Last month we were invited to tour the office of Aurora Feint Inc, developer of the recently released Android version of Open Feint. While there we were fortunate enough to be given the opportunity of conducting a pair of one hour interviews with some of the top men that work there so we could ask them questions about their software as well as more general questions about developing for the platform.
What follows below is the final part of our talk with Jason Citron (Founder and CEO) and Eros Resmini (VP Marketing & Developer Relations). This interview has been altered from the original recording for the purpose of readability.
Read the other parts here:
How are you encouraging people to move to Android?
It’s a developer-by-developer thing. The three basic objections I hear from developers are: They don’t have time or energy, so what we do in those cases is we’ve learned a lot and are still learning a lot in how to take shortcuts and how to optimize the work there and we just share that, very openly. You can go to our developer documentation, we have a HUGE swap of information about what we think you need to do to go to Android. Part two is “I’m really, really afraid that I’m not going to make any money when I go over there because it’s just not selling the way it is on iOS” that’s a tough question to deflect because that’s true. If you look at the download numbers of the number one spot between iOS and the Marketplace there’s this huge gap, with that said, with the Open Feint launch on Android we did a really good job of driving good titles to the top very quickly and I think we can repeat that success and get more people to buy and get more people excited and the handset numbers were fantastic. So what I tell those developers is “Look, you can come in early and try to establish yourself or you can come in later when it’s such a crowded space that it’s iOS part two and you have no chance, your choice”, but we’re here to help either way. The final piece is they ask “Do I need to be cross platform, does it matter that I’m cross platform?” I think there’s definitely developers out there that haven’t really thought anything about [SIC]iOS yes and that’s really about just communicating our mission which is we want you to be able to play with your friends no matter what device they carry and we think that’s the coolness, that’s what needs to happen. I think once you start explaining that to certain developers they start to get it.
I notice you didn’t mention DRM, has that come up at all?
Piracy is always a concern and it’s actually a massive problem on iOS too. They key thing is that on Android, yes it comes up, but it’s not any worse than iOS so I don’t think it’s a relevant issue at this point. The biggest thing is the 24 hour return policy, it scares the s**t out of developers, absolutely scares them. I think most of the developers coming over with us are high quality and probably won’t have to deal with that because they have good deep content in their games that people won’t want to return in 24 hours, but certainly it’s a fear for them.
What do you think of GameLoft with the DRM they’ve put inside their products?
(Jason gives two thumbs down and a Pfft!). It sucks for the players, it seems to me that they didn’t think about their customer when they did this, they thought about how can we control a little piece of an ecosystem and that’s not our story, that’s not how we do things. I understand why as a company they decided to do that because I think there are some things that are wrong with the marketplace that make it difficult to discover content etc, so I can see why some executive over there might come up with this hare-brained scheme but they forgot about the part where this sucks for the people playing the game.
You’re talking about sales, do you have a way of seeing games that have recently dropped in price?
A fantastic idea. We’re thinking about doing that, we haven’t implemented it yet.
Will we be seeing more games coming across to Android soon?
Our plan is to launch a wave of games one or two times a month leading up to the holiday and my team is working tirelessly to get developers over there, help them out, get them set up, get them lined up with assets so we can make the spotlight app sing with more cool games.
What stipulations are there for achievements on the system?
Each developer can assign up to 1000 achievement points. When they do updates (if they ask us nicely) we give them more but we try to have people stick at 1000. Before a developer launches a game they have to submit to us and we make sure that their achievements look sane and we check to make sure that their leaderboards look sane and to make sure they’re not just an achievement generator, there are games out there that will want you to press a button a hundred times you get a hundred points so we look out for those kind of games.
How long do you tend to take to moderate?
Usually twenty four hours, it’s never taken longer than two days. Under most circumstances we don’t have the developer submit a build to us, we just look at the data and if the data looks funny then we’ll ask them for a build, but in most cases, 99 out of a 100, we don’t need to.
Since you’re not checking the builds are you worried that someone might submit something that you’d rather not have your name attached to?
Yeah, we have thought about that. It’s been one of those things that we haven’t come to a conclusion yet with what we want to do there. Ultimately I think what we’ll probably have to do is have some way of remotely turning Open Feint off if a game is doing something that doesn’t make sense or is somehow cheating the rest of the community. I’d hate to have to exercise that right, but I think that’s ultimately what we’ll have to do.
Any thoughts on Windows Mobile 7? Are you going to try to jump into that market early?
We’ll wait and see what happens. We’re like Xbox Live for mobile except Windows Mobile actually has Xbox Live for mobile. It’s interesting though, some of our developers that we know and have worked with have ported their games over to Windows Mobile 7 and the feedback that we’ve gotten is that Xbox Live sucks and I was really miffed. They’ve said that Open Feint is better and they gave us some feedback that I won’t repeat, but apparently Xbox Live for Windows Mobile is lacking in many, many, many ways so we’ll see. The other part that we’re hearing from developers is that Microsoft is being very restrictive about who actually has access to Xbox Live and so there are a lot of developers, especially independent developers, who are used to coming to us and just downloading the SDK and using it and they don’t have that on the Xbox Live site. I’ve had a lot of developers contacting me saying “Can you just come over here and fix this thing?”
(Before they leave Jason wants to show us something)
We announced this a few weeks ago, it’s called “Open Feint: PlayTime” and the idea is: Real time multiplayer, with voice chat, cross platform, for casual and hardcore games. The experience for the player will end up being very much like what you imagine when you think of an Xbox Live game when you’re playing with a friend, but for the developer it’s very different. It’s built in such a way where they can integrate in their game in an afternoon. So if the game has high scores already they can add real-time multiplayer with voice chat in about a day. The idea from our perspective is we want to make every single game that has a high score, which is almost every game, to be a shared experience where you can trash talk with your friends while you’re playing. The trick here is that in order to make this work we had to design a multiplayer game mode that fits inside certain restrictions so that developers can just drop it in and turn their game into a multiplayer one immediately. The gist of it basically is this: Imagine if you’re playing fruit ninja; when you’re playing by yourself, the fruit comes up, you slash it and you get your points. Now imagine playing Fruit Ninja with voice chat but you’re playing by yourself and your friend is playing the same game by themself but exactly the same stuff is happening on the screen, you have voice chat and you can see each other’s scores. Exactly the same stuff is happening on screen and as I’m slashing, my score’s going up on your screen, and as you’re slashing, your score is going up on my screen. So it feels like we’re having the same experience together, but we’re actually playing separately. It’s a real time score competition, with voice chat, so I’m not actually shooting you, it’s not actually interactive multiplayer, but it feels like it is. This is the playtime casual version for the simple high score style games, plug this thing, drop it in and you can get this kind of an experience very, very easily. Another example of this would be in Jet Car Stunts: Instead of having scores they might have Mario Kart racing lines at the top (Jason draws two lines with images of cars at different positions across the line), we’re on voice chat and I can see how we’re compared up here as we’re playing and whoever gets to the end first wins. There’ll be the ability for developers to send special events onto the screen as things happen. So if I clear a section in Jet Car stunts in a really fast time, maybe I get an S+ for a section, the developer can send that across to the other person playing and have a little pop up that says something like “Andy kicked your a** in section 1 and then I’ll be able to say “Dude! How did you finish section 1 already!?” You can get that experience as if you’re playing with each other, but the developer doesn’t actually have to build a multiplayer game, there isn’t the latency issues and all the kind of complexity that gets involved with building a real interactive multiplayer game because it’s really pseudo interactive, but it feels like it’s real. We actually have this working and running and we’ve been playing with it in the office for the past month or two and now we’re getting ready to scale that out so we’re going from a prototype to an alpha version of it. We’re hoping to have this out in the marketplace for the holidays. Part of what we’re doing in addition to the Android launch is to identify games that are well suited for this or high quality that can be our first cross-platform versions of PlayTime.
So you have voice chat are you going to be able to randomly pick somebody, or is this going to require friends?
It can do both, it will do matchmaking and you can pick from a friends list.
Can you disable the microphone? What if you don’t want to be talking to play a game online?
So when you’re playing against a stranger, voice will be opt-in. When you’re playing against friends, voice will be opt-out. There will be two ways to get into these sessions, one will be when you’re in a game, such as Jet Car Stunts, and you want to do a playtime session, you can launch Open Feint and you’ll be able to say that you want to play with a friend or you can click matchmaking and be randomly matched against someone, then you can play Jet Car Stunts. The other way you can do it will be to start from the Open Feint app, where you’ll be able to pick a friend and kinda start an Xbox Party and then that voice chat will stay on as you move around games.
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That concludes the third part of the interview and we say goodbye to Jason and Eros, tomorrow we’ll talk to Steve and Jakob as the Aurora Feint interview session continues
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