This Place is Taken

Friday, August 31, 2012

It's inevitable. After enough time at any job, you have a day that really sucks. Then, eventually, maybe another. And another. Suddenly the job you loved starts to feel like, well, work. And bad work at that. It doesn't have to be that way.

The Problem

We've all dealt with bad bosses or smaller paycheck than we'd like, but that doesn't mean the cure for your ills involves quitting your job and finding another. Every job is still a job, and every job comes with downsides. They call it "work" for a reason, and even if you're lucky and do what you love, you'll have bad days, and it can still suck sometimes. You'll still have to deal with bossy managers, know-it-all coworkers, and, on occasion, frustrating busywork. Even so, many of us jump between jobs with only a matter of time after our first day until we inevitably conclude "this job sucks!" and start looking for the next one.
So how do you beat back that creeping feeling that your job is going to eventually wind up sucking? Sure, many circumstances warrant quitting your job. If it really is time to walk, you should do that. This post is for the rest of us. Here, we'll walk you through some tips to stay focused, upbeat, and happy with your work—especially if it's the work that attracted you to a job in the first place.

Step One: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

The first and most powerful thing you can do right away is to change your mindset. There are plenty of ways to go about this, but it starts with understanding that you have the final say over how you feel. Eleanor Roosevelt said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent," and the premise applies here: You may not be able to stop inevitable workplace annoyances from happening, but you can stop them from ruining your day. Here's how.

Avoid gossip and water cooler talk. We've discussed how the hive mind influences you before, but it's especially true in office environments. If everyone in your department thinks everything sucks, you're likely to feel the same way, even if you have nothing to gripe about. Try to stay objective when talking to coworkers about workplace issues and office politics, and don't let the gossip get to you. Focus on your work, and doing the best work you can.
Resist negativity. Avoiding gossip is a good first step, but you can also choose to be part of the solution. Look for the positive and talk it up to coworkers. Make a list of those positive aspects of your job and keep it front and center every day. Perhaps you get to work on something you love, or your job offers you free training, or all the coffee you can drink. Whatever makes you smile about your job, make sure you see and take advantage of it every single day.
Look for more perks. How many of your job's perks do you make active use of? look hard for them, and take advantage of them as often as possible. Whether it's flexible hours or a casual work environment, turn your job from a place you go every day to an active part of your life that contributes to your wellness beyond your paycheck.
Learn to cope. Stress will always find you—I've never heard of a job without it. The important thing is to learn how stress affects you and what you can do about it. Take up a hobby, meditate, mentor someone at work—whatever it takes. As you develop those coping mechanisms, you'll be less inclined to pass judgment on your job as a whole. Aggressively seek them out, too: when something bothers you, immediately think about how you can address the stress, even if you can't address the issue.

Step Two: Get Some Perspective: Some Things Suck, but are Those Things Your Job?

When your job gets you down, it helps to put things in perspective. Sure, there are things about your job that make you miserable, but every job will have some elements that aren't ideal. The important thing to do is separate those things out from the things that make you happy. Every job you go to will have some busywork you'd rather not do, coworkers who send snarky emails, and people microwaving fish in the breakroom.
The important thing to ask yourself: Are these irritating things my actual job, related to my actual job, or just surrounding my job?
If they're part of your actual job, let your boss know what's bothering you. If you're stuck working on an aging platform that makes you miserable because it goes down every week, your boss may agree that it's time to replace it—especially since it's your job to support that system. If those irritants are surrounding factors, you should search for solutions to those things too, but keep in mind that they're not representative of the job itself. If you enjoy what you do, don't let the small stuff bother you. Focus on the work and deal with the small stuff on the side.

Step Three: Work to Live, Don't Live to Work

Many of us are driven to hate jobs we once loved because we never actually put our work down. It can be difficult, but remember: You work to live, you don't live to work. Defend and enjoy your personal time, vacations, time with family and friends, even your sick leave. Here are some things to keep in mind:

Take your vacations. We've warned you against leaving vacation leave on the table, but most of us do it anyway. Taking vacations is one of the best ways to recharge, and besides, you worked for those hours. You deserve them.
When you're sick, focus on getting better. In a world where we can work from home and stay connected by smartphone, it's important to resist the urge to "work from home" when you're actually ill. When you're sick, your new job is to get better, not do half-assed, bleary-eyed, fever-induced work.
When you work, be productive. This one is important, because too often we overwork ourselves because we feel like we're not as productive as we should be. Find a productivity method that works for you and stick to it. Take time to review your work so you're never surprised and always in touch with what you're doing and why. Be proactive, don't just let your job be this thing that happens to you five days a week.
Recognize when you need a break. If that creeping feeling starts to catch up with you, you may be suffering from burnout or otherwise overworked. Identify it, acknowledge it, and take a break before you crash and burn.
Make small changes. Small changes in your office environment can make a big difference, sometimes more than large ones. A fast new computer, a few plants, a lunch buddy to chat with every day, as better cubicle—go get those things if you can. They may not address your annoyances, but they go a long way towards boosting your mood, and that can help you relax, de-stress, and focus on the positive.
Bring the things you love to your work. A great way to recharge your passion for your work is to find a way to work a hobby or passion you have into your work. Our own Adam Dachis found a way (see #3) at his old job to bring his love for video production to his job doing customer support.
Go the f**k home. Make a habit of going home every day at the same time. Even if you have to schedule something after work to force yourself to leave, do it. You need to keep a bright line between your work and the other things you do, if only for your sanity.

(Optional) Step Four: Give Up and Strike It Out on Your Own

If there's no fixing the problems you face—no mind hack or vacation time that can offer relief—it may be time to try something drastically different. Consider freelancing full-time or starting your own business. It takes nerve, financial fortitude, skill, and a lot of luck to strike it out on your own, but if every job you ever get sucks, you may never be happy until you're working for yourself, on something that you're truly passionate about.

Step Five: Take Care Of Yourself

Don't underestimate the importance of taking care of yourself. It's easy to feel like every job sucks if the problem is actually with you. For example, if you're clinically depressed and even the things that normally bring you joy fall flat, seek professional help, not necessarily a new job. If you're not getting enough sleep, or your diet needs some help, your attitude and approach to your entire day—at work or at home—will suffer. Exercise, sleep, time with friends and family, and caring for your mental and physical well being in general all go along way towards making any job more bearable.
To that point, make sure that if your job really does suck that you address the issues head on. Part of taking care of yourself is standing up for yourself when your job starts to walk on you. If it turns out that your actual work is the thing getting you down, or you don't get to work on something every day you feel you're good at, or all of the annoyances just outweigh the positives of your job, then it might be time to walk away—just take your lessons (and our tips) with you instead of starting the cycle all over again in a new place.

This post was illustrated by Dominick Rabrun. You can find his illustrations on his personal web site, or works in progress on his blog.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

The fall of Angry Birds

The fall of Angry Birds:

Last year I held a special webinar that was invite only and everyone had to sign an NDA before attending. On this webinar I explained the current state of the mobile game industry and my plans to dominate as an independent developer. If you missed it then, then stay tuned, I’ll be doing another one in the next month or so.
One of the things I talked about was an in-depth analysis of Angry Birds VS Tap Pet Hotel and how premium .99 games were going to be overtaken by free to play games. That sounds obvious now, but remember, this was 12 months ago and at the time I held the webinar Tap Pet Hotel was only a few months old. Many people on the webinar didn’t really know how social games worked.
So far the the app store has gone through two phases. The second phase completely took over about 6 months ago.
Phase 1 of app store monetization was Premium games (.99 titles)
Phase 2 is “Free to play” and it’s RULING the app store.

Phase 2 of the App Store: The fall of angry birds

Angry Birds currently doesn’t have ANY of it’s games in the top 50 grossing iPhone charts. The closest is the original title at #52:

iPad is a similar story. Right now the highest grossing Angry Birds game is sitting in the #55 top grossing position:

What’s interesting about the iPad version, is it’s currently NUMBER 2 in the paid charts:

If the #2 best selling paid iPad game is not in the top 50 grossing, then what type of apps are currently dominating the app store in terms of profits?
As you probably guessed, free to play:

Now, I knew free to play games were dominating the scene before I started this post, but I did not know it was THIS bad.
Right now, 18 of the top 25 grossing of all apps are Free To Play Games (72%). Also, it should be noted that 22 of the 25 top grossing apps are in the games category (88%), confirming the fact you need to be into games if you want to have the biggest potential payout. The reason for this is people have a stronger emotional attachment to games than any other type of app, therefore they are more likely to spend money.

How are these Free to Play games crushing it?

After digging deeper in these top grossing apps, you can see they consist of nearly every free to play genre there is… Social games, click games, gambling games, turn based games, card games, etc but all of these have TWO things in common: They each have lots of in app purchases and they encourage the user to buy stuff (a call to action).
This is the basics, but it’s SUPER IMPORTANT, here’s how:
A very small percentage of people buy stuff in games. Of this small percentage you have people who will spend a LOT. These are your die hard fans. I know, because I am one of them and won’t bat an eye spending $50 in a game I like.
Now, in Animal Mall for example, our call to action is very simple. When a user tries to buy something and they are out of money, we simply say “You don’t have enough coins for that, would you like to buy some?”. We do the same in every game we have. I’ve tested this and it increases revenue a TON.
I recently read an interesting game development article that got me thinking about writing this post. It was about a game called Gasketball that was from the same two man indie studio that made Solipskier, which was a pretty big hit.
They discuss how this new game bombed and even attempt to blame free to play games which the developer later retracted, saying he was upset at the time of interview. After reading the article I immediately knew what went wrong:
1. They had limited in app purchase options
2. They didn’t have a call to action
It’s that simple. They literally had friends trying to support the game and didn’t know how. Also, they didn’t have mass in app purchases, just a few including one to unlock the game. This is a bad in app purchase that has no emotional attachment and doesn’t give the player something to strive for. I could go on about this forever, but basically you either want an in app purchase to solve some curiosity for the player or benefit gameplay. Boring in app purchases like “full game” or “remove ads” are not as effective.
Let’s discuss more proof that multiple in app purchases increase revenue:
Remember above when I showed that Angry Birds was #52 grossing in the iphone app store? Remember, that was the ORIGINAL version of Angry Birds. If you look at the top paid charts, you’ll see Angry Birds SPACE is ranked higher than Angry Birds ORIGINAL… if that’s the case, then why is the original making more money?
Yup, they recently added a ton of in app purchase options:

It’s pretty simple really… the more options you give your customers to purchase things the more money you will make.
This is because there are only a small percentage of users out there who spend money in games (like me). Even though the percentage is small, typically those customers are interested in spending a LOT if they like the game (again, like myself).
Of course, this only works if you provide VALUE and things they are interested.

How much are these games making?

Let’s talk about how much money some of these games are making at the top. On last years “NDA Webinar” I figured out it was about $2,000,000 – $3,000,000 a month. Well, let’s just say the landscape is vastly changing with extreme speed.
CSR Racing (currently ranked #9 on the grossing charts) just released some data on their top grossing numbers.
In the last month, this single game generated over $12,000,000 on iOS alone. They have not ported the game to Android yet.
That is $400,000 PER DAY and they aren’t even in the top spot anymore. Pretty awesome.
Now let’s take an app that has done even better, Dragon Vale.

In the past 3 months, it has not dipped below TOP 5 grossing a single time on the iPhone or iPad. This is outperforming CSR racing, but let’s say it’s making $300,000 per day on the safe side. 25% less than CSR claimed with lower rankings.
If this is the case and it holds ranking for the rest of the year, then this single game is worth $109,500,000 PER YEAR on the low side.
Amazing. Hat’s off backflip studios, it’s a great game that innovated with theme and design instead of copying everyone else which is common in the marketplace.
Does this mean that paid premium games are DEAD?!
No, not at all. We are releasing Milo and the Shadow as a paid game in a couple months. I do think trying to compete in the market without in app purchases will be tough, but there will be many independent developers able to gain traction and break the top 25 charts now that bigger developers are focused on free to play.
In closing, that leads us to one final question… what is Phase 3?
I’ll write more on this later, but I think this will be the phase when we start seeing games go TRULY social with increasingly awesome online abilities. It always bugged me the first wave of free to play facebook and mobile games called themselves “social” as there was not much social communication going on. I think we’ll see a big shift in this and we’re already planning changes for future projects.
Thanks for reading and take care,
Trey Smith
P.S. – I would also like to clarify that I don’t think the Angry Birds brand is going to die out. I am sure they will be around for ages and have many different games, merchandise and all sorts of crazy things. The point of this post is show how Free To Play has taken over the once “king of grossing” and changed the landscape dramatically.

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Tagged as: angry birds going down, death of paid apps, falling, free to play games, free top play, iphone games, mobile games, paid apps, phase of app store, phase of mobile gaming, social games, top 25 apps, top 25 grossing

A tale of the supreme competence of Neil Armstrong

A tale of the supreme competence of Neil Armstrong:

In the 1980s, my wife and I wrote a book about the Apollo program. One of the many backstories we learned was about the ongoing struggle between the Flight Operations people who ran Mission Control and Deke Slayton, who managed the astronauts. Senior staff in Flight Operations were of the opinion that some astronauts were better than others, and wanted flight assignments to be made accordingly. Slayton believed just as strongly in a rotation system. Once assignments to the rotation had been made, he was adamantly opposed to making substitutions—it would be insulting to the crew that was displaced and destroy astronaut morale.
As a compromise, the rotation for the Apollo flights was set up so that command of the first lunar landing was likely to go to Jim McDivitt or Frank Borman, both of whom were especially esteemed by everyone in the Apollo program. But then came the fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1, which took one crew out of the sequence. Then Apollo 8, the first circumnavigation of the moon, was inserted at a new place in the schedule. And so it came to be that Apollo 11 was the mission that got the first lunar landing and that Neil Armstrong, assigned to Apollo 11 years earlier, was the commander.
I once raised this issue with Jerry Bostick, who ran the Flight Dynamics branch during Apollo—the guys in Mission Control who were responsible for getting the spacecraft from point A to point B. Yes, Jerry acknowledged, it was the luck of the draw. But it was a lucky draw for the Apollo program, he thought.
Jerry began to reminisce about Gemini 8, Neil Armstrong’s previous space flight. Armstrong and his copilot, David Scott, had rendezvoused and docked with an Agena rocket as part of the rehearsal for techniques that would have to be used on the lunar mission. The combined vehicles had started to roll, so they undocked. But once it was on its own, the Gemini spacecraft started to roll even faster. Unbeknownst to the crew, one of the Gemini’s thrusters had locked on. The roll increased to one revolution per second.
I had known all this, but hadn’t thought much about it. And if you watch NASA’s version on You Tube, it is all made to sound as if the roll was a brief problem, never rising to the level of a crisis.

Actually, it was a moment that would have reduced me, and some extremely large proportion of the human race, to gibbering helplessness, no matter how well we were trained.
Imagine an amusement park ride that sits you in a pod, and that pod is twirled sideways at one revolution per second (you’ve never actually been on an amusement park ride remotely approaching that level of disorientation, because it would be prohibited). You have a panel in front of you with dozens of dials and small toggle switches, and you are supposed to toggle those switches in a prescribed sequence. While spinning one revolution per second. Pretty hard, trying to focus your eyes on those dials and coordinate your finger movement under those g forces so that you can even touch a switch that you’re aiming for. Now imagine that the sequence is not prescribed, but instead that there are many permutations, and you’re supposed to decide which permutation to do next based on what happened with the last one. Heavy cognitive demand there—long-term memory from training, short-term memory, induction, deduction. While spinning at one revolution per second. And now, to top it all off, if you don’t do it right, REALLY fast, you’re going to lose consciousness and die.
Jerry Bostick mused, “So there’s Neil, calmly toggling these little banana switches, moving through the alternatives, until he figures it out.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I’m not sure that any of our other pilots, and we had some great ones, could have analyzed the situation and solved it as quickly as he did.” I could forget about trying to make anything of Neil not being the first choice for the lunar landing.
Armstrong displayed the same sang froid during Apollo 11, when the Eagle was heading toward a field of boulders and, with a fuel tank within seconds of empty, Armstrong flew the spacecraft to a safe landing spot. And then, back home and after the obligatory ticker-tape parades were completed, he never did anything to cash in on his fame, living out his life quietly, a good man.
In an age of vainglory, preening, and press agents, Neil Armstrong was that rarest of public figures: The man we can tell our children to admire who truly deserves it, for what he did, how he handled it, and who he was.