The multi-head world
It’s nice to finally see real movement towards a very old idea, the world that surfaces radically different experiences on different client platforms. With the announcement that Disney Fairies will have a Nintendo DS version, we see this finally coming to fruition.
Making clients that work on more than one platform or device is a tricky challenge, and one thing that has been talked about forever it seems is the notion of having a separate client that accesses a different portion of the world than the main client. For example, every MMO I have ever been involved with has discussed the notion of a cell phone client just for auctions, trading, checking your shops, and other sorts of low-rendering-requirements tasks. And yet, the movement towards this stuff always seems sort of tentative.
Disney’s jumping in with both feet, with the notion from the get-go being that Fairies is a property you interact with on many levels, and the DS version and the web version are just two ways (with perhaps “central authority” existing in the web version). For that matter, the toys are also just another way.
When you are engaged in the process of building alternate realities, this is the right way to think about it. The client is just a window into a larger world. Creators should be thinking of their worlds as properties and entities that exist independent of rendering method, interaction method, and so on. And the strongest properties will be those which are not rendering dependent and yet retain a strong central creative identity, designed for everywhere.
Universal client will come — but there are always going to be different real life situations that demand different levels of engagement, and you want your players to be able to engage in every way they might want. Forcing them to sit at a desk is to force them to interact with your brand your way, not their way.
2 Responses to “The multi-head world”
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The interesting question here is how different clients will manifest themselves. In addition to checking the auctions and trading, can you also explore the world? Where does that land you if you can? As a text client vs. a graphical client, the text client might have an advantage, because ‘a hairbrush is lying on the ground’ might be obvious, whereas it’s hard to spot on a graphical client.
Ultimately, I think it will turn worlds into more social places, just because more socializers will be visiting, because it will be an IM client to them. Anything else can just be window dressing, without having to load a huge application. Combine that with teleportation, and you can have friends visit each other’s in game houses and communities without needing to log into the heavyweight world.
Bravo. I agree 100%. It just makes good business sense. Since triple A MMOG’s and VW’s are becoming so costly to build and maintain, why wouldn’t a provider want to open subscriptions up to as many different platforms as possible?
We already commonly see MMO clients designed for multiple operating systems, such as Linux and OSX. Eve Online also offers two versions of their client; one with the new high-res graphics engine and the other with the classic low-res engine.
I imagine that every time you add another platform, it multiplies the work needed to implement any changes, but it seems like there would be synergy there, and it also multiplies the potential subscriber base.
Do the market studies bear out my views, or am I oversimplifying things?