On The Fly Entertainment’s Business Plan
Martin Copp - January 2011
TOC
On The Fly Entertainment’s Business Plan
Martin Copp - January 2011
TOC
Executive Summary
Mission Statement
Social Games
Gladiator Trainer
Monster Trainer
Casual Games
Sum Fighter
Robo Miner
Market
Market Justification
Target Market, Purchase Patterns and Data
Management
Martin Copp - Lead Developer / Lead Designer
Jeff Theriault - Artist
Pierre Chamberlain - Programmer
Mike Kettela - Background Artist
Objectives
Business Aims and Objectives
Keys to Success
Financial Objectives
Marketing Objectives
Unorthodox Marketing Plans
Gladiator Trainer
Robo Miner Advertisement
Kickstarter Project
Student Projects For Advertising
Company Summary
Startup Plan
Company Ownership
Risk Assessment
Company Risk Assessment
Social Game Development Risk Assessment
Marketing Risk Assessment
Start Up Costs
Initial Capital
Equipment and Space
Software
Servers/Database
Competition Analysis and Study
Warstorm - Zynga - San Francisco, California
Mousehunt - HitGrab - Oakville, Ontario
Competitors
Knights of the Crystals - Square Enix - London, UK
Levyn Light - HitGrab - Oakville, Ontario
Lost Trails - Tetris Online Inc - Honolulu, Hawaii
“Clash - Rise of Heroes” - Qunify - San Francisco, California
Conclusion
Executive Summary
Mission Statement
On the Fly Entertainment (OTFE) was founded to create unique experiences in the world of new
media. From social networks to mobile devices to consoles, we’re committed to making fun and
engaging games for a mass market audience.
The game industry is constantly evolving. Technology, design methodologies and development
techniques shift yearly. We strive to be a company that can rapidly adapt to the ever-changing
market situations and niches on which we can capitalize.
Products and Services
As a company we will have two focuses: developing social games and cultivating our portfolio in
order to acquire fees for service work.
Social games will be produced for demographics that are not as heavily targeted by the big
social game studios. Developing in niche genres which are less saturated will give our titles
more exposure without the need for a large marketing budget. This is elaborated upon in our
marketing section.
Initially OTF will be focused on portfolio building by releasing at least four titles over the course
of our first year. With these games on the market, the option of pursuing fee for service work
would be open to us.
The initial selection of social game titles we are determined to produce will be a strong foray into
the international mass market. There are several case studies of similarly sized companies with
games of similar scope and niche presented throughout this document. We compare and
contrast these competitors with our own design goals, using them as a baseline for success.
Social Games
Gladiator Trainer
Gladiator Trainer is a two dimensional social network action role playing game.
Current Gladiator Trainer prototype
Players purchase gladiators with a variety of skills and abilities. Gladiators can be outfitted with
randomly generated items they find in combat, or unique items they can purchase for real
money. Players pit their gladiators against others in arena combat, or cut a swath through
monsters in the Colosseum. Users raise their gladiators from unskilled peasants to noble
warriors, all while competing with their friends to become the greatest Gladiator Trainer on
Facebook.
Gladiator Trainer is our initial proof of concept for a social game. Gladiator Trainer builds on the
formula that many successful social games have used for monetization and virality. Throughout
our competitor analysis, we will compare and contrast our design plans for Gladiator Trainer,
with our competitors. Development of Gladiator Trainer is well past the 60% mark, and it will be
released early in the first quarter of 2011.
Monster Trainer
Monster Trainer is currently in its design phase as a “Pokemon meets Facebook” two
dimensional social network role playing game.
Monster Trainer concept art
Monster Trainer would build upon the technologies and design we have laid out for Gladiator
Trainer. Players would focus on catching and training monsters. Players would have to explore
the world of Monstrum to catch a plethora of monsters. Each month unique monsters would be
released for cash that users could purchase with real money. Friends would be able to pit their
monsters against each other, and compete against other Monster Trainers on Facebook.
Players would be able to trade and breed their monsters, allowing users to not only compete,
but also cooperate.
We believe that Monster Trainer will do exceedingly well on the Facebook platform as there are
numerous games that focus on raising your own pets, yet there are none that implement
Pokemon style combat.
Casual Games
Sum Fighter
Sum Fighter is a casual multi-player puzzle game. Players choose one of six unique characters
and battle their way through a high school math competition. Users rapidly add numbers to
destroy blocks on their screen and threaten their opponent. Using a cursor players drag
adjacent blocks together to combine their face values. The goal is to connect groups of blocks
together in the same quantity as their face value (players would connect five groups of the value
5 to destroy them, or two groups of the value 2, etc.). The first player to have his/her blocks
reach the top for ten seconds loses.
Sum Fighter was initially produced as a hobbyist project but ended up turning into a fully fledged
casual game. We initially planned on selling it on Xbox Live’s independent game market but
have reconsidered as that market is very small. We hope to find a publisher who would be
interested in the title before the end of 2011; otherwise it will be released on Xbox Live’s
independent game market to recoup the revenue for the development time put into it and as a
portfolio piece for the company. Sum Fighter is 90% complete.
Robo Miner
Robo Miner is a slight twist on the “match three similar items” game play mechanic. Players
must catch falling blocks and combine their colours before their screen is filled up with blocks.
Robo Miner is a flash game that was completed as a hobbyist project. It will be used as a free
game on flash portal websites to help advertise Gladiator Trainer. Robo Miner will be tied into
Gladiator Trainer by offering players who complete the game a special code to unlock a item in
Gladiator Trainer. The traffic generated would be relatively minor but it is an interesting
experiment that we elaborate on in our marketing section.
Robo Miner will be monetized by placing ads at the beginning of the game. We do not expect a
large return on this, but it helps to publicize the company and is essentially free marketing.
Robo Miner is 95% complete.
Market
Our initial focus is the social game market and Facebook will be our first distribution channel. Of
the 515 million[1] Facebook users, our early games will target users in the age groups of 18-25
and 26-34 which consist of 29% (149.4 million users) and 23%(118.5 million users)[2] of
Facebook users respectively.
Social games are monetized by the sale of virtual goods. Players pay real money to obtain ingame items and benefits. This virtual goods market has been growing exponentially in the last
three years, not only in the social games space, but the mobile game and massively multi-player
online game sectors as well (such as World of Warcraft).
Facebook and other social network’s games comprise 40-50% of these virtual goods
transactions[2].
Based on the comparisons we have made in our competitor research and analysis section, we
believe our development team has the skill sets to excel in this lucrative fast-paced market. The
following data in the market justification section reinforces our belief that we are poised to enter
this market at the perfect time.
[1]-http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats25.htm
[2]-http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/07/06/facebooks-june-2010-us-traffic-by-age-and-sex-users-aged-18-44-take-a-break-2/
Market Justification
The main public metric for success of a social game is their number of Daily Active Users
(DAUs). In September of 2010 the following data was released.
A graph detailing how many Daily Active Users there are across the top played games on Facebook.
This demonstrates an overall downward trend and many hastily hailed it as evidence of the
social games market beginning to close off -- that players were leaving these social network
games.
However when the data is graphed excluding the five largest social games companies (Zynga,
Electronic Arts, CrowdStar, Playdom and Rockyou), each with an excess of tens of millions of
daily active users, the chart looks like this:
We can see that there is actually a trend in growth upwards.
Next, if you remove the top 50 games from the data, you are left with a sampling of 125 games - each of which had no more than 200,000 DAUs.
This chart demonstrates that the healthiest of games and developers are the smaller
companies.
As a developer the following features of social networks are very appealing:
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No barrier for entry to developers.
○ We do not need to pay a publisher to get our game onto a social network.
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Virality/advertising of social networks.
○ We do not need to compete for visibility/shelf space in a traditional sense, as we
have many avenues to advertise our game. (Elaborated on in our marketing
section).
Consistent revenue and measurable marketing returns.
○ Revenue for each game can easily be linked to their DAUs. Facebook advertising
also gives access to powerful marketing metrics, letting you know exactly what
your advertising returns are in terms of DAUs. (Elaborated on in our marketing
section).
This is a perfect culmination of factors that lead us to believe this is the ideal market for us to
approach for game development.
Target Market, Purchase Patterns and Data
Initially we will be targeting the 18-34 age group of male casual gamers. The reasons for this
are two-fold:
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We have a keen understanding of this market and have researched and studied many
other games focusing on this demographic.
It is a lucrative and large demographic.
This target demographic is the largest consumer of the games on which we have done case
studies and research in our competition analysis. Our social games will fit into a niche similar to
these games and resonate with our target demographic.
This age group provides us with an incredible amount of players with disposable income. These
users will be more likely to purchase our virtual goods as an “impulse buy.” The 18-34 age
range is comprised of 270 million Facebook users and of these users 53%[1] of them play social
games. Of these 140 million players, 10%[2] have spent money on social games.
We have done extensive research on how games outside social networks (World of Warcraft,
Team Fortress 2, Maplestory) have implemented successful micro-transactions for this target
demographic. The research of these tactics along with our in-depth examination of social games
(Competition Analysis and Study) has provided us with what we believe to be a winning
monetization strategy.
[1]-http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30391/Study_53_Of_Facebooks_Users_Have_Played_Social_Games_19_Addicted.php
[2]-http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_100823.html
Monetization
Although social games are free to play, they are traditionally monetized in several ways:
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The sale of virtual goods and content.
○ This is the most common form of monetization for social games. It allows users
to make many small transactions (50 cents to 1 dollar per item). Pricing virtual
goods at this level encourages impulse buys.
Monthly recurring fees for a “premium” membership.
○ Some games offer a premium version of the game for a monthly payment. Very
few social game companies employ this method, as most users are
apprehensive of signing up for recurring fees.
Single time fee for a membership.
○ A few social games grant access to premium content after users have paid a one
time fee.
Ad-based revenues.
○ There are very few social games that run advertisements before users can play.
Generally since ad-based revenue for flash games is so low, and in-game
advertisements are deterrents to users, this is not an ideal choice.
The first option is the most lucrative for our current game designs and would work best for our
target demographic.
We plan on measuring how well we have monetized our games by using the standard industry
metric: comparing the revenue each day to our daily active user count. The average monetized
game on Facebook makes between one and five cents each day, per daily active user
(DAU)[1][2].
The following monetization techniques for Gladiator Trainer will bring the daily average revenue
per user (DARPU) to three cents or more.
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Selling unique monthly items within the twenty-five cent to two dollar range.
Developing an in-game trading system, where players can barter between each other.
○ We believe this is a key element for a successful Facebook game economy, as
demonstrated by Mousehunt in our Competition Analysis.
○ Creating this market gives all of our non-paying users access to paid content,
while providing paying users with a method of obtaining in-game currency they
would not want to invest the time into in order to procure.
Selling one-of-a-kind custom items to users.
○ This is a service we would offer to our players intermittently if an influx of revenue
was required for hires or the marketing budget.
○ We would offer a limited supply of in-game forms players can purchase for 25
dollars. These forms would allow them to describe a specific item (“That axe from
the Conan movie, a light saber, etc”) and specify in-game attributes for that item
(“Poisons an enemy when hit, does cold damage, etc”). We believe the large
price tag will discourage the majority of our users from purchasing this item, but
there will be a minority of users that will be interested in the exclusivity of these
items, which signify their uniqueness in the game.
The monetization plans laid out above work well in tandem and will leverage each other,
providing a market place in which both paying and non-paying users can be active.
[1]-http://www.slideshare.net/shayrockyou/monetizing-social-games-rockyou-at-gdc?from=ss_embed
[2]-Conversation with Qunify owner Joshua Quick, the developer of Clash:Rise of Heroes.
Management
On the Fly Entertainment (OTF) is a team with 25 years of combined experience in the business
of designing and developing software for the educational and entertainment markets.
Martin Copp - Lead Developer / Lead Designer
Martin graduated at the top of his class from the Electronic Game Design program in 2007.
He then went on to work for the Department of National Defence (DND) as a part of the Applied
Arts Advanced Diploma (AAAD) program. During his time at the DND he developed e-learning
software that was used across the Canadian Forces. After completing the AAAD program and
receiving a certificate of recognition for excellent work, Martin went on to work for the Child
Safety Research and Innovation Center as a game programmer and designer for educational
games. Martin has since been an active participant at the Miramichi NBCC, teaching Electronic
Game Design courses for a term and helping to organize game development events at the
college, as well as the Jalloo festival.
Jeff Theriault - Artist
Jeff started his classical training in 1997 at NBCC Miramichi as a classical animator, during
which he worked for Renaissance Studios as a freelance digital painter on one of their
interactive CDs. He graduated in 1999 and took one year to do freelance work. In 2000 he
moved to Halifax to work for Trainingscape Studios as a junior designer, doing everything from
background design, storyboards, scene assembly and Flash animation. Jeff learned from some
of the best Flash animators and designers in Canada and eventually made it to Senior
Designer. Since then he has moved back to Miramichi and has acted as the assistant director
for FatKat Animation Studios on three of their projects and in 2005 he was hired by CSRIC,
working on everything from character designs, storyboarding, backgrounds, and animations.
Pierre Chamberlain - Programmer
Pierre graduated from NBCC Miramichi in 2004 with a diploma in the E-Media program. Since
then, he has worked in various fields and positions : edutainment development, print-media
page-layout, UI developer, interface design, graphic art, website development (HTML, AJAX,
CSS), server-side development (PHP, MySQL), desktop and web game development, and
social media.
Pierre has been employed by: CSRIC, Miramichi Leader, Brovada, Mariner Partners, Innovatia,
Fatkat Animation Studio, Frima Studio (Quebec City) and currently works at Radian 6 in
Fredericton. Pierre also has a strong musical background and develops electronic music in his
spare time. The contribution of this talent adds a lot to the games he works on.
Mike Kettela - Background Artist
Objectives
Business Aims and Objectives
Our main business aim is to become a medium size (10-13 person) development studio with
over 150 thousand daily active users (DAUs) across all of our social network game titles within
the next three years.
We also wish to become a well established fee for service game development company within
New Brunswick. This would be very beneficial in a region with many game development
programs with graduates exported to other provinces. If we could establish ourselves properly,
there is an excellent pool of talent in this province to which we could contract work.
Using the following keys to success as our production methodology we will be able to capture a
chunk of market share that would allow for a sustainable business. After becoming established,
this methodology will create a stable lucrative studio.
Keys to Success
The following tenets will be the keys to success for our company:
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Focus on user experience, fun, and community.
○ We believe focusing on each customer’s experience is essential. We plan on
keeping a relatively low number of DAUs but heavily monetizing our customers
by providing them with a rich and personalized experience. We wish to be active
in our games’ communities and for our users to feel like they have a personal
connection with us.
Adaptive flexibility.
○ We have the awareness and the skill sets to adapt development to market
demands and unfulfilled market niches.
Rapid development / projects of small to medium scope.
○ We will rapidly release products that take around a quarter of a year to develop
and will focus on developing projects with a small scope, so we can quickly
bounce back with our next release if a project does not perform as projected.
Measuring our success with metrics.
○ We will measure the effectiveness of how our marketing budget is spent using
metrics provided by Facebook and Google Adwords.
○ We will test how well users respond to content.
■The number of DAUs will reflect if users respond positively or negatively to
new game content.
■As a social games company we will have a direct link to our audience, and
many social games users are very vocal about how they feel.
Financial Objectives
Our short term financial goals are to develop several social games that will provide enough
revenue to support the salaries of one development team consisting of three to four people by
the end of 2011.
Throughout the first year, our two initial milestones are to reach 15 thousand daily active users
(DAUs) across our two social games and to be monetized well enough to receive three cents
per DAU. Once we reach these points we will be able to consistently sustain three full-time staff
members while being able to put a percentage of our revenue directly into marketing.
Our long term goals are to create a medium size (10-13 person) studio that can support the
development of multiple projects. We will retain all of our business objectives but place a greater
emphasis on developing for multiple sectors depending on market demands. The core
technology we would develop by working on social games and tracking metrics translates very
well into the casual games sector, as well as the e-learning sector. These are fields we have
had experience with and fields we would wish to branch out into.
Marketing Objectives
Marketing is one of the cornerstones of our business plan. Our key marketing objectives can be
summarized as follows:
1. Iterate through multiple advertising strategies in order to develop an advertising strategy
that produces the lowest cost of acquisition per user (CoA).
a. Measure the average revenue produced per user.
2. Use our marketing budget to control our growth.
To effectively market our application we will be using Facebook ads and Google Adwords. Both
of these services provide excellent targeted marketing detailed feedback about the users that
click our ads.
As we generate revenue much of it will go towards marketing; this will be a two phase approach.
Initially we will create multiple month-long ad campaigns targeting different demographics with
several types of ads, each with a budget of a hundred dollars a month. Using enticing images
and calls to action (“Become the best warrior on Facebook!” , “Fight your friends and come out
on top!”, etc) we will iterate through multiple advertising strategies.
Next, using the feedback from these advertising systems we will be able to tell which campaigns
were effective. We will know what percentage of users that have viewed and clicked the ads
have become paying customers. From this information we will be able to extrapolate the
average CoA.
Over the same period of time, based on the amount of users we have and the amount of
revenue we are receiving we will be able to extrapolate the average revenue per user (ARPU).
Hypothetically, if we are seeing an ARPU of $1.50 a month for each user and on average a user
only plays our game for three months we would want to keep the CoA below $4.50 to generate
revenue.
This system would allow us controlled growth, as whenever we would need a revenue increase
we would spend the marketing dollars to increase our user base. Conversely this also allows us
to keep our user base at a maintainable size, by simply not investing in marketing when we do
not wish for large growth.
This is a relatively simplified view of ARPU and CoA but it is a cornerstone of our business plan
because it gives us a more precise control over money spent on marketing dollars, and allows
us to view direct results from different marketing approaches.
This marketing application will also be valuable to measure how well people respond to added
features and content in our games. We will be able to compare user retention after a marketing
push. For example, if we add a new feature and find users are now playing regularly for four
months as opposed to three after a marketing push, we can then focus on adding more
features..
With the valuable application of these marketing tools we will be able to develop our games “by
the numbers”. It will provide excellent feedback on what our game communities want and which
directions we will need to go to increase our revenue share.
Unorthodox Marketing Plans
Gladiator Trainer
Robo Miner Advertisement
When we publish Gladiator Trainer on Facebook we will release Robo Miner on free flash game
portals to draw traffic to Gladiator Trainer. We will offer any player who beats Robo Miner a
keycode that will unlock a unique item in Gladiator Trainer.
There is no barrier for entry to Flash game portals (Kongregate, NewGrounds, Miniclip, Armor
Games) and these games can average tens of thousands of views. We estimate that this will
draw between one and two thousand hits to Gladiator Trainer, which will be a relatively
significant number for us during our initial release.
Kickstarter Project
Kickstarter is an website devoted to funding small independent projects. Developers outline their
project designs and goals to the public, and then allow anyone visiting the site to pledge money
to the project’s development.
Projects offer a variety of pledge packages, each with different rewards as decided upon by the
developer. These rewards range from receiving a copy of the project for five dollars, to having
your likeness placed in the project for several hundred dollars. It is all at the discretion of the
developer. Investors do not receive any equity or any returns on their investment other than the
incentives the developer has provided. An interesting side effect from Kickstarter is that
investors usually become good marketers for the project, as they have a personal investment in
it.
After observing the success of Clash (elaborated on later in our competition analysis), which
used Kickstarter to get the initial capital for the development of their social game, we are
intrigued at the possibility of using Kickstarter to not only generate capital, but to use as a
marketing tool. Depending on our development schedule we may start a small Kickstarter
Project to procure initial capital for marketing our game and basic start up costs.
Student Projects For Advertising
Martin Copp has helped establish “game jams” at the local college. In these game jams
students participate in a 24-48 hour competition to rapidly develop games. The result is a
prototype or proof of concept for a game. The results from these game jams are becoming
exceedingly impressive with each iteration.
We would like to propose to the game jam student participants that we will mentor and assist in
the development (art and code) of these games in exchange for branding, and advertising our
social games. If our plans to use Robo Miner as a advertising tool are successful this
arrangement with students would be mutually beneficial. Students would have polished games
for their portfolios and industry experience, while we would get development done for free and
be able to closely assess which college students may be valuable assets for the company.
The college incorporates a work term during the month of June. Students apply to local
companies in their field of work. Since there is only one other game studio in town, and our
team has close ties with the college and its students, we believe the above proposition would be
fairly attractive to them as well.
Company Summary
Startup Plan
Initially we plan on releasing Gladiator Trainer in the first quarter of 2011. We will spend the
majority of our time in the first two quarters supporting the further development of Gladiator
Trainer by testing how to increase our user base ARPU. During these first two quarters we plan
on recruiting a full time Flash artist as our first hire.
In the third quarter we will begin focusing more strongly on developing Monster Trainer, our
second social game title, using the lessons learned and technology developed from Gladiator
Trainer. At the beginning of our third quarter we plan on making our second hire - a full time
Flash programmer.
We will cross promote our titles to decrease marketing costs (advising users that if they like one
of our games, they may be interested in the other). This is one of the keys to our growth, as it is
important to establish brand recognition using “Trainer” in titles of our social games.
Before the end of 2011 we will release Monster Trainer. By the end of 2011 we will assess
market conditions and the successes of our social games and decide where our market focus
should lie, ideally continuing in social games, but with an eye on the e-learning sector and
casual game markets as well.
Company Ownership
On The Fly Entertainment is owned by Martin Copp in sole proprietorship.
Risk Assessment
Company Risk Assessment
We have two main risks as a company. The first concern is that our games under-perform our
expectations and that we do not receive the required funds to hire staff during our first year. To
mitigate this risk, we will aggressively pursue fee for service work in any field our skill sets
pertain to if we cannot generate enough revenue to hire on staff. If we cannot accrue large
contracts we will use services such as elance.com to acquire small short term contracts.
Social Game Development Risk Assessment
As Gladiator Trainer is nearing completion we do not have any development concerns. Our
chief concern is that we do not have extensive experience managing servers for a large social
game. One of the largest problems for social games, much like web companies, is that when
servers are down, revenue is lost. This is doubly important for social games, as consistent
server issues will drive away the user base.
A common risk for most social games is that they grow too rapidly for their hardware to keep up.
This usually requires down time, in order to upgrade their server hardware.
To mitigate these risks we have explored two options:
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Purchasing server space from Amazon’s EC2 service.
○ This is one of the more expensive server set ups; however there is very little
down time, excellent support, and excellent migration if the game grows very
quickly.
Distributing our games through 6 Waves.
○ 6 Waves is a Facebook game publisher that works with small independent
developers. They provide small developers with server space, localization (teams
to translate your game into many languages), cross promotion through the other
games they publish and a monetization team to help with setting up user
payments and giving feedback on the game’s design.
○ The only negative to this is the percentage of revenue they receive from your
game.
As we near the release of Gladiator Trainer we will be actively pursuing both options. We would
like to present the game to 6 Waves in order to see what type of support they can offer us. If
their proposal is not in our best interests, purchasing EC2 server space is an excellent
alternative.
Marketing Risk Assessment
The speed in which we grow our user base is a concern. To effectively increase our user base,
marketing dollars will be needed. Initially we will not have access to much marketing capital, so
each marketing dollar will need to be spent efficiently.
To ensure that our marketing funds are spent wisely, we will initially run many test marketing
campaigns with budgets of fifty to one hundred dollars. The ads will be aimed at several subsets
of our target demographic (such as users with many games listed in their Facebook interests,
casual gamers, people that are not interested in games, etc). Based on the success of these
small campaigns we will know how to tailor our marketing once we have increased revenue.
If this initial marketing sampling is not conclusive and we are not drawing enough revenue within
the first three months to heavily invest in marketing, we will need to focus more on spreading
the game through word of mouth, and through social games news outlets. From that point we
will have to take stronger approach to our unorthodox marketing methods (Kickstarter as noted
above) or investing more of our own capital in marketing.
Start Up Costs
Initial Capital
We have two thousand dollars to invest into the company as starting capital. There has been a
significant amount of time invested in the development of many of our projects to this point
through in-kind donations of time.
Equipment and Space
All company members have personal computers and our own workspace in our homes.
Software
Adobe Flash Professional CS5 - $ 699 US - Adobe.com
Flash Develop - Free - Flashdevelop.org
Servers/Database
Operating our social games will require dedicated servers. Since we may be placing our game
on the Amazon EC2 servers our pricing relates to this.
As a new customer we will have the initial “Free Tier” of servers available to us for a year. This
allows for:
● 10 Gigabytes of storage.
● 15 Gigabytes of bandwidth.
● 750 hours of instance usage.
This is the allowance for each month. We believe we will not exceed this usage during our first
six months. From there we will have had enough time with the service to understand what our
database needs will require and will be able to more accurately estimate what server plan we
will need to invest in. This could range from 236 dollars to 2000 dollars a year.
Competition Analysis and Study
Below is the research and conclusions gathered from examining many other games in similar
genres to the titles we wish to develop. Data has been collected on each game and their
perceived successes and failures postulated.
We have performed a wide sampling in terms of companies. From behemoths of the business
such as Zynga, to small start ups with only a few developers. In each case we reflect on their
development and design and compare and contrast to how it differs from our own.
Warstorm - Zynga - San Francisco, California
Warstorm’s Combat Screen
Warstorm is developed by Zynga, the largest social game company on Facebook and the
creators of the popular FarmVille and Mafia Wars titles. Across all of their social games, Zynga
has 45 million daily active users (DAUs). This is the most DAUs any social game company has
by a wide margin.
Warstorm’s Daily Active Users. Changes made in August have had a significant impact on DAUs.
Warstorm is Zynga’s foray into the collectible card game genre (CCG). Currently sitting at 270
thousand DAUs after recently implementing several new features as suggested by fans of the
game.
The gameplay of Warstorm involves players building decks of cards which consist of spells and
monsters, in order to do battle other player’s decks. Once a battle has been initiated, cards are
drawn at random and the battle plays through without any other user interaction. The only user
interaction in a fight is when a player initiates a battle, at which time cards are drawn at random
from each deck by the computer (similar to the card game of War). A player wins if the cards he
draws overwhelm his opponent. Users can pay to unlock new fights and cards.
We can draw two conclusions from Warstorm.
1. There is money to be made even in small niches.
2. Adding more content and features trumps virality in these niche games.
Zynga has developed a product in a relatively well explored, but traditionally poorly monetized
CCG niche. Warstorm struggled with a low number of DAUs for a Zynga game, until they
implemented community suggested features. These updates are consistent with Zynga’s move
away from virality and towards focusing more on the player experience to increase the average
revenue per user(ARPU). This has had a beneficial effect for all of Zynga’s games, but it has
had a significant impact on Warstorm.
Examining Warstorm’s DAU trends reinforces our belief that for a small niche product with a
small demographic, viral mechanics are no substitute for developing a community and focusing
developing player experience.
Mousehunt - HitGrab - Oakville, Ontario
HitGrab’s Mousehunt
Mousehunt is a social game produced by HitGrab from Oakville, Ontario. HitGrab currently
employs 22 people.
In Mousehunt you take the role of a Mouse Catcher, in the kingdom of Gnawnia. Mouse
Catchers arm themselves with a variety of traps and cheeses. Each mouse is weak against
certain traps and types of cheeses. Players arm their trap with cheese and wait. Every hour
players’ traps will attempt to catch a mouse. Each area in Gnawnia has a variety of mice for
hunters to trap, all providing different rewards. Aside from selecting their traps and cheeses, the
only other interaction players have with the game is sounding the hunter’s horn. When the horn
is blown, the user’s trap attempts to catch a mouse. This can be done every fifteen minutes.
Mousehunt is monetized by selling virtual cheese. You can purchase Super Brie+ with real
money, as it is the most effective bait for a trap. Each piece of Super Brie costs two cents. All of
the sales of Super Brie+ added up in December of 2008, and Mousehunt was reportedly making
100,000 dollars a month, when it had 60 thousand DAUs [1].
Mousehunt is likely making a quarter of a million dollars a month off virtual cheese.
There are many contributing factors to Mousehunt’s success:
1. Low time/energy investment yields large payoffs.
2. Gameplay mechanics perfectly reflect the use of its platform (Facebook)
3. User-driven economy/trading system.
1. Mousehunt’s success can be attributed in part to the fact that the players only have to invest
a modicum of time into the game to yield any of the rewards. Once logged into Mousehunt, the
user is presented with all the captures that have happened while they were away. The only
interaction needed is to select a trap and location. Once those are set all of the captures
(payoffs) occur while the user is not playing the game, making them anticipate their return.
2. The Mousehunt gameplay mechanic optimally reflects how users interact with Facebook.
People frequent Facebook so often because of the compulsion to see what has changed since
they have last been there. When people log onto Facebook, it is not the actions they perform
while they are there that are the main draw, but rather the compulsion to know what has gone
on since they were last there. Each time they log into Facebook they see the wall posts and
interactions of friends. The longer they abstain from visiting Facebook, the larger this backlog
grows and the larger the compulsion they will have to see what they have been missing. This is
very similar to the compulsion some people have towards checking their email dozens of times
a day. Mousehunt’s gameplay perfectly mirrors the Facebook platform, as hunts go on while the
user is away, giving more incentive to return to the game.
3. Another key factor to Mousehunt’s success is the user-driven economy/trading system.
Players who decide to pay for Super Brie+ can sell it in an in-game market to other players.
They can price their Super Brie+ for however much in game currency per piece they desire.
This has led to a game within a game, as sellers try to get the highest value for their Super
Brie+ and buyers try to haggle for the best deals.
Most games have 1-5% of their player base as paying users. There is also a distinct difference
in mindset between paying users (who often think, “Why waste time when I can spend a little bit
of money and save hours?”) and non paying users (who often think, “Why spend money when I
can just put in a bit more time to earn what I want?”). Each group of users thinks the other’s
point of view is absurd. What HitGrab has done with this in-game auction system is leveraged
the users who are willing to pay money, with non-paying users who are eager to use in-game
currency to obtain an otherwise unobtainable resource. Realizing there are some users who will
never be converted to paying customers, this is basically the ideal solution. This puts paying
users in an interesting mindset:
● “Even if I buy extra Super Brie+, it is not a problem because I can always just sell what I
don’t need to get ahead.”
● “Oh, Super Brie+ is selling for a lot of in-game currency right now, I better sell some on
the market.”
Taking all of these things into consideration, we view Mousehunt as the ideal Facebook game
when you look at the time it would take to develop content, mechanics and interact with the
community, versus the revenue it generates.
[1]-http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10119880-2.html
Competitors
Knights of the Crystals - Square Enix - London, UK
Knights of the Crystal (KotC) is the second attempt at a social game by Square Enix. Players
develop a character and equip them with weapons. They can complete tasks to gain gold and
experience or fight against other players. After completing a series of tasks players get to fight
the boss for that area. The player and CPU take turns attacking each other - instead of being
automated the player must choose the actions they wish to take.
Combat against other players is more simplified, as both players’ stats and items are tallied
against each other and the stronger of the two players wins.
KotC is an interesting game considering our own designs for Gladiator Trainer. Their main
mechanic is more centered around the player vs CPU battles than the player vs player combat,
however it still allows us to observe the praises and pitfalls of a game in basically the same
niche.
The art in KotC is very crisp, yet they are not animated models. In contrast, our animated
models and combat interactions will bridge the gap aesthetically to make combat more
interesting to watch and less tedious.
We do not expect to grow as quickly as KotC, as they had a marketing push from a large
company, as well as being such a highly recognizable brand. Square Enix has been a company
focused on making games with multi-million dollar development budgets. It bodes well that they
have not only have taken an interest in social media, but are developing in a niche very similar
to ours.
Another benefit to having a game in a niche so close to our own is that users of KotC are very
likely to be potential users for us, creating a whole demographic that we can easily present with
targeted marketing. (“Bored of KotC? Battle to become the best Gladiator on Facebook!”)
Levyn Light - HitGrab - Oakville, Ontario
Levyn Light is HitGrab’s third game. It pits you against a multitude of opponents and players
equip items to their character and watch their battles play out through a series of die rolls.
LevynLight’s Combat Screen
Levyn Light’s DAUs have stayed fairly consistent. New content is regularly added to the game
and as such it is well able to keep its niche market. However it has not seen much growth for a
few reasons:
1. No marketing push.
2. Simplistic gameplay.
3. Not reliant on heavily viral features.
○ It does not ask to advertise to your Facebook friends.
It would seem that these issues would pose a significant problem for a Facebook game - at
least points 1 and 3, since they are not taking advantage of the platform. But these are the
same “problems” that Mousehunt suffers from. The case for both games is that they have a
much higher ARPU than an average game, and as such are content to retain their paying users,
instead of focusing on drawing more users in.
Lost Trails - Tetris Online Inc - Honolulu, Hawaii
Lost Trails is an interesting case study. Players command a party of randomly generated
characters and send them throughout the Lost Trails world to combat a variety of monsters.
Combat is automated, while players’ main interactions with their characters are developing their
skills and attributes (fairly linear) and equipping their party with items purchased from the store
(which offers little variety).
Although similar in concept, Lost Trails focuses its play experience on the “grind” for items and
skills (similar to a light free-to-play massively multiplayer online game). This grind is found in
most games, be it social or console, but is extremely evident here. Players need to spend lots of
time in each area repeatedly killing the same type of enemy, with little variation between
encounters. You can pay real cash to help bypass some of that grind.
Gladiator Trainer’s focus will lean more on generating new characters with mixes of skills,
finding new randomly generated items, and progressing through challenges. This is an
interesting case study as both Gladiator Trainer and Lost Trails have a very similar concept but
take two distinctly different directions in core gameplay mechanics.
Lost Trails’ numbers are telling however, because at the beginning of October the game began
marketing heavily and did pull in a significant amount of users. Unfortunately, weeks later there
seems to be very little retention of the users they attracted. It seems Facebook users are not
looking for a game that relies heavily on such a tedious and time consuming “grind.”
“Clash - Rise of Heroes” - Qunify - San Francisco, California
Clash - Rise of Heroes is another engaging case study. Qunify is comprised of three
developers: two brothers and their cousin. After they conceptualized their first game, Clash, they
applied to Kickstarter.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/150937481/a-superhero-game-like-no-other
Qunify were able to achieve their goal of ten thousand dollars in a little over three months. This
is an appealing way of pursuing funding for a project, because not only does it provide “free”
capital but it also provides a certain amount of free marketing for an up and coming project (this
method is described in our monetization section).
Clash’s DAU paints an interesting picture. If Clash is being monetized properly this is a rather
successful venture for a small company. Reading through user reviews of Clash, bugs are a
common complaint. The head of the company has stated several times that they did not expect
to grow so rapidly and as such they have had server problems. We have taken this into
consideration for our own titles, and denoted it as one of our major risks.
Conclusion
In conclusion this document provides an excellent road map for our company. We have outlined
our goals and strategies as well as methodologies we need to put in place to reach them, while
adequately assessing the speed bumps we may encounter along the way.
Our evaluation of the current market conditions, coupled with our skill sets gives us confidence
that this is our best approach for establishing a company. Developing social games will provide
us with a solid technical and financial base that we will require to grow into a successful flexible
company.