Web communities - the missed opportunity for game developers

The real benefit of Web 2.0 is that you can harness the skills of thousands or millions of users for free to create content and a community that would be impossibly expensive to develop commercially. Most of those users will create dross. Much of their content will be incomplete, riddled with bugs or dull to play.

So what? A social network will quickly help the good stuff to rise to the top. If MySpace could become the place for independent musicians to find commercial success, where is the gaming equivalent? Few developers are committed to helping share their content across the web in this way, and are stuck in a historic mentality of two year development times, tightly controlled content and a rapidly-obsolescing distribution model.

Don't get me wrong. I am not forecasting the demise of boxed products, the end of GAME or the independent retailers. For two decades, games have always bloated to fill the available storage space, and there's no reason to imagine that this will change. With 50 Gb Blu-ray discs on the way, developers will add video, artwork, sound and extras to create games of a size that will put off all but the most hardened downloaders. But offering gamers an extended experience that integrates with the boxed product will strengthen your brand and create a direct communication with your community.

Monetising that community will be challenging. Micro-transactions, in game advertising, sponsorship, possibly even betting will all play a role. It is likely that we have not yet established the best business model for this world, and that many different models will co-exist. The real opportunities exist for those developers and publishers who change their mindset from a product-led approach to a consumer-led approach. These companies will be adaptable, interactive and help their gamers get a real sense of ownership of the content.

I am not saying that the high-quality single-player narrative is over. It's just that the world has changed and the single player experience is only one of the experiences that gaming can offer. The games industry knows better than anyone how to reward players for little actions, how to draw them into an activity and make it addictive, how to create an entirely new environment for them to interact in and with. I'm not even saying that the MMOs are the only games of the future - these community opportunities will exist outside the game world as well as in it.

What I am asking is why are we in the games industry so slow to grab this opportunity now? The only thing that I do know is that someone will find a way to connect these communities, and profit from their efforts.

This article originally appeared in the July 2007 edition of Develop