4. “
One of the most difficult tasks
people can perform, however
much others may despise it,
”
is the invention of good games.
Carl Jung
5.
6. “ ”
Man only plays when in the full
meaning of the word he is a
man, and he is only completely
man when he plays.
(On the Aesthetic Education of Man)
Friedrich Schiller
12. Games vs apps
Games as a % of total downloads globally
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
iPhone Amazon Android BlackBerry Samsung
Free Paid
13. Regional differences
80%
70%
Games
60%
Entertainment
50% Social Networking
Utilities
40%
Photography
30% Music
Productivity
20%
Navigation
10% Lifestyle
0% Education
Asia Pacific Central & Central & Middle East North Western Global The Rest
Eastern Latin & Africa America Europe Average
Europe America
13
31. Draw Something
Launched In February 2012
No 1 app in 80 countries
Downloaded 50m+ times
It generates > $100k of revenue per day
It has over 12 million users per day
32. Phenomenal growth rates
Drawings per second
Feb 12 – 3
Feb 26th – 333
March 7 – 1660
March 8 – 3000
Time to 1 million users
AOL 9 years
Facebook 9 months
Draw Something – 9 days
37. Summary
Integrate gameplay into your app strategy
UI, design, look & feel really matter
Take a data-centric approach
Multi-platform development is vital
Editor's Notes
Started developing Marmalade in the games industry – because games are highly complex, and the best testing ground for any technical platformBut today I’m going to talk about games, share a few observations, and lessons which I hope will add to your thinking about enterprise apps
Why gaming – this is something that competes with work for employee time – and is a waste of time. Tell story about Euro 2000 – differing cultural attitudes
The assumption is that gamers are in a dead zone, and completely detached form the world19th century novelThis same criticism is levied against games as was against the novel in the early 19th century – but games are so at the core of human activity that we find a way to express gameplay in whatever medium we can find – children with sticks, bat and ball, a bladder – marbles, you name it.
Gameplay is intrinsically creative, and designing gameplay is one of the most creative acts there is, and one of the hardest (Carl Jung quote).
We make games out of anything that will respond yo, yo, ball, throwing (angry Birds)Video games is just one avenue. It so happens that a screen, a keyboard and a CPU can do all sorts of things to suspend disbelief and allow the imagination to wander … like the novel, what if … the laws of physics were different, BeautyAlso completely naturalGames are about the world responding – physics of response; computers delight because they are interactive and responsive, and therefore a magnet to the gaming mind.Zenith of interactivity: Amazon; Tetris
Known as Fritz
The Greeks used to stage competitions in anything that offered the bare possibility of a fight – beauty contests for men were part of the Panathenean and Thesean festivals; at symposia’s, contests were held in singing, riddle-solving, keeping awake, and drinking. Challenge, danger, contest – are all very close the play sphere. Danger, risk, chance – it is a single field of action where something is at stake – play and pledge share the same etymological roots.A bit about why I think games are interesting …
Urge to gameplay is universal – but the balance of play and seriousness is often confused. Sport has such competition and technical organisation that the play element can be crushed, and I for one miss the grace of the gentleman player – perhaps closer and more honestly toying with play, rather than hiding it under seriousness and money. Choking – magic in sport is often when the play element comes out despite all the competition and pressureShimmering tension– and I’ll show you some phenomenal successes where this competitive element is removed, and pure play introduced.
But this is not the case. Gaming is one of the most engaging, interactive and connected experiences we can have today. Games are leading the field in all major media trends – social, mobile, new methods of payment, and audience participation – and have been doing this for a long time. $67bn industry, just about 2x the music industry.Lesson 1: Don’t undervalue Gameplay!
The demographic is changing enormously...2/3 individuals un the US play gamesDemographics shifting – from young male to equal balance between male and female, but with different distributions.
Forrester survey - most women are casual players … most casual game players are women (58%) ; hardcore players and (collectors) collectors are men. 60% of ‘Freeloaders’ are women. 57% of hardcore gamers on mobile …
This is half the download ecosystem, and you have to assume that most enterprise app users also play games … or have games played on their devices
Lesson 2 – the game market matters, and what is important for enterprise apps is that most of your customers will have played games. And this will have set expectations on production values and interactivity across all apps.Therefore it really makes sense to look carefully at what is going on in the game market, and The good news is that doing research is quite fun!
War used to be the driver for innovation in technology; now it’s entertainment – in fact going full circle – 3D games used to train the military.Games and in particular the requirement for graphic performance drives this innovationCPU – Moore’s law on mobile at a faster rate … and this is also affecting the game industry as well as everything else
So what’s happening in the games industry?The solid lines are estimated performance, while the dotted lines are trends. According to NVIDIA, somewhere in the 2013 - 2014 timeframe is when we'll get Xbox 360-class GPU performance out of mobile SoCs. The console line only has two points (Xbox 1 and Xbox 360), while the mobile line starts with the original iPhone, moves up to Tegra 2 and then follows Tegra 3.
Transition from console and pc into mobile. Massive increase in processing powerConnected and cloud servicesEnterprise business is facing the same issues but needs to take lessons from gaming who are there before them
Lesson 2: massive change to the industry wrought by increasing processing and network capability – games matter – therefore worth looking at how they are dealing with this …
By the way, the same factors are affecting science: the revolution in processing power is transforming what is possible in science … from being hypothesis-driven to being data-driven.25 years ago, a survey of the night sky took 25 years; introduction of digital in 1990 at the Sloan Sky Survey reduced this to 8 years to survey ¼ of the night sky. The sensor is being replaced in 2015, and they whole sky will be surveyed in 3 days – 3000x the rate. Lesson 3: All industries touched by shift in processing and storage capacity are undergoing change … and in ways that are hard to deterimeOpen up your data – your customers are also likely to develop apps, and could do some of the work for you …In the face of this Apps Stores and discoverability are suddenly incredibly important issues
This shows the median lifetime revenues for developers at $3,000 – i.e. 50% of developers have made more than this figure, and 50% have made less.
Games as a serviceNot that remarkable – but the value is less in the purchase than in the ongoing revenues and transactionsOne of consequences is Superfluity of content, you can no longer use scarcity pricing !!! Branding is a form of scarcity, and of course incredibly valuable.
Development is now iterative and crowd-driven.This is a data-centric approach. No longer about a hypothesis Enormous success of Farmville, with xx m users and yy m in revenue has been created and fine-tuned on an hour by hour basis232 million players at time of IPO, delivering $445m in revenue to FacebookLesson 4: Take a data-centric approach – ensure that your app is metered, and you have strategies in place to change, personalize and respond.
Consumer expectations being brought to enterprise apps – if something does not look good, it probably is not goodCUT to demo of Lara on PlayBook
Information is beauty –and consumers now expect this – once you have seen data rendered beautifully, the retinal standard has been set, and everything else looks pale and boring by comparisonLesson 5. Expectations for graphical interfaces are going up and only up
Another key factor is that users use their own devices at work – and being their own, they need to run game and entertainment servicesComputer and mobile now becoming decoupled form the services that are played on it …. Apple’s 5x DRM
Parent over shoulder analogyGames are becoming social and mobile – and non-gaming applications can also learn from thisLesson 6. The devices matter …. And the device does not matter any more. – multi-platform
What And the element of play without the element of competition
CREATE A GRAPH FOR BOTHTOP DATA: Drawings/second for Draw Something
Lesson 6 continues …Point of departure really important – to get coverage, you need to be set up to hit all platfromsfrom the outset- HTML5 vs native
Netflix is now on over 800 different devices – embedded software, and therefore coded for every device. No download or install ..
The platform itself has a huge impact on the development complexity – this is a picture from the Android stand at MWC, showing all the different Android phones.
Key is to de-risk your initial approach, and leave as many platforms open as possible, as well as devices and form factors.
