After a day of playing joyless freemium games for research and then sharing a bottle of wine with my wife, I hit upon a brilliant solution – why not make a app which allows you to spend as much as you want on in-app purchases, without actually having to play some terrible game?

And so was born ‘Burning Money’.

With literally hours of development effort with the brilliant Corona SDK, I made the app.    The menu screen has two buttons – ‘Buy Money’ and ‘Burn Money’.

‘Buy Money’ allows you to spend from $1 to $1000 on credits.  $1000 dollars buys you a million credits.   Once you’ve got credits, you can burn them.

Pressing ‘Burn Money’ shows you a pile of dollar bills, and burns them with some quite nice fire and smoke effects courtesy of Particle Candy.   The more credits you’ve got, the longer it burns for.  Although not that much longer… fire’s like that.

The App Store description was thus:

Bored of playing those repetitive, free-to-play-but-not-really games? Not got the time, but still want to waste a load of money?

Burning Money saves you time and effort – you don’t have to build a tower, city or farm. Just spend as much money as you want, press ‘burn’ and see it all burn away!

If you’ve got more money than time, and more time than sense, Burning Money is the app for you. Show your friends just how rich you are. If money means nothing to you, why not just burn right through it?

The very nice man from Apple called me up and the conversation went like this:

Steve (Apple): So….err….Burning Money

Me: Yes

Steve: Could you tell me what it’s all about?

Me: Well (suddenly realising I hadn’t worked out a decent excuse)… it’s kind of about… conspicuous consumption. It’s… part psychological experiment, part high-value fashion accessory.

Steve: Right

Me: (getting into my stride) – we’ve found that some players don’t have time to play freemium games, and wanted to create something that allows them to engage with in-app purchases without having to spend a lot of time on the game itself.

Steve: We worry about apps which have very high value in-app purchases, especially as children could make accidental purchases.

Me: How about if I lower the amount you can spend?  And maybe we could release an age-restricted version with a higher IAP maximum?

That way, those mature users wishing to spend more could enjoy the convenience of a higher price credit pack, while younger users would be protected from inadvertently making a purchase they couldn’t afford or shouldn’t be allowed to make?

Steve: Well, the thing is, we’ve had apps like this in the past, you may have heard of the ‘I am rich’ app. That caused us a lot of problems. We’re worried about the possibility of people buying it by mistake, or fraud.

Me: There’s absolutely no intention of fraud, that’s very important to us. It says very clearly at all stages how much you’re spending, and even suggests you really shouldn’t do it, as it’s a complete waste of money.

Steve: All the same, we think it would lead to a lot of refund requests.

Me: Maybe it would, yes.

Steve: Well, to be honest, we think it’s just not the kind of app we want to see, so we’re going to have to pass on it.

Me: To be honest, I thought you’d say that. And I think you’re right, I’d reject it too. Thanks for letting me know.

Steve was so nice, and extraordinarily professional at all times,  it was a pleasure to be rejected by him.  And I think he was right, Apple shouldn’t really allow apps like that.  It would have been fun, though, to see if anyone was rich and stupid enough to buy credits.

Tempted to launch on Android instead.  Although might just let it lie.

We are in the process of setting up a new European social, mobile and console games business.  The company will be a subsidiary of a well-established Far Eastern game publisher.

We will be working with the company’s internal and external studios to localise (words, pictures, gameplay) various products and bring them to the European market.  It is likely that the majority of products will be in the social and mobile space, but we will continue working with downloadable, and potentially retail-based, console titles where there is a market opportunity.  In the medium term, we may also be commissioning some of our own European-developed games.

This is an exciting opportunity to join with a company which is already a success in Asia, and has had commercial and critical success with console titles in Europe and USA, but to join it in ‘start up’ mode as we build a European operation.

If you are interested in any of these roles please email a CV with links to portfolio (if appropriate) to harry AT heldhand.com or tweet me @hholmwood.  Thanks!

Location

The office will be located in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.  Tunbridge Wells is approximately 45 minutes from central London by train, with a service running four times or more per hour.  Direct trains run to London Bridge, Charing Cross and Cannon Street.

Ideal Candidates

As we are building up a very small team to begin with, priority will be given to applicants able to bring a broad range of skills. In particular, in addition to the key stills for each role, any of the following would be an advantage:

1. Excellent written English and presentation skills.
2. Fluency in another European language (particularly French or German).
3. Fluency in Japanese.
4. Demonstrable track record in managing others.
5. Entrepreneurial spirit and drive.
6. Cross-disciplinary skills – for example, being comfortable with technical, creative, managerial, marketing and business discussions.

Games Producer

We need a multitalented producer to work on multiple internal and, ultimately, third party products.  It will be key that the producer can demonstrate expertise in project management and game design as well as general business acumen and an understanding of the economics of social, mobile and console games.  Flexibility, intelligence and passion are more important to this role than years of experience.

The product lineup is likely to be quite diverse, from social and mobile games developed in Asia and requiring extensive language, graphical and gameplay localisation, to titles coming from the US and requiring some design input.

Skills/experience required:

• The ideal candidate will be educated to degree level.
• Excellent written English and presentation skills.
• Fluency in another European language or Japanese would be a bonus.
• Financial modelling / Excel etc.
• Project management of small-medium sized game and web projects.
• Familiarity with other disciplines (technical, graphical, marketing) an advantage. as this will be a small team with ‘all hands on deck’ needed. 

Game Designer / Evaluator

We require a multitalented game designer and evaluator to work on multiple internal and, ultimately, third party products.   The role will include working with developers in Asia, USA and Europe to localise their products for the European market – not just in terms of text but ensuring the graphics and gameplay are tailored for our market.

The ideal candidate will have a broad knowledge of the games market, in particular for social/browser games.  This might be a suitable position for a game tester looking to move into a more design-focused role, or possibly someone new to the games industry with demonstrable talent (demos, mods etc).

As we are starting as a small team, ideally we’re looking for someone able to demonstrate expertise in multiple areas.  Useful talents to have include:

• The ideal candidate will be educated to degree level.
• Excellent written English and presentation skills.
• Fluency in another European language or Japanese would be a bonus.
• Financial modelling / Excel etc.
• Familiarity with other disciplines (technical, graphical, marketing) an advantage as this will be a small team with ‘all hands on deck’ needed.

Graphic/Web Designer

We require a talented graphic designer to work on multiple internal and external game projects.  Initial work will include creating user interface assets for existing games developed for non-European territories, to make them more suitable for a western audience.  You will also be involved in creating the look and feel of a web portal for social and mobile games.  As the company progresses you may be managing freelance graphic designers, character designers and others as well as creating assets yourself.

We are starting with a very small team, and ideally looking for people with a broad range of skills and talents.

Essential skills will include excellent graphic design and illustration skills, PhotoShop/Illustrator/GIMP/Flash etc, proven web design expertise.  A strong understanding of user interface and user experience issues is a must.

Advantageous skills/experience will include:

• The ideal candidate will be educated to degree level.
• Excellent written English and presentation skills.
• Fluency in another European language or Japanese would be a bonus.
• 3D modelling and animation.
• Familiarity with other disciplines (e.g. web development, marketing) an advantage as this will be a small team with ‘all hands on deck’ needed.
• Previous experience with social games development an advantage.

Most of the time, things like mobile gaming, social networks, digital distribution and new business models delight me.  I’ve been banging on about ‘free’ being the right business model for digital since 1999. We’re bringing in new players every day, giving them new experiences and finding new ways to make money.  The sheer number of people owning smartphones (billions soon), and the way games have driven revenues in app stores and on Facebook is astonishing.

But.

For the last couple of days, I’ve been doing something I make sure I do from time to time. I’ve played a lot of games. Famous ones, unknown ones, everything I could lay my hands on. This time, all the games I played were on Facebook.

It’s been unbelievably boring.  I mean, painfully, soul-crushingly dull.  At one point I contemplated doing my VAT return for the light relief it would bring.

One of the great pleasures of this job has always been that you can justify playing games as ‘work’.  If this was work, I quit.  Screen after screen of identikit games, 95% of them sticking rigidly to the social game formula – namely, build something, build something else, slow down the gameplay until the player buys credits to speed it up again.  The pacing, presentation, tutorial structure, even graphic design is near identical across literally hundreds of games.  It’s not just Zynga – it’s nearly everyone.  In fact, it’s nearly everyone copying Zynga.

By the tenth game, I was literally closing my browser after two seconds of the game.  The arrow popping up, the smiling face encouraging me to ‘click here to place your first…’, the little bar filling up showing me how long something took to build was all it took to send me packing.  My children report the same… “it’s just the same game, with a different title”.  And they’ll play anything, given the opportunity.

Now, the positive me thinks “This is fine… that market’s huge, everyone’s piled in, there’s a lot of dross, Darwin will see to it that they all die off and a stronger, better, ‘funner’ future will emerge”.

Meanwhile, the negative me is saying “We’ve attracted hundreds of millions of potential new players, and we’re in the process of making them so bored of games that they’re going to go away for a generation.”  The industry’s collapsed before under the weight of cheap, cynical, joyless clones. It could happen again.

I don’t know which me is right. I’m hoping it’s the first one. Let’s try and make it so.

Remember – when you’re building your business model for your ‘mass market social media product’ – don’t forget to put a game in there.  And remember, games are supposed to be fun.  If you find yourself wanting to play it, and loving playing it, and wanting to get your friends to play it with you because they’ll love it too and you’ll all have fun – you’ve done a good job.  It’s all about the joy.

Please.  Because we could really mess this up if we’re not careful.

As someone who grew up in the eighties, I remember fondly the introduction of the Compact Disc.  Impossibly cool-looking, shiny discs, each apparently indestructible and capable of playing Dire Straits at unrivalled quality.  A few failed audio and video formats later, DVD came along and did the same thing for video.

All that time, the message, from the manufacturers, to the media, to the man in the hi-fi shop was “if it sounds better, it is better”.  And we listened to that message; and we heard that it was good.

But things started to change in the late nineties.  MP3 players didn’t sound better.  And once Apple married a cool, intuitive MP3 player to a vast, convenient digital store, the music world changed forever.  Convenience beat fidelity.

It’s doing it again with video – I can watch a TV show live, in crystal-clear digital HD or, I can stream it from iPlayer when I want.  At lower quality.  Not bad quality, but I could have better, at the cost of just a little convenience.  But I choose the convenience every time, and so do more and more people.

So, if convenience wins over visual and audio fidelity, what does that mean for gaming?  Despite the impressive processing power available, the best selling smartphone and tablet games hardly push graphical boundaries, but, particularly when combined with a free-to-play business model, they can engage huge audiences.

People have low attention spans, and there are a million other things to do if engaging with your product is too much hassle.

So, if people don’t care so much about fidelity, what do they care about?

Price, for sure.  The explosion of the free model, and revenue growth figures from apps which have made the move from premium to freemium.  It’s both common sense, and demonstrable, that adding a payment barrier at the start of a game will greatly reduce the number of people who’ll ever start paying.

But – haven’t console games got the biggest payment barrier of all – the console?  Could it be that the days of expecting users to pay upwards of £300 to start playing is coming to an end?

Consoles are incredibly expensive to develop, launch and manufacture.  Development costs for games has rocketed as developers push graphics and content ever higher to take advantage of the consoles’ power. The biggest games must now sell millions of copies, at  £40 or more, just to break even.

Outside of the hardest of the hardcore, who’s really going to be impressed if Call of Duty in 2015 looks even more realistic that it does today?  Are we in danger of turning AAA gaming into an industry only for the most rabid enthusiasts?  Is the console’s destiny akin to that of high-end audiophile systems, where the hardcore fool themselves into thinking they’ll have a better experience if they pay hundreds of pounds for ‘special’ speaker cable?

We’re now anticipating announcements about new hardware from Microsoft and possibly Sony, later this year.  Let’s be honest, as an industry, we’re not as excited about it as we used to be, are we?  And if we’re not, how do we think the public’s going to feel?

Isn’t the better strategy perhaps to focus on removing the barriers to entry – getting the pricing of existing console platforms lower and lower and lower – until they’re genuine impulse buys?

For years now, it’s been possible to buy a DVD player for £30 or less.  What would it mean for the industry if you could get a ‘current gen’ games console for a similar amount?  Answer – everyone would have one.  And what if an open pricing model, with both premium and freemium games distributed on demand, created a seamless, way to start playing?  Now, it might not be possible to build a PS3 for less than £30 today, but it won’t be long before it is.

My feeling is that by eliminating the barriers to entry for consumers, we’d open the door for real innovation from developers.  Innovation that would drive new experiences, new business models and new customers and, in turn, pave the way for continued success in the console sector.

Right now, that innovation is all going into the web and mobile markets.  With the right approach, that innovation might just return to the boxes under our TV screens.

I suspect it won’t happen – certainly not before it’s too late for the incumbent console manufacturers.

Tenshi Consulting is a sister company of Tenshi Ventures, which was founded by Ian Baverstock and Jonathan Newth, former founders of game developer Kuju, both of whom I’ve know for many years.  They’ve teamed up with Ed Daly, former CEO of Wide Games / Zoe Mode, where I was a non-executive director some years back, to create a new consulting firm.

The Tenshi team includes some very experienced people, all of whom have been CEOs or board-level executives of companies in the gaming, mobile and technology industries.  Together, there’s a real breadth of experience there, and I look forward to working with my new Tenshi colleagues.

Thanks to Dominic Mason and James Martin for asking me!

Harry Holmwood: Beware geeks bearing smartphones… the death of commercial TV?

For consultant Holmwood, retaining viewers’ attention as they browse their smartphones during ad breaks could be TV’s biggest challenge…
Right now, nestling in my trouser pocket, I’ve got the most interesting thing in the world. A third of American adults already have smartphones, and half of British mobile subscribers will be using them in 2012. Worldwide, we’ll see billions of people buy smartphones and tablets in the next few years. Billions. All of them one touchscreen away from every piece of information, every person, every game and every show they’d ever want to encounter.

I’m a bit of a geek. Always have been, and that’s been a pretty useful thing to be as we’ve entered this Brave New Connected World. But I’m starting to scare myself. My infinite access to ‘interesting content’ has crushed my attention span.
When I entered the world of work as a fresh-faced, dodgy-haired games designer 20 years ago, the only distractions I faced were the coffee machine and the 3 guys I shared an office with. Now, I’m sat here on my own with billions of pages and people at my fingertips, an awful lot of them way more interesting than ANYTHING else I’m doing.

But why should this matter to broadcasters? Well, the thing with geeks is, we spread like a virus. The things we do today tend to be those everyone’s doing tomorrow. Home computers, video games, internet, PVRs, MP3 players, iTunes, smartphones – all once the preserve of geeks but now pervading all our lives.

So, the way us geeks consume media now is pretty much the way everyone’s going to be doing it before too long. And how do geeks consume media? However we want to, that’s how. And if someone tries to tell us when, where or how we can do it, we’ll do it our way anyway. If someone wants to interrupt our viewing with adverts, we’ll have a way around it – whether it’s a PVR, a torrent or an on-demand service. I watch a lot of TV, but haven’t watched an ad in over 3 years – even when I’m watching an ad-filled show on Hulu.

How? My smartphone. It’s always there, always on, and it’s not only more interesting than the ads, it’s better than the show too – if you let it distract me for too long. My brain’s just itching for an excuse to stop watching and look at my phone instead… “Who’s that guy? What else was he in?” and I’m onto IMDB. “He’s so annoying… I bet people are slating him on Twitter,” and I’m browsing my feed. “Ooh, my friend messaged me,” and I’m gone.

The long-term future is difficult to predict –viewers will want to consume media when, where and how they want, uninterrupted by advertising and, here’s the killer, most of them are going to want to do it for free. We’ll have to monetise them in ways that seem alien today – maybe we’ll be watching ‘TV’ with embedded, targeted CGI product placement, with products and even computer-generated voices inserted into live action shows and movies as we stream them.

Advertisers will buy a number of views of their drink being served in the bar – once those views are used up another brand can take its place. Viewers will point to or just mention what they’re interested in and their TV will register their interest, for them to find out more at their leisure… either on their tablet device or the TV itself.

That’s the sci-fi bit, but what about now? If I’m shown an ad, chances are I’ll look away and at my smartphone. The key is going to be either getting my eyes back to the TV screen, or influencing what I do when I look away. Twitter’s a fantastic tool for this, but we can go much further. If we understand what people are Tweeting about or Googling for in those commercial breaks, and provide it, to their smartphones and tablets before they start looking. That way, we can monetise them, keeping their attention rather than letting it wander. Sound exciting? Or absolutely awful. I’m veering towards the latter.

Harry Holmwood has founded, taken to IPO and sold several companies in the videogames and online space. Recently returned to the UK after 2 years in California as VP of Software and Licensing for a leading peripherals manufacturer, he advises companies and investors on the online and entertainment markets through his consulting group, Heldhand.

I wanted to play with the latest version of Joomla with a view to evaluating it for a new project. My hosting account was on a server which didn’t support it. I mailed POE and, within minutes, they’d moved me onto another server and helped me with a couple of other configuration problems I was having.

I rarely have to contact them but, when I do, they reply within minutes and are always happy to help. So, if you need a hosting company for a personal or small business site, look no further than www.poehosting.com!

It’s a Software As A Service (‘SAAS’) package meaning, rather than buy outright and install it to a PC, you pay monthly to access it via a browser – all your data is stored remotely and backed up. For someone like me who uses many different PCs and other devices to work, that’s a pretty useful feature.

First impressions are OK – it’s certainly very easy to use and I’d recommend it to people who aren’t very familiar with accounting software already. A lot of packages (even Quickbooks) do seem to want the user to think like an accountant, which is the last thing most people want, or indeed need, to be doing. It’s missing some stuff I’d like – such as allowing expenses to be assigned to customers, so that they can be automatically reclaimed next time you bill that client – but does most of what a small business would need. Customer support seems excellent – when I mailed to ask if the expense feature was there, I got a reply within the hour, and the feature’s being suggested as a future upgrade to the team.

There’s a free 60-day trial here, which sounds a bit less ‘no risk’ than it really is – having spent the last couple of days getting my accounts up to speed with Kashflow, I’m pretty much committed to it since the alternative is to do all that accounting work again. That said, it seems as good a solution as any I’ve seen, and £15 a month for a year works out to be less than getting an upgrade to Quickbooks anyway.

I’m certainly sold on numerous other cloud apps such as (Google Apps and Basecamp, and hope that Kashflow proves as useful to my bean counting as the others do to my productivity. I appreciated being able to file a VAT return online yesterday from within Kashflow itself, so the signs are good. Will report back after a couple of months.

It’s at a very experimental stage right now, and far too early to say anything about, other than that it’s designed for children, and I’m working with my old friend and colleague, the artist Phil Corbett.

I suspect they’re going to get worse before they get better!