[MUD-Dev] facist marketers / content controllers

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: msew <msew at ev1.net>
>
>While I see that this is the status quo right now, doesn't this strike
>anyone else as fundamentally flawed?


    Certainly closes off an entire spectrum of potential development
initiatives.  However, it does *not* strike the marketing weasels and money
types as flawed, but as simple common sense.  That development types keep
bringing up ideas like this is (to them) just more evidence that they (the
developers) need a keeper, or they'd go off on some creative tangent without
thinking about the potential problems of image or revenue their little hobby
horse would create for the company.
>
>The next generation of MMP games (and even this generation) are more than
>just a typical product.  It is not as if we are talking about Microsoft
>Word here.  Playing these games is a HUGE part of your recreational time
>and also becomes part of your life.  Your social life is there (or at least
>a chunk of it).  I really don't believe the marketers and the
>administration folks understand this at all, nor understand that the
>community is their most powerful resource to leverage.   Marketing 101
>doesn't really work here.


    In any contest between Creative and Marketing, bet on the weasels.
They're much better at explaining their case to the suits, and the suits are
used to listening to them.


>It seems that if you want to differentiate your game from the others, you
>need to make it not a game but a never ending experience that is self
>supporting.  And the only way to get self supporting is to allow the
>community to create things or to have a DIRECT say in what the development
>team spends their time on (ie something like the old java bucks program
>(they use votes right now which has a bad connotation imo as it somewhat
>implies that the max votes will win) where the issues that people care
>about most are moved up on the priority queue for the dev team).


    When the day arrives that the suits can't deny that there are too many
OLRPG's out there for the market to support, and if they want to get into
that market they have to take some risks and allow the geeks a little more
rope, then you'll see this area get explored.  Maybe some exploratory and
token steps before then, but we're 3-5 years away from a game that truly
incorporates user-generated content in any significant ways, on the
commercial front, at least.  For a while I thought NWN might bring it a
little sooner, but they seem to have decided to make Solstice a closed
toolset, with no hooks for third-party extension or modification of the core
rulebase, so there's only going to be so much anyone can do with that.

--Dave Rickey

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