In case you may not have noticed, games have slowly been moving towards being services rather than stand alone products. New releases, from the biggest blockbuster to the lowliest PSN of Xbox Live Arcade game, are now frowned upon if they don’t include some sort of internet-based shenanigans either through online multiplayer, or even just simple leaderboards to compare your scores with your mates.
World of Warcraft and Runescape are the most obvious examples of games that are services. In fact everything from Modern Warfare 2 to Shadox Complex has some sort of online service incorporated into them.
“Service is becoming everything,” underlined Valve’s Jason Holtman during his Montreal International Game Summit keynote. “It’s going to impact every line of business and every line as you think about your game.”
Of course Steam is the perfect example of games delivered as services. They boast 20 million users worldwide and a catalogue of 950 games, all of which are automatically updated when Steam is running on your PC.
These include titles like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, both of which have been constantly updated since they launched. Team Fortress 2 alone has seen 97 updates that include new content as well as patches and fixes, and all provided for free.
“The direct customer relationship means now that you shouldn’t think of your product as ‘finished’ — a single piece that goes out monolithically. You should think of your product or the game you’re making as an ongoing service to your customer,” Holtman adds.
Of course, the services that Steam provides to its customers are also provided in a lesser fashion across the major consoles with updates downloaded automatically when they are available.
LittleBigPlanet is another fine example of how a game has grown into a service, with the community now topping 1.3 million user-generated levels. Over the year since its release, Media Molecule has been just as busy keeping the game up-to-date and running smoothly as they were developing it having now patched it 25 times. Paul Holden, lead architect behind the game, believes in the the importance of good community support.
“We realised pretty quickly how important it is to ensure the quality of the releases and the patches,” he said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz at MIGS. “It’s surprising that even fairly small changes that we’ve made have had large impacts on the community.”
Community maintenance is key to LittleBigPlanet’s continued success. Holden continues, “By releasing regular content we keep people interested. Once we release a big pack we can see a big uptake in the number of people playing. If you look at companies like Blizzard with StarCraft, or Bungie and Valve, they look after their communities by releasing regular content and updates, and in turn the community responds well to that kind of attention.”
He adds, “The next patch to go out is 1.21 which should have a whole bunch of new features that have been in the pipeline for some time. And then there’s more planned for well into next year. Sony’s been very keen for us to support the game ourselves. A lot of publishers are keen to move on once a game has been released and patched but Sony has been very keen to give us the resources we need to support the game in this way.”
In an industry still dominated by monolithic blockbuster titles and analysts claiming that marketing sells games more than quality does it is refreshing to see that there are some big names ready to stick their necks out and say that it’s the players and communities that games build that are important and that quality really does matter.
Amen to that.
Thanks to Gamasutra and GamesIndustry.biz.
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