[casual_games] Multiplayer casual games

[Chris Early]

Having been called out specifically (thanks John)...

Steve's comments are right on the mark.  Multiplayer is hard and there is a lot more than community to multiplayer.  One of my biggest regrets at Mplayer, GameSpy and my first few years at Microsoft is that while we made many tools to enable "retail" games to have an easier time with these features, we never really did it for the then "card and parlor" and now "casual" games.

Until now...

(/Begin company promotion)

With the launch of Games for Windows - LIVE, the same functionality available to developers for Xbox LIVE Arcade, is now available for developers on the Windows XP and Vista platforms.  This includes multiplayer game support and friends Leaderboards (for Steve's Shanghai friends), as well as the many other features of Microsoft's LIVE gaming service.

If you want more information on the program, please email the developer relations guys at Microsoft Casual Games directly at: mcg at microsoft.com<mailto:mcg at microsoft.com>

(/End company promotion)

Sorry for the promotion; it was specific and relevant to the question at hand and I tried to keep it brief.

Chris

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Chris Early
General Manager
Tel: (425) 705-6513
Fax: (425)  936-7329
Chris.Early at microsoft.com

From: John Szeder [mailto:john at mofactor.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 8:44 AM
To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Multiplayer casual games

People have been using the community buzzword since the mid nineties as something vital to their games. Chris Early, you still on this list? :-D.

You have to remember that in the casual games space the portal is king. Putting in multiplayer features and online community based content into games runs the risk of taking consumers out of the portal, and needs to be measured very carefully by the people managing the portal. A few people on this list and in the casual space have built features such as uploading and sharing levels into their games and spent considerable effort to ensure that their efforts were non-threatening and would not prevent a portal from saying "we will not carry this".

You are right it is a natural fit. There are also several start ups, including Kongregate and others, who are trying to provide better connected services for casual games because presently it is not clear there is a valid market leader in the "Casual community games" space.

Remember that the portals throw away 99% of the downloadable games revenue because those eyeballs are more valuable than a 20 dollar sale that gets shared up and down the value chain, and they want them coming back for more.

Discuss and debate!
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