Text Sim Developer's Blog
 

Clay Dreslough, the developer of Baseball Mogul, has started a blog where he has been giving some insights on running a text sim business. It makes for interesting reading as he talks about revenues from his Mogul products. I'm sure a lot of it applies to other indie developers.

You can see it here.

great find - interesting stuff

Good stuff to read. Thanks for the headsup.

That's a good read. Clay has built quite a bit there - his sales figures are amazing, something I could never approach without retail, and probably not even with retail exposure.

I've had the opportunity to meet Clay, and also Marc Vaughan and Tom Tippett over the years. I've enjoyed those meetings, and appreciate how much we all have in common - that desire to get the sim right, to frame the experience for our respective target audiences (Mogul has a broader appeal).

I agree with him completely about the competition aspect. A successful game brings customers to the marketplace. It gets people thinking about text sims, it gets them on message boards where other products are discussed. Eventually, people will try other products. They will be more likely to try other products if they've had a positive experience in the genre.

Excellent blog, just like Clay's competition blog says FOF (actually the demo of FOF2 and the first EA Sports version) was actually the gateway product for me to move onto BBMogul and eventually the other games I play.

Very interesting reading, thanks for posting this.

I just bought BBM2007 today, I'm doing the "one-pitch" route which was a favorite of mine back in the old Tony LaRussa 3 days. So far so good.

I've come close to buying this on several occasions. I'd be interested in hearing if you notice if the AI moves prospects up to the majors when they are ready or lets them languish in the minors even when fully developed.

100k units? Seriously, that seems extremely high.

Agreed.

Very interesting blog so far. It's hard to believe he only gets 2.87 per game for the ones that sell in retail stores.

It's also hard to believe that he sells around 100,000 copies in a good year.

Then again, BM is in Wal-Mart stores. They have over 3,000 U.S. locations. Thirty copies per store? Seems like a lot, but I'll bet it's plausible. Wal-Mart customers will buy almost anything.

And I don't mean that as a knock against Clay and BM -- I mean that as a knock against Wal-Mart customers.

I don't know if I've read the entire blog but I didn't see anything about the difficulty of retaining creative control over the game which, in my experience, is something that is always a problem for the independant developer. That's particularly true of text sims which retailers consider have little direct appeal to their customers and like to see "put right". Did I miss something?

His experience with BM 2000 - when his royalties didn't appear - is also something that corresponds with my experience of other developers who have been similarly ripped off.

And suing a retailer? That's another experience I wish I hadn't had :rolleyes:

It's a tough life as an independant developer but I can recommend it for the lifestyle if not the financial returns :)

Yeah, i considered the math on that. I guess it's possible.

Fixed it for you. ;)

Nice
 

Wow, great blog.

A bit depressing for me considering PureSim's sales numbers :) To me, the key is retail regardless of royalties, and I know Clay realizes this too. With retail, the games are exposed to hundreds of thousands of folks that never would have seen them. Even if 2 or 3 people pick up the game at each Wal Mart you are still talking 6-figure returns, not to mention maket share and the chance that they'll buy future products direct (online) with much higher royalties. Look at what "Season Ticket Baseball" did for Markus.

I also totally agree with Clay's take on the fact that we all benefit in the genre when a given game of the text sim ilk has a hit.

I will be following his blog with great interest -- I think I can learn a lot.

The Manager Mode in Baseball Mogul is very fun.

Very good stuff.

I was in Circuit City the other day and saw BM2007 on the shelf. If he's got the game in every Walmart, Circuit City, and similar stores (Target, Best Buy maybe?), sales of 100k wouldn't be surprising at all.

5,980 members at the Baseball Mogul boards. Wal-Mart customers don't have internet access?

mmkay

I've seen various versions of BM in Best Buy and Target.

nice link, dickhead

I'm very happy for Clay if he's achieving 100k sales with BM2007, with text-sims currently being a 'niche' market in America its very much all for one and one for all imho ... one game has to 'break' the mainstream before any of them have a chance to make large sales imho (heck I'm not proud I've been cheering for EA's American Football titles in the hopes that'd do it ;) ).

PS> With regards to recieved revenue for a small developer from retail sales bear in mind that its always only a small percentage of the price that the retailer purchases the game at NOT its eventual sale price. For instance in the UK generally stores purchase games at approximately £18 (rough as I don't have figures to hand) and the royalty is a percentage of that NOT the £29.99 price you see in the stores.
I'm not certain of the 'mark-up' which games recieve in America but its possible the figures given are wholly accurate (although if they are and he's shifting the units indicated I'd suggest renegotiating somewhat next year :D).

Interesting post. I wonder who the alleged guilty party is. There are only so many competitors in the baseball text sim niche...

No source? This "revelation" was posted on the offended party's site?

Total and utter lying bullshit.

Dola.

Not that I care, of course. I am no company's fanboy.

Except for Dr. Scholl's. My arches suck.

Sorry for the dolas, but I just had to be truthful.

I really have a hard time believing that. Why won't the source just come out and make it public if they were offered a bribe? This is a terrible way to handle the situation and I'd be really pissed if I were Markus or Shaun. Assuming they didn't do it.

BM=BS? FFT

deja vu?

So now no review that is the slightest bit negative about BM can be posted, because then suckers who saw this would believe they took a bribe. Well played. Extremely slimy, but well played.

If you think SI Games/Matrix Games would pull something like this.. then you probably think the Moon Landing was faked.

Yep.

This makes BM look really shitty (heh!). I think people should let them know how completely corrupt this makes them seem.

I am feeling that same deja vu. Can't quite place it though.

Exactly. Don't throw innuendo out there, that's nearly as bad as what you're accusing "other companies" of, except instead of fighting it out in a computer magazine (which is a dying industry, if you ask me), you're throwing mud in the most pernicious of markets, the Court of Public Opinion.

So, Clay and folks. You have names? Name em. Notice how they say they're 95% sure this is real? Well, 100% of stats made up on the fly are pulled out of someone's ass.

Wait... I'm just reading this thread for the first time.

So, is it a great blog, or total B.S.? I can't tell. Should I bother reading it now?

Ok... now I know he's lying:


Bah! Jim's release dates are the most closely guarded secrets this side of the Kennedy assassination.

I don't buy the accusation that Shaun or Markus or one of their cronies tried to bribe someone to cover up a good review of Mogul. I've talked with all those guys and they just seem to too invested in their work to piss it all away with one scandal. And yes, if word ever got out that this was true and who it was, it would be a scandal, and I think it would be big enough to effectively kill the game.

The text community is too close. There are rivalries to be sure, but most of us have, I am sure, bought at least 2 of the sports games right now and a sizeable minority purchase virtually everything semi-promising. There's way more to be lost with allegations of dirty pool than to be gained by trying to get folks to choose one game over another because at this point the majority of text-sim fans don't choose one game over another so much.

Bah, that's all well and good, but if you're going to rake the whole fucking industry in the mud, then give a fucking source.

If you don't, you are either a giant fucking vagina, or a giant fucking liar.

Dola. That's a lot of fucking.

I think it's obvious that my wife's put of town. :(

Yeah, completely agree. Or at least say which company did it and let them (try to) deny it (if applicable). Granted, you'd still need to pony up the proof.

The more I think about this, the more it hacks me off that Clay Dreslough's not getting more shit for it.

Maybe there's a super-secret society of good-guy developers? ;)

In all seriousness, having communicated privately a good bit with various people in the text sim world and having developed a pretty significant level of trust with quite sensitive information with some, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to learn that Jim and Clay communicate privately regarding information that would normally be considered "super-sensitive." I find this particularly plausible when I think about the history of Solecismic and Infinite Monkey/Sportsmogul. Remember, they released the first football and baseball text sims within, I think, less a year of each other, and Clay used to post a bit on The Sideline, even before Infinite Monkey had any message board, official or unofficial. Jim and Clay were the only two Americans in this genre for a pretty good while there. Ultimately, Clay STARTED this genre in this country, and Jim wasn't far behind. They were doing different sports, with VERY similar audiences--a HUGE opportunity for the success of one to help the other. They certainly had ample motive to exchange information, ideas, commiserate over the difficulties of the genre, and ultimately to develop a pretty strong level of trust and comfort with one another. I know in my own dealings with various developers that years of demonstrated ability to be trusted with private information has led to deeper levels of trust developing on both sides. [Morgado]shurg[/Morgado]

Agreed. However, I am still curious as to who supposedly tried to pay off a reviewer.

Yeah. He probably shouldn't have put that one out there without evidence and naming names. However, I could see from the reviewer's perspective why they wouldn't want to publicly "out" the offender. The cost of defending from the ensuing lawsuit wouldn't be worth it. I'm assuming, of course, that the offender would have gone through some steps to protect himself and sound vague enough to potentially win a lawsuit. If anyone with any savvy and sense of self-protection wanted to pay off a reviewer, they wouldn't just e-mail him and say, "Hey, I'll pay you $x to give Mogul a bad review, or not to publish a good one." If the person had any brains at all, it would be much more subtle than that, to give themselves the ability to deny their intent later on.

But then the begs the question, why even bring it up on such a public forum in the first place? It's not as if the offender is going to now get a guilty conscience and confess what they've done.

Why are we assuming the alleged culprit is Shaun or Markus? Nowhere in Clay's message does it say it was a text-sim company. It doesn't sound like something either Shaun or Markus would do.

It could be some larger publisher that is trying to break into a wider genre and Clay's position as a small player in the retail market makes him an easy target. I don't know. I haven't heard anything about this.

Having been on Clay's end of a similar "dirty trick," I sympathize, of course. But I did learn that the less people talked about it, the faster it went away.

SkyDog is right. My fellow developers know more about what I'm doing than I can talk about here. The reason? Not necessarily trust. It's that sometimes, changes need to be made late in development, or new distribution opportunities come up. That can change promised features, or even release dates. A fellow developer isn't going to get angry about that - he understands the business end.

It's best not to make promises unless you're wielding a major PR campaign and you need to get as many sales as humanly possible in the first three weeks, or your game is not going to be stocked any more. Without retail and without expensive PR, sales made six months from now count just as much as sales made today. So the negatives of the inevitable broken promises far outweigh the positives of having people look forward to a release date.

Did you miss my first full sentence? "He probably shouldn't have put that one out there without evidence and naming names." That was my only comment about Clay saying it. The rest of my theorizing was about the reviewer.

Heh, actually, I did miss that. Sorry its still early :)

don't forget all the fake press releases someone's been putting out on the behalf of Markus.

Good point.

Damned scary, me & Solecismic are thinking the same way on this. ;)

Although Jim's "larger publisher" scenario is indeed one possibility, my very first thought was on the opposite end of the spectrum: sounds like something a fanboy would do.

Worth noting too, IMO, is that there didn't seem to be any indication of what level of bribe was offered. I mean, it isn't exactly hard to picture some fanboy with some birthday money from Grandma offering somebody $50 for something like this. Or maybe a free copy of Net Detective. In other words, I don't see any indication that it was a realistic bribe attempt, just that there was an attempt ... and that opens up all sorts of possibilities really.


And right here, you raise the other thing that crossed my mind immediately:
Given that this isn't exactly unheard of, why does another instance seem hard to believe?

Because I've known Markus and Shaun online for years now, and this would go against not only how they act in public, but what they say in private. Neither ever seems anything other than supportive of the competition.

If this were a fanboy, he wouldn't have good access to a publisher. Maybe a writer directly. Either way, no one would think it worth reporting to Clay, except as a humorous story.

I've been on the reviewer end, too. While reviewers do not make a lot of money, it would take more than anyone not intimately connected with a project would want to spare to even begin to compromise someone's integrity.

There was also this one, come to think about it.

http://fof.sportplanet.gamespy.com//...73#post1172673

So, are you saying you do discuss release dates with Clay?

Nothing specific. Just saying that I don't need to watch every word when emailing other developers, so as to make sure I don't imply something that might or might not take place.

I'm astonished that you guys think there's anything unusual about this. Do you seriously think that reviews are not influenced in this way? And you think that it's only the independant companies that get up to this?

Here's just one event (amongst many) that I experienced some years ago:

I was contacted by a well known independant reviewer. He was a Phd maths student at Cambridge University and regularly reviewed strategy games for the major magazines. He informed me he was putting together a composite review of three soccer games recently published including my own. The other two games were from major publishers in the UK market.

I sent him a copy for review. It was my chance to get some real publicity.

A couple of months later I received a telephone call from the advertising dept of one of the three relevant magazines for the home computer involved. The magazine was publishing this composite review. Would I like to take out an advert in the magazine? I pointed out that I was developing a new game and would not be advertsing for another three months at least, but thanks. He was somewhat peeved and unpleasant about my refusal.

I was puzzled. This was the smallest of the three magazines and not one that often published game reviews. I had understood the review to be in one of the two larger, games oriented mags.

About a week later I received a call from the reviewer. He seemed nervous and embarrassed. I mentioned the advertising call and asked why that magazine - he normally reviewed for the other two.

He explained that the other two magazines had refused to publish the review. It was the first time they had ever turned down a review from him. They wouldn't say why. The third magazine had insisted on what they called "small changes". On returning the edited review he found that the changes had been far from small. In fact he said that the published review wasn't his review at all. Nevertheless, the only way he was to be paid for the review was to accept the changes.

I asked him to send me a copy of his original review. I received it a couple of days later. From my point of view it was an excellent review. There was an opening comparison stating "(my game) is a far more lucid description of management", then three separate parts for the three games and a conclusion. The part on my game was detailed, fair and complementary. Less complementary for the other two. The conclusion included "The others are simply a mile behind".

Even if they changed this the review had surely to be good for me.

The magazine came out. The review was unrecognisable. The two comments above were removed along with other complementary comments. The section on my game had been butchered. All positive statements removed and all qualifying or negative statements exaggerated. The review quite simply made the game look like absolute rubbish.

The magazine, which normally contained no advertising for games had an unusually large advert for that magazine - a two page colour spread - for one of the other games. The game was not advertised in that magazine either before or after that month's issue.

When I contacted the magazine for an explanation I was accused of trying to influence their policy on reviews :rolleyes:

I leave you to judge for yourself what happened here. Why did the other two magazines not publish the review? They'd never turned the guy down before. Was it mere coincidence that the two page colour spread appeared in this issue only along with the butchered review? Or did this publishing company, with a very large advertising budget, interfere with all three magazine review policies?

I could spend the next two or three hours relating such events for you and not all from the distant past or from the UK. My last experience of interference was less than 12 months ago and it was from a USA company.

The games industry is one of the worst industries existing for corruption. Very few games make a profit. Marketing is absolutely crucial to game success. Publishers will do all the can to ensure that their game is one of the successful ones. Reviews can be crucial to that success.

With the Internet it's become even worse.

PS neither of the two games involved were games you would know of. They were not games that are now known as major players in the smg market.

There you go again. Accusations, but no names.

Please, save us the drama. It's a nice story. Everyone loves a conspiracy theory. But back it up with hard facts.

FWIW - I'm not saying I don't believe this happens. In fact, I'm sure it does. But I'd rather see someone offer some proof and blow the lid off it, rather than simply sounding like it's sour grapes over a bad review.

Yes. One problem with complaining is that it will be seen by many as sour grapes. But as the review is not there for readers to see, why would you draw attention to it if the story were not true?

But if a major company is involved then whoever does name names had better have a very large fighting fund to cover the subsequent legal costs no matter how justified or provable the claims. It could cost someone a great deal to satisfy your appetite for more than drama particularly as most of the evidence is inevitably circumstantial in nature :)

Word. Even with more concrete evidence, it could be tough. Let's bring it home right here. I often think about using the front page of FOFC to start writing game reviews myself. Let's say that NFL Head Coach 2 and FOF6 come out right around the same time, and I were in the process of reviewing both of them, and someone from EA tried to do some unsavory things to influence that process. I wouldn't let them influence it. However, I certainly wouldn't name them on this board, even if I had pretty concrete evidence. They know good and well that 99.9% of reviewers don't have the resources for a full-blown fight against them.

Like I always do with sensitive information, I'd tell people I trust (most IHOF members and a select few others) here what's going on and name names, but I'd never in a million years post publicly. I haven't even named names publicly about some of the idiotic things that people have done behind the scenes here, but I've certainly told those I trust. I've posted generalities or told specific stories but left out the names.

Yes, you don't stand a cat-in-hell's chance if dealing with a major player.

And there is simply nothing to be gained by a developer complaining let alone naming names. Many will see the complaint as sour grapes as FN has said. Many others will see the review that wouldn't if it were not for the controversy. The evidence is inevitably circumstantial and difficult to prove and the legal costs could be enormous - in the above description I would have faced the legal teams of one major software publisher, two major and one minor magazine publisher had I taken the case further than a complaint to the minor publisher. The reviewer, who was not essentially at fault, would never have worked again.

And, even if successful, nothing gained but a very minor correction notice on page 63 of a magazine 12 months after the event with many concluding the review was probably right anyway :rolleyes:

It's infuriating when it happens, and it happens more often than users would like to know. But, while I can understand people's desire to see the dirt, there's simply nothing to be gained for the developer.

It's just bad luck to be on the receiving end. And in my case, it was much more minor (just some clown paid to cause a ruckus on FOFC and pump the competition in a review on a minor web site), but still, the guy who allegedly organized it was rewarded with a job at Electronic Arts.

When I worked for CGW as a reviewer, I had discussions with the editors about this issue. One time, I wrote a scathing review about a baseball game. The editor I worked with the most said he took heat for it, but he was proud that it actually cost the magazine some advertising.

A reputable magazine separates its editorial staff from its sales staff, and fosters an almost-hostile relationship between the two. Or at best, indifference.

It's stuff like this that keeps me from ever writing any serious code when it comes to games.

I'd like to encourage you to give it a go if you've a passion for games and think you'd enjoy making one.

There will always be conspiracy theories kicking around about the 'man' keeping people down in all aspects of life, a very small few might even be true ;) - but that is no reason imho not to try.

Its better to attempt something and know you've done your best imho than to always wonder what could have been ....

PS> The first ever Championship Manager game (what FM used to be called) got a whopping great 25% in its first review, people enjoyed it regardless ... make a good enough game and people will find and play it ... not least because people tell their friends about things, heck I promote 'The Battle for Wesnoth' on forums nearly as much as I do games I'm involved in ;)

As Marc suggests, It's not that often that you should let it affect your decision to write code. I've come across half a dozen situations like this but I have been publishing games for 24 years. A lot of garbage can happen in that time in any field of endeavour.