It is really interesting reading Kira Snyder’s experiences with the Warner Bros. Television Writers Workshop she has recently been lucky enough to get accepted to. And the reason it is interesting is because there’s nothing remotely like this in the games business.
This one is Kongregate,
which is founded by someone I worked with a very very long time ago for two weeks. 😉 We overlapped at the very beginnings of UO, back at Origin. I’ve been following it for a little while, but he came out of the woodwork today when he saw I had blogged pjio.com, to extend an invite to readers of this blog:
It’s been a very long time since I participated in one of these — but I took the plunge once more, giving one answer to the question of what Far Eastern and Western developers can learn fom each other.
I hadn’t seen this paper by T.L. Taylor until Michael Chui pointed it out — entitled “Beyond Management: Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player Culture,” it discusses the question of whether and how and when online world design can embrace the notion of true player participation and collaboration in the game design process.
I suspect there are some designers reading this in a state somewhere between strong dismay and abject horror even as we speak.
The press release is here, but basically, pjio.com lets arbitrary people upload games — standalone Windows games, that is — and put them on this portal. A web-browser plugin then lets them be played in the browser. Users can play them for free, tag them, and earn “karma” which lets them unlock game features, etc. They can also just follow the links back to the indie developer and buy the game from them. Lastly, the players can actually find a game they like and embed it in their own website, just like you can with a YouTube clip.
Developers not only get all the profit, but they also get a share of the ad revenue for the site. It looks like there’s an API for doing things like leaderboards and the like, so devs can hook into the larger community features.
This is a step beyond the sort of “portal-as-publisher” model that we have seen digital distribution take on so far, and it is a really exciting one. It originated within the BlitzBasic community, with a company called Indiepath.
