Adam Martin, (me!)
I was giving this talk, so … no live writeup this time :).
The slides are up on slideshare here:
NB: I lost my voice the morning of the talk, and panicked, and rewrote the slides to include everything in words in case I couldn’t get my voice back (or if it cut out part way through). Hence the unusually dour presentation style. Sorry!
This is going to be, um, … interesting. Darius lost his voice this week (some throat infection cominbed with lots of drinking, nonstop talking/networking, and then aggresive partying each night). Poor guy, he was totally inaudible yesterday.
And this morning I could hardly talk too, so I’m on a diet of “not speaking” and hoping it will clear up enough for my talks tomorrow, especially the midday “how to sell social networking to your publisher”.
Although … it would be awesome fun to have to do a talk without speaking a single word (I’ve seen it done before, deliberately). I think it would probably need a LOT more prepartion though than I have time for :(.
So … I’m not at the conference today, I’m chilling in SF and resting my poor beleaguered voice.
Don Choi, OGPlanet
Very little of interest in this talk. I think there is a *lot* more you could say, and it would be a lot valuable and interesting, on the topics covered. I have no idea why the talk was so content-light (mis-guessed the audience? speaker having to give someone else’s talk? lawyers insisted on removing info? nervous speaker?), the speaker seemed fine, it’s just that the content was … absent.
Alex Evans, Media Molecule
Mark Healey, Media Molecule
The MM guys are funny as ever, although Alex’s “I made it myself on the way here” presentation tool would perhaps have been more usefully replaced with something like Presi (or whatever it’s called – the “interactive” presentation tool that is like Alex’s thing, but on steroids. Ask Jussi, he’s a fan of it).
The overall impression I got is: here’s another studio that has “by trial and error and cunning and talent” independently discovered something very similar to Scrum. They don’t do Scrum, and I’m sure a lot of people will scream at me for even saying it, but … I went through similar “find a process that worked for game development” (not carried so far, and on much smaller projects), and I recognize a lot of the lessons they learnt and things they incorporated in their processes and approaches. And from my experience, I think they’d find it relatively easy to switch over to Scrum, and that they’d get a lot of benefit from having a more polished version of their processes. Not to say that Scrum is universally better – there’d be losses too – but for people considering their own processes to use – or trying to “understand” Scrum – you’d do well to read this liveblog and try to internalize some of the lessons and attitudes. And then consider this and scrum as alternative to each other, but both near-relatives. And … if you are *not* MM, and don’t have all the details of precisely how they work, you’d probably find it much easier and more effective to adopt the well-documented Scrum instead.
Sulka Haro, Sulake
The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it.
(I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)
Raph Koster, Metaplace
Raph promised to be nice and not make us depressed this year. It was an elegy on “look how much we progressed as an industry during 2008”.
EDIT: Alice has a shorter and sweeter summary up on Wonderland.
Austin Hill, Akoha
Conference organizer introduced this as “during this first talk, think about the platform they’ve made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience”.
I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at the same time taking a very “Don’t worry, be crappy” approach to core game design: lots of classic mistakes made, obvious stuff. Is this a case of being brave enough to deliberately make the mistakes they understand (because they’re easy to fix later when you’re more successful – and it leaves you more spare time to focus on fixing/avoiding the mistakes you don’t understand yet) – or just naivety?
Interesting to hear the philosophy that fed into the creation of the game, the speaker’s personal journey and how it informed the design. On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed how little actual content there was in this talk. It was perhaps 50% or more made up of a few long video clips. They were long and very little was pulled-out / emphasised from them. Most had very little information content per minute. Worst example was a mildly entertaining video of one of their players giving an intro to the product – but, frankly, so what? This was “new” and “interesting” 4 or 5 years ago, but by now it’s happened thousands of times over, and we’ve all seen it for many games. I didn’t understand why we were watching it.
I have a sneaking suspicion that – given he’s a VC – the speaker was pitching that video stuff to show “look, we have players who love our game”. That’s interesting and exciting to investors who have little or no immersion in the online world, but IMHO for game developers that’s just par for the course these days. No?
4 hours sleep or less?
Check
The main 8 hour event I’ve come for today “not listed” on conference programme?
Check
The big posters-sized signs don’t list any of the summit locations?
Check
The map claims that the giant room where the first session takes place “doesn’t exist”?
Check
No coffee and breakfast today?
Check (argh!)
I guess it must be the first day of a conference, then :). Bring it on!
EDIT: Darius has set up the RSS aggregator for all GDC talk liveblogging, parties blogging, etc – only this year with Twitter integration – http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0BaJsrgX3hGy_XuiwTSbTQ
Lots of news sites and blogs have reported that the recession has affected GDC this year, with lot of cancelled parties and a big drop in attendees. I wouldn’t be surprised, given all the redundancies (although … wouldn’t that mean more people looking to recruit / be recruited?), but the first round of evidence – the volume of parties – shows no signs of recession so far:
We finally have a mainstream response (as opposed to responses sitting quietly in obscurity in the IGDA.org forums) to the issue of IGDA Board Members pissing all over IGDA’s main tenets:
http://www.igda.org/newsroom/memo_032209.php
(from the IGDA monthly newsletter that just went out to all 15,000+ members)
Instances of the following words in that response:
sorry – 0
mistake – 0
fault – 0
acceptable – 0
unacceptable – 0
I guess that says it all, really. If that was meant to be an apology, or a recognition that the board and the org did *anything* wrong here at all, then it’s a clear FAIL.
If not … well, what was the point?
The fact that the org refuses even now to accept that it did anything wrong, refuses to apologize, or to commit to acting differently next time, that there is no action item offered to rectify it taking 4+ months for the organization to respond (having only acted *at all* after it was pushed into the news, DESPITE the board being present at the damn event), well…
All that seems to me to say:
“it’s business as usual, folks; EA, Epic, and all the other abusive studios – don’t worry, IGDA has your back! Our members come second”
I didn’t used to believe that – I know many key people in IGDA personally and knew they would never ever espouse that – but I’m now staring the reality in the face and seeing that “the organization as run by the board” != “the diligent and wonderful individuals I know who contribute so much”.
PS: quick shout to Tom Buscaglia (one of the board members who’s so far apparently done nothing about all this) – if, after reading this post, you’re going to accuse *me* of being “a whiney little bitch who would rather quit after a loss than jump in deeper” again, then I suggest this time that you link to the post URL rather than the blog domain. That way people reading this will get an automatic trackback link to your site, and get to see your response this time around :).
What’s the biggest single challenge to a Studio Director? Or to the VP of Development / Studios who oversees a handful of publisher-owned studios?
In the games industry there are no raw materials of variable quality, there is no variety of base services to build upon; everything that distinguishes one company (and set of products) from another comes solely from the people they hire.
In the games industry there are no raw materials to pay for, there are no service charges. There are only salaries and employee-support costs.
Recruitment is where the studio heads find their hardest problems, and see their biggest successes/failures as the studio grows in size. Eventually, all their own experience and ability at design, marketing, sales, programming, art, etc become subsumed by their ability to attract, recruit, retain, lead, and motivate their people.
…is the best thing for new game studios to happen in the past 5 years. It’s achieved four things:
The VCs have been blogging about the benefits to startups wrought by this recession, and I’ve put it to a couple of them now that, for the game industry, this one – recruitment – is the biggest by far, and each time met with straight agreement. Our industry is very like Management Consultancy: it’s driven by the people. Nothing else matters.
I’ve worked with a lot of experienced managers who’ve been adamant that “no-one leaves their job because of (too little) salary”. Also with slightly fewer who were convinced that “no-one accepts a job based on salary” (more often, that was rephrased with a rider to be: “no-one good accepts a job based on salary alone“).
In that case, why do people accept / leave a job?
“Culture” is the catch-all term that describes not just the direct environment which people experience each day in the office, but also the emotional and psychological experiences that they go through while there.
It describes how their colleagues think and act – and how those actions effect the individual. But it also describes how the “teams” within the organization think and act, which can often be very different from the people within them. You often see teams of smart people “acting dumb”, or teams of nice people act like assholes when taken collectively. Group think is powerful, very powerful.
But it’s hard, very hard, to really see the culture of a company until you’ve worked there for a couple of years, and in a couple of different divisions, and perhaps a dozen different departments. Which is not an option for most of us. You can work somewhere for just a few months and pick up the culture if you know what you’re doing and really work at it – but even that requires skill and dedication, and can only be done AFTER accepting a job offer.
(this is one of the reasons I posted my Manifesto for a Game Studio online – you can get a strong taste of the culture of my next startup, and decide if you want to work with us, without having to sacrifice a year of working there first)
Game industry staff often worry about reputation. The companies (as represented by the senior management) themselves often don’t.
The former care how their organization is perceived, and assume everyone else does too. They assume that a “better reputation” will lead to “more sales”.
The latter have access to the actual sales figures, and have convinced themselves that this is a nice idea but simply not borne out by fact (in some cases this is true, in some it isn’t – but it’s much easier to look at the figures on paper and believe it’s true than to see the flaws in that logic).
But the truth is that it IS important, very important. It’s the external reflection of the internal culture. As such, it’s what most people use to make a decision about whether they want to work there.
Obviously, it varies. The older and more experienced you are, the more you come to use a company’s reputation as a barometer of its culture – and the more heavily you weight this in your decision about accepting a job. The younger, more ignorant staff generally haven’t been burnt by terrible culture, or haven’t yet learned what to look for / avoid in their next employer.
Back to the issue of Recruitment: the biggest successes/failures are going to be from the more experienced people you hire (and, remember – hiring a “bad” person into a senior position is not just a loss, it can easily cause negative productivity, by screwing up lots of other staff who were doing their jobs better before that person arrived and started interfering / roadblocking them / etc).
So … you probably should care about your reputation, somewhat in proportion to the size of your company.
Pre-WoW, Blizzard had an exceptional reputation, for a handful of common reasons (amongst others):
Now, I’m not so sure. If a recruiter called me tomorrow with an “amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to work at Blizzard, my first reaction would be hesitation: would I really want to work at the place that Blizzard has become?
While people have queued up to defend them, the history of their actions against Glider, and now this absurd crackdown on World of Warcraft add-on authors, have left me with a sour taste in the mouth.
In my opinion, using the law to beat over the head people who discover flaws in your basic business model / acumen is the last refuge of those who recognize their own incompetence but would rather not go to the effort of raising their own quality bar. Blizzard seems to be making a habit of it. That’s not encouraging. Ten million paying players for one MMO is great, but … the sales figures of their games were only ONE of those bullets I cited above about Blizzard’s reputation traditionally. Money buys a lot of forgiveness, but not infinitely so.
For a mere $600 (yes, that *is* going to double the cost of the GDC ticket that you already bought), you can go to this competing event on Tuesday next week:
“VentureBeat is teaming with industry heavy-weights.”
Ah, hubris, how we love you.
“You’ll learn how one of the most successful and rapidly growing sectors in the high-tech industry will be critical in the development of every major computing platform, including web, mobile and social media technologies.”
The thing about making such grandiose claims is that you’re going to look particularly stupid if you can’t live up to them. I read this far with interest, perhaps even a little excitement – what were they doing that they felt bold enough to go head to head with the world’s largest and most important games-industry annual event?
Hmm. Well. Let’s look at what these Industry Heavyweights are going to be saying:
8:45: 5 different Venture Capitalists talk about new business models, and which companies are going to “win” going forwards. This would be cool, except that VC’s love to say “if I thought I actually knew, I’d quit and found my own startup”. Probably a good session if you’ve not been to these guys’ VC panels before, just so you can get a bit of insight of how they think. However, the lack of anyone who would force them to be honest takes away most of the value of having them there; VC panels *always* need someone on them who’s post-funding, or a super angel, and not afraid to cry BS on them. Where’s Nabeel, or Susan, or one of the other bullish entrepreneurs with no iota of fear of VCs?
9:30: the man who was so unpopular at the ION conference last year he almost got booed / dragged off the stage is back to take credit for creating an MMO 12 years ago which his company has failed to equal since, and to claim to “launch a new breed of online games” that as we all know is is just a clone of other, bigger, games that came out 8 years ago. Colour me not impressed.
10:00: Someone from PlayStation Network is going to talk about how tough it is to focus on your consumers, and what you should do. This will be a short one; I predict she’ll say “just don’t do what we did, we’ve screwed up on every decision we ever made”. There’s also someone from Nokia, That Failed Mass Market Wannabe Game Company Who Never Saw What Was Right In Front Of Their Faces (as if nGage weren’t enough, they had to make another one to really seal their FAIL title). And a publisher trying to make a play for control of one of the “new platforms”, who’s probably going to be a teensy weensy bit biased. I’d say that Neil Young is going to be the one here worth listening to, bias included, because he might well reveal some interesting things about life as an iPhone publisher. I don’t think there’ll be much on-topic of value, though.
11:00: “Are the barriers to entry just too big with giants like Activision Blizzard using World of Warcraft as a continuous revenue stream to reinvest?”. This will be another short session, we – all – already know the answer: “yes”. That is why no-one sane is attempting it. Wasn’t Hellgate: London enough of a lesson for you? Although it would seem implicitly that at least two of the speakers on this panel are going ahead anyway. What I’d like to know is just where do those guys find the pants big enough?
12:00-16:00: these sessions seem mostly normal, the right kind of people speaking for the topics. Although I’m not sure exactly of the value of e.g. a 30 minute session with a non-game-developer talking about his dream game development studio. Great for him, if he knows what he wants and is getting it, that’s cool. But … what does that have to do with the “industry heavyweights”? Surely it would make more sense to get someone who’s made a whole series of studios answering that question? Maybe I’m missing something here, but IIRC he … hasn’t?
16:00: “Is what sells today going to be socially acceptable tomorrow?” and “If they are indeed becoming routine, then what comes next? And, how do companies make money from it?” – well, the companies speaking at these sessions are near *guaranteed* not to answer, because they’re all betting their own futures on “them knowing, and the rest of you not knowing”. Could be a short session…
16:45: I’m taking a wild guess here that you’ll see 3 Analysts show how little they know about the industry. You’ve got someone from DFC up there, the same DFC that published a report the other week which couldnt’ seem to remember the difference between a “company” and a “product”, or at least was keen to ignore it if it got in the way of producing a vague “top 10 list”. And what’s with this factor-of-3-guesswork at revenues? I’ve got much much more detailed info than that myself!
CMP/Think Services needn’t start sweating yet. It’s going to be a heck of a lot more successful than their own attempt at something similar a few years back (“GDC Prime”), but it’s really just a sideshow, even with all the big names in attendance. They’re names, but not industry heavyweights; the heavyweights are all at GDC, IMHO.
Although … the cunning move of holding this on the Tuesday might well draw a fair few people into going who don’t have 5-day tickets for GDC (have the cheaper 3-day ones). TS has deliberately kept Mondays and Tuesdays quiet by charging an extra fee for attendance. My advice personally would be not to bother with the VB event (if you’re not already on a 5-day GDC ticket) and to instead spend the day meeting up with random GDC attendees / attending meetings.
GDC rocks. I’ll see you there…
EDIT: PS: the rampant attempts to re-inforce elitism at GDC are beginning to really wind me up. GDC Prime was bad enough, but everyone’s got to experiment with their business model from time to time. There are reasons why the elitist, coke-addled, E3 died and the developer-driven, egalitarian GDC did not (there’s a clue there to my own thoughts on at least one of the big reasons ;)), and I don’t take kindly to attempts to turn GDC into “E3 … take two”. They won’t win, so long as TS keeps their heads about them, but … it’s just tacky to watch.
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2009/QBlog210309B.html
Your professor tells you that you can’t study them for their own sake. However, if they’re as exciting as you say, and all the young people are reading them, then perhaps you could write an educational one? He therefore instructs you to go away and write a novel to teach addition.
For one of the conferences I was asked to speak at this year, I proposed a talk on the topic:
“Why the Serious Games movement is fundamentally bankrupt based on an idea that will never work, and what you should be doing instead, because there’s some great stuff you’re doing under that banner – but only when you undermine or ignore the classic definition(s) of Serious Games”
Unsurprisingly, they didn’t accept it. They kept on asking me to talk on something more “positive” and “business encouraging”; I kept on replying that it needs to be said, that it would be more valuable to their audience than anything else I personally could talk meaningfully on, and that if they didn’t want it, fine. Not my loss. Ah well.
(and to those of you who are doing great stuff and calling it Serious Games, but not following the foolishness of the majority – well done, keep it up, and we’re looking forward to what you come up with next!)
I’m very tempted to make this:
…with particular emphasis on the social / avatar / chat / networking features.
(seriously – otherwise I’ll be phoneless thoughout GDC :( )
I’ve had no interest in cracking my iPhone, so I haven’t.
Until I discovered the other day that my incompetent network (O2) won’t allow me to make calls in the USA on the agreement I have with them, so I need to use a local USA SIM while I’m there. Unsurprisingly, all O2’s own staff openly advised this as the only sane course of action. They were apologetic that this was necessary. O2 loses nothing if I unlock the phone.
And then I discover that Apple’s undocumented 2.2.1 update which I was bounced into installing has disabled all known unlock processes except for the hardware ones. If I had bothered to do the unlock a few months ago, it would have worked perfectly. Now, with less than a day until I leave the country, there’s nothing I can do.
Help? Anyone?
(NB: I’m not on a contract. I’m not even registered with the network. I’m sure the EU commission will sue Apple’s ass over this sooner or later and force them to stop retailing locked phones in the UK. That is of no help to me *today*)
(NB2: Apple’s lack of respect for their consumer continues to impress me every year. I know *why* they did it (network operators forced them to), but that doesn’t excuse screwing the consumer without warning them what you’re about to do to them. Undocumented updates are vicious)
…but if you want to make an MMO on iPhone, one of your first questions is going to be:
Am I allowed to sell virtual currency?
And the answer is:
No.
From the “revised” license agreement Apple requires you to agree to:
3.3.17 Only Paid Applications (which require You to enter into a separate agreement with Apple (Schedule 2)) may use the In App Purchase API. In addition:
– You may not enable end users to purchase Currency of any kind through the In App Purchase API, including but not limited to any Currency for exchange, gifting, redemption, transfer, trading or use in purchasing or obtaining anything within or outside of Your Application. For the avoidance of doubt, nothing herein is intended to prohibit You from offering for sale goods or services (other than Currency) to be delivered outside of Your Application.
– You may not enable the end user to set up a pre-paid account to be used for subsequent purchases of content or functionality, or otherwise create balances or credits that end users can redeem or use to make purchases at a later time.
Another big question is about the APN (push notification – lets you send messages to users of your app): what can you and can’t you do with it?
Apple seems to be taking leaves out of Facebook’s playbook here:
1.3 You understand that before You send an end user any Push Notifications through the APN, the end user must provide consent to receive such Push Notifications. You agree not to disable, override or otherwise interfere with any Apple-implemented consent panels or any Apple system preferences for enabling or disabling Notifications functionality. If the end user’s consent to receive Push Notifications is denied or later withdrawn, You may not send the end user Push Notifications.
2.2 You may not use the APN for the purposes of advertising, product promotion, or direct marketing of any kind (e.g. up-selling, cross-selling, etc.), including, but not limited to, sending any messages to promote the use of Your Application or advertise the availability of new features or versions.
That last bit is going to hurt a lot of people if it gets enforced – many developers would absolutely *love* to be able to do that.
It’s also a pain for the few apps that would have legitimate use for it. For instance, any Brain Game apps (which fundamentally *must* remind you to play every day – as the independent study in Scotland showed last year, they don’t really work if the user stops playing regularly). But within the constraints of the GUI that Apple designed and shot themselves in the head with (the notifications are very much “in your face” and annoying even just with Apple’s own App Store – and non-dismissable. ARGH!), I can see why they’ve done this; it would be a nightmare for the user otherwise.
EDIT: there’s some minor commentary + on Venturebeat already, but they don’t go into the details.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/
Developers will have the tools to enable in-app purchases — like subscriptions, additional game levels, and new content.
Strangely enough, this makes things a lot easier for me. Now we can stop treading carefully around the “can’t use the revenue models we know and love and have been using for years” problem on iPhone and use all that knowledge we’ve already got.
I wait to get the new SDK and see how true to the promise the reality will be…
I just received an “invite” to a pay-for event in London about “smartphone development”: an evening in a bar with a couple of speakers and some networking.
So … you can go and listen to an iPhone developer, an ex EA person, and an ex Motorola person, and pay for the priviledge, organized by non-developers. The cost is 50% more than you pay to go to world-famous VC/angel/investor networking events such as First Tuesday.
Or … you could go to one of the many near-identical networking + speaker events that are free, and run by real developers. Here are four examples which show that Upcoming, meetup.com – even Facebook and LinkedIn – are your friends here, with loads of stuff going on.
The issue of “how” you organize these things and “what” you provide has been on my mind a lot recently, as we’ve just started a fortnightly one in Brighton (for anyone and everyone interested in commissioning, designing, developing, and launching iPhone apps). I’ve been trying out all the above sites for arranging this (I can write up some notes about the pros/cons of the different sites if anyone is interested). If you can’t find something in your local area … why not start one of your own, all it takes is making a page on Upcoming.com, and emailing the local game / mobile / iphone / OS X developer communities … takes about 30 minutes, max?
Personally, I find the grassroots events organized by people actually making this stuff on a daily basis the far more compelling option. I also find that “special name speaker” events tend to focus on the audience being expected to shut up and listen, rather than share and learn collectively – which isn’t much use to me these days. Unconferences for the win!
Of course, sooner or later, if your event gets popular, you’ll have to start charging because the only venues big enough require large payments, and the organization effort becomes too much to do in your free time. But for the small events? My advice: if it ain’t free, don’t go.
For some reason, Firefox 3.0.7 force disables the KeyConfig extension (itself a workaround for Firefox bugs that have been around for more than 2 years and gone unfixed).
The main problem is that on OS X, the keys for editing in a textfield get overridden by firefox re-binding the same controls for moving back and forth in page history.
e.g. Press the OS X key combo for “jump to start of line” == Firefox will instead hit the Back button (and you cannot disable this directly inside Firefox. I did once try to do it through hand-editing config files, but it didn’t work)
Why is this still not fixed in Firefox? I’ve no idea (although I have a vague memory of FF developers specifically advising people to install KeyConfig as it provides not only a workaround (you disable the broken “feature” of FF) but it also adds a lot of useful missing functionality).
Anyway. I’m now in a really bad position that any form filling in Firefox is difficult and sometimes wipes data – that includes everything from “replying to emails” to “writing blog posts”. Hopefully I can find some hack that forces Firefox to re-enable the plugin (or I can find a copy of the last working version of firefox which allows KeyConfig to run, and uninstall Firefox, and install the working version)
NB: Firefox does, of course, warn you when plugins are going to be disabled. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that the reason I had the KeyConfig plugin was not so much a “nice little add-on” as “essential fix for core bug in Firefox” :(.
Maxis (part of EA) has a great competition up right now – use the public APIs for the Spore creature / user account databases to make “an interesting widget or app”.
I had a quick look at the API’s – they’ve got the right idea technically (use REST, provide PHP versions, etc), although the set of queryable data is pretty mneh (they could easily have done a *lot* more interesting stuff too). I’m impressed that they’ve got that right, and they appear to have done a great job of presenting it nice and clearly. Most importantly, because the selection of data is lame, the challenge is there – in your face – to be very creative with how you’re going to use it. Go for it.
I had a look at some of the demo apps that had already been done, and they show great variety. If you’re trying to break into the games industry as an online designer, you should try your hand at using their content (and this is *legal*) to design something cool. You (probably; I haven’t checked the legals) won’t own exploitation rights – but it could make a great portfolio piece.
So I was rather saddened that it’s taken until now, and a random glance at a newsfeed item, for me to be aware of this. Which isn’t so bad, except … I was one of the first wave of purchasers of Spore, and I played it heavily, and checked out the Sporepedia for the few months after launch.
But they launched with most of the Sporepedia either “broken completely” or “not implemented yet”. Having paid $50+ for a full price game, to discover that even after several months the Sporepedia was “mostly not implemented yet, watch this space”, my reaction was : “I have better things to do with my life than wait for you to pull your finger out and do your job properly and give me what *I’ve already paid for*”.
And because of the mind-numbingly stupid DRM decisions by EA, I’ve point blank refused to install their viruses – without which, the system isn’t going to let me upload any of my own creatures / UGC. Which takes away a lot of the other cause of interest that would have rapidly lured me in.
Finally if it had been a “real” online game (why wasn’t it? No-one really seems to know. My theory is “fear and shame over The Sims Online catastrophe”) of course … my friends relationships in-game would have meant I’d have been pulled-in to this new cool stuff as soon as it went live.
So … it would seem that when it comes to boundary-pushing game design Maxis is managing to go 2 steps forwards and 3 steps back. That’s a real pity, because I suspect a lot of people who would love what Sporepedia was *described* as being (rather than the massive short-sell it actually was) have already given up, gone home, and don’t care any more. Only the people who don’t know about the good games out there (the non-gamers who happened to pick up a copy – of whic there are many many of course, thanks to the Sims juggernaut) are still around to enjoy it.
Am I being too pessimistic here? Certainly, not a single professional I know has shown any remaining awareness or interest in what Spore’s doing for the last 6 months. That’s pretty damning, in my eyes, for a game with such big sales and the Sims driving marketing and sales for it.
(PS: in case it’s not clear – as far as I’m aware, there’s still literally zero socialising in Spore. That’s the irony of the title here. The only socialising is 1995-era “the players are doing it anyway despite the developer+publisher going out of their way to stop them”)