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OpenFeint developer aims for a hardcore audience with Fates Forever MOBA
Jason Citron is a true veteran of iOS gaming. He was one of the two developers behind Aurora Feint, and later vaulted it up to the huge social network that OpenFeint became. Now, Citron is back to making games with a new company called Hammer & Chisel (formerly Phoenix Guild), and he's just announced today that his upcoming game is called Fates Forever. It'll be a multiplayer online battle arena title, similar to the extremely popular League of Legends, but built from the ground up for iOS and a touchscreen interface. "If you look at games," Citron told TUAW recently, "very rarely do you find one that's generally new, and usually when you do, it's because of the UI change." Citron believes that even hardcore games "could be made materially better by changing them to use a large format touchscreen," and so he's decided to take on the MOBA gametype. Fates Forever will have battling heroes, just like League of Legends, but with a simplified format... at least at first. The map Citron is working on features just two lanes (it will pit three players against an opposing team of three, and matches should take around 15 minutes), and he says a lot of the mechanics around itemization and balance have yet to be determined. His focus right now is building standard touchscreen gestures for the heroes' various abilities. "The skillshots are all these fun little gesture things that you can pull off," says Citron. One champion will do a dash move that's controlled by dragging him around the screen with your finger, for example. "You hit the button on the left, you get a little ring around him and then you can drag the indicator away from him. When you draw out a path from him, he shoots flames on the ground." Citron says the goal is to take gesture mechanics that users know and love, and use those to match the precision and controls that you'd usually need a mouse and a keyboard on a PC for. When Citron began this project, the MOBA genre was very much PC-based. But in the last few months, several companies have thought to bring it to tablets. For example, Gameloft's Heroes of Order and Chaos, and Zynga's forthcoming Solstice Arena. "I figured [MOBAs] would be a trend," says Citron, but adds that "I can't say that I would have expected as much action to be going on tablets." Still, Citron says Zynga's entry will likely be tied down by in-app monetization efforts, and he thinks he can do the game better than Gameloft has. "I think ours looks better, has more innovative controls and it's generally fun to play." The plan for Fates Forever is to have "the core battle game out this summer, with a very light metagame around it." Once the core app is out, Citron and his company (currently about five full-timers and about the same number of contractors) plan to tweak and upgrade it according to the community, and will even build a tool called The Forge, where players will be able to suggest and build their own heroes, with that content possibly even reaching the game. "I very much see this as a marathon, not a sprint," says Citron. "I see this as a long-term thing. I'm starting with a nugget of something, and we're evolving it with the community." Citron's goal with Fates Forever is to "blend deep traditional game design with respectful game mechanics," he says. "It's obviously going to be free-to-play," and supported by in-app purchases for options and customization. But "our game will never force you to stop playing," he adds. "And you can't pay to win." Currently, the project is being put together in Unity, and while it will initially appear on the iPad only, the title may come to Android or other platforms later on. Fates Forever sounds interesting. We'll get a chance to play it later this year. Plenty of other companies have aimed and will continue to target this growing "hardcore" audience on Apple's tablet platform, but that specific audience is finicky to say the least. In the end, Fates Forever will have to stand on its own quality. If it can find the League of Legends-sized audience on tablets that Citron is looking for, then we could be playing this one for a long time to come.
Jason Citron picks up funding with new gaming company Phoenix Guild
Jason Citron was one of the iPhone's first big name developers. He and partner Danielle Cassley created a game called Aurora Feint way back in the early days of the App Store, and while that game didn't do as well as hoped, the duo and their backers eventually catapulted that title into its own social gaming platform called OpenFeint. That platform was later acquired by Japanese social network GREE, and Citron left the company that he originally founded last September. Now, Citron's back with a new venture, called Phoenix Guild. He's working on assembling a team that will, as he says, build "core games for gamers on post-PC devices." Citron's always been a fan of traditional gaming and "really rich, engaging games," and his new company, which was just funded to the tune of $1.1 million by venture capitalists (including his former OpenFeint supporters at YouWeb), is aiming to build those types of core, traditionally console style games for modern mobile devices like Apple's iOS devices and even Microsoft's upcoming Surface console. "It seems obvious to me," Citron says during a chat this week with TUAW, "that core gamers are moving from PCs to other devices and tablets," and Phoenix Guild's goal is to provide great core games on those new platforms. What exactly does Citron mean when he says "core games"? "Mass Effect, Call of Duty, and even Bastion," he says, rattling off a few popular and well-received console titles from the past few years. Citron agrees that you can't just "take what works on an Xbox and put it on an iPad," but he says there's a deeper experience that consoles currently provide that's not yet reflected on a lot of mobile games. Citron's also convinced that free-to-play is the way to go, but he's cautious of doing the model wrong. "You need to do free-to-play in a way that respects players," he says. "Not in a way that makes players feel nickle-and-dimed to death." Citron says on the traditional PC, games like League of Legends and Team Fortress 2 are examples of how to do microtransaction based games correctly, and he wants to bring that generous polish over to tablet-based games as well. Citron can't say anything about what Phoenix Guild's first game is like yet, but he says he's hiring AAA talent (including an artist from id games), and wants to put a solid, very social, very polished free-to-play game together (he even mentions the recent popular Magic: The Gathering iPad app as an example of the kind of game he wants to build, though he says that's not exactly what he's aiming for). So we'll have to wait to see exactly what Citron is building. But he does say that while OpenFeint was a nice success, what he really wants to do is "build a large successful gaming company," not another social gaming platform. OpenFeint came out of the ashes of Aurora Feint, which Citron admits didn't do as well as hoped "because it wasn't free, and because there was no free-to-play at the time." But this time around, while Citron is returning to the original game design ideas he started with, the goal is to aim for what Citron says Blizzard and Valve have built, big game companies founded on quality, classic releases. "I want to have a company like that," he says. It'll be a lot of work for sure, and as much as Citron is convinced there's a large hardcore audience ready to play games like that on mobile devices, he also agrees that it's so far "definitely unproven." And it's possible, he says, that he's wrong, and he's not able to make a company like this. Maybe he'll have to go the way of Aurora Feint, and turn the company he's growing into something else, a separate platform or some other important technology. But he hopes that doesn't happen. "If the universe will permit this sort of game company," Citron says with conviction, "I will build it."
OpenFeint hires new CEO, Jason Citron leaves
It's the end of an era for one of iOS' biggest ventures -- OpenFeint has hired a new CEO, Naoki Aoyagi, which means company founder Jason Citron is leaving the company to head elsewhere. OpenFeint, you'll remember, has its roots in an iPhone game called Aurora Feint, which Citron developed a few years ago with co-founder Danielle Cassley (who left the company fairly early on). After that early title saw some success, the venture was transformed instead into a free platform for developers to share friends' lists and other social networking features across apps, even before Apple's own Game Center was announced. Despite the introduction of that official service, OpenFeint has remained popular, and has expanded out into Android and elsewhere. The company was bought by Japanese social network GREE earlier this year, and it's from that company that Aoyagi comes (he was the 10th employee), taking over Citron's role. Aoyagi reportedly plans to combine the US operations of both GREE and OpenFeint, so it's unclear what this will all mean for developers using the service now. As for Citron, he confirms on Twitter that it's "time for something new." He and his team at OpenFeint did an incredible job of building up that company and network piece by piece, so it'll be interesting to see what he takes on next, as well as what OpenFeint ends up becoming without its founder.
360iDev: Game Jam creations
Tuesday night at the 360iDev conference in San Jose, around 60 developers gathered in a room on the eBay campus around 8pm as security locked them in for the night (one developer joined the group via Skype -- that's him on the big screen above). Their goal? A game jam. Before 8am the next day, they would put together working prototypes of games, either based on their own ideas, or revolving around the night's theme of "Tiny." Not all developers were there to make new games -- a few were there to work on current projects or offer up their help to others. But up until 2am and beyond (that's about when I chickened out and let them work), the room was full of developers punching away on their keyboards, writing code, designing art, and, well, developing. I originally thought that it was just a lark; a fun project that gave everyone an excuse to spend the night on the eBay campus. But no, this was serious stuff -- apparently at least one App Store game has its origins in past game jams at these conferences. So while developers were just testing their skills at putting their ideas into motion, it's possible that we may see some of these prototypes show up on the App Store eventually as working products. After the break, we'll provide a look at what a few developers were up to at Tuesday's game jam.
360iDev: The future of Jason Citron's OpenFeint
OpenFeint's VP of Engineering, Jakob Wilkerson, took the stage here at 360iDev in San Jose to talk about something most people might not have expected: Game Center. Ever since Apple's official social gaming network was announced last week, the question's been in the air about what will happen to all of those unofficial gaming networks, of which OpenFeint is the largest. Wilkerson took the news in stride, however. As CEO Jason Citron told us last week, OpenFeint isn't going anywhere, and as you can see from their chart above, OpenFeint still believes that they can build more social game services, in the form of OpenFeint X, on top of Apple's official offerings. Wilkerson talked about Game Center in terms of potential; he used examples from OpenFeint to explain how implementing leaderboards and friends lists in the right ways can really open up player interest in a game. OpenFeint often talks internally about bringing, both, hardcore and casual game players into the fold, and their different online features target those various audiences. We also got a chance to talk to Citron again regarding his thinking about OpenFeint so far, and what the company plans to do when Apple unveils its official plan. Read on for more.
Game Center sparks light reactions from competing iPhone social network devs
Yesterday, Apple announced Game Center, a social gaming service for iPhone. Pretty much everyone with an iPhone has reason to be delighted with this development, except for companies like OpenFeint and ngmoco, which already operate social network gaming services for iPhone in OpenFeint and Plus+, respectively. Are both companies freaking out? Not in public. In a statement, OpenFeint positioned the OpenFeint X service, which allows iPhone devs to sell virtual goods, as the next step for its business. "OpenFeint X is currently built on top of OpenFeint and in the future it will also sit on Apple's Game Center social graph, achievements and leaderboards so developers and gamers don't miss a step," said OpenFeint CEO Jason Citron. "Apple is a key partner and we are delighted that they have validated the first half of the OpenFeint vision and we can now fulfill the second half: OpenFeint X and Virtual Goods based Social Games." Citron also promised to "continue to invest in OpenFeint" for the benefit of the games using the platform now and in the process of adding it. ngmoco's Simon Jeffery released a statement indicating that Plus+ is also already moving in a similar direction. "ngmoco has anticipated this move from Apple for some time, and is happy to see a cleaner developer and consumer experience on the horizon," he said. "As we demonstrated at GDC 2010, Plus+ took a strategic shift in direction a few months ago toward being a service, and less about being a set of social gaming features." Plus+ is now focusing on "empowering monetisation and discoverability mechanisms for the development community," as evident in the service's support for player-created virtual item stores in We Rule. If both OpenFeint and ngmoco are to become virtual goods platforms, they stand to benefit from Game Center -- in essence, they can allow Apple to handle all the matchmaking and friend list stuff, while they focus on building marketplaces to interact with Game Center. At least until iPhone OS 5 introduces a virtual goods marketplace. [Via TUAW]
Current game network developers comment on Apple's Game Center
Way back in February at Macworld, one of my questions to Eros Remini of OpenFeint was pretty blunt: "Why," I asked a representative from the biggest third-party social gaming network on the iPhone, "haven't we seen an official platform-wide network?" Remini didn't have a good answer for Apple, but he did say that OpenFeint was happy to step up and fill the void. Apple answered for themselves this morning: They announced Game Center, which will be an official social gaming network for the iPhone and iPad, complete with friend lists, leaderboards, achievements, and everything else that third-party providers like OpenFeint have set up already. So what does OpenFeint think of Game Center? We contacted it for a statement and we are told that OpenFeint is welcoming Apple's Game Center. The company has recently released a virtual goods marketplace called OpenFeint X, and their statement about Game Center says that there's still a place for OpenFeint on top of Apple's official service. "OpenFeint X is currently built on top of OpenFeint and in the future it will also sit on Apple's Game Center social graph, achievements and leaderboards so developers and gamers don't miss a step," Jason Citron, CEO of Aurora Feint says. Current OpenFeint players (of which there are 19 million at last count) will automatically become OpenFeint X members, and it sounds like OpenFeint plans to move on to the virtual goods market, leaving their old social gaming realm behind for Apple. There were a few other reactions from various developers and publishers about the Game Center news -- read more information from PopCap and Ngmoco after the link below.
TUAW exclusive: Makers of Aurora Feint unveil new game, codenamed "VSL"
Aurora Feint was one of the iPhone's first big games, way back in the early days of the App Store. Since then, the company behind that first hit has added on a few different games in the same universe, each with their own separate features and focus, but all in the same vein of puzzle-based RPG. Today, Aurora Feint, Inc. has pulled back the curtain just slightly to reveal their very first original effort since that initial App Store release. The game is only codenamed so far -- they're calling it "VSL" -- but the developers at Aurora Feint plan to turn it into a "showcase" of what's possible with Apple's new policy of allowing free apps to provide content on demand. Above is the very first screenshot of the yet-to-be revealed game, and TUAW got a chance to talk exclusively with both Peter Relan and Jason Citron of Aurora Feint about the new game, what it'll be like, and how it'll integrate with their growing social gaming platform, OpenFeint. Click the link below to read on.
TUAW interviews OpenFeint's Peter Relan, Net Jacobsson, and Jason Citron
Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron are the folks with their names on Aurora Feint, but as Danielle told us in an interview a while ago, Peter Relan is the real mastermind behind the growing Feint empire. Not only did he put the two together in an idea lab, but he's one of the driving forces behind the OpenFeint enterprise. Under his oversight, the Feint folks have swelled to become one of the major forces behind iPhone gaming (and thus, behind the iPhone's app ecosystem itself).Netanel "Net" Jacobsson is a newer addition -- he's previously worked with Sony Ericsson on their mobile devices and Facebook on their own growing app empire, and now he's arrived at OpenFeint to help them use the lessons he's learned at the biggest online social networks around on their social software. Get the sense of how big this is yet? Relan, Jacobsen, and Citron all have pretty big ideas about where iPhone gaming is going, and as 3.0 comes down the pike and introduces a whole set of new features from Apple, they're in the best seat they can be in to do exactly what they want to do.TUAW sat down with the three last week, and chatted about iPhone 3.0 and why it's such a big deal for developers, how they're going to approach microtransactions (carefully), and what's coming next for OpenFeint now that they've rounded up a whole stable full of developers implementing their backbone. Click "read more" to continue.
TUAW Interview: OpenFeint, continued
Have you seen anything like that already, where developers have said, well we thought about doing it this way, but we're going another way? PR: Too early. The phones aren't even out yet, user experience hasn't occurred yet. I would say July, we'll get a lot of feedback once these games come out with push notifications. The other thing that's kind of interesting, by the way, is that OpenFeint is working on cross-compatibility, because if I have a 2.2 iPhone and you have a 3.0 iPhone, and you send me a social challenge, in my app on 2.2, it won't show up as a push notification, right, because I don't have the 3.0 iPhone. So we are support the concept of push notifications in the plumbing and infrastructure of OpenFeint, however on a 2.2 phone, whenever the user next opens the app, they would see a screen that is an OpenFeint screen that would have a notification saying "you've got to beat my score," as opposed to seeing it on the iPhone icon, as a number, like the Mail thing, where it says you have notes waiting for you. So I think as a user experience, the jury's still out, because the platforms are just getting ready, right? So the key here is to say that we're going to make it trivial by continuing our tradition, which is no servers, very easy to integrate, and some big games will launch in July with push notifications and then we'll go from there. I think, to a certain extent, the same thing will happen on the microtransactions side. It already has happened with Xbox Live -- I don't know if you remember the story of horse armor, where everyone says "how can you release a different graphic and ask us to pay for it?" Have you seen examples yet of how developers want to use microtransactions? Are they aware of that danger or are they fearful of that at all? PR: So I think the obvious one, just because I have, as I said, investments in companies in the Facebook app space, the big reason for microtransactions is virtual goods. So any kind of virtual world, avatar apps, some of these Mafia iMob apps, you can assume that there will be virtual goods unlocking with microtransactions. That one I think will translate over fairly well, in fact Net is going next week to China, where he's a keynote speaker at Tencent's annual conference. Tencent is an Asian company which does a billion dollars in microtransactions, all of it virtual goods. So I think that microtransactions, as we see them on social networks today, will come pretty much that way onto the iPhone social network, or the iPhone gaming network. NJ: I also think that it will actually lead to the pricing, might even drop dramatically, but those who are charging for applications are going to go free, because they're going to earn much more by making it free and leveraging microtransactions. Yeah, if you're charging $4 for an app and can sell four levels for $1 each, that's the way to go. NJ: The user starts playing, gets very engaged, and wants to get to the next level and make the purchase, and it's very difficult not to make the purchase if you're engaged and you want to continue the game. PR: The thing that's a little trickier, I think, is when you have microtransactions that aren't directly virtual goods, because virtual goods don't fit the theme. But are like chapters, or just additional content in the game. Then, I think, the business model is a little trickier, because that's your content update strategy, and to some extent, the iPhone user is used to -- like, if you look at the success of Pocket God, it's a double edged sword. If you talk to the Pocket God guys, their game is one of the few games that stays in the top five constantly. It's just always in the top five. And they use OpenFeint, and they're going to use push notifications, but when we spoke to him about microtransactions, he said, I have to figure that out, because their commitment to their userbase is, every week you're going to get an update with more content. So given that he's already committed that on the current price point, how does he unlock more content with microtransactions? So he was the first to say I definitely want to do push notifications, but I have to think hard about how I could incorporate microtransactions into Pocket God. So I do think there's a little more complexity there, especially when it's not just direct virtual goods. But I think they'll crack it. I think some other people we're talking to are certainly thinking of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, three microtransactions. And certainly the virtual goods guys are like no questions how they'll do it. And there are definitely precedents for both, in terms of episodic gaming on other services. Jason maybe you can talk about this, too, as a developer -- I'm really interested in the balance between making sure that what you're selling people is worth it, or something that's not. If you're asking to pay a dollar for a gun that's just a re-skin, people won't go for that. What do you think of that? JC: I think, as a game designer, what you have to really think about is the motivations for why people will want to purchase this content. Whether it's a re-skin or not is less important than what it will allow you to do in the game. And the reason why I think virtual goods have done so well on social networks is that social pressure is a huge motivator to getting people to do things, and if part of that social pressure results in you engaging and buying virtual content, people are much more likely to do it. I mean, if you just have another gun that allows you to increase your DPS by two points, that's not terribly interesting to anyone but the ultra hardcore gamer, and then they'll probably just be pissed off that they have to pay for it. So that's not really an appropriate way to go about it. As a traditional gamer, buying episodic content or buying level packs, or substantially new gameplay experience, fits with my head, and then virtual goods, I think, have to be motivated through social pressure. And the last question I have is just about the future of OpenFeint. I have to give it you guys -- there were quite a few, and there still are, services poking around that want to do the kind of stuff that you're doing. And just in terms of size and influence right now, you're kind of the top of the heap. So what's next, are you planning to kind of sit on the heap and just keep things set, or are you still aiming to improve here? PR: I think that definitely we will continue to innovate and add more services to the platform -- there's no question that it's a platform play, and that we will continue to add features and additional things. I would say two things: one is, we will publish games, always, on top of our own platform technology, that will really kind of push the borders of gameplay design around the OpenFeint platform, to sort of demostrate and lead the way. So in the last announcement, we did hint at a new game coming out this summer based around push notifications and microtransactions, where we want to lead the industry. Because we never think that by being in front today, that we will be always in front. So we want OpenFeint to be the premiere platform, we agree that today, we certainly feel like it's way up there, but we feel like you constantly have to build new product on top of your platform to really make a world class platform. Because otherwise you're just sort of opining and thinking oh, this is good stuff. So we always want to test our own platform, and expect a title this summer based on OS 3.0 and OpenFeint features. The second thing, which is, I think we're really doing something different around the business model. Ngmoco announced their Plus+ platform this week, and it's really a publishing tool rather than an open platform, and we're pretty proud of the fact that we're sort of the biggest player who is really able to provide an open platform where a developer does not have to make a publishing deal with us in order to get access to the platform. Ngmoco's platform is hey, we have this platform, it's part of our publishing network, and if you want to publish games with us, that's how you get the platform, and obviously you know the economics of the publishing business in the game industry, right? There's revenue that has to be sacrificed there. So I think as a guiding strategy, we will never make our platform related to anything with our publishing because it's our belief that this OpenFeint thing does two things that we will always have to provide for publishers: no servers, because 90% of developers have no experience building servers, they build great console games, client side stuff, C, C++ programming, all this stuff, but they really don't have any backend experience. And two, we're not going to take rev share, in terms of publishing deals. And those two things, I think, are sort of our long-term guides. The third thing is to build our own games constantly, so we can use Danielle and Jason's game design and knowledge to say here's the kind of games we can do. So if we can do that and execute, I think, with some fingers crossed, with some luck, we'll emerge as the de facto standard, which is our goal. I had talked to Danielle a little about pricing already, but I wanted to ask about microtransactions as well -- when you do that stuff, are you not skimming off revenue as it comes through, or what is the pricing scheme there? PR: Well even today, we have cross promotion inside OpenFeint 2, even before microtransactions, where if two players meet in a lobby, and they're from different games, then one player clicks on the other player's game, and you go to the App Store and you buy that other player's game? That's what you call our one-touch iPromote product inside of OpenFeint, it's a big draw for a lot of developers, because our community is now three million and growing -- we call it our social bazaar, because the App Store is so cluttered now that it's hard to differentiate. So you use OpenFeint and get your game in front of three million people in these lobbies. That revenue, when someone buys a game using OpenFeint's cross promotion feature, doesn't come from the developer, it comes from Apple. Because we are an Apple affiliate, through BigShare. So we take the user into a webview, which is our own catalog, where you can buy games off the App Store, and then Apple actually pays us. So that's hopefully -- this is the same thing, the whole idea is to get Apple to pay us every time there's a purchase in the App Store, including in-app purchases, as opposed to the outside. Great. That's pretty much everything I had to ask, was there anything else you wanted to share? I guess we'll keep an eye on the game coming out this summer. JC: Yeah, I guess the only other thing worth mentioning is that OpenFeint is available now -- it can be downloaded by anyone from our website. It's real. Cool. Thanks very much.
