Public Game, Private Server
March 9th, 2009, By Duncan Gough
Reading this interview with John Carmack and Marty Stratton from id software and there’s a number of thoughts that jump out immediately. Primarily, it’s continually inspiring to see how John Carmack works, approaches new technology like the iPhone, and how Quake III epitomised his stripped-back approach to game design:
Quake III was my game. I am all about the elegant, simple, minimalist design
This most interesting part of the interview, for me, was a brief discussion about making money from a free web game. Clearly id software will generate revenue from a popular website that offers a free game just from advertising alone, but there’s also an additional business model that has a lot of potential.
At launch, we’ll be ad-supported completely, and probably for a couple months after that. One of the big features that our player base is asking for is the ability to run private servers. Right now, we control all of the game servers, so all of the game instances that are happening are public games.
So, in the couple months after launch, we will be putting together, more or less, a subscription option that allows players, for a very nominal fee — something around like the $4.99 price point — to also probably do other things, but the core functionality will be to allow players to, through the very elegant interface they have on the website, run their own game servers.
This is yet another Counter Strike inspired idea! When I played Travian I soon felt that I would have more fun playing against a much smaller group of friends. Much like social networks like Facebook allow you to create your own group and interact with friends in there (publically or privately), a free game like Quake Live is going to collect enough passionate users that a sufficient number of them will want to play privately, and paying for that privilege is a valid revenue stream. What’s more, look at what you’d be able to do with your own private server:
There’s really no ability to say, “I want to run my own game and only have the people playing that I want to be playing,” primarily because it’s free and we’re paying for all that infrastructure anyway. There are huge benefits for us controlling the physical hardware that the game is running on.
You say, “I want to play this game at this location. I want it to be configured this way,” and then tie that into our friends list and the social aspect of it. “I want to invite this player, this player, this player, this player, this player. Start the match.” Or even have that match recurring, on a calendar basis — “Every day at six o’clock, I want to play a match against John, and I want the system to invite us both to the match, start the game for us automatically.” We’ll be introducing that.
Private servers are an excellent way to tap into a couple of different sections of your playing community. There are those users who are passionate enough about your game to want to play it in a smaller, more controller environment. Furthermore, there are always individuals in a community who love to ‘host’, those players who enjoy helping out others, on the one hand helping out and on the other having a say in the cultural development of the game. Both of these player types will consider paying for a private server, provided it’s affordable and worthwhile.
Elsewhere, something that’s been noticeable about this revision of the web is its ability to take old ideas and try them again. Flash games had been around a long time before they were branded Casual Games and turned into a multi-billion dollar business. Console games recently went through a phase of focussing on co-op and went one better than the old days by facilitating online co-op.
Thankfully console and PC games have begun to catch up with the innovations of the internet, picking up on the idea of games as something more than unconnected islands. A lot of games now use the internet for more than just convenient patching and updating. There’s an attitude amongst console and PC game developers that web development is easy by comparison:
What really hurt us was the initial thought of putting a web interface on it. Some things surrounding the game were certainly overly trivialized by us. That’s easy to do when you say, “Oh, we’re hotshot game developers. This web stuff can’t be too hard because so many people do it.”
There’s a little bit of a humbling lesson there in how much work we did have to do with all the things on browser compatibility and backend database integration and optimization.
Things like that that really had taken a couple times longer than we expected them to.
Whilst I’d doubt that any web developer is going to consider rendering complex 3D objects to be trivial compared to database optimisation, it’s possible that in their rush to adopt the web developers’ mindset when it comes to APIs, free content and the social fabric of their websites some innovate ideas get left behind.
So not only is it great to see the hardcore game developers and web developers might be moving closer together, it’s also very exciting to think about a real business model for free games on the internet.
« Previous — Next »
