Differentiation Between Product and Service

Another theme you'll hear over and over again is: online games aren't just a product; they are also a service . This is another one of those "Well, duh!" statements that many in the industry give lip service to but fail to appreciate at the gut level.

In effect, developing any online game means developing two competencies: the game and the host site ”those processes and procedures by which the game will be managed after launch. This is something few publishers and almost no developers have experience with. They are used to building a game and shipping it out to retail, doing a few bug fixes and posting the patches for them on the Internet, and then moving on to the next project within a few weeks or months.

To date, few development teams have thought in a comprehensive way about how and by whom a game will be run after it is launched. The service portion of a system is composed of several pieces, including all the components of the live team, which includes player relations, community relations, and the live development team, as well as network operations and the host hardware, bandwidth, and an NOC to monitor the machines. They're just building a game; apparently, someone else is going to make all the rest of that stuff magically appear. This attitude is changing, however. Some high-profile miscues since 1997 have begun to drive home the fact that being fully prepared and able to provide a good service, in all its components , is a huge retention factor for subscriber-based games.

And this is where differentiation comes in. It is becoming harder and harder to differentiate games based on mechanics, art, gameplay, ownership of items and "real estate," and socialization factors; developers are beginning to load up online games with those features, whether or not they understand why they are popular. The key differentiator in the future, then, is most likely to be the quality from service, from server and game client stability, right on down to response and resolution time on player-submitted support email.

If you walk away from this book understanding this one point, your chances of having a successful online game just doubled .

Use a License or Go with an Original Theme?

Licensed properties have always been a draw for game development, and some huge licenses are currently being redeveloped for the online world, as evidenced by the movie Star Wars and Tolkien's work in Lord of the Rings . Historically, publishers have not done well with licenses for retail games; they always seem to under-perform compared to their presumed potential.

This is liable to change in the online world because licenses are, at their essence, shared experiences. Devotees of a license want to gather with other devotees and share the experience; this is what fan clubs and conventions are all about. Obtaining a mass-market license for an online game has some good advantages, then.

However, there are benefits and risks to both sides.

Benefits and Risks of a License

Benefits include the following:

• You have a ready-made audience for the game. There is already an awareness built up in the marketplace , which may stretch beyond your game's niche. For example, there will be some people who will be pushed to buy their first PC or upgrade their existing one based on the chance to play a character in the Star Wars mythos when they learn that they can interact with perfect strangers who are playing some other character, especially one that made a big impression on them in a gender- related , endocrine-system way when they first saw the character in one of the Star Wars movies. This fact comes with its own set of plusses and minuses, but it makes the point that a widely known license has a chance of drawing in brand-new customers who may quickly become moderate or even hard- core enthusiasts .

• There are smaller acquisition costs per player due to market awareness of the license.

• You have a pre-fabricated universe to play in (which may include years of feature-balancing, if the license is a board or role-playing game, such as Dungeons & Dragons ).

Risks include:

• A license comes with limits imposed by the rights-holder. This is especially true in the case of mass-market properties such as Star Trek , where the owner tends to be very protective of the license and sets a "canon" of what can and cannot be done in the universe.

• The potential subscriber already has certain expectations about the license, which can be extremely difficult to manage.

• Licenses normally require royalty payments, which limit the margin you have to play with.

• You are trying to use a license that is character based vs. "world" based. Using LucasArts' Star Wars universe as the basis of a PW works; trying to use Obi-Wan Kenobi as a starting point doesn't.

Benefits and Risks of an Original Product

Benefits include:

• It has no pesky license to limit what you can and cannot do in the game.

• It has no royalty payments to increase margins.

Risks include:

• There is no market awareness or built-in audience, meaning higher marketing costs.

• It is far tougher to market an unknown quantity than to piggyback on a license.

On the whole, then, obtaining a third-party license is beneficial only if it is a well-known brand name that translates as a "world," not just as a specific character or a closed story with an ending. If one can be obtained, though, it can be a huge boost; Star Wars Galaxies from Sony Online is ample proof of that.

On the other hand, building your own brand on familiar themes can create much the same effect, depending on the effectiveness of the marketing and just how much risk you're willing to take to incur heavier marketing costs.