This multi-part series examines the history of Knockabout Games, a mobile games startup I co-founded in 2002, near the start of the pre-iPhone “first wave of mobile gaming”.  You can find all eight parts of the series below:

Before The Start (this post)

Product Strategy

Business Strategy

Funding, Equity And Staffing

What Actually Happened

Where We Failed

Knockabout’s Demise

An Epilogue

Before The Start:  Why Mobile?

In the fall of 2002 I sat down with longtime friend and business collaborator Monty Kerr to talk about a new venture.  I already had two game startups under my belt, and I’d just come off a one year break (most of which was spent living on a catamaran).  I was recharged and ready to dive into something new.

We didn’t have any idea at that point what kind of games we wanted to make, but we had two requirements:  it had to be in a relatively new space, and it had to be games.  So I got on a plane and made a three city tour of the west coast — Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles — to chat with friends and colleagues about the state of the industry and where things were headed (we also spent some time with folks here in Austin).

There were three sectors we were considering:  casual downloadable, mobile, and boutique MMOs.  All three were fairly new and unexplored at the time, but each looked ready to explode (indeed, in hindsight they all did).  We ultimately chose mobile almost by reduction:

• Boutique MMOs were much more costly than the other two ($500k – $1m a pop) and would require raising capital.
• Casual was exciting, but it felt like we could do this sort of startup any time — shareware games had been around almost 15 years at that point and it didn’t seem like anything was going to make entry into this space more difficult in the future (although that turned out to be wrong).
• Mobile had a small window that had just opened up.  If we wanted to try it, we had to go now.

The clincher was actually a conversation I had with Mitch Lasky, then CEO of JAMDAT (which later became EA Mobile).  Mitch gave me a thorough rundown of the value chain and how money flowed through it, and talked about the various challenges of building games for handsets.  And he shared some data.  What was most interesting, though, was that the first mainstream color handset had just launched (the Motorola T720), and people were suddenly starting to buy games.  Real money was flowing.

Building The Plan

I spent the next two months diving into all manner of research about mobile games:  carriers, publishers, developers, technology providers, handset makers, and so forth.  The way I like to do this is to write an operational plan, of sorts.  The goal is to create a document that covers how the space works and how we’re going to build a business that can thrive in it.  But it’s not as organized as a business plan and isn’t trying to pitch or sell anyone on the concept.  It doesn’t even need to be complete.  The purpose is to identify all the moving parts and look for opportunities on which to build a strategy;  the act of writing it down forces one to see everything and articulate that strategy clearly.

Knockabout’s plan was about 200 pages and unfinished.  And it was never looked at again after we launched.  That wasn’t because parts of it became slowly invalid over time; rather, it was because the process of putting it down on paper had effectively committed it to memory.  We knew it inside and out.

There were four basic parts to our strategy:  product, business, funding and development.  Next time I’ll dig into our product strategy.

One of my startup philosophies is to always plan for two or three things going wrong, all the time.  New businesses are chaotic enterprises, operating on limited information in new domains, constantly adapting.  You have to set an expectation for the unexpected.  If your baseline is a couple surprises every month or so, they’ll feel less like threats and more like business as usual.

That sort of attitude shift goes a long way toward coping with challenges as you build a company.  No more “oh my, what are we going to do?”, just a calm, rational “ok, we thought something might happen, lets figure out what to do about it”.

And if nothing goes haywire?  Great, you had a good month.

Next week I’ll be kicking off a multi-part company postmortem on Knockabout Games, the development studio I founded in 2002 to build games for mobile phones (during the first wave of mobile, i.e. pre-iOS).

There’s an old saying I heard when I first started making games almost 20 years ago:  in the arcade, you want a 90 second experience to feel like 90 minutes;  on a pc, you want a 90 minute experience to feel like 90 seconds.

Game play lengths have changed a lot over the past two decades.  There may even be a case against thinking in discreet segments at all.  Nevertheless, it’s worth applying the general concept to the wide range of gaming platforms available in 2012 (inasmuch as individual platforms tend to set certain expectations).

Which of the following should feel like more time has passed than actually has, which ones less?

• Arcade
• Console – Retail
• Console – Downloadable (e.g. Xbox Live)
• Console – Handheld
• PC – Retail
• PC – Downloadable
• PC – Web (e.g. flash games)
• PC – Social
• PC – MMO
• Mobile

I’d say arcade, handheld, web, social and mobile games want you to feel like more time has passed.  The rest — retail and downloadable games, plus MMOs, want your play experience to feel shorter than it is.  That may not be how they should or could be designed, but the current expectations of the audience suggest that breakdown.

Agree or disagree?  The original phrase isn’t exactly symmetrical:  the economics of the arcade drove shorter play times, so they had to feel much longer to create the perception of value.  At home on the pc, with more time available, you wanted the player so immersed they didn’t notice the passage of time (which is less directly about value than maintaining engagement).

I’ve written before about how value chain barriers are dropping, enabling a more product to reach consumers than ever before.  While a boon for consumers (setting aside for the moment the noise/discovery problem), this is a challenge for content creators:  more product means more competition, driving down prices and unit sales.  So the value of content is falling.

But it’s also rising.  Lower barriers make it feasible to bring niche products to market that couldn’t be justified in the past.  And consumers will pay extraordinary amounts for products that address a niche they find compelling.  The evidence for this is all around us, from low budget CCGs (e.g. the now defunct Warstorm) to high budget strategy games (e.g. League of Legends), and it’s been happening for years.

We’re talking about products that generate $50 – $100 per paying user.  Per month.  Do the math and ask yourself how small a niche you can serve and what it will cost to build the product.  You don’t need to spend millions like League of Legends, or even hundreds of thousands like Warstorm.  There are countless underserved niches out there just begging for a product.

I think there’s some acceptance in the industry that the terms “casual” and “hardcore” have been co-opted by historical circumstances and no longer match their functional meaning.  These days most people array casual and hardcore as two ends of an audience spectrum from large (casual) to small (hardcore).   What they’re really talking about is how niche a title is.

This would be merely a semantic debate and beside the point, except that folks in the industry also go on to attribute all kinds of other (arguably more genuine) characteristics to casual and hardcore titles.  For example, casual titles may have short play sessions, simple interfaces and fast learning curves.  Hardcore titles might have deep, complicated rule systems that encourage extended play and long life cycles.  By making the original assertion about audience, however, these characteristics falsely wind up at both ends of a spectrum.

To make something casual is to make it accessible.  There’s not much more to it than that.  Attention friendly, light on commitment, easy to understand, and so forth.  These are product characteristics not audience characteristics.

To make something hardcore is to make it more engaging.  More content to consume, more variety, more personal.

The question isn’t whether you’re making a casual or hardcore game but two separate questions:  does it enable casual play? does it enable hardcore play?  The answer can be yes to both.