Tremor (APi)'s Journal: How the Game Industry can Save Itself

How the Game Industry can Save Itself:

- Screw the publishers. Direct-download, baby. Appeal to the broadband connections of the world, use *them* to get a title off the ground, instead of letting the publishers use *you*. Publishers are middle-men. Distributors are middle-men. How much is Xbox live? Everquest? City of Heroes? Galaxies? World of Warcraft? GameSpy? How much would a gamer, who probably spends $1000 a year on computer hardware and software, pay per month to be able to download all the games they want? I'd pay. I'll bet anyone with a broadband connection and a lust for games would pay.

- Open-source, baby. The open-source model is good for innovation - no, it's GREAT for innovation. But it's a difficult model to make money on. But the gaming industry has it in the bag economically: what's the big deal in gaming? Why is the Xbox so popular? Why is Unreal Tournament so hot? Multiplayer. The gaming industry needs to be Linux, EverQuest, FilePlanet and Enemy Territory combined. We're hearing every day now that multithreading is the way of the future. We're hearing every day that Open Source is the way of the future. We're hearing every day about brilliant new games being built by one development house on another development house's brilliant game engine - look at Unreal 3! How many games are already planned to use it, and look how far away it is, time-wise. Open-source your physics engine, your graphics engine, your AI engine. Split them up and set them free. Let the community tackle the multithreading problem as a whole, and tackle it once, and benefit from it forever. Then use the community's engine(s) to build better games with better performance with less development time and expense.

- Forget demo's, give them games. Bear with me here, here, I know it's painful to think about, but just bear with me. How much was Wolfenstein: Enemey Territory? Not a penny. It was a free download. And players downloaded it in droves, even though it weighs in at over a hundred megs. And they played it. And they still play it. Why was it free? Because they couldn't get a decent single-player game working, so they scrapped it, left it as multiplayer, and gave it away. And it was instantly popular. Burn your copy protection schemes; stop trying to stop the pirates, you never will, and you're throwing money away in a losing game against an army of hackers in their bedrooms who can break a copy protection or serial number scheme overnight. GIVE IT UP. Take the opposite tack that ET did: give away the single-player game. Multiplayer is where it's at; single player is just a really long demo. Give the single-player game away, and charge a minimal, recurring fee for multiplayer. It's easy to protect multiplayer gaming with a secured, authenticated gateway. Let them play LAN games if they want to, let them direct-connect if they want to, but if they want to find somebody to play with, they have to pony up. And hey, bundle it with your game downloads. Be GameSpy, only without the part where it sucks. No ad-infested software; if you pay, you can play with us; if you don't, you can play with yourself - no pun intended, of course.

Once the games get off the ground, and they've proven themselves to be a winner, or at least a good shot at a winner, THEN get them onto store shelves, but don't make a big deal about it. It's just a way for dialup users to get your game, or for users to get a hard-copy manual, or what have you. Selling boxes can't be your lifeblood - because there isn't enough to go around, and innovation is being strangled to death in the process.