4 replies to this topic

[Mortikhi]

The last we heard from video game designer Richard Garriott, he was in outer space. Taking time off from game design, he dished out $30 million to take a private space flight to the International Space Station.

Now he has come down to earth, giving up on massively multiplayer games. But today, he is coming out as one of the founders of Facebook game company Portalarium.

The new startup says a lot about the direction of the video game industry, as Garriott joins an exodus of game veterans pursuing the Gold Rush of social games. And it is an interesting twist in the career arc of one of the game industry’s most famous designers. Garriott is announcing the company at the Dice Summit, an executive game conference that gets underway today in Las Vegas.

In an interview, Garriott said he has been blessed to be at the beginning of some very big things. Nearly three decades ago, he began making some of the first professionally-produced video games at Origin Systems (later bought by Electronic Arts), creating big hits such as the Ultima role-playing games. He started another of the game industry’s hot trends with the launch of Ultima Online, a pioneering game that kicked off the MMO industry when it debuted in 1997. He started Destination Games, sold it to Korea’s NCSoft in 2001, and worked for six years on the ambitious sci-fi MMO game Tabula Rasa. That game launched in 2007 but didn’t take off, becoming one of the great duds in game industry history. Then Garriott took off for space.

Now Garriott sees another sea change happening with social games on Facebook. Ever since he returned from space in October, he has been investigating social games. With Portalarium, he teamed up with some game veterans that he has worked with for much of his career. Joining him at the company are co-founders Dallas Snell (chairman and development director) and Fred Schmidt (CEO and publishing director), both of whom previously worked together with Garriott as executives at Origin Systems, Electronic Arts and, most recently, NCsoft. Stephen Nichols, vice president and technical director, spent his entire 17-year gaming career in online games, most recently as producer and lead programmer of NCsoft’s Dungeon Runners. Garriott has the role of vice president and creative director at the company.

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[mven]

Oh shit Farmtown in 3D what the fuck is the world coming to!

I think this is really bad news in the short term (i.e. next 5 years) for gaming. As the markets for "casual" facebook games probably dwarf the shit out of mainstream srs bsns gaming (consoles, PCs, arcades) it is probably where the money is. Just look at these stats from facebook alone:

Company Figures:
More than 400 million active users
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
More than 35 million users update their status each day
More than 60 million status updates posted each day
More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
More than 3.5 million events created each month
More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook
More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

400 MILLION USERS. 200 MILLION of which log on every day. If even 1 in 10 plays a game that's 3X as many users as WoW. And it's not like they aren't still growing. Looking at some of their platform statistics:

More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users

250 apps with over 1 million users. There are what maybe 5-10 MMOs that can boast that? And these apps SUCK. What if they were actually good?!

Soooo.. Short term sucking... If this is where the money is, this is where the talent will go. If making shit casual games for Facebook pays way more who is gonna bother making full retail games for the PC or a console?! This is not to say there won't still be people doing this but I can see a lot of talented people moving out of expensive large scale games to making simpler, less expensive, casual games for way more profit...

That said I think long term once the browser based gaming environments can catch up a bit to where "real" gaming is these days that this could do a lot to make more serious gaming more mainstream and as it becomes more mainstream obv we get bigger and better games. Maybe a win?! lol

[bonedead]

Come on, you know those games suck, you can't play those games daily or semi daily for over a month without thinking your life has taken a turn for the worst. If you can, then you're new to online gaming in general imo.

Crap games are crap. All these people started in MMOs and they tried to MMO it again and guess what? They failed. They're not moving into the future of gaming, maybe the future of casual gaming, but who cares about that? Casual gamers aka grandmas and grandpas on Facebook.

[DesertedSoul]

Richard Garriott is a fucking tool.

[mven]

Tool or not he got to go to spacccceeeeeeee...

Anyway, my point wasn't that Facebook games are awesome so much as they have an audience that makes WoW's player base look pathetic. Bigger audience = more possible revenue = can afford better coders = can make better games = OMFG = Viva La Revoluci... you get my point.