Smedley’s Keynote

One of his main points was cross-platform gaming. Being a Sony guy he used the example of someone playing a game on their PSP with some clanmates over in Taiwan who were playing on their cell phones and then coming home and playing on their PS3. He believes this is a very real possibility in the near future and that game developers need to begin developing the technology to allow gamers to play across platforms like this. However, in doing so he points out that to succeed in doing this, developers will need to avoid forcing their customers to buy additional hardware beyond what they already have to do this. For example, hard drives are still going to be optional on the next-gen consoles and to reach the most users, the games that are developed will have to not require a hard drive.

The way this can be accomplished is to create games that stream the data to the client, which can be very thin, rather than the networked storage model currently employed by many games. He believes the most important thing in MMOGs is the persistence of the characters and as a long as a player can log out from one system and log in another system to the same game with the same character name, general look (cell phone graphics obviously won’t be the same as the PC) and level/items/skill, etc that there is a huge market and opportunity for developers to capitalize on.

Of course, the platform creators will butt heads in many respects if this technology ever comes about. I can’t imagine the Xbox360 will allow players to connect and play with people who game from their PS3. So while I do think this is sort of cross-platform gaming is a real possibility I think only the hardware manufacturing companies that also produce games, such as Sony and Microsoft, will be able to fully utitilize cross-platform gaming and that third party studios will be hard pressed to build games with these capabilities that make full use of all of the systems out there.

He also touched upon the changing business models and notes that the subscription based business model is tough. It has already been chewed up and spit out by Korea where there are only two subscription based games, Lineage II and World of Warcraft. The rest use much different business models for their games. Only in the US are game companies, for the most part, clinging to the subscription based model for the games. One example of a game that does not is Runescape, which Smedley had never heard about until his son told him about it. Runescape is actually THE MOST PLAYED MMORPG in the world right now with over 3.5 million players. The reason it is not on most major gaming companies’ radar is because it does not follow the subscription based model for the majority of the players. Most play through the thin java based client and play for free. It spread through word of mouth and is a very popular game among the youth (think middle school) of America today.

Overall I think the keynote was pretty decent. He touched on a lot of the issues facing game developers today, mentioning the changing business models, briefly touching on real money trading, and the changing technologies and possible future for MMOGing. With more and more companies entering market and WoW raising the bar, gamers, their customers, will only be expecting more and better and its up to these developers to provide us with it in order to survive.