Protecting Intellectual Property

There are four ways one can protect the intellectual property (I will refer to as IP) of their company. The first way is to copyright your work. Essentially, it makes it so something cannot be used outside of the consent of its creator. With my company in mind, copyrights will be important to have since the I will need to copyright all possible creative works that is put into the game.

The next way to protect your IPs is through trade secrets. Trade secrets can be various things from a secret formula or a special technique that is not widely know to the public. An example of something that could have been a trade secret would be the drop shadow in 3D video games. It was first used by Nintendo in its first 3D Mario game. At first, people were struggling to gauge where Mario would land when they jump. In comes the drop shadow. The drop shadow is just a small shadow underneath the character. In the 3D Mario game, it allowed players to correctly estimate where they will jump.

This is not widely known to the public, but it is well known among game developers and designers. The drop shadow example is probably not a trade secret, but it is still something useful for anyone creating 3D games or simulations. Another thing about trade secrets is it is a good idea not to tell anyone about your own trade secrets.

The third way to protect your IP is to patent it. However, there is a strict guidelines on what can or cannot be patented. To overgeneralize this, to patent something, it should be unique. Sadly, I have not created anything that can be patented.

The final way to protect your IP is to trademark it. Trademarks are used to protect your brand or your company's identity. Something I would trademark for my company would be my company's name and its logo. It would be troublesome if someone else created a game development company under the same name or with a similar logo.                                       

The Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is defined as an introduction to yourself and your company in the span of 30 or so seconds. The elevator pitch should consist of your company name, what your company does, and the value of your company. Currently, my start-up company, Star Tail Studios is just a plan on paper. But what I can do to create an elevator pitch for my company is to imagine it through different stages.

Let us say my company started up and was able to create a decent game that is published on Steam with a couple purchases. Starting from that, I will make my elevator pitch from there.

Now let us imagine a situation where someone asks me about myself and my company. This is what I would say for my elevator pitch.

"Hello, I'm Peter Nguyen of Star Tail Studios. Me and my development team just shipped a game out on Steam a couple weeks ago. It received positive feedback and I hope the players enjoyed the story as much as our team at Star Tail enjoyed creating it."

To break down this pitch, I introduced myself and the name of my company. I told the person what we are by telling them what we shipped. I gave a sense of value by talking about positive reviews. I also introduced a snippet of our mission statement by talking about hoping the player enjoys our stories and showing the company's environment as well.

How Much I Will Charge for my Games

The pricing for a game varies quite a bit based on how much money was spent to make the game, how long it took to make the game, and the quality of the game. The pricing range for games range from free-to-play and up to the maximum of 60 dollars. Games will probably never be priced beyond 60 dollars because that is what the gaming community expects to pay for a high quality, AAA title. However, the games I will create will most likely never going to reach that level of polish. The games I make will probably range from 5 to 20 dollars.

This pricing is specifically for the games I make on PC. With this price range for the games I make, I will need to sell between 1,500 and 6,000 copies in order to make at least 30,000 dollars to get through a year. This may not be a problem because according to this website, there are 2.5 billion video gamers around the world. However, I will be limited by how many of them can speak English and according to some statistics from this site, only 30.43% of the 90 million users on Steam speak English. This would reduce the amount of people who would buy my game significantly.

Using the statistics from these sites, I calculated to have about 3 million players that might be interested in the games I make. If I somehow manage to get just half of these players to buy my game, it wouldn't even matter how I price my game. But, there is the problem of how people perceive the game based on its price. If it is too low, people will be skeptical to buy it believing that it is some cheap game that is not worth anything.

Taking a look at other independent or indie games, the more popular ones are priced at around 15 to 20 dollars while the less popular one are around 5 dollars. Though there are some exceptionally great free-to-play indie games.

Overall, the pricing of my game can only be truly price my game once I created one. From past experiences, the games I help make are not that great and are only fun projects with friends that are can be priced up to a maximum of 2 dollars.

Guest Speaker: Stephanie McKenzie

For class, we have Stephanie McKenzie as a guest speaker. She is the owner of Metro coffee at the UW Tacoma campus and with her presentation, she talked about how she runs her business and the process of how she got to where she is now.

She took ownership of the shop at the age of 24 when the previous owner, Charlie, was not able to work due to a brain tumor. She talked about how stressful it to run Metro Coffee and various stories about her experience. To go off topic, one story was about a man who used the public restroom as his own personal bathroom and walked out without any clothes on. I swear, the most absurd stories I hear about come from people who work in the food industry or retail.

To take from her experience, she told us that it was very important to have support. McKenzie went through tough times. Having support like how her husband helped her out was important for her persistence in working hard to keep the Metro up and running. Another thing that was important to know was knowing your worth. Knowing how much the work you put into a service or a product should be payed for. Also, knowing the worth in yourself is important to keeping any business running. As McKenzie continued her presentation, and another thing that stood out was how she stated it is good to keep your workers happy. This was a similar topic that was also discussed about during the presentation by guest speaker, Brian Forth. 

As long as you are persistent and work hard with a positive attitude, you can get through the various trials of starting a business. Overall, McKenzie telling us about her experience of taking over a business was a great learning experience for myself that I enjoyed listening to.

Guest Speaker: Erik Hanberg

We have the entrepreneur, Erik Hanberg, as a guest speaker for the class. One major thing I took from his presentation was the perspective of an entrepreneur where their company has no employees. Erik Hanberg is an entrepreneur that owns multiple companies with no employees.

In his presentation, he discusses about the importance of getting something out. There were some barriers that people had when it comes to getting things up and running. He introduced two quotes. One quote is from Thomas Edison and the other quote was from Sett Godin. The quote from Edison is about how opportunities are missed because of how it looks like work where Godin's quote is about how people don't do things because they are afraid of the emotional labor into it.

Further into his presentation, he talked about how he published his books. I payed close attention to this because how he makes money from his books is similar to how video games make profit. Both of them, despite differences in publishing, make money by selling copies. And once the product is out there, it is out there. For Hanberg's books, he has to get them published and have some production of physical copies along with digital copies. He has a deal with Amazon and they do all the production and shipping of his books. This is similar to how games for consoles are sold since, games can be both bought as a digital copy or a physical one.

An important topic he discussed about relating to profits is understanding what your target audience is. An example would be the two different genres of books he published. He has books about helping non-profits raise money and books about science fiction. Since his books about helping non-profits only caters to a small and niche audience, the amount of money he can get from those books are limited. Though, his fiction can cater to a larger audience with almost no limit. Therefore, the amount that can be earned from his sci-fi books have the potential to earn millions.

Guest Speaker: Brian Forth

For this guest speaker, Brian Forth spoke primarily about various topics such as company culture and the different ways of building a company.

To start his presentation off, Forth talked about his past of being a 5th grade teacher. During his time as a teacher, he taught himself how to do web programming while teaching his students how to program as well. With this early experience, he helped various businesses build their websites.

Today, Brian Forth is the CEO of the company called "SiteCrafting". SiteCrafting as the name implies creates websites for their clients. He owns 100% of his company. 

As he described how he built his company, he told us that there are different paths that we could take when building a company. A question he told us to think about was "What am I building?" when we make our own companies. It is an interesting question that could be applied to anyone creating something. In the case of building a business, knowing what your company will become is important for your customers as well as for your employees.

Forth also gave us tips about leading a company and creating a great work environment for his employees. One thing he mentioned was how important it was about "walking the walk". As a leader, if you are not willing to complete a task, why would you expect your employees to do it. For his company, he created an environment where his employees are happy and agree with the company's vision and mission statements.

Besides creating a good working environment for his employees, he talk about the importance of selecting clients and how important they are for any company. In a company, the largest part of its value is its customers. Customers are expensive and it is important to make sure your clients are happy with your service or product.

Overall, Forth's culture of his company is a sort of "stay forever" kind of company where his employees enjoy working there and his company makes an impact for the clients.

A Mission Statement and the Vision of my Company

This is my goal about the company I am designing. I want a company that creates games that tells stories that relate to people. This goal should have an impact on how the development team's creative process. Therefore a good vision statement for my company would be "Create a video game experience for people with stories to tell."

The reason why I wanted this to be my vision statement is because the stories in video games are unique compared to stories told through movies or books. Stories in games have the consumer, the player themselves be a part of the story of the game. This allows games to do something no book or movie can do. That is to allow the listener of the story affect the outcome of the story itself and even create stories of their own from what the game has already set up.

There are many companies that exist with the goal of creating compelling stories. What my company will do to distinguish itself to others is that we will make great games that tell amazing stories that will resonate and connect to the players to a deep level.

Hopefully this will influence the development team to create compelling experiences for players to relate and connect to. Everyone has a story or two to tell and creating video games is just one way to express them.