King driven opportunities for teams using Defold

Hey there,

I’ve been mostly communicating with selected teams, but let me also give a shout to the teams outside of my natural reach. We have a few ideas of how to help and reward those using Defold engine to ship good games. Our ideas range from direct technical help to bringing some of the teams/projects to the best trade shows in the world. And more…

We’ve established good relations with some of the teams, who are shipping this year or early next year. And we’re communicating individually. Later this year we’ll launch a set of public campaigns like the cross-promo from within King games portfolio, we had promised at GDC.

I am writing this post to inspire you tell us about your game:

Any questions - feel free to use this thread or poke me via email.

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Hey all, while this topic has little action, here’s a sample of what could have been done here. Today we have a top media writing an article about Defold and is willing to put links to some of the Defold-authored games. Please please please keep us updated on games you do with Defold so we connect you with such opportunities. We expect it gonna be more of those in the coming months.

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Aaand it has happened again. Press has approached me suggesting to talk about some of the Defold-authored games. Please be sure I know you’re doing something cool with Defold!

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It’s obvious to (even) a child why this would be of benefit to Defold, and King. But you’re positing all publicity as good publicity for a game.

Perhaps be mindful of a couple of things. There’s no acclaim available to a developer or game made with Defold that’s going to help sell the game. Defold doesn’t have a reputation. It’s not that it has a bad reputation, it’s that it has no reputation. I say that without gripe, I happen to think this is the best design and architecture of any current engine (with the exception of the horrid messaging concepts and syntax).

King, on the other hand, has a reputation. You might want to think that’s a positive reputation, but things like attempting to tag “Candy”, a word near and dear to the hearts of nearly every person on earth, do not engender good feelings towards a distinctive brand. Nor are they ever likely to be forgotten.

Further, if you’re an ambassador (evangelist?) for King and Defold, don’t use passive aggressive nonsense in your wordings to the community of people using the engine. You might take it personally that you’ve got little response to your outreach, but you shouldn’t. You should be more critical of yourself and the company you work for, first.

You might need this explained. “outside of my natural reach” is not a positive way to suggest the existence of the others. And you explicitly avoid listing those that you’ve approached, but do mention that they’re “selected teams”. The strong inference is that these are teams you’ve selected.

There’s no way for the reader to know if they’ve been passed over in your selection process, nor how far your natural reach is. Most will assume they’ve been passed over, and not bother contacting someone that passed them over, or they’ll continue reading.

Continuing to read reveals more completely ridiculous, deliberate ambiguity and nebulousness.

“…we have a few ideas…” Who is “we” and what are your ideas? Who doesn’t have ideas?

“…how to help AND reward…” help what, how, why, and what sorts of rewards?

“…to ship good games.” Who is the judge of this?

“Our ideas range from… [deliberately vague nonsense] to [even more vague nonsense] , and something about trade shows (what, for boats?) And more…. vagueness.

“We’ve established good relations with some of the teams…” this entire paragraph does nothing more than increase the feeling of isolation from your opaque selection process. Why would anyone submit themselves to being ignored by you, again? You probably want to make this sound like you’re capable of making good relations with developers. Don’t claim it, Prove IT!

And then there’s the King games portfolio. You probably think this is something everyone would treasure… you’d be wrong about that. A few might, but the antics of King’s lawyers and PR department are at complete odds with the joys its games can bring. And most people know this, it’s why most people fear using Defold.

Defold has some equity with game developers because it’s articulated reasonably well, and has an obvious design and attention to detail. But it’s missing lots of the little things that make a normal engine a full engine precisely because it’s been shaped by the explicit and specific demands of a few King games.

You might be a wonderful person, but you’ve written an awful post in attempting to reach out to developers. It’s like a what’s what of what to do wrong in such a post. Especially the last bit, where you finally get around to the point of the post, then give commands on how to approach you, and the rules/reasoning of doing so, then reveal that you don’t really care, just send me a poke or an email.

Make up your mind!

If you can’t be certain about what you and your company can do, how can you positively, with certainty, represent someone else’s game?

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I can certainly understand some people’s hesitation about King, but I think the key phrase from Olegs posts is this:

“…keep us updated on games you do with Defold so we connect you with such opportunities.”
(Emphasis mine)

We aren’t about to force stuff onto developers, but we would like to be able to offer you cool opportunities as they come along. After that it’s completely up to you guys if you want to go for those opportunities or not. If we contact you and offer something one-sides that is good for Defold but not for you, then you can and absolutely should tell us to shove it! :slight_smile:

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Cheers for taking your time to put this all here.

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This requires trusting King with information about a game…

And only serves to amplify all my points. Whether or not there’s a connection made is solely determined by the arbitrary and opaque decision making of someone seemingly completely unwilling to provide any transparency about anything he’s done, doing or involved with.

When asking for information about an unreleased game, to go into a blackhole, and that blackhole being (as the per the title of the thread) “King driven opportunities…” I think there’s an effort needs to be made to prove King is being benign, benevolent and beneficial. It’s not like King has ever demonstrated a good understanding of media. Great at making games billions love, bought the best engine… not so good at media and PR. And this is all about media and PR…

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Hi deeds, I am still trying to get your point. Is it good or bad that we’re trying to help those willing to get help from us?

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Why are you using one of our products if you do not believe that we have honest intentions? I’ve worked at King for three years and the people here are passionate about their job and about our products. Never once have I heard anyone ever talk about our players in a bad way. We have always designed our games with the end user in focus and the ambition to be fun and friendly. I’ve seen and heard of my share of bad tech companies and King isn’t one of them.

Now I won’t go into debate about the whole Saga and Candy thing but I can say that we acted no different than most other companies do when they protect their trademarks. The most recent similar thing that comes to mind is when Microsoft rebranded their cloud storage solution from SkyDrive to OneDrive due to trademark violations claimed by British broadcaster Sky. By the way, did you guys know that Marvel and DC have trademarked the word “superhero”?

Finally, if you are serious about making games for a living then we can help you to get publicity and there is even an opportunity to use our network of players to get a high number of players to try your game. Get in touch with Oleg (Oleg.Pridiuk@king.com), me (bjorn.ritzl@king.com) or anyone else in the team if you think this is for you. We will gladly help you with these things if you want to and if you trust us. And if you don’t, then I still hope you will enjoy Defold and create some great games!

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From my perspective there is not much reason to mistrust King.

Sure, the Saga and Candy thing maybe was a overzealous trademark protection move. But it was also overstated by press, gamers and developers alike. I remember George Broussard tweeting about a “cease and desist” against the Banner Saga guys when it in fact was a trademark objection. And such wrong statements can easily fuel shitstorms making a PR desaster out of a silly, but less dramatic legal dispute. In the end the two trademark disputes were settled and i’m sure King learned to not underestimate the devastating power of social media.

The other thing King was criticised for are controversal monetization methods especially in Candy Crush Saga.

But i’d like to differenciate here and view each part of a company differently. So as far as i know King made mistakes in their legal department and their monetization department used methods not everyone would call friendly (sorry Britzl :wink: ).

But this Defold project is a whole different department, and i don’t care how fiercely King protects their IP and how they design their own games and monetization. I care if Defold allows me to finish my projects. And in case this is true, i’d appreciate any help from them. And in case there are terms lurking i don’t like, i can always deny their offer.

So i will give 'em a chance and try to not judge them by how their colleagues do their legal and monetization stuff.

Regarding their PR department: We don’t know if they even had a chance to point out possible reputation issues when legal decided to go against Banner Saga and CandySwipe. But even if PR was involved and did not see the potential of the issues, this should be compared to what they contributed to make the company successful.

I may be a bit naive, but i think it’s much more likely to profit from King’s help, making it a win-win deal than to be dragged into another shitstorm… :wink:

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I’m quite new to this community so i’ll keep it brief.

When I look at this situation I see two things:

  1. A massively successful company investing time and money into an artistic community.
  2. An attempt to reach out at a personal level, for mutual benefit.

I’m not sure if i’m in the minority here, but I really don’t see anything wrong with that.

I understand that people might have reservations for one reason or another, but please don’t speak for the community at large.

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I doubt that.

I think you got all my points.

Perhaps try answering my questions instead of attempting a rhetorical straw man.

Feel free to add the correct context: that of trusting King’s employees to (first) assess a game and its potential, and then assess and recommend media and promotional activities (from a hidden basket offered to King) for Defold developed games, opaquely.

This conversation has nothing to do with USING the engine, it’s about the incredibly vague “claims” made in an attempt to seduce developers into submitting information about their projects -> to a blackhole.

All good points, Daggett, all widely known.

They also compound the incredibly vague and (seemingly) deliberately opaque nature of this “offer” of “help”, that requires sending information into a blackhole.

The OP seems frustrated that he’s not gotten much response to his appeal to Defold users. My first response was to that.

The simple solution, and a better way to communicate about something like this, is to answer my questions, be specific and transparent, and recognise some of the issues you’ve mentioned linger in the minds of many.

Nothing difficult about that.

Mistrust only arises because these things are completely absent and/or deliberately being obscured, everything is subjective. There’s no way to assess the nature of that subjectivity, nor the opportunities.

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If you want your game to be successful, it’s important to promote it as much as possible, using all good channels possible.

King is just telling that they can be one of these channels, because popularity of Defold games is in their interest too.

I see nothing sinister here. And if you have decided to make your game in Defold you have to trust King a lot anyway - given that your project is hosted on their git and all that.

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You can use self hosted git.

I can’t wait to take advantage of these opportunities when my game is approaching release/is released. Right now I’m in the “how do I fund this”/in development stage and I don’t think you can help too much with that (besides answering my engine questions which you already do).

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Since I’m working with Oleg I have a hard time thinking of him as a black hole :slight_smile: Sure, he’s got a lot of energy but I think the similarities end there :slight_smile:

What we are trying to say is that if you want us to mention your game when journalists ask us about games being developed with Defold it is important that you let us know of your game. We (mainly Oleg) meet with a lot of developers around the world, but unfortunately he hasn’t met with all of you (yet).

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Hello everybody!

I think Defold is great! And I appreciate so much to have this excellent engine, with so much potential, for free!

I also understand @deeeds and all his questions and uncertainties, because I share some of them too, but at the end I think @baturinsky summed it very nice : “I see nothing sinister here…” :slight_smile:

So let’s clam down and do our best!

And as the old adage says: “Trust God, but lock your car” :wink:

Cheers to all!

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I’ve not claimed or suggested anything sinister.

Part of my concerns are competence, transparency and appropriateness.

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