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A Television Production Delivery Commitments TV delivery commitments are serious business. The client (in reality an advertising agency) has paid for a specific delivery time slot, and if they don't deliver that time, then the client gets a refund. They have paid for ads on a specific show that they expect to be seen by millions of people during the commercial breaks. If the show doesn't deliver the audience, then the advertisers can expect paybacks. Thus there is additional pressure not only to deliver the product when promised but also to deliver the audience when promised.
Conclusion: We need to get real and deliver what we promise when we promise it. There's too much money at stake otherwise. We also need to get better data about how much impact any form of update matters. One lesson that TV knows very well: once you become part of a viewer's life, you've really made progress. It is one of the reasons why syndicated sitcoms really work. Everyone knows that at, say, 5:30 PM every day they can sit down with their dinner and watch Seinfeld. This is critical to the show's success. I knew a fine artist when I lived in New York who, every night, rain or shine, watched Mary Tyler Moore at 11pm on WPIX. This guy was a very influential illustrator in the NYC advertising scene, way too cool to admit to anyone but his closest friends what he liked to watch on TV, and Mary had him in her grip. These things become part of the fabric of our lives. MMORPG games do that as well, and we can do it even more so by understanding these techniques. Production Issues TV professionals know their production issues. The TV business has been doing this for years, and as a a result it knows how things work, how many people it needs, what technological processes work and which don't, how much lead time is needed, and how to skirt the edge of union rules and still keep everyone happy. The technology is stable. The workflow (write a script, cast the script, prep the script, shoot the script, post production, upload it via satellite, broadcast it) is proven. The technology gets incrementally better each year, costs rise, but these are all predictable concerns. And once the Fall season starts, it is all about keeping on schedule, keeping people sane, getting things done. When anyone, even a star actor, starts to get in the way, efforts are made to smooth over that bump, because bumps have a very detrimental effect on everyone's morale. Workflow is everything in TV. Game developers don't have any idea what their production issues are. We've been doing this only a short time and only by a few groups. Let's examine what the existing worlds do to update their product:
So, you can see that we're all really doing our own thing for the first time. We don't know what to do, we don't know how to do it, and we really don't know what makes a difference and what doesn't. Conclusion: Until we know what works, it will be hard to actually determine how to configure the live team. Audience Who is TV's audience? The TV audience has segments that are very well established. Advertisers sell to that audience. Content is created to fill and please certain demographics. While superficially this sounds like a bad thing, it is actually a good thing because then you get variety: from the Nature Channel to Bravo to MTV, and from West Wing to Golden Girls to ER to Married with Children to Will and Grace. The audience changes very gradually, but it really does change. TV is right now trying to adapt to the perceived "new audience" -- the one used to channel surfing and Internet content. The audience demographic changes based on the reaction to individual shows. The content dictates the direction of the audience. Reality shows added an audience category, essentially. "Reality" is a segment of the audience that no one knew existed before the first reality show hit the airwaves.
Conclusion: We need to spend more dollars and determine who this audience really is and also predict how big it will grow. If we're going to move towards a different production model, that model will probably be more expensive to run, and we need to determine whether the audience will show up to justify that spending. Technology TV Technology: Technology was very new and at first, very limited. Now it is ubiquitous. TV delivery started out much like broadband. Few homes, TV sets were expensive. Few families had them. Then it spread. There was a history of families gathering together to listen to the radio. In that same way, families gathered to watch TV. Families do not gather to log onto the Internet. Game Technology: For online games, the technology is broadband. The difference between TV and broadband is mainly the age of the mediums. No so much the age of games but the age of broadband Internet. Conclusion: The computer-human experience is solitary while the TV-human experience is communal. This is a big deal in terms of how we get people to watch. The technology is still very new. The delivery mechanism means that a large portion of homes doesn't have it yet. The percentage that matters isn't what percentage of computer users have broadband but, rather, how many homes have a computer AND broadband access. Broadband isn't needed so much for playing the game as it is for receiving the updates, which are huge in size "We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties" Correcting errors: Anything made by man has errors. Every TV show ever produced has some acceptable degree of error in it: bad continuity, incorrect props, lines delivered without the right inflection, and so on. The TV production system has people in the loop whose job it is to minimize those errors. But the errors are generally of quality, not of functionality. And so, because of the overwhelming pressure of the deadline, the TV product "ships" with some of those quality errors intact. The system prevents the gross errors from getting through. An example of a functional error in TV broadcast would be equipment failure: we've all been watching the news and become aware of the videotape machine breaking down. But that's about it. TV doesn't really have major functional errors. Making the product bug-free: The errors on the game development side are both kinds: quality errors and functionality errors. I differentiate them as follows: any bug that does not prevent the playing of the game is a quality error, even if the bug is systemic and causes performance problems (example: lag, a common problem for online games). While most developers would classify lag as not an error of quality, it is akin to a quality error in that it does not prevent the game from being played but prevents the game from being played enjoyably. Since there is a greater possibility for games to contain a functionality bug, one that prevents the game from being played (a crash-to-desktop bug) because of the nature of our business, there is a greater possibility that we'll end up arriving at the go-live date and have to pull back because an error of this type is discovered. I would say that 10% of the time Earth & Beyond arrived at a go-no-go point, we had to delay it because the update was unstable or contained a serious quality bug that we deemed unacceptable for shipment. This doesn't illustrate anything but how new this all is to us. Conclusion: The quantity of these errors can be lowered through various techniques -- layers of quality checkers, better scheduling, more mature technology, and so on. Many of these techniques will come on line as the audience grows and we can afford them. The real mistake here is to lower our target, to accept as "normal" an environment where we cannot deliver what we say we'll deliver when we say we'll deliver it. That has to be viewed as unacceptable instead of business as usual. How Visible are the Errors Visibility of TV's Errors: Most of the errors that do get through are unnoticeable by the viewers of the product. Many times, for instance, an actor's performance that doesn't deliver is itself not perceived as the problem it is but attributed to writing or just to as boring basic plotline, and vice versa. What's the worst that can happen in the event of a catastrophic error? The show isn't broadcast and people have nothing to do in that hour.
Visibility of MMORPG Errors: Gamers are used to products having bugs. In fact, they often attribute bugs where one doesn't exist. However, it is an accepted part of the gaming landscape. On Earth & Beyond we operated with a bug threshold. The game shipped with a number of known bugs and we strive to keep the number of known bug below that number while the game is live in order to keep the quality of game play acceptable. We believed that once the total number of bugs exceeded a certain amount, that even if any single user never encountered the major bugs, that the cumulative effect of many small bugs would leave such a bad taste in the mouth of that user it would drive them away from the product. This policy, coupled with the possibility that bugs can cause crashes and potentially damage the user's computer raised the impact of bug status as a variable of shipment to a very high level on E&B. It is not an exaggeration to say that we never rated timely shipment of an update above the need to keep the number and seriousness of existing bugs below a certain threshold. In other words, if the product was too buggy, we would not ship an update even if our players were screaming for it -- even if it was otherwise ready to go. While this makes sense from the standpoint of quality assurance, it does not make sense from a "keeping the customer's excitement level peaked" point of view. Conclusion: Our process has to change to gain a higher level of reliability while we learn to deliver more frequent updates. While our current customers might put up with this because to them it is just business as usual, our growth as an industry is dependent on our ability to deliver frequent content updates that are bug-free. That bar has been set high by our competition. The broadcast mediums have shown us that audiences crave new content delivered into their homes on predictable schedules. Online games are going to want to emulate that paradigm as they begin to attract a larger and larger audience because the methodology has been proven effective. Our game's own audience has shown that it will consume new content as rapidly as we can deliver it. We have to figure out how to do that, as the products that do will gain market share. ______________________________________________________  [back
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Features
Games
delivery commitments are treated loosely. The audience has no
firm commitment from the publisher. The game gets updated when it
gets updated. The client, who is the consumer in this case, only
has a commitment from the publisher to keep the product on-line.
Product development has no plan except a vague plan for the next
six months, if that. We're all trying to adjust to the idea of what
updating a product means. We don't know what it is we're supposed
to deliver, or what things we can deliver to grow the audience.
Everquest delivered only expansion packs and fixed systemic
issues, and that game's audience grew a great deal. So what really
works? E&B believes that frequent regular content updates
work, but we're not really set up to do that. On the E&B
team, we're learning to do that now.
Who
is the MMORPG Audience? The games audience is not passive. When
the original Star Trek audience reacted loudly when the show
was first cancelled, TV executives couldn't believe how vocal the
show's audience was. That encounter changed the way audiences and
TV interacted from then on. MMO audiences believe they own
the product. E&B's audience has asked me specifically
whether they could "sit on a board" and help us make decisions
about the way the game should go. The audience is unknown and perceived
as "geeky".
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