Happened upon an interesting post this morning about making art and making money.

Warning, this does contain strong language: “Why I am not afraid to take your money”

One of the interesting things about the App Store, which ties a little bit back into the post about Halo 3: ODST, is that the concept of “value” in the new mobile space is highly unusual. With ODST, the issue was that there was an expectation of what ODST was - the total value it brought to the table, and what it was worth.

In a single dimension - the length of the single player campaign - regardless of quality, ODST was perceived as a budget game. When it was revealed to be a $60 product, people felt slighted - and Bungie was unable to convey that the combined value of the campaign, a brand new multiplayer online mode, and a “complete” Halo 3 multiplayer package was worth the $60.

With the current crop of mobile games, it’s a similar situation. People expect to pay $1. In extraordinary circumstances, people may pay $5, even $10 - but absolutely not one penny more than that. The interesting thing is that these games, in many cases, are as complicated, and as fully-featured - in some cases even better than - PSP or DS games, which people are used to paying anywhere from $20-40 for.

Somewhere along the way, $1 became the default price. So now, selling a $5 game is like trying to sell a console game for $200. There will be some people willing to make the investment if the game is extraordinary, but not many. And the expectation is that for $1, you’ll get a fully featured game you can sink hours into.

So, with Word Ace, our goal was to try something different. As I’ve said in other posts, the basic goal is to let the player decide what they want to pay for the game - to let them establish the value of the experience. In many ways, it’s very similar to putting your hat out there, and hoping that someone will value the experience enough to put some change in.

We’ve had a number of people buy chips already (either buying Word Ace Pro, or the associated chip packages) in values from $1 to $20. We’re grateful for every single purchase. Every single one. We’re hoping to roll out the “hat” to Palm Pre and Facebook users soon, and then making the experience even more rewarding - showing others that you were one of the awesome users who helps keep the game growing.

As Amanda says,

“i believe in the future of cheap art, creative enterprise, and an honorable public who will put their money where there mouth is, or rather, their spare change where their heart is.

can i get a f***ing amen?”

Amen.

This may be one of the greatest paragraphs ever written. Then again, I may be biased.

“There are some things that I just should not do. Playing word games is damn near the top of this list. It’s not because of anything inherently harmful in them; quite the contrary, they are excellent ways to build up one’s vocabulary and quick-thinking skills. The critical issue comes when you realize that I love big words. You might say that I’m predisposed to extemporaneously suffusing my dialogues with prodigious pronunciations of apocryphal etymological artifacts. See? The latest game driving me to mainline Webster’s while eight-balling Roget’s and Oxford is Word Ace, which has the bonus of also inducing habitual gambling. The game plays like a cross between Scrabble and Texas Hold ‘Em: Players are dealt two letters, each with a score value, and bet chips (non-monetary; the game is free to play) as in poker. Five community cards are then dealt, again following the Hold ‘Em mode, and at the end of the hand the player whose word scores the highest takes the pot. It sounds silly. It is, in fact, very good. If you have even the slightest inclination towards language and the like, this game will consume your every waking moment. I had to eventually remove Word Wrap from my phone, because it was starting to really drive me nuts. Word Ace is most likely not coming off for a while. I just wish it would add “look into booking padded room” to my to-do list for me.” - from John Zeitler’s blog.

Halo 3: ODST

Over the weekend, I played through the single player campaign of Halo 3: ODST. I’d read some of the reviews of the game, which had dampened my expectations a bit, but I’ve enjoyed the other Halo games, and was willing to give this one a shot anyway.

Of all the Halo games, it’s by far my favorite.

Reviewers complained about the exploratory “hub” world, they complained that the firefights felt like stuff we’d seen and done before, they complained that the campaign was too short, and not worth $60… nonsense, I say.

First, to address the value issue - the campaign took me about five or six hours to finish. While that may be short for a Halo campaign, it was exactly what I was looking for. The best example of a game being the “right” length, to me, was the original Max Payne. The game was exactly as long as the mechanics could sustain a player’s interest, and not any longer. ODST feels the same way, to me. Couple that with the full multiplayer experience from Halo 3, and a Firefight mode you can easily sink a dozen hours into, and how this isn’t worth more than most other games on the market is a little beyond me.

The biggest thing that ODST really brings to the table, though, is a sense of pacing. I played Firefight, one of the multiplayer modes, with a friend - to get to the “Par Score,” where we’d get an achievement, took 2 solid hours. That entire time, wave after wave of the Covenant, there was no letup - no rest. It was utterly exhausting.

With ODST, the nighttime exploratory bits provide a radical change in the pace and atmosphere of the game. The flashbacks almost all culminate in a really intense firefight - the night sections that follow give you a chance to breathe, regroup, and get your bearings. In a genuine way, they let you *rest*. And when the conflicts build up again, you’re ready (and excited) to take them on.

More, the story and atmosphere more than held up their end of the bargain. Maybe it’s rabid Firefly-fandom speaking (with some BSG love thrown in there), but the voice cast did a spectacular job of bringing the characters to life. Nathan Fillion as Buck, in particular, was perfect. Sure, he was basically Malcolm Reynolds, but it was still fantastic.

In the end, though, it comes down to the fact that the story was interesting, the mechanics of gameplay were pitch-perfect, and the game was the *right* length for the experience. If the Halo 3 multiplayer stuff is something you already have, I could see waiting for a price drop, but I honestly hope that Halo: Reach is a lot more like ODST than the previous Halo games.

How’s this all tie in to what we’re doing? I think for me, it’s the question of perceived value. That’s something we struggle mightily with in the new mobile economy. I’ll probably have more on that later - but I just wanted to point out the positive aspects of a game I think has been kind of unfairly maligned.

Palm published an interview with us here! If you want to find out a little bit about how Word Ace was developed for the Pre, and how we managed to get a game like Word Ace up and running on a new platform in a really short time, there are a few interesting tidbits in there.

Palm Pre users will note that an update for Word Ace became available on the App Catalog today. This is not the first major update for Word Ace - instead, it’s a maintenance release that ensures full compatibility with the upcoming webOS v.1.2

If you have a Pre, please update the game at your earliest possible convenience. All of your game data will transfer seamlessly.

If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to send us an e-mail via our support page here.

Thank you.

Okay. So a 99/100 isn’t bad, whatever your parents might have told you in high school.

Certainly, this fantastic review at panappticon.com (I love that name) doesn’t sound like the kind of, “99? What happened to that one last point, hmmmm?” sort of response you might have gotten bringing home that score on a test.

Oh, heck. I can’t resist just jumping to the conclusion:

“Panappticon Verdict: 99/100 — Addictive. Fun. Free. Texas Hold ‘Em meets Scrabble means an infinite amount of replayability whenever and wherever you want to play it. If you hate Scrabble or word games or if you just can’t spell you might not love it, but give it a try anyway.”

Check out the review! It’s awesome.

Wow! Jon Rubinstein (Palm’s CEO) mentions Word Ace! While talking to Engadget in a really extensive (and interesting) interview, Word Ace pops up (28:10)! It’s quick, so don’t blink or you’ll miss it… but wow! Clearly, based on this, you must go get Word Ace immediately!

Word Ace scores a perfect 5/5 from The Current Gamer!

Check out the content of the review here!

” Word Ace is a great game that can easily eat away hours of your free time if you’re not careful. The unique hybrid brings out the best in both Texas Hold Em’ poker and word games and is just plain fun.”

Fantastic!

Yes, this may seem like a strange picture, but it’s alright. We’ll get to it. The picture is of us (and some friends) having lunch, but it’ll tie back into the progression of consoles, gaming, and technology. It’ll just take a moment.

I had a thought tonight, when I heard that Yakuza 3 would be localized for Western audiences. Basically, it went something like this:

“Oh. Cool. Maybe I should go back and finish Yakuza (the PS2 version). Well… I dunno. I’ve got a lot of other stuff to play, and while that game started off okay, the graphics really don’t hold up, and the constant load times and lousy control… nah. I’ll play something else.”

Seriously, that was my internal monologue, almost verbatim. But the thing is, those are the kinds of things that keep me from going back and playing some older games. Things like long loading times, which on modern consoles have largely been mitigated, or corded controllers, or lousy 3D graphics (2D graphics often hold up surprisingly well even today, as long as the resolution’s sufficient)… most of these are problems that modern consoles solve, and it makes going back and playing older games sometimes quite difficult.

But the biggest thing - and the reason my time playing console games has taken a radical nosedive over the last six months or so is even more profound:

Connectivity.

I *love* Xbox Live. Love it. It’s the best thing to have happened to console gaming in … maybe ever. I play with friends who live across the country. Some friends who I wouldn’t otherwise be able to keep in touch with, some friends who I’ve never met before in person. I’ve reconnected with relatives who I can’t speak with, due to language barriers, by playing games together.

The social impact of having games as a shared experience is immeasurable. It gives you something to do together. It gives you something to talk about - and from those beginnings, you start talking about other things. You learn about the person through interaction, and you develop a relationship through those shared experiences.

And yet, over the last few months, my time spent on Live has dwindled. Why? Because I have my iPhone and Pre. And those devices present a new layer to the advancement that is connectivity. And that’s ubiquity. With Tweetdeck, with Google Reader, with IM and text messaging, I’m more potentially connected than I’ve ever been *all the time*.

And so if I want to know what my friends in Detroit are doing - people that I met first years ago on a messageboard, and only met in person for the first time earlier this year - I hop on to Twitter. If I want to know what my friends find interesting, Google Reader’s shared items is enough to start a conversation. Having this sort of low-grade, ubiquitous connectivity changes my relationship with people dramatically.

But at the same time, it’s the shared experiences that create the stories - those memories of things that you remember doing *together* that really stick with you.Which brings us back to that photo above. I remember this lunch. I remember the food, I remember talking with everyone here, and more, they remember it, too. It’s not just a 140 character blurb about watering plants. It was something we all did together.

And that’s one of the things that’s been the most satisfying about playing Word Ace - the ability to do something with friends, wherever you are, whenever you want. I can hop on at any time of the day, and there’s someone playing. There’s a good chance someone on my friend list is playing. I’ve hopped online at 1am to find that friends of mine are getting in that one last game before bed that ends up lasting an hour and a half.

Maybe it’s my friends from Detroit, maybe it’s people from one of the boards I’ve posted to - in the span of a few games, I feel like I’ve made a few more acquaintances, and over the coming months, years, who knows how many of them will turn into friendships?

And so it’s in that combination that we have something genuinely new - connectivity and ubiquity together - a way to play with your friends, wherever you are, whenever you want. You no longer have to be tethered to your living room to have the kind of rich, social interaction. You can play with an old college friend halfway around the world while you’re in the park with your dog.

And so when I sit down to think about something like playing an old PS2 game, I realize that progress has made that game… old. There’s something missing there. And tonight, I fired up Halo 3 for the first time in a long time - and had a blast - and there was something missing there, too.

It’s that sense of being connected *anywhere* - whenever, wherever - that was missing. Once you’ve experienced the future, it’s hard to go back. Let’s go forward, instead.

On 9/9/09, the Sega Dreamcast celebrated its 10th anniversary. Got me to thinking a bit. While each of us at Self Aware has our own story about how we got into the game industry, mine starts with the Dreamcast. In 1999, I applied for a job at Sega - and in 2000, got a to work on the US version of a game called Seaman. You used a mic you could plug into the controller to talk to a churlish man-fish hybrid you kept in a tank.

Weird game, for sure - but a great experience, incredibly fun and satisfying, and it’s a game that people still remember almost a decade later.

And if you look at the Dreamcast, it was pretty cutting-edge at the time. Built in 56K modem! LCD screens on their portable storage, on which you could play little minigames. Analog triggers. And games like Soul Calibur looked so much better than anything else at the time, it made you wonder what the future held.

10 years later, we’re playing online multiplayer with friends across the nation at speeds that outstrip 56K, for sure, on 3D-enabled, wireless, motion-controlled devices that have orders and orders of magnitude more storage, that can be used as web browsers, music players, and telephones. And they fit in our pocket.

If you had asked me to guess whether such a thing would have been possible in 10 years when I was picking up my brand-spanking-new Dreamcast, I don’t know what I’d have said. But I definitely don’t think I would have imagined how much we’d take it for granted, now that technology like this is here.

I’m about to have my first kid. It’s a pretty bizarre experience in itself, but every once in a while, I wonder what kind of world he’ll grow up in. When I was 10, or thereabouts, I remember having played games on my C64, and I think at the time we had just gotten our very first PC. I’m pretty sure we still had a monochromatic orange screen at the time. We’ve come such a long way in the last 10 years. When my kid is 10… what kind of games will he play?