YOUR HEART IS FREE, HAVE THE COURAGE TO FOLLOW IT

A BROWSER MANIFESTO – PART 15

I’ve made the argument that game developers should build tools that allow them to support all platforms and screens from the same R&D thrust.  Among these platforms the open browser is the most critical because it is the one that is not controlled by a giant corporation with a profit motive.

It is always tempting to align with the titans because they are big, powerful, influential and know how to market themselves and their business propositions.  But historically, closed platforms don’t work any better for game developers than the Berlin Wall.  Prior to Nintendo there were many open media platforms including print, painting, photography, film, video, music.  While Philips invented the CD player they widely licensed their patents and charged a mere 6 cents per disc, and allowed complete freedom of operations and expression.  More recently, the World Wide Web was a gift to the public and we’ve seen again how a free, open, competitive platform can flourish.  But Nintendo ushered in a new generation of closed platforms with unappealing license terms for third-parties.  It has always been great for Nintendo, but there isn’t a single great game software company today that was built on the back of Nintendo.  In general, these licenses in the console industry drove up costs, crippled innovation and despite industry growth more than 90% of publishers that bore these costs were wiped out.

Rather than operating like the web or CD, Nintendo has been the reference point for many new closed platforms.  Digital licenses have gotten even worse because the licensors all reserve the right to constantly make unilateral changes, thereby creating a slippery slope for third-party game developers who are at the end of the whip.  Hot new digital platforms with high growth have been as alluring as the Pied Piper, promising developers liberation from publishers and retailers and a chance to be first-movers.  Thousands of developers followed because it seemed reasonable at the time.  Apple, for example seemed generous initially to be raking only 30% of the pot, because Western mobile carriers had been taking 50-75%.  But not enough science or even study of history went into the choice of 30% that has become a de facto standard.  The mobile carriers had failed, so that was not a good reference point.  DoCoMo succeeded by charging only 9%.  Other huge platform successes like the CD and the web were essentially free.  Where is the analysis or evidence that a 30% fee is viable for a third-party industry?  There isn’t any.  Instead we have many examples to the contrary.

Consider that for games, it will cost up to 30% of revenue for the cost of acquisition (also known as advertising, even after averaging this cost down to eCPA as a result of other free traffic sources).  Sales or VAT tax can be another 10% or more.  Server overhead to operate free client-server games can also be 10% or more.  If there is a 30% platform fee a game developer is now looking at variable costs eating up 80% or more of revenue, and they still have to cover product development and overhead costs.  From what I can tell from published industry stats, on many platforms these other costs are 50% or more of revenue so now we’re at 130% for a median performing app.  Given a bell curve distribution and 200,000 apps you’ll still have outliers like Angry Birds and Millionaire City but overall this is not a healthy economic picture for game developers.

Many other companies have simply copied the 30% rate from Apple, justifying it on the simple argument that Apple had set the standard.  Well, I guarantee you that Steve Jobs did not envision the cost structure and business model of today’s games and arrive at the 30% number based on a clear understanding of a win-win scenario that would create a healthy value system for game developers.  Steve Jobs may have been a genius but he never liked the game industry and he never understood it, nor did he care about the needs of game developers.  While we’re currently stuck with the number he made up, there are signs of increasing platform competition as Windows 8 will charge a reduced rate of 20% and Google+ launched at only a 5% fee.  But history has shown that as developers invest and help platform owners become strong, the rates go up.

Game developers need to wake up now and realize that they have too often been willing serfs in feudal kingdoms where they don’t own the soil that they till.  The open browser is the next big game platform.  But even if it wasn’t, it is the one, only and best place for a developer to plant their flag and invest in their future.  Because it is open and free!  Being strong in the browser will create even more synergy if you are also extending your reach with Facebook, Apple, Android and other platforms that you can branch to from the browser.  We can even tolerate their 30% tariffs if our technology leverages product investments to reach all screens and to provide more sources of free traffic.  But freedom for game developers must come first.  If we are free, we can consider a flanking move on a closed platform from a position of strength and we can negotiate with some bargaining power, perhaps even with a collective viewpoint.

There have been other freedom fights in game industry history and we’ve had our William Wallaces.  Activision’s founders were sued by their former bosses at Atari but their bid for independence survived.  Tengen challenged Nintendo but suffered a fatal loss.  I founded Electronic Arts to create a better business model for game developers.  The most important single thing I did at EA was to push my team to reverse-engineer the Sega Genesis so that EA could be liberated from the draconian license agreements that were offered in those days.  I founded 3DO as a bold attempt to help developers and improve the value chain, but 3DO was outflanked by Sony’s deeper pockets.  3DO reduced industry standard console license fees by 70% but Sony put them right back where they had been.  More than 900 companies signed 3DO licenses but they fled to Sony when Sony proved willing to take big losses to build their hardware installed base.  Sony executives did tell me later that they copied many business practices and licensing philosophies from 3DO, which made things better for developers.  With Steampowered.com, Valve pioneered digital distribution at a time when none of the PC game publishers would touch it.  Bigpoint and GameForge pioneered browser games when the mainstream didn’t care.  In every one of these cases, game developers took risks and ventured into unknown territory for the betterment of game developers and the public.  The courage of a few did help grow an industry that can now support a vastly larger number of global game developers.  Today, the open browser gives all game developers a chance to be courageous and help the industry reach for a new age that could be truly golden for game developers, not just for Apple, Facebook and Zynga.

The browser is worth fighting for.  We need to be free.  We are all William Wallaces.  Let’s follow our hearts.

Rio Review

Rio is inconsistent and short on personality, but there's some enjoyment to be had in this multiplayer party game.

The Good

• Many enjoyable minigames   
• Just $30.

The Bad

• Doesn't take advantage of film license   
• Some games are too basic to appeal to players of any age.

In the tradition of Fuzion Frenzy and the Mario Party games comes Rio. Rio tosses the vibrant avian stars of the animated film of the same name into a host of simple minigames. Not all of the games here will hold the interest of even young players for very long, and Rio fails to capitalize on its film license, squandering its story and giving its characters short shrift. But young players (and their parents) will find some enjoyment in the better minigames here, and the reasonable $30 price makes its shortcomings a little easier to overlook.

If you've spent any time with party games, everything about Rio will feel immediately familiar. You, and hopefully one to three friends, progress through a series of games simple enough that brief instruction screens before each one tell you everything you need to know about how to play them. There are 43 games in all, but don't take that to mean there are 43 entirely different types of experiences to be had here. Many of the games are very similar to each other, and they can be grouped into just a few categories.

Welcome to Rio, where birds engage in reckless activities for your enjoyment!

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There are some basic rhythm games in which the characters dance or play a musical instrument, and you need to push a thumbstick in a certain direction in time with onscreen prompts. These games move at a pace that most players of any age will find easy to keep up with and some will find too easy to be interesting. Then, there are shooting galleries in which you move an onscreen reticle to target fireworks or marmosets. The fireworks minigame is absorbing because your score multiplier increases each time you score a hit and gets wiped out if you miss, which encourages you to take shots carefully. Shooting marmosets is much less interesting. The screen is constantly filled with the animals, so you just move your reticle around and fire as much as possible, which quickly gets old.

In some games, players drop fruit from a high ledge onto marmosets or onto another player below. Being the one the other players are targeting is exciting; you dodge left and right and try to mislead your opponents about which direction you're going to head in next. But dropping fruit from above is less engaging. The camera is too far out to give you a clear view of the action, and when targeting marmosets, there are so many creatures and so much movement down below that it's difficult to keep track of who's hitting what. As a result, there's little satisfaction to savor when the watermelon you toss strikes true.

A number of games are variations on musical chairs. You and your competitors run around trying to collect as much fruit as possible, and when the music stops (or when villainous cockatoo Nigel appears), you scurry into a hiding place or leap onto a perch. As in actual musical chairs, there's a rush of excitement when the time comes for everyone to hurry to safety and someone is left in the cold. A few games are pure tests of your reflexes. One, which is conceptually identical to a game in Fuzion Frenzy, places you atop a moving vehicle and requires you to press buttons to leap over and duck under obstacles. Another has you and the other birds flying down a street, moving up and down to avoid fire hydrants, awnings, and other hazards. These modes start out slowly and progressively get faster and faster, ratcheting up the excitement as players are eliminated until only one is left standing.

These birds spend a lot of time either collecting fruit or kicking fruit.

The largest group of games are those that put you and your rivals in a small, contained area. These have you collecting fruit while avoiding an incoming tide; collecting fruit while jumping over a rope; running around and throwing snowballs, mud balls, or soccer balls at each other; or doing some other simple activity to try to earn the most points. These games move quickly and control well, making it satisfying to snag those bananas and mangoes from an approaching opponent or nail your friend with a soccer ball to the beak in dodgeball. Power-ups that provide brief score multipliers, speed increases, or other benefits like stealing points from a competitor lend the action an element of unpredictability without being frequent enough to make the contests feel purely like games of chance rather than skill.

There are a number of ways to play Rio. A Story mode loosely follows the events of the film. You play a few games in a given location and then a character from the movie updates you on your standings and tells part of the story before you move on to the next location from the film to play a few more games. The characters who narrate the story--Luiz the bulldog, Mauro the marmoset, and Nigel the cockatoo--repeat sections of dialogue so frequently that kids may be reciting them along with the characters before you've even finished it once, making this mode one you won't want to return to after completing it. Carnaval Wheel mode has players spin wheels to determine which game will be played next and the point value of that game. In Garland Gala, you earn garlands based on your performance in the minigames and then toss them at targets to score points and determine the game's victor. Carnaval Dance has you competing with other players to get a certain number of marmosets into your conga line, and it awards you four marmosets for each first-place finish in a minigame, three for each second-place finish, and so on.

The problem with all of these modes is that the selection of games you play is random. Initially, this is fine, but before long, you've seen all the minigames and inevitably will prefer some to others. For this reason, Party mode, in which you can create custom games with whichever minigames you want to play and lets you compete as individuals or on teams, is likely to be your go-to mode. There are also quiz variations in Party mode. In quiz games, players are asked questions between each minigame, with correct answers contributing to your position in the standings. These multiple-choice questions cover both places related to the movie ("Do you know which country Minnesota is in?") and specific plot points from the film, which make them as much a test of whether you've seen the movie as they are a test of knowledge. Additionally, repeats start cropping up in these questions after just a few games, so you won't select the quiz variants more than a few times.

This is Nico. He wears a bottle cap on his head for some reason.

It's a shame that the game doesn't take better advantage of the film on which it's based. The six birds that make up the playable characters really stand out on the screen, thanks to their vibrant feathers, but their personalities don't come through at all. Each has a few lines that he or she rattles off frequently during minigames, but that's about it. The disappointing Story mode uses snippets from the film so brief that you might miss them if you blink. Where other games aimed at kids, like Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, have used their characters to great effect, Rio's failure to capitalize on the source material feels like a missed opportunity.

There's no online support here; you can only play locally. Given the game's party vibe and target audience of young children, this isn't much of a setback. It's the sort of game that ought to be played with people in the same room. Not every minigame is a winner, and they could have benefitted from more charm and personality, but there's enough family-oriented fun here to make this good-natured game an enjoyable diversion.

By Carolyn Petit, GameSpot