On Game Design with Rich Hilleman (Part 1)

Rich Hilleman is the Chief Creative Director of EA. He is one of EA’s earliest employees and is best known for helping to build the juggernaut EA Sports business as the original producer of games including John Madden Football, NHL Hockey and Tiger Woods PGA Tour. This interview took place in April, 2012. For more from Rich, check out part 2 and part 3 of this interview. EL: What are some of the games you’ve […]

Breaking into game design: Part 3 – learn to sell yourself

This post is the third in a series about how to land a job as a game designer. Check out previous posts for details on setting your career goal and building your portfolio. Now that you’ve built a strong portfolio filled with tangible design works, you may think it is time to write your resume and start applying for jobs. But the same way that when designing features on Enhanced Wars I always set a […]

Breaking into game design: Part 2 – build your portfolio

This is post is the second in a series on how to land your first job as a game designer. You can read the first post about how to set your career goal at this link. Although I do not review as many resumes now that I’m an indie developer working on Enhanced Wars as I did when I was at BioWare San Francisco, I still review the odd resume here or there as a result of a […]

Breaking into game design: Part 1 – find your mountain

Before I left to work on Enhanced Wars, I was a producer and manager at BioWare’s San Francisco office. The majority of my time at BioWare was spent as a producer leading the Dragon Age Legends game team. During my most crunched state I had a team of 25, 19 of whom I managed directly. Hiring truly takes a team to do right (and I was lucky to have a strong team at EA between the […]

I built my career on a QA job – a response to Nathan (RC) Peters

After two years I was forced to hand in my employee badge for Pandemic Studios, a broken man. I was taking 4 vicodin a day to dull the pain of a herniated disc in my lower back. Wrist braces adorned both my arms to help control the repetitive stress injury induced by long days of playing Star Wars: Battlefront and typing. The herniated disc – acquired on a rare crunch time day off as I […]

Game Design is Business Design – GDC 2013 Edition

I presented this latest version of my game monetization lecture – Game Design is Business Design – at the 2013 Game Developer’s Conference as part of the Free to Play Design and Business Summit. In the talk, I mention some tools and templates in the lecture that you can find at the following links: Monetization Philosophy (template) Feature Brief (template) Game Treatment (template) Business Model Canvas (template)

5 UI/UX tricks behind CSR Racing’s $12 million month

Back in August, Natural Motion made big headlines when it was reported that their hit game, CSR Racing, had surpassed $12 million in monthly revenue. The drag racer spent most of the month of July dominating the iOS top grossing chart and enjoys a position in the top 25 on both iPhone and iPad today. Based on my model for iPhone/iPad revenue, I estimate that CSR Racing has generated a little over $5 million in worldwide sales in the […]

The Simpsons Tapped Out: Why EA doesn’t need new ip

In last Tuesday’s quarterly earnings report, EA touted the success of the freemium Simpson’s Tapped Out for iOS as one of the stand out successes of the past few months. EA’s Frank Gibeau was quoted as saying “another breakout hit in the fiscal quarter was The Simpsons: Tapped Out, a free-to-play mobile title which launched in August and was the #1 grossing game on iOS for most of the last 4 weeks” (via Games Industry International).  […]

The math of money in freemium

Last month I was struck by Going broke with success, the story of financial disaster for indie devs Mikengreg, the developers behind well regarded iPad app Gasketball. As told by the Penny Arcade Report, it is a heartbreaking story of two passionate devs dedicating two years to a project only to get completely wiped out financially despite hitting the #2 position on the iOS free charts in the US and #1 in 6 countries. Two years, a fun, polished, unique […]