My year at ouya the ups, downs, and lessons from launching a new distribution platform
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It has been just over one year since the very first OUYA units shipped. In this talk, Kellee Santiago will discuss the lessons learned in building a new game developer ecosystem from the ground up. Because of Kellee's background in game development, working on "the other side" has given her a unique perspective on seeing the challenges a console manufacturer and publisher faces, what defines success for both parties, and why the "right" path isn't always obvious. This talk will give the game development community a look into the thinking behind the decisions, the successes, and the missteps of operating a new game publishing portal on a hardware product. Intended audience & prerequisites: Developers interested in the possible opportunities presented by the new console marketplace. Session takeaways: Attendees will gain insight into the inner workings and thinking of a console manufacturer and game publisher, and insight into the possible future of the new console marketplace.
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My year at ouya the ups, downs, and lessons from launching a new distribution platform
- 1. KELLEE SANTIAGO HEAD OF DEVELOPER RELATIONS OUYA KELLEE@OUYA.TV
- 4. KELLEE SANTIAGO HEAD OF DEVELOPER RELATIONS OUYA KELLEE@OUYA.TV
- 10. A COUPLE OF MISSTEPS . . .
- 15. A COUPLE OF RIGHT STEPS . . .
- 20. SMALL, ACCESSIBLE & DYNAMIC TEAM ABILITY FOR RAPID ITERATION CAN MAKE OUR OWN RULES
- 24. FREE-TO-TRY
- 30. OUYA.TV
Editor's Notes
- It’s crazy to think that in one year I was a part of launching this (ouya),
- and also played a huge role in launching this as well (Calvin).
- I thought I would start with a picture of Calvin, because I’m really quite nervous about this talk. I’ve never been a part of something so controversial as OUYA. Sure, thatgamecompany was experimental, but audiences were pretty gentle with us. So, I thought I would start with just telling you all why I joined OUYA, because for some or all of you, it might be a question in your minds. And – spoiler alert – the reasons I joined OUYA aren’t necessarily the same reasons I’m still at OUYA. So this post-mortem is somewhat structured as a trip through my evolution in thinking about OUYA, and what it means to be building a distribution channel today. My father taught me that if something you’re doing or working on doesn’t make you kind of scared, then you’re not doing the right thing. So here goes.
- Some of you might know me from my work as co-founder of thatgamecompany, developer of flOw, Flower, and Journey on the PlayStation 3. As Jenova has mentioned in his talks about Journey, thatgamecompany was broke at the end of the project, and there were a few reasons for this, but one of the factors was that we were trapped in a Publishing model that favored the Publisher and the Publisher’s interests far more than the developer. And I’m not blaming Sony, their deal was similar to any other publishers, but especially any console manufacturer’s and it was the way business had been done for over a decade. Some things had changed, but they changed because of PC games and appstore development – open platforms that tried to get out of the way as much as possible between gamers and games.
- But that had yet to happen DIRECTLY IN THE LIVING ROOM. And fundamentally, I believe that the More open you can be = more variety in content there will be = the more people enjoying games and a better industry for all..
- OK. I’m getting ahead of myself here. While I was at thatgamecompany, I also co-founded Indie Fund. Indie Fund is a small angel investment fund created to help independent developers get and stay financially independent. And it was created because we saw a gap between the relatively small amount of money these new digitially distributed games required to go from good to great, and the funding terms you had to agree to in order to find that capital. By simply offering a more amenable alternative, maybe we could move the needle towards more developer-friendly agreements for all.
- So, In thinking about what I would do next, during this post-TGC hiatus, and what I could contribute next to this industry that I love, it was coming up again and again that tilting the console marketplace more towards developers could yield fantastic and entertaining results. I thought maybe I would work my way up within one of the larger studios in order to do this. And this could be a super fulfilling and rewarding next step in my career, and could lead to even bigger and better things.
- And then I met Julie Uhrman. She had recently successfully Kickstart-ed her company, OUYA, whose mission was not just to make a new console, but to open up the living room. To create a developer-friendly console that took down the barriers between developers that really wanted to make games for the living room, and people that wanted to play them without spending a fortune. And she asked me to come on board to create the company strategy around developer relations in order to manifest these goals. I wasn’t going to have to deal with long-established company practices, or concepts of “this is how things are done.” It seemed like an amazing opportunity because OUYA, being a brand new distribution platform, presents a unique opportunity to make some much-needed changes in the relationship between developers and publishers.
- When I came to OUYA, I thought I had already figured out some ways, based on my experiences as a developer with thatgamecompany and as an investor with Indie Fund, in which OUYA could be amenable to devs that would still benefit OUYA but be better than deals out there. I thought convincing Julie of this would be my first job. However, the day I started, Julie laid on me that she wanted to keep our deals as simple as possible. Focus on console exclusives, but otherwise the deal terms were better than Indie Fund’s. And I thought, “well that makes my job easy. I’ll just sit back and the devs will come to us.” In game development, sometimes you let the game just speak for itself. And I applied this philosophy to content acquisition at OUYA. Yes, there were naysayers and people critical of the platform, but once word got out about these deals and how easy we were to work with, it would all turn around.
- But that didn’t happen. And I think it didn’t happen for two primary reasons. 1) I didn’t open any of this up to the development community at large. Sure, I was having private conversations with developers, but that’s really the same as any other publisher. Moreover, I was assuming I could fully represent the interests of all developers by myself. And 2) I was still stuck in thinking about a relationship between developers and platform the way pretty much everyone else has for the last decade.
- I was narrowly thinking of improving a system that really needs full alterations. More on this later.
- Free the Games fund. (How many people are familiar with the Free the Games Fund?) I think this was a perfect example of how making decisions in somewhat of a vacuum, considering only a small percentage of developer types, led us astray. Julie gave birth to this incredible concept for a way to leverage our limited funding resources in a new and innovative way. We didn’t have a ton of money, because hardware manufacturing is really, really expensive, but we all recognize that a certain amount of money can help a commercial game really succeed in the marketplace. Kickstarter has been a great resource for many indies in helping cover these costs, but it’s also very risky, especially when you go over $100k. So we would create a fund to match Kickstarter projects, in order to mitigate the risk developers were taking. And this was non-recoupable money. We wanted to give away $1MM. This was going to be great, right?
- And… not so much. Developers felt the minimum project requirement of $50k was way too high. The overall exclusivity terms that were the same no matter what size project you had, was too restrictive. And we left too many loopholes in our rules, we oversimplified, and it would allow people to cheat the system, and in a very public way. Again, I hadn’t incorporated developer feedback into our core process. Again, I had made decisions based on the concept of making minor improvements to a system that many of our developers found completely flawed at its core.
- Along the way, OUYA made some great steps as well.
- OUYA is a small and scrappy team. Just to demonstrate, would the first 3 rows here please stand up. These people represent at a 1-to-1 ratio, the entire OUYA team. This is how many people make OUYA happen. I think that’s amazing. This is a picture of the 25 developers of OUYA, and there are 10 more people at the company not pictured here. And that’s it. That’s everybody. The dynamic of OUYA is that of a small indie studio. It’s a team of people who are extremely passionate about what they do, about making a truly developer-friendly console, and who are willing to do whatever it takes, regardless of their job description, in order to try and make that happen. So the entire team is empowered to bring the best ideas to the table in order to improve OUYA, and are given a lot of leeway to do so. I really, really love working with these people.
- This has led to a rapidly evolving platform. If you have an OUYA and haven’t turned it on in awhile, I highly recommend doing so! Since launch we’ve changed our layout, tried to further simplify but improve communication about games, added recommendations, a rating system, and more. And I really don’t know any platform that can or has responded to feedback so fast in this way.
- We Change in rules to FTG in about a month. We changed exclusivity to not include PC, to scale according to the scope of your project, and we lowered the minimum amount required to raise in order to participate in the fund. All of this based on public and private conversations we had with developers. You can check out three of the games on the showfloor – Sentris, Neverending Nightmares, and Read Only Memories.
- we implemented A/B testing so that we can try out different implementations of new ideas. And we use some of this information to help us advise our developers on how to make improvements to their games so they can see greater success. And something I’ve learned through this process is that OUYA has a really incredible community around of developers and players. There are now over 700 games on the platform, and over 34k developers. Half of our players play Emulators and/or run XBMC. But those players spend 1.5x more money and 2x more time playing games. These aren’t people who just want a free emulator box. They engage with games in whatever way possible. They download and discover a wide variety of content.
- So, as I look forward to the next year at OUYA, I am looking at how we can lean into these things that I think are right.
- We are talking a lot more with our developers. OFFICE HOURS – developers talking with one another We discovered in our A/B testing that quality really matters to players. We have an internal rating system we use to evaluate games that are getting submitted to the platform, so we can keep an eye out for games we think will perform better on the system, so we’re ready when they likely rise to the top. On a scale of 1 to 10, the games that are 7+ make up 85% of revenue on the store. And 8+ rated games make 2.5x more revenue than 7 and less. So we reach out directly to developers with 6 & 7 games to get them to an 8 because it’s such a huge difference. Or if there are higher quality games that aren’t seeing that much traction, we know it’s likely due to their game details page, and work with them to make improvements.
- In order to improve the reach our developers can have with OUYA, we are taking OUYA onto other platforms with our OUYA Everywhere initiative. So this dynamic of a developer-centric platform isn’t limited by just our ability to make hardware.
- Support more tools so people can make more games. In including adding Twine support soon.
- And, in response to developer feedback, in order to give more flexibility to game makers to decide what kind of content they want to make on OUYA, starting in April we are making the free-to-try component optional.
- The more I continued to talk with developers and OUYA developers specifically, the more I saw what you are probably all too aware of being here this week and going to talks – that developers are a wide and varied group of people. The increasing variety in distribution platforms has allowed for a variety of content, just as many of us thought it would. But that hasn’t been the only trajectory of variety that’s increased in the last decade in video games. There has been an increase interest in game making, in the creation of tools you can use FOR game making, and in the places and ways in which you can share and talk about game making. And this has lead to a variety in REASONS PEOPLE MAKE GAMES. You’re not all just interested in becoming rich. Or becoming famous. Sometimes it’s about effectively communicating an idea, or about trying something new, or just about the activity of making games being reason enough to do it. The conversation between developers and players is changing, too. The slow burn on PR for the average indie game has now evolved into bringing players into our Alphas and Betas, responding rapidly to player feedback after launch, of course the growing field of games as a service, but also games and new game genres now that live and breath with input from their players.
- And it make me think of The New Games Movement. How many people here are familiar with the new games movement? DESCRIBE MOVEMENT. Changing rules, ownership in the hands of players. video games haven’t allowed for this, but now I’m starting to see that they totally can.
- And I think about how I came to be here. At this conference. Talking to you. And I trace it back to my father, and his computer at our house. When he had to program the operating system so that it was easy enough for us to use. But then he showed us how he did it. And then he said, “Now you can do it. ->Just make sure to make a back up and save before you make changes.” What a simple rule, and yet it opened up so many possibilities. And it made a technology that, at the time, was so foreign and intimidating to most people – and still is for many people today – it made it accessible, and bendable. Through his encouragement of experimentation and manipulation on our home computer he created a world for me that was also filled with possibility because it all could be altered and changed.
- You can think of something today - like make 3 games based on three talks you saw today - prototype it tonight, and you can publish it on OUYA tomorrow. You can change something in the game, resubmit, get it up in less than a day. And just like that, you are a living room console developer. Oh, if you’re under 18 you do have to a parent or legal guardian to sign some paperwork on our site. But then, that’s really it. The act of playing games can go beyond just moving through the rules someone else has laid out. Players can becomes cognitive of them as a result of playing WITH the rules themselves. I believe that’s how we break free from making the same games for the same people. And closing the gap between game makers and gamers is what I believe OUYA is perfectly poised to do.
- In the last couple of months there have been a number of announcements from other console manufacturers and publishers around the indie studios they’ve gotten exclusives from. And the picture they paint is that they are shaking things up by taking big risks, but it’s not a huge shift in the fundamental relationship between developer and publisher. The publishers have simply moved their old paradigms of paying for quality content in order to sell boxes over to smaller companies. Smaller companies that are working their asses off, but the criteria remains the same, you guys. Content that will appeal to the publisher’s core audiences, from reliable developers with built-in fan bases they can leverage.
- It’s time to change the relationship between developers and publishers, because it’s been primarily a one-way street. And OUYA, being a brand new distribution platform, presents a unique opportunity to make this change. I think we need a developer-owned platform. Going to the highest bidder benefits us individually as developers in the immediate future, but taking on the entire establishment benefits everyone and will change the landscape. We all want the same end, and the 35 people strong at OUYA want to work with developers to make this happen – you’re not just a bullet point in my strategy for 2014 – you ARE THE ENTIRE STRATEGY. So please come help shape the future of games in the living room with us.