[casual_games] Community Functionality

[Ron]

 > It’s interesting. Makes you wonder why Pogo, Yahoo! and MSN invested in
 > multiplayer infrastructures since the late 90s. I have a hunch that’s
 > it’s a little bit more complex than that.

I don't think that it's so much that they are scared of community, it's 
that they are scared of loosing control.  Much like the IM stuff, 
everyone's happy if you can only use their system, but once you can hop 
around, it becomes a problem for them.  Community in Casual Games is 
probably the same.  The portals are in in favor of it, as long as you're 
locked in.   The last thing Yahoo wants is you playing with MSN players.

But I agree that community is going to be huge as soon as it moves 
beyond just chat and doesn't turn into PvP.

Ron



Juan Gril wrote:
> Joe was saying:
> 
> “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.”
> 
>  
> 
> It’s interesting. Makes you wonder why Pogo, Yahoo! and MSN invested in 
> multiplayer infrastructures since the late 90s. I have a hunch that’s 
> it’s a little bit more complex than that.
> 
>  
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>  
> 
> Juan
> 
>   
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> *From:* casual_games-bounces at igda.org 
> [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] *On Behalf Of *Joe Pantuso
> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:58 AM
> *To:* IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
> *Subject:* Re: [casual_games] Community Functionality
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> 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 
> <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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