Linking game consoles to the web

If you ever get a chance to meet anyone who works in the Xbox Live team, PlayStation Network team, or the Nintendo Wii network team, give them a pat on the back and thank them for all that they have done and all they do each day. Console networks are very large, complex and challenging to work with.

Gamers take for granted that games are networked together completely seamlessly today. They are unaware of all the work that goes on behind the scenes maintaining the fragile network of servers that supports all the online gameplay that has become a standard feature of a huge number of games sold today.

Linking any game to the web is difficult. In addition to the difficulty of developing web services and libraries that will support the communication between the closed console platforms, developers of online communities need to worry about the complexities of large scale web development and maintenance. 

Blockbuster games like Halo 3 are a web community developer's dream and nightmare. It's a dream because you know that you are building a community site for the most devoted and rabid fan base around. It is a nightmare because you are developing for the most devoted and rabid fan base around.

Halo 3 players bought the game, played for 12 straight hours and then, after a brief coma, did it all over again. Assuming each player created 100 matches worth of game data, and one million players played, you are dealing with 100 million data sets, all of which need to be parsed, stored, and cached for web delivery. 

Assuming you have the appropriate database structures and network infrastructure in place, you must still contend with the costly nature of getting your game data on web close to real-time. This is especially true of any blockbuster game.

Big games require substantial investment in the planning and implementation of web integration. You cannot bolt web services onto a potential blockbuster and achieve the same quality of execution achieved with a pre-alpha planned web service implementation.

Authentication and account considerations

In addition to the design and planning required to export the data from the game to your web service, you must concern yourself with the method of user authentication very early in the process. Each platform has unique authentication methods requiring careful integration to your web site. 

Additionally you must concern yourself with your own community log-in and authentication process. How can you assure your users that their game account won't be hijacked by someone else?

The authentication method will be driven by the format of platform authentication, format of data output from the game to web services, and the method you employ to arrive at some state of data parity.

Handheld platform integration

The process for building a web community with support for handheld platforms is in some ways similar to that of a console or PC community. Both the DS and the PSP connect to the internet very well through the use of their pre-existing network infrastructures. These allow you to network the handhelds and create server-based persistence for your handheld games. 

In the context of this article the assumption is that you are interested in integrating your handheld SKUs to your console community, however, don't overlook the power and value of web-based community for your strictly handheld users.

There is a lot of camaraderie and dedication among the handheld user base, and they deserve a place to call their own. Plan to provide an experience that is unique to the handheld users, and you will be rewarded with tremendous gratitude, loyalty and game replay longevity.

Cross-platform integration

In addition to creating stand-alone communities for your handheld SKUs, you can integrate them with your console and PC SKU's to create a hybrid community. The degree of integration depends on your creativity and imagination. It can be assumed that since game designers have no lack of imagination, the only limiting factor will be your resource and organizational constraints to implement networking needs early in the development cycle.

The beauty of centralizing your game community on the web is the mitigation of the barriers imposed by the consoles. If you are able to get substantial data out of all three major consoles the lines of separation between them blur, leaving you with a community of game players focused on the content, not the method of delivery. 

Since most major third party titles are multi-platform releases, and since the 360 and PS3 versions are almost always nearly identical (thanks to porting the initial game development from one platform or another during development) and the Wii implementations vary only slightly, you can develop a community which allows for bi-directional data flow to and from the game, from your web community. 

The game data moves to the community, where users interact with the data through your meta features and meta-services, and then through the data created through the in-community manipulation and experience, new data is shipped back up to the game.

This iterative loop is very scalable and limited by the capacity of your back-end infrastructure to deliver content. As a wise politician recently stated, "The internet is a series of tubes, and when you send too much information you can clog them up." So opt for the copper plumbing when building your community.