Goodsol Solitaire Blog

Out Sick

There has been no posting for the last couple of days as I've been fighting some kind of cold/flu bug.

I'll be back when I've declared victory over it.

Friday CatBlogging: I'm Really Quite Innocent

So this morning I'm working away in my office in the basement and I hear noises coming from the utility room.

Some months back we were having problems with Pumpkin (pictured above), jumping up on the water heater, then getting on top of heating ducts and going underneath the floor of the kitchen.  The utility room is unfinished so there is a gap there where she can get under the floor of the next higher level of our split-level house.  To stop this, we put up chicken wire blocking the gap.  It worked quite well, Pumpkin would sit on the water heater and get quite frustrated that she couldn't go up any higher anymore.  Every now and then I would hear her there attempting to get up, but with no success because the chicken wire blocked her.

This morning I heard those noises again, except they were different.  I went in to the utility room to investigate and discovered that the rascal (pictured above) had managed to bend and twist the chicken wire to create a small opening large enough to squeeze through.  Fortunately, the noise I heard was actually her coming down from her forbidden foray under the kitchen.  I've closed the gap again.

Bad kitty!

(The main reason we don't want here going there, aside from the fact that there is no way we can reach her while she is in there, is that years ago Queenie got up there once and fell into a gap in the wall and fell into the wall!  She was wailing in there for hours.  We thought we were going have to tear the wall somehow to get her out, but Anne showed a flashlight down into the wall and Queenie managed to climb up the wall to the light.   We've blocked that off, but who knows what other trouble a cat could get into under the floor.)

As always, for more cat pictures, see the Friday Ark #75.

What the Market Wants

There is an interesting discussion thread on Indiegamer this morning:  What the Market Wants.

It was actually interesting enough to get me to post in the thread, which is very rare on Indiegamer these days. 

Small Giants

Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham is a book about small companies that want to be small, but also great.  It details 14 small companies and goes in depth into the companies' histories, founders, and why and how these companies have decided to remain small companies rather than growing bigger.

The usual pattern for books of this type is to look at each company individually, generally with separate chapters.  Small Giants takes a different approach.  The book jumps around from one of the 14 companies to another to illustrate its points.  This takes a little getting used to in the beginning when you aren't familiar with the companies yet, but after you get used to it, it works well.

The companies featured in the book are small companies, but with one exception they are bigger than a typical MicroISV.  The smallest company has only two employees but the largest has more than a thousand.

The author chose only companies that had faced a decision where they could have decided to become a bigger company, either by going public, being acquired, or some other means.  Each company made a choice to remain a small, private company.

The book details the decision to remain small and how each company works and succeeds.   All of the companies are leaders in their industries, despite being small.  It shows how passionate, focused companies can compete successfully against much larger competition.  The culture of each company is described (and each company is different).  It deals with the issue of succession when the founders leave the company (some companies have faced this already, others are planning for it, and some others haven't yet planned for it).

While the companies featured are generally larger than MicroISVs and are in completely different industries than independent game developers, there is a lot here that applies that will be of interest to indies or MicroISVs.  A few of the companies, such as Righteous Babe Records, or Hammerhead Productions, a movie special effects company, are in intellectual property/development/publisher type industries and therefore face many of the same issues as indie game companies.

If you like reading about how small companies operate and are managed and how the people who run great small companies do it, then this is a must read book.

Carnival of Marketing

This week's Carnival of Marketing is up.  I'm going to be hosting it here next month, so I'm going to start linking to it every week.

Be sure to read the post about not doing discounts.

Beware of Oversupply

Another great post on gapingvoid: 100 Suits.

Over the last couple of days I've been thinking about this one idea I've had for English Cut.

The idea is basically limiting our output to 100 suits a year.

That's roughly 2 suits a week- less than what we're making at the moment, but not by a wide margin.

See also the referenced The Tao of Undersupply.

We both concur that the biggest problem in the Western world is oversupply.

So maybe the thing is to is get into "The Tao of Undersupply".

If only 100 people want to buy your widgets, then just make 90 widgets. If only 1000, make 900. If only 10 million, make 9 million. It isn't rocket science, but it takes discipline.

It also requires you to stop making the same stuff as other people. Doing that requires originality and invention.

This is a great idea, by limiting supply you can increase price.  David St Lawrence comments on this idea on his Ripples blog: Incredible audacity and success. 

My feeling is that his audacity will be suitably rewarded.

What do you think? Have you ever heard of output being limited successfully?

Have you ever considered how you might change your own business proposition to make it remarkable, instead of merely "sensibly" profitable?

The problem with limiting supply with an electronic product is that, essentially, there is no supply.  New copies of software can be created at will.  Therefore, how do you limit supply?

With premium, high quality suits, limiting supply makes sense.  After all, if you are going for a reputation for quality, it makes sense that you can only make so many of them and keep the quality high.  So having limited supply adds to the image of the brand.

But how do you do this for software when copies can be made instantly with no loss of quality?

One could put on a web site that you will sell only a limited number of copies in a time period, say a day.  You could say "We will only sell 10 copies of this game each day, get one while you can".  The problem with this is that it would look like it was just a sales gimmick (it would look that way because that is exactly what it would be).  It would be a totally artificial limiting of supply, rather than a limiting of supply that allows you to make the product of higher quality. 

Still, if there were some way to do this, it would be worth doing, because oversupply is the growing problem in the casual games industry.  Oversupply is what is going to eventually burst the portal bubble.

Anybody have any ideas on how you could limit supply with an electronic product without it being just a sales gimmick?

Get Paid While You Sleep

Hugh Macleod has a nice post on gapingvoid: Journeyman vs. Master.

A Journeyman gets paid while he works. A Master gets paid while he sleeps.

So do you get paid while you sleep?  One of the great things about a shareware business is that you get paid while you sleep.  Orders come in whether you are working or not.  You aren't paid by the number of hours you work, there are no billable hours.

Friday CatBlogging

Inquisitor on the kitty condo.

For more cat pictures, see the Friday Ark #74.

Microsoft Re-Discovers PC Gaming

Sleeping Giant.

With computer game sales in a tailspin and a new generation of sleek, graphics-spewing consoles hitting store shelves, the software giant is promising to not only pull the computer out of its slump, but to deliver a PC gaming renaissance.

"I want to apologize for the dereliction of duty to our company's No. 1 platform, the PC, in terms of gaming," Microsoft Vice President Peter Moore said during a speech on the changing world of PC games last week. "We've been a little distracted for the past few years. Mea culpa, we've been busy."

Translation: Holy cow, you mean people are making money selling games for the PC?  Why didn't we think of this?

Some of the PC gaming's hurdles include:

Piracy. Gamers are downloading the product rather than buying it.

Replace rather than with and.

  Stagnancy. Developers keep cranking out sequels when they should be innovating.

In casual games on the PC, sequels are not so much the problem as simply lots of very similar games.

He points to piracy as a chief culprit in the sales drop. He says developers need to first find ways to make people pay.

Piracy is not the problem.  People with pay if the game is fun and any good.

"When Vista launches at the end of this year we will be treating it like a gaming platform," he said. "We are really going to blow this out."

Microsoft's push for its new operating system and PC gaming in general will include an attempt to standardize some of the aspects of the industry. From game packaging to online play and installation, the hope is that PC gaming will adapt some of the better traits of its console competition.

The Vista system will also streamline the way games are presented on your computer.

A built-in "games explorer" will organize the games on your computer and provide details for each game.

"When you install World of Warcraft you will automatically get a lovely high-res box art image," Donahue said. "When you click on the icon it gives you the name of the publisher, developer, even links to support for the game and other stuff the developer can populate in the window."

This is the first I've heard of this.

As my wife mentioned to me yesterday, if Microsoft wanted to sell some games, they could start by updating the old Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack from the early 90s.  A lot of the games in there are now casual game classics.

Game Industry Will Double

From the Bubble Will Go On department:

Games industry revenues will double over the next five years: Study

A new study by ABI Research predicts a doubling in size of the videogames market by 2011, estimating revenues of USD 65.9 billion and highlighting a rapid increase in online and mobile gaming.

ABI projects 95 per cent year-on-year growth for the online market, including PC online casual gaming, which continues to show positive growth worldwide. Causal games provider PopCap Games and rival RealNetworks have both recently announced European expansion plans to meet the growing desire for quality web-based and connected casual games, and both companies have also expressed ambitions to more comprehensively capture the wireless gaming market - a segment which ABI believes will see substantial worldwide growth over the coming years.