Games innovation

Analytics isn’t everything

In 2003, after the dot-com bust that seemed to destroy the career of every person who ever touched a website, I was fortunate enough to get into a startup that was on a rocket-launch to great success. Added to that, I had unbelievable mentors and great guidance by a senior management team that, to this day, still continue to innovate and aid in the success of others. Of course, they’ve done very well financially, but they deserve it.

I was employee 15 at the time. I was starting up in mobile games just as the wave began to crest. I managed to help build a successful deployment team, and launch a bunch of great, successful mobile titles worldwide.

My real dream at the time, though, was to produce a console title. I’d been interviewing and was mockingly asked “why would anyone work in mobile when console is where everyone wants to be?” I’d informed the hiring manager that the people I’d worked with had been in console and decided mobile was the place to drive innovation, come up with new ideas, and work at a pace that wasn’t akin to a death march, which is what the console market had become infamous for.

When we were acquired by a BIG GAME COMPANY, I took the opportunity to transfer and learn about the console space. Sadly, that didn’t work out for me. I’d lost a lot since then. I’ve been working as a contractor for many different companies, struggling to find my voice, wondering where my confidence and ability to get things done went.

I realized the world, or at least the USA, has become incredibly afraid. Afraid of trying new things, afraid of breaking the mold. When I returned to California, games had just blown up on Facebook, and there was only Angry Birds to speak of for mobile. I still loved making games, and now that the phones could handle the ideas I’d had, I was reenergized. But again, as I mentioned earlier, people became afraid of taking chances. Looking back now, it’s clear a company like Zynga wasn’t interested in innovating, or developing a “surprise and delight” component to their titles, which was what I’d had hammered in me for years. As I see more people attempting to build games for mobile, they seem somewhat obsessed with analytics, with following what others have done, and not with adding their own soul into the title.

The vast number of mobile games have become just as stale and derivative as console titles. But this tactic wasn’t working…every title that has broken through to become a huge success on mobile did so through an innovative element. This is something not seen in your standard Facebook casual title framework. I believe it’s a result of fear…of not trying something new, and, of course, of greed. Games creators want insanely high monetization for their titles, similar to Clash of Clans of Candy Crush Saga. And they’ve decided if they can just copy those formulas, they can strike it rich. If they can “appropriate” another creator’s ideas for their own title, market it fast, and get enough eyeballs, they will succeed. Looking at the highest grossing titles in the app store, this doesn’t seem to be working. Clash of Clans and Candy Crush are still at the top a year later, and the appstore is littered with titles that never became viral hits.

Mobile is brutal. The players know if a title is derivative. They want innovation, easy to pick up and play, difficult to master game experiences. I know this because I am a hardcore mobile games player myself.

So yes, tools like metrics are great for optimization…but they are useless for innovation. Your game has to have a soul, it has to feel like someone put a lot of love and care into its production. And that’s what many product managers seem to be missing these days.