Connected Games Today

In today’s online world connected games are not simply games as products but rather games as a service.

Connected Games offer developers a way of bypassing several layers of content aggregators and distributors and come closer to their target audience and hence are an attractive proposition for most development studios.

With the massive success of online games, ranging from games such as EverQuest to Bejeweled to Pogo and Shockwave, it's pretty clear that this opportunity is real and here to stay. Online features are now starting to take hold in the console wars. It's no longer a question of whether the console world will embrace online, but how much. For the independent developer, the online world offers opportunities ranging from contrarian business models, to a less risky way to try out new ideas, to simply a way to work on different and cool projects.



But the independent developer is at a strategic disadvantage when it comes to the online world. Without access to research on what's actually happening in online, a developer can quickly find that any investments made will not get the returns needed.

One reason that connected games do not currently operate as well as standalone games is that MMG developers do not have a development platform on which to write and test their games.

Connected Games today come in various extremely distinct flavors;

· Online Persistent Worlds (Second Life)
· Massively Multiplayer Online Games (e.g. WOW, Everquest, Maple Story)
· Online ‘User Generated Content’ Community Games (e.g. Sims, Spore)
· Online Trading Card Games (Magic the Gathering, Urban Rivals)
· Online Virtual Economy Games (e.g. sharekhan)
· Online Multiplayer Ladder Games (BF1942, CS, AOE)
· Online Multiplayer Casual Games (Toribash)
· Online Casual Game Leader boards (Bejewled, East of the Web)
· Online Game Arcades (Real, Popcap)
· Online Game Stores (XBLA, NGage2, Wii Ware)
· And more…

Perhaps it’s not surprising that they can share a lot of common features despite having vastly different Experience, Gameplay and Narratives:

· User Personal Information Account Database & Hosting
· User Gateway & Portal
· Online World, Dungeons & Game Lobbies hosting
· User Statistics & Inventory Database
· Ladder & Leader boards
· User Billing & Subscription Database & Hosting
· DRM & Security and Online Authentication
· Anti-Cheating Software
· Online Community Services (Web pages, Forum, Chat, Blog etc)
· User Inventory
· Secure Online Transaction Services (Cash & Inventory)
· Online Store
· Front End Client Application (2D,3D)
· Application, Demo, Content, Patch & updates hosting & delivery
· Networking APIs
· Network & Bandwidth Management and Provision
· Server Hardware & Maintenance

It is unsurprising precisely because all the above elements other than sharing a common architecture with the Game’s Experience, Gameplay and Narrative and providing value-adds have very little in common with the process of game development. This throws up further barriers that smaller developers struggle to overcome.

Connected games so far have also suffered from conventional network infrastructure problems that have developed as quickly as the number of online gamers. Legacy servers based on inflexible, monolithic architectures are the source of the problems. As a result, MMG developers struggle with complex network and software balance issues, which distracts them from developing the best games possible.

Game publishers, in turn, must manage and support homegrown technologies for each game. This limits their ability to build effective, repeatable, and reliable infrastructures that support multiple connected games. They are forced to a high price for poor reliability and support costs, even as valuable revenue diminishes, thanks to server maintenance and reconfiguration that shuts down or slows down entire games.

Performance and reliability issues severely impact an online gamer’s experience and compromises their ability to interact with online friends. To avoid long delays to attach to popular game servers or the need to log in and out of MMG levels, developers must restrict the size of game worlds per server—which limits the players’ experience and satisfaction level in another way.