According to Marc Jacobs at Electronic Arts and Rob Pardo at Blizzard, the future streets of digital interactivity will be littered with the corpses of half-realised virtual worlds. Jacobs and Pardo, speaking to the gathered at the Game Developers Conference, also predicted that they'll be the victims of Big Media's forays into the space.
Via the BBC:
Because of WoW and dumb money and big publisher pressure there will be a lot of corpses," agreed Rob Pardo, head of game design at Blizzard, the makers of Warcraft.
"Viacom has launched three MMOs and nobody noticed," said Raph Koster, president of Areae and the former head of Star Wars Galaxies.
He added: "Anybody who is not watching how big media is moving into this space is missing a major major story... We are about to see a truly massive explosion in the quantity of online worlds of various types."
Regular readers of the blog will also be pleased/dismayed to learn that the luminiaries anticipate the movement away from "fantasy-style science fiction adventures" towards a social virtual worlds paradigm:
The panel also predicted that non-gaming MMOs such as Second Life would be prevalent in the short term. ... "Five years from now a social networking site without a 3D universe will look like a dinosaur."
[Mark Kern of Red 5 Studios] said there was a lot of similarity between how a social networking site cultivated and grew a community and the work done in MMOs.
