Most Amazing Form of Customer-Led Innovation: Where Online Games are Going

If you want to see the future of your business, take a look at what's going on in the online mulitplayer gaming industry. My hero in this context is Will Wright, creator of SimCity and the Sims--now in its 6th year of spawning and increasingly vibrant customer community and ecosystem. (Sims even has a French stamp in its honor!)

Having watched customers create characters, pets, houses, cities, furniture, objects, etc. in the Sims, Will quickly realized that the next generation of online games could be even-more customer-driven. Coupling that experience with the harsh reality that the complexity and cost of designing online games is escalating out of control, Wright and a small team of crack-game developers have taken a completely different tack in creating Wright's next blockbuster game, code-named Spore. Here's the seminal article by Dave "Fargo" Kosak that describes what Will Wright and his cohorts are up to.

GameSpy: Will Wright  Presents Spore... and a New Way to Think About Games It's a "MUST READ!"...

Then, this week, another article reinforced this point. In Tomorrow's Games, Designed by Players as They Play , CNet's John Borland describes similar presentations by Will Wright and by XBox team head, J. Allard at the Entertainment Gathering Conference taking place in LA this week.

In this illustration from Spore, the characters you create inherit their behavior from the behavior of the components you snap together. In this case, both tails and mouths can be used to grasp and manipulate objects.

Based on the amount of buzz Spore is already receiving a year before its launch, it's bound to change the way that multiplayer games are designed and produced. Customers/gamers will create the characters, behavior, vehicles, civilizations and worlds for the games they play!

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Good points, Dana--I am not saying that MOST customers will get become involved in co-designing games. If only a small percentage of customers become game co-designers--say 10% of total players--it absolutely changes the complexion/content of the game for all.

There are over 10 million people in the world currently playing multi-player online games. That says that up to 1 million gamers might be seduced into co-designing the games they play. This would dwarf the number of professional developers/designers who are currently involved in creating content, characters, and decor in these games--letting the professional developers focus on creating the underlying behavior and logic of the games as well as honing the tools that end-customers can use to strut their stuff and make these games more personal, idiosyncratic and interesting.

Re: your question about representative demographics, here are some interesting statistics from Edward Castronova's seminal book, Synthetic Worlds.

Although he doesn't provide a breakdown of demographics for players of MMPORG's only in the book, according to Edward Castronova,

- “The people who play video or computer games in the U.S. alone, now represent over 50% of the population over age 6.
- The average game player is 29 years old
- 43% of game players are women
- 97% of games are purchased by adults over age 18
- 60% of parents play games with their children at least once a month ”

(From: Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, Edward Castronova, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 57)

Yes, it's true that "shoot em up" games abound..and Spore will contain its share of "shoot em up" capabilities... But it's also true, according to Castronova, that many players prefer to relate to other players--not just to annihilate them.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Patty

[Dana]

Not sure that voyeur/browser based behavior types, at any given age, relative to the experience, will be doing much designing; isn't that why they play, rather than design to begin with? Yes I get the intrigue to the adult participants, but again, is the mass of audience, adult, or, younger? The buzz here may not be overblown at some future time, but for the foreseeable future, isn't the lack of such rudimentary needs as bandwidth going to be a factor? SIMS is fun, for a prescribed length and then it becomes less fun, simply allowing a change of scenery or behavior doesn't really pep it up much- yes, theoretically it should, but when we actually measure it in the marketplace of the real my doubts include such things as why shoot em ups are so popular versus non shoot em ups like SIMS?
Don't know any final verdicts, just looking over the content of Borlands article and Kosaks article my reaction is that the scene may be skewed and lack objective balance in the actual marketplace?