people playing (and hopefully paying for) their games. Enjoy and thanks for any feedback!

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So you've finished your game, and if you've nailed the game play, and you've made it easy for people to play with their friends... the only thing left to do is market and sell the game, right? Okay, not the only thing. But in order to keep making more video games, it would sure help to sell a few copies of the game you already finished, wouldn't it? Actually getting sales is a mind numbingly big problem for any video game, and it's even more challenging for tabletop games. Oh, what to do!?

While the casual games market might embrace some tabletop games, many games don't really fit well along side brick smashing and the latest match 3 craze. Heck, there isn't even a "strategy" section on many portals, and if there is, it usually only has a handful of tycoon games. Nothin' wrong with a good tycoon game, mind you. But a portal is not a sure-fire way to get your tabletop game into the hands of your adoring fans. Ah, the fans... Who are your fans? Where do your fans hang out? What can you do to reach them there?

Retail publication might be an option. While some people will inevitably pick up your game while strolling through the isles of their local Walmart, it's more because nearly everyone ends up finding themselves, at one time or another, strolling through the isles of their local Walmart. But rarely do tabletop conversion games "reach out to me" there. If anything starts reaching to me there, I usually run away... very quickly. So where do fans of collectible card games, miniatures, role playing games and such hang out? Where oh where can they be? Yep, that's right. At the local comic book shop. Sure, they hang out online in various niche web forums, and those aren't bad places to market either. But I think the real gold mine of untapped potential is right there in the local mom and pop comic book shop.

They aren't without problems though. The most obvious of them being that, by-in-large, they don't stock video games. Well, that is a problem. If you're up for it, you can try something like the affiliate route. That would imply that you give them coupons/fliers that include their affiliate number as a code that your customer would need to enter to get, say, 5 bucks off the game. Another 5 bucks goes to the affiliate for the hard work of passing out the coupon (paid out via paypal or whatever), and you pocket nearly half of the retail value. While it might work, there are definitely some serious logistical issues to work out such as Why in the World Would Someone Want To Buy a Video Game They Can't Even See? Demo cd's or other paraphernalia are going to be too costly... hmmm. How do you make a video game that is a hit in a store that doesn't sell your game?

Some of you, who were paying attention in the last post, probably caught it...

The answer is: You Don't.
What you need to do is give your paying customers the ability to play with their friends, online, for free. Even if the friend doesn't own the game. The person who owns the game would have the ability to send invitations to play the game to their friends (via instant messenger, email, or possibly via an in-game lobby). Then, as long as one person who owns the game is playing, anyone who has an invite can play online with them, for as long as they want. Your Friends Play Free. We’ll call it the Invite Model.

I'm not trying to go all new age open source communal living on you. I'm not even going all Shareware on you. What I'm saying is that the cards are stacked against you. While a couple hundred people may think that $20 dollars for a fun tabletop game is a good bang for their buck, there are thousands of people who will disagree. Something is very wrong with this picture. We're not bringing enough to the table anymore. With the Invite Model, you are promising the player more than just their own enjoyment. You’re letting them share the enjoyment of your game with all their friends. With that kind of viral marketing, then you may just be able to reach into the one place your video game wouldn't have been able before. The comic book shop.

See, it's the perfect setup. You have a game that appeals to a bunch of guys who are all sitting around playing Friday Night Magic in the comic book shops all around the country. One guy says "hey, have you played X yet". Another guy will say "never heard of it", and then the first guy'll say, "oh it's this cool game that's kind alike Y, but it does A, B and C". Now, normally, that's about as far as the conversation goes, and a great, potential sale is lost. But now the conversation will add... "and if you buy it, all your friends get to play with you online for free anytime". Which will be followed shortly by "what's your IM account?".

I know what you're thinking. That if it's that simple, then why don't games that are completely free become more popular. We’ve got shareware, do we really need an Invite Model? Because society is clear - you get what you pay for. I love talking about open source projects like Mozilla, but free games are different. It's like going out with an "easy" date. You may be willing to try it out (if you're willing to risk getting an infection), but you certainly aren't about to tell your friends about it. Shareware has gotten to the point where it’s more like “cripple-ware”, and the consumer isn’t an idiot. Look, why are sell through rates for video games so abysmal? People want something for nothing or else they wouldn't have downloaded it, but they also need to see the value in shelling out $20 bucks.

The Invite Model. Letting Friends Play Free. It's about value. It's about building communities of people who play your game. It's about reaching your audience. It's a movement (like "Alice's Restaurant"). Tell me what you think?
-Andrew
http://theoreticalgames.com/

[Jonas]

Yeah thats certainly a way to do it.

I guess my 1st thought is ( if your running say a server) why allow a lot of freeloaders.

Maybe a variant could be a lite version that allows basic game play forever as long as your with a pal with the full version.

Seems like if your pal has no incentive to by at all, then your leaving a lot of sales on the table.

or if you had to assign your friends, say you get 5 free freind licences where their only restriction is to play with your specficially.

I guess in the end, it still really is a cripple at some level, it's just whats the right ballance for a situation.

What would be interesting to explore is a Invite ONLY model, kinda what make gmail so interesting at 1st. So can we think of some more grassroots effort along the lines of Invite Only?

[woo]

Someone else mentioned a similar concern to me about how crippled would have you to make the game for the non-paying guest account. While you want to provide incentives for them to buy, just being able to play the game whenever you want, with whomever you want to is a pretty good incentive if the game is fun. The more "game" you can give your friends, the fewer caveats and "buts", the better. You lose cred. with the consumer when you "cheat" them out of too much and then the whole word of mouth thing goes right out the window. But the gmail invite system is a cool analogy. I like the idea of having X number of invitations that you can give out when you buy the game, and that you can "earn" more invites by playing the game. I like that idea a lot.

In terms of server capacity, in certain genre's that's definitely more of an issue than others. With my current turn-based game, it's not a big deal... But determining a fairly fixed and relatively small number of game invites you allow a player to give would definitely help keep the number of "freeloaders" down.

I had written up this little diatribe about the demo system that is also relevant to the discussion:

I don't mean to be critical of games with time limited demos, but when there are whole discussions on "is 30 minutes too little?", or "is an hour too much?" ... well, it sometimes feels like it's all just a hustle. "Weren't those 30 minutes great. We'll keep giving you great gaming experiences.. trust us.. just give us $20!" It feels like, even if it's not true at all, that the developer knows that the game gets boring before long and there's not much more to see or do compared to what you got to do for free. Regardless, if you can play around with the time limit in your demo and get a conversion rate of 1.25% instead of 1.0%... you are still only convincing 1.25% of the people who bothered to download your demo that you're being honest with them. Something is terribly wrong with that model. Higher conversion rates are certainly possibly - just look at Xbox Live Arcade. We have to change the model for PC's. Note: I'm not saying this is the perfect model to do that, but it may be one way.

With the "Invite Model", I think my personal goal is to give the whole online experience to your friends that are playing with you. Game modes, maps, characters, whatever, without any time restriction whatsoever. Things like persistence, leaderboards, maybe experience/unlockables, and obviously off-line features are going to be fairly "crippled" for people who don't buy the game. If that's not enough to cause people to want to buy the game, I guess I'll jump off that bridge when I get to it. Tracking game invites and games played off of invites will be really interesting. If the invitations are flying, even if the cash isn't, then I'll consider it a success. At that point, like you said, it's just a matter of finding a balance. That's a much more pleasant thought for me than accepting the current demo model that, to me, doesn't really start your relationship with your customer off on a very good note and certainly isn't something that makes them want to share the game with their friends. Thanks for the feedback. Any other suggestions or ideas that anyone would like to see tried out?
-Andrew

[Jonas]

Interesting take on fostering trust amongst players.

Basically your tought seems to be like a board game you'd buy. I can purcase say Monopoly and my freinds don't need to buy. So in a way, I as the buyer have done something for my friends. I kinda took the bullet so I could have my freinds hang out.

Now as a friend of that owner of the game, I might too want to have a party where my freinds play, so I too purchase the game from the cool experiance of my friend taking me out with 4 Hotels on Boardwalk :)

So you have

a) Everyone who buys not only getting to enoy the game but also getting to empower thier freinds to enjoy the game.
b) Folks wanting to also enjoy empowering thier other freinds.

Is that about right?

[jeb_]

In our game, The Strategist, a player who has bought the game can play with anybody as long as she or he hosts the server. Not sure if that's incentive enough to make the free-loader players to buy the game, but at least it makes the game more valuable to the one who purchased it. I also don't know how many people who actually use this feature... would be fun to know, heh.

[woo]

Jonas: that's exactly what I was trying to do! It's just been staring us right in the face, hasn't it? (note: my original blog posts on the subject were called Tabletop Versus Video Games, and it was in the process of comparing and contrasting the two that it became clear what was lacking in video games).

Jeb: It'd be very interesting indeed to find out how many games were played that way. What I'm curious about though is that it isn't mentioned anywhere that I could see from your web site that your friends play free with you forever as long as you host the server. It's not discussed in the Game Tunnel review, either. They even mention in their review that it might be hard to find people to play with online, which is something that the Invite Model addresses directly. I think making it clear that your game provides that support (both in-game and in your marketing) would be very helpful in terms of sales. But that's just me :)

-Andrew

[jeb_]

Jeb: It'd be very interesting indeed to find out how many games were played that way. What I'm curious about though is that it isn't mentioned anywhere that I could see from your web site that your friends play free with you forever as long as you host the server. It's not discussed in the Game Tunnel review, either. They even mention in their review that it might be hard to find people to play with online, which is something that the Invite Model addresses directly. I think making it clear that your game provides that support (both in-game and in your marketing) would be very helpful in terms of sales. But that's just me :)

-Andrew

Hmm... That's actually a very good point. The "shareware benefits" are actually only written inside the game and in the readme. I should put it on the website as well.

The problem with The Strategist's "invite model" is that the player must know the host's ip address and enter it in the connection view, or use the lobby. Unfortunately none of the registered users seem to use the lobby (I only see unregistered people there who are asking me to start a game).

[woo]

Well, one option is to provide instructions on how to configure dyndns so that players don't have to send out an IP address, they just register with dyndns - it's free and there's usually even support for it built into most routers today.

There are a number of ways to wrap up the player's current IP address though to make it even easier (say, when a register user initiates a hosting session, save their IP to a central server/web server, and when a guest opens up the lobby, it pulls the IP address for their hosting friends).

While it may be impractical for your game at this point, I think the best option for the future for PC games is the Jabber protocol, as it solves so many of these problems. Even if you don't use it for all game communication, using it just for coordinating the startup of a game session may very well be worth it - seeing as you can get it free using the open source tools that are out there like LibJingle. You can catch my discussion about it here:
http://theoreticalgames.com/portal/?TabId=36&EntryID=7

Enjoy!
-Andrew