The biggest problem with the community games review space right now has nothing to do with those of us that are actually reviewing games–it’s the larger review sites who don’t review them. Run a Google search for pretty much any community game (for example, google two recent games we reviewed–FreaKick or Planet Crashmania 9,000,000) and you get a litany of results from the “bigger” players in the game review space: IGN, Gamespot, GameRankings, GameFAQs, GameStats, Gamespy. All of these sites automatically create pages for all the XBox games, but the problem is that they don’t actually cover any of the community games. After a half-dozen search results yielding no actual content, it’s no wonder that only the developers themselves (who are willing to scour through pages of results for any press) seem to be finding the actual reviews. Unfortunately, the only solution to this problem is time.

The second newsworthy item was the announcement that Amazon has started carrying XBox Live Arcade games. There are some kinks (you’re actually buying download codes, which means you have to punch them into your box manually), but this has the potential to be a huge boon for arcade games in general. While they don’t carry any Community Games yet, it’s a short leap from Arcade titles to Community titles (assuming Amazon doesn’t have any hang-ups over the lack of rating). Putting the community games on Amazon would instantly solve the number one request by community developers: game ratings. WTP and other review sites allow users to rate games, but for it to really be a useful feature you need a TON of ratings–something Amazon could provide. Having community games listed on Amazon would also create an instant revenue stream for any site reviewing community games (referral links). I doubt the conversions would be all that high (it would be MUCH better if Microsoft had their own referral program, as you can actualy tell your XBox to buy/download games through their marketplace site), but it would probably beat ads. The more I think about it, the more I think Microsoft should just let Amazon run THEIR marketplace–they’ve got way more experience in the space.

I was hard at work on the Flash version of Filler 2 when the XBox Live Community Games initiative launched, so I didn’t have time to get the XBox version out as a launch title. I was very impressed by the whole idea, but I found Microsoft’s game store to be less then helpful in finding out which games were good and which games were crap. For the regular Arcade titles, there’s an expectation of quality. If it’s a type of game you’d normally be interested in, they’re at least worth a demo download to give them a shot. There’s no expectation of quality on the community games (at least, not yet), so I found myself downloading crap demo after crap demo and thinking there must be a better way. I’d heard about CommunityEngine, which was more blog oriented and less “purely” social than something like Insoshi–and the license was a heck of a lot more favorable. I also had no experience with Amazon EC2, which was something I wanted to fix. A community games review site seemed like a perfect opportunity to test both out, so I went for it.

Without further adieu (or just click the banner above), feel free to check out Worth the Points: XBox Live Arcade Community Game Reviews. The site’s actually been “live” since around Christmas time. I’ve been slowly funneling traffic (both through a test of the MochiAds self-serve ads and from the ads in front of the original Filler, which is still being played ~10k times a day) towards it to make sure it didn’t break and fixing bugs as I spot them, but I think most of the major kinks have been worked out. We play a lot of games in my house, so I figured it was our civic responsibility to wade through the mountain of crap and try to find a few gems–and there are definitely some out there.

A lot of my crazy side projects don’t make it this far, but I saw this one as a good excuse to get some friends involved on something, so my twin brother, an old high school friend, and my roommate are all “featured writers” for the site (for the time beings). I once thought I’d open it up so anyone could write community game reviews (after all, there are more games being released than we can even keep up with)–but ultimately decided a tighter focus on just the four of us would work better in the long run.

There are already sixteen reviews posted, and I’ll try to prod everyone to do one or two a week. You can go directly to the games which got the thumbs up or which games didn’t make the cut, browse games by overall rating (users can rate games from 0-10), genre, or tags. Hopefully giving credit where credit is due (or at least finding a few games that don’t totally suck) will help legitimize the community games as a viable platform.

Stats
Total gameplays are now over 9,000,000 (at least on Mochibot enabled versions), though the actual number is surely much higher than that. Roughly 5,000,000 of those gameplays came on licensed versions (AddictingGames being the biggest single contributor) while the other 4,000,000 or so came through ad-supported versions on Kong and the Mochi network. Daily gameplays are down to around 12,000/day but seem fairly stable around that number. Of those gameplays, ~35% are from site-licensed versions (Gimme5Games has actually been gaining steam with their Facebook version, which is nice to see), ~50% are ad-enabled version (either the distributed Mochi version or Kongregate), and around 15% of the eyeballs see traffic-share ads on the Mochi network–roughly 1/3 of my own site’s traffic comes from traffic-share. I haven’t gotten the game on MindJolt yet, though I expect to at some point in the future–from what I’ve heard, that usually gives a pretty nice bump in traffic. I’ve done a total of 13 different licenses now, and I still git an email every so often asking for a new license. From pure Filler income, the game has cleared over $10k. See the chart below for how that breaks down.

(Image lost in the Great Update of 2009)

My expenses for Filler are sitting just over $200, mostly from PayPal transfer fees. It’s a bit of a pain, but worthwhile in the longrun just for how easy it makes record-keeping on these sorts of things. Miniclip was one of the very first people to contact me about a site-license (within a week of launching the game), and they were offering a pretty nice sum for it. I built it for them and delivered it… and then heard nothing. I emailed them in March, and my contact assured me the game was being tested and that it would release soon. I emailed them again in May, but they didn’t even bother returning my emails at that point. I’m not super-chapped at the fact that they welched (it’s their business, they’re free to continue hawking referral links to Puzzle Pirates and Club Penguin as much as they’d like–if I had that many eyeballs, I’d do the exact same thing), but I am a little annoyed that they never bothered to send me a courtesy email saying something to the effect of “Whoops, we’ve decided not to go with your game. Better luck next time.” For any license under $500, I think a contract is pretty much a waste of time. In the future, though, I think I’ll go for a contract on any deal larger (this one was quite a bit larger) before building it for them.

Cashing In
I’m a firm believer that you should invest in yourself. Most of the money for Filler was coming at a really opportune time (right as I needed to fund my IRA and literally days before my old car decided to call it quits). Moving in May also meant some out-of-the-ordinary expenses, but I’ve finally settled in enough to start spending some of my loot. A new 24″ iMac was delivered over the weekend, the first component to my new home office. I used to be a die-hard Windows guy, but now I pretty much just need a text editor and Firefox to function. I also picked up a copy of Parallels, though, just in case I got the urge to do some XNA or Torque development on a bigger screen than my 8″ Fujitsu. Having a bigger computer around means I can also do a little more 3D stuff (my copy of Lightwave runs on my laptop, but who wants to model on a screen that small?). I’m thinking about upgrading my Lightwave 7 license to the newer version 9 (~$399), and I’m seriously seriously considering picking up a copy of the Swift3D plugin, which would let me render stuff from LW straight to SWFs. It’s basically a toss-up between doing that and getting an actual version of Flash to create game assets. I’m leaning towards the LW side because I’m already intimately familiar with it (not that Flash is rocket science).

Clones
Since Filler’s release, every so often a friend of mine sends me a link and a comment to the effect of “OMG this guy ripped you off!” For the most part, it’s an exaggeration. This version over at Sims Carnival is more of an homage than a clone. Several friends sent me Biolabs: Outbreak!, but I wasn’t too cheesed about that one. The game mechanic is the same (and even the sort of underlying physics sim), but the goal is different. I thought it was an interesting twist, but I also thought the graphics were a little rough around the edges. I was looking at the rest of his games, though, and his Ladybug game kind of bugged me. It’s eerily similar to a prototype I did a few years back–one that I showed to a bunch of portals who asked what I was going to make next (and probably would’ve if I hadn’t done Boulder Blast). It’s close–but not identical. Just as Biolabs is close to Filler–but not identical. I’m chalking it up to coincidence (I’m not big for conspiracy theories), but I did find it mildy interesting that there’s another developer out there who “thinks” like I do. Someone sent me Colorfill, saying it was pretty similar. I thought it was closer to Jezzball than my game, so again–not too cheesed.

This morning, though, I actually found a clone that sort of pissed me off: Panfu Balls. Not only is Panfu a cheap knockoff of Club Penguin, it seems they’re also cloning as many popular games as they can. All of the games lead directly back to Panfu with a referral link from the “game portal” hosting it (AGame in this case). I can’t help but think portals like AGame (and to some extent, even Miniclip) are desperately holding onto an outdated business models predicated on taking advantage of as many developers as possible. The “new breed” of portals (like Kongregate) who actually view developers as resources instead of cattle are gaining popularity with both developers and players, so it’s (hopefully) only a matter of time before the old portals either follow suit or wither up.

UPDATE: Someone at the SPIL (behind the AGame family of portals) sent me an apology and removed the offending game from their network of sites. Looks like all hope isn’t lost for them after all. =]

What’s Next
I’m mostly taking it easy–I’ve been tinkering with XNA and have a rough version of Filler working on the XBox. I’ve been putting a little bit of time into some of poorly neglected web projects. I’ve got about six “solid” game ideas sketched out in a fair amount of detail. Two of them are fairly trivial (and already prototyped), so I may just knock them out if I get a surge of motivation. The other four are on a MUCH larger scale. Other than perhaps prototyping and doing some concept art for them, those aren’t likely to see any serious development until the web economy supports games of a slightly larger scale. Depending on how the XNA port goes and whether or not Microsoft ever announces the revenue model for the Creator’s Club, I might build them as XBox games at some point (unless there’s a benevolent VC out there somewhere who’d like to help me set up my own game studio).

EDIT: What do you know, Microsoft just announced their pricing. There aren’t a whole lot of sales numbers available for XBLA, but I can imagine doing a version of Filler for $2.50… figuring ~50% take, I would only need to sell 8,000 copies to make as much as I’ve gotten from 9,000,000 players on the internet.