You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February, 2008.
JOKING! (and who got put on what card was mainly random)
But still, kind of funny: (bottom, second from the right is me). I guess if I had to be a card and couldn’t be the Ace of Spades or one of the Jokers, King of Hearts isn’t too bad. I feel a bit bad for those who got stuck on the threes and fours.
Woot! Just finished it, and it only took a month and a half, with a recorded play time of about 19 hours (probably 25-50% more if you consider all the dying I did in the early to mid stages of the game).
One of the best games I’ve played in a long time. Minireview: Loved the story, loved the conversation mechanic, loved the ‘world’ backstory, enjoyed the combat, hated the inventory management. 9.4/10
I don’t know him well enough to call him a friend, but Scott Jennings and I certainly share a similar enough outlook on many parts of life for me to consider him a friend-in-waiting. His blog, of course, is at www.brokentoys.org.
Scott’s got a problem currently. He lives in America, and has been operating under the understandable assumption that freedom of speech lives on, for the most part. Sadly, not everyone feels that way.
It’s that GDC time of the year again, and for those interested, I’m running roundtables on virtual goods with Dan James again, like the last two years, and will be on a panel about raising venture financing with a bunch of good folks. You can find a link to the descriptions of the roundtables and panel here. Hope to see some familiar faces and some new faces!
We (Sparkplay Media) announced today that we closed on a $4.25 million Series A round from Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks.
Closing this investment round has been both exciting and, to be frank, a bit scary. There was definitely a bit of giddiness on my part when I first saw the money hit our ban account, supplanted within 12 hours by a sense of crushing responsibility. I’ve certainly never seen that much money in one place before, much less under my control.
I’m not going to talk in detail about the process but three things about raising VC money stuck out to me:
- Everybody warned me that raising a Series A would be a full-time job. They’re dirty liars. It’s two or three full-time jobs, encompassing every single waking moment for months straight. Endless meetings, endless documentation/presentation re-writes. I’m sure it’s easier if you’ve done it before and are a known quantity, or if you have a major league reputation, but I don’t fall into either of those categories.
- Before deciding to raise VC money, my view of them generally was along the “vulture capital” line. I was prepared to really be put through the ringer and find myself getting screwed at every turn. These are guys who control immense amounts of investment money and I was expecting that a lot of VCs would be cynical, dismissive people whom I had to kind of hold my nose to deal with. The reality was literally the opposite. I think out of all the VCs we met, there was only one that I actively didn’t like. Almost all of the ones I met with (which is probably not a representative slice, as we took a fairly targeted approach to fundraising) were very sharp, genuinely interested in what we were doing, and showed no sign of trying to force us into any kind of deal that was untoward or bad for us. I really liked almost every VC I met, which makes sense I suppose: Their job is to attract good entrepreneurs and they’d quickly cease to do so if they acted like the jackasses some people make them out to be.
- Our plans morphed a fair amount between deciding to raise VC money and actually doing so. These guys are really good at forcing you to think through exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Even VCs we didn’t end up taking money from contributed in this way.
It came down to choosing between two deals for us (each with a syndicate of two VC firms), which was a great position to be in, though it was much harder than I had anticipated to turn investors down. By the time you’re offered a term sheet, you’ve probably gotten to know your potential investors a bit and feel a bit of a personal bond with them (at least I did).
We’re extremely happy to have chosen the investors we did (there were no bad choices between the two deals on the table at the end of the process…only a great deal and a slightly greater deal). As a bonus, one of our board members (Fouad ElNaggar from Redpoint) is a Rock Band god. His band, “the Red Stained Lips” is currently ranked in the top 10 worldwide (though has been as high as #2 I believe). Serious gaming cred!
(In case they are reading this, so that they don’t feel left out, I want to thank Scott Raney@Redpoint, and Will Kohler and Bong Koh from Prism as well. You guys rock, just not as literally as Fouad!)
Imre Jerle, the content boss for Jagex (developer of the massive hit Runescape), tells us, in an interview with Eurogamer, that engaging in RMT (buying in-game currency like gold with real money) is the equivalent of hiring prostitutes. In his words, “It’s not necessarily the prostitution which is a problem, although you might have moral problems with it. The real problem is the organised crime that’s built around prostitution; the human trafficking, the drugs, etc.”
He’s completely right, just not in the way he believes. It is indeed all of the crime that surrounds prostitution that’s the problem with it, but the reason that the crime in question exists is because prostitution is illegal. Similarly, RMT is only a problem when the game company bans it. How do I know? Iron Realms has had legalized RMT for a decade, with in-game systems to facilitate it. Its MUDs have had exactly none of the problems associated with RMT in games where the operator has banned it. How about Puzzle Pirates (which also has legalized RMT and in-game systems to facilitate it). Any RMT problems there? Nope.
The problem isn’t RMT, the problem is trying to outlaw an activity people want to do. You can, of course, object to the activity itself (as some people do with both prostitution and RMT) but the “crime” surrounding the activity is entirely a result of trying to dam the flow of demand. Permit me to engage in an analogy:
You build a dam, and the water builds up but the dam is only so high. Since you believe that absolutely no water should be let through the dam based on some sort of weird moral objection, you dogmatically refuse to try and channel the water, believing that you can simply stop it from flowing forever. Of course, you cannot, and eventually either the dam explodes or the water finds other ways out of the reservoir. The trouble is that you’ve just lost control of the water and thousands of poor farming folk in nearby farming villages have perished as a result. If only you had acted responsibly and channeled the water rather than simply pretending you could dam the river forever, Farmer Joe and his seven kids would still be alive.
This is possibly inappropriate for my blog “about games”, but that’s never stopped me before. I wrote about my dad in a post about the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviets a bit over a year ago. It’s perhaps a small thing by some people’s standards but it makes me proud to see my dad’s local newspaper write an article about a medal he recently received from the Hungarian service for his selfless service in the cause of freedom from Soviet oppression during the Revolution. Article is here.
Fuck tyrants, no matter what flag or god they cloak themselves with.
I wrote a guest post for Jeremy Liew (a really sharp venture capitalist) over on his blog about using dual currencies to unlock the demand of non-paying players in a virtual goods business model. Check it out. (His blog is worth reading and I’ve finally updated my blogroll to include his.)
Three people have pointed me at this article on Techcrunch today.
It’s about a “passively” multiplayer game played on the web’s network of sites and links between them, called PMOG (in closed alpha as of this posting). In it, users create missions/quests for each other involving going to certain websites and can leave mines for each other on specific sites. So, for instance, I might leave a mine for you on Google and if you point your browser there you get hit. Details are a bit sparse, but the root of the idea is to use the web as a map on which to anchor gameplay mechanics, and to use navigating from site to site as the verb that drives everything.
I’ve had more than one conversation in the past about ideas that use the web’s topology to drive gameplay but I was unable to come up with anything that felt really compelling. I think that there’s a potential in the core idea to create something incredibly viral and sublime, but the details of that idea have always remained on the tip of my tongue, so to speak. I’m greatly looking forward to seeing what Justin Hall and his team does with PMOG. If they can make this work I think they’re in danger of defining an entirely new genre of game. I hope they nail it.