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iPad: Giant Meh

Posted in Uncategorized on January 28, 2010 by themaroon

So the big news of the day before, you know, that whole State of the Union thing, was, of course, the announcement of the iPad. Love ‘em or hate ‘em (and don’t tell anyone I said this, but I actually moderately like them) everyone pays attention to Apple. They’ve been disruptive to the music industry, are running the show in the high-end PC market, and have sparked a wave of innovation in the mobile phone one, so when they launch something new it’s worth attention.

This particular product has had more speculation than any device since the original iPhone. I may be wrong, but unlike the iPhone, it feels like everyone is underwhelmed. Except, perhaps, their competitors, like Amazon and HP, who are probably ecstatic.

If I were an OEM already making a tablet, I would be very happy about today’s announcement. The only thing surprising about it was the total lack of surprises, which is unusual for Apple. Everyone’s been expecting basically a large iPod touch with books in its app store. That’s exactly what they got, and it doesn’t even have that many books either, with only a few publishers signed up.

So if I were prepping a tablet of my own, or the Kindle, the iPad we saw today would be what I’d consider best case scenario. It would be what I’ve been planning around for the last six months to a year. I would have been holding my breath, waiting to hear “Oh, and one more thing, it can READ YOUR MIND!” at the end of the Jobsnote, and when it didn’t come, uncorking a bottle of champagne that cost about the same as the 16 GB version.

Do you think the cell phone OEMs, when they saw the first iPhone, said “yeah, that’s about what we expected”? My guess is their reaction was quite the opposite. Guys at RIM and Motorola were probably thinking "holy shit, I didn’t know a phone could be that good looking or good at web surfing." They still weren’t going to shut the company down and give the money back to investors due to the iPhone’s exorbitant pricing and single carrier, I’m sure, but you know they were steaming. It was a curveball. They caught what they knew was at least a glimpse of the future, and they were already a year behind.

Does HP feel that way right now? It seems doubtful. Their Slate device has everything the iPad does, except the App Store. But is the App Store better than having available to you every program made for Windows? You can’t play League of Legends or World of Warcraft on your iPad. (You may not want to on your Slate, depending on what’s under the hood.) You can’t play Flash games from Kongregate or chess on Yahoo Games.

And while the App Store is the best thing to happen to the iPhone, it’s raison d’être, as Gabor Cselle points out it’s largely due to the iPhone’s limitations: slow processing and a tiny screen. And, I’ll add to that, the inability to run the programs you already use. The App Store isn’t a feature; it’s a clever hack.

Even Apple didn’t allow apps for the first year because they thought web apps would be sufficient. (Also Apple did not understand what I call Maroon’s Law of Platforms, which is that any sufficiently popular technological platform will evolve into little more than a method for playing games, but they get it now.)

The iPad doesn’t seem to have those limitations, or at least if it does, they’re self-imposed. Same goes for it’s competitors. They’ve got laptop-like screens, and will probably have way better processors than whatever you’re reading this on now within a few years. They can run Windows, and could probably run full-fledged OSX if Apple decided to put it on there.

But the question people seem to be asking the most is “why?” Why would I want this?

I admit, it would make a good toy. It’d be fun to play with, and that’s good for some number of sales right there, but at $500 not many. Anyone who has an iPhone, Android, or WebOS phone will tell you that web surfing on it is somewhat painful. Far less so than on the Treo 650 we had previously, but still no picnic. There’s all this pinching and swiping. It’s kludgey. Even the sites and apps designed for it entail fat-fingered misclicks and slow page loads.

But you put up with it because it’s always with you and it takes no extra effort. You don’t surf the web that much from your phone at home (other than maybe on the john, if you don’t have a PC in your bathroom yet) because you’ve got a computer right there. But when you’re walking down the street and you need directions, or you get stuck in a traffic jam, or you’re in line at the grocery store, or any of the other hundred reasons you find yourself bored on a daily basis, it’s a godsend.

The iPhone and it’s generation of smart phones kicks ass when you’re on the go. It’s always with you, and that’s why it works. Nobody wants to carry a laptop everywhere, and even if you did, you couldn’t use it while walking. You wouldn’t pull it out and start surfing in a line at Starbucks. And that is true of a tablet.

It’s no more convenient than a laptop. You can use it pretty much only when and where you could use a laptop. It’s better for some things (surfing the web from your couch, perhaps) but no matter how much effort they put into iWork, are you really ever going to want to do real work on it? Can you imagine editing a spreadsheet on that thing? Typing has to be less brutal than the iPhone, but it’s still going to be painful relative to a keyboard.

Unlike the iPod , it doesn’t replace your Walkman. Unlike the iPhone, it doesn’t replace your crappy clamshell. Unlike the Mac, it doesn’t replace your PC. It doesn’t look very compelling as a book reader, so it won’t make you ditch your Kindle or good old papyrus. It has to create it’s own usage case somewhere in between, and that’s tough.

So I’m sticking with my guess before that this is going to be about as successful (or failureful) as the Macbook Air. It won’t be a total flop (Apple TV) but it won’t be an iPod Nano either. It’ll be something you hear about for awhile, then becomes just another item on the shelf behind the Genius Bar.

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God’s Wrath According To Pat Robertson | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Posted in Uncategorized on January 20, 2010 by themaroon

God’s Wrath According To Pat Robertson

700 Club founder Pat Robertson stated that the earthquake in Haiti, which may have killed 100,000 people, was God’s punishment for a deal Haitian slaves made with the devil 200 years ago to get out from under French rule. Here are some other tragedies and Robertson’s explanations for them:

Eruption of Mount St. Helens, 1980: Divine wrath was incurred when people were too busy enjoying the natural beauty of Washington state and not spending enough time appreciating God

Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion, 1986: Ten-year-old Walt Sudul, of Racine, WI, made friends with a Jewish boy at school

Oakland Hills Firestorm, 1991: Emily Garrity pointed out a logical inconsistency in the concept of an omnipotent god to her Sunday school teacher

Magic Johnson Tests Positive for HIV, 1991: An ardent Portland Trail Blazers fan, God was horrified to see His team lose 4-2 to the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1991 Western Conference Finals, and thus decided to give the winner’s best player AIDS

Crash of American Airlines Flight 587, 2001: Though the flight was filled with pious individuals, God was distracted by a masturbating 14-year-old in Boise, ID and was therefore unable to keep the aircraft from falling apart in midair, like all planes would without His loving intervention

Columbine High School Massacre, 1999: Tinky Winky

Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004: Newlyweds Todd and Nancy Tate experimented with non-missionary sex during their honeymoon

Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Divine retribution for Girls Gone Wild: Mardi Gras (Volume 3)

via theonion.com

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Undressing the Terror Threat – WSJ.com

Posted in Uncategorized on January 9, 2010 by themaroon

I’m not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky set shot and a bad knee, I can’t hold my own in a YMCA pickup game, let alone against more organized competition. But I could definitely beat LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. The game just needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and when I score, I win.

We might have to play for a few days, and Mr. James’s point total could well be creeping toward five figures before the contest ended, but eventually the gritty gutty competitor with a lunch-bucket work ethic (me) would subject the world’s greatest basketball player to a humiliating defeat.

The world’s greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

Photo illustration by John Kuczala

Read More

Crunching the Risk Numbers

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day.

via online.wsj.com

The Bottom Feeder: Make Your Game Easy. Then Make It Easier.

Posted in Uncategorized on January 4, 2010 by themaroon

People will happily forgive a game for being too easy, because it makes them feel badass. If a game is too hard, they will get angry, ragequit, hold a grudge, and never buy your games again.

via jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

I really couldn’t disagree with this article much more. Easiness and depth are almost mutually exclusive and both have their place. If you want high user numbers and low RPU (think Farmtown) then yeah, dumb it down until you can’t dumb it down anymore. Think to yourself “could the average person who owns a Sarah Palin t-shirt play this game?”.

If you’re going the opposite way though, with relatively low sales volume and high RPU (like any console game or my latest Facebook game, Starfleet Commander) then you want the game to be hard. Difficulty is directly proportional to engagement.

And by that I do not mean hard to use of course. A good model to look at is Ocarina of Time. The puzzles and the game were as difficult as anything out at the time short of maybe Myst, but the controls were as intuitive and easy to use as the many 3d RPGs still being made a decade later.

I think this is the direction in which Facebook games are moving too because the RPUs of a real game are obscene. Engagement is directly proportional to RPU (revenue per user, by the way) and higher RPU means you can spend more money acquiring a customer. With organic growth stalling, or on the web where it’s largely unproven, squeezing dimes out of users is going to be extremely key to long-term success.

If Facebook’s invite system removes organic growth like a lot of people suspect, you’ll see the flood of Farm games and other easy to play, low RPU, high volume Flash games turn into a trickle.

And there’s a line there clearly, difficulty and engagement don’t scale together forever. At some point it becomes just painful. But difficulty (which, even in an RPG, does not necessarily equate to a player dying) is not something to be shunned.

Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy – GOOD Blog – GOOD

Posted in Uncategorized on January 2, 2010 by themaroon

via good.is

But hey, who needs health care reform anyway?

Great Conversations

Posted in Uncategorized on December 30, 2009 by themaroon

Me: I don’t think there is a legal grade of beef worse than what McDonalds serves.

Chad: I wonder why.

Me: Because if there was, they would use that instead.

LoLz

Posted in Games, Uncategorized on December 30, 2009 by themaroon

I’ve been really getting into a game called League of Legends lately. It’s the latest incarnation of a relatively new genre of games popularly called “MOBA” or Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. The high-level synopsis is that it’s a real time strategy game (think Warcraft 3) on Ritalin.

Gameplay

Rather than building up slowly from the start, the way you do in a typical RTS, you play a Summoner and start off each game with just one hero character which you choose out of dozens of available ones. You can choose a different hero each time if you like from ones you have unlocked or a set of 10 freely available ones that rotates each week. Each hero has a unique set of abilities and statistics, and there are a few different roles heroes can play. Some are “tanks” who run into battle and start bashing everything in sight, some are “supporters” who hang back a bit and beef up themselves and other allied heroes in the area, some are “carries” who have special abilities that help a team push down towers and bases at the end, etc.

Games are typically played 5 on 5. Both teams have a base on opposite corners of a square map guarded with lots of beefy defensive turrets (the purple and blue objects on the map below) and there are 3 paths between them, each of which has more turrets. Each team spawns minions (the green and red dots) periodically at the same time that move down each of the 3 lanes attacking whatever enemies they find and, if left unmolested, meeting in the middle.

For anyone who has played Warcraft 3 this may sound familiar. It’s based on the popular custom scenario called Defense of the Ancients (or DotA). It’s built by a company called Riot Games, which as far as I can tell has raised somewhere north of $15m and hired 40 people, including some who built DotA, to put it out.

Monetization

Possibly what fascinates me most is how they monetize: exactly the same way my Facebook games do, by letting people play for free and selling things in-game. They primary sale item seems to be the heroes. There are dozens of them, and you could unlock them yourself by playing a lot and gaining experience, but it would take you forever. Even unlocking one of the top tier heroes could take you weeks of casual play. Instead you can buy them at prices ranging from about $2 to about $8.

We’ve thought a lot about doing some sort of more traditional RTS game on Facebook. The problem is that Facebook games monetize so well because they are persistent. When you buy an android in Starfleet Commander, he provides you with a permanent resource boost. That’s why we went with the perpetual RTS model that we use now, where it’s like a very slow version of Starcraft that lasts forever.

Normal RTS games, however, last generally around a half hour to an hour. Thus it would feel like a waste to a customer to buy something that will only help your team out for that short a period of time. The tough design decision then is finding a way to give people permanent incentives (and therefore advantages) to purchase items while keeping the game somewhat competitive for those who do not.

League of Legends solves this to a large extent with the Summoner/Hero paradigm. Summoners gain persistent advantages over time, both as a reward for playing and from purchasing Riot Points for cash. Heroes start off every battle anew, though they gain some of those persistent advantages.

Summoners level up on a persistent basis. Playing games nets you experience that increases your level. With each level you get a mastery point and a rune slot. The mastery point lets you improve one of the two Summoner spells you choose for your hero at the beginning of every match. The rune slots allow you to purchase runes (using another type of points earned by playing) that increase your hero’s stats as well.

Heroes also level up in-game, but start each game again at level 1. So if a level 20 Summoner playing a hero called Ashe faces a level 1 Summoner also using Ashe, their heroes both start off with the same base stats. The only differences are that the level 20 guy will have more and better runes and better masteries, giving him a pretty serious advantage.

Matches

Because of the level advantage provided by runes and masteries, a strong matchmaking algorithm is necessary. I feel this is the biggest flaw in the game so far. The matchmaking is very uneven.

From what I can gather they use an ELO-style rating system (similar to what chess uses) that is unseen by players to determine (probably to a fairly accurate degree) each team’s chances of winning. They try to match up players such that they will win half of their matches and lose half.

The problem with this system is that a game is fun when teams are evenly matched and the 50/50 split is a result of that. The problem is that there are other ways to get a 50/50 split than evenly matched teams.

Suppose, for instance, you took a group of 5 Level 20 Summoners. One game you matched them up against 5 Level 40 Summoners, giving them effectively no chance to win. The next game you matched them up against 5 Level 1 Summoners, giving them effectively no chance to lose. Your group of 5 guys just won one game and lost one, but neither were fun at all.

While the net effect of their ranking system isn’t quite that drastic, it’s not far off either when you’re new to the game. Once you have some experience, though it seems to improve a decent amount.

I found out, through our Starfleet Forums, that one of the game’s designers happens to play our game and had a chance to talk to him about it. It sounds like they know it’s a problem and are working on improving it. I’m sure they will. It’s a tough problem to get people in even matches, especially when time is a factor (nobody wants to wait more than a couple minutes for a game to start) and one that I imagine they will be able to improve upon greatly both with effort and as their user base grows.

Interestingly, matchup quality will give them somewhat of a network effect when competing against other games in the genre, much the way game selection did for online poker. The more players you have, the more you will be able to get, say, a group of 10 level 1s all playing together in 2 minutes.

Either way I’m excited to see where they go with this. Riot Games is really breaking ground with their business model, and doing it while making a big-budget, high quality downloadable game. They’ll be one of the startups on my watch list for the next couple years.

Facebook Hacked Their Own Platform

Posted in Uncategorized on December 23, 2009 by themaroon

Us app developers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to “hack” the platform. By hack I mean make our apps spread better without violating the sort of rules that get you banned from the platform. One of the most notable and successful hacks is allowing users to send gifts to other active users via requests.

This works because Facebook limits the number of requests users can send based on a few factors. The key one seems to be blocks, the number of times a user blocks your app based on invites. The lower the blocks, the more invites per day you get. The second (but apparently much less relevant) factor is the acceptance ratio.

So when you have one user give another user something free in the game every day, it dramatically lowers your blocks rate and increases your acceptance rate. Unfortunately this sort of hack is easily discovered just by playing the top apps and incorporated into every actively-developed app on the platform in a matter of weeks. I’ve mentioned before that this has virtually no effect on reducing spam, but instead just makes your app’s spread based solely on the value of gifting in the app, which is idiotic (and probably not what Facebook intended at all, though it took them a full year to do anything about it) and will probably be fixed by the new platform changes.

But recently Facebook hacked their own platform for us. Somewhere around 1 to 2 months ago, they had a bug in the platform that made users unable to block apps. You would click the link to block the app that you got a request for and get an error.

It took them a week or two to fix that bug, and over that time us developers saw our invite quotas spike as our blocks rate dropped to 0. And interestingly even after Facebook fixed the bug that had disabled blocks they seemed to have yet another bug that didn’t track when the blocks happened. Despite the fact that users were undoubtedly blocking apps just as they had before the bug, every app’s Insights stats showd 0% blocks. Within a couple weeks every app on the platform had the full 60 requests per day.

Inside Social Games posted yesterday asking why app traffic was dropping, and whether it was due to the holidays or something more. While the holidays don’t help, it was mainly due to apps dropping from 60 invites per day to 8. This was also compounded by the new Facebook rules that app developers cannot gate content based on the number of friends a user invites, but I suspect those had significantly less effect than the invite limit.

How Serious Is Justin.tv About Fighting Live Broadcasting Piracy?

Posted in Uncategorized on December 15, 2009 by themaroon

via techcrunch.com

My guess: they’re serious about claiming they’re serious about fighting it, and that’s about it. It’s not their fault, it’s the nature of the game.

Between them and ustream, I was always able to find a Stanley Cup playoffs stream, and not just of the finals either. The rooms were linked to from some popular forums, and persisted from one game to another, so it wouldn’t have been hard to prevent.

And it’s not surprising. If this traffic graph:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/justin.tv+ustream.tv/

is even close to correct it’s a dead heat between those two sites. Guess what’s likely to tip the scales in one’s favor?

YouTube got big largely on copyrighted content. In fact still the most popular clips there are professionally-produced music videos. The simple fact is that user generated content is largely crap that nobody cares about, and all of it added together isn’t as in-demand as one Katy Perry video.

So the video sites will go around claiming “we’re covered by the DMCA” and “we’re developing software to stop it” but really their incentive is purely to allow copyright violations, and shocker, that’s what they do.

One Of The 32 Million With A RockYou Account? You May Want To Change All Your Passwords. Like Now.

Posted in Uncategorized on December 15, 2009 by themaroon

It’s no secret that most people use the same password over and over again for most of the services they sign up for. While it’s obviously convenient, this becomes a major problem if one of those services is compromised. And that looks to be the case with RockYou, the social network app maker.

via techcrunch.com

This is no surprise to anyone who has ever dealt with RockYou. These people are as dumb as a box of rocks. That they’ve raised $119 million never ceases to amaze me. Here are just two of my experiences so far.

1. When emailing all developers, instead of using some mailing list software, or hell even BCCing everyone, they simply CC’ed hundreds or maybe thousands of people. On multiple occasions. Despite having promised to fix it after the first.

Once they sent out one that said “Merry Christmas” filling my Inbox with scores of replies, half of which said “Merry Christmas to you too!” and half of which said “take me off of this list.”
2. Negotiating a two-week ad run with us, followed by sending us a contract for x months. When returned, sending us a contract for 2x months. When we decided “what the hell?” and signed it, having run the ad for far longer than 2x months and then sending us a massive bill.

So yeah, this doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. RockYou is the short bus of the social games industry. I’m just glad I use Roboform so all any potential hacker got is some random string used only for them. And I’m not worried about someone getting my email address since RockYou already sent that out to everyone.

MattMaroon.com