I was lucky enough to attend this year’s #GDCEurope in Germany. GDC Europe is the little sister of the main conference that takes place yearly in San Francisco, but nevertheless since a big part of the most creative game studios is located in Old Europe, this conference had nothing to envy to its bigger sister.

A lot of my readers have no clue about games. They find it childish and consider them as a waste of time. I’m not going to argue their views here, yet if you look at it from afar, games are massive software projects involving very different skills from pixel artists to assembly language developers al aiming at creating emotions through a unique interactive experience.

And those projects are really massive, seeing how CTC (EVE Online) and Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain) are handling virtual teams and subcontractors while still ensuring a high level of quality and timely execution is really impressive. Quantic Dream for instance has designed highly detailed “subcontractor pack” with all the raws elements and the artwork for a scene for the 3D artists and level designers to build. In their case managing the subcontractors and preparing their work seems something like 30% of the company’s total energy (they are about 100).

One of the main theme this year was “casual is the new hardcore”. Even non-gamers have got addicted to casual Facebook games such as Farmville and spend countless hours on them. I have a few raw notes on this topic I wanted to share :

• Setting up a 2D casual game should be around 50keur (Unity 3D game is about 250k, Java over 1Meur)
• After launch games should be updated weekly/bi-weekly with new contents
• Marketing the game is 7 to 10 times the development cost
• Social games players are 43yo 55%female play multiple times a week
• Active users lifetime around 8months
• Managing microtransactions can be a pain – bigpoint has integrated with 200 payment systems
• The lifespan of a game is hard to evaluate – social games have trouble dying
• Conversion rate to paying players : 6 to 7%
• Virality accounts for 1/3 of the new user recruitments
• Virality works best when based on a social substrate – FaceBook, MySpace…
• The viral feed must be another way for the player to express their motives – get help tools resources…
• Having people “Like” a game will ensure more stickiness since the player wants to have some level of consistency
• Most popular viral feeds include
  * Sharing reward resource
  * Offering partnership apprenticeship < best retain value
  * Cries for help
• Achievements are a big part of the stickiness – one of the main player motivation is always to be “better” than his mates
• Achievements can point of exemplar values quantitative or qualitative of ur game
• Achievements must value both for main track and side quests
• Achievements help bring ppl in places they would have missed without it

As you can see most of these techniques actually can be applied to any piece of software. Recruitments of users, ensuring stickiness and loyalty are core objectives that one should always have in mind when building a piece of software. Seeing your software as a game and designing it as such brings a lot the the end user experience and can drastically change the dynamics of your community.
Understanding those mechanics has been one of the key assets for services such as Foursquare to actually emerge while so many other LBS in the past have failed (software using those techniques are known as Funware).

Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned

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GigaOM is running today a story called Yahoo’s Big Plan for the Social Web in 2010: Aggregate It . Aggregating the Social Web is definitely something big for 2010, and obviously Yahoo is not going to be the only one trying this.

Obviously, we all are part of various social networks: some professional, some personals, some where we are active, some where we barely show up, all in the spirit of keeping in touch with our friends and following the real-time web. As such, the social networks websites are not the only place anymore where end-user are willing to check on their social activities. Better user experience, convergent activity view… all those themes open up opportunities for third parties such as software developers (Seesmic) or web portals (Yahoo) to stay in the game without the hassle of actually creating a social network.

Just like with the search, the user experience is a strong factor of adoption for a service thus opening opportunities to create value on top of those services.

Let’s face it, since Windows XP, everything consumer from Microsoft (apart from the XBOX) has been lame.

Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, MSN/Hotmail have been performing really badly and can be totally regarded as failures.

Yet it seems this time may be over.

For the first time in a long while, Microsoft is releasing exciting products one after another. Short development cycles, convergence and innovation has enabled them to release an excellent Windows 7, a challenging Bing, improved XBOX 360 experience and insights let us hope for the best with the upcoming Windows Mobile.

It seems that Microsoft managed to make massive changes in their R&D process to be able to regain that flexibility and ability to innovate aiming at shorter production cycles and more iterations, sounds like an interesting case I would love insights on.

Cool presentation by 37 signals about getting real in the Internet economy. Thanks Alexis for the link!

MXP4 – Play with it! from MXP4 on Vimeo.

Beautiful video trailer explaining the MXP4 concept. Well I shoudl say trying to explain since I tested on someone unfamiliar with MXP4 whose conclusion was “So MXP4 let u listen to music while walking?”.
Nice to have the money to make that kind of clips anyway – and while I still don’t understand why I should be interested in remixing music myself, and why I should care, it’s still quite puzzling.

Love to see products I’m involved in (even just a bit) appear on TV, just makes my day ! First one is my fave.

Since a few years, if you had an idea the price for creating your first prototype got significantly lower. With a few thousand bucks and a little time you can now come up with a talented team of AD and coders that can turn most of your ideas into working prototypes. I’ve been using this approach now for years letting me rather confront ideas to the market than do old-style market studies that at the end always prove what you want to demonstrate. It’s also a great way to try new business models and validate assumptions.
Apart from my usual subcontractors with whom I built strong bonds over the years, I usually use odesk or rent-a-coder to add new specific skills to my virtual teams. Those services are great but it’s always hard to rely on them for more then a prototyping or proof of concept phase. Usually u get the basics done but the guys there fail when it comes to QA your product decently or meet deadlines. Nevertheless they are a valuable source of cheap workforce !
My point is that today, you can really launch a project with little money and go sell it. This will lead to a new generation of self-funded startups where the entrepreneurs will try to self-finance completely their project and keep a limited burn-rate as long as they can until the customers fund the growth. This is going to reshape completely the entrepreneur job since the “go get funding” stage is no longer compulsory.

These slides are presenting Netflix’s corporate culture. I like this though of a company being able to grow and maintain high performance and flexibility by stressing and developing those values in their HR process and in their daily management.
Definetly worth a thought!

Culture

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It’s always such an excitement to see a start-up complete its life-cycle by a positive exit. As you know I joined the Steek adventure 3 months ago to create and develop the mobile division. When I first stepped in I discovered a company with talented people really sales-oriented and customer driven. This 7 years old start-up has achieved great goals and with over 2.5 million users it can really play in the carrier playground. Seeing a positive exit as announced today is a positive signal sent to all the other start-ups around : develop the business on your own, deliver stuff that work and you *will* make a success story out of your company.
Congrats to all the team, can’t wait to see how Steek will change F-Secure by bringing our end-user focus and their huuuge salesforce together!