Show HN: mgwuSDK, Turn Based Multiplayer SDK | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: mgwuSDK, Turn Based Multiplayer SDK

makegameswith.us

36 pointsDesaiAshu37 comments

Wait, so in order to use the SDK developers are forced to publish through the company AND the company takes the first $1000 in revenue? Isn't that really bad for developers?

Mobile games are so hit and miss I bet most people using this SDK will never top $1000 in revenues and will never see a dime. But if their app does blow up and get popular, they won't be able to get the brand recognition that comes with it. I am struggling to find the benefits of using this :/

We are working on allowing folks to use it without publishing through us. What kind of pricing model would you like to see?

Here's why you want to use it:

-It's so easy to use a couple high school students build a social game with it that's doing quite well.

-It leads you to build the type of game that has a higher chance of succeeding.

-When you publish with us, we produce all the art and music for your game at no upfront cost to you and promote your game. This is easily a $1000 value. We got Name That Jam! To the top 25 Trivia and Music games in the App Store for 2 weeks :)

I agree that the art and music is a $1000 value but I don't like that it comes off the top of the revenue. Why not charge 40% from day one (so you keep 10%) and give an optional $1000 production charge for producing the art and music?

Is it because you don't want bad art/music in games you publish for other people? I can see where that gets tricky.

The people we work with generally don't have $1000 up front and one of their main draws in publishing with us is that they have no other way of getting art/music. For those who have art already we shift that fixed cost towards promotion. Don't forget that we also offer code-level support to a lot of our devs and do extra stuff for them like optimize their OpenGraph actions. It ends up being a really good deal.

I should also point out that by using the SDK you can make three games in the time it would have taken you to make one. The Ghost template game was built and pushed to the App Store in the span of a few days.

Gotcha. It is an interesting business plan for sure. I think if you guys can figure out how to allow devs to use the SDK under their own brand it will be awesome.

Definitely the plan at some point. What kind of terms would you like to see offered?

Free. :P

But it is... up front ;)

That's a good call IMHO. I find this intriguing but I wouldn't know where to start to get the art work and wouldn't want to throw down $1000 just to find out whether my idea appealed to the marketplace.

Pricing wise, it is nice to give people some money. Perhaps 30% for the first 3000 dollars? It is just nice for beginners to get hooked, and get some money, even if it is just a token.

If I can't figure out even the most fundamental technical information about your platform from the splash page (or even where to go to find it), I'm going to assume you are marketing something for people who aren't technically literate enough to care about it.

Just to confirm you mean the makegameswith.us/sdk page and not the makegameswith.us home page?

Thanks for the feedback. Our focus demographic is currently high school and college developers. We've noticed that most of our existing users tend to prefer seeing an example of the code in use (the Ghost template) as opposed to an API/documentation online. The full instructions on how to use the SDK are included in both downloads, but perhaps we should also include a link to it directly on the SDK page.

You don't even say what OS's you support.

On Github[1], they have some instructions[2].

1: https://github.com/adesai/mgwuSDK

2: http://pastehtml.com/view/cpfdfurib.html

This is the v1 of our SDK, we launched Name That Jam! with a beta version a few months back. Would love to hear any feedback you have about bugs, improvements or feature requests. Feel free to contact me directly (ashu@makegameswith.us)

This seems like it could speed up development of one of my projects but for the first $1000 dollars and 30% thereafter of my revenue, I will skip it.

Good to know! What kind of deal would you like to see offered? Do you need the extra services we provide - art, music, code help, promotion?

I guess I am not your target market. I would like to use the software outside of your ecosystem subject to a license fee.

I understand - what kind of licensing terms would you find acceptable?

I am not sure but interested in what you guys come up with.

Very impressed by your responses by the way, taking notes.

"The first $1000 in revenues and 30% of revenues after that."

I understand the entire arrangement is probably worth the price, but you have to find a way to separate this component from the rest of the stack.

A pricing arrangement that would be nice to see is something tied to usage. For example, if it's free for the first thousand users (and then start charging if more than 1000 people sign up) then you ensure a healthy lock-in (after all, who is going to risk changing the multiplayer infrastructure if it keeps up with demand -- devs will focus on the game intrinsics) and a solid stream from those who can pay up (most likely, after some traction, the devs will either have cash on hand or do an equity round)

Thanks for the feedback! We initially built this because a couple of our devs requested it, but it looks like there is more interest in it. We're going to look at different revenue models for the SDK as a standalone component for those who don't want to use the rest of our platform. The one you suggest sounds pretty interesting. Do you think people would respond well to a smaller royalty for just the SDK, or the pay per users/api requests model is more attractive?

It depends on how you want to position your firm. The real show-stopper is the fact that you want to take a percentage fee and take the first revenue piece -- its as if you don't want to take the equity risk yet aren't content with a flat payout. You have to choose one (or at least make the upfront smaller or the percentage much smaller). Something like $1000 + 1% or $50 + 20% or 40% would be better.

The way we had been thinking about it (which seems to be an incorrect assumption) was that 1k was a pretty small amount of future revenues to recoup. The reason we had thought this was even if your game is moderately successful (like the game I built when I was 16 which made 35k), the 1k would seem pretty inconsequential, and it is simply a way for us to reduce our investment per game. Our goal has always been to invest in the future of the game. I think psychologically it may seem more greedy than it is in reality, but either way this would be a good reason to reduce the first revenue piece.

Does this mean if a game doesn't succeed, you guys essentially did the artwork for free? In that case, is there any kind of screening process for games built on your platform to make sure you don't waste your time building something that's unlikely to produce revenue?

I'd also be interested in how the agreement works if the game has a Web component as well. Can the artwork be used anywhere? Is the plan to take a cut of revenue the game makes on other platforms?

Yup, we end up taking the hit on art/promotion/other costs. So far the best screening process has been motivation. We haven't yet encountered someone who was motivated enough to finish a game with us and whose game was poor enough we didn't want to publish it. We help with game design and playtesting where needed as well.

The artwork can be used in versions of the game that live on different platforms, we will take a cut of any version that uses our art/music/characters.

Sounds great :) Have you thought about allowing people to buy out of this agreement if they want to be able to use your help to bootstrap/test and then move in the future?

We don't take any ownership of your IP. If you strip out our characters, art, music, sdk, you can do whatever you want with what's left. If you stick with us we want it to be because we're doing a good job as a publisher, not because we've taken ownership of all your IP.

Thanks for being so responsive in your questions. I'll keep this in mind as I have a project that might suit this model well.

Cool! If you want to chat about it shoot me an email at jeremy@makegameswith.us. Also happy to hop on the phone or Skype if you want to bounce ideas off someone or if you have any further questions you want to ask about what we do.

So, can I release a game I made with this for free?

Yup :) In fact almost all turn based multiplayer games that succeed are free.

So then there's no payment to you guys ever? Interesting.

Well most such games go on to add in-app purchases. If you never did, we certainly wouldn't force you to. In that case there would indeed never be any payment to us.

Is this Apple products only?

Yep. iOS only at the moment.

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