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An Xbox Live-like Service For Open/Indie Gaming?
Byrne Reese writes "Amidst all the crazy ideas in online video entertainment in the past year, there is a small company called Arena Unlimited that is taking an interesting approach to gaming economies. As near as I can tell, they're trying to open up a multitude of online gameplay services (e.g., opponent matching, free market item trading) to the masses (i.e., open source and independent PC game developers). (I shudder to think what would happen if one could actually introduce a legitimate and real free market economy into The Sims.) It's no Xbox Live, and their list of supported games is pretty small, but if they can do all that they say they may one day support, then sign me up."
There will always be fanatics to a certain game that will devote the time necessary to create a place for followers of the game with all these services. PC gamers tend to have longer-attention spans than console gamers and stick to usually at most 4 online games at any give point. I just dont think that the market is there.
Well, I love any company that can plan to be Slashdotted, complete with a google link to their home page at the ready.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
It's a safe bet the economic impact will be boring.
But does it run on linux so it'll work on my hacked Xbox?
There's just no way those solutions will be competing with commercial online gaming platforms, like XBox Live, any time soon though. Mostly, for technical reasons: most console users don't want to have to deal with setting up a LAN or even basic routing functionality (as you have to do when using a tunneling tool), no matter how simple, they just want stuff to work out of the box. Exposure is another problem: XBox Live is a household name. Most people, on the other hand, don't even know that independently run online gaming services exist.
It will be interesting to see how the PC gaming crowd, which is generally more inclined to tweak their systems and try new stuff, will react when free, preferably open-source online services become widely available. With high-bandwidth Internet access becoming affordable, or even standard, in many areas this might just turn out to be a very interesting thing(tm).
He's mainly a PC online gamer, and it would be cool to have a friends list with him on it, saying what game and what server he's playing on, just like Xbox Live.
Um, All Seeing Eye anyone?
Just as there was never a real implementation of Communism, there is no real "free market capitalism."
There are, on a simple level, two reasons for this. One, no one can really agree what "free market capitalism" or "communism" is. The second one is that there's no way in hell politicians would ever inact something that makes sense without perverting it with "political realities."
Being an economist is definitely a dismal science ;-)
I would have to agree overall.
Even though it's a pay for use network, and a lot of gaming companies dont like Microsoft getting in their online future business (EA for example), it's still is one of the best systems you can find on a console, and its game portable, which makes it really nice when you want to play more than one game with all your friends.
And seriously, the one year price at roughly the price of a game is a whole lot better than monthly. Especially considering the value that it does bring to the online gaming table.
Even the PC is going Live like. From the looks of things, it seems like Steam is trying to be a Live device for all things Valve, since it has buddy lists, automatic updating of content, and online voice chat intergrated. If they can work all the bugs out of it, It would be a whole of a lot better than most online gaming to date.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I've been playing online games since what - 1997?
How is an open games service any different from something like Gamespy, All Seeing Eye, or even just finding a server and logging onto it? yes, I know there are the issues with scoreboards and ranking and whatnot, but stuff like Raven Shield does that anyway.
So, to cut my rant short: what makes X-Box Live so great that it needs to be open-sourced?
Secondly, if X-Box Live is so groundbreaking, why the hell do I always hear about open source ripping off other people's models? I mean it's embarrassing! We bitch so much about Microsoft, but spend most of our time copying them: Media Center, Mono, Office, and now an online gaming community... way to go guys...
The real money is in real world games..
I'd pay if someone could tell me where the nearest topless women's volleyball game was, or even drop in floor hockey on a tuesday night..
This whole 'internet' fad is bound to fade soon, I mean look at CB radio's, and we'll be back at home with no friendsters, and duke nukem forever still six months away!
I hate spyware and spies
...true capitalistic free market anyway.
It's called the "Black Martket".
Drugs, cigarettes, prostitution, software, satellite cards, anything that is regulated and/or taxed to opression or overpriced or has unserved demand due to a monopoly has a black market and as such also has a true free market.
All that participate, do so by choice. They take the risks for the rewards. They pay the costs for the product. All suppliers compete in a totally unregulated fashion and all buyers are free to choose based on price and product.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Being an economist is definitely a dismal science
If you aren't familiar with it you might want to see if you can track down a copy of Stephen Leacock's (Professor of Economics- McGill University) "Too Much College" for his view of what the field of economics was becoming, circa 1939, as well as his views of a number of other fields and education in general.
There's a good chance your library will have this.
Of course there's another reason none of these political/economic theories has been tried in their purest form.
They simply don't meet the needs of people. Capitalism and democracy work great in the market place. They really don't in the private home where oligarchy is the only workable system. Communism works great in the monastary and group farm, but only when imbedded in a larger social framework that allows dissenters to leave freely and not distrupt the communal ethic. In the early days of America we experimented with privately held roads and bridges. It sucked. It sucked a lot. Socialism is the only really workable way to deal with such infrastructure.
Some "political realities" have reality.
KFG
i am the lead developer of an open source game,Fmorg and somehow these arena unlimited people got my emailaddress, and sent me THIS....
:-) So far the project has been entirely self-funded (all our cars are beaters and paid for if you don't count the repair bills -- by the way does anyone have a spare alternator for '92 MX-3?). Our biggest hurdle to date (aside from trying to find Other People's Money) is tearing ourselves away from BZFlag and Armagetron long enough to get some work done.
First, let me apologize if the e-mail was unwanted. Your e-mail address is listed on the Fmorg project page and we thought you might be interested in what we're doing.
this sounds like a sort of scam to get us OO & indie game developers into some kinda contract on the off chance our game hits it big, and creates a demand for this crap
Second, we're not a contract-based service. We don't charge or require anything from developers. Period.
Personally, I'm an advocate of and contributor to the Open Source community. As long as I have any input, games released under any approved license will never be required to pay licensing or developer fees to use our system.
We are constructing and offering a set of tools to be used at will by any developer who might benefit from the inclusion of such features. For example, if a developer wants to sell, say, cars to augment a racing game to help support development, etc., then we would like to help facilitate that in a convenient and secure manner. We don't have or want any say in setting the price. We're looking to support ourselves by collecting a small percentage of the sale (the majority of the revenue goes straight to the developer).
my personal recommendation, JUST SAY NO TO SUITS!! -Ted
We're really not suits, we promise! (If you don't believe us, then check out our pictures.)
But if you feel violated by our approach, I sincerely apologize. I hope you continue work on Fmorg with our without our help, as it looks very promising.
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