So today I have hit 50 million total video views. This is as per tubemogel.com, not what it says on YouTube, as YT’s view stats are lagged by 3-4 days. This is very cool stuff, especially given the time it took to go from 10 to 25 mil vs 25 to 50 mil (178 vs 209 days OR 11.86 vs 8.36 days/mil). This is almost a 42% increase in views/day, with an average of almost 120,000 per day over the past 209 days.

More stat milestones… This is the only level too broke 2 million, just edging Use Boxmen as my 2nd game to 2 mil; this also makes the 2 TITOL games #1 and #2 on my most viewed list all time. But to keep John’s ego in check, he still has less total views than his AG co-worker Joey (5.36 mil vs 5.39 mil)… barely.

Random other stuff: going to try and start posting daily again, if I can. This means not everything will be work related. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

So crazy to think… amazing really. For a walkthrough to have so many views. This is the only level’s walkthrough hit 3 million views today. Yay!

Use Boxmen will hit 2 million very shortly as well.

Don’t think I’ll have any new 7 digit milestone posts for a while. Oh well.

The original list is from February. A lot has changed since then. There are 17 new videos in the Top 100. The 100th video viewcount increased from 58k to 93k. Total views from the Top 100 has increased from 22 mil to 33 mil. But other things remain the same… Armor is well in first, with BubbleBox still solidly second. Joey Betz is still my top dev, but John Cooney and Eugene Karataev are gaining. And the % of views from the Top 100 has decreased from 81% to 76%.

Here is the data from Feb, side by side with the data from now:

Views are viewcount in thousands, Count is number of videos in the Top 100.

I typed “Walkthrough” into my YouTube search bar and waded through the 1st 17 pages of results, which takes us down to 200,000 views per video.  ”Walkthrough” returned the results of any video with the word Walkthrough in either the title or description of the video.  This should be a pretty all-inclusive list, barring any games besides Ice Breaker that have a crapton of videos for 1 game (I just happened to know about the walks for those games, so I knew to check…  no one of the vids has 200k+ views).

The List: Game Name (# of Vids) – Total Views in Millions – Ave Views/Vid

1. Red Remover (2) – 11.4 – 5.7
2. This Is The Only Level – 2.8
3. Wake Up The Box – 2.6
4. Poptropica: Nabooti Island – 2.0
5. Cover Orange – 2.0
6. Use Boxmen – 1.8
7. Roly-Poly Eliminator – 1.6
8. This Is The Only Level TOO – 1.1
9. Poptropica: Big Nate Island – 1.0
10. Wake The Royalty (2) – 1.7 – 850k
11. Poptropica: Astro Knights (4) – 2.8 – 700k
12. Fragger (2) – 1.4 – 700k
13. Poptropica: Spy Island (3) – 1.9 – 633k
14. Demolition City 2 (3) – 1.9 – 633k
15. Poptropica: Counterfeit Island (4) – 2.2 – 550k
16. Poptropica: Mythology Island (4) – 2.0 – 500k
17. Demolition City (2) – 1.0 – 500k
18. Crush the Castle: Players Pack (4) – 1.3 – 325k
19. Stadium Sneakout (10) – 1.0 – 100k
20. Ice Breaker (40) – 1.8 – 45k
21. Ice Breaker: Red Clan (40) – 1.4 – 35k

These are video groups done by 1 person; no mix and matching.  Also, no 1 game/island had more than 1 person with 1 mil views on their walkthrough… although 1 or 2 of the Poptropica Islands were close with a 2nd.

Analyzing the list shows very specific types of games that meet this list: Poptropica, Phuzzles, and Puzzle Platformers account for 19/21.  CtC:PP is a physics game, but not a phuzzle… and Stadium Sneakout is a point & click that doesn’t really belong on the list at all because each video is :08-:30 long.  The top17 are 6 Poptropicas, 8 Phuzzles, and 3 Puzzle Platformers.  Finally, I made 8 of the top 18 (8 of 12 if you discount Poptropica).

If you know of any game that I missed, please let me know.  :)

Got this sexy screenshot last week:

Don’t know if anyone else finds it impressive, but I sure do. Also, thanks to these 3 vids, I got my first entry into the Top Monthly Channels, maxing out at 90th. Alas, the good things disappear so quickly; when those games were new, 200k+ views a day… now, under 80k.

I received an email a few days ago asking me to fill out a survey about FGS, and what I filled in for the comments is pretty much what I am going to say here. I’ll only discuss those topics that I sat in on, which was all 3 developer story times that were in the dev room and all but 1 of the money panels (I also missed the NowBoarding storytime, but it was in direct competition with another story time). I did not hear anything about the 3 flash technologies that were discussed in the dev room.

Keynote: As stated in my previous post, we got to the keynote late, and only heard the last 10 minutes or so. However, I don’t understand the grandstanding of Jameson Huo (CEO of MochiMedia). I’ve said before that I have no idea how conferences generally work, but in my logical mind it seems appropriate for someone opening up a day of speakers to talk about the state of the industry, advances of the past year, hopes for the coming year… not to promote one’s own company and use it as a platform for announcing new services. People speaking are supposed to be imparting wisdom to assist those attending, not trying to boost their own bottom line (ok, everyone speaking is trying to boost their own bottom line… but it doesn’t have to be THAT obvious and in our faces).

AtomAtomic and Canabalt: I think I was pretty accurate with my statement in my previous rant from last month. Cool game, but no point/sense/need to have a 30 minute talk about how it was developed. It’s an incredibly simple game, and I think just about any successful game’s development story would have been quite similar, if not significantly more interesting.

History of Nitrome: Quite fascinating and entertaining, but I don’t know how helpful the talk was. I feel like their formula is fairly straight-forward… it just takes years of dedicated game development to get to the point that they’re at. Most developers could have taken a similar path as the Annals, they just didn’t have the drive or creative mindset to do so.

Next Gen Monetization: This panel was 4 guys who have microtransaction (MT) platforms trying to tell everyone why MTs are awesome, but that games need to be designed from the ground up to incorporate them; they can’t just be slapped on at the end. I certainly agree with what they said, but they pretty much covered everything they could say in about 5 minutes, then repeated themselves for another 55. The Social Gold guy barely spoke English (same with the moderator) and did not seem to add much at all to the panel. There was a question asked at the end of the panel that would have been quite worthwhile, except the douche who asked it was more interested in trying to be an asshole than actually asking something meaningful. He wanted to know why the 4 guys were only discussing MTs, when the topic of the panel was not “MTs in Flash Games,” it was “Next Gen Monetization.” Which is a perfectly valid question… and it stems from the selection committee either a) picking a bad topic or b) not picking a diversified enough group of people. I’ll go with B, given the group of people were all completely identical, just from different companies, although A could be accurate if all one wanted to do was change the name of the panel to match the people speaking.

Monetize Game Outside Sponsorship: So we got the money side of things from MT companies. Now we get the low and dirty from developers who all made a bunch of cash not getting their games sponsored… 3 through direct sale and 1 through MTs. Daniel James, while just as interesting as last year, didn’t really say anything new from last year (except the fascinating tidbit about Whirled losing 4+ million dollars). The Rocketbirds guy was a flat out terrible speaker, and probably detracted from the panel, having no idea what to say and admitting he had no idea what he was doing when monetizing his game. Colin Northway, after his plethora of comments and mockings last year, was rather refined when speaking. From talking with Andy Moore (Colin’s best friend, worked on Fantastic Contraption, and was the moderator of the panel) the night before over beers, I was informed that Colin had spoken about FC multiple times at conventions… my guess is he was a bit burnt out by it at this point. Overall, fairly interesting… you definitely can make way more money through this model, the game just needs to be really cool.

Sponsorship Panel: My proposed panel was so awesome that 2 of my speakers were stolen for this one. [/bitter]. Greg completely dominated this panel. Candystand was doomed from the start, because their member on the panel doesn’t even do sponsorships for them and she’d only been with the site for 4 months… my boy Dave Fahrer should have manned up and owned face on the panel. Joel Breton from Addicting Games seemed to be in his own little world during the panel, and apparently has a different opinion about his site’s sponsorship methods than that of every developer and other sponsor that I talked to (their speaker at last year’s FGS left the same impression). Lars is a cool guy, but he and Robin were toting the sugar-coated P.C. corporate verbage that nobody actually believes is truthful. And this is why Greg rocked it… he told the truth, bluntly. We’re all industry people, we’re all big kids, we all want to know the truth to make successful games as well as money… sugar coating sponsorships doesn’t help developers.

Boxhead: I’ll say the same thing I said directly to Sean Cooper about his talk… I didn’t understand 95% of it. But I’m not a developer, so it’s ok. The developers who I talked to about Sean’s talk (Jmtb, Gregory Weir, etc) all said that Sean is a genius. So I approve. However, it was also noted (and I agree) that he jumped around a lot, and didn’t really have a good flow from A to B in his talk. He also said something to me later in the day that I wasn’t sure if he was joking about or not (John said the same thing happened to him when talking to Sean); I’ll have to investigate more.

Zynga’s After Party: [rant]This started off strong… bus transportation from the conference to the bar. And it was all down hill from there. Let’s list the problems… 1) Extremely loud music is not conducive to networking. 2) Over 500 people at FGS this year, yet the bar is smaller than the 09 after party bar… could barely breathe, let alone move around. 3) Why, why, why, why, why did Zynga invite people from GDC to the party? Are they seriously that cheap that they can’t have 2 parties if they really want to host the FGS after party AND have a GDC party? It started off with all FGS people, but by about 8:00 it was filling in with old people in suits.[/rant]

So, I know this all comes across as pretty harsh… but this event is important to me and I’d like to see it be as awesome as possible. I also focused on the negative in this post, as I covered most of the positive things in the previous ones (networking, awesome people, etc). The event still needs to focus more on the games themselves, and less on profiting from them (I think we’re at the point where if we talk about monetization any more next year, it’ll just be a complete reiteration of this and last year’s talks). I think I have 1 more post’s worth of material, dealing with suggestions for FGS11.

Also, random note, I completely agree with something John said in his FGS10 blog post: it’s shocking how many social games are being developed in Flash; last year at the after party, I met all kinds of people doing random stuff in the industry… this year, almost every random person I talked to was working on a social game for Facebook.

Monday started with 7am polka. Not too bad of a way to start a day, all things considered. However, we apparently forgot to turn on the heat in the room… and I was a frozen Tassicle. I finally got out to bed around 7:40, showered, and we were off for some breakfast sandwiches at 8am.

Yummies consumed, we hailed a cab and reached FGS by about 8:45. Check in, free t-shirt and other goodies, and we quickly entered the main room to catch the end of Jameson’s (CEO of Mochi) opening remarks.

I’ll save my commentary about FGS for a 3rd post, and stick to narration for this post. For the 9:00 session, I went downstairs to the “dev room” and listened to stories about the making of Canabalt and how Nitrome went from barely being able to eat Ramen to having an office of 10 people. At 10, I went back upstairs for a panel on about microtransactions by owners of MTX platforms. The 11:00 hour was a “state of Adobe” presentation, and since that was highly technical and of no use to me, I used that time to network in the hallway. I talked to tons of people, including Zeebarf, Crazy Jay from MaxGames, John from CrazyMonkeyGames, Lars from King, and many, many others.

After that was lunch, which was some uber-fancy box lunch nonsense that made Simple Tass cry. I sat with ConArtist and his Aussie possie, and we chatted about a bunch of interesting stuff. Towards the end of lunch, I moved to the “Kongregate” table, and met AlisonClaire, Ducklette, and a few other newer staffers who I hadn’t met before; Greg Weir was also at the table and 2 gentlement from EA Games. My position as someone who never will be made a mod on Kong was affirmed many times over. My dreams are officially ruined. Lol.

The 2nd annual Mochis followed lunch, and some cool games won awards… including Sacred Seasons. Had Jamie told me that they won (winners knew ahead of time), I could have accepted the award for them. Given I’m a mod in the game and whatnot. Oh well. Also, Mechanarium has some crazy sexy art.

2:00 and 3:00 were 2 more panels about making money… one by devs who made craptons of money by not going the sponsorship route, and one by sponsors pleading for devs to get their games sponsored. Greg was one of the speakers on the sponsorhip panel (moderated by another one of my Polish panel members, Jared Riley… ) and totally kicked ass. 4:00 brought a short break, which was filled with more networking, mostly with Andrew Sega (who made Mytheria, amongst other things).

The final session I attended was by Sean Cooper, and made no sense to me… but many devs said it was brilliant. So I’ll assume it was. With the end of the summit was the start of the after party. Buses were provided to transport us from one location to the other, and I spent my time talking with a man named Lee from Adobe who either made Flash Player or updates it. Basically, he’s really cool and seemed to be interested in my little niche market.

1 paragraph summary of the after party: Zynga failed horriby at planning it. Full rant in FGS post. However, I did manage 2+ hours of hardcore networking, although I’m not sure how many of the people I talked with will actually have any benefit from working with me. Except Martine from Spil and the 2 fine Fins from Frosmo. Also, I “may” have changed Greg Weir’s opinion in regards to in-game walkthroughs. I am a master wordsmith!

Most of the cool people left the after party around 7 or 7:30, while I stayed til about 8:30. At which time, I joined the cool people 1 block over at what i’ll refer to as the after after party. This group included the guys from Armor, ConArtist, the Hero Interactive folks, Greg and Alison, John from CMG, Zeebarf and EntropicOrder, a random dev who made a bunch of games I’d never heard of… and then cameos by Sean Cooper, the Nitrome guys, the Thing-Thing guy, and a few others that I can’t recall. This party wound up breaking up around 12:30. At which point we walked home, slightly in the wrong direction because Greg and Alison suck at direction giving, set my alarm for 4:30, and fell asleep.

The trip started off wonderfully, with a 90+ minute delay before I even left. Got into SFO around 12:45 and waited for about 20 minutes until John and Joey’s plane landed. Got bag and left to get a BART into the city. Now, John grew up in this general area, so we trusted him with the simple task of airport navigation to the BART station… and instead we wound up doing a giant loop through a parking garage that put us right back where we started. At that point, I took charge, and we quickly made it to the train and eventually to out swanky hotel.

I guess I should note that I stayed in a suite with Dan, John, and Joey from Armor Games. Dan flew in on Friday to see some friends, so we were expecting him to be at the hotel and get us access to our room. But apparently he was 20+ minutes away, driving an ‘82 pick up truck for some reason. We wait and eventually Dan arrives. Our room appears to be too small for 4 people, so Dan decides to get us a swankier suite with plenty of extra space. And a freakish lack of outlets.

Not too much interesting stuff took place in the room… we were pretty tired from the trip in, and took an hour or two to relax before the party that night. Then I get a phonecall from a developer I know, benologist… except I don’t remember giving him my number. He wants to bring another guy I know, who makes music, to the party. Dan, being the nice guy he is, allows this. Except beno called me from a hotel, didn’t tell me his room number, and I couldn’t remember his last name to get connected to him room from the hotel staff.

We head to the party, which is next door to where last year’s Armor Party was. I volunteered to go with Dan in the ghetto cruiser. Thankfully, I did not die. The party was solid. About 30 people, many of which I knew already… few I didn’t. Had a few beers, some food, good conversation. All in all some good fun. With dinner over, it was off to a nearby bowling alley for some heated competition with big prizes.

Me, being the giant douche that I am, brought one of my bowling balls with me from LA… along with my shoes. This did not wind up helping me, as I bowled like complete crap. But, developers tend to not be the most atheltic people… so I still handily won. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, which was the most important thing anyway. The top 5 scorers were put into a drawing for 5 prizes… basically as a method of preventing me from getting the top prize automatically. I really wanted that NetBook too. Instead, that musician that beno brought along wound up getting it… grrr. On the other hand, I now own a DSi… but apparently it does not come with games? Not sure what to do about this, but I’ll figure it out.

After we finished bowling, we still hung around and talked for a bit at the lanes. Then walked back to our hotel with a drunk Weasel (not the Thing-Thing one, the Frantastic Contraption / Streambirds one). We were going to have a nightcap with him at the hotel bar… sadly it was already closed. He left, and we went up to bed.

Not too bad of a first day, in spite of the 5am wake up. Will have storytime on Day 2 later, along with commentary on FGS.

My channel has been top100 views for Gurus and Gaming for a while now, but I’ve never had an individual video in the top100 for Gaming. Until now. Without even noticing it, TITOL1 is #73 all time in Gaming. Which makes it 1 of 4 flash games in the top100 (Red Remover walkthrough, Pandemic 2 instructions, Wake Up The Box walkthrough). Here’s to hoping on getting many more vids in there.

I spent some time on 2/17/10 compiling a spreadsheet of my top 100 videos, their aprox viewcount (rounded down to closest 1000), sponsor, developer, and whether the video was featured in-game or not. From there, I tabulated the top sponsors and the top developers (only calculated devs with 3+ videos in top 100, unless they have 800k+ views).

I have 450+ total videos, so this is less than 25% of my total videos… but these 100 account for over 22 million of my 27+ million views, so they are a fairly accurate representation of the whole. Obviously, the farther down the list you look, the less accurate it is (like LegitGames having 1 video on there, but they have 2 others that just missed the cut).

Any questions or additional data you guys would like to see? I did not include the raw list of top 100, nor did I do any analysis of in-game vs not in-game. And TITOL2 is not counted in this list for Armor or jmtb.