Tired of your friends texting on their phones while they should be getting schnockered? This clever hack is called the Offline Glass and it’s designed to ensure that you and your friends don’t sit at the bar checking Wikipedia for who starred in The Greatest American Hero and whether Tabitha will totally come out tonight oh my god she won’t she and Christian just broke up oh god she’s with Raul and Paula and maybe she’ll come in an hour! In fact, you can’t hold your phone because of the unique shape of the glass’ bottom.

The glass has a notch cut out of it so it will only stand if it’s situated on top of a phone (an iPhone works best) and you can only use your phone if you’re also holding your beer. Knowing the average drunk person I suspect a) this will destroy hundreds of iPhones a night and b) this will result in lots of spilled beer, but by gosh if it isn’t a clever idea.

The glass is being used in the Salve Jorge Bar in Sao Paolo and was created by the Fischer & Friends ad agency in Brazil. You can’t buy one but, with the right tools, you could probably make a few. I’d like to see someone 3D print a few of these for house parties.

Whenever I go out with the TC team I make everyone play the phone game which consists of piling up all the phones in one place so no one can reach them. It helps encourage conversation and, unless they’re wearing Google Glass, the pained expression after the first few minutes of the game is mesmerizing. Here’s to anything that helps recreate that experience.

The Offline Glass from Mauricio Perussi on Vimeo.

via PSFK

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The mobile wave has been cresting for several years now, so when a decade-old web company is only now debuting its first ever native mobile app, it’s a little late to the game. The folks at TheLadders, which is launching its first iOS app this morning, understand that — but they are angling to make their “mobile last” strategy work in their favor in the long run.

It is indeed a beautiful app, and you can see it demonstrated by TheLadders’ co-founder and CEO Alex Douzet in the video embedded above.

First, though, a little bit of a background on TheLadders. The company was founded in New York City ten years ago in the summer of 2003 with the initial aim of being a job search site for professionals earning $100,000 and above. The company enjoyed solid growth in those early years, at one time having more than 300 employees serving an international market.

But TheLadders hit a few stumbling blocks amid a more competitive job search landscape, and has since expanded its purview beyond the six-figure salary market while cutting staff and axing its international businesses. And in the past 18 months, TheLadders, which had thus far been focused completely on the traditional web, has decided to shift much of its energy into rebuilding itself as a force on mobile devices.

The journey of TheLadders has been a varied one, and if anything it’s a testament to the benefits of how keeping some power and autonomy as a business allows you to be more flexible to change course. TheLadders is currently profitable, and has taken on only one round of venture capital funding, a $7.25 million series A back in 2004. If the company had taken on more investors or not focused on profitability, things might have come to a different end by now — it’s refreshing in a way to see a company that’s taken some hits to be still standing independent and adapting to changes on its own terms.

That leads us to today. The new app really re-thinks the way that people search for jobs in several interesting ways: There is no option for entering text, for example, and the “scout” feature that allows you to see details about who else has applied for the same position really plays nicely on the smaller screen. Once again, you can see a full demo in the video embedded above, as well as in a video produced by the company here.

TheLadders is certainly late to the mobile game, but Douzet says that has allowed it to really observe the landscape and create an offering that’s truly different. That argument makes sense, once you see the app. There is something to be said for getting something right the first time, rather than coming out of the gate with a mobile app early and then making users wait through several initial iterations. It’ll be interesting to see how this strategy ultimately plays out, and what kind of traction TheLadders is able to pick up in the crowded mobile space.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Kristian has been at the forefront of the rapidly transforming game industry since 2001. After serving as Electronic Arts’ executive vice president of digital, he left three months ago to focus on startups. Today, he leads seed-stage investments with Initial Capital and serves on the board of Supercell, the #1 iOS grossing game company in the world. Before that, he co-founded, ran and then sold social gaming pioneer Playfish to Electronic Arts for $400M in 2009. He was also a co-founder of mobile gaming pioneer Macrospace – today Glu Mobile (Nasdaq: GLUU) in 2001 through the successful IPO in 2007.

TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler and Benchmark Capital general partner Mitch Lasky recently wrote two insightful pieces on venture investment in games (here and here) – both expressing some degree of skepticism of venture capital models for funding game startups. I agree venture funding is not for every game startup, and certainly not every game startup makes for a great venture investment. However, I would argue the case for venture funding for games is today stronger than ever.

Here is why:

Why game startups are better off with venture investment than publisher funding

There are broadly speaking three models available for a game startup today: bootstrapping (including crowd-funding), publisher financing and venture financing. For those who can afford the risk and have cash readily available, bootstrapping always trumps the other two. It comes with maximum freedom, control and upside in a success case.

But the risks are very real and significant. Those unable to bootstrap because of the risks or ambitions of the project should in my view consider venture investment over publisher financing models.

Publishing as an idea for digital pure plays is simply turning out not to work very well. Many have tried it with very little to show for it. This is because the typical publisher value-add of financing, marketing, technology and distribution through retail channels doesn’t translate well to the digital world. It says something that not a single game in today’s iOS top-25 grossing has been “published” by a third party as far as I can tell.

While developers continue to need financing, the rest of the “publishing services” have become obsolete in four key ways:

• Publishers can’t compete with atomized marketing services by specialists: As the digital market has matured, player acquisition, telemetry, cross-promotion and other marketing services have become widely available as independent specialist services that compete on price and quality of the service. Companies like Swrve (one of our portfolio companies at Initial Capital), Chartboost, HasOffers, Nanigans, Flurry and a host of competitors are evolving their services at a blistering speed, requiring only a small set of increasingly available talent at the developer end. Doing it directly is not just cheaper and more flexible as the world changes, it also forces a more profound understanding of player flows and distribution challenges, which ultimately helps uncover product design insights.
• Publisher channel access may accelerate your success, but will not define it: Much has been made out of the advantage that big game publishers have in terms of access to Apple or Google in terms of promotions. Clearly, being featured helps generate initial downloads. However that success is short-lived if you are unable to retain your audience and acquire users independently at a profitable cost of acquisition. Plus, you won’t be re-featured unless you generate the numbers. A game investor worth their salt will be able to make the right introductions here anyway. The incremental publisher value here is small.
• Holding on to rights to extend IP has become critical to value creation: As Lasky emphasizes in his post, gaming even in the games-as-a-service world is inherently hits driven. For a game startup to become valuable over time, it needs to find ways of anchoring its success around building franchises. Ownership of intellectual property (IP) and all extension rights becomes important. Angry Birds-maker Rovio and Moshi Monsters-maker Mind Candy have shown that game originated IP is an increasingly viable base to build out a broader IP following with over 40 percent or revenue from each being attributed to non-game products. At the same time, the halo marketing effect from these non-gaming products can still contribute value to the core gaming product. Publishing deals are typically structured for the publisher to get hold of this.
• Long term margins help you hold onto key talent: Perhaps most importantly, success in games has always been about key creative talent. The more cash a game startup is able to create, the more it can afford to invest in everything from the office to culture to individual, innovative compensation models for rockstar talent. Signing away a revenue share limits these options and ultimately is likely to encourage the best talent to leave.

Venture financing from a specialist fund that understands games should therefore be seen as a compelling alternative for game startups. It provides the financing value add, typically at far more flexible terms, without any of the restrictions to value creation that lower margins or complicated IP terms can create. And you could even get good folks around the table for advice how best to build for long term success and shareholder value. It should be no surprise that today’s most promising game companies including Supercell, King, Kabam, Rovio and Kixeye are all venture-funded.

What about the case for investors – does it still make sense to invest in games?

The digital pure play market growth has recently been characterized by the rapid rise and occasionally fall of new entrants. Zynga is cited as the key example by both Cutler and Lasky. A thoughtful article by Tadgh Kelly about “Peak Mobile” further highlights the cycles any individual platform tends to go through. In a world of few game acquirers and a troubled IPO market, does the venture model therefore need a re-think?

In my view and that of Initial Capital, which is an investor in Supercell, Brainbow, Supersolid, Space Ape Games and others, the case for continued investment is strong.

Even though some VCs are shying away from games, here are five reasons why I and Initial Capital are doubling down on games:

• A continued virtually unopposed growth opportunity in digital: The next generation consoles are doing a wonderful job at distracting the big publishers away from the fastest growing parts of the game industry. That clears the water for pure digital plays to gradually build up dominance with new IP on new hardware platforms. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick’s recent dismissive remarks about mobile, and EA’s strategy of ANDs: consoles and PC and mobile and online (which dilutes their excellent talent across too many opportunities) are cases in point. The innovators’ dilemma confronting the big guys is creating continuing unopposed growth opportunity for new and established digital pure plays alike. That is giving new players time to build up the brand and marketing advantages that big publishers have held for years on what are rapidly becoming legacy platforms.
• There are plenty of “blue water” opportunities on new platforms: Very few game play styles or categories on personal screens, like four- to seven-inch screens across mobile phones and tablets, feel mature at this point. Clash of Clans’ take on the tower defense genre, Candy Crush Saga’s interpretation of Match Three games and Hay Day’s way of approaching farm games are possibly the most mature examples out there. But who is making the category-defining racing game, the best first person shooter, sports game, real-time strategy, monster breeding or puzzle adventure game on these platforms? The console guys are hamstrung by their lack of focus.The starlets who already dominate one or two categories will have similar focus challenges due to successes to date. Seldom have there been such clearly profitable, well-defined opportunities for new startups to re-imagine these experiences for personal touch screens.
• The opportunity has gone global: The traditional gaming “Galapagos Islands” of Japan, Korea and China have been overrun by the great global equalizers of Android and iOS. This creates unprecedented opportunities to go global. Supercell’s Clash of Clans is currently the #1 game on iPad in China and #11 in Japan. For Candy Crush, the same positions are #64 in China and #4 in Japan. This is not to belittle the differences in local tastes, marketing channels and in some cases app stores or distribution mechanisms. But the opportunity to reach the other half of the game industry that these countries represent has never been more tangible.
• Unprecedented margins: Because of the margin structure and low headcount requirements of the industry, companies can become very profitable very quickly. Recent lessons from other companies that have grown too quickly are causing newer companies like Supercell to be more thoughtful. They are banking their profits, stabilizing their mid-double-digit operating margins and re-investing carefully into nurturing and expanding their talent base. This is also great news for top talent as it gets to increasingly share in the financial success both through company perks, private and public share sales and also dividends.
• The M&A and IPO markets will be back. And there’s nothing wrong with dividends either: It will just take time. Large M&A deals in games are unlikely to be on the horizon. The traditional console folks are too busy fighting each other and do not have the resources to acquire an increasingly confident set of digital pure plays. The leading pure plays on the other hand are mostly focused on ensuring their own model scales before embarking on aggressive M&A. M&A is particularly hard an industry in the middle of a disruption where talent and inspiration are more important than scale. While Zynga’s troubles may have damaged the IPO prospects for the next 18 months or so, if the new generation of companies can show sustained profitability, they will be in an incredibly strong position to consider listing later. Some will undoubtedly choose to stay private and pay out dividends in the medium-run, which is fine from a venture investors perspective. But the option will be there.

The next few years for games will be choppy. But the fundamentals for gaming investments are stronger than ever. As Lasky says, you have to be building a game company and not just a game for venture funding to make sense. And for a venture fund to consider gaming investments, you need to understand the sector.

But neither of those mean that venture investments in games aren’t alive an well. In fact, the team at Initial Capital remain as bullish on the sector as we led the seed round into Supercell. We continue to seek out the very best, most inspired design and coding teams who want to define where games will go next and help them get started with capital, advice and structure.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Songbird, an early digital music service that aimed to compete against the iTunes, Pandoras and Spotifies of this world with an open source platform, is shutting down on June 28, after running out of money and failing to find a buyer. The startup, backed by Sequoia, Atlas Venture and Phillips, had raised at least $11 million and is planning to formally announce the news on its own site later today.

“Unfortunately, the company has found ourselves unable to fund further business operations and as of June 28, 2013 all of Songbird’s operations and associated services will be discontinued,” CEO Eric Wittman wrote in an email to TechCrunch. A post in Digital Trends on the closure notes that a sale of the company had fallen through at the last minute.

Songbird is the flagship product launched back in 2007 by Pioneers of the Inevitable, first as a desktop open source alternative to iTunes, and more recently as an online, Android and iPhone app that also offers ways to stream music, incorporating different audio formats and making an especially strong emphasis on higher-quality audio FLAC files, and offering YouTube-powered access to playlists. The online social music service, songbird.me, was attracting over one million users each month, Wittman says.

The open-source code behind Songbird was used as the basis for other services that could then customize the look and features (and subsequent monetization) around it. That code is still available to download, but it’s not sure for how long, and it’s also the basis of a service, Nightingale, that Wittman and Songbird are now recommending as an alternative to Songbird’s users.

It looks like POTI will close along with the demise of Songbird. It is unclear how many employees will be affected. We have reached out to the company, as well as its investors, and will update this post as we learn more.

You can see how it may have been hard for a company like Songbird, which lost its founder Rob Lord back in 2009 amid a bid to improve its monetization, to compete and get enough scale in the margin-squeezed world of digital music.

On the download side, companies like Apple’s iTunes and Amazon are oversized players. Meanwhile, mindshare (and marketshare) in streaming music services go to Spotify, Pandora and to a lesser extent companies like Rdio and Deezer; and there are yet more, well-backed names wading into the game every day, including Apple’s iTunes Radio and Twitter Music.

Update: that announcement is now live, and Wittman has also answered some of our questions. He says that plans for Songbird now are to work on placing the team members to, “do our best to transition customers and to find a buyer for the assets. We’ll be working hard to do all of this over the next few weeks.”

He notes that the company, after a restructure in 2012, had 11 employees. “These folks were rock stars in their respective areas and loved working together as a team and did so very well.” It was during the restructure in 2012 that Wittman, who had been SVP of product, became CEO. He’s been with the company since June 2011.

“We currently have enough [cash] to sustain minimal operations through end of the month,” he adds. The company had been in the middle of pivoting the business from being one primarily focused on licensing our Desktop product to 3rd parties to one focused on offering premium features such as remote music collection access; music in HD formats like FLAC; and advertising. “Sadly we were unable to make this transition in time before cash ran out.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Now that China has surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest smartphone market, it’s no surprise that many developers are intrigued by the prospect of a country that may have 500 million devices in circulation by the end of next year.

Because of that, plenty of companies like Yodo1, iDreamSky and Punchbox have cropped up to help advise studios on how to navigate the unique complexities of the market. In China, you need to distribute through dozens of app stores and market through different social networks.

Kii Corp, which was created out of a merger three years ago between Servo Software and Synclore Corporation, is also getting into the game with its own publishing service.

With that, they’ll help with all of the standard things like integrating with China’s different in-app payment systems and mobile ad networks.

They’ll also integrate with China’s unique social networks like Sina Weibo and WeChat, because most players don’t access Facebook and Twitter because of the Great Firewall.

They’ll help with distribution to China’s many different Android app stores. There are about four to five leading ones, but beyond that there is a long tail of dozens of other ones.

“Google Play isn’t formally available in the Chinese market so a lot of developers can’t find out how to go there,” said Masanari Arai, who is Kii’s founder and CEO.

Then there are a few more pieces with handling quality assurance, translation and hosting apps through a mobile-backend-as-a-service product called Kii Cloud, which handles in-app analytics, cloud storage, user and data management. It’s a service that resembles Parse, which Facebook bought for at least $85 million excluding retention earlier this year.

Kii competes with many, many other players like iDreamSky, which publishes Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja and Imangi’s Temple Run in China. Yodo1 is also another emerging player, but they do a lot of hands-on work beyond translation to localize a game, such as changing the graphics and music to make them more appealing to Chinese tastes. Another publisher, Punchbox, which also goes by the name CocoaChina, says that its first-party games are starting to see about $6 million a month, most of which is in China.

The company has a lower revenue share than its competitors, taking a 15 percent cut instead of the typical 50 percent share that we see.

Kii, which is Tokyo-based, has offices in Silicon Valley, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple’s developer bits are generally the bigger picture story that comes out of WWDC, and some details are slowly emerging about those 1,500 or so new APIs Apple has added for devs to take advantage of. Some of the better news is around new gaming technologies, which should result in much improved experiences for both gamers and the people creating the games they play.

iOS 7 will introduce support for “Made for iPhone, iPod and iPad” (MFi) program-compatible game controller hardware (via 9to5Mac), which means developers will finally be able to access system-level tools for building in support for a wide range of devices from accessory manufacturers. The new API supports both controller sheaths that hold the iPhone or device itself, and standalone controllers that would more closely resemble your traditional gamepad.

New images found by Touch Arcade from the iOS 7 developer’s guide shows that controllers will be able to offer support for configurations of two joysticks, a directional pad, and up to six buttons at least, so that it should be able to replicate the setup of traditional controllers like the PlayStation DualShock or Super Nintendo gamepad pretty easily. For retro titles and core games alike, this should be a tremendous addition to the arsenal, and you can expect third-party hardware accessory makers like Griffin, Belkin, etc., as well as startups on Kickstarter, to be all over this. There are third-party controllers already out there, but they’ve always required devs to integrate an external SDK to get games working with them, that’s not going to be the case anymore.

Retro games should also get a nice boost from SpriteKit, Apple’s new framework for developing more simple, 2D style games and creating interesting physics effects like the one shown in the video below. Sprite Kit looks to be pretty powerful, but has the disadvantage of not reaching outside of Apple’s ecosystem, or of supporting older devices. Still, Apple has a very fast-adopting user base for new versions of iOS, and there are a lot of dev shops that focus only on iOS, so we could see some very cool stuff built with this new, simpler Unity-type engine on Apple’s devices.

Other new gaming features include turn-based multiplayer game modes, ladder rankings for high score leaderboards and more. But the game controller element alone could have a huge impact on iOS and its role in the mobile gaming market, and it’s quite likely that Nintendo and Sony should be watching very closely to see how the ecosystem around that feature develops.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Marketo is coming out with its first launch since its successful IPO last month. It’s a one-to-one marketing tool that applies machine learning for social campaigns that allows marketers to automatically adapt messaging based on the customer and the history of engagement.

The engine for Customer Engagement Marketing (CEM) utilizes templates to create a content stream, a set of ideas for how to conduct a dialogue with a customer. For example, a customer buys his third video game. That might trigger the notice of the CEM that would then offer the customer a credit on a next purchase if he tweets about it. A larger incentive might come if the customer tweets three times about the game.

The CEM has built-in rules and machine learning algorithms that gauge customer engagement, said CEO Phil Fernandez in an interview last week. The engine is designed to understand which sequence of messages are creating active, positive engagement. It is designed to deliver messages based on the customer and what content they have received in the past. It uses a drag-and-drop user interface that allows new or modified content to be placed in the stream. The system manages the timing and sending of the content.

Companies with multiple products are often juggling different marketing efforts. The struggle comes with trying to get the right message out. Fernandez said the CEM allows the marketer to set up sequences for each campaign, tailored in a way so the system knows when to send a message and when it might be best not to send one at all.

It comes down to how best to nurture the customer. Doing it manually is impractical as it means changing the rules on a constant basis to best suit the individual customer.

There are also the pitfalls that arise. A customer might get a completely wrong message if a marketing automation system is set up wrong. The CEM has rules built in to adapt to the customer’s history.

Metrics are provided that encompass the broad array of measurements marketers track when building campaigns. This allows the marketer to better tune a campaign with content that is most compelling to the customer.

Machine learning has broad implications for business. It can be used in risk analysis, financial decision-making, and on an operations level to best determine where resources should be allocated.

It’s early in the game, and engines like the one from Marketo will need to be refined as people find more ways to communicate online and campaigns get more sophisticated.

But more so, Marketo’s news points to how analytics is changing the market landscape. Competition for Marketo is not just from other similar services but also from the new generation of companies that can provide their own flavor of analytics.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Perhaps you blinked and missed the Anki Drive demo at WWDC this morning. Well, guess what? That car racing video game “in real life” is the real deal, having raised over $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Two Sigma to launch in the fall. And it’s more than just a car racing game, as it aims to be an entire robotics platform — in an “Internet of things” sense.

From the Anki blog:

Five years ago, my co-founders and I sat around a kitchen table and dreamed up the idea of the Anki platform. Countless algorithms (admittedly, many failed attempts), late nights, napkin sketches, and prototypes later, we realized that we just might be onto something.

The first manifestation of that “something” is Anki Drive. We gave our very first sneak peek of Anki Drive today at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. At first glance, it’s a racing game that pits real cars against players and each other – but after playing for a few minutes, you’ll see what makes Anki Drive special: We are making the first video games in the real world, and our team has worked tirelessly on the robotics and AI challenges that this presents. Each car is equipped with sensors and intelligent software to make thousands of decisions every second. We use mobile devices not as remote controls, but as drivers for an immersive real-world experience. And we took great care to make sure that despite everything under the hood, the final experience is intuitive and entertaining.

According to Anki, each car is AI-empowered, knowing where they are and where they have to go to do best in the game. Apple’s Tim Cook explained the startup’s lofty goal while onstage, “When we look at Anki Drive, we see the first steps of the future of robotics and artificial intelligence being realized. We see an entertainment experience transformed today, and we see countless possibilities in the future.”

In addition to having a friend in Tim Cook, Anki apparently also beguiled Marc Andreessen, who will be taking a place on the startup’s board. Sort of explains the cat bird seat of getting to launch on stage at Apple’s developer conference, and in front of 27,000 people watching the livestream.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here.

I was not particularly surprised. I’m talking about this week’s Zynga, OMGPOP and Tapjoy news, but not in a haughty-told-you-so sort of way. I’m wondering whether they are canaries in the coal-mine, symptomatic of a larger shift in mobile gaming. I’m wondering whether the mobile market has hit a peak, and whether that means its tone is about to shift. I’m wondering whether mobile gaming has passed a point where it is no longer cost-effective to create lowest-common-denominator games, and whether we need smarter approaches.

Before The Peak

Before a peak is reached, games always seem like a business in which the most important skill to possess is the ability to rush.

Usually it starts with an unexpected novelty, such as when Facebook turned on its API, Apple surprised everyone by releasing an App Store or Nintendo invented the Wii (or more up to date, the microconsole idea, which I think is the next one). The novelty often seems unproven, leading to a wait-and-see attitude from most astute observers. Developers tend to not like making games for platforms that don’t seem validated yet for year of wasting money, but there are always some early movers. They are the people who realize that there may be an opportunity in the new market that others don’t see, and they leap before they look. In so doing, they prove the novelty’s validity for others.

The novelty phase then leads to a low-hanging fruit phase as reports of early success surface. A couple of key games show that there is a new kind of interaction or other game mechanic that seems to work in that space, and they nail its possibilities (your Flight Control or Mafia Wars moment) in a way that opens a lot of eyes. Where last year the skeptical games executive may have scoffed at the idea that Facebook would ever go anywhere, this year he’s suddenly leading the charge to get on there as fast as possible.

During the low-hanging fruit phase a lot of obvious game concepts are explored, often little more than re-skins or clones of other successful games. The size and scope of the market start to be wildly exaggerated, but also the sense of optimism. A gold rush mentality takes over and developers start inventing genres on the fly, such as “endless runner”. These are usually good times for those who execute at speed and do it well, and they lead to some outsized successes (your Angry Birds or FarmVille moment) that achieve cultural critical mass. Folks start talking up their game science, their playbooks and their mechanics decks, and more and more people pile on.

However then the problem becomes one of discovery and – like any gold rush – that leads to a third phase where it’s better to sell shovels rather than do the mining yourself. Marketing tools, sharing plugins, advertising solutions, customer acquisition, monetization tools, game engines and many more services explode. In the old days we might have called that publishing, but these days we call it APIs. Regardless, there seems to be more reliable money to be made in servicing developers than the market directly, and many companies strive to fill those niches. This is where success stories like Applifier come from, as well as the thinking about what it really takes to get up to the top of the iOS charts.

Nonetheless it still seems relatively straightforward. The next phase, the peak, is when the business stops being simple.

Peak

Up until the peak there may be many roads to take and many avenues to success, but the product itself is usually pretty obvious. Whether we mean farming games, casual games or casino stuff like bingo, these are all the kinds of game that are broad. Some may be very smart, others as dumb as a post, but none of them represent a complex conversation with customers. Like selling brands of soap, what the game is and how it plays are questions of mass appeal, and the most repeatable road to success is about maximizing commercial advantage.

But when customers’ platform amnesia starts to wears off, everything starts to change. This is the peak.

Customers start to notice that they’re being offered the same product over and over. They start to become sensitive to the vagaries of the platform and then less inclined to just jump into a game willy-nilly. They start to develop deep loyalties to certain games, and certain game makers. They start to get slightly bored of watching the same ludemes endlessly recycled and want to be delighted all over again. They start to find the non-mechanical aspects of a game, such as its fiction or aesthetic, more appealing. In short they start to become somewhat like any media audience, which is to say complex and hard to read as one whole bloc.

Whether searching for complex games like Star Command, retro games like Knights of the Old Republic, elegant games like Dots or arty games like Year Walk, they start to drift away from the center. Bit by bit, day by day, the cost of being in the center seems to get that little bit tougher and cracks start to show. Even selling shovels to help others get to the center starts to get icky and layoffs begin. Developers start asking whether there really can be a meaningful return ever generated for any company paying $4 per quality customer install.

Take Zynga for example. Zynga was a great company in the days when social games were all about being fast movers and fast followers, but those times are past. Now it’s facing the much harder task of operating in mature markets where growth is not as explosive, and unless it can figure out a third way such as the real-money gaming or trying to develop some wacky hits like a MOBA it’s probably got a long road and many more layoff rounds to come. These are non-simple choices, in a no-longer-simple landscape.

I also think similar forces are at work at Tapjoy and other plugin providers. Aside from the fear of another AppGratis situation, there are a lot of competitors selling very similar products with a limited range of tactics at their disposal. And, not unlike the days when Facebook was full of wild west plugin solutions, it seems to me that a great shakeout of these services is looming. They all essentially say they can find you quality users through cross promotion and pay-per-something advertising, but actual accounts of success or failure in those networks produces wildly differing impressions.

After The Peak

The frustrating aspect of peak oil is that we’ll likely only know that we hit the peak after the fact. All the indicators tend to trail where the market actually is, and this is why crashes happen. The same is true of any gold rush or any stock market bubble. We can only sense what might be going on from watching canaries and reading runes, and by the time the real information comes in the fight-or-flight decision point is usually long past. In games, as in many areas of life, if you wait too long to know what you should do, your hesitation kills you. That’s why it’s entirely possible that – even though Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga may be making dump trucks of money – peak mobile has actually been reached.

If I’m right then the next sign to look for is just how dependent success becomes on relationships. It starts to feel as though that succeeding on a platform is about who has the strong partnership with the platform holder, who has the inside track, who has the deals in place to guarantee prominent placement on the front page, the top shelf, or the prime location, then that’s a big indicator. Similarly if the platforms start to talk up their exclusives in order to get prominent placement, it says a lot.

Like I said, this is when the games business stops being simple. Influencers start to matter as much as outlets or process because customers want delight, but don’t want the cognitive load of dealing with overwhelming choice. Trust assets become more important, whether in the official guise (like the old official Nintendo magazines, or the Editor’s Choice on the iOS App Store) or among communities. Getting on the radar of a hot blog, getting in tune with a motivated tribe of customers, or even building that tribe to begin with, are the factors that start to determine your success, but to do so you have to learn to speak their story and language.

One example is the importance of art. Most games look like other games, but some manage a wow factor. In console gaming that factor is usually wrapped up with over-the-top graphics (which we’ll no doubt see a ton of tomorrow when the E3 press conferences begin), but in mobile it’s often associated with a certain style. The App Store editors, for example, seem to love cute paper-cut-out graphics and style apps like Musyc or Paper. Therefore to get noticed by them your probably have to speak to those values. Factors like this start to matter and, depending on the platform, the customer either starts to become more sophisticated and driven by marketing stories, or grows jaded. For mobile developers the question of which way the market will go is particularly pertinent.

The peak came at various speeds to console gaming, PC gaming, indie gaming, flash portals and social gaming. Each market had its own traits and its own kind of customer, so each peak looked different. PC gamers, for example, became a highly engaged audience with and dense cultural conversation. Nintendo gamers developed lifelong brand loyalties that few companies could ever hope to match.

Facebook gamers, on the other hand, just don’t care. Facebook games may have accelerated in user adoption faster than any other platform to date but they also hit their peak very early. Rampant cloning and platform changes that up-ended free virality channels were largely to blame, but efforts to make that market more sophisticated have not exactly taken off. The so-called “midcore” social game customer (a half way point between the traditional casual and hardcore archetypes) sort-of exists, but not at the same scale as a and Zynga. Meanwhile Zynga competitors like King seem to be doing really well from going back to basics with simple casual games.

For mobile, it really could go either way. Somewhat like the PC world, there is a vested interested from app store like Apple, Google and Amazon to ensure that they keep pushing great content. Great content drives platform adoption, which in turn drives a whole host of other benefits. It works to Steam’s advantage to have games like FTL, and likewise it works to Apple’s advantage to have great games like Star Command.

Yet at the same time we’re talking about gaming on mobile phones. Those little screens may always be perceived as only for frivolous gaming (such as Warner’s Heads Up game) or playing Sudoku on the bus, but it’s hard to see that they will ever become venues for more immersive games. Can we pragmatically expect the audience of mobile games to develop strong cultural identities and communities? Or will phones always seem just that little bit lightweight for those kinds of game? (And will tablets prove different in this respect?) And if they do, does that mean mobile’s peak will be more like Facebook’s, stalling and settling into fixed patterns and jadedness?

Nobody can say for sure. But it does feel to me that mobile seems to have crested, and mobile game makers are heading toward non-simple times.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

It’s been six months since PlayJam’s GameStick started its off-again, on-again Kickstarter campaign that netted it nearly $650,000 — well beyond its $100,000 goal. While it attracted less than a tenth of the funds that its predecessor OUYA nabbed for its Android-based home game console, things have moved apace with the two-piece, controller-hosted console that plugs directly into the HDMI connector of a TV that should be shipping to backers next month.

“Thirty days felt like thirty months. We were so unprepared for it,” said PlayJam CMO Anthony Johnson, who notes that stretch goals such as a charging dock were conceived out of thin air in a matter of hours before they even knew if they were feasible.

The GameStick straddles worlds with different rules. Traditional consoles fix a platform essentially in stone typically for five or more years. The stability of the platform itself is a response to PC gaming where configurations are all over the map. This has been the inspiration for NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience addressing the issue from the PC side and Valve’s Steam Box(es) on the console side. On the other hand, its ARM processor and Android operating system hail from the world of smartphones where updates are an annual occurrence in a state of constant leapfrogging.

PlayJam plans to take advantage of the rapid progress in chip architectures. The company wryly notes that one of the few advantages of being based in the UK helps enable it to have a close working relationship with ARM. In this respect, the GameStick is kind of a no-frills vanilla equivalent to NVIDIA’s pricey Shield handheld, which costs $349 and which PlayJam characterizes as “a reference platform for Tegra 4,” a laudable but niche attempt by a chip company to get into the consumer device business.

GameStick, on the other hand, will be profitable at $79 while yielding a palatable retailer margin. And since the primary electronics are in the stick and not the controller, the former can be updated independently, and the company plans to keep offering new sticks to enable richer game experiences.

Which, in some cases, it could use. PlayJam’s 12-year history is in super-casual TV-based games distributed through cable operators and moving into smart TVs. That understanding of the power of distribution has helped lead to an agreement with GameStop, although GameStick, of course, lacks any way for physical distribution. The scaling up of smartphone-quality games to the bigger-than-tablet screen results in games that may be fun to play but don’t necessarily impress graphically. And like so many Android apps, the quality varies widely.

That said, GameStick, OUYA and another similarly inexpensive entrant from BlueStacks have some opportunity to capitalize on the pick-up-and-play home gaming market that the Wii resurrected only to stray from with the more complex and disorienting Wii U. In fact, the company is hoping to stand on OUYA’s shoulders; unsurprisingly, developers have found it a relatively easy port from that Android-based game console to PlayJam’s CMO Anthony Johnson. “It’s a new category. You need to validate the market.” Compared to the platform variation in designing for smart TVs and pay TV operators, Android’s level of fragmentation is pure bliss to PlayJam.

GameStick may be cheap. But its success will depend on if they are willing to come back to the TV for gaming experiences that may not be significantly more engrossing than what they can already get on their mobile phones or tablets. This will be particularly true if TV manufacturers and handset companies can better communicate the ability to project phone displays onto televisions via standards such as Miracast (which GameStick supports) in order to play the games that they’ve already downloaded or purchased. In that case, PlayJam will be happy to move its store to other platforms.

GameStick will launch with 100 titles and the company promises it will ramp quickly from there. For consumers who value the tactile controls or may not want to drain down their phone battery as they play on the big screen as well as for the company’s equally embryonic competitors, it’s game on.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch