[casual_games] Community Functionality

Tue Jan 31 17:25:44 EST 2006

I am going to shoot from the hip on this one.

Marketing for the main stream is to drive buyers into the stores where 
your product is located. For more casual games, the portals are the 
stores. If they are already there then why spend the money to drive them 
there? So, we are pretty much paying for the privilege of having our 
product "on the shelf" at the corner store.

I think as the market grows and diversity becomes a smaller and smaller 
percent of what is out there, we will start to see the 
"publishers"/portals start to play a more traditional role.

Charles P.

Ron wrote:
> You know, this is a very interesting topic (ok, a little off-topic), 
> and something that has confused me for a while.
>
> In the mainstream game business, a publisher provides 3 basic functions:
>
> 1) Financing of the game.
> 2) Marketing/PR support and funding.
> 3) Production guidance.
>
> In my experience, the portals (who are often referred to as 
> Publishers) rarely provide any of these.  They are, in my mind, 
> nothing more than distributors and/or retailers, but they take a 60% 
> or more cut.  A distributor should be taking a 20% or less cut.  What 
> it basically comes down to is the developer is taking all the 
> financial risk, and getting very little of the reward. It's strange 
> that it evolved this way, and I don't have enough history to know why.
>
> But my question is:  How long is this going to last?
>
> It would be one thing if the publishers/portals were paying for 
> development or real marketing, then I would expect them to be getting 
> the cut they do.  With Risk comes Reward.
>
> Am I missing something here?  I've asked this question to a couple of 
> developers and they are respond "yeah, sucks, what are you going to 
> do, they have all the traffic".
>
> Is that really it?  Do games with strong community elements start to 
> break this down, or do they only make it worse because the barrier to 
> entry for a small developer is now even higher.
>
> Ron
>
>
>
>
> Juan Gril wrote:
>> Distribution is selling goods to the consumer, and publishing is 
>> creating the goods for the consumer. Multiplayer games require that 
>> you create the goods, and to create a relationship with the consumer. 
>> In the videogame world so far this has not been a huge problem 
>> because the distributor’s business seems to not be affected by the 
>> publisher’s after-sale relationship with the consumer.
>>
>>  
>>
>> But in the online world, the line becomes a little blurry, isn’t it? 
>> So since the consumer purchases a digital good, it doesn’t really 
>> make a difference for the consumer to buy it at the distributor’s web 
>> site or at the publisher’s web site, isn’t it? It’s just a URL after 
>> all.
>>
>>  
>>
>> So is this the survival of the fittest? Is distribution/publishing 
>> becoming one entity, and at the same time, polarizing in less than a 
>> handful of companies? If so, aren’t most of us in this list in 
>> serious trouble? Will Google save the day? J
>>
>>  
>>
>> 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 11:52 AM
>> *To:* IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
>> *Subject:* Re: [casual_games] Community Functionality
>>
>>  
>>
>> Exactly.  And responding to Juan; it's not the big guys that are 
>> scared stiff, I should have been more clear.  It's the smaller 
>> portals that just aggregate games and don't have deep pockets.
>>  
>>
>> The big guys will screw it up because they want to keep each others 
>> players out of the other guys hands.
>>
>>  
>>
>> We'll no doubt have other limitations of our own, but at least we're 
>> going to be trying to bring games to all the IMs.
>>
>>  
>>
>> On 1/31/06, *Ron* <lists at rzweb.com <mailto:lists at rzweb.com>> wrote:
>>
>>>  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>
>>>  [mailto: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>
>>>  <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.
>