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So I've ran two round tables so far at the in San Jose, on the business model that's enjoying such worldwide success, and what was amazing that out of a couple hundred game developers, venture capitalists, publishers, media guys, analysts, researchers, etc, there was not a -single- person who objected to this model, or the fact that it does indeed fit every reasonable definition of free.
It's pretty cool really. We were one of the pioneers of this model nine years ago (I'm not actually aware of any other developer/publisher who used our model as their primary model before then), and it's taken awhile, but it's sweeping the game world absolutely by storm. It's the dominant model in Korea and almost dominant in China, and my co-host for the panel, Daniel James (who co-founded Avalon and now runs Three Rings, which does ), made a bold prediction that within 10 years, the subscription model for online games would be basically dead, supplanted by our model. I'm not sure I believe it'll happen so quickly or so completely, but it was an interesting prediction.
Other interesting sessions today that I went to included Will Wrights (SimCity, The Sims, and the upcoming "Spore", a game based almost entirely on algorithmic content) presentation on, well, whatever the hell he wanted to talk about. There were around 2500 people there, and I swear, we all treat him like he's a rock star (with justification). He gave this odd but very compelling talk on the design process he goes through that ranged from human resource problems to astrobiology. Will Wright is simply operating on a different level from every other game designer on the planet. He's brilliant. It must be really gratifying to be essentially the designer in the industyr that can make literally whatever he wants. Can you imagine any other designer being given a huge budget by EA to make a game that sets out to allow players to "mess with the evolutionary process"? Freaking awesome. The guy is a national treasure.
Also attended a round table today on competitive PvP systems focusing on larger groups (think the sieges in Lineage or Shadowbane), but it wasn't particularly useful, as expected. A few text MUDs are still so far ahead of graphical MUDs in terms of this kind of thing (including ours) that we mainly didn't participate in the roundtable. Anything we could say on the matter is so far ahead of anything they can conceive of being practical (as they're operating with a much larger audience than any text MUD, and that is simply harder to design for) that it would require tons of explanation for it to not sound ridiculous to these guys. It's not at all that they're dumb - quite the opposite in fact: There was the producer for City of Heroes/City of Villains, one of the lead guys from Dark age of Camelot, a guy from Xbox Live Arcade, etc. They are smart, competent, reasonable people. They just have no exposure to the level of depth that text MUDs can take things to. They don't even realize that their games have taken what has existed for quite a long time and actually dumbed it down rather than advanced the state of the art.
--matt
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