100 Days of #VoiceFirst Games — Is it worth it?
Generally, the last 100 days have been an interesting time in my life. I’ve completed the last days of my previous marketing job, started my job as a product manager for Jovo, got in touch with some brilliant people from the voice ecosystem, and, well, started blogging. Let’s take a step back and look at what I invested, the value I created for myself and others, and how this will continue.
Alright. So when you talk about investment… What and how much did you invest in this blog?
First of all, I am super happy that I had to invest almost nothing into blogging infrastructure. Doing it all on Medium is simply super convenient and fun, and I love how the design and the social functions are all taken care of.
So, what I did end up investing in was my time. How much? Hm, difficult to say… I didn’t track it, but I would say that the shortest articles took about 2 hours to write, the longest ones were about 10 hours, and the median might be at about 4 hours.
Factoring that with the 24 articles I published so far, we get about 100 hours, with 8 hours per week, which sounds about right, with considerable variation over weeks.
But what about loss of opportunity cost? What did you end up not doing, in favor of this blog?
Great question! Well, the obvious answer is that I could have used the time to produce more voice apps instead. And indeed, my output was higher, both quality- and quantity-wise, before I started blogging. But on the other hand, part of the reason I’m doing this blog is to become a better voice game developer: By understanding on a deep level what makes voice games ‘work’ (in terms of discoverability, engagement and retention), I can be reasonably confident that the next voice game I seriously invest time in won’t be all that bad.
And what about that ‘One Game A Month’ challenge? You did plan to produce one basic game per month, right?
Er… Right. I did that. I might take that up again, at some point. At the moment I feel like I learn more about producing voice games by analysis and abstraction than by producing itself.
Well, if you say so. What did you learn, then, after three months of blogging about voice games?
I learned about assessing the potential of a game concept: A game can’t be great without being great in each of the three areas discoverability, engagement and retention. I learned about some typical hooks in each of these three areas, and how differently particular games apply certain techniques, with varying effect.
As a favorite genre of mine, I dug very deeply into interactive stories, and now have a thorough understanding of what makes them ‘work’. I’ve also developed a some of that sense for complex games like management simulations or map-based exploration and confrontation games, as well as for offline voice games.
And what else?
Well, having a blog is in itself an interesting life experience, of which I am glad to have it.
But the — both emotionally and rationally — more relevant aspect is that blogging greatly facilitates being part of the brilliant #VoiceFirst community: I enjoy contributing to the community’s body of knowledge (and hopefully, to enable my peers to build better voice games!), getting recognition for my work, getting in touch with fascinating people (especially game producers and content people, like Adva Levin, Kane Simms, Amy Stapleton and Jürgen Carstensen), and getting cool opportunities (being guest in a podcast, talking at a meetup or beta-testing new games) that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Nice! And do people actually read what you write?
To some degree, yes. When I started blogging, I expected engagement to be low or absent, and was surprised by the positive resonance I received. In average, each of my articles was viewed 59 times and read 29 times — Again, with a my two top articles being read more than about 100 times each, and some underachievers as little as 12 times. Personally, I ‘m happy about every article I wrote, and exhilarated if an article’s total reading time exceeded the time it took to write.
So, will you continue your blog on voice games? And if so, in which direction will you develop?
I’m very happy about this blog, and plan on continuing it as long as it’s interesting to myself and my esteemed readers. I think I will experiment a bit with both the content and the format — There’s actually something new I’ve prepared over the last days, to be revealed soon. I might cut down on medium-length articles in favor of both shorter ‘Mini Review’-style articles and longer overviews.
One direction I want this blog to develop into is more engagement with the #VoiceGame community. There are three approaches I have in mind to this end:
- Interviews
I know I’ve been talking about this for a while now… Honestly, I am a bit shy of doing interviews — Doing them right seems to be somewhat of its own art form! But I will get down to it, I promise! - Guest articles
I’d love to read about other #VoiceGame producers review a game they like in detail, or their thoughts on one particular aspect of producing voice games. If you’re reading this, and you feel like writing an article for this publication, please do get in touch! :) - Crowdsourced articles
I’m not sure if and how this would work, but it’s something I’d love to try: I start a ‘primer’ article about a controversial or multi-faceted topic like discoverability levers, monetization or save points, and then everyone who’s interested writes one or two paragraphs with their own thoughts as a reply.
Generally, I am very much open for feedback on this blog — If you have ideas for topics or games to review, would like to read more or less about a particular topic, or have feedback on my approach, style or tone, please let me know!
