[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #301 - 15 msgs

[Dr. Cat]

> From: Greg Underwood <gunderwoodhsd at earthlink.net>
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Movies bigger than games?

> This conversation is starting to ring bells... I believe Dr. Cat was
> working on things aimed at a wider market a couple years ago.
> Unfortuntely, I've not been keeping up on list traffic for some
> time, so I'm not sure if he's still up to it.  But, I'd bet if he's
> still tuned in, he'll start chiming in soon... ;)

I've been aiming for the broader market for years now.  I suspect most
of Furcadia's players are non-gamers or casual gamers, though we see
our share of hardcore gamers hanging out there too.  And we're still
tripling in size each year.  You did mention The Sims - Raph told me
thursday night he thinks the online Sims game will beat both of us to
the one million user mark, and I think he's probably right.  But I
told him since neither of us worked on that, our bet is still on for
who gets there second.  (I also wonder if they'd even try to have all
their online users in one single world, which is what I'm really
interested in doing.  There might be a million players playing
backgammon right this second, but there's no "Backgammon community"
they're all in with a high level of accessibility to each other.)

Regarding whoever said a while back that merchandising and licensing
revenues "shouldn't count" in determining whether the game industry or
the movie industry is bigger...  I think the question that's
interesting to me there is "Which industry has more money coming into
its collective pockets", and I think the dollar bills from Jurassic
Park lunchboxes are just as green as the dollars from movie ticket
sales.  And I think the movie industry still probably has a lot more
money in their pockets.  I remember the first wave of stories in the
media years ago, when game sales first edged briefly past movie box
office receipts for one year and they trumpeted "games bigger than
movies!"  But even if you don't allow for licensing, they weren't even
counting all the money spent on viewing the actual movies, because
they didn't include video rental and purchase!  (Not to mention pay
per view, movie channels, and the money big networks pay movie studios
for broadcast rights).  Yes, the game industry has a few success
stories like Pokemon now, but the movie business has tons of 'em.
Jurassic Park wasn't nearly as ideal a property for licensing as Star
Wars, in my opinion, and even it did a billion dollars in licensed
merchandise.

As for pushing more aggressively for licensed stuff in the computer
game and videogame market - that's one of the things I was always
pushing for and grumbling about back in the 1980s, when hardly
anything except Mario and Sonic had any licensed merchandise to speak
of.  My partner and I designed some stuff aimed at being highly
merchandisable into several games, only to watch the companies we
worked for fail to care or even notice.  We still design stuff with
that aspect in mind, I consider it to be one of the components of
professionalism in a creator.  Ars gratis ars doesn't pay the bills.
And even if you become wealthy yourself, the more profitable you make
your work, the more successfully it can acheive the goal of letting
OTHER creative people work full time on quality creative works for a
living.  A laudable goal in my opinion.  Anyway now that they're doing
things like Starcraft action figures and the like, I say "About bloody
time".  Though I think we'll have a long way to go to catch up with
established media.  The game industry is behind the other creative
media on having skills at writing, creating compelling characters and
settings, etc.  It's been too obsessed with technology, to the
detriment of those other aspects.  I think we're catching up though.
We also have that huge obstacle of requiring an expensive machine in
order to be able to use our products.  Not much of an obstacle in a
rich country like the United States, but to acheive the sort of world
domination movies have, it's hard to beat the fact that a poor person
in a poor country can scrape together a few dollars, sheckels, dinars,
or whatever, go for an hour and a half into the building when some
business owner has invested in the necessary equipment (movie
projector, sound system, big screen, and chairs), and enjoy the
product that Hollywood spent all that money putting together.  The
Internet gaming cafes in South Korea are a fascinating example of a
very similar business model, I don't know if that will catch on in
other parts of the world or be viable long term or not - but it's very
interesting and worth watching.

On another topic, That "Tale in the Desert" game looks very
interesting, though it has a bit of an aroma of "bite off more than
you can chew" to it.  I really hope they pull it off, and manage to be
a success.  Though that whole "when the story ends, the game ends"
thing smacks of not really wanting to make money! With just 49 quests
to complete to finish the story, too, I think they may be
overestimating how much they can slow people down by requiring a lot
of participants in each quest.  One of the example quests they give,
which requires you to get 10 trustworthy people to not rip you off,
looks trivially easy to "game" by making 10 mule characters.  I
suspect some of the better organized Everquest guilds could zip in and
make short work of things like the 40 person coordinated ritual, too.
But it sounds like a very creative and innovative project, I hope they
pull it off to at least some extent.  We need more people at least
trying games like this, even if many of them fail.

What I'm really curious about right now, though, is what Lord British
is going to do next.  I'm going to go talk to him about it next week -
I probably won't be at liberty to say what he tells me, though.  I do
think his good luck is holding true to form, though.  A little over a
week before his non-competition agreement with Electronic Arts
expires, and he's allowed to get back into the game industry, what
happens?  They lay off 85 people who are right here in Austin,
experienced at developing multiplayer online games, and have worked
with him before.  As if that wasn't convenient enough, a couple days
ago Inforgrames shut down the online D&D project they'd acquired along
with the rest of Hasbro Interactive.  That's 23 more online game
developers in Austin on the job market.  Impeccable timing, I must
say!

We live in interesting times.  Anyway I think EA.com is too big and
has to much potential to monopolize the online gaming market, which
would make things get stagnant.  They need more competitors like
Sony/Verant to keep the market innovating and growing at a better
pace, especially since Microsoft has been a bit slow in this area,
Sega's been glacially slow, and Sony hasn't moved too fast on PS/PS2
online stuff either.  With EA having bought up Origin, Maxis, Kesmai,
and now Pogo, and having a five year exclusive with AOL, they're in a
position to end up the big sleepy behemoth.  We'll see.  I'd still
like to see Blizzard, Id, or Epic get into the massively multiplayer
field someday too.

Interesting times.

*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* 
   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free alpha test:
*-------------------------------------------**   http://www.furcadia.com
    Furcadia - a graphic mud for PCs!       ||  Let your imagination soar!
*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
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