Greetings, fellow golf enthusiasts and card game aficionados! We’re thrilled to announce a game-changing update to the The Golf Card Game. As the autumn leaves fall and the crisp breeze sets in, we thought it was the perfect time to tee off a new chapter in the game’s journey on the App Store.

iPhone and iPad – https://apps.apple.com/app/the-golf-card-game/id1114415982
Android – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=glowingeye.the_golf_card_game

What’s in the Bag?

1. Multiplayer

We’ve often been asked to for a multiplayer version of the game and now you can play against friends and family connected to your home WiFi. If there’s only two of you can even add additional computer players to enhance the competition!

2. Performance Boosts and Bug Fixes:

Our team has been hard at work optimizing the game for a smoother and more enjoyable experience. Say goodbye to pesky bugs and hello to improved performance. We’ve fine-tuned every aspect to ensure that your golf card journey is as seamless as a perfect swing!

Fore-ward Into the Future:

This update is just the beginning of an exciting journey for our games. We’re now hard at work bringing this delightful multiplayer experience to our Mexican Train Dominoes games!

Stay tuned for future updates, and in the meantime, enjoy the new and improved game on your phone or tablet.

iPhone and iPad – https://apps.apple.com/app/the-golf-card-game/id1114415982
Android – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=glowingeye.the_golf_card_game

The Trademark Mistake that Almost Doomed Us

With our recent, beautiful update to Magic Towers Solitaire I got to thinking about the history of our longest running game!

Before you continue and learn how to be careful with trademarks you might want to play it!
Android Version – link
iOS Version – link

The early history of Magic Towers Solitaire included one of the biggest mistakes I made in the early days of Glowing Eye Games. Freshly moving on from being a producer at Glu mobile, I made a mistake that almost sank the game and the company in its tortuous beginning.

Originally, I named the game Tri Towers Solitaire. It was released back in the days of online games created using Adobe Flash. In internet time that feels like ancient history, back in a time when mobile games on tiny screens had only just started to begin their rise to completely dominate the casual games industry. Despite respectfully managing several licensed and trademarked games in my previous job, my naivety and lack of forethought trampled on the toes of a trademark held by a multimillion-dollar entertainment company! That was not a happy place to be, especially when you’re struggling to pay rent.

A thumbnail of Tri Towers Solitaire.

I distributed the original Tri Towers Solitaire as far and wide as I could in a desperate scramble for revenue to finally start making Glowing Eye Games profitable and stop the impending doom of the company. Despite the game being more casual than the popular online games of the time, it had started to bring in advertising revenue. Maybe, just maybe, this was the game that turned my little one-man company into a viable business.

For a few weeks I saw the number of players rising, with reviews varying from solitaire haters wondering why their beloved games’ site was being polluted with such software to the surprise acclaim of players saying they were glad they’d given it chance. It started to look like that there’d be enough revenue that at least for this month the company might be able to pay me. Finally, I thought I’d found the first sun rays of a bright new dawn and maybe the chance of a buying a new laptop.

However, the sun faded when the lawyers of the legitimate owners of the trademark for Tri Towers Solitaire sent an email. Now if you’ve never received a letter or email from a lawyer, then you might not know how terrifying these pieces of text can be. There were demands for the removal of the game (my only real income at the time) from everywhere it had been distributed and talk of financial damages and compensation. That night was a horrid night, the feeling of finally turning a corner, had been wiped out. Visions of calamity and disaster haunted my dreams.

By the third cup of tea in the morning, in my naivety I had convinced myself it was just a misunderstanding. I emailed the lawyer back and suggested talking to the boss. I don’t remember the exact words that their lawyer used, but it I remember it was beautifully polite. However, it all boiled down to the idea, you’re out of your depth, get a lawyer. The first lesson to pass on is that when a lawyer writes, get your own lawyer immediately.

I liked my lawyer, again he was polite and kind enough to guide me through the process of discussing what was happening. It helped that I bolstered my knowledge with reading around the internet. It was an epiphany to realise how little I knew about trademarks, and at least in the future I’d have a process to work through to avoid problems.

Once their lawyers had a trained counterpart to talk with, it became clear that what they really wanted to do was protect their trademark and demanding compensation was standard. If a company doesn’t protect its trademark, then it can lapse, and if that ever happened to them, there’d be a free for all where anyone could make a product with the same name.

For the record it’s easy to avoid this problem. Simply use the free US government website to search US Trademarks. Although trademarks can exist independently in any country, for most products the USA is a huge market, and most likely if an (English) trademark doesn’t exist over there, it *should* be fine globally. If you aren’t sure then you can search further, but it’s not as easy as checking trademarks in the US alone. I hear the distant echoes of my past lawyer telling me to write that this isn’t legal advice, and you should do your own research, although this has worked for us, so far. It’s worth saying that this is for name trademarks rather than trademarks of logos, they’re a different issue, and I am not commenting about those!

Within a few days I’d changed the name of the game to Magic Towers Solitaire, which along with my apology was a great first step to getting the other side to appreciate that I’d made no real attempt to profit off their trademark and that I wanted to set things right. The thornier issue was that online game distribution, was a bit of a wild west where online games portals just did their own thing. I attempted to the redistribute the retitled game and managed to get a few websites to take down the old ones and replace them with Magic Towers Solitaire. Unfortunately, we had to explain that we needed them to accept that we couldn’t get rid of Tri Towers Solitaire totally. Rumblings of damages, reappeared, but my lawyer came to the rescue with a very simple explanation, yes, I was in the wrong, but in coded lawyer speak, he explained that Glowing Eye Games had done everything in its power to remedy the problem and could barely afford his services. He welcomed their lawyers to go after each of the remaining, offending websites individually.

At that point they relented and once again I was blindsided by their politeness. They accepted my efforts and thanked me. I was utterly relieved. I had a final conversation with my lawyer. I told him that I’d expected this to drag on for a long time. He explained that between my obviously sincere efforts to resolve the problem quickly and the fact that we were a new business their lawyers didn’t really have much to gain by continuing to pursue me. He said fixing the problem quickly was particularly important with them, because it meant they and their bosses could see that I wasn’t trying to profit out of the trademark even though my efforts to resolve all the problems they highlighted weren’t completely fulfilled.

So, for all those game developers who want to avoid this kind of stress, remember to make sure that the name of your shiny new game doesn’t copy the trademarked name of another product. It might be the most important five minute job that you can do! You’ve also got to make sure that it isn’t even close enough to be confused with a trademarked name. I promise you, even though you won’t know it, you’ll have avoided weeks of stress and costs that could have been spent on making and marketing your game.

It’s taken a little bit longer than we hoped but our gorgeous and more magical than ever before Magic Towers Solitaire is now available for iPhones and iPads. This update is so good it should be a sequel!

Our wizards of code, art, design and testing bring you the biggest and best Tri Peaks Solitaire game we’ve ever made. Featuring 30 levels, more beautiful backdrops and host of other improvements we’re delighted to release such a significant upgrade. With this update we’re hoping you will all agree and be one of the players that helps this game reach it’s next BILLION rounds completed!

The Android upgrade is coming soon, but for now all you iPhone and iPad players can get it from here.

https://apps.apple.com/app/magic-towers-solitaire/id403274099

As we gear down for Xmas, I decided I wanted to find out what DALL-E would do with some of our game names if they were used in a description for an art. If you don’t know then DALL-E is an Artificial Intelligence picture generator that creates original artwork using descriptions that you’ve typed in! It’s pretty amazing stuff and fast, there’s tons of amazing tech that’s accessible to everyone in the last couple of years.

The results are weird to say the least but fascinating. The images and their descriptions are below.

Forty Thieves Solitaire Gold, surreal

Magic Towers Solitaire, oil painting

People playing Mexican Train Dominoes Gold, cyberpunk neon

A woman playing Pyramid Solitaire in ancient Egypt, surreal

A giant llama playing solitaire during a snowstorm, oil painting

Christmas Solitaire Tri Peaks and Santa, abstract pencil

Happy Holidays!

Magic Towers Solitaire is Glowing Eye Games’ most long-lived game. The two games that came before it are lost to the mists of time. However, this game is still going 14 years later and was big enough online that Glowing Eye Games could actually hire people.

It’s an example of a simple game doing one thing really, really well. Even now after years of gradual decline and fairly small updates it gives us a meaningful amount of revenue despite the competition for tripeaks solitaire games being absolutely bonkers these days. In comparison to other games out there its incredibly basic, it has one level. Yet players have kept on coming back year on year. I’ve questioned why in the past, and really it just boils down to a few things.

1. It feels good, the graphics and setting are calming. The green countryside and the magic of the castle appearing is a reward that seems to hit the spot.
2. The cards, and I sound a little bit nuts for saying it, move right. The amount of solitaire games where the cards don’t move fluidly, or too slowly, or too quickly annoy me so much!
3. The game difficulty is beautifully balanced, so when you start you always feel like you can win, but it’s not necessarily easy or too hard!
4. It isn’t pay to win. Sure, that’s the most profitable model for making a mobile game these days, if you can get the players, but by its nature it forces players to decide if they just want to give up every time they need to pay! At some point we do need to add more ways of monetising beyond adverts and an upgrade, but the advert supported business model has its own advantages. The most important being that as long as your game has short play levels, you really can do whatever you like in terms of progression and fun.

In the years since it was made, we did one great thing that didn’t work out financially but forced us to look at our own games. We made a variant for Skillz, and the talented folk there pushed us to make the best Tri Peaks Solitaire game we’ve ever made. In particular the project forced us to create new levels and increase the variety. Finally, we’ve been ready to roll that back into Magic Towers. The trick with such a big upgrade is to do everything to make sure that current players feel they are 100% getting their beloved game, but even better. It’s what Apple has been doing with iPhones, each iteration almost without exception looks and feels like an evolution of the last one, sometimes they even gave us a revolution.

On the art side we’ve added more relaxing locations. They’ve been beautifully made by Katie our artist, who didn’t make the original, and yet the graphics feel like they fit perfectly.

The game’s got 30 levels now, so it’s thirty times bigger 🙂 We’ve also made sure the classic game that players know is still there as an easy to find option on the main menu. I hope that they’ll vote with their fingers and the majority will be playing the all new and improved version, but if it’s too far out of their comfort zone they can return to what they love.

The final change is that the new game mode with all those juicy levels, saves your score for a week before challenging you to beat last week’s top score. We know you’re going to come back, so how about you try and out play last week you? I’ve got to say I’m slightly worried by that change, but I wanted that particular challenge to be friendly to players who come back after a gap. The advertising supported mobile games model, means that people are going to try other games. You’re doing incredibly well if after they try something new, they want to come back. That’s the hallmark of a classic and hopefully this update to scoring mechanism facilitates that in a way that the fans will enjoy.

On a lovely company note, Evie our Head of QA was playing with (I mean testing!) the level designer and created some great levels to the point where we expanded the game to fit them in. That’s a great thing that I hope Glowing Eye Games allows for the team, maybe not often enough, but a chance to do something that’s enjoyable and doesn’t quite fit the job description. The kind of projects that allow for personal growth. She’s got two lines in the credits now, and I got the chance to register a bug for her to fix for a change!

Now it’s nearing completion and should get released first on iOS in November we can only let the players decide but we’re really happy how this one has turned out. With our customer support set-up we’ve also got a great way to capture feedback, maybe they’ll tell us we’re doing things right, but if they don’t, we can make further improvements. With all this work, I trust that Magic Towers Solitaire will be enjoyed for another 14 years!

We’re happy to announce the release of a great new update for our game Solitaire Classic Gold.

Get it here! https://apps.apple.com/app/solitaire-classic-gold/id1272057723

The biggest improvement is the addition of our Daily Double Solitaire Challenge! We know that lots of you start the day with a game of solitaire to kick start your brain into action in the morning. Our classic solitaire game is rarity that puts an emphasis on letting you build up winning streak by finishing several rounds of solitaire in a row.

Our daily challenge focuses on using your skill to complete two rounds in a row, with every other player that day enjoying the same the challenge. You can compete against friends by sharing your results!

Of course, no self-respecting update adds just one thing. The new Solitaire Classic Gold plays more smoothly and fixes several issues. It’s the best it’s ever been and will only keep getting better.

Have fun! https://apps.apple.com/app/solitaire-classic-gold/id1272057723

Jasmine kindly wrote the previous blog post giving her thoughts and tips from the time she spent at Glowing Eye Games as she rose through the ranks. With a small company like ours, her departure for new pastures leaves us at a crossroads. Even in these short weeks she has been missed, but it’s not the end of the world and we owe it to ourselves to look to the future.

Armed with her insightful exit interview, along with discussions internally it’s become obvious Glowing Eye Games is changing once again. Our aim is to find future colleagues that have the same beneficial impact to the company that she provided while continuing to avoid the political backstabbing that we’ve enjoyed throughout our history.

Before I start discussing the trials and tribulations that we’re looking to overcome, it’s worth saying that whenever we’ve had new joiners it’s always brought something into the company. Although ideas generally are cheap, having the opportunity to talk and more importantly listen to a colleague and then between you implement and execute them is vital. These collaborations have led to great improvements within the company over the years, and we must be doing something right to survive 14 years now. Our systems and procedures have improved and although I am Director of the company, my previous calling was as a producer. The changes that Jasmine and the rest of the team implemented over the years are better than the working methods that I had used previously. While I temporarily take the reins of our producing efforts, it’s immensely gratifying that my faith in Jasmine has been repaid with an improvement in my knowledge and the evolution of the way we work.

It leads to one thing that’s important to me, personally, while running the company. I get immense professional fulfilment from seeing improvements that we have made over the years. In particular I love facilitating the growth and development of our team, and although I’d prefer if Jasmine had stayed, it’s great that we have the company culture where progress is possible. It makes me want to hire an assistant producer or someone earlier in their games industry career and facilitate their development to a fully-fledged producer. Although I think we all work in a company where growth is possible, on the production side I can be a greater part of the solution of offering a framework that gives feedback and experience in an area where (I believe!) I know what I am doing (mostly).

In the exit interview, Jasmine obviously felt that she was being asked to provide real thoughts to our future, and she absolutely made it clear that marketing is one area where we could greatly improve. It’s something we as a team have thought for a while, but unfortunately, I’ve never quite resolved that issue despite our ever-increasing marketing budget. I don’t want to go into specifics too much, but we currently spend a five-digit amount in advertising every month, just for our games to remain relevant. This is a significant part of the company’s budget that has grown over last few years. With the Covid dividend for digital creators fading, it’s something we need to concern ourselves with again.

The problem stems with me, I’ve effectively coordinated the majority of the marketing operations, and I’m not a natural marketeer. Basic PR elements such as newsletters, social media and cross promotions have been implemented, but could be further refined. Getting our games noticed in general seems to be a weakness for us. Technically our marketing budget is almost completely spent on advertising rather than the time and skillset needed for PR.

Our advertising effort only really uses two sources, we’ve worked to optimise them and based on recent estimates with admittedly a varying quality of data, I have better idea of where we’re successful. Further optimisations are possible. We haven’t tested enough variations of our marketing packs and advertising efforts. One of the reoccurring themes is that digital advertising offers a great deal more options for testing different marketing material. We made a little progress here, but someone who has time to focus on this area could find a host of things to make even better and of course work out what tests we should perform next.

Recently I had a conversion with a friend who is far more marketing orientated, and the vagueness in my answers to his questions horrified me! So, a marketing hire is a must. How I do that is an interesting question and for me I’ve still got to work that out. The goal is in effect simple, to hire someone who can take that budget and improve on our results while fitting into our work environment. If they can’t get through the probationary period, then I failed on the hire. So, the questions I need to answer before proceeding all revolve around working out what is needed to move our promotional efforts to a higher level. That will involve some figuring out, and to start with I’m writing a job description of our current marketing and advertising efforts. That will shine a light on where we are today, the step after that is to research further and see what other competitors are doing, especially those who are similarly sized that appear to have been gaining success.

Now of course with two potential hires, it’s quite easy to have grandiose ideas, but one of the reasons Glowing Eye Games works on smaller projects, is that on a personal level I’ve always preferred working on games with smaller teams. I have had the good fortune to work on a couple of larger projects in my career, but they were never quite as enjoyable to me. So, one thing that always stays in my mind is that Glowing Eye Games has a maximum size, at least while I am running it! For me, I think we’ll start with two and then we’ll see how we get on before considering future options. Of course, if our hires are successful, then more options will present themselves. Hopefully we’ll make it another 14 years!

I started at Glowing Eye Games six years ago, starting as a greenhorn intern and climbing the ranks to producer. It’s been an absolute pleasure discovering the wonderful world of producing with Glowing Eye Games. My career and experience have very much been shaped by my lovely colleagues, a variety of interesting projects, and trial with the inevitable error.

Producing

I’m often asked by family and friends what exactly it is I do. They’re aware of my job title and that I work with mobile games, but what does that entail? It’s difficult to sum producing up in a single sentence, but I also don’t want to bore them to death by delving into the niggling avenues of game development. I’ll try to keep it brief here as well, lest your eyes roll back as you fall into a blissful, boredom induced coma.

I quite often think of producing as keeping hold of the big picture. While everyone else on the team is busying themselves creating beautiful art, perfecting that gameplay, and finding those pesky bugs, you must make sure that everything created is helping form the envisioned final game. This means lots of meetings, reviews, and a lot of playtesting. There’s a great satisfaction watching all these individual departments come together to create a fantastic end product that’s the culmination of everyone’s hard work.

Lessons Learned

I have very much learned on the job. I came into Glowing Eye Games as a bookseller, with absolutely no knowledge of game development except a great interest in video games. My gateway was marketing, managing social media, writing copy for the games and website, and helping create the marketing material. This is still very much part of my job, but I now have the luxury of delegation. Glowing Eye Games really encouraged my career growth, letting me find my path by giving me both marketing and production tasks, and supporting me when I ultimately decided production was my preferred track. Thinking back through the years I have tried to boil down six years of experience into three important points.

Be Flexible

Being flexible is incredibly important in a small company as you often step in and fill in gaps in moments of slack. While I’m first and foremost a producer, I also find myself doing many of the marketing tasks from my intern days or if there’s a QA backlog and someone needs to do some LQAs then I’m happy to pick that up. This can make work quite fractured at times but becoming a jack of all trades is never a bad thing. My organisational skills are now top notch and being able to use the full Adobe Creative Suite is a huge bonus. Pick up those extra tasks you may not feel comfortable with; you don’t have to be an expert for all jobs, and it never hurts to add more skills to your arsenal, especially as a producer which has you working with all different departments.

Being flexible also helps when working with your team. It quickly became apparent that different people prefer different management styles. Some prefer to be given a task list with check ins when needed and others prefer to brainstorm and discuss before the ultimate review. All are valid and as a producer it’s your job to make everyone else’s job easier, so adapting to their work style is invaluable.

Communication

Good communication is always in job descriptions as one of the core soft skills desired, but it rings especially true for producing. I said earlier that being a producer is all about keeping the big picture in mind, and to do that you need great communication. I would be lying if I said I was on the ball all the time, but I always have the best intentions. This means meetings, emails, instant messages, and screen shares that make sure you’re all on the same page and that things are heading in the right direction. This can be off putting, but it’s all about balance. For example, you don’t have to have an hour meeting every time. A ten minute text meeting might be all you need, or sometimes an email will suffice. This goes back to the be flexible point; you don’t need to do things by the book if there’s another solution that better suits the situation. Just always make sure to take notes. They will be invaluable when you need to follow things up and figure out the status of a project.

Good communication also means accepting responsibilities when things don’t go to plan. As soon as you realise things aren’t going right, talk to your teammates and get it fixed as soon as possible. Things will inevitably go wrong, and the sooner you get on top of things, the sooner you can right the course. It always feels horrible to be the bearer of bad news, but it also shows that you’re able to work under pressure and own up to mistakes.

You are a team

The wonderful thing about game creation is that the game wouldn’t exist without everyone in the team pulling their weight, and that’s very important to remember. Everyone is playing their part so it’s vital that no one charges ahead to take credit but make sure to acknowledge individuals’ hard work as well. Credit where credit is due always.

Listen to your teammates and they will listen to you in turn. Their expertise is extremely important, and you are the point of control herding everyone in the right direction. Work together and not against each other, and always be ready to step in to help or boost your teammates up. Everyone needs support sometimes.

There’s more to it

The art of producing is ever changing and growing, especially with new styles of project management coming through all the time. It’s hard to sum up the job in a single blog post but I feel like these three points are important aspects. I think it all comes down to respecting and listening to your colleagues. All people are different and it’s important to remember that. As a producer you are captain of the ship while every specialist on the team is doing their part. Keep an eye on the end product and keep pushing forward, but always be respectful and kind.

If a developer isn’t learning how to make better games, then they’ll always end up in trouble! While you’re not progressing others are, and the competition for the hearts, minds and wallets of players is intense. Games made by big teams get quite a few post-mortems, but I wanted to focus on a few games made by small teams with five or less people. Here are five great game dev post-mortems that every indie developer can benefit from.

Drunk Shotgun by Alexey Strelkov

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-i-wasted-4k-and-half-a-year-of-my-life-to-develop-a-game-that-earned-only-30

With Drunk Shotgun the developer created a fun casual overhead shooter for mobile. Having played it, it feels like it’s almost there as a regular five-minute timewaster, but in Alexey Strelkov’s own assessment, there were several mistakes that he spotted. The perennial indie problem of marketing was of course there. Personally, I swear that marketing is the hardest job for an indie! However other identified issues included monetization, the difficulty curve and play testing. A useful read and a worthy example of showing how easy it is to lose money as an indie gamedev. It’s also a fun, free game that I still haven’t beaten!

Starcom Nexus by Kevin Lin

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/disciplines/starcom-nexus-postmortem-an-indie-dev-journey 

The story of Starcom Nexus has a much better outcome than Drunk Shotgun. Kevin showed us, that a Steam game starting out as an Early Access game (that was pretty good on first release) and then graduating to a full release is likely to receive a sales bounce on that second release! That’s incredibly helpful to know!

What’s fantastic is although the post-mortem is around two years old, it’s pretty obvious looking at this action RPG that he continued to build upon his earlier, smaller success and grew the game. It looks like a solid win for him.

Bass Money by Jacob Weersing

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/bass-monkey-postmortem-from-zero-experience-to-solo-game-dev-in-18-months-without-quitting-your-day-job-

This is one man’s journey about making their very first (totally free) Steam game, and all credit to him, it offers so many thoughts for anyone who might want to try and live the indie dream. It covers so much ground and if you’ve never made a game then it is a definitive must read.

Game Development Tips and Tricks from the Creator of Civilization, Sid Meier

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/just-one-more-turn—game-development-tips-and-tricks-from-the-creator-of-civilization-sid-meier-

Well strictly speaking this isn’t a post-mortem, but it is advice from one of the best, most consistent game creators with experience garnered over several decades. Many of his games released in the nineties are still phenomenally playable today. If you’re looking for what creates enjoyment for your players, then this is the blog for you. Bonus points if you buy his memoir!

Core Defense by Mario Kaiser

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/case-study-making-core-defense-a-solo-dev-success-2

This post-mortem talks through the success that Core Defense became. In its first week it made over $20k and in its first year just over $70k. Those are solid numbers for a one-man team, and no doubt the long tail effect of having a well-regarded game will keep revenue trickling in for a long a time. The detail from the initial post and its follow up, will give a great understanding of what it takes to find this kind of success.

Summary

These are a good set of examples of indie gamedev post-mortems. They’re all worth reading individually, but there are common problems that we should consider before making a game.

Game Development

From the game development side, there are always challenges. Here are a few of the more common ones.

• Finding The Fun – Creating a fun game that retains the player’s interest. We’ve released a few here that maybe we shouldn’t have if we’d spent more iterating and getting feedback.
• Schedules – making a realistic schedule seems to be virtually impossible! Plans change (and hopefully improve), and too often unrealistic hope is used in the schedule diary.
• Testing – Testing for fun and bugs are two different things. It’s far too easy to make large changes towards the end of development that lead to unexpected bugs. Too many bugs and the players will hate the game!
• Game Balancing – After playing your own game during development it just gets too easy, so you make the game harder. Until it’s so hard a new player will drop it in frustration.
• Unrealistic game size – You can spend forever on a game if you don’t go for a design you can actually finish.
• The Artwork Pipeline – Making sure your artwork fits into your game properly and easily needs serious preparation.

Game Marketing and Business

Arguably the Marketing and Business side of making a game is even harder than the development. It’s easy to see why, because as an indie developer we’re just more likely to be focused on the development side. Marketing looks like an alien concept and frankly having suffered from this myself, it’s a vastly different discipline than development. Good marketing folks are smart, but they are smart in a way that the average game maker isn’t. Remember building and releasing it doesn’t mean that your player will ever find the game.

• Advertising and PR – Most games simply need advertising. Finding the expertise and the budget for this is tricky with indie game development. If you’re lucky you can sidestep this problem by finding a publisher which, you guessed it, is also tough!
• Monetisation – Will you sell the game, use in app purchases or advertising to earn your living? Decide at the beginning of development and tailor your design accordingly!

I want to sign off with one final thought that seems to apply to all the developers. If you aren’t doing post-mortems whether that’s just thinking about what’s happening with your games or making the bigger effort of writing it down then you are missing out. It’s tough to make a financially successful game, for us it’s about 20 to 25 percent, and nudging that number upwards can make the difference between making a living or not being able to do a job that you enjoy.

Square Enix just announced the sale of everything related to Tomb Raider, Thief, Legacy of Kain and Deus Ex along with the studios that made them and a back catalogue of 50 titles. It’s a pretty huge change of direction for them and it got me thinking, when should smaller developers sell games or give up on some of their creations. We can’t all get the $300 million that Square Enix received but any sized developer or publisher that has been around for a while will have the same question.

Using examples from us, Glowing Eye Games – a plucky solitaire, dominoes, and casual game developer that has been around for 14 years – and supersized examples from Square Enix, maybe we can learn something here. While writing this, I was amazed that even on our tiny scale there are real comparisons even with the tenuous and somewhat ridiculous links to famous games. Also, it’s fun being an armchair pundit, and I loved some of these games.

Let’s start with the easier games first. The ones that really lose money. We’ve talked about Mahjong Seasons in a previous blog post, our attempt to break into that kind of game many years ago. It never found the traction that we as a small company needed to make it financially worthwhile. Did I say that it was easy to ditch that game? Well, I was wrong.

As a small company we had an existential crisis, on our development scale we built some useful bits of technology and spent lots of effort and wages on honing the game. We believed we had a great combination of level designs and the artwork. It hurt us, that this game didn’t find an audience despite a large (for us!) advertising budget. Those tens of thousands of dollars are totally a valid comparison to millions that Eidos and Square Enix have spent on marketing. (No need to send us emails about the previous line!). We added new levels, and for a little while doubled down on the advertising, all to no avail. We asked ourselves why it failed, but frankly I don’t think we ever got an answer to that, other than the players didn’t prefer it over other Mahjong games. We had other ideas around Mahjong (mild reinventions and invigorating concepts) and never moved forward with them, maybe rightly so. I still wonder if new iterations with the knowledge we had earned would be something that players could enjoy and want? I’m not sure anyone would want to try updating Mahjong Seasons, and even after all these years we don’t want to either!

Using the collection of IPs from Square Enix, the Legacy of Kain is their supersized version of our Mahjong Seasons. This collection of dark fantasy, action-adventure games was started in 1996 on PlayStation. There were four more games released by Eidos before Square Enix bought them out. The last attempt was the multiplayer game Nosgoth. It entered an open beta in January 2015, but never got officially released with the servers shut down mid 2016. For those players moving from a single player adventure to this multiplayer world, it just didn’t work. Negative reviews kept on coming, and they decided to cut their losses. The developers and Square Enix painfully accepted that what they’d created simply hadn’t captured a broad audience, despite changes and tweaks in a year of the open beta. I have no doubt that the dev team would have been hurt just like us with Mahjong Seasons, but I can only imagine that to them and Square Enix the audience numbers were painfully obvious. It would take a brave new company to resurrect this franchise without a concrete plan about attracting fans old and new. For purposes of this discussion, the Legacy of Kain is the lowest valued part of this sale. It’s not the franchise that encouraged Embracer to buy this collection.

With the Thief games, we here don’t have an amazing equivalent that we can shoehorn into this delightfully preposterous comparison of $300 million dollars’ worth of franchise but damn it I’m gonna try! I loved Thief, and Thief 2. I never played the third one or the final one released by Eidos in 2014. That final one seemed to lose some of the essence though, it became linear, and the reviews were mixed at best. Thief never got a Square Enix reboot, and it’s understandable why. Every iteration of Thief, whether it got good reviews or mixed reviews, never seemed to get the sales that Eidos expected. So again, Embracer probably aren’t considering this as a major item as part of their $300 million.

I’m going to go ahead and compare a little puzzle game to the Thief franchise as it’s my blog post and I’ve come too far to give up now. Brilliant Blocks was the name of a simple block dropping puzzle game that we initially made in Flash for online players in the mists of time, when mobile phones still had number keys instead of shiny, flat multi-touch screens. It was a time when Nokia still made phones and good money. It did well but not brilliantly (which is annoying given the game name). We got fan emails, we even sent a semi-official email to someone stating that he was the best Brilliant Blocks player in the world. A superb friend, saw how much his buddy liked the game, and contacted us so that we could tell him he was great. Let me be clear, his scores were good, damn good, so that accolade was well earned. I wish I still had that email and the artwork we created and sent. Must be great to have work mates like that.

Even though that first online version made decent (but remember not brilliant, sad face) money for us, the audience plateaued. We tried making another online sequel, it didn’t work out, but the original was still making money. Well, okay, it was just one of those things we thought, maybe next time. We tried rebooting it for mobile. Thank you Apple for the shiny touch screen and the marketing genius that changed all phones forever and ever and ever. That didn’t work either, so although we definitely had some lovely fans, enough to make a small profit on the franchise overall, we’ve been very reticent to bring it back. We started designing a similar game with a new name, but it didn’t get far before we thought we had better options. I’m not sure what needs to happen for us to try again, but this one hangs around in the background. I hope it get its chance to shine again, but maybe it’s like playing Sega’s Columns puzzle game today, it needs something that will make more people love it. I mean, oh yeah just like the Thief franchise, etc.

The real prizes are the Tomb Raider and Deux Ex characters and worlds. Oddly, despite selling 38 million copies between the three new Tomb Raider games and 12 million units of the two new Deus Ex games, Square Enix regularly complained about these games underperforming. That’s so wild, it’s become a meme. Maybe, and it’s difficult for me to know for sure, these franchises suffered from declining sales. The expectation is either going to be sell the same number or more! Maybe Embracer believe that these two franchises can rise again.

It’s time for a me to make another tenuous link to our games. Pyramid Solitaire (Ancient) Egypt, and Magic Towers Solitaire are my contributions. Naturally, being on mobile it’s a little different. For us it’s about the daily active users (DAU). If players are active, then they see adverts and that’s where we make our revenue. We have made lots of minor improvements to both games, but never really moved the games forward. Our DAU numbers have been declining over the years, less than half of their respective peaks but despite that there are still many loyal players which continue to make these games a massive part of our total revenue.

A few years ago, despite the numbers continuing to trace downwards, I turned down an offer to purchase these games outright from us. I saw a longer-term future for them, but we were working on so many different things we never had the time to turn our attention back to them. Recently, we’ve decided that what these fan favourites need is a proper overhaul and some effort and love poured back into them. When they were first released, they were absolutely some of the best solitaire games out there, with Apple featuring them on the app store. Even now, we know players still like them, but with so much choice out there they don’t stick around as much. More specifically, for an advertising supported game it’s about them coming back after they enjoy something different. That’s where we’ve stalled a little. Starting with Magic Towers Solitaire we’ve begun work to increase the variety and range within the game. For us, this is a major project, and it will be months before we’re able to release this update. The hope is that we’ll entice our fans back to play another round and gain new fans in the process. Once we release it, we’ll see what the players enjoy and try to repeat that for Pyramid Solitaire.

For me it’s been a great deal of fun writing this article, and through the light-hearted lens of these great franchises, there are connections that game creators of all sizes can benefit from in what they do.

Find Pyramid Solitaire – Ancient Egypt here!

Find Magic Towers Solitaire here!