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Wish I had seen this 21 hours ago. I currently work in the game industry, previously worked in the game industry, and have worked for non-industry consultancie

Wish I had seen this 21 hours ago. I currently work in the game industry, previously worked in the game industry, and have worked for non-industry consultancies that are trying to break into the industry. First, if you're not a gamer yourself, you're not going to get much traction. You'll be able to check reasonable boxes of features, and no-one will ever use them, and you won't understand why. The domain knowledge is cliquish and subtle and if you don't actually play games (a lot), there's no way to acquire it. Your first idea is a great example of this, and it's the first one most people hit on, because there aren't a lot of web-based communities for gamers like there are for other markets. This is because the community is in the individual games and on the individual consoles. A consultancy I worked for made this same mistake, actively pitching companies by saying "we can help build community around your games" and being thrown out of offices for their ignorance. This is also why you can't make a social network that effectively ties together PC, PS3 and Xbox360 gamers: the console manufacturers and publishers don't want you to. Rupture might have gotten close, but then EA bought them, and then shut them down. 2, 3) Groupon for gamers doesn't make sense on the consoles, because you'll need to get MS/Sony/Nintendo buy-in, and Steam already runs sales on the PC, and there are already the indie game bundles that they organize themselves... there's no pain point there. In fact, someone else mentioned this already: gamers don't have a lot of pain points that a startup can address. There's a big one in the MMO space: I get an MMO and it's awesome and I tell my friends, but by the time they pay for a subscription, the server I'm on is full and they are all on some other server, so I have to re-roll and start again. There's no good way to get everyone "on the same page" quickly and easily... and there's no way for you to do it as an outsider. That's functionality that really has to be provided by the MMO developers and supported by the publisher. 4) There is one LAN gaming center in Austin, TX left. It's dying from utter lack of interest. Gamers don't need to meet in real life. That's the whole point of networked consoles and PCs. Security is some place you might be able to break in: a universal PC gaming security dongle. WoW already offers an RSA keyfob-style authenticator. Steam is basically online DRM like Ubisoft was doing, except the value proposition is enough to make gamers not care. Give publishers your dongle for free. Give it away to gamers. Charge the publishers and studios a retainer for integration and on-going support and servers for storing data. Steam will be your biggest competitor in this, because along with DRM, they also offer cloud data storage across Mac and PC (and expectedly Linux). All the other tech, like MMO servers and graphics engines, many game companies still believe they know best and would rather build themselves (NIH is strong in the industry).

vitovito 16y ago
After thinking about this a little more, it's not strictly true that all the other tech would be avoided because of NIH. The game industry is always several years behind research in some levels, most notably around content creation. A modern, triple-A title has hundreds of artists laboring for years on all of the art for a game. All the tools to export art from Max or Maya or Z-brush or Modo or whatever are custom, and buggy, and one-offs, because every engine (except for Unity, apparently) has their own custom import format instead of using a standard like COLLADA and then baking out the models into a packaging format afterwards. Just like CGI helped George Lucas eliminate actors, if you can build something that eliminates the need for more artists, you'll be able to sell that. Things like procedural content generation: even open-source game engine tech like OGRE supports integration with systems like Speedtree, which is a specialized procedural foliage generator, because when you're making an outdoor scene, making trees and bushes and grasses by hand takes a lot of a real person's time: http://www.speedtree.com/ http://www.speedtree.com/ The latest version of UnrealEngine3 supports procedural building generation: you tell it how buildings are made and all of the art assets that make up corners and sides and windows and walls and such, and it'll generate a building out of all the component art, but you still have to build the component art: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html (Also, this is stuff that was in SIGGRAPH papers a decade ago.) Procedural texture generate for art is also still really in its infancy as far as adoption goes. Besides what was done in Spore, I only know of one tools company that does it: http://www.allegorithmic.com/ http://www.allegorithmic.com/ Animating characters is expensive. A lot of it's motion captured, which is expensive, and requires a lot of refinement by character animators, and a lot of it's still done by hand. Creating characters and all the outfits they wear all the time is such a chore. I once wanted to use real-time game engines and real-time motion capture to put on theatre productions. If you could get the capture equipment good enough for that, and inexpensive enough to use for children's theatre, that would be a hardware win, but you shouldn't even have to do that. This is all something that I believe could be done procedurally. I mean, people all have a certain set of proportions, right? With a fractal variety of differences. Generate bodies and then apply procedural stylistic changes. Let artists define their character style and algorithmically riff off that. Then do the same for clothing and outfit models and textures. Content creation for games should be picking characters out of a line-up and tweaking them by turning knobs and dials, not modeling by hand. Same for monsters and other enemies. There are thousands of years of fashion design that could be boiled down to algorithms and procedural generation. I believe you could do the same for gameplay. Some Doom map generators were excellent. Gameplay has gotten different and more complex, but so has our understand of what's fun. Generate plausibly fun maps as starting points for content generation based on the gameplay story. All of this is several steps beyond where any game company thinks, because the development model doesn't support ongoing, repeat development. If you're an engine company like Emergent, who makes the Gamebryo tech, you'll sell to one company, and at some point early on they'll stop taking your updates because they've forked something and don't have time to re-integrate it, and then you'll never hear from them again because their game didn't sell well enough to sustain the studio. Plus, some of what I'm talking about isn't supported by research yet. There's no minimum viable product that you could build in a Y Combinator three-month timeframe. This is like Masters in graphics thesis-type stuff. :/ (That doesn't change the fact that it's what the industry needs, of course.)

vitovito 16y ago

After thinking about this a little more, it's not strictly true that all the other tech would be avoided because of NIH. The game industry is always several years behind research in some levels, most notably around content creation. A modern, triple-A title has hundreds of artists laboring for years on all of the art for a game. All the tools to export art from Max or Maya or Z-brush or Modo or whatever are custom, and buggy, and one-offs, because every engine (except for Unity, apparently) has their own custom import format instead of using a standard like COLLADA and then baking out the models into a packaging format afterwards. Just like CGI helped George Lucas eliminate actors, if you can build something that eliminates the need for more artists, you'll be able to sell that. Things like procedural content generation: even open-source game engine tech like OGRE supports integration with systems like Speedtree, which is a specialized procedural foliage generator, because when you're making an outdoor scene, making trees and bushes and grasses by hand takes a lot of a real person's time: http://www.speedtree.com/ http://www.speedtree.com/ The latest version of UnrealEngine3 supports procedural building generation: you tell it how buildings are made and all of the art assets that make up corners and sides and windows and walls and such, and it'll generate a building out of all the component art, but you still have to build the component art: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html (Also, this is stuff that was in SIGGRAPH papers a decade ago.) Procedural texture generate for art is also still really in its infancy as far as adoption goes. Besides what was done in Spore, I only know of one tools company that does it: http://www.allegorithmic.com/ http://www.allegorithmic.com/ Animating characters is expensive. A lot of it's motion captured, which is expensive, and requires a lot of refinement by character animators, and a lot of it's still done by hand. Creating characters and all the outfits they wear all the time is such a chore. I once wanted to use real-time game engines and real-time motion capture to put on theatre productions. If you could get the capture equipment good enough for that, and inexpensive enough to use for children's theatre, that would be a hardware win, but you shouldn't even have to do that. This is all something that I believe could be done procedurally. I mean, people all have a certain set of proportions, right? With a fractal variety of differences. Generate bodies and then apply procedural stylistic changes. Let artists define their character style and algorithmically riff off that. Then do the same for clothing and outfit models and textures. Content creation for games should be picking characters out of a line-up and tweaking them by turning knobs and dials, not modeling by hand. Same for monsters and other enemies. There are thousands of years of fashion design that could be boiled down to algorithms and procedural generation. I believe you could do the same for gameplay. Some Doom map generators were excellent. Gameplay has gotten different and more complex, but so has our understand of what's fun. Generate plausibly fun maps as starting points for content generation based on the gameplay story. All of this is several steps beyond where any game company thinks, because the development model doesn't support ongoing, repeat development. If you're an engine company like Emergent, who makes the Gamebryo tech, you'll sell to one company, and at some point early on they'll stop taking your updates because they've forked something and don't have time to re-integrate it, and then you'll never hear from them again because their game didn't sell well enough to sustain the studio. Plus, some of what I'm talking about isn't supported by research yet. There's no minimum viable product that you could build in a Y Combinator three-month timeframe. This is like Masters in graphics thesis-type stuff. :/ (That doesn't change the fact that it's what the industry needs, of course.)