Sure, if home is going to be an email client I'm sure it would be mostly fully functional in beta. However, if its going to be a persistent online virtual world with a variety of functionality there's going to be issues.
NPD March 2008
- Thread starter iceberg187
- Start date
Sure, if home is going to be an email client I'm sure it would be mostly fully functional in beta. However, if its going to be a persistent online virtual world with a variety of functionality there's going to be issues.
I don't think that you're the target audience of Home. In fact, I think few people on this forum are. And in fact, I think that few people that own PS3's today are it either. However, I think there certainly is one.
I think there is definitely a class of people for whom this kind of social-network, interactivity sort of thing is pretty compelling. I hear WoW and Second Life bandied about a lot, but I think the target for Home is more like people who have blown tons of time on The Sims. However, I'm not sure how many of them are all that interested in PS3, or how many would buy it just because it has Home.
The nightmare scenario for Sony is that they release Home and nobody uses it. That's a lot of money down the drain. I'm not even going to speculate on whether or not that will happen though, I have no idea.
I guess that's true, but where the Sims is kind of a shallow game, Home seems like a dried up lake, because it's not a game. It's a glossy way of delivering content and services. Rather receiving an email, you're paying a guy in a $10,000 suit to deliver it by parachuting onto your front lawn. It's impressive, but after you've seen it once, you'd rather just get the email. The Sims is at least a bit of a game, where you try to get your Sims better jobs to pay for better stuff for your home, and you have to manage everything and train your sim so they don't turn into a slob. I mean, in the Sims I could do stuff like force a Sim to drink from the bar immediately after waking up, and eventually that Sim was an alcoholic that would drink until they peed on the kitchen floor. Or I did stuff like making a person sleep in a room with gravel floors that shared a toilet and had no lights, and then I'd have them verbally abuse a child Sim until the child was taken away by child services. It wore out fast, but I don't really see what I could do in Home (without getting banned).
Personal taste, I guess, but to hear people say it's part of Game 3.0, whatever that means, or call it a revolution or an improvement on anything doesn't make sense to me. I'm sure there are people that will like it.
I was under the impression that it would be primarily driven by voice chat.
You have a valid point that Sony doesn't include a BlueTooth headset in the box, but I don't know that it's that massive of a barrier. MS didn't include one in the box with the Xbox1, but attach rates on the headsets were pretty high.
I wouldn't mind playing some home game such as pool while chatting/voipping with some friends. I see some additional value there compared to just sitting in front of messenger and browsing web or playing java minigolf. It kind of gives the extra before and after gaming feeling for building up the excitement before real gaming sessions and afterwards gives opportunity to deload the session. I already have bt headset and keyboard connected to PS3. Both ways to communicate should already be supported.
What about game achievements as avatars and items inside ones home. I see some value there to be had(bragging rights?). Could also entertain the younger gamers a lot by allowing them to build their own virtual homes with premade items. Like a modern puppet house or canvas which can be used to draw. Maybe integrating a painting engine(water colours?) by using gestures recognised by the playstation eye. That could be fun for the younger ones in family. Or simpler enough it could just be a plank white screen and you could paint it using your fingers.
What about user created content? There was even some talk sony might be allowing creating custom java programs to home. Though don't know if that will actually ever happen. I would like an idea such as creating a version of old blockout game that would flood the apartment with blocks if not cleared
Physics aspect of home seems interesting too(i.e. how items interact in realistic way). The whole warhawk war room cannot be the pinnacle, I think it's just the beginning once developers start to explore new ways of integrating some extra experience to their games via home.I'd say there is loads of interesting concepts in home. I would rather see sony to try to innovate than just follow the lead when it comes to online experience. Perhaps they succeed, perhaps not, but at least they try to bring something new to mainstream(assuming ps3 sells enough to be called mainstream). So I give the benefit of doubt and hope there is some real innovations to be had in home.
Also all the virtual theaters, streaming music from your machine to friends machine if they happen to be in same apartment etc. Going to be interesting see if it's useful or not. Like having a virtual party with your clanmates with somebody being the dj, someone putting funny clips to tv inside the private home, etc. Could be some fun definately. Clips could also be some autogenerated replays from the previous gaming session such as the 5 best headshots or some overtakings from race in gran turismo players just ended . Wonder if sony has thought about features like that. Would be fun to deload gaming session that way by viewing highlights and maybe showing off the new achievements one just got and the others didn't.
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This is debatable. Home is P2P based. By this Fall, they'd have already run the game launching service for more than six months with an expanded userbase. The 3D world has been around for about a year with real users. They may encounter some more headaches but the basic infrastructure should be intact.
The analogy is not quite correct. In Home, you send a message the same way you send one without Home. There is no need to jump through hoops. The attraction is you can see more than just the message. You can talk to more than one person and do other leisure activities at the same time -- while waiting for your party game to start, or while waiting for your gang to show up.
The Game 3.0 aspect is the personal media sharing and exchange within Home. And e-v-e-n-t-u-a-l-l-y user scripting. As someone pointed out above, there are also free, persistent mini-games in that environment, etc.
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Game3's supposed to be user created content for games, and the prime - and kinda lonely - example is Little Big Planet.
Sharing media doesn't have much to do with games IMHO, unless it's created from a game like machinima movies and so on. But even that can be questioned as you can't use it for anything within a game.
Sharing media doesn't have much to do with games IMHO, unless it's created from a game like machinima movies and so on. But even that can be questioned as you can't use it for anything within a game.
UT3 ? I thought Echochrome also featured an editor ?
Sharing media that you can use in Home (e.g., RFOM in-game screenshot, short videos) to decorate up your living environment before inviting people over ? How about decorating your clan lobby, which is traditionally just a simple list of names, while waiting for games to be launched ? Exchanging media for you to use in LBP ? As long as it's a supported format, it can be used right ? The magic is that the personalized space is integrated into the gaming experiences (via lobby and other lobby extensions like Warhawk's war room).
I don't think it's a discrete event. As long as the users enrich their game experience using their own content, it can deepen the relationship. Traditionally, Internet services count even chat transcript/content as user-generated content.
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Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Well after? It was one year to the day.
UT3 needs a PC to create content and a separate app; I think you have to buy the PC version of the game in order to get it anyway. So I'd place it outside Sony's Game3 concept.
Haven't really seen Echochrome so you may very well be right about that. However it isn't really a high profile AA game; and it doesn't change my point on how Gam3 isn't about media sharing
))Why ? As long as you have a copy of UT3 for PS3, you can enjoy content created by other users. Not everyone has the talent to create, but everyone should be able to have fun with new characters and maps.
The media sharing aspect is only part of the entire Home and online game customization concept. As long as you can share content created by other people... and can apply them in Home and compatible games, it is in the spirit of Game 3.0. Heck, some people derive fun and status just by aggregating these user-generated content for others to find.
What's with all these artificial rules (PC editor vs in-game editor, Big game vs small game, etc.) for keeping people from enjoying other folks' work ?
The media sharing aspect is only part of the entire Home and online game customization concept. As long as you can share content created by other people... and can apply them in Home and compatible games, it is in the spirit of Game 3.0. Heck, some people derive fun and status just by aggregating these user-generated content for others to find.
What's with all these artificial rules (PC editor vs in-game editor, Big game vs small game, etc.) for keeping people from enjoying other folks' work ?
Does anyone else here think that "Game 3.0" seems about as silly (and generally meaningless) as "Web 2.0"? This discussion reminds me of all of the AJAX debates a few years ago.
Anyway, on topic, I'm not really convinced that the whole user-generated content thing is as big as a lot of folks in the core gaming community make it out to be.
The fact of the matter is that most user-generated content is awful. Most people don't want to be beta tester's for someone else's crap. And even then, most people would be put off by anything that requires them to pick and choose from a bunch of unknown stuff.
I'd be curious to know how much user-generated content has actually been used on PS3 for UT3. I'd also be curious to see how some other games that are doing content sharing have fared (Halo 3 and N+ come to mind, and looking further out we have things like LBP and Echochrome on the horizon). I'd love to be wrong on this one, but based on what I know about software in general, the average person just doesn't like dealing with this stuff.
Anyway, on topic, I'm not really convinced that the whole user-generated content thing is as big as a lot of folks in the core gaming community make it out to be.
The fact of the matter is that most user-generated content is awful. Most people don't want to be beta tester's for someone else's crap. And even then, most people would be put off by anything that requires them to pick and choose from a bunch of unknown stuff.
I'd be curious to know how much user-generated content has actually been used on PS3 for UT3. I'd also be curious to see how some other games that are doing content sharing have fared (Halo 3 and N+ come to mind, and looking further out we have things like LBP and Echochrome on the horizon). I'd love to be wrong on this one, but based on what I know about software in general, the average person just doesn't like dealing with this stuff.
AJAX has real user and server benefits because it saves time and resources. It is not silly at all. From usability perspective, it breaks away from the old page-loading navigation concept. One of the first AJAX-like apps is actually Microsoft Outlook Web Express. It behaves almost like a Windows native app even though it runs purely on IE (and the XML plugin).
Web 2.0 is simply a term coined to indicate the evolution and success of the surviving dotcom business models. Game 3.0 is simply a loose term to promote games that take advantage of user-generated content. Both are not new concepts.
As you pointed out, the current user-generated content approach is awful. It does not necessarily mean that it cannot be better. The Internet thrives on user-generated content. It is a natural next step to see if similar, distilled experience can apply to games, especially online games. It is a natural fit because one player's action will affect others. Game 3.0 empowers people to tailor and share that's all. How the devs make it fun is up to them. It doesn't have to be just mods and level designs.
The average person doesn't decide whether he/she likes user-generated content or otherwise. They make decision based on the final output/package. If it's a fun and useful experience, they will bite like other games.
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I'm fully aware of the benefits of AJAX. I was criticizing how a technology that has been around for a long time became some buzzword and suddenly everyone thought they needed to use AJAX for everything (which is flat out wrong, and has made many web sites terrible as a result of shoddy shoehorn jobs).
The whole "Game 3.0" thing has the exact same problems. There are many cases where it is entirely inappropriate, and it is almost universally done poorly. Slapping a feature in somewhere just so that you can tack the latest buzzword on your box is one of the most braindead things one can possibly do in software development. The right features in the right product at the right time is what is important, which is why I hate these stupid buzzwords. They encourage bad software and bad software development practices.
The Internet is not a fair comparison for games. If you consider the most successful *sites* on the Internet, they most definitely do not thrive on user-generated content. They typically thrive because of one of three reasons: they provide a reliable service at a competitive price (eBay, Amazon, etc), they have very strong social networking (Facebook, MySpace, etc), or they provide convenient access to information (Google, GameFaqs, Yahoo, etc).
You could argue that there is much user-created content on the Internet, and some of it has made some web sites successful. However, on sites primarily driven by user-content (Wikipedia, GameFaqs, etc), that content is typically of a reliably high quality. That sort of quality bar is *never* maintained in the user-created content space in games.
You're correct that the average user doesn't make a blanket decision on whether or not they like "user-created content". It's not that it's user-created content that's the problem, it's the problem that user-created content in games by design involves content provided by a disproportionate percentage of people who are not qualified to provide it, which makes the experience bad.
I think one of the best efforts we've seen in the arena has been the "Bungie Favorites" feature of Halo 3. However, the relatively small scale of user-created content in Halo 3 and the multiplayer-only nature of the thing means that it's not a robust enough model for anyone to make an example of.
Who does Game 3.0 today ? What are the good and bad examples ?
A lot of the services you highlighted are free or cheap because they are dictated by the users not a publisher or studio or operator.
eBay is purely user generated content/commerce (The quality of goods is certainly not always pristine). Amazon reviews and collaborative filtering recommendation engine (People who likes A also like X, Y and Z) is based on user-generated content/input. Facebook and MySpace are based on user generated content alone (empowered by their APIs). Google and Yahoo search engines thrived partly because of ads serve out from end users' sites (beyond their search engine). A large part of their search database (even page ranking) are also derived from user generated content. Wikipedia is user generated content, PayPal started with user-to-user payment, Youtube started as user generated movie site and then even the premium movies are pirated there, Sourceforge and the whole OpenSource idea is user generated content, flickr is a library of user-generated photos, Amatuer pr0n that rocks the pr0n industry is also user generated content, Chat and instant messaging are all classified as user-generated content by Internet literature.
The quality bar was not an issue for many of these services. It is moderated by price. What Internet has emphasized is quality is not the only measurment for success. Relevance, novelty, shock, realism/reality, timeliness, clout, etc. are part of the formula too.
The question is how do you make (more) money out of it.
That's because we take a pure content view. The fun can be something else.
Again, this is purely mods and people go for Halo because they want to know the official Halo story. The mods are simply side shows.
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Yeah, I've always said that too.
This is very true for anything in the strict sense of content: complete levels, player models etc. It's obvoius that competing with professionals, particularly artists, is a hopeless race.
However there are smaller pieces of content that can leverage general creativity or gameplay experience instead of coding/graphics skills.
Halo3 user movies are all around the internet, on youtube and elsewhere. People who have never played Halo can still easily 'get' the funny ones, with the silly kills and stuff, just like it has been with the Warthog jumps. So I can only imagine how many of these movies a hardcore Halo player watches...
I'm also sure that LBP, with it's easy to use and straightforward editor, will spawn a lot of user created content, especially in relation to how many copies it'll eventually sell.
I already provided examples and talked about pros and cons.
In the interest of keeping the quoting short, this addresses the above and the paragraph that followed.
Your statements here are not different from what I was saying. I wasn't arguing that you cannot make a useful service with user content (in fact, quite the opposite). My argument is specifically that the most successful applications of user-generated content is where either a) the majority of users contributing are making valuable contributions, b) without user content, the service/product would be insufficient, and/or c) there is a clear valuable proposition between time spent finding what you want and the value received.
I've already spoken to point a.
Most of the examples that you provided all fall clearly under point b. Games do not. With a game, you have (in most cases) already been provided with a significant amount of content at a very high bar. Given that most players never finish the games they buy (in fact, a distressingly low percentage ever beat games), the audience for more content is already fairly small. Compound that with the fact that of the remaining audience, many won't be interested in content that is below the bar of what came before (point a), and you can see why most games with level editors and sharing don't see them used.
Point c also lines up with your examples. The precise reason that search engines are so successful is that they allow you to make a small investment of time to find something highly relevant. This is also true for Wikipedia, Amazan, eBay, and almost any other successful web site.
Part of what makes these services able to be so successful is the vast sample sizes that they have to cull content. With a huge userbase, it takes a relatively small percentage of participation for the good stuff to bubble to the top. These are sites with millions of hits a day. Beyond that, the barrier to entry is generally cheap (no money, little time).
Where it becomes a problem in games is really a compounding of all of these issues. Let's look at a few cases:
Case 1: A game of 100% (or near 100%) user-generated content
We see things like this on the PC rather regularly. And unsurprisingly, some of them have actually been reasonably successful. There are a few things that we may be able to attribute to this.
a) Price of entry is typically free (no cost to try, no penalty for quitting if it sucks)
b) Anyone with a PC can participate (helps provide critical mass)
Case 2: A full game with mod support on a console
We've seen several examples of things like this. UT3, Band of Bugs, N+, etc. Participation here tends to be pretty low. Why?
a) To even get in the door, you have to pay money
b) Even if it were free, you need to own the console
c) Frequently, content rating doesn't even exist, so you can't sort the wheat from the chaff
d) If it did, the size of the userbase is frequently too small to provide sound ratings, which hurts the experience
e) Most of the provided content is of far inferior quality to what came out of box
Case 3: A full game with mod support on PC
This is an interesting one. Participation is wildly all over the map. Almost any RTS or FPS has mod communities around them. Some trends?
a) It's really only the blockbusters that see much real participation
b) Popular mods are usually found not by using the game, but on fansites that implement filtering of some sort
c) Participation is still really only among the hard core
I think what will be really interesting to see looking forward is not "how many games implement user-created content". It's a silly question. Tons of games have been doing it for years. The real question is, "when will someone get it right on console, and what will that solution look like?"
If I were a game developer interested in user created content on a console, my approach would be to create a system where anything you create on your console can be played only by you or shared directly with friends. Above that are two approval levels.
1. Create an "Unrated Community Content" bucket. Anyone can play stuff from there and rate it. After enough ratings, it goes into one of two buckets "Community Recommends" or a black hole.
2. In-house devs could then vet content from "Community Recommends". Things that look good can get playtested, and if they look good, they can then get pushed out in some more global way.
But that's just me. It'd be expensive to implement, and frankly, I doubt it would get enough use in 99% of games to be worth the effort. Wouldn't it be nice if Live or PSN provided that framework for you?
It's not an artificial rule, it's just that Sony's got almost nothing to with the fact that there are user-created levels for an Unreal Tournament game. To me Game3 means that you can buy a console and contribute to the entire community with just that.
