Dori Adar, consultant with Dori Adar Consulting, offered a different approach to a new game you want to develop in his talk at Casual Connect USA. Likening a game to a relationship, he stressed that the most important event of its life is the first date. Twenty years ago, the game developer behind Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, David Jones said, “I don’t care how great your games is, you have 3-5 minutes to capture people”, said David Jones,. Dori points out, “Today, it is even worse. We have this grace period of 3-5 minutes that has shrunk. We have less time to capture people, less time to make them fall in love with our game, less time to form a relationship with them. Now a days uploading your game to the App Store is like participating in a weird twisted version of the Bachelorette”.
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Dori Adar is a broker of information. “I think there’s a lot of knowledge out there that is scattered around and not accessible enough,” he says. “I want to change that.” He is doing just that as a consultant for companies in the gaming space and by building a website dedicated to analyzing free-to-play games for game designers.
Upward Trend
Dori’s dream job as a child was to make games, something he started dabbling in at the age of 10. At the time though, neither he nor his parents thought it was a viable profession. Still, he was on a constant search for new ways to create..
This search first led him to music, something he still calls “a passion and a profession.” Eventually he moved into cinema, and then to online video where he managed a video platform that called for a good understanding of UX methodologies. This experience has been incredibly useful to him when it comes to building games. He says that, even now, the gaming world and UX world are too far apart and he encourages companies to think about their players before deciding what games to make, urging them toward interviews with players before any game code is written.
After his stint in the video sector, he says gaming was the next logical step. He got involved in the games industry making interactive digital toys as a part of TabTale before eventually becoming the company’s creative director.
He considers himself lucky to have been recruited by what was then a small company and to be able to grow with it and see it become one of the leading forces in the global kids category. “The most fun part was to see our games at the top of the iPad charts,” he says. “It’s very empowering to have millions of users play with your creations.”
One of the highlights of his career came when his first big casual game as a product lead, Cheating Tom, was featured by Google. “We were working long months and long hours on this title,” he says. “There were moments when I was pretty sure it was not going to happen. But it did, and generated more than five million downloads in the first month. That was pretty awesome.”
The Broker
Now, as a consultant in his own company Dori Adar Consulting, Dori works with companies who have very different products, from serious games to educational games to physical games, diversity he finds immensely satisfying after spending so much time focused on one part of the gaming industry.
He also finds his entrepreneurial work as a website builder refreshing as it allows him complete control over what he is doing. “It balances my team play,” he says. However, there are downsides to being an entrepreneur as well.. Working for yourself can be hard and it takes confidence in what you are doing to keep going.
As he looks forward at where the industry is headed he sees a comeback for paid games, noting that the trend of gamers in search of games free of “F2P shenanigans” is getting bigger and louder. He also believes games will continue to be incorporated into the real world more, citing Covet Fashion, a dress-up game that uses real brands and clothing as game components that can be bought in real life through the app, as an example. “This is ingenious and I think we are going to see more of it.”
As for his personal future, he plans to stay true to his creative roots and his quest to make knowledge more accessible. “One day,” he says, “I’ll have a school.”
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