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.

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.

My Game is progressing. Getting the art coordinated is proving to be quite challenging, and a slow process. Hard to judge how the programming is going, but I’m being assured that it’s mostly done. Custom music is also progressing slowly.

I’ve been talking to Synth a decent bit recently, and we’re looking at a June 18th re-launch of the site. Synth believes that all data will be recovered.

Walkthroughs are continuing, steadily. My daily views seem to be constant above 80k/day, which is good. Would be nice if I could get that up over 100k.

Was offered some level design work on Crush the Castle 2, which I accepted initially… but after about an hour working on it, it was pretty clear that my cbf level outweighs the offered cash. Those castles are just so damn intricate. So many small details to them. Instead, I wrote up some general level ideas that hopefully will be useful to Joey.

Life is moving quickly. Less than 1 month until all my stuff gets shipped back east, and 1 month until we fly away from LA. Will have to start packing shortly. We have a new kitten, which complicates the move a bit… but Whorli just can’t say no to kittens.

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.  :)

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.

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.

I know I say how awesome the guys at Armor are… but it’s hard to stop when they keep doing awesome things for me. About 5 months ago, I wanted to say thanks for everything they’ve done to help me in this industry… so I sent them a candy gift basket. It was extremely well received… but if you ever run into Joey and see his eye patch… it was a candy basket related incident; so my bad on that.

A few days ago, Dan asked me for my address. I was quite curious to know what I was being sent; W-2 came to mind, or a t-shirt. The address that I use is actually Whorli’s parent’s house (which is 3 houses down from where I actually live). This morning, Whorli’s dad came by to drop off 3 packages that had arrived… a hanukkah gift from my mother, some weeaboo stuff from a Japanese girl for Whorli, and a giant f-ing box from one Daniel McNeely. This is what he sent me:

I had a feeling that I would eventually get a gift basket from Dan & Crew… they’re the type of guys that will not forget a present, and will want to return in kind. But I’m blown away by the quality of this basket. I already put down the jerky, which was honestly dried and salted heaven in a pouch. I will be nursing one of the brews later tonight while eating some of the pepperoni and crackers. Some of the items don’t agree with my Brown Diet pallet… but they’ll find a nice home with Whorli’s family.

So once again… I give my sincere and public thanks to Dan, John, Joey, Larry, and everyone else. I owe hugs for this one, which will be given out at FGS (if I don’t see you guys before then).

So I was talking to Greg today (Kongregate’s Greg)… and it came up that there haven’t been many great games released recently. Laments were had about lack of sponsored games and lack of video views. Tears were shed (probably… Greg’s that kind of guy). He then asked me what the guys at Armor were working on, and the list of stuff I gave him surprised me when I looked at it.

Armor has 5 full-time flash developers. This is what they’re working on:
Tony: Shift 5 & a spoof TD game based around his spoof RPG game
Con: The Last Stand: Union City
Krin: nothing official, but his forum’s moderator posted that he’s working on a Sinjid sequel
John: FlipSide, a mini-game compilation akin to FSF meets Simon Says… I have a feeling the title will be changed before release… I haven’t played it, but from my understanding of the game, the title doesn’t seem to fit that well.
Joey: that phuzzle that I mentioned in an earlier blog, plus he mentioned some sequels in an ArmorBlog interview.

Now, what does this all have in common? Not a single original idea in the lot… every single one is a sequel (I’m stretching a bit on John’s game, but go with it). This seems to be a big trend in flash games recently… very few new ideas, lots and lots of sequels / title re-works. BTD4, BTTD, CycloManiacs 2, Perfect Balance 2, Epic Quest, etc etc. I could give a very long list.

There’s nothing wrong with sequels. It’s far easier to come up with 1 great idea and then capitalize on the success of that game by releasing sequels. But you can only rest on your laurels for so long… it’d be nice to throw some new concepts in now and again. Console games have been doing it for years. My fear is that this is some sort of early warning bells for the start of the industry’s decline. I’m likely being paranoid, and this just happens to be a lull time, but I’m mostly dependant on ad revenue from video views to live… so forgive me my paranoia.

What are your thoughts on flash game sequels? Are you happy to see a 5th SHIFT game or 4th Bloons TD game? Where would you like to see these top developers spending their time? I’m a bit torn on it myself. This is something I’ve told more than one developer: Sequels have name recognition. That can be a good or bad thing (or both to different people). People KNOW what Sonny is; they aren’t going to play Sonny 3 if they didn’t like Sonny 1/2… even if Sonny 3 is 100x better. So you’re immediately alienating part of your potential player base. But, there is the other half… those who will immediately play it because they recognize it and like it, and portals that will host it for the same reason. With a non-sequel, players have no bias… they see a name, a picture, and a rating and decide if they want to try the game out or not. There are obvious pros and cons to both, depending.

I really don’t think I can say it enough times… the guys at Armor are amazing. Not only were they the first guys to work with me on walkthroughs, but they continue to help me out and hook me up. I was just trying to assist John and Joey, giving some feedback and advice on their upcoming games… and Dan sends me a nice chunk of cash. Completely out of the blue. I’ve tried to do what I can to return the favors… running Poker Night in San Fran, sending a Candy Basket… gotta figure something else out now. Maybe they want bowling lessons?

So, yeah. Make sure to play all your games on Armor, because they’re the coolest guys I know (note: nothing against all the other really cool guys I know and work with). And check out Joey’s game that I helped out on, The Competitor.

-Tass