Everyone recognizes the virtues of studying precursors, fixing their mistakes, and making a clone to try out new wrinkles on established ideas. And of course, category leaders inevitably spawn imitations. Of course, every new game builds, to greater or lesser degree, on earlier designs. You can’t tell one community from another.Īnd increasingly, you can’t distinguish the games they sell.Ĭasual games look alike, not just because all the portals carry the same games (though they do), but because the portals encourage straight knockoffs of current hits. But portal social scenes are, at best, low-key. does better, with player blogs and pages of kid and dog pictures. Sometimes, these use off-the-shelf middleware like GameFrame.
Leaving aside the unadorned shopping sites, a few portals make cosmetic attempts at community building: chat, buddy lists, forums, profiles and avatars. Phil Steinmeyer Top 9″>estimates today’s market at around $200 million annually.
Some other companies are growing the same way, like all those housing sprawls. Miniclip claims 27 million unique users each month. RealNetworks just announced record fourth quarter and 2005 results, including year-on-year games revenue growth in Q4 of 52%, to $15.7 million annual games revenue was $56.3 million, a 63% increase over 2004. No one knows how big the casual downloadable market is, but it’s growing. On the big portals, at any hour, day or night, tens or hundreds of thousands of players gather to play Hearts, Spades, Canasta, chess, backgammon and a zillion shareware match-three games. Some big portals are mere front ends for faceless distributors like Oberon Media or Boonty. These lookalike sites are “portals” because they aggregate dozens or hundreds of casual games from many indie designers. You get the same vibe off the most popular gaming sites in the English- speaking world, the casual game portals: EA’s Pogo, Miniclip, Yahoo! Games, Microsoft’s MSN Games, RealNetworks’ GameHouse, Big Fish Games and many more. Such ugly, sterile, crass 1950s Chamber of Commerce concrete-asphalt provincial whitebread booboisie burgs count as “communities” only if you believe their marketing literature. Built by developers without taste or imagination, these soul-dead burbclaves ignore the human-centered design principles in Christopher Alexander’s landmark A Pattern Language. A Texas subdivision looks like Connecticut, which looks like Idaho and Georgia. The streets are twisty mazes, the houses endless reshufflings of a dozen bland elements, their plans generated randomly in some nameless architect’s CAD/CAM program. There’s nowhere to meet, and no reason the nearest market/bar/bus stop/anything is two miles away. After five years here, I know the names of the couple next door, but nothing about anyone else on this street.
I live in one such suburban wasteland in northwestern Austin, Texas. Many online game “communities” feel like those housing subdivisions spreading around every American city like carcinomas on a pancreas.
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