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开发者谈广告游戏制作过程中面临的挑战

发布时间:2011-07-15 09:13:19 Tags:,,,,

作者:Byron Atkinson-Jones

4年前,当我决定成立Xiotex Studios时,我的想法是要制作属于自己的游戏。自我在主流游戏行业辛勤工作完成指定游戏编程以来,一直都有着这个梦想。正是这些年才让我有足够的自信和经验自己设计游戏,我并不后悔付出这些时间。尽管我遇到了许多优秀的人才并在许多很棒的工作室中工作过,但我还是想独立设计游戏,所以我走到了现在这一步。

胸怀抱负的独立开发者

我并非随机挑选工作室工作或找那些想雇佣我的工作室,我有着自己的计划,我所挑选的目标工作室是自认为能学到最多东西(游戏邦注:包括游戏运营和技术)的地方。也就是说,我是凭借自己的激情和想法挑选工作室。对我影响最大的公司是PomPom、Introversion、EA Canada和Lionhead Studios。我在这些公司中学到了大量的知识,提升了自己的经验。在编码、游戏设计及运营和其他问题的处理方面,这些公司教会了我许多东西。

在我闲暇之时,花了1个月的时间自行制作游戏,感觉很不错。有人开始给我打电话,让我帮助开发他们的项目。一段时间内,我并没有接受这些请求。但后来我意识到,我自己在做的东西要过很长时间才能为我长期的发展积累足够的资金。因而,我决定拒绝全职的工作,接受短期合同。花数个月时间来开发其他人的项目可以给我提供足够的资金,使得Xiotex Studios能存在得更久些。过去4年来我一直这么做,而且效果不错。有些工作室向我发出了全职工作邀请,但我依然坚持着Xiotex Studios所承载的梦想并将其继续运营下去。

我之所以要写出上述开场白,是因为我想让你们明白之前我有着自己的计划并一直遵从计划行事。但是“广告游戏”这个意外出现的东西有可能改变我对游戏开发的认识。

以下便是我为某大型国际品牌开发以Flash为基础的Facebook游戏的经历。我先前还在犹豫自己是否应该编写这篇文章,因为开发还未完成,经验并不完整。在我与同事讨论过此事后,正式决定把自己的经历写出来,因为我认识到还有其他开发者正尝试进驻这块领域。

Advergame_Just-Eat(from hoopergalton.co.uk)

Advergame_Just-Eat(from hoopergalton.co.uk)

广告游戏不等同于广告

这个问题没有确切的答案,因为游戏确实与某品牌相关,你可以把它当成是对品牌的推广,但它又不是电视或印刷等传统形式的广告。至少,游戏广告不应该成为这样的广告。GAMESbrief高管Nicholas Lovell帮助公司通过游戏赚钱,他对广告游戏评述道:

如果品牌对此行业有所了解,他们就会意识到游戏的优势在于留存率和盈利,获取用户是该推广的劣势。他们应当利用其他的营销方式来驱动顾客接受游戏。不幸的是,以我自身经历来看,多数品牌都把游戏视为普通的电视广告。其他这两种之间有所差别,游戏并非大众传播媒体。它们为各个用户提供个性化的体验。正是这种体验才对用户有如此大的吸引力。这种体验与观看30秒钟的电视广告有显著的差别。

事实上,原因完全在于广告游戏的意图。我们的方法是以品牌构建世界,并由此作出游戏。我们非常幸运,游戏所涉及的品牌很大,我们可以直接根据品牌流畅地设计出游戏。重点在于,游戏世界必须有自己的含义。也就是说,游戏必须能够在脱去品牌外衣的情况下依然存在。事实上,我们已经得到授权,在游戏中合适的地方用上真实的品牌产品。

发行商有所不同

制作这款游戏的过程中,最有趣的是游戏想法的来源。凭我在主流游戏行业中的经验,游戏的产生要么是工作室有自己的想法,要么是发行商想要以某个想法制作出游戏。这款优秀的发展路径有些许不同。先是品牌持有者接触广告代理商,后者让各个不同的开发者投标来获得这个合同。

这种间接性以后会变得更为重要。采用这种方法的结果是,由于广告代理商和品牌持有者都没有游戏开发方面的经验,因而所有的游戏开发细节都由我们开发者来决定。随着开发逐渐进行下去,这也是个非常重要的因素。

广告游戏需要有宽广的用户触及面

即便游戏并非品牌的直接广告,持有者仍然希望游戏能受到玩家欢迎。虽然游戏的设计目标并非直接产生盈利,但必须从一开始就要求足够的玩家来向外界宣布游戏的存在。近来一直在强调所谓的社交游戏和社群构建,这款游戏将成为构建品牌在线社群的又一个武器。他们已经在Facebook等处进行品牌推广,他们希望游戏能够提供帮助,也就是说游戏必须以网页浏览器为平台。游戏的目标在于尽量接触更多的用户,因而我们用Flash来开发游戏,因为它依然是浏览器市场中兼容性最好的工具。用Unity或HTML 5开发或许会更加有趣,但不幸的是,这两个工具在浏览器中的兼容性不及Flash。

保护品牌地位

在游戏开发过程中,最令我们感到震惊的是品牌身份的珍贵。这确实令我们感到大为惊奇,也使得我们递交游戏的时间推迟了1个月。品牌不仅是他们的IP,而且还是产品的身份,是公司需要誓死捍卫的东西。与我们合作的品牌很大,而且已经做过了大量的电视广告,这意味着我们不能按照自己的想法来制作,我们低估了品牌对游戏的控制力。游戏中所有的内容都应当尽善尽美,完全贴合之前所做的推广,或者至少要与品牌当前身份保持一致。

这意味着,只要有一个人感觉游戏在视觉效果、感觉或其他方面与品牌不符,那么游戏中的所有内容都应当仔细审查和修改。我们收集了品牌电视和印刷广告的图片,参考它们来设计游戏的视觉效果。我们觉得这就是与品牌保持一致需要做的事情,但是我们错了。

代理商得到的任务是制作一款能够保卫品牌身份的游戏,这使得他们需要从各个细节上控制游戏的视觉效果。他们的想法是,他们需要全力保护品牌,直到他们能够自信地认为品牌持有者不会批驳游戏中出现的图片。这个事实意味着我们必须从至少两个方面来改善艺术设计。事实上,要做的远不止这些。

scamp及其效能

我们必须改变视觉效果的设计方式,我们必须适应代理商工作的方式,也就是“scamp”形式。这个术语我此前从未见过,也无法给出令人满意的定义。

一旦scamp得到认可,美工在进行产品图像设计时会认为按照scamp许可来进展会相对安全些。然而,事实证明许可只是第一阶段。光线、颜色和质感等细节都需要进过许可。有时,这些因素中有些被否决会导致整个场景返工,然后又开始上述的认证循环。

事实上,直到游戏发布之前,这种循环一直在进行中。背景是一个很大的问题。静态图片看起来效果很不错,但放在游戏背景中感觉就可能发生改变,这样就必须重新设计。我们在这个过程中小心翼翼,确保所有的图片都编写邮件请求代理商许可。这样当图片需要改变时,我们便能迅速找到问题的关键。不断的修改会让游戏的开发显得遥遥无期。

从上文中,你或许会认为我觉得这整个过程异常繁琐。尽管这些过程确实让我们极受挫败,但我已经完全理解了。坦诚地说,我们甚为幼稚,根本没有意识到可能会发生这些事情,只是按照原因制定的计划来施行。当然,他们的目标是尽力保护他们的品牌,而我们制作游戏的目标是为他们服务。我们需要遵从这些规则,防止自己的所作所为破坏品牌的身份。

以上便是广告游戏制作中最重要的因素。不可低估你的团队和游戏时间安排可能造成的影响。应该准备好面对这些事情,并且不断调整时间计划。

与客户的分歧

过去我制作的所有游戏都在开发过程中不断发展。但在广告游戏开发中,我有自己的游戏设计想法,他们也想提供游戏整体的设计框架。在开发过程中,游戏与设计计划间可能存在偏差。这是很正常的,因为在我们执行游戏设计时,显然会出现某些与我们计划不一致的东西,我们必须去适应这些改变。我会与其他设计师讨论这些改变是否会产生意料不到的后果。但是,这种我们认为很自然的改变却会让我们的客户感到震惊。

在开发期间,客户多次打电话过来告诉我们某些元素的位置不对,我们会跟他们说我们做出此等修改的理由,但他们只会硬生生地回答道“我想要的不是这样的游戏”。对客户来说,他们有着自己的想法,而且他们确信这种设计就是他们想要的内容。之所以会出现上述尴尬的情形,是因为客户缺乏游戏开发经验,同时我们又缺乏与代理商和品牌持有者沟通的经验。过去的传统电视广告或印刷广告,设计的是线性体验。每个人从设计中获得的体验是相同的,但游戏是个互动媒介,每个人的体验不一定相同。这意味着要完全遵从一份文件来设计游戏且不作出任何改变是很难的事情。因而,当我们在遇到某些问题时根据我们的想法做出些许改变,这让我们的客户大感意外。

对我们的客户而言,设计文件所规划的就是他们想要得到的东西,不可做出任何改变。有时我们不得不遵从他们的设计方法,因为他们坚持认为必须根据文件来设计,这才是他们想要得到的东西,尽管有些特征并不适合游戏背景。随着游戏开发逐渐进行,双方逐渐熟悉对方的工作方式并建立起信任感,此时我们才可以解释哪些功能并不能发挥出预期的作用并提出相应的解决方案。

游戏语言问题

在开发后期,我们遇到的最大问题是客户希望游戏在以阿拉伯语为主要语言的国家发布,也就是说我们需要根据阿拉伯语来本土化游戏。这令我们大感惊奇,因为在此之前我们都认为游戏只会在欧洲发布,因而游戏只支持英法意德西五种语言。事实上,开发早期的邮件交流也是这么说的,因而我们也只考虑这些语言。

原始交流邮件已经找不到了,因而这种突然间产生的需求让我们吓了一跳。既然已经发生了这些事情,弄清楚怎么发生已经不重要了,重要的是如何解决这个问题。

当时,我甚至连Flash是否支持阿拉伯语都还未曾知晓,因而我不得不花些时间来做研究。最终证实这不是个问题,但由于游戏已临近发布,我们确实已经没有足够的时间用来做本地化,我需要完成剩余的游戏代码。然而,我们还是召开了紧急会议来努力解决这个问题。

还有个问题,阿拉伯语是门从右往左看的语言,但游戏所使用的动态文本域只支持从左往右的语言。我们将文本域构建在游戏中,这样我们可以使用单个SWF文件来应对所有的语言,并在游戏运行时自动转换成相应语言。为实现这个目标,游戏中所有的文本域都必须是动态的。

在Flash游戏中添加阿拉伯语文本

最终证实,解决方案很简单,我已经记住了这种方法,可以用在将来的Flash游戏制作中。过去,你时常可以指派HTML给动态文本域,Flash会根据HTML标签将其组织起来。这让我忽然想到,我们可以利用此功能来使用HTML加载远程图片直接呈现在文本域中。这么做使我们无需修改任何代码,所有的阿拉伯语文本都可以通过现有文本数据库来呈现。我们将代码“TEXT_TAG=Text to be displayed”修改成“TEXT_TAG=<img src=http://somewebsever.com/Arabic/Text_to_be_displayed.png>”。

这也意味着我们可以将阿拉伯语本地化工作交给外部团队,将这个问题放在以后解决,我们所需要做的就是指定所有特定PNG的大小。

继续开发广告游戏

在开发过程中,我们曾经数次有过不再制作广告游戏的念头。但现在游戏几近完成并面世,坦诚地说,我可能还会想制作广告游戏。关键在于不可随意假设游戏所要传达的内容,你需要将自己的想法和开发过程向客户解释,而且尽力去理解他们提供的开发流程和做法。

我在本文开头中说过,广告游戏会改变我对游戏开发的看法,其原因在于开发广告游戏与我已感到厌倦的主流游戏开发大不相同。广告游戏不是主流游戏(游戏邦注:如第一人称射击、竞速等),而是小范围的有趣游戏。广告游戏很简单,因而玩游戏也不会存在什么障碍,它们有着更广阔的用户基础。

我过去曾认为制作这种类型的游戏无异于用游戏设计师的灵魂来换取金钱,但在我看到他们对品牌的强调之后这个观点已经发生改变。他们想要的是款有趣的游戏,而不是想通过这款游戏来赚钱,事实上游戏本身并不能产生利润。依我在某些大型工作室中的经历,这些工作室有时纯粹为了盈利而制作游戏,他们看重的并非娱乐性,而这种想法有时会伤害到游戏的质量。这或许是个很无情的观点,但我感受到的确实是这样的。可能我想的过于理想化了。

从我与代理商和品牌持有者的会面中,我感觉广告游戏很像独立游戏,因为此类游戏极具实验性。设计游戏的目标并非为了盈利,因而无需遵从市场趋势或根据市场流行题材来制作游戏。仅此便足以吸引我继续开发此类游戏。因为这些游戏正是我乐衷于设计的,而且还能获得报酬。这世上还有比这更好的游戏吗?(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

ADVERGAMING IS TOUGH: SOME SIMPLE LESSONS IN HOW DEVELOPERS AND MARKETERS CAN MAKE GAMES TOGETHER

Byron Atkinson-Jones

When I set out to found Xiotex Studios over 4 years ago I had every intention of doing so to create my own games and nothing but my own games. This was a dream that had been brewing for a long time as I toiled away in the mainstream games industry, pulling crunch on whatever title I was tasked to code. Don’t get me wrong; those formative years were essential to give me the confidence and experience to strike it alone and I don’t regret it, having met and worked with a lot of very good people and studios but my heart was always leading me to work for myself and that was just what I was going to do.

An indie with a plan

I didn’t just work in random places or places that would take me, I had a plan and I targeted places I felt I could learn the most from – in both business skills and technical ability, having said that here were some places that I just wanted to work because they were places I aspired to when I was younger. The companies that had the most effect on me were PomPom, Introversion, EA Canada and Lionhead Studios. I learned a hell of a lot from each of those places and I owe a great deal to my experiences there. They taught me a lot about coding, game design, dealing with others and business in general.

When I finally made the break I spent a month working on my own title and it felt good. Before long word got out that I was free and people began to start calling me to come work on their projects. I held out for a while but it occurred to me that what I was working on was going to take a while before it would generate enough funds to be able to make it a very long-term prospect. I decided to turn down the full time offers but go with the short-term contract. Spending a couple of months working on somebody else’s project would give me enough funds to continue with Xiotex Studios a lot longer. I’ve done this on and off for the last 4 years and it’s working well. There have been a few tempting offers to go full time with some studios or other but I’ve pretty much held on to the Xiotex Studios dream and run with it.

The reason for that little pre-amble is that I wanted to make it clear that I had a plan set out and I was following it because something unexpected turned up that had the potential to change the way I think about game development forever and that is something called “Advergaming”.

The following is my experience in developing a Flash based Facebook game for a major international brand. I pondered for a while if I should write about it because the experience is on-going but after talking it over with my colleagues I decided to go ahead since I know that there are some others out in the development world who are contemplating entering the same field.

Doesn’t advergaming mean that you are just making an advert?

There’s no clear answer to this question because the game is about a brand and you could say it was commissioned to promote it but it’s not a clear ‘advert’ in the purest form, like a television spot or a static print advert. At least it shouldn’t be. Nicholas Lovell, director of GAMESbrief or “a man who helps companies make money from games” has this to say about advergaming:

“If the brand has any sense, they will realise that games are great at Retention and Monetisation, but rubbish at Acquisition, and use the rest of their marketing to drive customers to the game. Unfortunately, in my experience, most brands think of games as being equivalent to a television spot. They are not. Games are not a mass broadcast medium. They offer individual users a personalised experience. It is this experience that gives users such a high level of engagement and powerful recall. It is a totally different experience to viewing a 30-second television spot.”

It all comes down to what the intention of the game is. Our approach was to take the world of the brand and create a game out of it. We were quite lucky that the identity in our case was quite strong to begin with and a game design flowed straight out of it. It was important however that the world had to make sense in it’s own right and that the product wasn’t forced down the players throat at every possibility – the game had to be able to stand up in it’s own right even if it were not cloaked in the brand. In fact, we had to get permission to use the actual product in the game where it made sense.

Publishers?

The most interesting thing about working on this game is where it came from. In my experience in the mainstream games industry games either came from ideas that studios wanted to pitch or publishers had a game they needed to make. The route this game took was a little different. The brand holder approached an advertising agency, they in turn put the game out to tender to various different developers who had to pitch to win the contract.

This level of indirection is something that would become very important later on. Another consequence of this route is that both the agency and the brand holder didn’t have any previous experience of developing games and all the particular foibles of game development that we all go though. This is something else that would become very important as the development progressed.

Advergames need to reach a wide audience

Even though the game is not an explicit advert for the brand, the holder didn’t commission it just to disappear into obscurity. While the game is not designed to generate revenue directly it has to have enough players in order to justify its existence in the first place, which in turn was based upon projected players on a specific platform. The emphasis these days is on so-called social gaming and community building and this game was intended to be just one more weapon in order to build their online community. They already had campaign plans revolving around Facebook and they wanted the game to run along side that, which meant that the game had to run in a browser. Sticking with the ‘as wide an audience as possible’ theme this meant that we were going to be developing using Flash since it still has the broadest penetration in the browser market. It would have been fun to develop in Unity or HTML 5 but the sad fact is that neither of those has the same kind of coverage of Flash yet.

There are lots of gatekeepers in marketing

The biggest shock to the development of the game came from just how precious the identity of the brand was. This really caught us by surprise and meant that we were at least 1 month late on delivery of the game. The brand is not just their IP it’s also their identity of their product and they will defend it to death. The particular brand we were working with was massive and had a huge legacy of television spots, which meant we couldn’t just go around modifying that identity as we saw fit but what we underestimated was the level of control they would exert over the visuals. Everything had to be perfect and in complete cohesion with whatever went before or at least in tune with the current incarnation of the identity.

This means absolutely everything about the game was going to be scrutinized, judged and changed if just one person feels that it doesn’t match the brand in visuals, feel or any other possible reason. We had lots of images from the television and print adverts to do with the brand and designed the visuals of the game with those as reference; we thought that was what we needed to do to ensure that we kept within the identity. We were wrong.

The agency that was commissioned to produce a game acted as a gatekeeper to the brand and as such retained full control over the visuals down to the smallest detail. The idea was that they protected the brand to a level that they were confident that the brand holder would not reject images that were to appear in the game. The reality sunk in that this meant that we had at least two levels that would have to approve our artwork. In practice there were far more levels than that with each level below acting as a gatekeeper for the higher up levels, in both the advertising agency and the brand holder.

What are scamps, and why do they matter?

We had to change how we approached the design of the visuals, we had to adapt to the way the agency were used to working and that came in the form of ‘scamps’. This was not a term that I had come across before and we never found out a satisfactory definition but what it boiled down to was reams and reams of rough grayscale images depicting every scene in the game.

Once the scamps were approved the artist moved onto the actual production of the images thinking that he was fairly safe to proceed based on the scamp approval. However as it turns out the approval was only stage one and details such as lighting, colour and texture had to be approved as well. Sometimes rejection of any of these factors would push they entire scene back into the scamp phase and the whole cycle would repeat.

In reality this part of the production of the game continued in this cyclical fashion almost up to the release. The problem was one of context. While a static image looks fine, actually seeing it inside the game placed it in context and changed the feel of it, which meant that it was subject to change yet again. We had to take special precaution to make sure that we got written email confirmation of sign-off on all images so that when change was attempted again we could point out the various processes that image had gone through. The constant change was in real danger of making sure that game was never finished.

It might seem from my writing above that I viewed this entire process as being very detrimental. While it was certainly frustrating I can fully understand it and to be honest we were incredibly naïve in not expecting it to happen and build it in as a factor in the timescales that were initially presented. Of course they were going to protect the identity to this degree, we were making a game for them, not us and was based on an already strong brand. We needed to abide by the rules they guarded to make sure that the identity was not subverted by something we did.

This if anything is the most important factor of working in advergaming. Don’t underestimate the impact it will have on your team and the schedule of the game. Be prepared for it and build iteration into your schedule – lots of it.

This isn’t what I paid for…

All of the games I’ve worked on in the past evolved as they were developed. I’ve had game designs but they were mostly guides to give the overall vision of the game and during its development that game would often take a tangent to the actual design. This was natural because as we implemented the design it would become obvious that something doesn’t quite pan out as planned so we had to adapt. We have a tendency to take this for granted and along the way I would discuss any possible changes with the designer to make sure that there weren’t any unforeseen consequences down the line. This comes naturally to us but comes as a shock to the clients.

There were many calls where the client would ask us where feature ‘X’ was and we would announce that we had to change it because of some reason or other and the stark response that came back was “This isn’t what I paid for”. To the client they had signed off on a design and they were pretty sure that’s the design they wanted. This kind of reaction was somewhat fueled by their lack of experience in dealing with game development as much as it was our lack of experience in dealing with agencies and brand holders. In the past with a traditional Television spot advert or print ad the design is very linear experience. You can get a feel for the entire campaign from the design because it runs from A to B whereas games are an interactive medium and the experience one player gets is not necessarily going to be the same as another player. This means that it can be tough to absolutely nail the entire game in a document without some changes happening along the way. So when we suddenly change the design to accommodate some issue it comes as a surprise to the client that we thought we could do that. It never occurred to us that we couldn’t because that’s how we have always worked.

To our clients the design document was exactly what they were getting, what they had signed off on and any deviation from it had to be rigorously defended by us. In some cases we had to come up with alternative ways of building in the feature that the client wanted because they were adamant that they had signed a document that said it was going to be included and that’s exactly what they wanted, even if it didn’t really work in the context of the game. As the game progressed each side became more used to each other’s way of working and a mutual trust emerged where we could explain why some feature wasn’t actually working as envisioned and here was a solution that would make up for it.

“And we want the game in Arabic”

The biggest bombshell that landed on our laps really late on in the project was that the clients wanted to release the game in countries where Arabic was the main language and as such required us to localise the game into Arabic. This came as a total surprise to us because up until that point we were under the impression the game was going to be a European release only and we would only have to support EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German and Spanish). In fact emails circulated early on in the development backed this up, the game had been commissioned with only these languages in mind.

Somewhere along the way original communications had been lost and while the sudden demand of Arabic came as a shock to us it appeared that the source client had requested it from the beginning, the message just simply hadn’t made it down the chain. These things happen and it’s not how it happened that matters but rather how you deal with it and besides, I love a challenge.

At this point I wasn’t even sure if Flash supported Arabic so I had to take some time out to research it. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue but since the game was already quite close to release it was time we didn’t really have, I needed to be able to complete the rest of the game code. However there were a lot of panic meetings happening to try and resolve this issue so into research mode I went.

The problem was that Arabic is a language that reads from right to left and the game was using dynamic text-fields that only supported left to right languages. A text database was built into the game so that we could use one single SWF file for all the languages and simple switch at run-time to the relevant language. In order to do this all the text-fields in the game had to be dynamic.

How to put Arabic text in a Flash game

The solution turned out to be so simple and elegant and it’s certainly one I will remember for Flash games in the future. In the past you’ve always been able to assign HTML to dynamic text fields and Flash would format it based on the HTML tags. It occurred to me that we could use this feature to use the HTML to load remote images to display in the text-fields. Doing this meant that no code had to change at all and all the Arabic text could go through our existing text database, instead of this:

TEXT_TAG=Text to be displayed

We had:

TEXT_TAG=<img src=http://somewebsever.com/Arabic/Text_to_be_displayed.png>

It also meant that we could hand off the entire Arabic localisation to an external team to deal with at some later date, all we needed to do was build the specification for the sizes of each PNG and not worry about it from then on.

So, would you do it all again?

Once the reality of the process we were forced into sunk in we each in turn had our moments of “never doing this again”, but now that it’s coming to the end and the game will soon be out there in the world I can honestly say that I would do it again. The key to surviving it is to not go into it with any assumptions about how it’s all going to work and above all do not make any assumptions about the experience of those you are dealing with. Everything has to be spelled out, if need be you will have to explain how your process works with the client and conversely do your best to understand how their process works.

I mentioned right at the beginning of this article that Advergaming was changing the way I thought about game development and the reason for this is that it is sufficiently different and interesting from mainstream development that I find myself drawn to it. By that I mean they are not a constant stream of me-too games (FPS, racing etc) but rather small-scale fun games not too far removed from Flash games. On top of that they are free which means the barrier to play them is substantially removed and you can reach a wider audience.

I used to think that working on this type of game would similar to selling your soul or “selling out” but that opinion has changed having seen the emphasis from the brand where they want to make a fun game rather than just make a game to make money, in fact the game itself is not a revenue generator. Something I have often felt when working for the larger studios is that they make games to make money rather than to be pure entertainment and sometimes the game suffers because of that. That may be a very harsh view but that’s how it felt to me. Perhaps I am too much of an idealist?

From the meetings I have had with agencies and brand holders there came a feeling that Advergaming is very much akin to the indie spirit in that they are much more open for experimentation. The games are not designed to be revenue generators so they are not concerned with following the market trend and making a game that fits into the genre of the moment. That alone makes me keen to continue working on them. It’s like the best of both worlds, get to make games I like and get paid for it. What can be better than that? (Source: Games Brief)


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