On Sun, 2010-07-25 at 10:57 +0200, david blanchard wrote: > [David] I'm trying to say that given the context of our game and the > kind of exp we want to provide, it is going to filter our players. It is > perfectly > possible that a 15 years old person likes our games, it will just mean that > he will share our interests - there is a maturity aspect here, so what > term should I use instead of "adult target" according to you ? Mature target ?
Hum... Yes, you're right, I don't have a better way to define it. Let's go for adult games : ) > [David] This quote is part of the paragraph about the adult niche. So > I replaced 'space' by 'niche' to be more clear, but I still believe we can say > that the traditional publishers are not focusing our target for their social > gaming attempts. Ah, I see - you mean that, even when they try to target social gamers, they are more in the copycat posture (aka redoing Farmville) rather than trying to address the needs of those who have played those games, got tired, and wnat more. Right? > [David] agreed. But this is why I mention it in this paragraph, don't you > think that this is one of the reason why we go for a niche ? To be able > to reach the right community more easily, and therefore to reduce the > acquisition cost that we would face if we aimed at everyone ? Hum, I think it really depends on the type of community you're trying to reach. Being a niche alone doesn't mean that it's cheap to reach - from a marketing point of view, it mostly depends on how much competition you are facing and how saturated the ways to reach that community are. It's true for ads, but it's also true for word of mouth... Here, I think it's mostly the fact that we are doing something new and surprising that will help - along with working with the community to spread the word. Also, it depends how hardcore/casual the game is. Hardcore players are hard to please, but once they are the word spreads very quickly and easily - it's often a structured audience with a lot of means to communicate the information. With something more casual, even if it's a very small niche, the players may not care as much about it, and it can thus become harder to get them to spread the word. > > It's missing a lot of explanations on the inclusion of players in the > > discussion, reversed pyramid/bottom-up model, and the detail of > > decision > > process > > [David] yep, I've added these elements now but I chose to include them > In the paragraph "how should the studio be organized", it made more sense > according to me. Please let me know if it includes everything you had in mind. Yup - made a small change, but generally it's good: http://community.hackit.cx/index.php?title=Business_Plan&action=historysubmit&diff=2268&oldid=2075 > > Need to better introduce the difference between the development project > > and the game operation. > > [David] I'm not sure to understand what (and where) you refer to here, > can you be a bit more specific please ? > > > Source of revenues: cf my email about premium service, could be a > > reason > > to increase conversion too. > > [David] I'm not sure about which mail you refer to, can you remind me ? Hum, I don't remember for those two - it was probably not very important then : ) > > We need to talk more about Hackit! > > [David] I've added relevant links for HackIt in the following > paragraph of the document -> > http://community.hackit.cx/wiki/Business_Plan#Development_of_HackIt.21 > I prefer to put links only and not content, to avoid additional > maintenance of the document in the future. Would still be good to explain some of it there... Or to include content from another page. It feels weird to talk so little about the project itself. Same thing about the financials, btw. > > Overview of potential competition => EA *is* a competitor > > > [David] yep, but what I said remains relevant I think -> I revamped > the sentence you'll tell me if it's ok for you. Was good from what I could see. Would be good to use all that to put together a SWOT comparison to the competition - would be nice in the slideshow. > [David] We don't know the audience, but we know that we should aim at > a niche and we're more interesting to do games for adults right ? Yup. > [David] on the excel financials : > > 1) separated business plan financials and the growth model in two > separate sheets, should be easier to manage Hmm, I'm not sure it will make things easier - the links you have in the spreadsheets (both Excel and OOo) are relative to the position of the file your hard-drive. I don't think I ever opened a spreadsheet with external references without issues... What is the issue with keeping it in the same file? > 2) started, in the growth model (new tab), a template on weekly basis > to check the metrics. It's a draft, I still need to work on it. I'll > add the daily cohorts that Xav sent in a mail when I find time a bit > later. Couldn't see it for the above reason. Looks like a great initiative. Btw, you wrote that "The metrics used will be the conversion rate from visitors to registered users, the virality, the churn rate, the conversion rate from active users to paying users, and the ARPU". What are the numbers you need from the game every week to be able to feed the spreadsheets and have them work everything out? If you have a precise list of the things that you will need, we can start specifying development that would ensure you can access those numbers any time. > 3) in the bp financials : > - reviewed and merged the staff/subcontracting, because it is not easy > to predict our ratio employee/contributor, and it will be easier to > work on the document this way. Modified all the other operating > expenses in consequence. Ok! Just a remark: an employee or a shareholder is a contributor too - the word is to take on its broader meaning, ie someone that does actual work for the project. > Added a yearly bonus. Actually... I'm changing my mind on that one. I think I'd rather transform it into an individual development budget. It can still be linked to personal objectives - I just think the perspective of learning new things is a better motivation factor than money. And this way we could be able to pay for intensive external courses that are always difficult to get even in large corporations. It shouldn't change much on the BP though, just the lable. On which sheet is it? > - Reduced the expenses for year 1. We are now at 180k€ until end of > July 2011. It might still be too high, can you help me by challenging > our expenses for the first year ? Sure! * How do you calculate the number of heads for code/graphist? It switches from month to month... * What's the 2K for a dev lead in September and February? * Why 3K in directors starting on February? * You've left some budget for CS/CM in September... Maybe this should only come when we have the proof? (ie when the activity starts to take off) * What's the 100 euros/month in PR for? * We could need to ramp up the ads budget when we have the proof - we'll know where to target to bring users, so this will be especially true if we find a profitable way (COA > ARPU) * We'll see how much Olivier Hugot charges for the legal tasks, but the budget may have to be higher * Why 30 euros/month for mobile expenses? Not sure if it's the right time to buy a cellphone : ) * You can increase the bank charges IMHO - between the recurring cost, having a credit card, making wire transfers, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if it was around 100/month * About the travel expenses budget - what did you count in there? Is it to bring Vlad (and any other developer) to Paris, or to travel to Canada? * You need to ramp up the numbers with hosting - better to end up with a budget excess there than not having the money to correctly host the players * Why no budget for accounting? We'll need to pay Ubidoca & Magalie, no? > - added costs for tools. Currently I've added it in Capex (as software > we buy). We can put in dev cost later, if we want. I've added > stats/BI, CRM You can remove the stats/BI fee, and the license for ZenCRM while we remain small is $10/month. Afterwards, we'll need to develop our own anyway, so it will be included in the development cost. I would remove most of the costs here. > - I updated the page http://community.hackit.cx/wiki/Financials where > I deported financial information from bp, explained how we will build > scenarios according to success and criteria for success/failure > - I updated the BP abstract following the modifications on the BP > extended doc. Looks good. Btw, I've: * Added header structure to the BP abstract and removed extra spacing from the BP, for consistency (presentation spacing and headers formatting should be left to the CSS, not be tuned on each document - if you want to better separate blocks, you should add more subsections) * Changed the fact that we haven't released the proof of concept to "These directions position our game as more for adults than for children." We're not late, let's take advantage of it : ) Xavier. _______________________________________________ Hackit Bar mailing list - [email protected] Wiki: http://community.hackit.cx/ List: http://community.hackit.cx/ml/ Forum: http://community.hackit.cx/forum/ Ideas: http://community.hackit.cx/ideas/ IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/#politis
