"The future of massively multiplayer gaming"
27 October 2005, Texas, Austin, Austin Game Conference
30 M dollars now for each title.
Vision:
At starbucks, you are playing untold legends in your psp.
Your friends in tokyo are playing via their cellphones, crawling the same dungeons.
Go home. Firing up your nxt gen console.
Your character is exactly where you left him. Same name, same look, but more beautiful.
Your fiends are online, wants to go on a raid.
Wireless headset is on, you have done your raid, having a virtual beer. Decide to go to bed. Wondering how your friends can play 24 hours
At work you get an instant message, your guild need help.
The version you have on the pc is stramed to you, only 2 mb, realtime streaming.
"we want you to be able to log in to your vw on any device anywhere in the world. It will be the future. Playing you character anywhere in the world on any device."
Imortant thing: persitence of you character across all platforms.
/*omg, that is so along the lines w the mmro wp, except they dont incoroporate rl locations*/
Thechnical herdles will be major.
Procedural environments.
Datasize is key.
30 M dollars is the lowbar for the high end stuff.
Proceduralize textures, look good on any platforms.
Ppl will be communicating, voice.
EQ for ps2: can play without keyboard, without harddrive.
Thats optional on next version too, the harddrive.
So what to do: make games that doesnt require harddrives.
Communication number one goal of any online game.
New breed of ppl playing on consoles. Interesting examples. A kid playing on xboxlive
(video clip, actual recoring)
Kid screaming to his mum... Suspension of disbelief eh.
Toontown way of doing it, restrictions of who to talk to.
Datastorage: how do. Q. Challenge.
Ppl will need to have bb connections.
What about ppl who play on the same servers.
FF- solution where ppl can play across servers. (//did they? I had to get stuff from BalSog in order to play w my friends. Maybe that was it then.)
DC Comics Online, action oriented MMO. Perfect for console, but need to adress how PC players will play, and gameplay they want. Think through how autoatack would work on different platforms. Conloles mean psp too. Wireless.
Nxt year, focus on the online side.
The dream of playing in LA and in Tokyo is possble _now_.
Persistence.
The major factor in online games.
- Character name
- Overall look and consistent art style
- Level, item and skills
Speaker reference to self: different playstyles in different genres: FPS/RPG, usning same character name, but constrained to game type.
Buisness side.
Will make a free MMO.
Works if possible to get income from surrounding things. Added value services. "Station Exchange" RNTs. Sales of virtual items player to player. Real bisness running on 2 servers, revenue stream growing.
In future, might, depending on the game, put it in.
33% of player base wanted it, 30% was ok with it, rest negative.
They think it will work especially good on consoles. Not used to play for money on consoles. That would be a way to getting in console players slowly.
Runexxx, low tech javabased, viral,3.5 M ppl play it regularly (each week) They use a buisness model alike the one presented here.
/*ouch. The biggest will win this. On the other hand, there may be room for indie stuff too. Depending on how play communies develep, individual plans of community leaders combined w mass group behavior.*/
Digital item sales.
Huge in asia... Soe trying to build it into gamedesignframeworks.
70% of sales is done digitally.
Market in china, prediction it will be 3x us market in a few years.
Offer playstiles that fit different cultures.
Just localizing doesnt work anymore.
/* which in iteslf is extremely intersting. A lithmus paper for regional cultures. What about cultures that cut through globally, the layers we have in the population? */
Joint venture w company in tawain. Learn from them how to make games for asian market. Doing a game. Will launch it in US as well.
Think globally from day 1.
Thought to leave:
Think world wide
Think cross platform
Potentially this could be a larger market than single player games market, especially in asia.
Photos from the speech
