[MUD-Dev] BIZ: Who holds your cahonas in their hand? (runs yourinfrastructure...; )

[Dave Rickey]

From: "ceo" <ceo at grexengine.com>
> Crosbie Fitch wrote:

>> Maybe, IBM's Butterfly grid thingy might be a step along the
>> right direction. If you could find a third party to provide a
>> relatively reliable MMOG platform and get them to charge the
>> player directly for the platform running costs (like an ISP), it
>> could then act as 'common carrier' and be immune from player
>> litigation. The MMOG provider can then sell 'content only' to
>> this player base, on a 'fun until you abuse it' basis. Like
>> selling buckets and spades to kids on a beach. You can tell them
>> how to have safe fun with them, but if they decide to hit each
>> other over the head with the spades, and use the buckets to throw
>> sand at each other, well that's up to them.

>> Making a fun MMOG should surely not be about providing massive
>> infrastructure and 24/7 moderation services for an online theme
>> park? That's 5% game and 95% service. Bleagh...

> Fine. But if you do that, you won't make much money. Long-term,
> you won't survive in the market. In the past, senior execs at some
> big corporates involved tangentially in this market have told me
> privately that, based on their combined experience of many other
> IT markets, it's only the infrastructure that's worth
> controlling. All the rest is too hard, too risky, too low
> margin. I happen to agree with them, although for slightly
> different reasons...

> Many games developers would like to be a little more independent
> of the whims of their publishers; the situation you describe only
> makes you even more beholden to someone else.

Whoever controls the revenue stream controls everything.  The film
and music industries were hammerlocked by someone grabbing a
critical gateway and leveraging that into near-total control of the
industry.  It's been referred to as "Getting between the talent and
the money."

In online games, the critical gateway is having your finger on the
power button (more literally, having the ability to administer and
update the game servers).  Where that is not the company that
developed the game (not many examples anymore), you have a situation
that resembles nothing so much as indentured servitude.  Almost as
important is who is doing the billing, but there aren't any around
anymore where the billing and administration is split, as far as I
am aware.

Customer service, billing, and ownership of the physical servers all
seem to go hand in hand, either you have all of these and control
your own destiny, or you don't and you're basically hired hands
being paid a stipend to maintain your game.  This *does* involve a
fundamental shift in what business you are in, you're no longer an
online game developer, you're the operator of an online game
*service*.  Mythic, for example, has more people doing one version
or another of customer service than they have developers.

--Dave
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