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Games of the Future - User Generated Content
The biggest news of GDC 2007 was almost certainly the bright future of the PlayStation 3. Home was interesting, to be sure, but the title that captured the imagination of attendees was Little Big Planet. Edge had a thorough look at the game in their April issue, and now it seems like there might be a downloadable version of the four-player game used to demo the community/toybox at the conference. This 'games 3.0' thing has a lot of people sitting up and taking notice, including Flash and Shockwave developers. GameDaily spoke with MTVN's David Williams about the user-generated content possibilities being added to Shockwave.com and the AddictingGames sites. "In yet another sign of the web 2.0/game 3.0 phenomenon, one of the new features of the site is a game upload feature. User-created content is bound to have an increasingly profound effect on this industry. Already, the company has received 200 new game submissions in the past month, empowered by a game sponsorship program, which pays developers of popular games for integration on AddictingGames and provides them with enhanced distribution and marketing."
Having worked on a major game title that gave users the tools to build content some 6 years ago, I can honestly say that like most everything else about today's internet and it's "user-generated" content (blogs, photobucket, etc): the ratio of quality to utter crap is so low that the signal is almost completely lost in the noise.
We did get one or two gems that were good enough we compensated the author in some fashion and made them official. There were a slew of others that we unofficially reccommended. But the vast majority of it was either total newbs goofing around with the tools, learning projects by the more serious designers, or deliberate crap by the kinds of people that find such things funny.
So if a publisher relies on user-created content to sell a title (like, oh, say, the original Neverwinter Nights), they need to have enough in place to start with to make it worth plunking money down on for the first wave of users. If they don't have enough content to hold people's interest while the designers learn the tools, the community never reaches a big enough size to produce enough worthwhile content to generate a steady stream of interest and the game is doomed to niche status or worse.
In the case of Neverwinter Nights, they had enough to get the ball rolling and the community designers had enough time to learn the tools and start turning out some good content before interest in the game completely faded away.
But the history of games is littered with the countless discarded husks of those who tried this path and failed.
If they don't have enough content to hold people's interest while the designers learn the tools, the community never reaches a big enough size to produce enough worthwhile content to generate a steady stream of interest and the game is doomed to niche status or worse.
Well, sometimes there's a niche that it's worthwhile scratching.
Virtually all the content in Second Life, There, and Activeworlds are user-created. Comparing the three may show you where you went wrong:
We did get one or two gems that were good enough we compensated the author in some fashion and made them official.
These three games make compesating the developer an integral part of the game. The amount of paperwork the developer has to go through to get compensated differs... in SL you just set a flag on the product and peope can buy it. In There you have to go through an approval process. And Activeworlds is in between. The amount and variety of user-created content varies in direct proportion to how easy it is to make and sell stuff.
If they have to wait for you to notice that it's "cool" and compensate them "in some fashion", you're running in a sack race against racing bikes.
There's no "Games 1.0 and Games 2.0". Games 3.0 is just a buzzword based on Web 3.0, which is all that interactive, user generated web stuff which is "more than just Ajax" (which was Web 2.0). It's all bullshit anyways.