Lesson 10: "DLC doesn't make any money." Outpost Kaloki, a previous NinjaBee Xbox Live Arcade game, had two pieces of paid DLC and both had an 18% attach rate. DLC release has a small impact on full game sales. These numbers skewed by retail disk sales. At one point free DLC downloads more than full game sales. Band of Bugs, another NinjaBee game ("one of [their] least successful games") had six pieces of paid DLC. The lowest attach rate was 1% while the highest attach rate was 19%. Similarly to the Outpost KalokiK DLC, "DLC release had a small impact on full game sales."
"OK - I changed my mind.... DLC only makes money on popular titles." A Kingdom for Keflings, an XBLA game that was the first to use Microsoft XBL Avatars in-game, had two pieces of paid DLC and each had an attach rate of 6% and 7%. Since the game was bigger than NinjaBee's other games, though, that percentage yielded far more overall sales. "Comparable results to [Ninja Bee's] other games" would have had a 30-70% attach rate. "DLC release almost tripled full game sales." "So despite the fact that I told DLC was a bad idea to do financially, I think that it depends on your game. This particular game was a big success so we're going to keep looking at it."
Lesson 9: "MS Avatars get attention but they don't sell games." Despite being the first game to use Microsoft avatars gave Kingdom for Keflings, gamers won't pay money unless the game is good. Fox contrasts A Kingdom of Keflings with Band of Bugs which patched avatars in after release, but "conversion rate improved only slightly."
Lesson 8: "Build relationships with platform holders." Fox elaborates on this saying developers need to "play nice" with their publishers, "make friends," and "help meet [the publisher's] goals." "It's great to be indie and stand up for your principles, but [ you have to be] palatable." Dude goes on to say that making a publisher look good, it helps them a lot and that benefits everyone. NinjaBee then goes on to talk about Doritos: Dash of Destruction, which was a free game that was very good for NinjaBee's relationship with Microsoft. "Microsoft needed it done, wanted it done" and they got to work closely with Microsoft and learn more about the platform and benefited the team in many ways down the line.
Lesson 7: "'No' doesn't always mean 'no.'" Editorial insert: I'm pretty sure you may want to reword that slightly. NinjaBee cites the Band of Bugs level editor, Microsoft said no, but NinjaBee did it anyway, and MS still said "that's really awesome, but you still can't do it." MS drew a penis on the ground with the level editor and then said "that's why you can't do it." NinjaBee kept pushing on the feature over and over, and eventually Microsoft caved and changed their policies so that NinjaBee could ship with the level editor. NinjaBee went through a similar pattern with the greenlight process on their prototype for Ancients of Ooga; it was initially red-lit, but NinjaBee went back and improved on it and eventually got it approved.
Lesson 6: "A picture is worth $1M." "The industry is very visual and people are very visual," he says. "Visuals matter a lot," he says as he indicates that NinjaBee does mock-up screen shots so that the screen "looks like the game." It doesn't matter whether or not the everything in the screen shot is fully in-game or not (and, in the example, it was a pure mock-up) to help sell the look of the game. NinjaBee sold Microsoft on their capabilities of doing avatars in their games with mock-up screen shots. Similarly, Fox says, videos are super important for conveying the purpose and viability of a game.
Lesson 5: "XBLA is 'hit driven.'" Fox points at the best-selling list of XBLA games on the XBLA site. The difference between page one of the best-selling and page two of the best-selling is substantial. "Give it a little bit of extra effort to be that hit can make the difference." I'm not sure that's how it works, personally, but okay.
Lesson 4: Focus testing is huge. "We bring people in, they play the game, [we ask them questions] and we made a lot of changes, then we bring in 'em in again, and we make a lot of changes." Fox says this yields great results and he doesn't "think that's an accident." "We are, as an industry, pretty immature [regarding] trial experience."
Lesson 3: "Plan to go over-budget and take more time." "Now what I'm not talking about is 'add a cushion to your schedule'." Fox says it's still going to go longer than even that cushion and when you go over schedule that you, as the company, "won't die." "Once you've done one and you think you've got it down, guess what? It happens every time." He displays a slide that says: "It doesn't get better on your second game or third game or fourth game, etc."
Lesson 2: "View everything as a sales pitch." He displays a slide saying "It's easy to miss an opportunity to present yourself, your ideas or your company. These opportunities often come at unexpected times." "There's just a ton of places where being enthusiastic about your game can bring you great results."
Lesson 1: "The game industry is always changing." "The rules change all the time. You need to be ready!" the next slide reads. "I don't care if you're sleeping iwth someone at SONY who knows the approval process who can tell you which games are approved and which are not, it'll change." Just because marketing tactics or strategies work for one game does not mean that those same tactics and strategies will work for the next game. "Just know that even if you get good advice does not mean it's good advice next week.
Fox then goes on his "crystal ball" to say that: "Digital distribution is the future. I predict that 4.5less than three years stores taht rely primarily on retail game sales will be out of business or drastically changed." He shows a slide with: "EA - Pandemic - $300M + Playflish = NO GameStop." He quotes John Riccitiello as saying that digital games will "overtake the console market by next year." "2 weeks ago... GameStop CFO quit." Fox then goes on to cite more examples of EA's changed game portfolio as it increasingly shifting to digital games. "However don't despair," he says as he puts up his final slide "Don't let them take over YOUR domain!"
