Author Archives: David Mullich
What Makes A Game Well-Designed?
When a man was asked why he bought a tacky velvet painting of a nude model for his den, he replied, “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.”
If you’re reading this, you probably enjoy playing games. But there are some that you enjoyed better than others. Why? Was it just that you liked the theme? The art? The story? The genre?
A well designed game, regardless of genre, puts the player in a state of flow. Flow is the mental state of operation in which a player playing a game is immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. When players experience flow, time stops, nothing else matters, and when they finally stop playing the game, they have no concept of how long they have been playing.
Game elements that contribute to creating a state of flow include:
- Clear goals for the player to achieve.
- A steady stream of not-too-easy, not-too-hard challenges, taking into account that the player’s skill is gradually improving as they play the game.
- Providing the player with immediate feedback about whether or not s/he has successfully overcome a challenge or met a goal.
- Replacing met goals with new goals to achieve.
Other essential elements are complexity and depth.
Complexity has to do with how difficult it is to learn a game’s rules. A game should be easy to learn; that is, it should not be so complex that the player cannot understand the rules. That doesn’t mean that a well-designed game can’t have a lot of rules, but if it does, the player should only be required to learn a basic rule set at the start of the game and then be gradually introduced to more advanced rules are s/he progresses.
Depth has to do with how many interesting decisions a player has to make. A game with depth remains interesting to play and has more things to discover even after the player has played it many times. That is, it should be difficult to master.
A well designed game should be easy to learn but difficult to master. That is, it should have a low degree of complexity but a high degree of depth.
The next time you find yourself playing a game that you really enjoyed, stop and ask yourself, how difficult was it for me to learn this game? Did I lose track of time while playing it? And would I enjoy it just as much if I were to play it all over again?
How Do Game Developers Make Money?
Whenever I get an incoming class of new game students, I ask them, “How many of you are enrolled here just because you like playing video games and want to learn more about their hobby?” No hands raised. Then I follow up with, “How many of you want to actually make money at game development?” Every hand goes up.
So, exactly how do you make money by making games?
Well, the first thing you should know, I tell my students, is that most computer games do not “make money”, and by “make money” I mean “earn a profit”. The estimates for the percentage of games that break even (earn the amount of money that they cost to make) is 5-30%, and that figure certainly doesn’t count all the games made by indie developers released through the App Store or on a web portal.
Most games earn money by being bought in a “brick & mortar” store (such as GameStop) or downloaded from a virtual store, like App Store, and the developer receives a percentage of the sales.
In recent years, many game developers have adopted a “free-to-play” model, allowing gamers to download their games and play them for free. So how do they make money? There are three basic techniques:
- Sell additional levels, assets or features.
- Sell virtual goods (such as power-ups and decorative items) as micro transactions.
- Sell eyeballs (incorporate advertising).
- Work for hire. The publisher pays the developer a negotiated fee for developing the game, and then they part ways. The developer gets no money from sales or other revenues, and has no other rights to the game, including to its characters.
- Publishing license agreement. The publisher pays the developer an advance against royalties for developing the game; that is, the publisher pays the developers costs for making the game — but not all at once; the publisher pays the money out in increments when the developer completes pre-negotiated deliverables, called milestones. Then when the game is sold at retail, the developer gets a royalty; that is, a percentage of the sales — but not until after the advances have been earned out.
Let’s say the publisher advanced the developer $5M for developing the game. The developer will not receive one penny of royalties until the game has sold enough that the developer’s percentage of the sales would have been $5M. (Note that in all my years in the game industry, have I have never known a developer who worked on a project for me to have earned any royalties). In a publishing license agreement, the developer may also be granted certain rights, such as right of first refusal to make a sequel, or a percentage of character merchandise rights.
Of course, that’s if the developer is publishing its own game.
If a developer works for a publisher, then there are two main models.
Of course, the way most of us in the game industry is by working for someone else who is taking these risks. But even then, there is some risk involved. As an employee, there is a risk of getting laid off, which happens far too frequently in the game industry. As a contractor, there is a risk that your client won’t pay you for your work, which has happened a couple of times to me, too.
So, as I tell my students, don’t make games merely because you hope to get rich. Instead, do it because you can’t imaging doing anything else, despite the risks.
David Mullich 