The gaming industry is continuously experiencing various types of change, but the change that excites me most is how online connectivity is altering the way we think of our console, which in turn has affected how games have evolved. These changes have morphed gaming communities from their origins as basic fan sites into full-blown destinations and stand-alone products.
There was a time when once the game went into the box and left the factory, the game maker’s job was over. Those days, however, are long gone. Today, when a game ships, it is the second step in this evolution -- the game is going to take on a life of its own for each gamer, and the publisher needs to be active in order to keep up with this change. Downloadable content needs to be created to help evolve the experience, but it needs to be in the vein of what gamers want and in sections of the game being played most. Meanwhile, online gameplay is going to create competition, so games require leaderboards, player profiles, and a match-making system. If the game is particularly difficult, it should also have easily-accessible cheats, hints and tips to help gamers get through it.
moscalloutStatistics are the key to maximizing all the assets produced in this new evolutionary stage of gaming./moscalloutGame-specific communities often form after games ship to help support this kind of content. Sometimes these communities have the full support of the publisher, and other times they do not, but whether or not this support is there, the learning is. Gamers are very vocal and they will tell publishers (and other gamers) what they want to see in, well, just about everything. In order to achieve the highest level of success for a single game or an entire franchise, publishers need to stay active on these sites to build out the second stage of a game’s life.
The community site often becomes another level of the game. The more tools these sites have, the better that level becomes. The standard features, such as forums, hints and tips, and news, are becoming commoditized and therefore, new features should be looked at and built, and extensions into other media should be explored. As it stands now, most game publishers embrace community sites to some degree, providing a level of support that may range from a cursory provision of assets to a full-fledged cooperation in building and maintaining full leaderboards.
Gaming is, in large part, about competition, and that means having the ability to measure oneself against other gamers, be it head-to-head or with other measurable statistics. It is precisely these statistics that are the roadmap to that next step in the evolutionary process. At GameStrata, we work with statistical support for a number of publishers (and their players) through our third-party middleware -- but this puts us in a very challenging position, because the publisher typically believes that their gaming data is valuable, and therefore they would like to keep it in-house. Because of resource constraints, however, what ultimately happens time and again is that the data gets unused and is wasted. Ay, there’s the rub: internal support for full statistical tracking and leaderboards is usually the first thing to get stripped down -- or cut entirely -- after a game ships, as game companies turn their focus elsewhere, adjust budgets, try and make up for lost revenue, or compensate for falling behind schedule when trying to ship the title.