It's such a simple, wonderful game. There's a few key details that I think distill it into a masterpiece.
1. A three year old could learn to play in minutes. Simple to learn, harder to master.
2. Your best runs last the longest, so as a fraction of your overall time played your better ones are the biggest portion. You remember winning a lot of the time.
3. It's absolutely pure animal player vs player. There is no chat, no real teams, no organization, just outplaying one another.
I enjoyed the game, but it became extremely boring after reaching the #1 spot on a leaderboard. I probably played for 30 minutes before deleting the app. Kudos to the developer for his success though.
It has some major issues unfortunately, including massive input lag and frequent latency spikes. This makes most deaths that occur feel very random, rather than the result of skilled play. These issues were around months ago, so I'm not sure it's simply the result of any recent virality referenced in this article.
lag/latency most likely due to combination of high/increasing traffic plus imperfect arch/code. but traffic is a Very Good Problem to have for a game, especially if his revenue comes from advertising, and is passive.
if I were him I'd focus first on identifying & fixing his bottlenecks, and consult a cheatsheet list like this to see if he's overlooked anything:
Lag spikes -- yes, definitely, and they're annoying. But are you sure the 'input lag' you're referring to isn't the small (by design) delay between moving the mouse and the snake moving?
I definitely see the similarity. That said, I never liked agar.io. Slither.io's ability for the smallest snake to kill the one at the top of the leaderboard makes for a more rewarding experience IMHO.
It's interesting how replacing a single component from otherwise the same concept makes for 2 games with completely different mechanics, strategies and kinaesthetics.
In agar.io you can shoot fungi at a big blob, which makes them explode into smaller blobs. You can potentially take down a much larger opponent that way.
this indie game designer's perspective: almost all new/modern "hit" computer games are just a revival of the mechanics/elements of some previous hit game. sometimes with little tweaks, always with a different superficial skin. very rare that a new hit game is truly novel.
"To make money, Mr. Howse relied on advertising. Players can spend $3.99 to remove ads that appear when a player loses. He doesn’t sell virtual currency or power-ups, surprising given how vital in-app purchases are to mobile gaming. Most users put up with the ads, he said."
As a person who is working on a game project on the side (that I have been neglecting recently due to time pressures), I find this double revenue model very interesting. So the game is free to play, but with ads upon death, of which he gets less than a penny.
"Those ads drop less than a penny in Mr. Howse’s pocket each time a player sees one. But with an average of 460 million fails a day"
So he is making mad revenue just off the ads, and then the percentage of players who pay add up too... all while providing an entertaining game that people like.
While I have always hated ads in game, I have a feeling this is going to be the main model for the next few years given the dominance of advertising. It saddens me that novel content creators don't get as rewarded for pure exchange of product (here is game, here is money), but I can't really say I blame them for starting to adopt this model, and to be frank it is making me reconsider my traditional approach of pay once.
I am 100% sure all his revenue is from ads. Every free product we've released in 7 years, including Paper Toss with 100 mil+ downloads, has made next to nothing from a "no-ads" in-app purchase. Full screen incentivized video ads however are worth a lot now with companies like Supercell spending millions a day on them.
I figured no one made money off the in-app purchase because so few vendors even give the option anymore.
I make a living off software development myself, and I love the "pay to remove ads" model. I play a game a while with ads to decide if I like it, then I pay a couple of bucks. It's like a demo to me. And ads drive me nuts.
I'm curious how much traffic he's sending (it doesn't sound bandwidth intensive):
> Mr. Howse spent weeks finding server space in regions where demand bubbled up. He is trying to save money by avoiding cloud services from the likes of Amazon Inc. or Alphabet Inc. “It’s incredibly expensive because of the amount of bandwidth this game uses,” he said.
[Edit with more quotes]
> Three months ago, Steven Howse struggled to pay rent. Now, the 32-year-old developer is trying to keep his hit videogame running smoothly as it pulls in more than $100,000 in revenue daily.
> “Slither.io” is profitable, Mr. Howse said. He pays about $15,000 monthly for online-hosting services, and shares revenue with Apple Inc. and Google.
So $3M/month in revenue on $15k/month in hosting ;). I'm sure much of the $100k/day is recent and likely a fad, but I guess I'm surprised that he's apparently spent weeks trying to get capacity while his revenue is skyrocketing "just" to keep his bandwidth bill down. (It seems like all the networking would be effectively player state back and forth, not assets).
This is probably the reason and the unexpected scale. Initially as a broke(referring to part where struggled to pay rent) 32 year old developer, you don't want to share spend a lot on AWS/GCP. If the revenue stream is consistent, I'm sure, he is going to move to either of the platforms. So much less headache that way.
Wrong. He isn't even running on cloud anyway. For this type of workload, bare-metal is 10 times a better option, both in terms of performance and costs.
The "problem" this dev is having is what AWS was built for.
He could get his OS of choice, customize it with his server software, then copy the AMI to various regions, spin up dedicated instances as he needed them, use what he needed in various regions and direct players to their closest server. Turn on and turn off servers as need arises and they are close to players. After his game settles down to predictable traffic, he can move to some bare cost ISP. He would not have to call anyone and within a hour or so he could have a game that gave a much better experience.
What kills a flavor of the month game like this is being laggy and having an awful experience.
The only thing I think would be an issue is the bandwidth charges. I wonder why his game creates so much traffic?
The game is very latency sensitive and it makes complete sense to use a cloud and distribute the servers based on the user load : locations and that's what he plans to do as mentioned in the article.
It seems popular for multiplayer games to manage state by taking all user input and processing it on the game server. With the prevalence of cheat clients this makes the most sense, and I've seen some games do it to limit state information easily accessible on the client (to combat botting tactics). Could contribute to large bandwidth usage if allowed to run rampant (which is probably what happens in blitz-scaling situations).
EDIT: After playing the game it seems plausible that each and every mouse event is sent to the server. That's a low of mouse events.
But you only pay for responses (ingress is free, you pay for egress). Can someone playing the game see how much traffic they're receiving to make this discussion more informed?
I played it for a little while, but it's too easy to die, I'd prefer it if you rapidly shrank while touching another snake, giving you a few seconds to turn out of they way.
Was popular with my students for a few days, but they're back to agar.io now
Every time you lose (you hit a snake) you are showed a full screen ad. And you lose a lot during a 30-min play time.
Multiply that for millions of players every day.
EDIT: The WSJ article mentions an average of 460 million game losts a day (which means about 460 million ad impressions a day...you know, some of us have adblockers on android)
51 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread1. A three year old could learn to play in minutes. Simple to learn, harder to master.
2. Your best runs last the longest, so as a fraction of your overall time played your better ones are the biggest portion. You remember winning a lot of the time.
3. It's absolutely pure animal player vs player. There is no chat, no real teams, no organization, just outplaying one another.
I hope future game makers learn from this.
if I were him I'd focus first on identifying & fixing his bottlenecks, and consult a cheatsheet list like this to see if he's overlooked anything:
http://synisma.neocities.org/perf_scale_cheatsheet.pdf
from slither.io creator(s)
About their infrastructure, sw, hw architecture.. revenue model.. etc.. could be very interesting read
As a person who is working on a game project on the side (that I have been neglecting recently due to time pressures), I find this double revenue model very interesting. So the game is free to play, but with ads upon death, of which he gets less than a penny.
"Those ads drop less than a penny in Mr. Howse’s pocket each time a player sees one. But with an average of 460 million fails a day"
So he is making mad revenue just off the ads, and then the percentage of players who pay add up too... all while providing an entertaining game that people like.
While I have always hated ads in game, I have a feeling this is going to be the main model for the next few years given the dominance of advertising. It saddens me that novel content creators don't get as rewarded for pure exchange of product (here is game, here is money), but I can't really say I blame them for starting to adopt this model, and to be frank it is making me reconsider my traditional approach of pay once.
I make a living off software development myself, and I love the "pay to remove ads" model. I play a game a while with ads to decide if I like it, then I pay a couple of bucks. It's like a demo to me. And ads drive me nuts.
> Mr. Howse spent weeks finding server space in regions where demand bubbled up. He is trying to save money by avoiding cloud services from the likes of Amazon Inc. or Alphabet Inc. “It’s incredibly expensive because of the amount of bandwidth this game uses,” he said.
[Edit with more quotes]
> Three months ago, Steven Howse struggled to pay rent. Now, the 32-year-old developer is trying to keep his hit videogame running smoothly as it pulls in more than $100,000 in revenue daily.
> “Slither.io” is profitable, Mr. Howse said. He pays about $15,000 monthly for online-hosting services, and shares revenue with Apple Inc. and Google.
So $3M/month in revenue on $15k/month in hosting ;). I'm sure much of the $100k/day is recent and likely a fad, but I guess I'm surprised that he's apparently spent weeks trying to get capacity while his revenue is skyrocketing "just" to keep his bandwidth bill down. (It seems like all the networking would be effectively player state back and forth, not assets).
Disclosure: I work at Google on Cloud.
This is probably the reason and the unexpected scale. Initially as a broke(referring to part where struggled to pay rent) 32 year old developer, you don't want to share spend a lot on AWS/GCP. If the revenue stream is consistent, I'm sure, he is going to move to either of the platforms. So much less headache that way.
He could get his OS of choice, customize it with his server software, then copy the AMI to various regions, spin up dedicated instances as he needed them, use what he needed in various regions and direct players to their closest server. Turn on and turn off servers as need arises and they are close to players. After his game settles down to predictable traffic, he can move to some bare cost ISP. He would not have to call anyone and within a hour or so he could have a game that gave a much better experience.
What kills a flavor of the month game like this is being laggy and having an awful experience.
The only thing I think would be an issue is the bandwidth charges. I wonder why his game creates so much traffic?
EDIT: After playing the game it seems plausible that each and every mouse event is sent to the server. That's a low of mouse events.
The only accomplishment here is that someone figured out how to make serious cash from multiplayer snake.
Was popular with my students for a few days, but they're back to agar.io now
Multiply that for millions of players every day.
EDIT: The WSJ article mentions an average of 460 million game losts a day (which means about 460 million ad impressions a day...you know, some of us have adblockers on android)