As usual, the companies with the big PR budget get the attention (and the press coverage, be it on/. or elsewhere.) Here's an excerpt from our Furcadia user agreement, which we've had for quite a while...
Copyrights for any original works made by Content Providers belong to them, or jointly to them and Dragon's Eye if their work is based on Furcadia artwork or other content to the extent that it constitutes a 'derivative work' under current laws. By uploading their original work and/or derivative work to Furcadia, Content Providers automatically grant their permission for other players to use the Furcadia software to view and experience those works, a process in which the software may download copies of the works to the viewer's computer for viewing. In addition, the act of uploading grants Dragon's Eye license to redistribute the work in other formats or on other media that the software may support in the future, and to redistribute it in any way that it deems beneficial towards the goal of promoting Furcadia to the general public. Content Providers recognize and acknowledge that making their content available for other players to view and use incurs a certain amount of risk that some of those players may use, modify, or distribute that content in unauthorized ways which may infringe on the copyrights of the Content Provider. Each Content Provider agrees that they assume the entire risk of such infringement when they choose to upload, that they indemnify Dragon's Eye from any liability resulting from such infringement by third parties, that Dragon's Eye assumes no responsibility for taking punitive or corrective actions against such copyright violators, and that the Content Provider will pursue any and all remedies for such infringements on their own, whether these consist of requesting the infringer to cease and desist, filing a civil lawsuit against the infringer, or any other measures. In the event that a Content Provider chooses to file suit on a copyright infringement matter, Dragon's Eye agrees to provide any requested information regarding the transfer or use of the content involved that it may have in its records in a timely fashion.
I suspect that games like Regenesis and Alpha World were treating user created artwork and such as belonging to the user before we were, though I never actually read their license agreements.
The "independent developer" niche has always been crammed full of companies with short half-lives. If you want to "play the game" of trying to make A titles, or even B titles, with publisher funding, publisher distribution and marketing, and basically dancing like a puppet on the end of the publisher's strings, it's HARD to keep the cash flow to stay alive year in and year out, and very few developers build up the kind of warchest or royalty stream that will let them weather a project cancellation, abysmal sales of a title, or a six month drought between finishing one project and finally getting a contract to do the next game. So you see little companies come and go in the 3rd party development scene all the time.
That said, there are a few well managed ones and/or developers with big enough hits that they can stay around a long time - Stormfront Studios is still in business I believe, and id Software isn't going anywhere any time soon. Some of the more successful developers deliberately decide to be absorbed into a big company, too, like Blizzard or Westwood - and didn't Valve do that also?
The other route is to keep expenses tiny, always, and just keep making games until they pry the keyboard and mouse out of your cold, dead, fingers. The fellow that did the Dink Smallwood games is still at it, at the Independent Games Festival I saw his teenage lawnmower game. I've been running my own Dragon's Eye Productions for over 10 years now, and doing better than ever. PopCap Games is doing really great (and their games are tons of fun, so they deserve it), and there's too many shareware, freeware, flash and java games and game sites to even mention. Yes, a lot of them suck, but there's some good ones too. There's a lot of interesting looking games at dexterity.com for one. I still hope that Garage Games will thrive, too - they're doing original game development using the Tribes 2 3D engine (which they made, at their last company). I don't think the development houses are dying any time soon - just some specific individual ones, which has happened pretty much every year, often with little fanfare.
A lot of the big companies are leery of player created content for various reasons. X-rated content could cause them problems, and copyright-violating content could cause problems. But also, most developers I've known are focused on the attitude of "WE make the wonderful creative stuff, the players we sell our game consume it".
Having the creators try to keep up with the voracious demand for content of hundreds of thousands of players is tough, though. It's not as easy to get away with "everyone goes through the same quests" as in a single player game, because the players are interacting and communicating more, and thus telling each other the quickest ways to get through everything. So ideally you would have more content the more players you got. But the creator-centric model doesn't scale so easily. You could try to hire twice as many level designers, artists, etc. if your user-base doubles, but it's tough to keep up if your game is successful, managing a large team gets increasingly tricky, etc.
Player-created content scales great. If your game goes from 10,000 players to 100,000, the demand for variety of content may be larger, but your number of potential creators has gone up by a factor of ten, so you're covered. The vast majority of the interesting content in Furcadia is user-created maps, art, and scripts for various quests, games, etc. And we have players that are still playing and highly interested and addicted since they started in 1996. Player created content IS a viable approach to making an MMORPG.
I don't see why they should be complaining about games being delayed, given that most MMORPGs are shipped too soon and many of them have a shaky launch because of it. They even noted that some of the ones that did launch in 2003 had features trimmed to get them out the door. I think we're better off when the developers and publishers take the extra time to get more of their bugs fixed & make the games more polished and feature-laden before release.
The vast majority of books and albums ARE mass market failures. They're both hit-driven businesses. In the book business in particular, the majority of books lose money for the publisher, but the few best-sellers make enough money to make up for it and make the publisher a net profit (hopefully). I don't know if the many poor-selling albums also lose money or if they cover their costs - wouldn't surprise me if they lose money on those too, though.
I think perhaps the biggest part of the difference between the hardcore gamer and "the masses" is the role that goals play in their entertainment. The gamers tend to be very goal oriented, eager to find out the best ways to improve their chances of "winning" or of getting more gold, etc. Casual gamers might like a little bit of "keeping score" but nothing too serious - when they're playing Spades or Hearts (still two of the very most-played online games to this day, if you check the numbers), many of them are more interested in the chatting and socializing than in the gameplay. A goal that's too strongly built into the fabric of the game reality, or too compelling, can cause people to focus on the goals to the point of being anti-social. What we're trying to do in our game (Furcadia) is to give people multiple things they *can* try to shoot for, so it's not "just a graphic chat room", but nothing so overbearing as in the EQ/UO/etc. hack and slash games. I think The Sims Online got a little too goal-oriented, and made money too hard to get. And limiting houses to 20 players interacting at once is a big social barrier too.
Because let's not miss an important fact here - socializing is the number one leisure activity humans want. If your hardcore gamers focus on levelling to the point where they're not fun to chat with, or will only chat about in-game things, that'll turn the average person off to socializing in that environment. Reality check on the numbers - last time I checked (years ago, admittedly), people spent around $10 billion each on electronic games and on movies a year, around $20 billion on radio and newspapers, around $40 billion on television... And something like $160 billion on talking to each other on the telephone.
Socializing is what people want most, and the first online game to get it right will make big money. Voice chat, video chat, build in messaging systems competitive with the best pagers and email programs, put in spectator modes, an attention economy, etc. etc. If you're working on a game to compete with mine though, please pretend you didn't hear any of that. *wink*
I entered this last year with Furcadia (and also the first year of the IGF, with DragonSpires). If you make it to the finals, the value of the free passes for several members of your team to get into the GDC is worth a lot more than the entry fee, at the prices they charge these days (hundreds of dollars per person). In addition to that, I was interviewed for two TV shows, by people from several different game magazines and gaming websites, and got to talk to people interested in acquiring foreign rights to games for markets like Korea, China, India, etc. Although we didn't win any of the prizes, just what we received as one of the ten finalists was more than worth the entry fee.
Of course the non-finalists don't get as much free publicity and such. But even so, they're all presented and linked to from the IGF website, and get some coverage elsewhere. (We got a really glowing review on Electric Playground's site before the finalists were even selected.) All in all I've had a good experience with the festival, and will probably enter our next game in it too. I also think it's good to encourage the development of the indie scene, so we can get some more variety in gaming and not just the safe-but-boring parade of sequels from the big conservative game companies.
I believe it was more of a graphical extension to a normal Mud of some sort than a completely new thing.
It sounds like you're probably thinking of Regenesis, which was at it's core a text mud with the ability to attach illustrations (vector graphic ones I think) to locations. It was an interesting early experiment. I think it was developed in Sweden?
There were some commercial games that predated Meridian 59 considerably as well. Neverwinter Nights on AOL was based on the SSI Gold Box games, adapted to play online with other people. (No relation to the recent game titled Neverwinter Nights, other than having the same name.) On The Sierra Network (which was later renamed ImagiNation), they had a game called Shadow of Yserbius which was another multiplayer dungeon crawl, kind of like the Bard's Tale games in some ways.
I think all three of those would fall somewhere in the early to mid 1990s, if I'm remembering right. Our game DragonSpires came out in 1994 I know. Anyway Meridian 59 is a good historical landmark for them to have chosen to mention in their article, as the first MMORPG to reach a certain size paying player base that I'm sure no game before it had reached. (Maybe not even any free MUDs.) The next landmark is Ultima Online, which was the first one to get into the hundreds of thousands of regular players.
Looking back before Meridian 59, in some ways the biggest commercial milestone is Gemstone 3, which was the first online game to generate more than one million dollars a year in revenues. But it was a text-only game, essentially a for-pay combat MUD.
Of course I wish Furcadia were a big enough milestone that they'd have wanted to mention us, but with the article only covering a handful of the very biggest and most influential and important developments, I think they pretty much chose the right ones to cover. A lot of articles leave out any mention of Lineage, which is still THE largest game in the world, and I see they didn't make that mistake.
This quote from the article could be a bit misleading:
There seems to be general agreement that MMOGs grew out of MUDs.
While it's accurate that the inspiration and even the past development experience of most MMOG developers came directly from the text MUDs (including myself) - I think this article is likely to contribute more to the belief that online fantasy combat/roleplaying games started with the first MUD in 1978.
The fact is, though, there were online D&D inspired games on the Plato network as much as 3 to 4 years before that - and they ran on 512*512 monochrome graphics displays as opposed to the text-only of the early MUDs! Some of the early games were DND, Moria, Oubliette and Avatar. I was lucky enough to get the chance to play around with the Plato system in the mid 70s, it was also innovative in the areas of real-time chat, message boards, email, and a lot more. In many ways it was 20 years ahead of its time. They also had a 32 player game of spaceships and planetary conquest, which Netrek is pretty much directly based on. Pretty amazing stuff in its day. They had 1200 baud communications when everyone else was using 300 baud modems, and smart terminals that you could download custom character sets or graphics into to speed up interactive graphical applications. Those were the days. They were really the birthplace of interactive real-time multiplayer graphical computer games over a network, I wish history would give the system the credit that it's due. It was developed at the same University in Illinois where the first graphic web browser (Mosaic) was invented. Quite an innovative place.
Our game Furcadia has been running for almost seven years now, and currently supports a community of around 40,000 players. We don't charge any fee to play the game, and I'm proud of what we've accomplished. We do have some optional addons players can get, but most of our players never buy anything. So we have a LOT less than the $120+ per player per year that the big online games have to work with, and our first three years we didn't charge for anything at all.
Our bandwidth was provided free at first, by Mplayer and then by Playnet. (Thanks, guys!) Now we pay something like $650 a month for a game server, mail server, and web server plus enough bandwidth to service all our current players, with really good private peering to keep netlag minimal. It's great how much bandwidth prices have come down since we started in 1996! If we had to, we could take day jobs again as we did our first few years, just pay that monthly hosting bill, and keep the game open. And the game's been a lot of fun for a lot of people, led to marriages, all the usual things online games have (and a few unusual things, since we let players upload their own art, maps, code their own scripts to make quests, games, etc.)
But... While you might think someone with a background like that would be on the "they charge too much, burn the witches!" side of the debate... I've worked in the game industry since 1982, and I know a lot of the people that work on the big expensive hit MMORPGs. And those costs aren't made up. Yes, my partners and I, and the game we made, serve as living proof that you can do SOMETHING on a pretty fair sized scale for almost no money. But you do get a lot of things on a game that charges $10-$13 or more a month. Millions of dollars worth of professional quality art and animation, for one thing. And paid customer service and tech support staff, something we mostly use unpaid volunteers for.
Ultimately, the biggest operational cost on most of the commercial online games today is customer service, eclipsing even the number two cost, bandwidth. And I think most people would agree that the average level of customer service quality today is not satisfactory to players, and would not be considered acceptable in most other industries that maintain customer service phonelines and such. (Which is almost all of them). Rather than argue that they exaggerate their costs, one COULD make an argument that they need to be spending even more, until they are providing satisfactory service!
Current games spend half or more of their revenues on customer service staff and bandwidth (and a few other operational expenses). Whether they'll eat into the profits more, raise prices, get consumers used to the idea of never expecting higher quality support, or keep outsourcing more and more of the support work to India, that remains to be seen.
I kind of like our all-volunteer model for the enthusiasm it brings, but the big companies would never take a legal risk like that, after seeing the lawsuits against AOL and Ultima Online. A lawsuit like that could crush a company as small as ours just from the legal fees, even if we won - but it's in the nature of tiny companies to take the big risks, right?
I still remember buying Ultima I when it first came out - later I worked on the remake of it, and on Ultima 5 and 6 and various other Ultima related projects at Origin. While there were a lot of other talented people at Origin that contributed to the games - and I'm sure they have good people working there now, who might make a good game... The series was always about Lord British and his personal ideas, style, and game design sensibilities. Putting out a new Ultima game without his involvement and input is like all those comic strips in the newspapers that get taken over by another artist after the original creator dies. Sometimes they turn out funny, but they're not the same thing.
Kind of makes me think of Infogrames, first buying the Atari name (and rights to do remakes of the old classics) then ditching their own name entirely to put out their games under the more prestigious and well-recognized name. Well, I know that the word "Ultima" and the word "Atari" are powerful enough to make games sell more copies, so they have to do that. I wish people wouldn't buy into that kind of thing though. Atari was a certain place with certain leaders, creators, corporate culture, etc. that led to a bunch of games in the 70s and 80s. When you see "The Matrix" and it says "Atari" on it, there's no real connection there at all to the company that put out Asteroids, Centipede, and the Atari 2600, except for the name. Which they picked up at firesale prices, most likely.
Anyway I hope they did their best to put together a good game, with some of the spirit of the Ultima series. The few people who're still at Origin that I know personally do have some real talent, so maybe it's got a shot. We'll see. I'll still be a lot more curious to see how Tabula Rasa comes out when Richard's through with it. He's got Scott Jones working with him on again, who I think is one of the best artists in the game industry, and a lot of very good people who used to be at Origin. Should really be something to see.
Let's be generous and say that the Heroes of Might and Magic game sold 50,000 units.
The problem with that assumption is that it assumes most 3DO titles sold roughly comparable numbers. But computer games is a hit-drive industry, and it's likely that 3DO is typical there, with a lot of games selling very poorly, and a few hits selling far, far more. So their better selling titles would be well above 40,000 units sold.
Since they also got the rights to all the Might and Magic games, as well as Heroes of Might and Magic (which I'm a big fan of, though in 3 and 4 they kept adding more features than the game needed, featuritis made it LESS fun in my opinion)... They got the rights to over a dozen games probably, maybe more than two dozen when you count in all the expansion packs. They could easily put out a collection of ALL the Might and Magic products in one box for $60, with zero product development cost, and probably sell enough to make a good profit.
As for Trip Hawkins getting a "sweet deal" - having his game company still running would be a better deal for him. When a company goes bankrupt, leaving behind some "dregs" of titles that didn't sell well even when they were brand new, their future sales potential is generally pretty dismal. Plus not having your own game company to manufacture and sell them also puts him in a worse position to ever do anything with them. It's likely most or all of them will never see the light of day again, and he bought them up cheap because of sentimental value and/or Don Quixote syndrome. After losing control of his old company EA, he was determined to "show them" by making 3DO bigger and better. Guess he didn't succeed...
My father taught history at Notre Dame for 30 years, and he had almost all the football players in his classes (maybe it was because of all the dirty jokes he told). He was in as good a position as anyone to know that a HUGE percentage of professional football players get hurt.
When Joe Montana was a freshman, he was studying pre-law so he could have a well paying backup career option if he didn't get into the NFL. Dad called him aside after class and said to give up football and just be a lawyer. "Joe," he said, "I've seen what happens, these guys go in the NFL and play 2 or 3 years, then get a crippling injury. If you join up you'll have arthritis by the time you're 30. You won't be able to close your fingers together to make a fist. Give up football and be a lawyer!"
Years later, Joe Montana (who didn't take my dad's good advice) sent him a manilla envelope in the mail. Inside was an 8x10 glossy photo of him wearing his football uniform, grinning, holding up his hand with a big, fat superbowl ring on each finger. On the back it was signed, "Dear Professor Shapiro, you were right. I joined the NFL, and now I can't close my fingers together to make a fist! -- Joe Montana"
With the recent outage on in the northeast, think of what could've happened if the entire world was on one grid.
Well, given that we already had a grid much larger than the area where the power went out, and automatic safeguards kicked in on a lot of its connections and limited the area of the blackout... If the rest of the world had connections to our grid too, I think what most likely would have happened would be a blackout of the same size we did see, or just a little bit larger. Big deal.
While a handful of Slashdotters might use this to run Linux or to program their own Playstation 2 games, the effect it'll have on most people is an increase in PS/2 game piracy. The fact that there might be some difficulty in setting this up is a minor hindrance... It will enable crackers or crack groups to produce a CD or CD image which will boot as-is on an unmodified PS/2 and play a game. Once one person creates a crack of a popular game, the warez traders will start passing it around on IRC, FTP, etc. and it'll require no more skill to use than the ability to burn a CD. Expect PS/2 piracy to go way up for a while. Expect Sony to make changes shortly to future production runs so that newer PS/2s don't have this vulnerability, and would-be pirates will have to make sure they have an older machine.
I started doing this back in the days of MS-DOS, when nobody was using Windows yet. Some of the other people at Origin upgraded to DOS 4.0 as soon as it came out. I waited until I'd heard from various people at work and elsewhere that the bugs had all been fixed, and I got DOS 4.21 (if I remember right.)
Being an "early adopter" when it comes to software just means extra expense, and extra bugs. I started buying games a year or two late just to pick them up on the bargain racks for $5-$20. But these days, they're sometimes as buggy as system software, so even if you don't mind paying full retail, it's probably worth waiting a few months and watching the message boards to find out when enough patches have come out to make a game playable! With SO many new games coming out all the time, who has time to give a first chance *AND* a second chance to a lot of different titles? You can't even give ONE chance to more than a tiny fraction of what's released each year.
If you want to make money playing online games, check out what Julian Dibbel's been up to (the guy who wrote the article "A Rape In Cyberspace about a billion yeas ago) here.
There's also a couple of sites where you can play games like Beyond Castle Wolfenstein against other players for cash. And Worldwinner.com and some rivals let you play things like Tetris, Minesweeper, Solitaire, etc. for cash. Woo.
Me, I'd rather keep *making* the games for money. And our game has been free since 1996, this is old news to me!
When I started making games professionally in 1982, I would make a game entirely by myself, as did most people in the industry. By the time the 90s arrived, game development teams were becoming the norm. (Origin, where I was working at the time, was ahead of the curve on this.) After a while they started to swell to the point where management was difficult, and costs were so high that companies became more and more risk-averse.
And I went independent again not long after, making games with just two people (myself and my artist partner, 'Manda). Big game publishers would rather fund the big teams, because they need games with enough flash to compete with the other big expensive titles on the shelves. But being small means we A) have an easier time scraping up enough cash to become self funding, B) are less likely to fail to complete a game because it got too tangled up in conflicting visions and goals, C) can do exactly the kinds of games we want rather than only what a publisher will take, and D) don't have to put up with anyone telling us what to do, which I've been allergic to ever since I was a kid being forced to go to elementary school.
The result is, though I have about three dozen published games I've been involved with over the years, the one we have total control over (and ownership of) is the one that I feel is my best work by far. Some of our players are still addicted to it more than six years after they first started playing, and it's now supporting a team of six people. If you want to check it out, the link is in my sig line below. Independent games won't ever supply all of the public's gaming demands, but they are crucial for keeping the variety and innovation levels high - hopefully they'll do so even more as improving software and art tools keep lowering the barriers to entry, and online distribution lowers the costs of getting your game out there and making a few bucks!
"I left wrestling to come home to Utah and be with my family"
Doesn't that mean he wants his "identity" now to be "Darryl Peterson, retired former celebrity who spends time with his wife and kids and gets left alone"?
and I find myself in the biggest battle of my life - to save my identity
How about "to save my chance to cash in on somebody else using a name I was done with, since I'm greedy"? I mean, if the videogame was about a wrestler guy that looked like him, that'd be different. Isn't the Max Payne videogame about a non-wrestling cop who shoots people 'n stuff?
Frankly, if he sincerely wants to be retired and be with his family, having his old name associated with something new now would probably just get him less rabid wrestling fans pestering him and interfering with his new "Darryl Peterson, family man" focus. He should thank them, not sue them!
One thing I've noticed in the 21 years I've been in the game industry is that most of the stocks are way too unstable to make it look like anyplace a sensible investor would put their money as far as I'm concerned. Even the successful companies with several hit games can have hugely variable cash flow, dramatic reversals in their financial health over the course of a year or two, or even just huge overspending on new "promising" projects that don't pan out, negating the value of the huge sales of their hit titles. There's a few exceptions like Electronic Arts that are fairly long-term stable and valuable, with a broad enough portfolio and conservative enough management to produce good results for people who'be bought and held their stock over the years. But I've seen wild roller coaster rides through the 80s and 90s in the fortunes (and stock prices) of companies like Activision, Acclaim, Microprose, etc. Even when the sales are there, the kind of experienced management to turn that into a stable company that's investor-friendly is usually absent.
In response to things a couple of other people have said... It's been fairly well known that people still spend on entertainment during economic downturns since the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the movie industry flourished. A lot of people were poor, but if they could scrape up a nickel or a dime for a saturday of escapism (including serials, cartoons, and newsreels in addition to one or more main features), they often would.
As far as "one hit wonders" - venture capitalists are smart. They know that if some company is going to turn out just one hit game, it's a better investment to be funding that one game through a deal with the developer than it would be to invest in the whole company and have the earnings diluted by the expense of several money-losing titles... But more to the point, the most desired "exit strategy" for the venture capitalist, taking the company public and cashing in the stock, does NOT work well with a "one hit wonder" publisher. The way to maximize the amount of investor dollars that a game company can raise at IPO, you want at least 3-5 hits, preferably all of them "franchises" where you keep turning out sequels and/or add-ons that can be expected to keep generating a healthy revenue stream for years. A one hit wonder publisher might attract some foolish investors, a strong publisher with several good product lines will attract foolish investors AND savvy investors too. Which means more money, which means more profits for the venture capitalists. I've talked to VCs, believe me - they are interested in building stable (or at least stable-seeming) long term businesses, not something that investors could see is a "flash in the pan". They want to get OUT of the business quickly, sure, but they want to be able to sell it to other people who'll be willing to believe the business will stay around and keep making profits for years to come.
Anyway I'm not surprised investment would die down in the computer game industry - I'm just surprised it took so LONG. At one point, there were about 3000 new PC games coming out a year, with only a tiny fraction of them breaking even or turning a profit. I think that's dropped down to more like 2000 or less. Which is probably a good thing. The fact that there was so much "stupid money" being pumped into the game industry is why the retailers shifted more towards breaking even on sales to consumers, and making their profits from Market Development Fees (thinly disguised bribes) from the game publishers. If there's less stupid money input into the system, maybe it'll eventually go back to the slightly saner way it used to work.
You are quite wrong about that. Giving away code means gaining fame - that is, if the code is good. With enough fame, you can write your own ticket.
I think this is a bit too optimistic. Realistically, in my experience, giving away good code means fame for a small minority of the people who do so. And for the rest, it means a few pats on the back followed by continuing to live in obscurity as a little-known, non-famous coder.
I think handhelds certainly have some social potentials that consoles and PCs don't - I remember taking a prototype of a Gameboy game I was working out to the park to get feedback on it from some non-gamer friends. But overall, I think screen size is the biggest limitation. For "gather in front of the same screen" playing, a handheld will never match a system that can hook up to a big TV in the living room. For "each player playing on their own screen" socializing, handhelds make it easier to do the equivalent of a "mini-LAN party" without the effort of lugging a big heavy PC somewhere for the weekend... But they don't (so far) have as much access to online gaming. Cell-phone gaming might be competitive there, once it has developed more.
One thing Xbox is way ahead on, as far as social gaming is concerned, is how people talk to each other. A pretty small percentage of the population converses by typing messages to each other - most humans don't like to type, and they don't like to read as much as they like to watch and listen. People spend more each year to talk to each other on the telephone than they spend on movies, tv, radio, magazines and videogames COMBINED. Talking to each other is big business.
Xbox gives you a headset microphone. People talk to each other the way they like to, with their mouth and their ears. Meanwhile, none of the big MMORPGs for the PC supports voice chat at all. I think including that headset was a VERY smart move.
Console game machines have generally had a big head start on PCs at being social, anyway. They're often in the living room, a socializing room with a sofar, while PCs are usually tucked away someplace for one person to use. Consoles generally support two or more game controllers, and most games support them. Even when playing single player games, it's more common for people to gather around and watch, take turns playing, etc. Hardcore games do that sort of thing with PCs too - but with console games it's common.
Play is fundamentally a social act, too. Just watch two kittens doing it (or two lion cubs). The amount of solo-gaming we have these days is a fairly recent historical phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the computer. It's a good thing, but playing with other humans will still occupy the majority of human play - it's just more interesting.
That's really the key phrase for me in the above comments. I think in general, when the control of the game is in the hands of a small company or group of people that did the project not only as a business venture, but as a labor of love, there's some chance of them trying to keep it going for more than a decade. (Though they may lose interest, focus, financial resources to do so, or get sucked into newer projects that pay the bills). I know Gemstone III is still running after a really long time, and still making money. (I think it was the first online game to make over a million dollars in gross revenues in one year). Achaea is another for-pay game I'd expect to see stick around for a long time.
When there's a big corporate daddy that has final say, games are more likely to die off when their usage (and thus revenues) fall below a certain point. And since graphic games are a lot more expensive to create, you'll usually (though not always) see them under the control of a big corporation. I have occasionally seen small groups of people acquire rights to their dearly beloved game after it's been shut down, but usually they come back a lot smaller, and gradually fade from sight. Castle Infinity from Starwave was one of those. More recently, two of the original programmers of Meridian 59 got the rights back from 3DO, and seem to be doing ok so far, even fixing some old bugs and adding new features. And the latest incarnation of Habitat in the US, Dreamscape, is still limping along the last I heard. Something like server emulators as an option to keep a game alive is a newer phenomenon, but I think those would have trouble living much past the five year mark, because the community will fragment to multiple emulators right from the start, the emulators won't have 100% of the features people liked in the original game, and the game probably won't progress technologically or artistically on the client end.
I've always deliberately kept my team and my overhead small on my game. For the first few years, we worked other full-time jobs and maintained and expanded it in our spare time - and operational and support costs are still so low we could switch back to doing that in a heartbeat, if we really had to. In addition, I owned over 50% of the company when two of us founded it, I own over 50% of it now, and I will always own over 50% of it. I won't sign any contracts that'd give any outside party the authority to shut our game down for good, so nobody can get rid of it till they pry my source code from my cold, dead fingers. I think I ought to easily be able to live another 50 years or more, so maybe I can set some kind of new duration record eventually!
Though I do think in 50 years most kids would rather play the new 4D holo-stim games than my old technologically backwards crude looking "retro" game. Also I think MUD 2 is still running somewhere, which started a long time before Furcadia did. I don't know if there's any copies of MUD 1 running anywhere - probably so. I think a few of the old mid-70s Plato multiuser graphic dungeon games that preceeded MUD can still be found on things like NovaNet, though I haven't checked in the last couple of years.
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Copyrights for any original works made by Content Providers belong to them, or jointly to them and Dragon's Eye if their work is based on Furcadia artwork or other content to the extent that it constitutes a 'derivative work' under current laws. By uploading their original work and/or derivative work to Furcadia, Content Providers automatically grant their permission for other players to use the Furcadia software to view and experience those works, a process in which the software may download copies of the works to the viewer's computer for viewing. In addition, the act of uploading grants Dragon's Eye license to redistribute the work in other formats or on other media that the software may support in the future, and to redistribute it in any way that it deems beneficial towards the goal of promoting Furcadia to the general public. Content Providers recognize and acknowledge that making their content available for other players to view and use incurs a certain amount of risk that some of those players may use, modify, or distribute that content in unauthorized ways which may infringe on the copyrights of the Content Provider. Each Content Provider agrees that they assume the entire risk of such infringement when they choose to upload, that they indemnify Dragon's Eye from any liability resulting from such infringement by third parties, that Dragon's Eye assumes no responsibility for taking punitive or corrective actions against such copyright violators, and that the Content Provider will pursue any and all remedies for such infringements on their own, whether these consist of requesting the infringer to cease and desist, filing a civil lawsuit against the infringer, or any other measures. In the event that a Content Provider chooses to file suit on a copyright infringement matter, Dragon's Eye agrees to provide any requested information regarding the transfer or use of the content involved that it may have in its records in a timely fashion.
I suspect that games like Regenesis and Alpha World were treating user created artwork and such as belonging to the user before we were, though I never actually read their license agreements.
That said, there are a few well managed ones and/or developers with big enough hits that they can stay around a long time - Stormfront Studios is still in business I believe, and id Software isn't going anywhere any time soon. Some of the more successful developers deliberately decide to be absorbed into a big company, too, like Blizzard or Westwood - and didn't Valve do that also?
The other route is to keep expenses tiny, always, and just keep making games until they pry the keyboard and mouse out of your cold, dead, fingers. The fellow that did the Dink Smallwood games is still at it, at the Independent Games Festival I saw his teenage lawnmower game. I've been running my own Dragon's Eye Productions for over 10 years now, and doing better than ever. PopCap Games is doing really great (and their games are tons of fun, so they deserve it), and there's too many shareware, freeware, flash and java games and game sites to even mention. Yes, a lot of them suck, but there's some good ones too. There's a lot of interesting looking games at dexterity.com for one. I still hope that Garage Games will thrive, too - they're doing original game development using the Tribes 2 3D engine (which they made, at their last company). I don't think the development houses are dying any time soon - just some specific individual ones, which has happened pretty much every year, often with little fanfare.
Having the creators try to keep up with the voracious demand for content of hundreds of thousands of players is tough, though. It's not as easy to get away with "everyone goes through the same quests" as in a single player game, because the players are interacting and communicating more, and thus telling each other the quickest ways to get through everything. So ideally you would have more content the more players you got. But the creator-centric model doesn't scale so easily. You could try to hire twice as many level designers, artists, etc. if your user-base doubles, but it's tough to keep up if your game is successful, managing a large team gets increasingly tricky, etc.
Player-created content scales great. If your game goes from 10,000 players to 100,000, the demand for variety of content may be larger, but your number of potential creators has gone up by a factor of ten, so you're covered. The vast majority of the interesting content in Furcadia is user-created maps, art, and scripts for various quests, games, etc. And we have players that are still playing and highly interested and addicted since they started in 1996. Player created content IS a viable approach to making an MMORPG.
I don't see why they should be complaining about games being delayed, given that most MMORPGs are shipped too soon and many of them have a shaky launch because of it. They even noted that some of the ones that did launch in 2003 had features trimmed to get them out the door. I think we're better off when the developers and publishers take the extra time to get more of their bugs fixed & make the games more polished and feature-laden before release.
The vast majority of books and albums ARE mass market failures. They're both hit-driven businesses. In the book business in particular, the majority of books lose money for the publisher, but the few best-sellers make enough money to make up for it and make the publisher a net profit (hopefully). I don't know if the many poor-selling albums also lose money or if they cover their costs - wouldn't surprise me if they lose money on those too, though.
Because let's not miss an important fact here - socializing is the number one leisure activity humans want. If your hardcore gamers focus on levelling to the point where they're not fun to chat with, or will only chat about in-game things, that'll turn the average person off to socializing in that environment. Reality check on the numbers - last time I checked (years ago, admittedly), people spent around $10 billion each on electronic games and on movies a year, around $20 billion on radio and newspapers, around $40 billion on television... And something like $160 billion on talking to each other on the telephone.
Socializing is what people want most, and the first online game to get it right will make big money. Voice chat, video chat, build in messaging systems competitive with the best pagers and email programs, put in spectator modes, an attention economy, etc. etc. If you're working on a game to compete with mine though, please pretend you didn't hear any of that. *wink*
Stress user-created content? We've been doing that since 1996 in our game! Engage smug-mode.
Guess it's time to move on and add whatever's going to be the next trend, before everyone else figures it out.
Ok, ok, disengaging smug mode. But I thought I earned at least one quick "I told you so" after all that work. Back to the code mines now.
Of course the non-finalists don't get as much free publicity and such. But even so, they're all presented and linked to from the IGF website, and get some coverage elsewhere. (We got a really glowing review on Electric Playground's site before the finalists were even selected.) All in all I've had a good experience with the festival, and will probably enter our next game in it too. I also think it's good to encourage the development of the indie scene, so we can get some more variety in gaming and not just the safe-but-boring parade of sequels from the big conservative game companies.
It sounds like you're probably thinking of Regenesis, which was at it's core a text mud with the ability to attach illustrations (vector graphic ones I think) to locations. It was an interesting early experiment. I think it was developed in Sweden?
There were some commercial games that predated Meridian 59 considerably as well. Neverwinter Nights on AOL was based on the SSI Gold Box games, adapted to play online with other people. (No relation to the recent game titled Neverwinter Nights, other than having the same name.) On The Sierra Network (which was later renamed ImagiNation), they had a game called Shadow of Yserbius which was another multiplayer dungeon crawl, kind of like the Bard's Tale games in some ways.
I think all three of those would fall somewhere in the early to mid 1990s, if I'm remembering right. Our game DragonSpires came out in 1994 I know. Anyway Meridian 59 is a good historical landmark for them to have chosen to mention in their article, as the first MMORPG to reach a certain size paying player base that I'm sure no game before it had reached. (Maybe not even any free MUDs.) The next landmark is Ultima Online, which was the first one to get into the hundreds of thousands of regular players.
Looking back before Meridian 59, in some ways the biggest commercial milestone is Gemstone 3, which was the first online game to generate more than one million dollars a year in revenues. But it was a text-only game, essentially a for-pay combat MUD.
Of course I wish Furcadia were a big enough milestone that they'd have wanted to mention us, but with the article only covering a handful of the very biggest and most influential and important developments, I think they pretty much chose the right ones to cover. A lot of articles leave out any mention of Lineage, which is still THE largest game in the world, and I see they didn't make that mistake.
There seems to be general agreement that MMOGs grew out of MUDs.
While it's accurate that the inspiration and even the past development experience of most MMOG developers came directly from the text MUDs (including myself) - I think this article is likely to contribute more to the belief that online fantasy combat/roleplaying games started with the first MUD in 1978.
The fact is, though, there were online D&D inspired games on the Plato network as much as 3 to 4 years before that - and they ran on 512*512 monochrome graphics displays as opposed to the text-only of the early MUDs! Some of the early games were DND, Moria, Oubliette and Avatar. I was lucky enough to get the chance to play around with the Plato system in the mid 70s, it was also innovative in the areas of real-time chat, message boards, email, and a lot more. In many ways it was 20 years ahead of its time. They also had a 32 player game of spaceships and planetary conquest, which Netrek is pretty much directly based on. Pretty amazing stuff in its day. They had 1200 baud communications when everyone else was using 300 baud modems, and smart terminals that you could download custom character sets or graphics into to speed up interactive graphical applications. Those were the days. They were really the birthplace of interactive real-time multiplayer graphical computer games over a network, I wish history would give the system the credit that it's due. It was developed at the same University in Illinois where the first graphic web browser (Mosaic) was invented. Quite an innovative place.
Our bandwidth was provided free at first, by Mplayer and then by Playnet. (Thanks, guys!) Now we pay something like $650 a month for a game server, mail server, and web server plus enough bandwidth to service all our current players, with really good private peering to keep netlag minimal. It's great how much bandwidth prices have come down since we started in 1996! If we had to, we could take day jobs again as we did our first few years, just pay that monthly hosting bill, and keep the game open. And the game's been a lot of fun for a lot of people, led to marriages, all the usual things online games have (and a few unusual things, since we let players upload their own art, maps, code their own scripts to make quests, games, etc.)
But... While you might think someone with a background like that would be on the "they charge too much, burn the witches!" side of the debate... I've worked in the game industry since 1982, and I know a lot of the people that work on the big expensive hit MMORPGs. And those costs aren't made up. Yes, my partners and I, and the game we made, serve as living proof that you can do SOMETHING on a pretty fair sized scale for almost no money. But you do get a lot of things on a game that charges $10-$13 or more a month. Millions of dollars worth of professional quality art and animation, for one thing. And paid customer service and tech support staff, something we mostly use unpaid volunteers for.
Ultimately, the biggest operational cost on most of the commercial online games today is customer service, eclipsing even the number two cost, bandwidth. And I think most people would agree that the average level of customer service quality today is not satisfactory to players, and would not be considered acceptable in most other industries that maintain customer service phonelines and such. (Which is almost all of them). Rather than argue that they exaggerate their costs, one COULD make an argument that they need to be spending even more, until they are providing satisfactory service!
Current games spend half or more of their revenues on customer service staff and bandwidth (and a few other operational expenses). Whether they'll eat into the profits more, raise prices, get consumers used to the idea of never expecting higher quality support, or keep outsourcing more and more of the support work to India, that remains to be seen.
I kind of like our all-volunteer model for the enthusiasm it brings, but the big companies would never take a legal risk like that, after seeing the lawsuits against AOL and Ultima Online. A lawsuit like that could crush a company as small as ours just from the legal fees, even if we won - but it's in the nature of tiny companies to take the big risks, right?
Kind of makes me think of Infogrames, first buying the Atari name (and rights to do remakes of the old classics) then ditching their own name entirely to put out their games under the more prestigious and well-recognized name. Well, I know that the word "Ultima" and the word "Atari" are powerful enough to make games sell more copies, so they have to do that. I wish people wouldn't buy into that kind of thing though. Atari was a certain place with certain leaders, creators, corporate culture, etc. that led to a bunch of games in the 70s and 80s. When you see "The Matrix" and it says "Atari" on it, there's no real connection there at all to the company that put out Asteroids, Centipede, and the Atari 2600, except for the name. Which they picked up at firesale prices, most likely.
Anyway I hope they did their best to put together a good game, with some of the spirit of the Ultima series. The few people who're still at Origin that I know personally do have some real talent, so maybe it's got a shot. We'll see. I'll still be a lot more curious to see how Tabula Rasa comes out when Richard's through with it. He's got Scott Jones working with him on again, who I think is one of the best artists in the game industry, and a lot of very good people who used to be at Origin. Should really be something to see.
The problem with that assumption is that it assumes most 3DO titles sold roughly comparable numbers. But computer games is a hit-drive industry, and it's likely that 3DO is typical there, with a lot of games selling very poorly, and a few hits selling far, far more. So their better selling titles would be well above 40,000 units sold.
Since they also got the rights to all the Might and Magic games, as well as Heroes of Might and Magic (which I'm a big fan of, though in 3 and 4 they kept adding more features than the game needed, featuritis made it LESS fun in my opinion)... They got the rights to over a dozen games probably, maybe more than two dozen when you count in all the expansion packs. They could easily put out a collection of ALL the Might and Magic products in one box for $60, with zero product development cost, and probably sell enough to make a good profit.
As for Trip Hawkins getting a "sweet deal" - having his game company still running would be a better deal for him. When a company goes bankrupt, leaving behind some "dregs" of titles that didn't sell well even when they were brand new, their future sales potential is generally pretty dismal. Plus not having your own game company to manufacture and sell them also puts him in a worse position to ever do anything with them. It's likely most or all of them will never see the light of day again, and he bought them up cheap because of sentimental value and/or Don Quixote syndrome. After losing control of his old company EA, he was determined to "show them" by making 3DO bigger and better. Guess he didn't succeed...
When Joe Montana was a freshman, he was studying pre-law so he could have a well paying backup career option if he didn't get into the NFL. Dad called him aside after class and said to give up football and just be a lawyer. "Joe," he said, "I've seen what happens, these guys go in the NFL and play 2 or 3 years, then get a crippling injury. If you join up you'll have arthritis by the time you're 30. You won't be able to close your fingers together to make a fist. Give up football and be a lawyer!"
Years later, Joe Montana (who didn't take my dad's good advice) sent him a manilla envelope in the mail. Inside was an 8x10 glossy photo of him wearing his football uniform, grinning, holding up his hand with a big, fat superbowl ring on each finger. On the back it was signed, "Dear Professor Shapiro, you were right. I joined the NFL, and now I can't close my fingers together to make a fist! -- Joe Montana"
Well, given that we already had a grid much larger than the area where the power went out, and automatic safeguards kicked in on a lot of its connections and limited the area of the blackout... If the rest of the world had connections to our grid too, I think what most likely would have happened would be a blackout of the same size we did see, or just a little bit larger. Big deal.
While a handful of Slashdotters might use this to run Linux or to program their own Playstation 2 games, the effect it'll have on most people is an increase in PS/2 game piracy. The fact that there might be some difficulty in setting this up is a minor hindrance... It will enable crackers or crack groups to produce a CD or CD image which will boot as-is on an unmodified PS/2 and play a game. Once one person creates a crack of a popular game, the warez traders will start passing it around on IRC, FTP, etc. and it'll require no more skill to use than the ability to burn a CD. Expect PS/2 piracy to go way up for a while. Expect Sony to make changes shortly to future production runs so that newer PS/2s don't have this vulnerability, and would-be pirates will have to make sure they have an older machine.
Being an "early adopter" when it comes to software just means extra expense, and extra bugs. I started buying games a year or two late just to pick them up on the bargain racks for $5-$20. But these days, they're sometimes as buggy as system software, so even if you don't mind paying full retail, it's probably worth waiting a few months and watching the message boards to find out when enough patches have come out to make a game playable! With SO many new games coming out all the time, who has time to give a first chance *AND* a second chance to a lot of different titles? You can't even give ONE chance to more than a tiny fraction of what's released each year.
There's also a couple of sites where you can play games like Beyond Castle Wolfenstein against other players for cash. And Worldwinner.com and some rivals let you play things like Tetris, Minesweeper, Solitaire, etc. for cash. Woo.
Me, I'd rather keep *making* the games for money. And our game has been free since 1996, this is old news to me!
And I went independent again not long after, making games with just two people (myself and my artist partner, 'Manda). Big game publishers would rather fund the big teams, because they need games with enough flash to compete with the other big expensive titles on the shelves. But being small means we A) have an easier time scraping up enough cash to become self funding, B) are less likely to fail to complete a game because it got too tangled up in conflicting visions and goals, C) can do exactly the kinds of games we want rather than only what a publisher will take, and D) don't have to put up with anyone telling us what to do, which I've been allergic to ever since I was a kid being forced to go to elementary school.
The result is, though I have about three dozen published games I've been involved with over the years, the one we have total control over (and ownership of) is the one that I feel is my best work by far. Some of our players are still addicted to it more than six years after they first started playing, and it's now supporting a team of six people. If you want to check it out, the link is in my sig line below. Independent games won't ever supply all of the public's gaming demands, but they are crucial for keeping the variety and innovation levels high - hopefully they'll do so even more as improving software and art tools keep lowering the barriers to entry, and online distribution lowers the costs of getting your game out there and making a few bucks!
Doesn't that mean he wants his "identity" now to be "Darryl Peterson, retired former celebrity who spends time with his wife and kids and gets left alone"?
and I find myself in the biggest battle of my life - to save my identity
How about "to save my chance to cash in on somebody else using a name I was done with, since I'm greedy"? I mean, if the videogame was about a wrestler guy that looked like him, that'd be different. Isn't the Max Payne videogame about a non-wrestling cop who shoots people 'n stuff?
Frankly, if he sincerely wants to be retired and be with his family, having his old name associated with something new now would probably just get him less rabid wrestling fans pestering him and interfering with his new "Darryl Peterson, family man" focus. He should thank them, not sue them!
In response to things a couple of other people have said... It's been fairly well known that people still spend on entertainment during economic downturns since the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the movie industry flourished. A lot of people were poor, but if they could scrape up a nickel or a dime for a saturday of escapism (including serials, cartoons, and newsreels in addition to one or more main features), they often would.
As far as "one hit wonders" - venture capitalists are smart. They know that if some company is going to turn out just one hit game, it's a better investment to be funding that one game through a deal with the developer than it would be to invest in the whole company and have the earnings diluted by the expense of several money-losing titles... But more to the point, the most desired "exit strategy" for the venture capitalist, taking the company public and cashing in the stock, does NOT work well with a "one hit wonder" publisher. The way to maximize the amount of investor dollars that a game company can raise at IPO, you want at least 3-5 hits, preferably all of them "franchises" where you keep turning out sequels and/or add-ons that can be expected to keep generating a healthy revenue stream for years. A one hit wonder publisher might attract some foolish investors, a strong publisher with several good product lines will attract foolish investors AND savvy investors too. Which means more money, which means more profits for the venture capitalists. I've talked to VCs, believe me - they are interested in building stable (or at least stable-seeming) long term businesses, not something that investors could see is a "flash in the pan". They want to get OUT of the business quickly, sure, but they want to be able to sell it to other people who'll be willing to believe the business will stay around and keep making profits for years to come.
Anyway I'm not surprised investment would die down in the computer game industry - I'm just surprised it took so LONG. At one point, there were about 3000 new PC games coming out a year, with only a tiny fraction of them breaking even or turning a profit. I think that's dropped down to more like 2000 or less. Which is probably a good thing. The fact that there was so much "stupid money" being pumped into the game industry is why the retailers shifted more towards breaking even on sales to consumers, and making their profits from Market Development Fees (thinly disguised bribes) from the game publishers. If there's less stupid money input into the system, maybe it'll eventually go back to the slightly saner way it used to work.
I think this is a bit too optimistic. Realistically, in my experience, giving away good code means fame for a small minority of the people who do so. And for the rest, it means a few pats on the back followed by continuing to live in obscurity as a little-known, non-famous coder.
I think handhelds certainly have some social potentials that consoles and PCs don't - I remember taking a prototype of a Gameboy game I was working out to the park to get feedback on it from some non-gamer friends. But overall, I think screen size is the biggest limitation. For "gather in front of the same screen" playing, a handheld will never match a system that can hook up to a big TV in the living room. For "each player playing on their own screen" socializing, handhelds make it easier to do the equivalent of a "mini-LAN party" without the effort of lugging a big heavy PC somewhere for the weekend... But they don't (so far) have as much access to online gaming. Cell-phone gaming might be competitive there, once it has developed more.
Xbox gives you a headset microphone. People talk to each other the way they like to, with their mouth and their ears. Meanwhile, none of the big MMORPGs for the PC supports voice chat at all. I think including that headset was a VERY smart move.
Console game machines have generally had a big head start on PCs at being social, anyway. They're often in the living room, a socializing room with a sofar, while PCs are usually tucked away someplace for one person to use. Consoles generally support two or more game controllers, and most games support them. Even when playing single player games, it's more common for people to gather around and watch, take turns playing, etc. Hardcore games do that sort of thing with PCs too - but with console games it's common.
Play is fundamentally a social act, too. Just watch two kittens doing it (or two lion cubs). The amount of solo-gaming we have these days is a fairly recent historical phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the computer. It's a good thing, but playing with other humans will still occupy the majority of human play - it's just more interesting.
That's really the key phrase for me in the above comments. I think in general, when the control of the game is in the hands of a small company or group of people that did the project not only as a business venture, but as a labor of love, there's some chance of them trying to keep it going for more than a decade. (Though they may lose interest, focus, financial resources to do so, or get sucked into newer projects that pay the bills). I know Gemstone III is still running after a really long time, and still making money. (I think it was the first online game to make over a million dollars in gross revenues in one year). Achaea is another for-pay game I'd expect to see stick around for a long time.
When there's a big corporate daddy that has final say, games are more likely to die off when their usage (and thus revenues) fall below a certain point. And since graphic games are a lot more expensive to create, you'll usually (though not always) see them under the control of a big corporation. I have occasionally seen small groups of people acquire rights to their dearly beloved game after it's been shut down, but usually they come back a lot smaller, and gradually fade from sight. Castle Infinity from Starwave was one of those. More recently, two of the original programmers of Meridian 59 got the rights back from 3DO, and seem to be doing ok so far, even fixing some old bugs and adding new features. And the latest incarnation of Habitat in the US, Dreamscape, is still limping along the last I heard. Something like server emulators as an option to keep a game alive is a newer phenomenon, but I think those would have trouble living much past the five year mark, because the community will fragment to multiple emulators right from the start, the emulators won't have 100% of the features people liked in the original game, and the game probably won't progress technologically or artistically on the client end.
I've always deliberately kept my team and my overhead small on my game. For the first few years, we worked other full-time jobs and maintained and expanded it in our spare time - and operational and support costs are still so low we could switch back to doing that in a heartbeat, if we really had to. In addition, I owned over 50% of the company when two of us founded it, I own over 50% of it now, and I will always own over 50% of it. I won't sign any contracts that'd give any outside party the authority to shut our game down for good, so nobody can get rid of it till they pry my source code from my cold, dead fingers. I think I ought to easily be able to live another 50 years or more, so maybe I can set some kind of new duration record eventually!
Though I do think in 50 years most kids would rather play the new 4D holo-stim games than my old technologically backwards crude looking "retro" game. Also I think MUD 2 is still running somewhere, which started a long time before Furcadia did. I don't know if there's any copies of MUD 1 running anywhere - probably so. I think a few of the old mid-70s Plato multiuser graphic dungeon games that preceeded MUD can still be found on things like NovaNet, though I haven't checked in the last couple of years.