YouTube for Games #3
(Visited 10997 times) Game talk, Gamemaking
Nov 232006
Here comes another… this one, from GarageGames. The Great Games Experiment is a site where you join a social networking service of gamers, developers, and publishers. At heart, it’s a social network, but it does allow uploading of games to the site. More here about how it works.
Clearly, this whole “YouTube for Games” thing is something lots of site owners are interested in, and probably some developers. But are a lot of players actually looking for it? I don’t know yet. Guess we’ll see soon enough.
7 Responses to “YouTube for Games #3”
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It needs built-in construction kits to make it uber-leetzor.
At the very least, it will serve as a contact base for the mod community. At best, it will skyrocket the indie developer to awesomeness.
Speaking only for myself it depends on whether or not developers and publishers are interested in it. More specifically, whether or not they upload demos &/or games. I’d be much less interested in the pure social networking. If I want to know what developers are thinking I can come here or those places over on the sidebar 🙂
Interesting, I was at an event in Palo Alto two weeks ago and met the founders of kongregate which is basically another games aggregator (flash) they had some really great games uploaded from indie developers.
Whats more interesting is these various game aggregators are getting VC funding now (I know of at least 3) so we can assume the business model is viable and that VC’s are interested in the (free)games aggregation business model at least for flash and casual games.
More interest in the game space is great…
“Are a lot of players actually looking for it?”
I think that depends heavily on what types of “players” you want, what type of community your building, and how you frame your mission….but thats just my personal bias 🙂
I still have the reaction I had at GameFest — when the content assets are spheres and other such “programmer art,” it may be straightforward to make some kinds of games, yet how will Joe Gamer do it? Probably via massive IP appropriation. Brad Pitt’s head versus an Galaga-like array of strobing paparazzi — or Lara Croft versus Mario versus Max Payne.
I’m not saying there might be an occasional person who finds these as outlets for some amazing game ideas that had no other outlet. But it really does seem like a play for site traffic ala YouTube. The problem is, YouTube is based on an existing tech base. ANYONE can upload because everyone (on the net) has a TV and probable access to a VCR or Tivo. It takes a web cam and three minute to make a two-minute YouTube vid.
Unlike video there’s no easy copy-n-paste or recording technology for games. Games are about structure, and structure isn’t easily expressed or copied in tiny snippets unless the structure itself is tiny.
Raph you’re totally correct that a tool is needed, the lack of this is why all these sites won’t achieve the critical mass of YouTube. When something with a great tool comes along, it will blow up exponentially, especially if there is a good metacontent archetechture, with people’s avatar’s crossing genres and worlds to interact.
I’ve thought about this a little since the first time it came up I think that we already have the YouTube’s of gaming.
Stuff like jayisgames.com, addictinggames.com, http://www.mygamercard.net and http://www.bigfishgames.com (which is allowing you to create profiles now along with downloading demos and buying games). I think that’s mostly what people want. What I think may still catch on here is some place that offers effective, easy-to-use MySpace plugins for games and gamer account information (you can already put your LiveArcade profile up on MySpace ). This will just be a place to host flash scripts though, not a tool or a platform.
I’ve been pretty consistently unimpressed by Garage Games and their tools and I don’t expect any of these sites to take off by creating tools for users to make games. It’s always going to be a small cadre of specialist users which create games content just as it has always been a very small cadre of specialist players who used things like in-game toolkits. The creativity, math skills, art skills, etc., required to make any sort of decent game are just not common currency. The skills required to make a YouTube video are ubiquitious by comparision. In fact most of the content on YouTube that people actually look at is pirated/illegal rebroadcastings, i.e. merely by-products from a different market.
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The Great Games Experiment is “a social networking community for gamers, developers and publishers to play, show off, promote and ultimately enjoy games.” Sounds good to me. Raph Koster blogged this recently, along with two other sites that…