GP3 and a radical look at the future of gaming

[slitchfield]

Ewan watched Reset Generation's creator at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival and then sat down in a cosy corner to interview him - it turns out that RG is the tip of the iceberg - Scott Foe has a vision where every game will work (and generate income) on every static or mobile device, using piracy as the main means of distribution. Radical stuff.

Read on in the full article.

[ashu]

wow.

What a reading, don't ask me where!

Foe has a heady mix of a marketer's brain in a developer's body.
Bacterial marketing, reference marketing are the best tools of spreading a product, service.

He has his sight on a potent way and i see how games gonna bombard us. Not that i am complainin though!!

Keep them coming Foe.

As a commercial software developer, I will go against commercial wisdom and say that until the software and media industries understand that what we currently call piracy is the future of software distribution, they will fail.

If these industries were not blinded by greed, and applied some intelligence, they could see a mile off that file sharing or at least spreading of links to files, is just ideal. And pay as you use of media or software is also ideal, and fair.

Maybe filesharing and "piracy" really do need to kill the software and media industries, or chunks of them to make people realise this. There is no way that filesharing and "piracy" are not going to win in the end. It is an inevitability, an unstoppable force. The winners will be the producers that realise this sooner and change their business models to take advantage of the tide, rather than futilely swimming against it.

[Tzer2]

If these industries were not blinded by greed,

I'm not sure what you define as greed, but a lot of anti-piracy feeling is just content makers wanting to be paid for their work.

It's especially common on phone games for the developers to be very badly-paid self-publishing independent teams who find that their games are pirated virtually the instant they're released.

It's all very well to talk about owning the hardware or owning the platform if you're a massive corporation, but direct sales is currently the only business model open to independent game makers. If you want indie game houses to die then you'll probably also see games getting less imaginative and more commercial and EA-like.

The winners will be the producers that realise this sooner and change their business models to take advantage of the tide, rather than futilely swimming against it.

So, what IS the business model they should switch to? And does it require the content maker to be a large corporation?

Which games company is making money and decent games using a non-sales model?

The article talks about wanting to make a YouTube of gaming, but the only people making real money from YouTube are Google and the large corporations they've paid off in order to avoid lawsuits. There are some smaller partners but these are still rather rare, and even some people with millions of views a year are currently turned away.


(edit) I think that South Park episode about the "underpant gnomes" which parodied the dotcom era also sums up the current pro-piracy movement:

Stage 1: Pirate games

Stage 2: (incoherent mumbling)

Stage 3: Profit

I'd absolutely love to be wrong about this, it would be great if we could have our games free and the makers get paid for them, but at the moment it seems too much like having our cake and eating it.

Ewan, thanks for the lovely write up!

A few comments ...

1) "Bacterial Marketing" - I was using this term to refer to a product advertising itself by default through use of the product, e.g. when you embed a YouTube video, the player application is advertising YouTube. (Another good example of this is when you send an email and the emailer adds an advertisement automatically to the bottom of your message as it goes out.)

2) I agree with the underpants gnome post above - the only people I see making real money from 'the YouTube of Games' is 'the YouTube of games' ... though, marketers could use the YouTube of games to issue game demos ...

3) ".gpg" ... not ".gp3"

PS Think there might be a bug in your site ... I'm quite sure that 3 times 3 equals 9, but your anti-spam protection is telling me that is not the case.

[Tzer2]

BTW in case my last post seemed too negative, I really genuinely would love to see gaming "set free", but it doesn't seem to be plausible until someone comes up with an alternative way of paying the people who actually did the games.

In theory there are alternatives to direct sales: payment through taxation (like public broadcasting TV), payment through adverts (like commercial TV), or payment through subscription (like pay TV). But though these models have succeeded with television and many other arts, none of them have succeeded with games so far. One exception is online gaming where the subscription model seems to have made a lot of money for some titles, but as most people prefer offline games this is arguably a red herring.

Open source and other kinds of collaborative projects can create some excellent free-of-charge software, especially serious utilities such as word processors or media players, so in some software fields financial compensation isn't actually needed.

However, OSS's track record in gaming is awful, almost always producing direct clones of existing commercial games or add-on levels for commercial game engines. For example probably the best OSS game on S60 is Frozen Bubble, which is a near-identical clone of Puzzle Bobble with the graphics and code redone to avoid legal problems. It's a great game, but there's nothing new there.

I'm not saying most commercial games are original, just that most original games are commercial.

PS Think there might be a bug in your site ... I'm quite sure that 3 times 3 equals 9, but your anti-spam protection is telling me that is not the case.

Could be the weakness of the dollar?

[Bosambo]

Tzer...you might be interested in this article at Ars Technica on this very subject