ChiefBakingOfficer
San Francisco, CA
Male, 33
What's the best thing since sliced bread? Duh! Video Games!!! I'm the Founder and Chief Baking Officer of Sliced Bread Games. I wanted to see what it was like to make and publish my own iOS game ... so I did! Our first game, Sliced Bread, is now in the top 25 charts on the iTunes (Entertainment category)! Game info at: www.slicedbreadgame.com. Ask me anything!
Ben, this is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg (sandwich). Some of the most brilliantly designed games of all times died on the vine with poor marketing, and sometimes a game that has great marketing but is terrible has poor sales. Hits are a very, very fickle thing to come by in the gaming industry, and I have worked on games both great and terrible that have had a wide range of sales success. Ultimately, it comes down to your belief in a game. With Angry Birds, Rovio knew they had a great game and marketed the heck out of it. I would focus first on making a great game, and then building the marketing to support it. It's important to plan out the marketing while still in development, because you don't want to launch a game with no marketing plans, or else you will likely just shortchange yourself.
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Draw Something creator OMGPop was purchased by Zynga for $200 million last week. You can read about it here: http://news.yahoo.com/zyngas-purchase-draw-something-going-drawsome-213850131.html I think the game itself has *SOME* staying power, especially since the developers have the ability to add new words on the fly. New words will be important for keeping the game fresh. Even if the game does burn out in not too long of a time, OMGPop has a decent customer base online, and if Zynga is ever hungry for anything, it's new paying customers.
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That is a really, really good question. I have to think about it for a while longer, but off the top of my head I thought a game like Nutz from Limbic was hilarious and really well done, but I don't know what kind of success it has generated. As for the opposite, I would say a lot of these apps that do just one thing that blew up have been a surprise.
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Some people definitely do! I just haven't met them yet! :-)
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Ah...the ultimate conundrum. Generally, if you ask permission first you will be denied. If you make a great knockoff, you will be sued (or even bought!). My belief is that if you are going to make a game, make it your own. Most mobile games take inspiration from something else, mine included. But I put my own spin and my own ideas into play, and for me that made it different and more satisfying.
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Oh I hate this question, because I can never just choose one game. I generally have to keep it to a franchise rather than specific games. Here are my top ten (in no particular order): 1) Halo 2) Ratchet & Clank 3) Battlefield 4) Batman (the new ones) 5) Uncharted 6) Mass Effect (just 2 and 3) 7) Dead Space 8) Resident Evil 9) Lego Games 10) Mirror's Edge If push comes to shove and you really twist my arm, I would probably go with my number one game as Resident Evil 4.
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In terms of straight man-hours, this would be about a two month process to get to the version that is in the app store now. We did go through some iterating in terms of design and gameplay balance, and that can take a lot of time along with strict a QA process. What is important is knowing who needs to do what - an engineer probably won't be able to do what an artist needs to in terms of fixing art bugs, and vice-versa. As for the costs, I can't share what I spent, but every developer and publisher may want to work on a different model. Some developers may want to do rev share, some may want cash, and some may want a hybrid of the two. It is important to find a developer that you are comfortable with if you are going to make and publish a game.
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