Meteor Games President Talks About Founding Neopets and Making Social Games…

Donna of Meteor Games talks about their new games as well as Neopets

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/meteor-games-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]RWN8p0QOMKY[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Donna: Hi, my name is Donna Powell, and I’m the President of Meteor Games.

Interviewer: What games have you done?

Donna: At Meteor we have released Island Paradise and Little Rock Pool which are two games available on Facebook. Prior to Meteor Games my husband and I founded neopets.com which is a large website.

Interviewer: Well, congratulations on Neopets. When you first started Neopets, what were you thinking at that time because I don’t think those kind of online games were as prevalent?

Donna: It was back in ’99. The Internet was very different then. I think it was Flash2 or something we were using, something really, really primitive. My husband has a background in MUDs. He’s been making games since he was five. It’s obvious. He’s the reason that I got into games pretty much. We just started looking around at what people were playing. At the time [?] were huge, absolutely huge when we were teenagers, and cats and dogs and pets. They were like desktop buddies, and they were massive as well.

We were just looking at those and thinking what’s the next step, what would make sense? And we decided to make Neopets which is basically accessible to everybody in the way you look after pets. Then, we kind of built the virtual world around it.

Interviewer: When it first started taking off, what were you thinking because it’s a different type of game. No one wouldn’t expect that kind of success from that type of game when the paradigm was kind of like, hey you need to have high production values. You need to be in a retail box, stuff like that.

Donna: Yeah. To be honest, when we started Neopets, we had one personal PC. That was our database, our image server and our web server. The poor little thing was dying. We didn’t expect the breaks we had. We did no marketing. It was completely viral. The only thing–I e-mailed a few people that had pet-based websites, and it just spread like wildfire.

The first six months we had really big scalability issues because it was just Adam and myself. We had no money, and we were just students and we were really struggling to keep the site up. So, that was really the beginning.

Interviewer: So, how did you address the scalability issues and, I guess, make it a pay model?

Donna: Well, originally when we launched the website we had banners which neither myself or Adam found [?]. We also had to pay for the banners somehow. We got some investment in April of 2000, and we relocated the company to Glendale, California. With that investment we were able to actually build up an engineering department, so it wasn’t just Adam staying up all hours of the night. We were able to invest in hardware, and we just started really building up the framework and being able to scale.

Interviewer: So, you started building up this business. What were you learning about the game industry because you said you weren’t a hard core gamer before then? What were you doing? That’s a good thing actually because it turned out that the things that worked during that time are completely different than what the original game industry did.

Donna: Yeah. I love the game concepts that are in Neopets, from very, very old games, like [?] and Warrior and like crazy, crazy old games. As far as learning about the industry, to be honest we kind of put our heads in the sand and just made Neopets. And we really were just playing. We were having ridiculous amounts of fun just coming up with crazy ideas and being like, “Oh, do you remember playing this? And this is really cool” and just putting it out and seeing if it worked. Everything worked, but it was a lot of fun to kind of find out.

Interviewer: What were the top three lessons that you got from that whole experience of Neopets?

Donna: The shape of rocks. [?] rocks should be curves, not flat lines. If it starts looking like rock in Australia, you’ve got issues. That was very important. We learned that people really, really want a fast experience. They don’t want to wait. They’d say, “Whatever you can do to it, cutting down on load times is invaluable.” It really, really helped to do that. I guess the third lesson was really you need to enjoy what you do. It’s going to get really, really tough. You’re going to have to put in crazy hours. If you don’t enjoy doing it, then you’re not going to be able to keep doing it.

Interviewer: So, you sell Neopets. What inspired you to get into social games because it seems Neopets did pretty well. What’s the inspiration because you were actually used to these types of games where it’s kind of different than what people understand, but it’s huge.

Donna: Our Neopet social games were for [?] so you have to be on it. When we started Meteor Games we were making a web-based 3D MMO as well as everyone and their dog. That was back in ’97. It was the hotness. Everyone wanted to make, like, wow lights. That was huge. So, we tried making it. We spent 18 months in development, and we had this fantastic story line that we definitely want to go back to and all these characters.

We’re self-funded. We’re an independent studio so when the economy started to take a big nose dive at the end of 2008 we just had to take a long hard look at it. We had all these people who we were employing. Is it right for us to take a risk just to make it work? We may have to not be able to keep the studio going. So, that’s when we started looking at what was growing and what was easier to do.

I guess we got a bit of a wakeup call and decided to go back to our roots, like, we knew 2D games. We knew it was fast. We knew it would last longer than anyone, basically, and that’s why we got back into it.

Interviewer: With Flash were you thinking about–is the paradigm here still a little bit different. It’s an asynchronous game. Were you thinking about putting Real Time servers into this thing?

Donna: Honestly, we tried it. Vikings Pirates and Ninjas was a game that we released in March, and that had Real Time chat. And so, you could actually play games with people and you could talk to people. We were using the small server which is really neat. Honestly, that wasn’t what people on Facebook wanted.

As a company we actually adored making Vikings Pirates and Ninjas. It was a huge fun project to make, but unfortunately I had 4,000 people actually show enjoyment in it. We just couldn’t keep going. So, we decided to make things simpler.

Interviewer: And what was the thing that you decided to make?

Donna: The game that we launched immediately afterwards is called Island Paradise. It’s basically taking the age-old farming set from Harvest Moon and giving it a top spec so you’re like Robinson Crusoe. You have your own island.

Interviewer: When did you release this game?

Donna: We released Island Paradise late August of 2009.

Interviewer: At that time were you thinking about just doing a straight farm game, or were you concerned about the island game because it seems like on Facebook there are just different trends, you know, first farming, then aquarium, now cities.

Donna; Honestly, we were a little bit concerned. We weren’t the first farm game. There was Farm Town, Farm Buddy and My Happy Farm and all sorts of farm games out there. So that’s why we decided to do an island spin and hope that would differentiate us. And we both added a lot of features that set us apart from just a farm game, that you could do cooking and fishing and all kinds of stuff.

Interviewer: So you released the game. It starts growing. What are you thinking then? Did you run into even more scalability issues? Are the number of users on this bigger than Neopets because that’s how big this is.

Donna: Currently, we have eight million monthly active users which is two million daiy active users. We basically did the first four years of Neopets in four months. So, we had huge scalability issues, to be honest. It’s been a complete headache, but it’s a fun headache to have. We’ve worked with some really, really good guys. We’re getting there.

Interviewer: And so, for other indie game developers is it just best to then get outside help to handle the scaling because a lot of developers just want to focus on the game rather than the back?

Donna: We actually used a consulting firm called [?] who were really, really helpful. There were things that you may not necessarily think of when you initially design the game, but they’re little kind of ways to speed up the upload times and so on. I would definitely recommend getting outside help. You don’t necessarily need to go to some huge support desk. There’s loads of awesome discussion boards especially with software. People are really, really cool.

Interviewer: Now, usually when developers get a hit they always think they can do more, they can do better and they can make another hit. So, what was your strategy at that point? Was it to follow some of these bigger game companies and just try to produce another hit? Or was it to focus on this game?

Donna: The thing we did immediately after Island Paradise was we just wanted to get a second game out there to prove that we weren’t a one hit wonder, to prove that we could actually…

Interviewer: One big hit can work.

Donna: Yeah, that’s true. But we wanted to prove that we were able to basically make other games like be able to release them independently without one game dying as a result. So, we made Little Rock Pool which is essentially an aquarium game. It was a very, very short development time, and it was mainly just figure out how we do this. We worked out exactly how to do it, and now we’re ready to do more advanced games.

Interviewer: When was that released?

Donna: That was released the end of December.

Interviewer: So, where do you think social games are going to go now? I mean, you were able to grow the island game really huge, and then Facebook made a change that makes it extremely difficult to post news feed in Real Time or something. So, games have been impacted by that. Do you feel that indie gamers can still use Facebook as a way to get their game out there?

Donna: I definitely do. Most of the changes that Facebook has made have been cutting down on games that really weren’t games. They’ve been cutting down on games that just spammed you or games that you need to have 500 friends in order to win at the game. We actually had a discussion with Facebook yesterday in figuring out why they do all these changes. You can see they are trying to make a better platform, both for players and also for game developers. So, I still think it’s very viable for indie developers to use Facebook.

Interviewer: What were the surprises you had running the island game versus Neopets? Is there really anything different?

Donna: Let me just think about this. We have a very active community. With Neopets that was really, really an integral part of the game. On Facebook with our Facebook users we really don’t have that many people post in the discussion boards. People seem happier to come in and play and have their single player experience and just only communicate with their friends. So, that was very strange for us to get used to, but you kind of have to fish around to get good feedback.

Interviewer: Were there any other surprises that you’ve had working with social games?

Donna: Surprises?

Interviewer: The business model is a little different, maybe, than the banner ads. Is that it?

Donna: The business model is very different. We’re still very much testing what people are willing to buy. Right now, our biggest selling item is [?]. So, we’re comfortable essentially which was quite surprising. It thought people would be going more for avatar customization and such items.

Interviewer: And so, what’s next in store, I mean, as much as you can talk about? When’s the next game coming out?

Donna: We have two games in development, but we’re heading to launch pretty soon. I can’t really tell you what they are other than they’re going to be more in depth.

Interviewer: What do you think about the competition in space? It’s really aggressive. You have, you know, shameless cloning, whatever, aggressive marketing and all these other techniques which are important and which are definitely going to happen when you have such a big opportunity. So, you as an indie game developer, how do you handle that?

Donna: Honestly, it’s brutal. It really is. It’s like an insane…

Interviewer: There’s another island game actually that came out. Did it come out after you guys?

Donna: Yeah. We were the first island game. There’s now like six of them. We actually had one island game that literally took our codes, like literally took our code. We politely asked them to not do it. They’re no longer around, but that was just ridiculous. You have to be careful who you talk to and what you say because everyone is trying to make a Facebook game.

Interviewer: Do you feel that there is a way to differentiate or is this just going to be the nature of the system where because these are simple games and, you know, ideally you need a simple mechanic from what I’ve seen. And actually to get something to succeed, there’s all just going to be fun.

Donna: I don’t think so. I think you can do something that’s creative and unique. Look at Portal. It was a completely new mechanic and it just took off. It’s simple, but it’s amazing. It’s so fun. It’s so addictive. I’d like to bring a concept like that to Facebook.

Interviewer: I think the difference though is with Portal there were no concrete metrics and no one could say, “Oh, this is making… This has this many million [?], so it’s making this much money when it’s so obvious. Everyone knew Portal was making 100 million dollars, and it took them one week to do it or two weeks to do it. I think it changes, the dichotomy of who is going to jump in to do it and how many other people are going to do it.

Donna: Yeah, that’s definitely true. I saw in the competition it was to have really, really high quality games, like really, really top notch art, a really pleasant game experience. We weren’t spamming. We weren’t making you sell your soul to get anything like that. I’m just trying to do things that haven’t been done before. People will always copy you. It’s human nature. It’s always going to happen, but you just need to try to do more.

Interviewer: To just constantly differentiate.

Donna: Yeah.

Interviewer: Any other suggestions then for indie game developers out there who want to start their own Facebook game, aside from, obviously, not an island game?

Donna: Just go for it, honestly. Even if it doesn’t succeed, you’ll learn so much doing it. The next game that you do and the next game that you do, one of them will succeed just keep trying.

Interviewer: Do you think that Facebook has been overplayed? Where do you think the future of these types of games are going to go? Is it still going to be on Facebook? Do you feel it’s going to be on mobile phones or alternate reality games or augmented reality games?

Donna: Honestly, I think you’ll see a blending. Already you can kind of see there are the casual game concepts which are really becoming successful on Facebook. Like Diner Dash type games are really supposed to be the next big thing. I don’t know. It’s very interesting to try to say that. I would like to believe that people will be playing on their phones and on websites and on Facebook, but I just don’t know.

Interviewer: You took funding for Neopets. Are you thinking about trying to get funding here as much as you can?

Donna: Possibly. We haven’t completely ruled it out. We’re still very happy being independent.

Interviewer: Were there really any drawbacks to taking funding with Neopets? It ended up pretty well, so do you feel you have more freedom in this case versus Neopets?

Donna: Yeah. Without being disparaging, we were very, very young when we did the deal with Neopets. We left our courses at university to start it. We really were completely inexperienced and na