As promised/threatened, here's the first installment of my notes from the various talks, seminars, roundtables of this year's IGDA Leadership Forum. It's lengthy, but there was a lot of really good material to comment on.
IGDA LF, November 4th, 2010
Notes from opening speech, John Vechey (founder, Popcap Games)
I'll admit to coming into this talk with minimal interest. I knew very little of Popcap aside from the most basic of common knowledge: they make high quality, polished games and they pretty much created the Casual Games space. My own ignorance makes that sound like a fairly dismissive summation, which is unfortunate, because that's kind of like downplaying the significance of the mathematician who told Descartes, “You know what? I know it'd be tough to draw, but you should have a third dimension.” Who was that guy? Oh, nobody really. He just invented the Z axis, that's all.
Like I said, I started off fairly meh but the more I heard John talk the more interested I became. I'm going to just throw out some of the statements Mr. Vechey made and give my two cents about each one. Maybe you already know all of these points, but it was all news to me.
A 20-person company turned down a $60 million offer to sell
This actually happened early on at Popcap. The impression I came away with here is that everyone at Popcap wanted to keep making fun and they didn't feel that would happen if they sold the company. Maybe it was a matter of timing, maybe it was the prospective buyer...I don't know. But here's how I read it: these cats were presented with the choice of instantly becoming millionaires or staying true to their vision for their company. And they chose door #2. Respect.
Popcap is now up to 375 people and has been around for a decade
OK, so how'd that “no, thank you, we don't want your sixty million dollars” thing turn out for them? Pretty darned well, apparently. I'm not enough of a Pollyanna to believe that they created a superior future for themselves by being idealistic – although the ability to remain true to your vision is, I think, an indicator of values that fertilize the soil of success. Rather, I think they also had some pretty great leadership, excellent execution, and a boatload of persistence.
Every game would be better if it included a social graph (a la Facebook)
This is a pretty sweeping statement, but John's example of Minecraft is tough to refute. Let's just say I'm not sold on the absolute nature of this comment, but Mr. Vechey knows a heckuva lot more than I do about it. So if I had to recommend paying heed to his opinion versus mine...
Stay connected with the customer
Really, I think there could be an entire lecture – or series of lectures – on this topic. There's a ton of information to discuss here and I'm only bringing you a poorly drawn snapshot of the tip of the iceberg. Games that maintain a connection with the customer on any and every imaginable level have a great probability of making the customer happy and enhancing the game developer's revenue. A very simple example would be providing a web game X that rewards an achievement after 30 minutes of gameplay. And that achievement gives you $5 of in-game credit towards items you can purchase in game Y. What has that done for the consumer? What has it done for the developer?
Item-buy is a better business model than $60 purchase + $20 (or even $5) DLC
This makes me cringe a little, since my background is almost entirely one of AAA development – an arena in which providing attractive DLC is considered almost critical to getting a project greenlit. Almost nobody in the AAA space stops making a game after they ship it.
“I don't poo-poo technology but I haven't seen a technology problem that hasn't been solved by smart engineers.”
I put quotes around that because I made a point of exactly recording John's words when I heard that statement. It's a bit nitpicky, and I hate to look like I'm stooping to the level of soundbite-reporting so prevalent in this day and age, but I took issue with this because Mr. Vechey made it appear as though any idea with perceived value should still be pursued if it only represents a technical hurdle. Coming from a project management background as I do this smacks of – as Spock put it – two-dimensional thinking. Now, obviously the Popcap leadership is no bunch of dummies. And I'm sure they have a history of employing some pretty great technical problem solvers. But as a general rule if you get hung up on pursuing something because it's only a matter of time until your programmers find a way to overcome the current obstacle you might be taking a beating on opportunity cost, damage to your production pipeline, or even your long-term milestone schedule. Bottom line: If you aren't getting it done quickly (or at least on time) then it's not just a tech issue, it becomes a production issue.
“If it's a great game, we should make it”
My favorite quote from the whole thing. Because Popcap's games have traditionally smaller development cycles it was troubling a particular dev that he was working on something that could take three years to come to market. The dev asked if his work was relevant and this quote was Mr. Vechey's response. John went on to say that they should still make a game even if it will have a limited audience with a limited revenue potential – if it's great. It's one thing for someone to say that if they're an indie with a day job or an idealistic hardcore gamer looking at the industry from the outside. But when that comes from the founder and VP of Corporate Strategy for a successful company? Wow. Just...wow.
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