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Game Developer GAME GAME DEVELOPER MAGAZINE THE MONEY ISSUE 2013 INSIDE: 12TH ANNUAL SALARY SURVEY APRIL 2013 APRIL 2013 VOLUME 20 NUMBER 04 THE LEADING GAME INDUSTRY MAGAZINE VOLUME VOLUME 20 NUMBER 04 XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN POSTMORTEM + CROWDFUNDING: ONE YEAR LATER ////////// GAME GAME DEVELOPER MAGAZINE THE MONEY ISSUE 2013 INSIDE: 12TH ANNUAL SALARY SURVEY APRIL 2013 APRIL 2013 VOLUME 20 NUMBER 04 THE LEADING GAME INDUSTRY MAGAZINE VOLUME VOLUME 20 NUMBER 04 XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN POSTMORTEM + CROWDFUNDING: ONE YEAR LATER ////////// MAKE GREAT GAMES Developers, build HTML5 games for the regulated gaming industry using our: Certified RNG & game engines HTML5 Game Development Kit (GDK) Session handling (resume play) Cloud content delivery network Multi-currency handling Multilingual library & tokens Territorial rights management Single licensing and distribution agreement Drive your success by promoting your games to players and operators on Odobo Play. Apply today. THERE’S NOTHING VIRTUAL ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY I N R E A L- MON E Y GAMBLING. www.odobo.com/developers EARN $100+ PER PLAYER Real-money online gambling is already a regulated $35bn industry outside the US. The US market is quickly emerging. With Odobo, developers can produce games for the leading licensed online casino operators worldwide. Odobo looks after distribution, monetization and compliance. As an Odobo developer, you can earn substantial royalties from the play of your games offered to existing vast player bases. Earn an additional 30% of the lifetime value across all gaming activity when you drive new players via Odobo Play. The combination of immediate royalty income and affiliate commission earns Odobo developers the highest ARPUs in the games industry. Want to know more? Get ‘The Real Money Gambling Opportunity’, an exclusive report by H2 Gambling Capital. Visit www.odobo.com for more information or tumblr.odobo.com to download your free copy. Also available by emailing [email protected] LET YOUR CAREER REACH THE PEAK! JOIN PEAK GAMES ! SHAPE AND DRIVE THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY WHILE CONTINUOUSLY DEVELOPING YOURSELF Talk to us at [email protected] www.peakgames.net 003 CONTENTS_April 2013 VOLUME 20 NUMBER 04 Postmortem 036 XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN Resurrecting a complicated turn-based strategy game that practically defi ned “old-school hard” seems like a recipe for commercial failure in today’s market. In this month’s postmortem, Firaxis Games’s Garth DeAngelis explains how they defi ed the odds with XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN. By Garth DeAngelis Features 015 SALARY SURVEY We’re back with another Game Developer Salary Survey! Find out how much the industry made in 2012. By Patrick Miller 22 CROWDFUNDING, ONE YEAR LATER What does crowdfunding look like in 2013? Game Developer talked to Greg Rice (Double Fine), Chris Roberts (Roberts Space Industries), Brenda Romero (Loot Drop), and Jim Rossignol and James Carey (Big Robot) about the current crowdfunding climate. By David Daw 030 THE LANGUAGE OF MONETIZATION DESIGN If you’re going to try to design your game to make money, make sure you know what you’re talking about with this guide to monetization design terms. By Ramin Shokrizade 033 MINI-MORTEM ROUNDUP What’s it like developing for <insert platform here>? The devs behind FASTER game developer magazine THAN LIGHT, DYAD, DRAGON FANTASY, and WAR COMMANDER share their dev experiences in this collection of short postmortems. By Staff Departments 004 Game Plan [Editorial] 008 Heads Up Display [News] 010 Educated Play [Education] 011 Good Job [Career] 012 GDC News [News] 049 Toolbox [Review] 053 Inner Product [Programming] 057 Pixel Pusher [Art] 060 Design of the Times [Design] 063 Aural Fixation [Sound] 064 The Business [Business] 089 Insert Credit [Editorial] game developer magazine 096 Arrested Development [Humor] 003 GAME DEVELOPER 004 gp MAGAZINE GAME PLAN_April 2013 WWW.GDMAG.COM UBM LLC. 303 Second Street, Suite 900, South Tower San Francisco, CA 94107 MONEY ISSUES t: 415.947.6000 f: 415.947.6090 MONETIZATION IS OUR INDUSTRY’S NEXT BIG PROBLEM— SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES AND OPPORTUNITY FOR INFORMATION, ORDER QUESTIONS, AND “Free-to-play is killing video games!” If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand ADDRESS CHANGES times. From a business perspective, free-to-play is a useful tool because it can offer smaller t: 800.250.2429 f: 847.763.9606 studios a shot at an extraordinarily wide audience and higher overall revenues than the [email protected] pay-once model—which, in turn, means more stability and job security. But nobody likes www.gdmag.com/contactus playing—or making—a game that feels like it’s powered by your wallet, either. Rather than EDITORIAL wish f2p would go away, we’ll just have to get really good at using it. PUBLISHER Simon Carless [email protected] EDITOR MORE (MONEY, PROBLEMS) end up with all the liability another 25 cents to see Patrick Miller [email protected] Judging from the comments of a film worker, but without the next level, and so on. EDITOR EMERITUS from this year’s Salary any of the unions or support The experience is actually Brandon Sheffield [email protected] Survey, monetization is on structures that make that enhanced by the presence of MANAGER, PRODUCTION everyone’s minds these model sustainable. actual, real-world stakes (the Dan Mallory [email protected] days. But while devs and On the other hand, many quarters in your pocket). ART DIRECTOR consumers alike aren’t shy f2p games launch as early Another unorthodox Joseph Mitch [email protected] about heaping disdain upon as they can put together a example of effective CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Alexandra Hall, David Daw, Ramin free-to-play games, it’s worth minimum viable product in monetization design is the Shokrizade, Garth DeAngelis, Dave Mark, pointing out that over the order to start getting revenue time-honored “money match,” Chris Parnin, Steve Theodore, Damion last three years of salary coming in, and then gradually where two players bet on Schubert, Damian Kastbauer, Kim Pallister, surveys, we’ve seen a gradual add new features and content the outcome of a game. The Matthew Wasteland, Magnus Underland decline in layoff rates and an after launch. As long as there fighting game community has ADVISORY BOARD increase in average salaries. is something to add to the taken these to rather ridiculous Mick West Independent Brad Bulkley Microsoft Certainly, not all of those game, there’s a reason for extremes (see the MARVEL Clinton Keith Independent gains are necessarily due the dev studio to keep people VS. CAPCOM 2 $50,000 money Bijan Forutanpour Sony Online Entertainment to the rise of the f2p model, employed and working on the match between Toan and Mark DeLoura Independent but if you think about some game. Logically, that means Fanatiq), but as an enthusiast Carey Chico Independent of the hidden costs incurred we should see fewer layoffs myself, I love upping the stakes Mike Acton Insomniac Brenda Romero Loot Drop with the traditional pay-once in f2p game dev (when the by putting a dollar or two on development cycle, you might games are performing well, the line just to give each in- ADVERTISING SALES be a little bit less skeptical anyway). As my film editor game moment a little bit more VICE PRESIDENT, SALES about f2p. buddy Brian put it, “Pay- real-world weight. I lose more Aaron Murawski [email protected] Traditional game once dev is like working on a than I win, but the extra thrills t: 415.947.6227 development, as we think of blockbuster film, free-to-play make it worth it. And as f2p MEDIA ACCOUNT MANAGER it, is somewhere between is like working on a TV show.” models continue to develop, I Jennifer Sulik [email protected] t: the entertainment industry/ suspect we’ll see more going 415.947.6227 GLOBAL ACCOUNT MANAGER, RECRUITMENT Hollywood model, where you FUN-TO-PAY? Free-to-play on in f2p than just sticking a Gina Gross [email protected] assemble a one-time team proponents like to mention price tag on in-game content. t: 415.947.6241 of people to produce one that arcade games were the GLOBAL ACCOUNT MANAGER, EDUCATION project, and the software first example of monetization MAKE THE WORLD GO Rafael Vallin [email protected] development model, where design. What many people ROUND Nobody wants to play t: 415.947.6223 you have a team of developers seem to miss is that some of a game that makes you feel ADVERTISING PRODUCTION focused on building and those games actually hit the like a cash cow. But pay-once PRODUCTION MANAGER improving a product for as Holy Grail of monetization games are harder to sell than Pete C. Scibilia [email protected] long as that product is sold. design; they made paying they were 10 years ago, and t: 516-562-5134 If you’re a developer making, fun. Play CONTRA on free- those business models also say, Microsoft Word, you can play mode and it gets dull gave us wonderful workplace REPRINTS be pretty sure that once you’ve fast because there’s no practices like “crunch time” WRIGHT’S MEDIA shipped a version of Word, cost to failing. Play it with and “laying everyone off Jason Pampell [email protected] you’ll still have plenty of work a fixed amount of lives and after ship”—both of which t: 877-652-5295 left to do with fixing remaining continues and things get make it harder to attract, AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT bugs, releasing new patches, more interesting, but you end cultivate, and retain talented AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER and working on the next up playing through the same developers. If we want to see Nancy Grant e: [email protected] version of Word.
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