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Cyberspace
in the 21st Century: What is
your unique talent? Is it shifting boxes? Providing a service? Or is it
perhaps creating entertaining works of art? "You think that's air
you're breathing?" Wake up and challenge what you've accepted for
so long you think it's critical to survival. Don't do what you don't need
to do. Distribution, marketing, customer support, maintenance, etc. may be exciting to some, but games developers only need to develop games. There are many other areas that risk being thought of as part of the games development process, including technological, so even coders are not entirely innocent of an occasional pre-occupation with incidental concerns. Consider the following two points:
To make
all our lives much easier and far more focused on producing entertainment
rather than meeting marketing schedules, maintainability, bug-fixes, etc.
all we have to do is let the community look after everything except the
game - we work on the fun, and the punter plays with our work and pays
us for it. Many of
you will either think that that's the current situation, although expressed
in a rather simplified form, or that it's a patently obvious statement
(and miss my point completely). If you know where I'm going, bear with
me. If you're
not convinced… So, which
bit is the game? Unfortunately,
quite a few companies want to turn into Microsoft and so it's difficult
to wean them off the pursuit of developing yet another proprietary technology
in order to obtain the supposedly vast monopolized rewards. If you're
in a company like this (especially if it's one of the few that might actually
be successful), you have an uphill struggle turning them away from this
path. You're faced with arguing against many sacred cows, saying no to
patents, no to closed source technology, and no to closed communication.
That's all the baggage that encumbers the dinosaurs of the industry. However,
if you look at it closely, you'll realize that you don't need it to make
and sell games. Therefore,
we end up concluding that the game is just the content — that nebulous
informational entity that determines the graphics and gameplay. Everything
else, while a familiar sight in the game industry, and sometimes perceived
as part of the game by its consumers, may not actually be directly critical
to the game development process. Produce
a game and sell it — what could be purer? Note that
I'm not advocating the creation of technology in order to deprive artists
of their just rewards; I'm just using this as an example where owning
technology can be a double-edged sword. If you provide yourself as a target
for litigation then you'll surely become a target. If a technology provides
a revolutionary facility then there's no reason why you should become
a scapegoat for that part of industry that would rather see the revolution
delayed for a few years. If everything
except for the game's content is public domain, then the only thing you
can sell is the game. Let the players support themselves. Let the players
petition the Open Source community to improve the stability and security
of the infrastructure. Let the players pay their ISPs to deliver the software
and host the servers. Do you really want to do all this yourself? Do you
really want to be obliged to thousands of players to provide them with
happy times? Sure, money
can buy a game, but it can't buy guaranteed fun playing it. I'd suggest
that you seek to create a game that can be fun (for most people), but
try to get out of that deal as soon as possible. As long as your game
has a reputation for facilitating fun then you're ok, but you can't hope
to hold each player's hand each month and ensure they have fun. Running
a massive crèche is a much bigger job than making a game, and a
tear-free experience is not something I'd recommend anyone contract to
(have you heard of a tear-free crèche?). So, is anyone
mad enough to try this business model? Well, I don't know much about them,
but Nevrax (http://nevrax.com)
appears to be trying it, i.e. develop the game infrastructure Open Source,
but obtain revenue via the content — the game itself. And yes, naturally,
there are a quite a few conventional and not so conventional revenue models
you can choose from (some depending upon copyright or encryption, some
not). ______________________________________________________ |
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