Thoughts on SOPA

Today's the big blackout protest day for SOPA, the anti-piracy bill currently wending its way through Congress.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike SOPA.  But as a software developer, I have mixed feelings about the bill, and I have to admit I'm a little annoyed by all the knee-jerk opposition to it. 

Granted, it's a poorly written bill. I don't want to see it passed in its current form. But it does try to address a real problem, and the thing that bugs me is that opposition to the bill never proposes any kind of alternative solution.

As with the whole ratings issue, ultimately the solution should come from the private sector. But the private sector has been achingly silent on the issue.

Here's an example of the kind of thing I'd like to see:

Youtube self-regulates copyright infringement through content search and advertising revenue. It also provides copyright holders a means to flag infringing content for review. Yet if you do a simple Google search for one of my games, you get any number of hits on the first page or two that take you directly to pirate sites where users can (for Android apps) just click a link and download the game for free. I suspect many users who do so don't even know they're pirating the game. And yet Google provides no means for me to flag a link for review. I can, however, flag content as "inappropriate" -- why is that? Boobs bad but pirated software OK?

Maybe it isn't a perfect solution, but it's an example of the kind of thing I'd like to see companies like Google talking about, instead of just putting a stupid black bar over their logo.

So to all o' youse who are applauding the blackout today: Why not take advantage of the browsing downtime and spend a little brain power thinking up real solutions? If you want a vibrant independent game developer community, you need to be concerned not only about free speech, but also about the ability of said independent developers to turn a profit.

Only an App developer...

Some days my life seems.... a little unreal.

How else can you explain the picture to the left?  The hottest new iPhone and one of the hottest new Android phones bought by the same person within an hour of each other.

And why?  Not because I'm going to use them.  Oh no.  So we can debug some stuff on them.

Weirdest conversation with the guy at the Apple Store too:

Me:  Hi, I'd like to buy an iPhone 4S!

Genius:  OK, what carrier do you want?  Sprint?  Verizon?  AT&T?

Me:  I don't care.  Whichever you have in stock.

Genius:  Er, OK.  Well what size do you want?  16GB?  32GB?

Me:  Whichever is cheapest.

Genius:  Ah, OK.  And, uh...what color do you want?

Me:  I don't care.  Whatever you have in stock.

Genius:  Really?  Most people ... whatever, OK --

Me:  No wait, white.  [After realizing all our other iPhones are black, so white will help us tell them apart more easily.  Who's the Genius now??]

Genius:  Ok, white.  Well you're in luck, we have just a couple in stock.  These things have been selling out really fast.

Me:  That's awesome, thanks.  What's your return policy again?

The guy must have thought I was a freaking lunatic.  

Actually I'm being kind of a jerk about it -- Sorry, I'm sleepy.  It's actually a really sweet phone.  So's the S2.  The nerd in me would be drooling over getting a chance to play with both of these puppies.  If I weren't so busy.  And if my credit card weren't emitting low moans of ultimate pain and suffereing from inside my wallet.

SHH!  Bad credit card!

The long days of summer

Wow.  I just realized it's been months since we posted anything up here in the old Vector Unit blog.  Sorry for the extended downtime -- we've been craaaazzzy busy.

What have we been busy with?

Well there's Riptide GP for one.  We haven't really made any official announcements, but I don't think it's any surprise at this point that Riptide GP is on its way to iPhone, iPad, and non-Tegra Android phones and tablets.  We've been hard at work porting the game over and testing it to make sure the game is as fast and fun as possible on a whole range of new devices.  

We've also been working on a brand new game which we're really excited about.  I won't say too much about it, except that it involves water.  And moonshine.  And chickens.  Stay tuned for an announcement sometime in October.

OK well that's enough time in the blogosphere.  Gotta get back to work!  

How Free is Freemium?

Playing Gun Bros this weekend I think I finally "get" the dual-income Freemium business model.  

I was always puzzled about why you need to design two different kinds of money in a Freemium game (at least, this type of Freemium game.)  Why not just one?  But now I get it -- Money A is is for the cheapos out there (like me) who just want to earn money by grinding, Money B is for people who give a little back to the developers -- who are willing to click on ads, invite Friends, or pay out real money -- in exchange for extra special buffs or upgrades.  (Of course you can buy extra Money A too if you want.)

I have to say, to my surprise I'm even finding Gun Bros fun.  It's a silly game, the art is cute, the game is entertaining, and the plentiful upgrades are pretty satisfying.  Even the economy -- while it seemed complicated at first -- is not overly annoying.  Haven't actually paid any money yet, although I've definitely felt the temptation.  

We've been talking a lot at Vector Unit about whether it makes sense for us to try and design a game around this type of economy, rather than our usual "old fashioned" way of just making games that people pay for once and then just...play.

Freemium is tempting.  You get craptons of downloads, and from everything we've seen if you design the game right, you can make a lot more money than you can with a regular pay-to-play game.  Also it helps combat piracy (why pirate a free game?)

But man, I don't know.  I still have some problems with this whole model.

For one thing, it seems odd to call these games "casual" when in fact the currency management is as complicated as any mid-level console RPG.  It seriously took me a while to figure out Gun Bros, and it's not even complicated compared to Farmville or something.

But also, I think there's something kind of messed up about a game that allows -- even encourages -- players to spend this much money.  In Gun Bros, the cheapest coin package you can buy is $2.99 -- which is probably about how much the game would cost if it were a P2P game.  The biggest package of in-game booster currency you can buy costs $199.  TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS.  For a simple dual stick shooter! 

I wonder if there will ever be some kind of backlash against games like this and Farmville. From a social-good standpoint, it seems like there's a very fine line between online gambling addiction and Freemium gaming compulsion. 

And what about the gamers who support these "free" games, who complain about mobile games that you have to pay for?  Do they realize what they're giving up?  That the game mechanics are designed around increasing your frustration and impatience, rather than your entertainment and enjoyment? 

I'm not saying we're not going to try this out at some point.  Man, the numbers don't lie.  But I still feel like there's something to be said for paying $2, or $5, or -- gasp -- even $20 or more for a clean, well designed game experience that doesn't ask anything from me other than my pleasure.

The tech behind Riptide GP

You would think that converting a current-gen console game engine to a phone would be a daunting task.  I’m happy to report that this is not the case!  This year’s crop of smartphones with their multiple CPU cores and competent GPUs are definitely up to the task.

When we started developing Riptide GP for Tegra 2, we had certain expectations of the performance we could squeeze out of these devices.  The GPU (graphics) more or less met our expectations, so we were able to hit our graphics quality and rendering performance targets by optimizing the fragment shaders and doing more work per vertex.  However, we were completely blown away by the CPU (computation).  The dual-core ARM Coretex A9 is an amazing piece of silicon.  What’s running in Riptide GP is the same underlying water simulation that powered our previous game on the Xbox 360!

Besides our internal tech there are three key components that made Riptide GP possible:  The Android NDK, Bullet Physics, and FMOD Sound System.  The NDK allows us to write native C++ code which is then optimized for the ARM architecture.  Bullet Physics, which we use for collision detection and rigid body simulation, just worked out of the box.  FMOD Sound System released an Android version of their SDK just in time, which has been working flawlessly since the first release.