[casual_games] Community Functionality

[Joe Pantuso]

My own opinion on all this is that community driven casual games are the
next big things, and the portals only figured this out the last 12 months
and they are all scared stiff.  My thinking is admittedly biased as we've
been working on infrastructure specifically for this for nearly 3 years.

Our approach is this; there is room for community features in all games and
they will be de riguer very soon.  There will also be an increasing number
of multi-player 'casual' games.

One of the models I'm hoping makes sense to people with existing
single-player games is to look at doing multi-player or MSOG versions (
http://www.traygames.com/Developer/FAQs.aspx?faq=dev_terminology) of their
games that are hosted through us, but go ahead and do the single player
version for all the portals.  Since we want *only* games that are MSOG or
multi-player we're perfectly happy for your single-player version to be on
every portal under the sun.

I assume there will be a trend in these things similar to what we're seeing
happen in the IM products.  They've been rabidly insular the first decade,
and only the past year are we starting to see signs that things will open
up.  Within 18 months you'll be able to inter-operate between all the major
IM products.  This is a big boon to us as it will make our strategy of being
the service you install to add games to your IM (regardless of which one you
have) much simpler to make happen.

I expect that eventually it will be hard to compete without at least some
community features in a game.

-J
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