The Global Game Jam is an asset to the development community, so let's look at how it can and can't work as a model for newsgame development. For one part, although a large number of finished games emerged from this competition, there's also a large number of games that just don't work. After the two day race is over, they're completely broken. Professional game designers need to create something that works when thousands of people are visiting their site daily to play the game. 

For another part, we should take into account the subjects of the games. Most of the GGJ games didn't take on topics related to current events, although some did (my favorite is A Moose's Love, an allegorical game about gay rights). 

But  most importantly--even if we assume that all of these developers could have created such games, we ought to consider the business implications of such a project beyond the experiment that is a game jam. The Global Game Jam is a one-time weekend event, and people do it for free. But such an assumption cannot be made in the long term. It seems pollyannaish to bring the most liberal of crowdsourced, donated labor conditions to bear on this model. We performed some calculations on the implied economics of Game Jam games to explore this last question in detail. 

According to the GGJ website, 1,600 creators participated, cramming in roughly a 40-hour work week within two days (anecdotal reports from local participants suggests that groups may have slept rested for 6-8 hours of the 48 hour period). This equates to 64,000 man-hours of effort. 

According to Game Developer magazine the average salary of a game developer in 2007 was $73,600. Given economic conditions, the shift of industries, and the fact that the GGJ participants were students, let's discount that 10% to $65,000. Assuming a standard full-time work effort of 2,080 hours per year, that amounts to a $31.25/hour wage. Multiplying that figure by man-hours and cost, we can conclude that the Global Game Jam produced the equivalent of $2 million in labor:

  1,600    creators

x         40    hours

x $        31.25    /hour

------------------------

 $2,000,000

Based on the results posted to the GGJ site, 360 working games were submitted. Assuming all of them are "worth playing," this amounts to a rough cost of $5,500 per game. 

That seems pretty reasonable, doesn't it? Sure, it's more than a newspaper pays for a column, but it's worth considering. Moreover, it would seem that $5k is a viable price for a small web game on today's market. It's the amount many developers receive as an advance from game portals for web games, or the very top 1% sum of a sponsorship, as might be brokered by a site like FlashGameLicense.com. 

So, what's the problem? Let's lay it out. 

Publishing deals are often only part of the story; an advance from a publisher like Shockwave.com would be measured against a share of future advertising revenue, which offers a much higher financial ceiling for a developer. The creators of sponsored Flash games also enjoy ad share revenue from sites like Kongregate or via systems like MochiAds. 

Now, online news sites also sell advertising. They could share revenues with developers in the same way, overcoming the low ceiling of a one-time fee with the promise of larger financial gains. This sounds nice, but in my experience news organizations are unprepared, unable, or unwilling to explore advertising revenue share as a risk-mitigating factor. This is an important topic worthy of further consideration, but I'll save that for another day. For now suffice it to say that the hypothetical $5,500 development cost of a newsgame fails to compete fully with other online game publishing methods. 

The reason ad revenue sharing is important for developers and publishers alike is because not all web games are successful. This was certainly the case for the web-based newsgames Persuasive Games published on Shockwave.com. One of the games, Airport Security, enjoyed perhaps 80% of the total plays of all four games we made in that series of newsgames. 

This is a fairly standard notion, one we shorthand as the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle: in many cases, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. 

What this suggests is that, on average, it would be possible to invest $5,500 (or any other sum) in a single game. Rather, by this logic, one successful game might require 5 games total. 5 x $5,500 =  $27,500. 

The Pareto Principle also points to a generous overcalculation in our original assumptions above. We assumed that oft he 360 games created in the GGJ, each and every one of them was good enough to be published, even in the more informal context of one-time news. That's surely not the case. If we apply the 80/20 rule to that figure, then we could assume roughly 72 "good" games for our 64,000 hours of effort. 

Dividing that 64,000 into the hypothetical $2 million outlay yields a much less attractive per-game cost of $27,777. Lo and behold, that's the same figure we arrived at in the thought experiment just above.

Scale 

The issues above suggest that looking at the per-game time and cost is a losing proposition. What the GGJ demonstrates is not the fact that it is easy to produce a good game in two days with a few people. Rather, it demonstrates that a such a thing can be successful when operating at scale. 

Scale costs a lot more than one-offs in the short term, but a lot less in the long term. An example: the $2 million estimate above assumes that all newsgames would be created on freelance contract, and that there are no costs of integration, implementation, or publishing on the part of a news organization, which is clearly not the case.

Yet, if we assume a full-time development, we must factor in the cost of overhead--payroll tax, health insurance, disability, and so forth. One typical way to account for such overhead is just to double salary. That doubles the effective cost per game to $11,000, and it still only works if an organization commits to produce them at scale over time. It's hard to say which method would increase quality: on the one hand, a small, tightly-knit group of newsgame developers at a single organization would likely ratchet up their efficiency and success rate quickly. On the other hand, a larger group of scattered contract developers spreads the risk.

This isn't a losing proposition entirely. If news organizations were capable of selling ads, especially higher-CPM rich media ads, the financial investment could pay off--but such a situation is not the case in the present moment. The most obvious reason for this is the decline of online advertising, generally due to the economy and in particular due to the falling influence of newspapers as sources for ads

But the greater problem is one of will. New approaches require resources, but moreso they require the resolve to commit those resources and to see them through. Success in newsgames will likely require scale, and scale will require commitment. 

Continually we hear how journalism (and other fields) need to develop new approaches to remain a going concern. Why should we believe that new approaches will also feel safe and similar? The above observations could be read negatively, as evidence that newsgames are improbable investments with little chance for commercial or journalistic success. Or they could be read positively, as evidence that such change will be hard, and that journalists will have to harden themselves to face it.