Pondering Studiocom
Virtual Worlds News has a great article on the developer of BarbieGirls.com. The company’s name is Studiocom, and they have some interesting things to say about trends in the market. (I shared a panel with Juan Pablo Gnecco, their CEO, at Living Game Worlds at Georgia Tech a year or two ago. They’re the same folks who worked on MyCoke Rewards).
Studiocom breaks content down into four categories. There’s explicit creation like text or images that provides a very direct, open-ended form of communication, and also life-caching, a constant stream of self-reporting with cameras or audio. But more important for Studiocom’s work are the last two: mediated development and relationships.
“In mediated content, you work with existing tools,” said Santos. “You make music through your mixer or you decorate your room. A room is an incredible piece of content. In Coke Studios, we created 17 environments but then users created over 2 million rooms of their own. And the fourth type is content created through relationships. If you think about Facebook, people have profiles, but more important are the connections of who knows who. You filter that by adding friends or groups, but it’s a piece of content that the user never has or creates, but the system has it.”
Looking at their portfolio of “go deep” experiences, it definitely shows that they came out of the Flash and website world, showing that the tech behind a virtual world is becoming increasingly more accessible. They are also self described as an agency, not a development studio, which also reflects the sort of background they come from. In fact, MMOGs are listed right alongside email marketing and SEO as services their firm offers. What does the virtual world landscape look like when large quantities of the content are created by marketing firms?
Although they do run their own world as well — MiniEgo.
Another interesting little fact — the company management is from Colombia, and they retain strong ties there. When’s the first big Latin American virtual world going to hit? It almost seems overdue.
2 Responses to “Pondering Studiocom”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
It’ll probably look like other kinds of marketing-driven engineering. Dominated by buzz-words and catch-phrases; a broad scope with a shallow depth. My first concern would be whether polish and debugging would take a back seat to product tie-ins when it comes to launch/patch/expansion release deadlines (same-IP in a different medium, movies/DVDs, merchandising, etc). Then I’d wonder if the focus is on the usual bag of tricks to keep folks hooked, or providing entertainment that people won’t want to leave even without the psychological conditioning.
But, I’ll be fair in this prediction of doom….we’ve got plenty of that laying around already. As an outsider, though, I wonder how much of it is lack of creative design and how much of it is publishers who let their marketing team dictate design. That is my tinfoil hat for the week, I thank you for playing! :9
We have a (fairly) long track record in the the MMOC space. We developed CokeStudios almost 5 years ago and have been able to work with a fantastic team in creating virtual environments for brands ever since. I would say that while we are definitively and Agency we have a much stronger tech team than the usual one.