Disqus - Latest Comments for alanodea

Re: Investors shouldn’t finance races to the bottom

alanodea — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 11:35:59 -0000

This has happened more in games than any other industry and as we try and rebuild enterprise on mobile and across platforms well see exactly this point hold true.

Re: Occupy the App Store!!

alanodea — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 18:04:49 -0000

Surely this is why games dominate engagement and monitisation and will continue to do so on all our future platforms.

Re: When should games companies think about licensing?

alanodea — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:48:48 -0000

I think 400K or 1M are great targets I'd suggest amending it too per territory. For instance 1M in the UK in Moshi's case is a huge 1/60th of the market and demonstrates great brand saturation where 400K in domestic US is a drop in that ocean. Maybe 1% of target country/territory for serious thinking 2+% to start rolling out a master toy licence in that territory. I'd also argue given the longitudinal mature of producing, stocktaking and distribution of retail products that you have some sort of time advice i.e. if the brand has sustained 400K or 1M MAU for longer than a year or ideally two+ which was also something Moshi managed to do extremely well. Some brands are just longer lasting and warrant licencing.

Re: http://www.vampirecities.com/signup1/?utm_expid=49406447-4

alanodea — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:02:51 -0000

This looks like a really cool game. I wonder when its going to get launched?

Re: Ouya? Booyah! [Marketing Stories] - What Games Are

alanodea — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:41:37 -0000

I win this argument :)

Re: Ouya? Booyah! [Marketing Stories] - What Games Are

alanodea — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:33:24 -0000

You said the same thing about live streaming services like onlive and gackai yet they have been shown to work and are since being bought are going to be the backbone of the next generation of mainstream consoles online streaming services

Re: Are Facebook games finished for startups?

alanodea — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:52:51 -0000

Interesting I assume others includes Google+.

59% are essentially working on Smart Devices i.e. iOS/Android formats which I categorise as essentially the same class.

This is natural SmartApps are cheap to develop the games are not massively asyncronous or in need of large hosting, infrastructure, billing systems, logistics, customer support, player matchmaking, or event triggering across a social graph or external api. These require intensive activity, time and cost for developers even for the the relatively simplistic social and casual browser games.
I think given f8's recent announcements about the changes to their notification and messaging systems, open graph and social widgets in the timeline we're going to see a new class of apps being developed for Facebook. I also still think there are huge opportunities for all ranges of developers on Facebook and in the future Google+ so i'm going to stay bullish on social networks.I'm also very bullish about Android and cross platfom social applications and games with widget elements being pushed to various platforms including eventually smart TV's which I believe is where the market is ultimately headed.

Re: What does an LP look for in a venture capital fund manager?

alanodea — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 07:34:51 -0000

Hey guys great series and articles so far my comment is about relevance for this post if the series is fifty questions you should ask before raising venture capital.

It might be more valuable to focus on what sort of questions to ask your potential VC partner i.e. more tactical advice and less strategic and VC value chain issues.

As a company owner looking for funding I don't care where my VC money comes. I’ve never had had my board members, investors, co-founders or managers ask me about what a LP is and how a VC raises its money.

Nor am I going to be sitting down over tea talking to VC partners about their own fund raising struggles, strategies and hardships :) I wouldn’t expect my VC to share that information with me or any other company or company owner looking to raise money with them.

If it is fifty question you should ask before raining venture capital

The next questions in the series to my mind are filling in more detail on what a VC is looking for and what does it involve for a company owner when and if they decide to chase and secure VC funding.

So questions such as
• How much do they invest?
• What are the typical format and criteria for investment?
• What returns and timeframes do they expect a company to deliver?
• How will they work with the company i.e. does investment require board positions, special share privileges and voting right?
• What is the general process of getting VC investment?
• How long will it take?

Beyond that if you think it’s really important to focus on LP’s and talk about the fact that VC’s manage their own investors funds then a further output of this post might be some questions a company owner should ask when performing diligence on their potential VC investor?

• Has the VC currently got a viable fund under management?
• Can they invest?
• What will they invest in?
• How much of that fund is current invested and not invested?
• When does the current fund end?
• When are they expecting to see returns on that fund for their own investors?
• What terms and RoI are they supposed to deliver to their investors?
• What other companies have they invested in for that fund?
• How many failures, successes and exits have they achieved so far with their fund?
• Can I talk to owners of other companies in the fund and have you got contacts for them

A good VC should have all of this information on hand and a good entrepreneur founder should have these questions lined up if their getting to a term sheet with a VC.

Re: What does an LP look for in a venture capital fund manager?

alanodea — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 06:58:09 -0000

Error

Re: EA Louse, you are no EA Spouse. Your pettiness is shocking

alanodea — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:43:51 -0000

Yes I agree and I think the time to take those discussions to the public forum is now, and will as you rightly say be a trend going forward.

Re: EA Louse, you are no EA Spouse. Your pettiness is shocking

alanodea — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:42:00 -0000

Sure and I'll be right there defending your right to not agree with him :)

As they say I am not a man of the people but I am most certainly a man for the people:)

Re: EA Louse, you are no EA Spouse. Your pettiness is shocking

alanodea — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:04:12 -0000

Nicolas he’s not a child that needs a public berating or spanking. He is a games industry professional and our peer. I would argue that he needs OUR support and he most assuredly needs an industry and peers that should support his viewpoint, his stance and his voice. He and all the many, many, many others like him deserve an industry where he should feel safe and free to complain and vent his emotions, anger and despair. It is our failure as an industry that he has to hide his name to simple state his feelings, he should be free to bitch and gripe in public all he wants.

The guys clearly loves his company and the games he’s working on. He also very clearly wants to respect and admire his company, publisher and managers but they seem to be making that a hard task for him. The guys annoyed and pissed off and feels betrayed that something he admires, respects and has devoted so much of his time too has failed him.
I’ve seen far too many reasoned post company/project failure stories, post mortems and measured articles and there necessary and make for interesting reading but they only ever present half the story. There’s a human side to every game company failure and that human story is not measured and reasoned it is the story of people that have been failed by managers, failed by publishers, failed by the very companies that they dedicate so much time, effort, blood, sweat and tears too and are then left without jobs, without believe, without respect AND they have a right to be pissed off AND they have a right to vent that anger and frustration on the Internet.

This is the 21st century the age of the social graph, the age where each and every person has an equality of speech, expression and presence on the Internet. Where the online world is dictated by like buttons, sharing and status updates. It is an Internet defined first and foremost by the word Friend. It is the personalised web where an ocean of expression consists of the infinite diversity and immediacy of the individual voice.

Let the guy have his voice. Let him vent his rage. He is not a brat. He is not a jerk. He is just a person that pissed off and he has my support and he deserves his industry’s and his peer’s support.

I believe more people should be using the web to rant at the failures of the games studios, companies, managers and publishers they work for. I believe a generation of game industry leaders and managers have failed the companies they work for and the employees they serve. I believe these failures need another side of the story. Another, rawer, human voice that runs contrary to the measured reasoned business analysis from the usual, stalwart and risk adverse august body of industry experts.

Our peers, our contemporaries, our equals should be able to say the things they feel need saying RIGHT or WRONG without getting slammed for being a jerk, be lessened, demeaned, or be seen lacking because he does not possess the deft hand of a practiced blogist, or provide us with some deeper hereto unknown insight to the business failings, or fail to provide us with a well structured post mortem of the full cause and effects of the lead up to these failures.

Sometimes people are just people. Hurt, betrayed, stinging, bleeding, crying, screaming and angry at the world and its peoples and sometimes just sometimes pissed off son of bitches.

Re: Service providers: Huddle

alanodea — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 06:25:12 -0000

Goshdo is a start-up and definitely worth tracking. I've used the Beta and its getting more useful. Basecamp as you say has its specific uses but has been widely adopted in a lot of games companies which suggests it value to those companies.

The other major dedicated commercial software I would recommend is http://www.hansoft.se/ its expensive but its been widely adopted in the games industry and it very featureful.

Re: Service providers: Huddle

alanodea — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 06:15:55 -0000

There are two serious contenders to Huddle as seriously I don't actually know a single games person or company that is using Huddle.

One is obviously Basecamp which is being used by games companies (and we use it ourself so I can heartily recommend it) and the other is a dedicated games project management and collaboration tool Goshido www.goshido.com

Re: http://www.alanodea.com/post/983244438

alanodea — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:09:32 -0000

Sure it simply a matter of Dave making a point. He's really only talking about ranges here and making the point that it's much cheaper now than in the past to fund and start a new start-up.

Re: And the winner is…

alanodea — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:28:52 -0000

I like it :)

Re: A note on first mover advantage – there is none

alanodea — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:33:32 -0000

Steve Blank is an inspirational guru to web and game start-ups. We use 4 steps as our bible at the moment.

Re: How much does the UK government spend on games?

alanodea — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:11:07 -0000

As far as I'm aware NC Soft applied for and received £1 million on the Grant for Business Investment (formerly known as Selective Finance for Investment or SFIE grants). http://www.1up.com/do/newsS...

Re: How much does the UK government spend on games?

alanodea — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:46:38 -0000

Thats not entirely a realistic map of investment presented by the government for the games industry.

We have the various skills councils (Skill Set etc) who provide training and other soft investment , we have the R&D bodies such as NESTA and the Technology Strategy board which have all invested heavily in games technology companies and ITC over the last few years. We also have the R&D tax credit system that is direct aid in the form of government tax deferral for qualifying companies I don’t know many established game companies and publishers that don’t subscribe to this program every year. Additional the business support agencies such as Connect Midlands and Business Link provide capital loans and grants to games companies such as management training and investment readiness programs. There’s a lot more money out there to support games companies than just the regional screen and media agencies.

Re: Online game design: which of the three business models will work for you?

alanodea — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:03:53 -0000

My problem with these drivers is that two are marketing/funnel optimisation functions i.e virality and stickyness and one is the core fucntion of a business model that results from getting customers through your marketing funnel and making them stick. To my mind the comparatative dimensions should really be more direct, viral and word of mouth which is to me much more useful side by side comparision to work off. Monitisation would simimilarly have sub groups like subscription, digital goods, trail version so you can stack up and compare like for like. In the world of online games all companies have to focus on virailty, stickyness and monitisations so I agree with Diane compnaies have to focus on all three if you don't your not a business. Good post and discussion guys. If were going to core competencies then its much more relevant to be focusing on the type of monitisation the types of marketing you use.

Re: What is a ‘Social Game’?

alanodea — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:26:26 -0000

We are aiming to launch our first game onto facebook within the next couple of months.

Re: Game Development Begins

alanodea — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 12:11:53 -0000

Thanks Diane. Well let you all know when the game is live.

Re: Game Development Begins

alanodea — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:38:09 -0000

Cheers Ois big stuff coming up in the future but yeah its all kicking off for real now:)

Re: Startup Diary – Communication Tools

alanodea — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 06:06:56 -0000

Of course your right staff costs is the single largest project expense for a game company. We also firmly believe in the benefits of a dedicated work environment. That’s what we are used to. Working with excellent teams and people we love that. Well eventually have a Simple Lifeforms office.

What we’re doing at this very early stage of the business however is metering our company, growth milestone deliveries and investment events in a staged approach. We get a small amount of investment, deliver a product and associated games services (support, billing, feedback, community) as best we can with a small remote team, get that to market see if that works and then go for another stage of investment and grow out the team and put them in an office eventually.

Tadhg and I didn’t want to do the whole let’s start big first with a couple of millions pounds, get a full team of artists, producers, programmers and designers into an office and start cracking into a big console or online MMO project without testing our theories on social games first.

If our first game does well in market we will have spent a relatively small amount of money to prove our assumptions but if it fails and let’s be honest it can as easily fail as succeed we haven’t had the initial overhead of an office or big team that has drained our resources.

The other side of this is we’re very focused on building a business that doesn’t include some of the major problems inherent in typical games development i.e. large staff numbers which when combined with very long development period equals massive monthly and overall project costs.

We’re building a business we hope can scale in some ways like a social network by using concepts such as user generated content and small, lean, agile teams constantly iterating smaller products to reduce overall costs for our projects. We hope to make a company that solves some of the bigger cost inherent in traditional game development. One of those solutions is product and platform targeting. By focusing on social gaming products which presently don’t require the massive costs associated with 3D artists, c programmers and multiple SKU’s for very sophisticated hardware platforms such as PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.

I will be talking a lot more about the business side of Simple Lifeforms in future issues of our development diary.

Re: Startup Diary – Communication Tools

alanodea — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:46:31 -0000

Hey Dave

Yeah we saw that. Thanks for the heads up.