Shiny Entertainment's Dave Perry has taken on the challenge to oversee the development of a community-generated online game, Top Secret. In Part 2 of the gamesblog interview, he discusses why he likes the community better than his own employees, and how singer Kelly Clarkson inspired his foray into the WikiGame.
Gaming is the most interactive medium, yet it's one of the last entertainment industries to have any kind of truly collaborative project. Top Secret feels like it fits the bill. This is either going to be a crazy experiment and too difficult to manage, or the next project we do will be the biggest one in gaming history. I'll have a million people signing up next time.
It's like American Idol when Kelly Clarkson won. She was the first winner in America and no one knew whether she'd be a hit or not, and then boom, she was a hit and now everyone wants to be on American Idol. If that does happen with this, I'm going to kick off a really big project.
The amount of content I can have generated versus the amount of content a traditional development team can generate is profoundly different. It would be orders of magnitude different. If I have 100,000 people producing content and only 1% of that content is good, I will still have 1,000 people who make good stuff. The average size of a development team in American is about 35 people. And if I get a million people, that's 100,000 people. 100,000 developers.
And the bonus is that you don't have to pay for them. Yeah. It's a huge bonus. And that's part of the whole thing. It would be impossible to do if you paid that many people. But it's not like they're being forced; it's not like we've got whips on them or anything. They're doing it for the love of it.
On the other hand, if you feel like you're learning and your career is advancing because of it, it's probably worth it. I think there will be spin-off games as well. You can't really predict how people are going to interact, but you do know that there's going to be a lot of intelligence combined and that's going to be fascinating to see.
People say to me that what I want to do is make free content, and that's why you're asking all these people to join you, but they don't understand that I've already got a fully funded team who is going to end up cleaning up the data. All the programming is going to be done by my team. We also have a team who's running the whole thing as well, and we're paying them too. It's not just, hey, free content. It's managing the whole thing, getting everything correct, getting it into an engine and distributing it. It'll cost us money when participants are playing around too 'cause they're using our bandwidth as well.
This is an interesting development model, like the studio models people have suggested will come over from Hollywood and other media industries. Do you think this kind of freelance model will become the dominant one in the games industry? I don't think so initially. Many companies are invested in having internal teams with 30-70 guys who are working on big $15-20 million projects. That's just how they function. Turning that on their head would be very difficult for them. Adoption will be extremely slow for the industry. But when you see World of Warcraft coming out and being enormously successful, you do see loads of publishers and companies taking massively multiplayer online games a little more seriously. If we prove that this works, so that everyone goes, 'Wow, there is a lot of talent out there,' we'll see other companies swinging for it.
It reflects the idea of LBP, of "Game 3.0", community-generated content. We've decided to use the community whenever possible. For example, we don't have any testing staff anymore. When I launch a game, we have 140,000 people sign up just to help test it. They want to play it right now and give us feedback. The difference between 20 and 140K means that someone in that 140K is going to be an absolute expert in at least one aspect in part of the game, and really passionate about it too. I get these really long letters from gamers saying how, for example, the daggers aren't balanced properly and why. You really don't get that kind of feedback normally. Normally, you get hey, if I'm playing the game this door doesn't work. I won't go back to 20 people. This is the future as far as I can see.
We can stand down and say no, involving the community is a crazy idea. Or you put their contributions in knowing that this game is for the consumers, and they're going to have a lot of fun knowing they're part of it. Then they'll tell all their friends. I side with the gamers. That's who we're making the games for.
