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NimbleBit builds a tiny empire of quality freemium apps
NimbleBit's David Marsh kindly met with me at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week. While he's not interested in discussing the Zynga/Tiny Tower fiasco (a game he first showed me at GDC last year), the public's interest in that story is understandable. Zynga is a social company that uses analytics and testing to make its games easy to play and monetize. However, Marsh says he and his developer brother don't bother with a lot of analytics. "Part of the thing," he admits, "is that we don't try to figure it out a lot, because that's not the most fun part of making the game for us." NimbleBit consists of the two brothers, another programmer hired last August and David's wife, who manages support. The group is happiest while making good games that monetize themselves because users enjoy them so much. That's a contrast to many of the social and freemium titles out there. NimbleBit makes its games with love, and that's why it's funny when other companies try to copy their success without that key ingredient. When I asked Marsh if NimbleBit would consider acquisition by a larger game developer, he reiterated what he told me last year. "We're making enough money." Tiny Tower has consistently been on the App Store's top grossing list since its initial push, and then again after Apple picked it as the iPhone Game of the Year. "Getting Game of the Year for iPhone was really awesome for us," said Marsh. NimbleBit's next title, Pocket Planes, looks like it will follow the same pattern of success. Marsh gave me a quick demo of the latest build. The look and feel are very similar to Tiny Tower, but the goal is to build a network of planes that around the world, as opposed to an apartment building. Originally, says Marsh, the idea was to make a game about trains, and he even showed me a screenshot with train cars that had interiors using the Tiny Tower floors layout. But they found that running trains around tracks was too limiting and slow to be fun, so the trains became planes. Marsh says taking to the air has inspired a nice "jetsetting feel, about exploring rather than being stuck on rails." The build I saw looked great. You can buy planes with bucks earned either by playing the game or with in-app purchases, and then you can build airports at various cities, "unlocking" them with in-game gold (of course, any of that might change in the final release). Once you've got a plane and some airports to travel to, you can take missions from the in-game citizens, ferrying passengers or cargo from city to city. Each plane has a range, and each trip costs a certain amount, so the game currently consists of figuring out just how money you'll make versus spend on a certain mission. If you think that sounds complicated, you're right. Pocket Planes is the most complex freemium title that NimbleBit has put together yet. That doesn't mean it's inaccessible. While the worst you can do in Pocket Frogs or Tiny Tower is leave your frogs or bitizens unattended, in Pocket Planes you could lose money by playing badly. Could NimbleBit have the same success with a title that's more complex? Marsh says he and his brother are doing what they always do: making a game they want to play. "We're aware of the fact that it might have a smaller potential audience" due to the complexity, he says, "but that's one of the things we're interested to find out." Marsh also says that because it is still early in the development, there's lots of time left to spin the game more casual or complex. One idea he and Ian have played around with is "plane parts," which users could buy, trade, or collect, and use build planes with various stats. But that system isn't quite done, and it might not be included in the final game (or might be added in with a later update). NimbleBit hopes to release Pocket Plans in "summer, hopefully." Pocket Planes looks terrific, and it's great to see NimbleBit make great games that support a solid freemium model with excellent gameplay.
First GDC Online 2011 summits announced
Despite the brutal, anti-nerd reality that is Texas weather, Austin has become a major hub for development houses that produce MMOs and casual/social online titles. BioWare, NCSoft, Blizzard, SOE, heck, even Zynga; they've all got offices in Austin and collectively they're responsible for a sizable growth spurt in the city's already impressive technology sector. It makes sense, then, that GDC 2011's "Online" chapter should return to the Lone-Star State's capital city. GDC has, historically, been a conference "for developers, by developers," meaning that it's probably not the sort of show Jimmy Halo and Ricky Killzone want to spend their tuition money on. However! If you're in the industry, or just really, really into game design, you just might find something worthwhile at one of GDCO's recently announced summits. The Game Narrative Summit, for instance, returns for its 6th year of lectures and dissertations with Eidos Montreal's Mary De Marle giving a talk on "Building the Story-driven Experience of Deus Ex: Human Revolution," and Volition's Steve Jaros hosting a roundtable discussion of development mistakes and war-stories in "Sins of the Past." PopCap's Giordano Bruno Contestabile will be contributing his knowledge of pocket-sized, casual gaming to the Smartphone and Tablet Games Summit, and while the GDC Virtual Items Summit has been announced, no specific session details have been listed as of yet. If extremely-inside-baseball discussions really are your bag, baby, then summit lectures will be open to GDCO attendees with "All Access" and "Summits & Tutorials" badges during the first two days of the conference's October 10-13 run at the Austin Convention Center.
Booyah gets 10,000 to download new Nightclub City DJ Rivals
Earlier this week, social game company Booyah (whom we've spoken with before) released its latest game for iOS, called Nightclub City: DJ Rivals. Booyah first found huge success with an iOS social game called MyTown, and then went over to Facebook to create Nightclub City, a social app about sharing music among friends. Now the company is back on iOS with DJ Rivals, and early indications are that it's going to be popular: it's already garnered over 10,000 downloads in just over a day. Last week at GDC 2011, I spoke with Booyah's Brian Cho about the game and the plan behind it, and he told me that Booyah is "taking the best parts of MyTown and the learning that we had on Nightclub City," and combining those into both a persistent social game, as well as an arcade-style music game to play inside of it. He showed me the app as well -- after creating an avatar in the style of Nightclub City, you then claim locations around you (or around your friends, even if you're not in the same place), and then your DJ can play music battles (akin to Guitar Hero or DJ Hero on consoles) to take over those locations.
Xperia Play phones given away at GDC end up on eBay
Sheesh. First the Xperia Play is obtained by the press even before its official announcement, and now the first units to reach the North American public, given away to developers at a GDC panel and raffles last week, are ... wait for it ... being sold on eBay. That's right -- even weeks before the actual launch, you can't give these things away for free. eBay seller "mejones73-1" doesn't hide the fact that he's one of the developers who won a free phone (and neither does this guy), though the Sony writeup says that a winner named "Mike Jones" just happens to work across the street from their office in Redwood City, CA. Jones might want to be careful in the parking lot this week -- even if he plans to buy another phone with the $730 and rising that his auction is earning, Sony can't be too happy about this one. [Thanks, Benny!]
Riot Games' Marc Merrill on the Tencent acquisition and the future of League of Legends
Last year's "focus," if you can assign such a thing to the Game Developers' Conference, was probably Zynga and its Facebook games, but for 2011, there was one company that kept getting brought up in the hallways and various panels in San Francisco: Riot Games. Not only did the makers of free-to-play MOBA League of Legends clean up at last year's GDC Online awards, but last week, the Riot booth was constantly surrounded with developers, all wanting to get in on one of the quickest-growing companies around. Riot President Marc Merrill kindly sat down to chat with Joystiq about the game and the company, and we talked about the recent acqusition by Chinese giant Tencent, why Riot is growing so fast, and what's next for the game affectionately dubbed LoL. And yes, LoL players, we asked about Magma Chamber and the Mac client.
GDC 2011: Firemint's Agent Squeek
Australia's Firemint is perhaps one of the most popular developers on the iPhone. Firemint's games, Flight Control, Real Racing and Real Racing 2, can be found in any Apple Store, and likely on most iPhones, too. The company's founder, Rob Murry, and his new acquisition, Infinite Interactive's Steve Faulkner, were in San Francisco last week to show off the third original IP that Firemint is creating for iOS, another line drawing game called Agent Squeek. In Agent Squeek, you control a mouse on the screen by drawing a line for him to follow, and the goal of each level is to collect various cheeses while trying to avoid hungry cats. But while the game starts out easy, the complexity quickly ramps up, and you can do things like psyche cats into chasing you before dodging the other way, or you can even build gadgets from blueprints that you find.
GDC 2011: Remedy brings Death Rally to iOS
Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment is known for making full-fledged console titles like Max Payne and Alan Wake, but it's stepping into the iOS arena with a touch-based remake of its old racing combat game Death Rally, originally released back in 1996. I got to see the game in action at GDC in San Francisco last week, and I liked it a lot. While it does make use of a virtual joystick (something that Graeme Devine had railed at in his panel earlier in the day), this one's done very well, providing both direction and acceleration to your little car as you race around the game's various tracks. Remedy worked with developer Mountain Sheep (makers of Minigore) on this one, and the polish and experience on the platform shows. The textures are clear and bright, and the gameplay is very solid. There are five cars to start (with possibly more coming later), and each of them handles differently, from a huge van down to a muscle car. The weapons are also very different, and all of them are upgradeable. Spending money earned after every race can be used to improve your car's stats or push your weapons up to the next level. As you race, you also unlock various challenges, like racing against just one opponent or going around a reversed track, that mix up the gameplay. %Gallery-118560%
GDC 2011: Chillingo's upcoming slate of titles
The good folks at Chillingo invited me to stop by their suite at GDC 2011 last week (which was actually run by EA, thanks to a new deal with EA's Partners program) to see the company's upcoming slate of titles on their way to the iPhone and iPod. On the next page you'll see previews of Blobster, Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Painkiller Purgatory, all due out in the next few months from Chillingo. Stay tuned -- I also got a chance to speak with co-founders Chris Byatte and Joe Wee about their role publishing games for the iPhone and the iPod touch, including, of course, Angry Birds.
TUAW's Daily App: ZombieSmash
Our own Michael Grothaus really enjoyed ZombieSmash when it came out around this time last year. Last week at GDC, I had a chance to speak with Matthias Hoechsman, creator of the game and CEO of gamedoctors, about the title. An upcoming update, which is due out in just over a month, will essentially double the size of the game, bringing 31 new days of stages to play through. Since it's at a prison called "Camp Nowhere," there will be new zombie types to take down and new weapons to kill them with. The update is adding a few new social features as well, including the ability to tweet and share killshots, showing friends how you take out the last zombie in each wave. ZombieSmash will finally get a long-awaited Retina Display update and Game Center integration as well. The update isn't out yet, but the game's available right now for US$1.99 on the App Store. There are already 31 days of waves to defend against, plus an Endless Siege mode and a Sandbox mode to just play around with. If you pick up the game right now and play through a level a day, you'll be ready for the big update right around the time it hits. Seems like a good deal to us.
GDC 2011: Nexon goes kart riding on the iPhone
Nexon is a South Korea-based publisher that's basically helped create and define the idea of free-to-play, microtransaction-based MMOs around the world. While microtransactions have become popular in all kinds of game genres in the last few years (including in quite a few apps on the iPhone), Nexon pioneered the business model with popular MMO games like MapleStory and Combat Arms. The company's been saying for a while that it plans to move more into the social and mobile game spaces in the West (it already has quite a stable of mobile games in Korea). At GDC 2011 this past week, I got to see the company's first entry on the iPhone in America, a game called KartRider Rush. KartRider Rush is based on an MMO called Kart Rider that has never been brought to the West before (except for a short run in beta on the PC), but is well established in Korea. It's a cartoony kart racing game in the vein of Mario Kart, with customizable characters racing around a set of tracks. I enjoyed the game, though it is fun and simple. KartRider Rush accelerates for you, so you can either drive with a set of on-screen buttons or change the option to tilt the device. There are power-ups, like speed boosts and attacks, and races can be chaotic, with players quickly switching positions over the ride.
GDC 2011: Spacetime Studios returns to Blackstar
I last spoke with Spacetime Studios' CEO Gary Gattis last year at GDC Online in Austin, and when I saw him then, he told me his company was commissioned to create a PC MMO for NCsoft called Blackstar. Spacetime spent months and months of work on the project before it was abruptly canceled, leaving the company in the lurch and requiring it to make cutbacks until it got to work on what was supposed to be a much smaller project. That project eventually became Pocket Legends, an MMO that's now thriving on the iOS App Store. The game has seen over 3 million downloads across both the Apple and Android platforms (somewhat surprisingly, the game is more popular on Android, where Gattis says he's seen "more numbers and more money" coming in), and is an unqualified success. It's so successful, in fact, that when Spacetime thought about what to do for its second game, Gattis and company decided to go back to their origins and recreate Blackstar on the mobile platform.
GDC 2011: Backflip Studios' Boss Battles, Army of Darkness Defense, and more
Backflip Studios' Julian Farrior was here in attendance at GDC 2011 this week. His company has been doing quite well lately, and he tells me that they've recently hit 85 million downloads across all of their free apps, with over 23 million monthly active users. In plain terms, that means that tons of people have downloaded Backflip's apps (like Paper Toss, Ragdoll Blaster and the popular NinJump), and they're playing them often as well. As I heard at last year's conference, Farrior is all about experimentation, using paid downloads, freemium apps and a large, well-organized network of in-app advertising to drive traffic around and monetize his company's users. He has a relatively large slate of games due out in 2011, including four social games that we'll be hearing about later in the year, and a few games using various models that I got to see in action. Boss Battles was the first -- it was still in an early stage of development, but the idea is that Farrior wants to try to marry a scrolling arcade shooter (like Gradius) with the freemium business model.
Skyhook brings location-awareness to the Sony NGP, including WiFi-only models
The news got a bit overshadowed by some augmented reality demos and a little game called Uncharted, but Sony also talked a bit about the NGP's location-aware capabilities at GDC this past week, which we now know will rely on Skyhook's Core Engine system. What's more, that functionality will apparently be included on WiFi-only models in addition to those with 3G, which means that all NGP users will be able to play location-aware games and take advantage of other various social applications. As explained by Sony at GDC, that could include things like the ability to find nearby NGP users and see what they're playing, and even more elaborate things like real-life treasure hunts -- all of which can presumably be switched off if you prefer to keep your mobile gaming habits to yourself.
GDC 2011: Graeme Devine on the iPad for gaming
Veteran game developer Graeme Devine took the stage at GDC 2011 this week to talk about Apple's iPad (and by extension, the new iPad 2, of course), and called it "the best gaming machine on the planet today." He went through his own thoughts on the device, talked a little bit about how developers could use the metaphor of touch to make the best games possible, and then went through a list of what he felt were the best practices for iOS development. Devine said that the first time he held an iPad, "I felt like I was holding something from science fiction in my hands. It was different from any other experience I've had before." The iPad reverses the trend in gaming to move the screen farther away from the player, and instead puts it relatively close up and personal. Additionally, the joystick is gone, and while a lot of games depend on that virtual joystick (more on that in a bit), the iPad removes any hardware between your fingers and what's happening on screen. A finger isn't a mouse, either -- rather than selecting and then clicking, fingers on iPad screens just tap and move.
NeuroSky shows off MyndPlay, we control movies with our brainwaves (video)
Would you pay $100 to control the outcome of a movie with the power of your mind? That's what NeuroSky and Triete Labs are banking on with MyndPlay. Simply put, it uses NeuroSky's $99 Mindwave headset with a custom video player that monitors your mental activity during critical points in specially designed films, and offers multiple outcomes depending on your focus and relaxation levels. For instance, in Paranormal Mynd (above), you play an exorcist who must drive a evil spirit away -- if you don't focus intently, this woman will choke to death. Another gangster film has you dodging bullets and sports multiple endings; depending on how relaxed and concentrated you are, you could come away clean, take a bullet to the head, or dodge poorly and have the projectile strike your friend dead instead. MyndPlay plans to produce a raft of such short-form content for $0.49 to $1.99 per episode, and also let you shoot and share your own, scripting sequences with a tool to be released next month called MyndPlay Pro. We gave Paranormal Mynd a try at GDC 2011, and came away somewhat impressed -- you definitely can control the outcome of a scene, but it doesn't work quite like you'd expect. Since NeuroSky's technology is still limited to detecting the mental states of concentration and relaxation, you can't "will" the movie to go the way you'd like with your thoughts -- in fact, thinking about anything rather than what you're seeing on screen seemed to register as a form of distraction, and lowered our scores. Instead, the ticket to success seemed to be focusing intently on processing the images on screen and clearing our head of all thought or emotion, making us feel totally brain-dead even as we aced the scene. If that sort of zombification sounds like fun, watch a couple video teasers after the break!
Sony celebrates PS3 success at GDC, 41 million sold worldwide
It's tough to get solid numbers out of Sony for hardware sales, usually they're cloaked behind a vague "shipped" figure, but at GDC this week the company gave us one rather impressive number: 41 million. That's the number of PS3 consoles the company says it has sold worldwide, and over 80 percent are sucking down data from ye olde internet. Confirming the moneymaking trend we heard about last month, in 2010 the PlayStation store saw a 60 percent boost in traffic and a 70 percent boost in revenue from a total of 70 million PSN accounts. Let's see... 70 million PSN user accounts, 41 million PS3 consoles, 80 percent of which are online -- that means almost everyone has one account for gaming and a second for griefing. Sounds about right.
GDC 2011: Tatem Games' Carnivores and RoboSockets
Tatem Games is a mobile games studio out of Ukraine that's been making games since the mid-'90s. They originally started with PC games, CEO Igor Karev told me here at GDC 2011, but lately the company's focus has been on the iPhone and the iPad. "It's about timing," Karev says, "we can make cool games, and not spend two years on them." The company's biggest titles are the Carnivores games, a series of 3D "hunting" games (though the titles have grown to encompass more than just killing things) that started out on the PC and have since garnered 3.5 million downloads. The Carnivores games have a dedicated user base, and Tatem closely follows customers' advice, structuring updates around iTunes comments and input. There is an update due out soon that will bring more mythical creatures into the games, as well as new weapons to use and a new game mode requested by users who don't want to kill the animals; it'll be a photo hunting mode instead, letting the player wander the world with a camera rather than a gun.
Sony announces Move.me application for researchers and hobbyists, promises improvements to PlayStation Home
The PlayStation Move may not have proven to be as instantly hackable as Microsoft's Kinect, but it looks like Sony is now trying to change that -- it's just announced its new Move.me server application that promises to let researchers, hobbyists and others use the Move as a controller for a PC, with the PlayStation 3 handling all the work in between. It will be available for download from the PlayStation Network this spring, although you can also try your luck with Sony's early-product seeding program if you'd like to get it sooner -- no PS3 SDK or licensing agreement is required. In other PlayStation news, Sony's also confirmed that it's now working on version 1.5 of PlayStation Home, which promises to add real-time multiplayer gaming functionality to the virtual world, along with improved physics and refined graphics. Details on it are otherwise still fairly light, but it's also slated for a public release sometime this spring. Head on past the break for the official word on both announcements from Sony.
Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX543MP2 really is faster, better, stronger (video)
You may have heard of the PowerVR SGX543MP -- you know, the GPU behind Sony's NGP and possibly on its way to the iPad 2 and iPhone 5 -- but chances are, you've yet to see it working up close. Well, feast your graphics-hungry eyes on this: that's Rightware's Tai Chi benchmark running on a tellingly sheathed device at GDC 2011, working the MP2 (dual-core) iteration of the processor, and that fine smartphone to its right is the Nexus S, sporting the PowerVR SGX540 you've come to know and love. As you can tell, Imagination Technologies' promises of 4X the performance aren't just baseless boasts -- the lady on the left moves with grace and fluidity, while her counterpart on the right is all sorts of herky-jerky. Think that's fast? Check out what the GPU can do with two more cores. Sean Hollister contributed to this report.
CE-Oh no he didn't!: NGP will be 'dead on arrival,' says ngmoco boss
In all honesty, you would expect the leader of a team concerned exclusively with producing games for smartphone platforms like iOS and Android to be dismissive of a new dedicated handheld console's chances, but it's still jarring to hear such a strident dismissal of the Sony NGP's chances. In an interview at GDC this year -- yes, the same place where we were treated to some very impressive demos of the NGP's performance -- ngmoco CEO Neil Young has expressed his belief that Sony's next PSP will be "dead on arrival." Claiming that the new portable will be incapable of competing with the rich ecosystems and affordable pricing models that smartphones now offer, Young says not even the crazy specs or PS3-like gaming will help the NGP survive. This echoes comments from Satoru Iwata last year saying that Apple, not Sony, is the "enemy of the future" for handheld consoles, though Young does close off on a positive note, saying that he sees brighter prospects for the 3DS thanks to Nintendo's rich collection of own-brand franchises and reserves of fan loyalty. So that's it, folks, better start selling those Sony shares while they're still worth something! Or not, it's up to you. [Thanks, Dominick]
