Tadhg Kelly › Comments

"Also it's not about being cynical in business. It's about having the right approach. Time and again the game companies that stick out tend to make big bets before all the data is in, and often in uncertain areas. From Angry Birds and Minecraft down to Ridiculous Fishing and Temple Run, the front lines are where a certain kind of risk lives, sure. But it's also where all the juice is. Assuming you don't have a giant pile of marketing reserves to try and force a success, the only way a developer has to make an impact is largely to aim for that kind of individuality. To be smart, like Nimblebit, but also creative. Like Nimblebit. Not the people who then copy Nimblebit because they have no ideas in their head and a methodology that makes them too afraid to have any." - Tadhg Kelly

""He states that developers and companies try to use “mystical formulas” to achieve success but that this approach rarely proves fruitful. He rails against those who espouse the use of analytics and mourns the death of gamemaking from a place of pure creativity rather than market-driven research." No I didn't. I railed against the use of pretend science, or methods that feel science-y but are simply fearful. There's a big difference." - Tadhg Kelly

"Yep. It's a marketing spend." - Tadhg Kelly

"You go get 'em Mr President!" - Tadhg Kelly

"Wait a while. While the game's had endless promotion within Z's network, it's not any great surprise that it has achieved high MAU. However look at the engagement rate (DAU/MAU) at around 13%. At its height, FarmVille used to achieve engagement rates of 35-40% (And even now still has a higher rate than F2). Mafia's collapse didn't happen in a day. It took a few months." - Tadhg Kelly

"Because avatar implies a certain kind of doll. In a sense, the doll is the wide set of player-controllable objects (including pieces, cars, abstract blocks, depending on the game) and avatars are a subset of dolls. http://www.whatgamesare.com/do... Tadhg" - Tadhg Kelly

"Better watch The Newsroom" - Tadhg Kelly

"ditto" - Tadhg Kelly

"Mr President: How do you deal with all the crazy?" - Tadhg Kelly

"Well consider it as $700 spent to potentially be at the start of a platform and experience significant adoption versus assets, which you can get at any time." - Tadhg Kelly

"Oh they have all those things to be sure, but what I meant was that operating system is rarely of any interest at all to the gaming market, even the hardcore gaming market. It's different to other computing sectors in that respect. So from the point of view of Android geeks, it's a win. For indie gamers and the like however, the story is much more about Canabalt or Minecraft or being able to use any Ouya as a dev kit etc." - Tadhg Kelly

"As others will no doubt say, the problem if you tie it to days is the implicity perception of the need for exactness, and also the sense of thinking as the whole story as one task, one person's responsibility, etc. Agile's problem is not the method, but how hard it is for many people (particularly programmers and managers) to think in conceptual rather than tangible terms, and also to avoid attaching a blame culture to same. The best work comes when some indeterminacy is permitted, and the more exact the estimates try to get, the less they actually are. It's the eternal conundrum of how extrinsic specificity and psychological realities (and the individual and group levels) never interact as well as our left brains think they should." - Tadhg Kelly

"Actually I don't think the fact that it's Android is of that much interest in this case." - Tadhg Kelly

"12-18 months I'd have thought." - Tadhg Kelly

""how is "who wants this" and "why do they want it" not part of a marketing story?" It absolutely is a part of all of this. Where did I say it isn't? "except this is far from the first attempt to do this. previous attempts failed pretty badly for the same reason i'm suspicious of ouya - they can't articulate why someone would want it, and why someone else would want to develop for it." No, that's wrong. If it were true then nobody would be funding it. They articulate it very clearly: you as a player get to play the fun games the big bad consoles won't let you play. You as a developer get to get at a TV playing audience. Previous attempts did not do that well, in part because some of them were purely bullshit-led (Gizmondo especially) but in large part because there was no real mechanism to get the crowd to invest and so test your assumptions about what they want early. It's not only about the money, but also the response, the feedback and the general interest value. Getting such..." - Tadhg Kelly

"Hi Zach, Those are all fair questions, but of course it's very early to tell with many of the answers. Right now the story is not so much the actual product but the marketing story around it. One thing I would say is that I doubt it's a mass market proposition, just as I doubt Raspberry Pi is a mass market proposition. However I also think that "mass market" is an increasingly indefensible idea when we keep seeing niche after niche after niche emerge. Again, much of that is marketing story driven. Not unlike the Pebble watch, Ouya may well be huge or it may just be for the people who buy in now. However it doesn't matter. Something is going on in the world of hardware generally where the need to be huge or go home is falling away, just as it did in software, and instead there's a lot of micro-brewery equivalent things happening. That's what resonance is all about, and tribalism and marketing stories too. Is there actual customer demand? At least $4.6m worth in 72 hours. Seriously,..." - Tadhg Kelly

"Shown to work how? It strikes me that the Gaikai purchase in particular is a beachhead one, a way for Sony to try and build a new story for PS4 and the future. However where's the actual proof that these services are widely wanted/popular/functional?" - Tadhg Kelly

"Thanks for the comment Peter, When I say "reason bedamned", I'm referring to the mindset of the backer, not the project owner. Belief plays a huge factor in all kinds of purchase intent and those who intend to buy will do so regardless of reasons if their belief is powerful enough. This can lead to either strongly negative or positive outcomes, of course." - Tadhg Kelly

"Thanks for the note, fixed :) I'll get back to you on MGS." - Tadhg Kelly

"Do it sir!" - Tadhg Kelly

"It's on my list Endre!" - Tadhg Kelly

"Well, not to invalidate your learning as such, there is a difference between the ideal and the real. The problem with GDDs, as I said, is that it's rarely clear to anyone what they are for exactly, and so nobody reads them. Also, the attitude of plan-to-fail tends to miss the whole point of prototyping spectacularly. If you don't permit yourself to fail then you often won't discover anything either." - Tadhg Kelly

"Of course. Why were you surprised?" - Tadhg Kelly

"Wow, thanks for all the reblogs guys. :)" - Tadhg Kelly

"There may be an element of different national exposure at work here. Here in the UK, for example, gambling isn't generally considered illegal, betting companies advertise on TV and there are dozens of bingo, poker, penny auction and other behaviourist games out in the open." - Tadhg Kelly

"Hi Wretch, I'd contend that you jumped back because you believe you are there. My major contention is that this sort of conduit effect, where the game world becomes believable, largely happens *because* the player is playing through the doll, not empathising with it." - Tadhg Kelly

"Honestly, I thought it was weak. It's small stuff, like why does the keyboard need to be so wide, when compared to something like the Logitech Ultrathin with its middle groove. Why on earth does it need a trackpad? Why did Sinofsky have to swap out tablet mid-presentation and why did it take several attempts (on the part of all speakers) to click, select, drag and otherwise make it actually work? Why does it need a vent? Why did Panos keep having to tell us that this innovation or that idea was important? Why should it need a back-clip thing at all if you'd just got the keyboard right? Why rubberised ZX Spectrum-esque keys? Why a 16:9 frame in landscape mode, which turns productivity on most office apps into a series of constant scrolling. Does it even work in portrait mode at all? So, like that. Just going from the videos, it does not seem like a strong product at all." - Tadhg Kelly

"My impression of it is that it continues with an ur-strategy theme of games, music, movies and so on all under one box. Certainly this has already been the direction of the Xbox for some time as it has attempted to fit ever more content into its dashboard and made moves into every space it can find. However it has come with some cost. The current device feels undirected, and often the options within the dashboard have very thin content. However the ambition is appealing, a sort of game console-meets-iPad idea. Clearly Microsoft wants the Xbox to be a universal device - and they are one of the few companies that could conceivably do it - but the question is whether they will continue to try and marry that ambition to their publishing-heavy approach to content. The iPad strategy works because it is curation- rather than publisher-driven, so each user's dashboard of apps is essentially their own. Microsoft, so far, have been trying to manage that for users directly, and the result feels..." - Tadhg Kelly

"Actually I did think The Last of Us was excessive too." - Tadhg Kelly

"That's an interesting answer, thanks." - Tadhg Kelly