How to get the most out of Twitch

Livestreaming is on the rise, and we're yet to see the full force of what Twitch streaming can do for game developers looking to get the word out about the latest and greatest new game experiences.

At tinyBuild, we've been working with Twitch and livestreamers for a while now -- in fact our best ever sales day was thanks to a livestreaming session we put together with PewDiePie last year. If you can get the livestreaming community to care about your game it can yield incredible results for building a fanbase, and of course, scoring sales.

For those of you who have no idea about the ins and outs of Twitch, it's best to get to know how these services really work first. Once you begin to watch lots of content that is in a similar vein to how you'd want to be covered, you'll get a good idea of how to proceed with your Twitch strategies.

Twitch streamers love to focus on interacting with their audiences, so you'll want to give them reasons to use your games to build their communities, rather than just spamming them with links and codes for your game.

When you're contacting Twitch streamers about your game, the best way to make them care is to give them exactly what they need, as quickly as possible. Streamers want a quick description of your game, a code or link to download the game for free, and a video or two of the game in action, so they can assess whether it's worth covering.

As mentioned previously, they also want ways to use your game to interact with their audience, be it extra codes to give away to viewers, or an assurance that you'll tell your own fanbase when a livestreamer starts broadcasting your game.

But before you even get in contact with them, make sure your game actually streams properly! Go download all the most popular streaming software, like Open Broadcaster Software and XSplit, then make sure your game plays nicely with each. If a streamer is put off playing your game because of technical issues, that's just the worst.

There are opportunities to work with Twitch directly too. The company is still pretty fresh and the team is exploring how it can help game developers out. At tinyBuild we've been working with the Twitch team to market some of our upcoming games, including featuring on the front page of Twitch, and it's working rather well for us.

Before I sign off, you might find the following link useful. It's a list of contact information for hundreds of livestreamers, as collected together by myself. Enjoy! http://tinybuild.com/twitch

By Mike Rose. Formerly a video game journalist of eight years, Mike Rose is now the talent scout and general firestarter at indie developer and publisher. tinyBuild Games.

Game developers need to accept reality: Virtual reality.

Unlike many of his investors and the analysts who follow his company, I wasn't sent scrambling to consult Star Trek or the Marvel comics to discover why Mark Zuckerberg had swooped for the mysterious sounding Oculus Rift last year – let alone why he thought Facebook should spend $2 billion on it.

The games industry had kept me ahead of the wider technology space. Virtual Reality had been back on our radar for at least 18 months before the Facebook CEO got out his wallet.

Zuckerberg surely suspects that Facebook's flat desktop experience – or even its increasingly dominant mobile fly-by interface – will one day be about as relevant as using smoke signals to ask your hunter-gatherer neighbour to bring over a couple of extra wooly mammoth steaks for the cave bake.

He certainly wasn't about to let some VR incubated social network get a head start. However we choose to swap cat photos and pictures of our lunch in years to come, Zuckerberg is willing to spend billions to be part of it.

Pie in the pixelated sky?

The same should be true of game developers. As I say, we had a jump start on Virtual Reality 2.0.

Yet most I meet are highly sceptical that VR will EVER be how we play games, let along that we'll do it anytime soon.

For instance, Sony was demoing its Project Morpheus headset at the last Develop conference, and plenty of attendees took it out for a spin.

The verdict? Cooler than they expected, but nothing to rival franchises like Far Cry, FIFA, Dragon Age or Grand Theft Auto.

Now, I think they'd be right if they were talking about the next couple of years, though perhaps wrong if they're thinking the next ten.

But many game developers seem to mean… forever!

Let’s get real

This is madness. The future of interactive entertainment is VR. The question is when not if.

All you need to know to make this prediction is Moore's Law.

To jump to the end of the story, ever-increasing processing power means we'll eventually have VR that is practically indistinguishable from our current reality (assuming we escape global warming or nuclear Armageddon on the way, of course.)

Will it take 20 years, 50 years, or 200 years?

Search me, but if I look at the difference between Spacewar from the 1960s or Pong from the 1970s and the sort of games we see on next-gen consoles today, then I'm inclined to bet on brilliant engineering and programming delivering it sooner rather than later.

But anyway the fact is we don't need true reality in a headset (or whatever device VR eventually settles into) for VR games to be sufficiently compelling.

Something very close to reality will be achieved many decades before we get to perfection.

That near-reality experience will be so immersive, empowering, exciting and even frightening that the idea that anyone is going to instead sit in front of a TV fiddling with a joypad is laughable.

Virtual Rome wasn't built in a day

Just because I believe VR will eventually be achieved and universal, that doesn't mean I think it will be easy getting there.

We don't yet have the scaffolding to create a convincing VR sock drawer, let alone a fully immersive world.

But VR games today have as much in common with where VR games will end up as a Punch and Judy puppet show has with Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens.

There is so much to be invented, tested, and learned.

And that's why I believe VR will be the most exciting area to work in games over the next few years.

For all the advances in what we used to call multimedia, we're still near the bottom of a Mount Everest that has to be scaled.

Or to mix metaphors, while films can now conjure up utterly lifelike scenes – given sufficient talent and months of rendering time – when it comes to live, interactive VR entertainment, we're gazing across the Uncanny Valley.

We're wondering when to take our first hesitant steps downhill. It'll be years before we can even think about climbing out the other side.

Tomorrow's world

Old hands have seen this sort of thing before. It reminds me of the consensus that said 3D would never be mainstream in video games, because how would you do side-scrolling platform games in 3D?

Soon enough, Super Mario 64 and Tomb Raider showed you couldn't quite achieve the same thing – but you could do something better.

Or think about mobile games.

I co-founded Pocket Gamer in 2005 when most people's idea of fun on a phone was Snake on a Nokia. Game developers were at the forefront when it came to scoffing.

But the technology moved incredibly fast, and now mobile is arguably the most popular platform for games.

Similarly, over the next few years, experimentation and innovation by pioneering game developers will radically improve VR entertainment, and along the way lay down the laws of virtual reality for generations to come.

How fast should a VR player turn and move? Can a static player be made to believe they can jump and fly?

And what to do when a player leans into a supposedly solid wall? Go black or fade out or send an electric shock through the headset? (Well, perhaps not that last…)

Forget Facebook or even the first true Virtual Reality Super Mario.

I have a hunch that VR game developers will work out the first 'rules' of a ubiquitous digital reality – one that someday we'll all live in.

Blog by Owain Bennallack, freelance journalist and member of Develop: Brighton advisory board. 

GUEST BLOG: Window Shopping in Steam

My dad used to own a shop. It was a men's clothing store. He was in business for a long time (over 50 years) and only recently retired. I've learnt a few things from his experience managing a small store. One of them I remember quite clearly is related to the shop window. He used to say that no matter what you put in certain spot in the window it will sell well. If you put something good then you'll sell truckloads of it, if it's something mediocre then it'll simply sell better than it ought to.

The store had 2 windows, a big one, where the 'sweet spots' (there were a couple I think) were placed, and a smaller one, on the side. In that smaller one he usually put stuff that was new or on sale, last pieces of last year's items, etc. He changed that one more often because it was there to serve a purpose (increase the sales of what was there) not to attract people to the store (that's the main window's purpose).

My dad's store as it appears in Google Maps. The side window isn't even visible from this angle

I can't but find similarities between how my dad's store worked and how Steam works. You have your main window (the big banner with game pictures that appear when you open Steam) and you have your side windows (the 'New Releases', the 'Top Sellers',...). If Steam thinks your game is a great game (or is going to be a great seller) you'll make it to the main window, otherwise you'll be in the side window ('New Releases') for a while and only if you prove to be good enough, move to the main one.

As of lately we're hearing a lot about nay sayers talking about the indie bubble. They argue that the amount of games published on Steam is going to drown the good indie games. I don't think that's what's going to happen. Indie hits are going to go on happening and Steam is going to support them just as much as they did in the past. The problem is going to affect niche indie games. There are a lot of games being published every day in Steam now. We released Super Toy Cars on June the 7th, along with 27 other games! What's the effect of that? Our side window time was reduced to mere hours (8-10 hours).

When we launched LightFish in 2011 the game stayed in the 'New Releases' first page for over a week. That's 15-20 times longer! That means we found then a lot more people that liked the niche genre of the game and it showed in our sales.

Still, blaming Valve for opening the gates to everyone is neither fair, smart or, more importantly, a solution. Actually, I believe there's no one to blame. How could you blame anyone for doing what you do (releasing a game on Steam) or for giving them that chance? I personally don't like many of the games but then again I'm stupid and I might have the same opinion about Minecraft if I didn't know better. Only the market has the right to decide what's worth it and what's not.

So, what can we do about it? Well, the first thing we should do is make sure we have good games worth playing. Then marketing them the right way. Make sure there's buzz about your game. You've tried e-mailing the main webpages and youtubbers and they are ignoring you? Maybe you need to do something different, something better, more unique with your game or the way you communicate it. Be it releasing the game in additional platforms, polishing a long forgotten genre or adding something unique to it, mixing two genres in innovative ways, creating something completely new, or presenting your game to everyone dressed in a pink suit or, better, do a combination of these.

Alexander Bruce not only had unique style but also an outstanding game in his hands (Antichamber)

You can do anything to try to get our game noticed by the press and thus by the public. Anything but blaming Valve because your window time is now a small portion of what it used to be. Now we have to work to get noticed while before just being in Steam gave you that marketing for free. Deal with it and find solutions to the problem!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go pick my green suit from the laundry.


This blog was written by Eduardo Jimenez from Eclipse Games. Eduardo will be talking in the Production track at the upcoming Develop Conference 8 - 10 July, Brighton

GUEST BLOG: Life Moves Pretty Fast

Wondering whether to attend this year’s Develop Conference? Stop wondering, and commit. Commit right now. Clear your diary. Book your train ticket. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

To quote Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it”.

Everything is changing. Everything is always changing. Novelty, imagination, surprise and experimentation are fundamentally embedded into games culture and markets. We bestride the twin galloping horses of technology and culture like giggling, partially-blindfolded, stunt riders. Our job is to make millions of people do things they’ve never done before - while our platforms, models and markets are in a continual state of turbulence.

This month, Amazon announced a phone that tracks your head movements. Didn’t they used to sell books? Cloud Imperium revealed that they have 260 people working on Star Citizen. Didn’t you used to need a publisher to make a game like that?

So stop and look around once in a while. Remind yourself that games are made by people; people more or less like you - and that they’re ultimately FOR people, too. Good analytics will give you excellent insight into the way your players are behaving right now; but if you want them to stay with you next year, you’ll need a taste for the future.

Get it at Develop.



Jonathan Smith is Strategic Director at TT Games, and a member of the Develop in Brighton Advisory Board.

GUEST BLOG: Realistic Jam

Game Jams are a lot of fun to be part of. They're inherently flexible, and can last anything from an hour to several days.

Most of the jams I've been involved with have been fairly typical affairs, where a bunch of people arrive with laptops or use lab machines at a university. I've organised and hosted some really strange ones too though; Nat Marco [ http://www.honeyslug.com/ ] ran one a few years ago in which people made games out of paper and rocks:

The year after that, we did "Jam Game Jam: A Game Jam With Jam", which involved throwing jam around on the deck of an East German fishing trawler:

The same day, Jonathan Whiting [ http://jonathanwhiting.com/ ] ran a level design workshop in which people defined rules, stuck bits of paper down onto the deck, and pranced around:

 He'd initially approached me saying he had an idea with scary spatial requirements, and I replied that I generally read "scary" to mean "exciting".

Those examples might seem esoteric compared to the day job you spend at a tablet or keyboard, but there's a lot of value in them. Games are fundamentally about rules and behaviour, and when we bind those to a given type of hardware, we're also binding them to a lot of established convention.

The technology we use isn't the pinnacle of games, it's just another branch of stuff we can express them through. Play and games have a history stretching back thousands of years, all of it relevant to the things we make.

Sure, few if any of the weirder avenues point in viable commercial directions, but that's not what jams are about. They're increasing your skills as a designer, artist or programmer, they're a way of hanging out with other developers, and if you happen to make something amazing that's probably too weird for an existing audience or platform, there's a growing throng of festivals and events worldwide that might still be interested.

A game jam is a perfect place to experiment with the strangest ideas you have. That's because beyond tech (or the intentional lack thereof), the best thing about a jam is the time constraint it imposes. It creates a space where it's okay to try something new and perhaps fail horribly, knowing that the project won't drag on.

Some of the best things I ever designed, way back, came from speed mapping contests run by the Unreal Tournament mapping community. The results were never pretty with a four hour time limit, but they were an excellent way of getting a good, solid sketch done.

Without such constraints, it's easy to get attached to something then sink too much effort into it, and I've seen even established developers do this. A game jam is above all a focussing tool. You might still become myopically attached to a duff idea, but that deadline is going to come in nice and quick to finish it off instead of letting you toil at it for months.

 

David Hayward [ http://www.ympt.co.uk ] wrote this blog. He will be running the Develop in Brighton Game Jam  for 2014.
Photos by Natalie Seery [ http://www.natalieseery.com ] and Jessica Bernard [ http://www.ph0t0.co.uk ])

GUEST BLOG: Industry echoes: 19 years later, the first E3 still rings in my ears

I was lucky enough to attend the first E3 back in 1995. It was, I think, my second ever trip over the Atlantic.

For a reasonably young man, whose work travels had up until then taken him to Croydon, Derby and Woking, it was overwhelmingly exciting. I stayed in the hotel through which Arnie rode a horse True Lies, and the one friends tell me Pamela Anderson took her clothes off in “The Pamela Anderson Story” (sadly no longer available, apparently).

I thought of my teachers who said I'd amount to little and imagined them still tormented by little bastards like me, cursed to a life of endlessly scrubbing chalk phalluses off their suit jackets whilst I was on a business trip to where Americans came from.

They were actually filming Heat in the streets outside. Imagine that. No do: imagine that.

For an industry which had historically sold its wares on hunks of plastic or “floppy” “disks” (technically neither, though no-one seemed to mention this) that first E3 was a sign of intent. We were moving from business shows in stuffy hotels literally to Hollywood.

Of course, as a young industry, we were hopelessly naive. Rich execs decided that the best way of showing how great their games were was to throw vast amounts of money at their stands; setting a dick-waving precedent which would escalate so quickly that apparently Peter Moore originally suggested he announce GTA4’s appearance on Xbox at the 2006 Microsoft press conference not with a fake tattoo, but by dangling the game’s logo from his still smarting Prince Albert.

Poetically, in 1995, no stand was more impressive than that of Acclaim. Standing proudly inside the main doors, where EA usually is these days, it was a nightclub of a booth, all flashing lights, massive screens and pulsating music from show open to show fucking close.

I was working on the stand next door, so I was the regular unintended victim of Acclaim’s “theme “ – a 30-second ditty which opened the 10 minute showreel. I heard it 162 times.

Now and again – close to 20 years later – it still bounces round my skull.
It went like this: “[Something, something] Acclaim, your entertainment source. Hits on every format – can you feel the force? Interactive entertainment, it’s so hot you just can’t contain it, something something something something Acclaim!”162 times.

What’s most astonishing about this song isn’t that presumably an actual human being was paid coins of money in order to write it and that other human beings didn’t think that the first human was joking, nor that it made such an indelible mark on my then young brain that even now – at an age when I genuinely occasionally forget the names of my family – I can still recall most of it.

No, what was most astonishing was, that from a marketing point of view, spending such a vast amount of money on a stand and theme song did the job – even now, when people stop me on the street to enquire as to where they can find the source of entertainment, I remind them of Acclaim before showing them some SNES and Mega Drive cartridges and pushing them over so they can feel the force.

Sadly, that’s where the story ends. These people can’t buy Turok: Evolution, WWF Wrestlemania, nor Dave Mira’s BMX XXX even if they wanted to. Which they didn’t: Acclaim went out of business in 2004 – leaving nothing more than a few gaming controversies, some brilliant PR ideas and one dreadful song.
E3 has always been about attracting attention, making the most noise, having the biggest queues. Yet, with the exception of a just couple of years when, quite rightly, publishers questioned the amount they were pouring into the building that Nicholas Cage tried to blow up in Face/Off, E3 has got bigger but not necessarily better.

The news rarely comes from the show floor any more, beamed instead globally onto monitors the day before, via grainy, buffering streams. American execs trying hard to be casual without realising they’re memes in waiting.
Fact is, if you’re a publisher in decline or a hardware manufacturer which lacks confidence to deliver your vision, chasing Twitter favourites rather than sticking to your design philosophy, attracting such vast attention is pointless unless you’re able to deliver the goods. Come see my talk at Develop this year and I’ll show you how to be Mike Bithell – current King of the Indies, deliverer of goods and, at the time of writing, someone who’s yet to resort to a theme tune.

Though it is only a matter of time.

This blog was written by Simon Byron, a director at Premier PR. Simon will be talking in the new Marketing track at Develop in Brighton on 9 July. www.developconference.com

GUEST BLOG: Go With the Flow - A Fresh Look at Old Concepts

I suspect that some of you reading this will think “Why talk about something as obvious as flow when everybody in the industry understands the concept and gets it right?”

Well, believe it or not, there’s way more to flow than people in the industry might imagine.

Only the other week, Keith Stuart talked in The Guardian about the concept of flow as one of the reasons people find games like Candy Crush so compelling (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-crush-angry-birds-psychology-compulsive-casual-games-mobile-flappy-birds).

When players are so completely engaged with a game, to the extent that they don't even hear you when you call them or acknowledge you when you talk to them, there’s a very good chance that they’re experiencing flow in the game play. And when an individual is experiencing flow, they’re completely fixated on the task of playing the game, and you’ll find it pretty hard to break their concentration.

I remember late last year consulting at a large game developers studio and the fire alarm went off - it was lunchtime and a few employees were playing a game in the games room during their break. Despite the piecing sound of the alarm, they didn’t even look up from their games and the boss of the company had to literally go in and drag them out.

So you can see how flow, the state of utter engagement in gaming, can certainly account for how compelling video game playing can be.

A really great piece of work that I would recommend to developers is by Boyle et al (2012) – ‘Engagement in digital entertainment games: A systematic review’ - who initially uncovered a staggering 20,000 papers related to engagement, and then drilled this number down to 55 key papers to review.

The authors describe flow as the most influential construct used to explain the subjective emotional experience and optimal state of pleasure experienced in video game play. They highlight how flow is actually quite a complex construct involving eight different components. They maintain that central to the concept, is that the experience is intrinsically rewarding and enables immersion in the game, and they suggest that flow as a state evokes high levels of concentration and allows the player to have a sense of control, have clearly defined goals as well as providing direct feedback.

Further to this, is the motivation to escape the real world, because flow in gaming does offer opportunities to carry out behaviours not possible in the real world!

Last year I was delighted to be asked to contribute to the Charlie Brooker documentary ‘How Video Games Changed the World’. In the documentary I talked about the concept of flow and this really hit home with many gamers who watched the programme. In the weeks after, I had loads of emails from gamers who were quite relieved to understand what was happening to them when they were in this almost altered state of mind, completely fixated on a game.

Following the programme a blogger posted the stills of my contribution about flow on tumblr and so far nearly 60,000 people have reblogged or commented. (http://senjukannon.tumblr.com/post/68759294958/gloriousbacon-cyber-psychologist-berni-goode) As a psychologist, what this tells me is that gamers really want to understand what’s happening to them when they’re engaged in virtual worlds and that they very much want developers to make games that enhance this state for them, as they garner immense pleasure and contentment from the experience.

Alex Meredith, Cyberpsychologist from Nottingham Trent University says "Developers can really embrace the concept of flow and incorporate it into the development of their games, within ethical parameters of course, and of particular interest is how flow impacts on motivation to play and the sense of self during game play and cathartic release.”

And there’s a lot more to the concept of flow in video games that psychologists like myself are still uncovering, I’m especially interested in the group flow and recently saw a great presentation by Linda Kaye of Edge Hill University who examined the extent to which group flow experiences (versus solo flow experiences) impact on post-play positive effect. The results of her work indicate that post-play positive effect was heightened in group flow, something which is particularly interesting when designing for collaborative play.

At this year’s Evolve, on the first day of the Develop Conference, as part of the psychology track, a number of leading psychologists will join me to look at what it means to develop games that enhance this flow experience, and together we’ll be offering some ethical take-away tips about how to build in strategies that evoke the flow state in gamers and really heighten the gaming experience.

Berni Good is a psychologist who specialises in Cyberpsychology, particularly in video games and is the founder of Cyberpsychologist  Limited,  www.cyberpsychologist.co.uk. This year Berni will curate the psychology track at Evolve which will see some of the leading psychologists and experts in the field of psychology in video games talk and give amazing insights and tips into how to develop games incorporating psychology to really heighten the experience for the gamer. 

@GoodBerni