gaming or gaming?

Here's an interesting tidbit I read a few days ago. I'm quoting the text in full from Notzed's blog here:

Is it gaming or gaming?

The other big thing to come to light is the attempt to push the revenue model up significantly higher than the selling-disks model will ever be able to provide.

Here in Australia 'gaming' generally refers not to computer games, but to the computerised gambling industry. An awful lot about the intended revenue models (and mobile/tablet 'free to play games' in general) share a lot with this despicable industry which prays on people psychologically to fleece them of their cash. Even the words being thrown around like 'whales' come from directly that industry.

And gaming is big money compared to the computer game industry.

Unfortunately it seems 'computer games' are going to be headed at least in some part toward this gambling revenue model; anywhere there is this much money to be had it will be sought out actively. Companies that don't embrace it will be fighting for the scraps but hopefully they'll be able to survive and hopefully this is just a passing fad (or gets regulated out of the market).

This suddenly made a lot of sense to me. This past autumn I have followed the game industry events in europe, especially the UK. The trend seems to be that the gambling industry is developing ties with computer game companies. I wondered why those loathsome fuckers are accepted in the gaming events at all but now it's pretty obvious really. The mechanisms of gambling seem to be infiltrating the proper games industry as well.

Cannot say i'm really looking forward to a more complete amalgamation of gambling and gaming. I think that conditioning people to be more accepting towards an industry who's line of business is of basically ripping people off and creating an impression of 'It could be you!'. And the house always wins. What's next, gambling Mario now with crackwhores for kids?

The pay-to-win models work tho. And as a game producer I could reason that we're only supplying a demand. Just like your local meth dealer does. Supply and demand, It's business baby!

I wonder how much the expectation of multi-billion exits affects us startups. If you don't proclaim intentions of making a huge amount of revenue, you are not going to get funded. I think Notzed's observation about companies who are not comfortable with heroin-dealer tactics of ripping people off are accurate. You are left to fight for the scraps.

Our vision is not of pay-to-win or endless IAP's to keep up. The point of Hoodownr is to bring people together. Once purchased, it's yours to enjoy forever. There will be no ads for the most lucrative fields of ad revenue, gambling and pornography. In fact, there will be no ads at all. We feel people get bombed with enough advertisement propaganda already.

In the current state of affairs, I think this is the only sensible way for us and our players. If you're a die hard F2P proponent, think again. Think of all the ad crap that you've been force fed and the gambling-derived business models behind the attractive package. Time to uninstall some software guys.

Sami
Hastur

we got slushed!

A few notes about our Slush experience here.. totally tired after the three day trial..

So as usual, when there's an tradeshow or something happening, we hit the high gear with development. This time our goal was to get a gameplay demo of hoodo with most of the key features in. The features we had shown on the video but that we're not ready yet. And what a big piece of the cake it was. Totally burned out with all the development hell and testing, we were really burning the midnight oil for the current build.

Slush organization was really good, they provided a steady stream of emails with hints about how to connect with investors and the like. Studying investor profiles and learning about the investors hobbies and stuff was encouraged. Big plus for all that info so everybody could find the maximum benefit.

We are a small team so instead of studying loads of profiles and things we just skimmed thru the material and looked up people who were doing or funding interesting things. And worked on the build of course. At the venue, Z went to talk to the accelerators and small investor players. We registered late so there was no opportunity to pitch in front of an audience so I just did a lot of cold pitching to interesting people I met wherever. That approach worked out fine and I had a few very nice conversations with people high up the ladder.

Another thing that we noticed once again was the 'show me the playable demo'-thing. Startups and other future game devs, nobody is going to care about your video, be prepared to show your progress thru the demo. We had the party build ready online and prepared to give the link via qr-code and an nfc tag. Tap your phone to the tag, get the build, wham bang thank you mam. I saw nobody else having anything like that. NFC rocks!

All in all the venue was really chaotic and I found it hard to concentrate on the presentations. So many projects and companies all pitching on stage. I felt our direct approach was really good for us for making contacts.

So now there's a lot of following up to be done. We went thru all the business cards and things and made a plan of what to do next. The push for slush was a big step for the game, we've pretty much got all the basic elements of Hoodownr in place for further playetesting. It was really hard work but very encouraging to see how far we got in a very limited amount of time. Still a few bugs and additional features to throw in, I can see the rest of the year flying by really fast.

Well, it's time to get back to the old grindstone. Thanks all who we met and helped along the way - stäy tuned!


Sami
Hastur

Under the hood

Busy busy bees here hacking away with Hoodownr codebase. We're preparing a build for next weeks Slush 2013, tech company and investor meetup.

The slush build will have most of those fun things our playtesters during assembly2013 and wärkfest asked to have to grok what the game is about. We've also improved the build deployment process so installing it is easier than ever. This time around things should be really straightforward for testers.

On the backend side, we've been botbuilding and discovering all kinds of neat things we can do with the game. Neat things like making it easier and more intuitive. People who have seen the game already were surprised how easy it is to play. Newsflash: It just got even easier.

The backend work also contributes to a good few gameplay elements we're going to incorporate in Hoodownr. It's fun to see the project evolve.

Last night's build didn't work on Froyo anymore due to google policy. What followed was a mad rush to a local theatre production company unofficial headquarters to get the DOCOMO galaxy mk1 (a.k.a the shitphone) properly cracked and reflashed. Where else would you have your phone hacked?

After a few hours of Z and Jonttu trying to break the devices Japanese carrier-locked backbone and me and Merja talking about the situation with play rehearsal spaces here in Tornio, the phone finally yielded and runs Gingerbread now. And the latest build of Hoodownr.

Jonttu was wondering why we would support an old piece of crap like Gingerbread. The answer is obvious of course but it made me remember our four letter words project a few years ago on IOS. The game has a heavy self-organizing cell algo and we decided it should run on iPod mark 1. The algo was heavy even on a current iPod at the time but Dr Lukasz's madskills came into rescue and sure enough, the release is perfectly playable even on that iPod that looks like an early proto of a touch-screen device. If that's not a win I don't know what is.

Professionalism is the thing that is not immediately apparent goes the old Finnish saying. We want to show you more.

A beautiful snowy day in Northern Finland. After a cup of coffee, I'm going out to do a run with the latest build. Forgetting about testing while you're testing means you're doing something right.And that's the plan!

See you at Slush
Sami

Camper trailer

Just like Clark Kent works at day and flies at night, things move with Osuuskunta Hastur. Last friday we had an exhibition opening for Jouko Alapartanen, theme being 'art is here'. Jouko popped by a few weeks ago during a portrait painting gig in Ylitornio and mentioned he had a bunch of heavy old paintings stashed away somewhere that could be used for an art show. Things set in motion!

Jouko's paintings are really big and heavy and it was no easy feat to arrange the exhibition. Visiting sculptors Pekka and Teija Isorättyä  had a van but no winter tires and that problem had to be solved before any of the art could make it's way to camp hastur. When the paintings came in, we realized just how heavy they were and got into scratching our heads on how to display them without crashing the ceiling down. Welding wire to the rescue.

Again, unexpected things happened. Certain Mr Matti drops in out of the blue and turns out he's a pro building exhibitions and me, Florentino and Mr Matti start shuffling the pieces about. Inspirational 70's disco was played and plenty of bassist jokes were told. Didn't quite break our backs with the stuff but it took three grown men to set things up.

The opening was on friday and Jouko took a coach from Rovaniemi to join us. Well stocked with crisps and bubbly, we sat down to wait the guests to arrive. And arrive they did.

Instead of the usual flowers, the artist received a bottle of swedish blended cognag (such a thing exists in Finland too, a remnant of the wartime when cognag was mixed with vodka, google Jaloviina for more details). Jouko was well happy with the present =)

After all the hard work building the exhibition, the party turned into a total chaos at Isorättyä's workspace where we eventually ended up. Trombones and organ were played amongs the dementic robot sculptures. We made a hell of a racket for at least an hour, got too tired and then it was time to start pretending we're 9 years old and at school, Pekka was the headmaster. Local disco-taxi took us to the next afterparty in sweden (yep we switch countries fluently here). After the disco-taxi things got a bit fuzzy. ahem.

But we had a great time. Probably the craziest party in years. People of software engineering: Hang out with artists every one in a while, it'll do you good!

This week is preparing for slush 2013 amongs other, coding and promotion related things. Hope to see you at Helsinki next week everybody!

school organ licks!

shamanic drumming by Jyrki

Merja doing the Lappland witch singing

Blow blow Pekka!

auxiliary percussionist Pia passing

Pekka and Teija and a dementic robot