Creating Platforms

Creating a really great piece of software is a lot of work.  Yet no matter how great it is it will not appeal to everyone.  Take a look at the hugely successful Tiny Tower game for iPhone.  The game mechanics are solid but the 8 bit graphics may turn some people away.

One of the key benefits to the Freemium model is that players can pay as much or as little as they like.  I believe that same sort of flexibility needs to work it’s way into game play.

Take a look at Angry Birds.  It was not the first game of it’s type available but it managed to be the most successful because of the delicate balance between being too easy and too difficult.  It always feels like you finish the level just as you are on the edge of giving up.  It’s not so hard that you give up, and it’s not so easy that you get bored.  That balance is what makes the game fun.  Rovio must have either been very lucky or done a lot of fine tuning to get the game play just right.

Platforms allow me as a developer to work on the hard stuff (software) once and have it appeal to the most number of people possible.  Thinking from the start about making my software a platform means that I try to make it easy to swap out graphics or make them updatable from the web.  It also encourages me to design things in a way that makes it easy to adjust game dynamics easily.

I’ve done a number of apps now that sit far down in the rankings.  Not because they’re bad but because they appeal to only a small niche of people.  These apps will never hit mass market appeal and will probably never make more than $2/day.  The only way to make a livable income from such apps is to develop a platform flexible enough to allow me to spin off a bunch of variants with very little extra work.