ID:138362
 
I only have some vague thoughts here, but I thought I'd start getting them out there to see if they kick off anything. The important point in all this is a belief that Dantom should not be passive about waiting for developers to do an interesting set of games, but should actively work to make it happen.

Some assumptions:

a) The ultimate goal of BYOND is to have lots of players playing a variety of games which make money through advertising or through player contribution.

b) The goal of Dantom is to have lots of developers creating a variety of games using a model that provides income to the developer and to Dantom.

These assumptions imply the following:

c) Developers need to be attracted/motivated to use the system.

d) A simple, provable business model needs to be established and easily participated in by the developer.

e) Developers need to create games that people will keep coming back to, or that continually attract a new audience.

Looking at the assumptions and the implications, the first step would seem to boil down to:

Goal #1: Create an infrastructure that encourages developers to create addictive games that produce income.

My hypothesis is that all our energy should be devoted to Goal #1. Obviously this isn't rocket science, and Dantom has already stated an intention to concentrate on this sort of thing.

Here are some thoughts on possible ways to do this:

Examine the state of the industry and decide on the model most likely to make money within the cultural constraints of BYOND (that is, no gambling or porn, cutting out the major successful internet money making schemes!)

Is this model lots of addictive free games leading to advertiser revenue?

Is it in-depth RPG-style games that people are willing to pay a monthly fee for?

Is it email-oriented multi-player games?

Is it some combo of these?

Develop a list of game types that need to be provided.

This falls out of the earlier item. For example, lets say we decide something like this:

- We need at least 10 popular free "standards" that people expect to see with any gaming service. These include Backgammon, checkers, chess, whatever else you find at Yahoo games and pogo.com.

- We need at least two monthly-charge RPGs. (This is a LOT of work, and to be really successful would probably require the coordinated efforts of a team, especially to be done in any reasonable time.)

- We need at least 5 fee-based email-driven turn-based games similar to the Hasbro model (the Deadron agenda rears its head!)

Find ways to encourage the development of the desired set of games.

While paying people for providing a certain game is a possibility, I don't think it's necessary. Instead, motivation should be provided through popularity.

For example, the gaming portal could be set up to focus around the, say, three areas of games that we decide we need (Classics, whatever, and whatever).

There could be a couple of levels of motivation: Dantom deciding to make a game one of a limited number of "featured games" -- for example, say in each category, the portal features five games. Other games are available, but not as prominently and not actively "advertised" by the system. Under this scenario we should also think up other benefits for featured games.

To get on the featured games list you need to either provide a game that impresses Dantom enough to warrant it, or that garners enough popularity among players to deserve it. And for certain game types (say the email games), to be on the featured list you have to have a revenue model.

The featured games themselves are ranked, purely by player popularity, based on number of unique players and number of games played and player ranking (players indicating how good they think the game is, like reviewing a book).

This implies a system for keeping track of unique players and times played -- or whatever criteria is used. I think this is VERY important. If you look at Amazon, they have gotten huge writer involvement by having popularity criteria for books and for people providing reviews. Individuals contribute hundreds of reviews not to get money, but to get recognized as a "Top 100" or "Top 1000" Amazon reviewer.

Find high-level ways to motivate players.

The biggest player motivation is of course having great games to play. But, as with Amazon and others, Dantom can provide important additional incentives.

This would probably be player ranking systems, within games and across games.

What kinds of global rankings might players get? Maybe they get points for most time spent playing the games, or for playing the largest variety of games. Maybe bug reports garner points.

Recruiting new players would garner the most points.

Then, just as with the games, we'd have "featured players" who receive recognition and maybe special gifts (say, a special sword in Cerulea if they are a Cerulea player).


This is where I'm at right now.

What do you think?

Does this inspire any other ideas?
I don't have time to write a long reply right now, but I think there's a lot of potential in those ideas.

One important consideration is that, however the set of "featured games" is promoted, pride of place should be given to those people who are paying for Dantom hosting and/or buying the book. (Unless they specifically request that you don't draw attention to them, which I doubt will happen very often.) This is just personal opinion, of course, but it makes sense to me... a nice "value-added" incentive.

Find high-level ways to motivate players.

The biggest player motivation is of course having great games to play. But, as with Amazon and others, Dantom can provide important additional incentives.

This would probably be player ranking systems, within games and across games.

What kinds of global rankings might players get? Maybe they get points for most time spent playing the games, or for playing the largest variety of games. Maybe bug reports garner points.
Recruiting new players would garner the most points.

Kind of like AllAdvantage, right? First of all, it would be VERY hard to track, what with lots of keys... Second of all, it might give advantages to people, whereas people who don't want to do so much labor getting referrals will lose out. AllAdvantage doesn't care if people make $200 a month, because the company itself makes millions from advertisers. They even seem to enjoy drawing inactivity fees from accounts who just use it fairly sparingly (mine in particular, which made me cancel immediately, the bastards).

I'll stop hate speech about AllAdvantage, though, because I have to keep in-topic. =P

Then, just as with the games, we'd have "featured players" who receive recognition and maybe special gifts (say, a special sword in Cerulea if they are a Cerulea player).

I don't know if I speak for Zilal when I say this, because I don't know how her twisted mind works (heh), but I'm pretty sure she wouldn't want to give unfair advantages to anyone just because they are well recognized in the community. Otherwise, I'd be one nasty newbie killer! =)
In response to Guy T.
On 10/5/00 2:19 pm Guy T. wrote:
I don't have time to write a long reply right now, but I think there's a lot of potential in those ideas.

One important consideration is that, however the set of "featured games" is promoted, pride of place should be given to those people who are paying for Dantom hosting and/or buying the book. (Unless they specifically request that you don't draw attention to them, which I doubt will happen very often.) This is just personal opinion, of course, but it makes sense to me... a nice "value-added" incentive.

This is the way to think!

And I think it's totally fair for Dantom to say "We have limited ability to promote games, so those who are helping us eat are going to get priority."
In response to Deadron
And I think it's totally fair for Dantom to say "We have limited ability to promote games, so those who are helping us eat are going to get priority."

Naw, they don't have to eat. It's true! They come from Mars... I saw their spaceship.

Where are you taking me? No, I'm not insane! It was the butterfly! Aaagh! Hey, that hurrrrrrrt... *thump*

* Spam, brought to you live from Port Moody Secondary School by Spuzzum himself... uh, sorry. I couldn't help it.
I'm in agreement with the whole of your mail, but the following is the only part I feel I can really add to at the moment.

[snip]
Goal #1: Create an infrastructure that encourages developers to create addictive games that produce income.
[snip]

I posted a couple of months ago about my ideas for creating an rpg development environment, rather than actually trying to do a fully featured game. There was some support for this, but I have unfortunately been away for a while since then and under achieved :)

What I was hoping to create was the basic structure for building BYOND worlds and then let others use this to actually do the maps, graphics, set the variables and add their own code. This would not only greatly reduce the start up time for newbies, but would also make BYOND even more accessable.

However, the idea arose (a certain Canadian) that it would be possible to take advantage of a base structure to allow easy movement of mobs between worlds, both directly and via a central world hub/portal, allowing players to adventure through multiple worlds.

I now have a character/skill/stat system coded that allows player movement between worlds, whilst allowing similar skill transfer, memory of all encountered skills and concepts for most of the problem areas. Is there any more support for this, be it coding or ideas?
In response to Al
On 10/5/00 3:14 pm Al wrote:
I posted a couple of months ago about my ideas for creating an rpg development environment...
What I was hoping to create was the basic structure for building BYOND worlds and then let others use this to actually do the maps, graphics, set the variables and add their own code. This would not only greatly reduce the start up time for newbies, but would also make BYOND even more accessable.

I totally agree -- and I did months of work on an RPG project that I finally flaked on, wanting faster progress.

As I believe Dantom has already been thinking, for each important kind of game, we should develop some infrastructure for quickly creating that kind of game.

Fast initial progress is an important part to attracting developers -- especially since you need to overcome some likely initial skepticism due to the graphics model.
In response to Deadron
especially since you need to overcome some likely initial skepticism due to the graphics model.

Such as from a certain vulgar individual who shall remain nameless, for the children's sake.
Oh my this is frustrating. I have made two attempts to respond to this post, and both times my computer froze after I had written what seemed to be numerous pages. I think your post sucked up all my swap, Deadron! So much for Linux stability.

Anyway, try #3. I'm quite defeated now, so this won't be so long. You bring up a number of interesting points that will take some time to fully absorb. Here's what struck me upon first (and then, after crashes, second and third) reading:

b) The goal of Dantom is to have lots of developers creating a variety of games using a model that provides income to the developer and to Dantom.

I like this goal especially. I consider the developer the underdog in a way, since he/she (or, in our case, he/Zilal) is most likely doing this out of their own passion and without the backing of people with money (BTW: if any of you have said backing, please email me!) That is very similar to our situation, so naturally I feel that the developers should be rewarded too. In all likelyhood, this reward will probably be negliegable for all but the best of games, but I think the fact that it is plausible is nice. So that's where we're going with the BYONDime and banner ideas.

This falls out of the earlier item. For example, lets say we decide something like this:

- We need at least 10 popular free "standards" that people expect to see with any gaming service. These include Backgammon, checkers, chess, whatever else you find at Yahoo games and pogo.com.

Yes. Our current goal is to make a "central portal" on the web that basically services as both the hub and pager. Users will connect to this portal by default when they use DreamSeeker, thus averting the current "what the hell do I do now?" condition. The portal be organized by game category, of which these "standards" should be prominately featured. We need to make it a priority to quicky duplicate the most popular games (hearts, poker, checkers, etc). Actually, I think this will be a fun effort and have been meaning to give it a try but have of course been bogged down by feature creep. Now that that is over (crosses fingers), I'll look into it. I'm hoping that we can also provide a number of other games that are more difficult to do in Java (and thus not featured on common portals). A lot of the standards are very well suited to BYOND, so there's no reason we shouldn't create them, especially now that the feature-set should be relatively stable.

I don't think we have to worry about a system of direct revenue for these games. Their purpose is merely to draw people in, to the point where we have a constant flow of users at all hours (permanent GoBfest), much like the other standards. I'm a big believer in the notion that a big audience speaks for itself, since it can be used to direct advertising and as a pipeline into other games, including pay-for-play ones if that evolves. I think with such a system everyone wins. And the easiest way out for us would be to show these figures to an investor, propose our schemes, and get some funding so we don't have to worry about daily finances. I don't really care if we get super rich off this or not; I just want enough so that we can keep it going and support ourselves. (On a personal note, because of the lack of income social functions are currently somewhat embarrassing to me; having the backing of some multi-million dollar investor would certainly help the self esteem!)

- We need at least two monthly-charge RPGs. (This is a LOT of work, and to be really successful would probably require the coordinated efforts of a team, especially to be done in any reasonable time.)

Yes. I think the mud/RPG/MtG genre is huge, and well-suited towards this system. I like Al's idea of having a common library or system to manage games of this nature. Dan has this nifty idea about a system for typical pen & paper games (which are currently done through email or the web). We could host them and get some money that way. It would be a community effort to provide the "campaigns", but hopefully the system could be developed enough so that little programming was involved and we could thus attract the ambitious artsy type.

- We need at least 5 fee-based email-driven turn-based games similar to the Hasbro model (the Deadron agenda rears its head!)

I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with this. With the new account you'll be able to do things with sendmail and BYOND that you hadn't though possible.

This implies a system for keeping track of unique players and times played -- or whatever criteria is used. I think this is VERY important. If you look at Amazon, they have gotten huge writer involvement by having popularity criteria for books and for people providing reviews. Individuals contribute hundreds of reviews not to get money, but to get recognized as a "Top 100" or "Top 1000" Amazon reviewer.

I think this is an excellent idea, and not difficult to do. It would also help organize the games better ("most popular", "featured", etc). You are correct about the involvement angle. I think people like getting acknowledgement, even if there isn't any revenue involved. We will be extending this to the referral system too, such that when a new user downloads BYOND or uses an account on the web the referring person gets some sort of credit.

I also like your idea of tracking "power users". People will undoubtedly find ways to scam the system, but we can probably come up with some such scheme to make it at least difficult. I really want users to feel like they belong to a community, especially in the early stages when things are so wide-open.

Well, I'm spent. More later!
In response to Tom H.
On 10/5/00 8:03 pm Tom H. wrote:
Oh my this is frustrating. I have made two attempts to respond to this post, and both times my computer froze after I had written what seemed to be numerous pages.


Oh wow. I HATE HATE HATE retyping thoughtful posts, or redoing involved work. So much so that at times I am willing to trash a project because of it (one reason I'm now a big fan of source control -- which wouldn't have helped you much here!)


(BTW: if any of you have said backing, please email me!)

Well, if you're a watcher of the stock market, you might have noticed that half my money vanished a few days ago. Oh well!


I'm hoping that we can also provide a number of other games that are more difficult to do in Java (and thus not featured on common portals).

Ah, great idea. I think I'll start a topic on this cause I'm curious what it implies.


(On a personal note, because of the lack of income social functions are currently somewhat embarrassing to me; having the backing of some multi-million dollar investor would certainly help the self esteem!)

What, you don't say you're part of a web start-up? Anyway, I consider it a personal mission to get this problem fixed!


I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with this. With the new account you'll be able to do things with sendmail and BYOND that you hadn't though possible.

Well given that I initially just wanna rip off the Hasbro concept, it won't actually be that fancy -- just email to inform the next player that it's their turn, with a .dms file included so they can double-click in email to play.

However, I do happen to have been playing an entirely email-based multi-player game called Singularity, and it might be fun to try something like that.

Okay, off to start a topic on what kinds of games we should consider.