Garriott goes to social games
The highlights:
- A plugin to allow deploying games written as standalone titles. Torque2d is referenced as the tech for the first title, a poker game.
- A virtual world hub called CenterPort, with a “semi-3d world”, minigames, ad-driven quests, housing, and microtransactions.
- A social network. It looks like this will be tied into the OpenPlay network, which is a separate endeavor by other well-known ex-Originites that tries to develop an industry standard for social play data portability.
The requirement for a plugin will have all the same barriers all the other plugin efforts do, of course. (Unity is doing well, but it is having to fight hard for every user). One big example — it’s Windows only right now.
This is a play for anticipating the curve on the social gaming market lifecycle. The bet being made is that social gamers will ask for greater sophistication over time. It’s a good bet that this trend is valid — even “simple farming games” like the new sequel to Happy Farm feature farming, apartment decorating, and a central town; and Island Paradise has merged in a cooking game… showing that greater complexity is well on the way.
That said, the Facebook game explosion — social gaming in general — is more a phenomenon of distribution than it is one of game design or technology. The users tend to be older women, and not that technologically sophisticated. Social gamers don’t care what technology you use. They only care how long the loading time was and whether it worked perfectly on the first try.
So the plugin choice may be banking on the wrong aspect of the trend. You don’t need a better rendering engine to make richer games.
9 Responses to “Garriott goes to social games”
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As much as I like seeing the trend of social games (as social networks and games converge from both directions), I dislike seeing all the lock-in with Facebook. I’d like to see more social games work with other social graphs such as Twitter, though I don’t want them to devolve to Spymaster-like spamming.
Really cool to see Richard hasn’t lost his taste for games. Also great to see more grass roots development. I think it’s unfortunate when our original thinkers in games become annexed by publishers to crank out sequels and manage teams and just generally gravitate away from really thinking about games and innovation.
As for the concept, I have been saying someone needs to do an internet version of Sierra’s old “TSN” Network (later dubbed “Imagination”) for years. With casual games exploding the way they have lately, I predict an MMO experience combining socialization and casual gaming will be the next big thing. And the guy who does it first will totally get rich and buy a castle.
Oh, wait…
-Stacy D.
I don’t think Twitter will be a major games platform.
I also don’t think Twitter will be a major platform, the end. I think it is now stuck as a geek toy, unless it changes dramatically.
We will see a diaspora from Facebook as Facebook itself tries to get more lock-in. More games will start up their own sites like Zynga is doing with Farmville.
I don’t see how you can match the effectiveness of Facebook for app launch. A network’s ‘power’ is a function of the number of connections and that’s why FB has so many apps with millions of monthly users.
In fact I see a large trend for standalone apps, specifically iPhone apps, to use Facebook Connect to tie into that connection base.
I think as games move along and increase in popularity youll see more. and more move away from facebook. it is a network which has advantages and disadvantages. i for one dont use facebook, cant stand it. same with pogo….
whereas if you had a more spam free environment like metaplace was, it is a lot more family friendly.
i trust garriott will do the right thing. hes the man.
I believe their CTO Stephen Nichols was one of the original programmers of TSN. Unless I’m getting him mixed up with someone else.
Either way, here’s hoping the next incarnation of Metaplace (whatever trickery Raph et al. have up their creative sleeves) doesn’t require using FB. I only mention Twitter as a social graph provider, so to speak. Then again, Google Buzz, despite whatever flaws and controversy have surrounded it, has pointed up that other graphs / networks exist.
Kyle, have you not seen Island Life? The next incarnation of Metaplace is already on Facebook, and has been for a month. 🙂
I have not seen it, I dumped FB back in December. Any chance you’ll have a semi-standalone version (in the sense of its own site) or tied to another network?
And how is it that there’s no mention on metaplace.com? 🙂