Two 2009 titles under development for Nintendo’s DSi and WiiWare platforms point to an innovative use of GameSpy Technology’s Sake cloud data storage solution, according to recent reports from the gaming press.

As reported by MTV’s Multiplayer Blog last week, the upcoming Made in Ore, a new WarioWare title for the DSi (sold exclusively through the DSi store in Japan), will enable users to create and upload microgames to a central server. Other users will be able to download and play these games on their own platforms. Nintendo also announced the development of a WiiWare version of Made in Ore that will allow users to download and play these games on the Wii. The game’s title derives from the Japanese, Meido in Ore, which translates literally to “Made in Me.”

GameSpy’s Sake services – which enable developers to avail their users of centralized cloud-like data upload, storage and retrieval for all types of data – will power the feature as part of the service’s standard integration into all “connected” Nintendo titles.  The service has been used, in the past, to power other Nintendo game features such as Mario Kart Wii’s “ghost races” and Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s level sharing feature. However, by allowing users to create and share microgames – not just passively consumable content – Nintendo is clearly pushing the boundaries of what is traditionally considered “user-created content” for games. Essentially, users are creating the game itself – with GameSpy’s help.

Last month, we predicted that 2008 would be a record-setting year for connected gaming – and October continues to validate that claim.  This past October, GameSpy Technology tied its record for licensed titles released in that month, continuing strong momentum that began in the Spring and now carries into the holiday season.  At the close of the month, GameSpy marked the launch of its 650th licensed & shipped title.

Among the marquee “Powered by GameSpy” titles released this month: Electronic Arts’ Red Alert 3, the newest title in the revived Command & Conquer 3 franchise, which made extensive use of GameSpy’s Sake (cloud data storage) and ATLAS (stats & competition) services, and which bundled our GameSpy Comrade social gaming software; and Rockstar Games’ Midnight Club: Los Angeles, which showcases GameSpy’s abilities to deliver extensive in-game / out-of-game barrier busting community technology to all of the major console gaming platforms.  Other notable titles include the independent smash World of Goo, THQ’s acclaimed Saints Row 2, and Activision’s Guitar Hero: World Tour, both on the Nintendo Wii.

Here’s a full rundown of the games of October. Congrats to all of the developers & publishers who shipped this month!

• Blitz: The League II (PS3) Midway Games
• Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (PC) Ubisoft
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS) Konami
• Culdcept DS (DS) Sega
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (PC) Electronic Arts
• Dimensity (PC) Playlogic
• FIFA Soccer 09 (DS) Electronic Arts
• Guitar Hero: World Tour (Wii) Activision
• Midnight Club: Los Angeles (PS3 / 360) Take 2 Interactive
• MotoGP ‘08 (PS3 / PC) Capcom
• Saints Row 2 (PS3) THQ
• Shido to Chocobo no Fushigina Dungeon (DS) Square Enix
• Simple WiiWare Series Vol. 1: The Block Kuzushi (WiiWare) D3 Publisher
• Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals (DS) Disney Interactive
• Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (PSN) Psyonix
• Tenchu 4 (Wii) FROM Software
• Tetris Party (WiiWare) Hudson
• War Leaders: Clash of Nations (PC) Enigma Software
• World of Goo (WiiWare) Nintendo

If this month is any indication, the close of 2008 is going to set a new benchmark for the release of “connected” games across all platforms. GameSpy Technology is celebrating a record-setting September, marking the largest # of “Powered by GameSpy” titles released during this period in the group’s 8-year history.  Among the games hitting shelves this month: a Nintendo DS version of EA’s massive hit, Spore; an expansion to last year’s watershed shooter, Crysis; a new entry in the ever-addictive Civilization franchise; and a number of titles in the emerging WiiWare group of downloadable games for Nintendo’s unstoppable platform.

• Bomberman (Wii) Hudson
• Bomberman Blast (WiiWare) Hudson
• Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (PS3) Ubisoft
• Crysis: Warhead (PC) Crytek
• Gradius ReBirth (WiiWare) Konami
• MegaMan 9 (WiiWare) Capcom
• Pokemon Platinum (DS) Nintendo
• Prey the Stars (DS) KOEI
• Samba de Amigo (Wii) SEGA
• SAS: Secure Tomorrow (PC) City Interactive
• SBK 08: Superbike World Championship (PS3) Lago
• Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization (PC) Take 2
• SimCity Creator (Wii) Electronic Arts
• Spore Creatures (DS) Electronic Arts
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (PC) Transavision

Congrats to all of the studios celebrating releases this month!

The GameSpy Technology team has a lot of love for Austin – it’s ground zero for connected gaming development here in the United States, for starters (with a number of top developers headquartered nearby). Plus, it’s home to some of the finest barbeque (Stubbs, Iron Works, Salt Lick) and Mexican food (Las Manitas) joints in the country.  It’s also home to one of the industry’s best conferences: the Austin Game Developers Conference, which kicks off on Monday, September 15 at the Austin Convention Center.

We’ll be there in force all week, catching sessions, taking meetings and finding every excuse we can to buy folks a beer and some pulled pork.  This is always an exciting conference for us – we can’t think of another place where the industry is so frank about discussing its challenges, or so willing to share ideas for innovating in the space – and we’re thrilled to be back for another year.

And we’ve got several great reasons to be excited about the state of “connected gaming” this year, and our role in it:

• The 3 biggest selling games of 2008 (Grand Theft Auto IV, Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. Brawl) all used GameSpy Technology to push their respective franchises to new levels of online connectivity – with results that can’t be ignored
• Our new Direct2Game SDK is making full service in-game digital commerce – long a hot topic at Austin GDC—available to developers here and now
• GameSpy Open is connecting the open standards & indie gaming revolutions with world class online gaming technology, services and digital commerce
• Direct2Drive, FilePlanet and GameSpy Comrade are having their best years ever, providing developers and publishers with unbeatable ways to deliver more games to more gamers

Members of the GameSpy Technology, Direct2Drive, FilePlanet and GameSpy Comrade teams will be around to chat about all of this and more.  Contact us now to arrange a meeting – or feel free to badger us when you see us at the show – on the floor, at a party, jogging on the River Walk, wherever.

Level Up Charity Games Party

As part of our Austin GDC invasion, IGN and GameSpy are sponsoring the Level Up Charity Games party on Wednesday, September 17 at the Four Seasons Hotel.  The party kicks off at 6:00 p.m. (registration opens at 5 p.m., however – so get in early!), and is open to the public for a $20 donation to the ESA Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to providing free game design education tuition to minority and female students.

Stop by to mingle with the crew, and enjoy drinks, food and tons of game events – including tournaments for Rock Band, Madden, and Super Smash Bros. You could score yourself a copy of Rock Band 2 for the Xbox 360! And it’s all for a good cause. We’ll see you there!

Our partners on the PlayStation team at Sony have released their highly anticipated 2.41 firmware upgrade on the PS3, adding support for 2 much-requested features that have already become a staple on other online multiplayer platforms: ubiquitous access to your friend lists through the in-game XMB and a trophies concept that encourages gamers to get the most out of their games by setting individual, increasingly difficult challenges, thus giving them more accessible goals that don’t require them to slug it out against thousands of hardcore gamers to reach the top of a leader board.

Encouraging gamers to build up large buddy lists, strengthens ties to a particular platform, opens up more matchmaking opportunities, provides a viral promotional avenue for newly released titles and overall builds a stronger community for your game, allowing friends to see when all of their buddies are online, issue challenges, talk smack about a match they just played or simply revel in the shared experience of playing that hot new game on launch day just like 10 of your buddies are.

PlayStation Network Director of Operations Eric Lempel calls it a big leap forward for the service, and we couldn’t agree more. This is an exciting update for us at GameSpy too, because it opens up further opportunities to use some of our own middleware offerings. Trophies provide an opportunity to lock gamers into a specific title and for a developer to issue a challenge and say ‘I bet you can’t do this!’. Suppose you needed to track your progress towards a specific trophy qualification? Tie it into a stat you’re tracking with our ATLAS Competition system, or just store it remotely in our Sake database, so that players can track their progress across multiple PS3s, without having to copy save games around.

Any title using GameSpy’s in-game buddy list immediately benefits from the increased attention that the PSN buddy list now gets, since we synchronize with Sony’s own buddy list and make friend lists and online status information available fully in-game, without even popping up the XMB. You can now create more tightly focused, custom experiences, instead of relying on the generic, XMB-based buddy options, which compete for attention with a number of other UI elements. A few examples:

• If your buddy just sent you a message about this great server he just ended up on, but forgot to send you an actual invite, your in-game server browser could highlight what servers your buddies are on, and you could make a decision that way about what game to join.

• Enhance your auto-match process, by preferring players who are your buddies and currently online.

• A favorite here at the GameSpy office right now is Valve’s Team Fortress 2, and one of its own achievements is awarded if you ‘uber’ 10 players from your friends list as a medic. Imagine an in-game buddy list that explicitly highlighted which of your buddies you haven’t uber’ed up yet, and what servers they’re playing on?

If you’re already a developer, or are interested in becoming one, contact us to find out about other opportunities to make the best of these new features on the PS3.

We’ve returned, triumphant and filled with knowledge, from this year’s ION Game Conference in Seattle.  The conference was packed with great information presented by some of the leading minds in the online world.  If you can only attend one conference in a year and online games is your thing, ION is the place for you.

You can find my presentation here: Follow Me: 7 Cool Things to Do With Buddy Lists.  (Note to self for next time: don’t use the word “cool” in a presentation.)

The conference started with a bang.  David Hunt‘s (Flying Lab) presentation on retention mechanisms for MMOs was filled with excellent techniques on keeping your users playing.  It was great to see that more and more folks had picked up on the power of the social aspect of games to set them apart.  This theme was also touched on by Bill Fulton (Ronin User Experience), Nicole Lazzaro (XEODesign) and others during the three day conference.

I treated myself to a few “off-topic” sessions like Brandon Reinhart‘s session on using “storytelling” to communicate vision and Joe Ludwig‘s “port-partum” for Pirates of the Burning Sea. 

I always come away from these conferences filled with passion to go out and do great things… along with a nagging hangover.  Great stuff all around.

It’s a fact: we LOVE talking to people. All kinds of people. About all kinds of things.

What we really love talking about, of course, is multiplayer gaming (that’s our day job, after all ... heck, it’s our night job too, and quite often it rolls into an early morning gig to boot). To wit: this ION network interview with Director of GameSpy Technology Todd “Tungsten” Northcutt, which does a great job of fleshing out the GameSpy “connected gamer” worldview, among other things. 

It also does a good job of teasing Todd’s speaking engagement at the upcoming ION Game Conference, which takes place May 13 – 15 at the Waterfront Marriott in Seattle, Washington.  He’ll be giving a talk entitled, ”Follow Me: 7 Cool Things You Can Do With Buddy Lists,” which, given our experiences in facilitating in-game buddy list / messaging systems and building GameSpy Comrade (our desktop social gaming application), promises to be chock full of good ideas, best practices, and other terms you’d expect to see in a conference presentation abstract.

GameSpy / IGN will have a sizeable contingent at the ION conference, in addition to Todd’s talk – no booth, but representatives from GameSpy Technology, GameSpy Comrade, FilePlanet and Direct2Drive will all be on hand to soak up the sessions, converse, and maybe (OK, certainly) buy folks a few drinks and meals.  If you’re planning to be at the conference – or just in the area – please drop us a line and let us know!  Don’t be shy. As we said at the beginning of this post, we love talking to people.

When it comes to “connected” gaming, Rockstar clearly gets it.

No, that’s not something we ever expected to plunk out on the old keyboard - after all, it took the mod community to drag the studio’s Grand Theft Auto juggernaut into the online realm.  And while the company’s Midnight Club franchise does have a respectable multiplayer pedigree (full disclosure: Rockstar partnered with GameSpy to enable online multiplayer gameplay in several installments of Midnight Club on the PlayStation and PC), it’s tough to point to those games as doing anything besides dipping a racing slick into the waters of true gaming connectivity. 

View Tuesday’s worldwide press blitz on GTA IV‘s multiplayer modes through that historical lens, then. (Miss the coverage?  You can get an in-depth hands-on preview over at GameSpy.com). The Grand Theft Auto franchise, venerated for revolutionizing both gameplay and storytelling mechanics, has finally shifted its focus to online multiplayer - and they’re approaching the task with the same zeal applied to developing open-ended sandbox game worlds, non-linear storytelling and hooker jiggle physics.

To wit, not one, but FOUR very distinctive multiplayer modes: Team Deathmatch, Cops & Crooks, GTA Race and Hangman’s Noose (a co-op mission). At first blush, this sounds fairly run-of-the-mill; we’ve seen co-op and TDM before.  But Rockstar has several surprises in store. Team Deathmatch, for example, goes beyond the vanilla implementation of that game mode by allowing players to do pretty much everything they love to do in singleplayer in a multiplayer setting: dive out of speeding cars, take out pedestrians, you name it. GTA Race literally allows you to hurl the game’s full arsenal in your competitors’ ways.  To cap it all off, GameSpy.com also reports that, “… some elements of Rockstar’s Social Club [which launches today!] will integrate with multiplayer.” In essence Rockstar has carjacked multiplayer gaming, and is mashing its pedal to the floor to bust through the in-game, out-of-game barrier.

The point here isn’t to wax rhapsodic about GTA IV, however - it’s to point out what’s possible when a developer puts the full spectrum of connected gaming front and center in its design. Rockstar is committing the same level of revolutionary thinking to multiplayer, community and competition that it applies to the actual gameplay experience.  Truly, for GTA IV, the two are one and the same - obviating the excuse you typically hear from developers that they’ve “sacrificed multiplayer features in order to spend more time on the core gameplay.” We’ve long argued that the two are not mutually exclusive.  Rockstar seems to agree.  We’ll let GTA IV‘s sales numbers finish the story. 

As Mario Kart fanatics in Europe and Japan are finding out this week, the much-anticipated Mario Kart Wii is living up to its hype - a fact that we modestly think may have something to do with its stellar multiplayer experience. (Cue rubbing of knuckles on jacket collar.) The game has hit shelves in both territories, and we can confirm that people are already racing their wheels down to nubs online in unprecedented droves.

US fans (at least, those who haven’t already picked up their copy of the game from their favorite import shops) will be waiting until late April to hit the starting line - but, in the mean time, they can revel in some of the coverage being given to the game’s online features.

As IGN UK’s recent “Online Impressions” article details, there’s a lot to love here: Up to 12-player racing across 32 tracks; interactive, graphically fun leaderboards; the ability to race against “ghosts” of top-ranked players; and weekly “Competitions,” objective-based challenges that show off Nintendo’s ability to reconfigure individual tracks-on-the-fly. The cap on the mushroom?  Virtually lag-free online multiplayer races and dead-simple matchmaking, which put players into matches quickly and delivered quality races the minute their wheels hit the track. 

As with all Wii titles, the Nintendo Mario Kart team worked directly with GameSpy Technology to power all of these online features, putting a unique spin on the standard tools and services that we make available to all Wii developers. We’ll detail all of this in depth in a future case study when the game launches in North America - for now, start revving your engines. 

CVG had a great interview with Peter Shea, Creative Director at Firebrand Games, talking about the forthcoming DS version of Race Drive: GRID. (See IGN UK's preview for a more general overview.)

The interview really focuses in on what Firebrand is doing differently for the handheld version of the game. It sounds as if they're really doing a great job in taking the special capabilities of the DS into account when it comes to track creation, as well as tweaking gameplay to match the handheld experience. I'm glad to see that more and more developers are taking this approach. Shoveling out ports helps no one.

Race Drive: GRID does user-gen content

Perhaps the most interesting bit for me, though, was Shea's discussion of how they're taking all of the user-created content the track editor is going to spawn to really make GRID something special:

Shea: It's very straightforward. You can save six different tracks on your Game Card, and then by connecting to Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, you can upload any of these tracks to your own space on the Gamespy servers.

You can then tell your friends about it, and they can look for your tracks online using your Friend Name, and download them to save on their own copy of the game. They are then free to race or edit the track, or upload it to their own bit of the server.

There's a wealth of great content out there that people are creating every single day. The hardcore folks know to head over to FilePlanet and look for the latest maps or mods on the PC. The more mainstream gamer, and those on the console, aren't necessarily going to want to jump through those hoops. What they need is a dead simple means of sharing that content from directly within the game.

That, my friends, is exactly what we built Sake, our Persistent Storage system, to do.

We saw a similar approach taken in Mini Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2, a single player title, and the first game to ship with Sake. The additional content spawned a thriving, if small, community and gave the game huge legs. You can read more about it in my presentation from last year, Breaking the In-Game/Out-of-Game Barrier.

I'm excited to see Sake put to great use again on the DS, this time by Firebrand. We'll definitely be doing a case study on this bad boy when it hits shelves later this year.

Well, that certainly didn’t take long!  Super Smash Bros. Brawl was unleashed upon Japan just two short weeks ago and, already, the game is breaking sales records.  (I refrained from making any “smashing” jokes.)

Kotaku, courtesy of Famitsu, are reporting that Super Smash Bros. Brawl has become the fastest selling Wii title, beating out hits like Wii Fit and Wii Sports.

We’re hoping that the killer online feature set - from straight-up multiplayer action, to betting on replays, to sharing home-brew stages - are helping to contribute to those numbers.  Nintendo pulled out all the stops when bringing one of my favorite franchises to the Wii.

Look for a full case study on Super Smash Bros. Brawl when the game becomes available to the rest of the world in a few more months.

January would have been a slow, slow start for 2008 had it not been for a few powerhouse titles.  Perhaps you’ve heard of a little game called Super Smash Bros.?  Apparently the kids in Japan have been looking forward to this one or something.

Congrats to all of our publisher and developer partners who braved the snowy, cold month of January and released the following great titles with superlative online play:

• Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) Nintendo
• EXIT DS (DS) Taito
• Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (DS) Sega
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS) Nintendo
• Wii Chess (Wii) Spice Games
• Nitrobike (Wii) Ubisoft
• Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity (Wii) Sega
• Rune Factory 2 (DS) Neverland

Those of us outside of Japan will have to wait until March for the Smash Bros. Brawl goodness to come our way.  In the meantime, take solace that the boys at GameSpy.com have more screenshots, movies and opinions than you can shake a stick at.  Pay particular attention to the online write-up!

The year ended with a bang as far as online gaming was concerned.  Heavy hitters like Unreal Tournament 3 set the PS3 on fire while old favorites, like the Warhammer franchise, made their debut on handhelds.  A good trend to see as we wrapped up 2008.  Pay special attention, too, to all of the “casual” titles that are doing interesting things online with the Wii.  Would have guessed it when 2007 began?

• Arkanoid (DS) Taito
• Power Pro Kun Pocket 10 (DS) Konami
• Faces of War: Brothers In Arms (PC) 1C
• Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command (DS) THQ
• Unreal Tournament 3 (PS3) Epic Games
• Chocobo’s Dungeon (Wii) Square Enix
• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams (Wii) Sega
• MX vs ATV: Untamed (PS2) THQ
• Heisei Kyouikuiinkai DS: Zengoku Touitsu Moshi Special (DS) Namco Bandai
• Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu Wii Ketteiban (Wii) Konami
• Kousoku Card Battle: Card Hero (DS) Nintendo
• Puzzler Number Placing Fun & Oekaki Logic 2 (DS) TDK
• Rising Eagle (PC) Invasion Interactive
• Anime Slot Revoluion (Wii) Namco Bandai
• Simple Wii Series, Vol 3: THE Party Casino (Wii) D3P Publisher
• Simple Wii Series, Vol. 4: THE Shooting Action (Wii) D3P Publisher

November was a prolific month for online play across all of the different platforms we support. More PSP goodness from Red Lynx and THQ with Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command after last months PSP resurgence is always a good thing to see. Timeshift kicked things off for the PS3 this holiday... look for more PS3 titles in December and gaining strength into the new year.

• Panzer Tactics (DS) 10Tacle
• Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (Wii) Sega
• Empire Earth III (PC) Vivendi Games
• F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate (PC) Vivendi Games
• Ultimate Mortal Kombat (DS) Midway Games
• Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command (PSP) THQ
• Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 (Wii) Ubisoft
• Need for Speed: ProStreet (DS) Electronic Arts
• Crysis (PC) Electronic Arts
• Word Jong (DS) Destineer
• TimeShift (PS3) Vivendi Games
• TimeShift (PC) Vivendi Games
• Unreal Tournament 3 (PC) Midway Games
• Geometry Wars: Galaxies (Wii) Vivendi Games
• Trauma Center: New Blood (Wii) Atlus Software
• Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2008 (DS) Konami
• Tank Beat 2 (DS) Milestone

Is the single player experience nearing an end? I would argue not. We've seen a raft of great single player games in just the past few months. Portal or Bioshock anyone?

But MTV thinks otherwise. The MTV Multiplayer blog has an interesting bit of speculation up, suggesting that the "solo-only" experience is on the way out and more simultaneous play is on the way in.

For proof they cite Super Mario Galaxy and the inclusion of a two player mode. One guy is jumping about as Mario while the other shoots incoming enemies and collects golden goodness. There are also all of the ads featuring groups of happy people on couches - even if the game in question (Metroid Prime 3) is single player.

Perhaps MTV are on to something here... though I would hesitate to say that Nintendo is the only one leaving the solo experience out in the cold.

If anything, I'd say Nintendo are just now catching up with a wave that the industry has been riding for some time now.

Gears of War did a phenomenal job with the co-op campaign last year and looks poised to repeat it in the "single player/tournament" mode in Unreal Tournament 3. GRAW 2 and Lego Star Wars also had stellar co-op campaigns. In fact, there were entire sections of the game that practically required co-op play in order to access. Guitar Hero 3 is in the same boat here, with co-op play being required to access songs like "Reptilia"" and "Sabotage."

I believe that Nintendo are, however, doing what they do best: taking a fairly straight-forward concept and applying it new and in novel ways.

Mario Strikers lets you take local co-op to a new level by competing against another team of two humans sharing the same Wii. The same will be true in the new Smash Brothers title due out next year.

While MTV makes some great points, I'm more inclined to believe that Nintendo's recent designs are less about leaving the solo experience out in the cold and more about offering Player 2 a cozy seat by the gaming fire.

Last week we had an "Orange Day" and, while the media gushed over Episode 2 I was far more excited about the full version of Team Fortress 2, to be quite honest. Episode 2 will come and go but I suspect I'll still be playing 2fort for years to come. (Just like these die-hards.)

If you haven't had a chance to listen to the developer commentary included in Team Fortress 2 you definitely should. It offers a unique look into the minds of some very talented designers. Miss grenades? Learn why they aren't there. Curious about the choice of art direction when so many other games are going beyond photorealism? Hear why Valve scrapped their approach and went in the opposite direction.

Your personal best is tracked in TF.2

I was especially intrigued by the developer commentary Kerry Davis gave on the design of the stats system. Davis says something I've long maintained: global leaderboards are dumb.

Games usually approach stats by comparing a player to everyone else in the world. This is only really of interest to those who are near the top. With Team Fortress 2, we decided that a better approach might be to compare the stats to the players previous successes, turning them from a world-wide comparative system into a personalized motivational one.

The beginning player gets encouragement and acknowledgment, that while they are not highly skilled yet, they are getting better all the time.
Kerry Davis, Valve Software

What a global leaderboard lacks is context. I'm never going to be at the top of the list so it is irrelevant to me. Why show the top 100 to me as the default view? Are you trying to make me feel bad? Do you want me to give up on your game and go play someone else's game?

(Not only that, but it can encourage exploits and cheating. Witness Bungie outright removing leaderboards from Halo 2.)

By applying a buddy filter, for example, I'm no longer competing against 450,000 anonymous smacktards any more. I'm duking it out for #1 against my 14 closest gaming friends. Better yet, I've now got an acceptable joke about performance to throw out at meetings at my boss's expense. You can see this put to great use in the new Unreal Tournament 3 demo.

Or, if the information is available, a regional or zip code filter could, again, provide some context. Are you the best Madden player in Orange County? (I can assure you that I am not!)

While on the right track, I think Valve takes it a bit too far and eliminates leaderboards all together. Leaderboards themselves, of course, aren't all bad. With the application of a little context the information in a leaderboard can be relevant, interesting and a great community builder.

There's an excellent new article up on GameDaily.biz today examining how effective game websites are at driving sales. In it Scott Meldrum of HypeCouncil (warning - ANNOYING music!) takes a critical look at the websites for Bioshock, Guitar Hero 3 and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

The sites, while in many cases beautiful, come up sorely lacking when it comes to some of the key functions you expect from a major marketing vehicle. There was little call to action for purchase, little or no attempt to create a community around the sites and almost no attention paid to turning your users into Mini-Marketers for the games.

Bummer... but not at all unexpected, to be quite honest.

Where are the feeds for game news? Where is the link to purchase Bioshock digitally? Where is my AIM icon pack? What about keeping people coming back once the game has launched?

Now, The Cult of Rapture does have some awesome goodies but it is so, so hard to find... and doesn't really seem to fit in at all with the big, Flashy main Bioshock site. Could it be that the two were designed by different folks? The Cult by people who "get it" and the main site by people who, quite frankly, don't?

The Guitar Hero 3 site does offer a glimmer of hope with the Backstage Pass but breaks one of my cardinal rules for websites: the dreaded "coming soon." I can almost guarantee you that I'll never come back to see if you finished what you promised.

We're always preaching to developers about how community needs to be a part of game design from day one. It looks like that message needs to be expanded to more forcefully include marketing as a part of the design process.

Command & Conquer 3 was an excellent case study for this approach. We worked very closely with the team at EA LA to get as much of the site up and functional as soon as possible. C&C Online was there to provide a constant stream of information for fans of the game.

There were forums for users to chat with one another, developer blogs on the design process and in-depth podcasts for users to download and listen to again and again. In addition to a wealth of information we gave them a real reason to visit: gamers were allowed to pre-register their nicknames for the retail release.

Perhaps most importantly the site morphed once the game was released. The marketing material was still there for new users but new, live content appeared. Ladders, clans, Battlecast and other features were exposed giving people a real reason to return time and time again.

It pains me to think of all the time and money spent on the ineffective sites Meldum profiled. How much more effective could they have been in driving sales by recognizing and using the simplest of tools the Web has to offer? What more could have been done post-launch to keep users coming back, priming them for the next installment in the franchise...

Word on the street is that there's this great new game in town. Halo something or other. I hear it is breaking all kinds of sales records, causing rampant truancy at schools across the nation and is also the future of gaming.

What impresses me most, though, about Halo 3 aren't the big things but rather the small things, the niceties, that most people are probably going to ignore.

The Forge? It reminds me of the skate park editors in early Tony Hawk games. I've seen better level editors and, let's face it, most user-created maps are crap. I admit, though, that I am curious to see what the little twist playing games while editing takes place will turn up. Those of you who played SourceForts can probably relate. An 8-player deathmatch with all eight players simultaneously editing the very same map has fascinating potential. A small twist sure to reap rewards.

The replay system, too, has all be done before. There's a long history in the Quake community of making games, Half-Life gurus took it to another level and then, of course, there's the rabid RTS replay-consuming community. (See also the great BattleCast feature we worked with Command & Conquer 3 on earlier this year.) What I love about the replay system in Halo 3 is just how drop-dead easy it is to use. A hallmark of the Halo series is the attention paid to usability. While usability is certainly no "small thing" it definitely is oft overlooked.

Truth be told, I think the matchmaking in Halo 3 is just average. It's fairly easy to find a match but, being the fast-twitch gamer that I am I'm frustrated any time I have to sit and watch my Xbox tell me "Searching for close match." Thankfully there's a gorgeous little map on the matchmaking screen that has little dots on the globe showing me from where online players hail. (We had a similar feature in GameSpy Arcade's lobbies - see "Playing Peer to Peer Games.") I love it! I could stare at this thing all day. It's a tiny little feature, but one that distracts me from the tedium of matchmaking and makes me feel connected to the community.

I haven't seen much hooplah about the player stats shown on Bungie.net perhaps that's because, given what the Battlefield franchise and others have done on the web many find it fairly ho-hum - aside from the slick presentation. What I absolutely think is a small but important feature is the feed available for every player. I can now add a friend's feed to my favorite reader and get hourly updates on his ownage.

All of these little things, along with dozens more, take a game that is "merely great" to all new heights. I hope that more developers take note and start sweating the small stuff. As consumers grow more savvy they're going to expect these niceties and, maybe, start to punish developers for "merely" making a great game.

We participated in the last Gamasutra Podcast and debated with a few other industry folks whether or not the new E3 works.

Susan Arendt, from Wired, N'Gai Croal, General Editor of Newsweek, and John Davison of 1UP were there to represent the media. Denny Thorley, President of Day 1 Studios, and I were there to represent developers. Opinions on the new format varied, with media being disappointed while Denny and I thought the new format largely worked. Give it a listen and let us know whether or not you agree.

I was recently listening to Science Friday on NPR and heard a fantastic interview with John Maeda, Associate Director of Research at The Media Lab at MIT. During the interview Maeda discussed his book The Laws of Simplicity.

The laws range from the obvious (Law 1: Reduce "The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.") to the nearly contradictory (Law 9: Failure "Some things can never be made simple.") You can - and should - read more about each of the laws on Maeda's blog. It struck me as I was listening that complexity is among the greatest barriers we in the game industry face.

Complexity prevents us from expanding our audience.
Need proof? Just watch a non-gamer struggle with a controller. The 360 controller, which I consider quite usable, has two stick controls, a D-pad, 7 buttons on the top of the controller and 4 triggers hidden from view. Over time, of course, using the controller becomes second nature - a natural extension of the player. But not everyone has the time to commit to learning, nor the desire to learn some new skill in order to play a game.

Touching is good. And intuitive.

A large part of Nintendo's success with the DS and the Wii, I would argue, comes from stripping away the complexities of the controller. What could be simpler than tapping directly on the screen of the DS? Or swinging the Wiimote just like you would a golf club? My three year-old quickly figured out how to pet her Nintendog (named 'Anchovy' in case you were interested) and my father has no problem playing Clubhouse Games - online, even!

That's Law 1 in action, folks. How could you put it to use in your game?

Complexity prevents users from discovering (and enjoying) higher-order functionality.
We've focused a good bit in recent years in adding more and more complex functionality to our suite of products. One of the questions that constantly comes up during design meetings is how to add Feature X such that the interface doesn't become needlessly complex? Or, perhaps more importantly, whether or not anyone will really make use of a feature if it requires too much thought on a user's part?

We are, for example, big proponents of lots of filtering in a server browser. It allows users to get a smaller list, making the browsing process faster (Law 3: Time). It also makes the list far more relevant, making it easier to select a server that meets your criteria. Great!

So many options, so much complexity.

Sort of. In practice, though, we often see filtering implemented as a jumble of drop-downs, multi-state checkboxes and text-entry fields. Worse still? The filter options are all present but defaulted to none. Why not pre-select some? Like "not empty/not full" or "not passworded." Law 5, people. Simplicity and complexity need each other.

Complexity causes frustration, fatigue and failure.
As a game developer you want to evoke emotions in your players. You want them to feel attached to the characters. You want them to feel a rush of adrenaline in the heat of battle. You want them to forge strong friendships with the people they play with online.

You don't want them feeling frustrated because they don't understand how a feature works. Or feel fatigued by having to do the same tasks every time they play. Law 7 states that more emotion is better than less. So long as it is positive I'd say that's true. The last thing you need, though, is more negative emotion.

Immediately after hearing the interview I put in an order for The Laws of Simplicity. Download the podcast and see if it has the same effect on you. Who knows, maybe the game you're working on right now could use a little simplicity!

I really welcomed the disappearance of the week-long assault on my senses that E3 had become in recent years. Our primary focus at the show has been to meet with our publisher and developer partners to discuss current projects as well as begin talking about things they had announced at the show. The mega-event had grown so over-the-top that it was difficult to get anything done. As the E3 booths grew more elaborate and the decibels increased meetings held on the show floor literally turned to exchanges shouted between drum beats.

I was relieved when the ESA announced the format change last year. President Doug Lowenstein cited making the show more "business-friendly" among their key reasons for the change:

"When we asked key audiences what they wanted in the new event, we heard that they wanted opportunities for high-level meetings in a business-like setting, to play games, network, and socialize, to see major company offerings while also preserving the sense of discovery that is so much a part of the show, and to hear substantive presentations on the most important issues and trends facing the industry," Lowenstein said.

Sure enough, this year's format was great for business. The 30 minute shouting matches were gone and replaced by leisurely conversations with publishers and developers in private, quiet locations. It was easy to bump into someone walking down Ocean and have an impromptu discussion on the way from the Fairmont to Lowes. What a change!

What was missing, though, was the "sense of discovery." What was missing, more specifically, was Kentia Hall.

Kentia always held a special place in my heart. You never quite knew what you would discover there. There were crazy peripherals, like the CyMouse, that you controlled with your head instead of your hand. I saw the first cool use of a USB camera on a PC at Kentia in Gaijin's Flight of Fancy in which you controlled your dragon and cast spells via gesture recognition.

Kentia was always the home of the risk-taker. While there was certainly a large number of flat-out kooks (God love 'em!) showing their wares in Kentia you could always find one or two gems that you knew would go on to greatness. You can never forget the biggest thing to ever come from Kentia: Guitar Hero. Would Rock Band be all the rage this year without the help of Kentia oh so many years ago? I tend to doubt it.

There was no place at this year's E3 for the smaller developer to participate. If the ESA can crack that nut next year I think that the new E3 will be on the right path.

I'm getting a little tired of all the hype over cross-platform play recently. First it was Shadowrun. Now people seem to be all gah-gah over Universe at War allowing PC vs. Xbox 360 play.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think cross-platform is a good thing, especially when it comes to building a community around a game. No more segmentation of audience by platform. You don't have a little group of Xbox gamers and little group of PC gamers; you have a great big, happy group of Universe at War players. Nothing but goodness, there.

We've been big proponents of cross-platform play for a long time. Together with Terminal Reality we successfully brought PC, Macintosh and Dreamcast users to play against each other in 4x4 Evolution... in October of 2000. Yes, the Dreamcast (R.I.P.) and, yes, in 2000.

4x4 Evolution multiplayer on PC, Macintosh and Dreamcast

Since then we've worked with a number of developers on PS2 vs. PSP games, including the World Series of Poker games. Our long-time friends at Aspyr do an admirable job of keeping PC and Mac users playing together in the same universe in the Civilization IV and Battlefield ports to the Mac. Hell, we even powered the cross-platform Halo on PC and Mac!

Cross-platform isn't rocket science. It's just smart community building.

What rubs me the wrong way about all of the recent cross-platform news is that it is being touted as something new and technically amazing - and that journalists seem to be buying it. I said "Universe at War allowing PC vs. Xbox 360 play" in the first paragraph and I meant it. There's nothing new here, other than a change in Microsoft's attitude.

The story really ought to be, "What's taken you so long?"

The always excellent Bokardo published the second entry in a series on Common Pitfalls of Building Community. (Look for part 1 here.) I thought the first point, not appointing a full-time community manager, was particlarly applicable for the games industry as more and more games look to build a vibrant community both inside and outside the game.

The MMO/persistent world guys have this all figured out. They appoint community managers from the day that a game is announced and carefully herd their community like a much-loved flock of sheep. That said, I still talk with developers on a nearly daily basis who think they can slam a server browser and some leaderboards into their game and - bam! - online and community is done.

Not so, kind sirs. Your community needs a manager, just as a party needs a host. They need an official representative to speak with, an advocate within your studio, someone to mete out justice, someone to set the tone and site mores.

Some of the folks we work with, like the Command & Conquer team, have known this for years and actively manage their community from the inside. (Hi, APOC!) APOC is in the forums every day talking with users, posting news and updates to the site and always on the lookout for troublemakers to punish and community stars to rave about.

For those who use our competition tech to create web-based ladders we offer community management as a part of our service. Take a look at the Star Wars: Empire at War space ladders for an example. [Guard]Valdimer is always there monitoring the ladders for suspicious activity and keeping the community up-to-date on ladder information.

One last thought: Don't make make the mistake of thinking one of your designers or developers can act as the community manager. Once your community becomes active, a place where thousands of users flock each and every day part-time just won't be good enough. Plan ahead for success. Build that CM into your live team's budget or give us a shout to help you out.

The monthly DigiPen PodClass podcast is all about computer and video game development, courtesy of the DigiPen Institute of Technology in lovely Redmond, WA. Host Omaha Sternberg, who also hosts the iGame Radio podcast for MacRadio, gives a run-down on industry news, interviews game industry professionals, and DigiPen faculty on a variety of game development topics.

For Issue 13 of the PodClass Omaha turned her attention to... us! We chatted about our mission at GameSpy, what developers can do to differentiate themselves and how they can use the collective might of the IGN family to get their title front-and-center with our audience. Issue 13 also features Jeremy Mayes and Tom Rassweiler of Arkadium talking about advergaming and advertising in games.

Stream or download the PodClass and hear what we have to say.

Like what you hear? Subscribe to the podcast and get a new issue each month.

First we launch a blog and now we're podcasting? If we can find a way to work in "social networking" and "mash-up" we'll be all set.

When I saw Chris Paladino's most recent post on Managing the 100-Person Friend List I had three thoughts:

1. God bless us geeks and our obsessive ways. Only the best among us would use Excel to scrupulously catalog their play habits.
2. Why on Earth is there a 100-person friend limit on Xbox Live?
3. And why on Earth must one keep a spreadsheet like that when software can do it for you?

Xbox Live attempts this last bit for you with their "Recently Played" list. That's a great feature and I use it all the time. It doesn't have all the detail that the spreadsheet contains, so I can understand the need, I guess. But why the 100-person limit? It seems antithetical to the whole concept of a buddy list.

I have 573 buddies on my list, gathered across 50+ games over the past 5 years. I met n3Eo playing Tony Hawk 4 on the PS2 back in 2002. I see him playing Command & Conquer 3 most often these days. BT_Davids owns me when we play Battlefield 2142. XchiN still pops up playing C&C Renegade almost every single day.

Do I play with n3Eo or XchiN? Nope, not in years. But their very presence on my list has a huge impact on my sense of community. I'm a part of a large - and growing - group with some real history. Limiting it to 100 would mean severing ties with people I gamed with in the past.

My Comrade Buddy List

Creating a vibrant community is, afterall, the whole point of a buddy list. Don't you have buddies from high school or college that you very rarely see or talk to? And when you do speak you trade stories about the crazy night when you trashed the quad after your football team won. (Or something.) Should you excise them from your life because you hadn't interacted more than 4 times over the past 3 months and 27 days?

No, of course not.

And you shouldn't have to with your buddy list in games, either.

Now Chris mentions "non-trivial technical hurdles" that are the source of this limit.

I'll be blunt and say that seems rather hand-wavy to me. We've been helping game develpers add buddy lists to their games for years now with no limitations at all.

It is our job as technologists to find solutions to the problems that users have. It is our job to enable them with tools and functionality to build a vibrant community.

"Non-trivial hurdles" be damned.

I saw this weekend that clever folks at Team Ninja are giving gamers an actual, honest-to-God reason to play their demo: free loot. (Thanks, Joystiq.) Players are rewarded with in-game currency based on the length of time they play the demo.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma (PS3)

It struck me that there were a number of other interesting and unique things that a developer could do to put their demos to better use.

Link to Pre-Orders
Why, oh, why, do we still see static "Buy me when i finally come out!" images at the end of game demos? Digital retail is here! Stop asking people to remember that your game will be coming out in the future and start taking their money now.

Interested? Talk to our friends at Direct2Drive about digitally distributing your game and enabling their awesome pre-load functionality in conjunction with your pre-order program. At the very least link to some sort of retail pre-order landing page explaining where you can buy retail.

Reserve Your Nickname
Games that use our Community services have the option of letting their players choose unique nicknames on a per-game basis. Encourage people to "claim" their name by using the same namespace in your demo. (Expire old, unused nicknames at a later date or use our "Naminator" to suggest creative name variants.)

Accumulate Stats from the Demo
We see more and more games featuring leaderboards and stats. Why not combine the demo and retail info into one, unified leaderboard? Let your players jockey for position at the top in the demo and then see if they can maintain that position once the retail game comes out. We're doing this right now with the Ghost Recon 2 (PC) demo on GameSpy Arena.

There are a million other ways to make your demo a more powerful selling tool, I'm sure. When it comes time to assemble the demo resist the urge to slap together a single player level with a static "buy me" image at the end and find one of those million ideas that will work for you.

Several weeks ago Terra Nova posted an interesting opinion piece on The Inevitability of Voice. The piece focuses on an interesting phenomenon in-game voice had introduced: suddenly who you are in "real life" can have in impact on your role in a virtual world. (Tip via Fargo's FileBlog at FilePlanet.)

Suddenly a player who you assumed was a grizzled warrior turns out to be merely a child. Women are harassed by adolescent boys instead of being allowed to simply play the game.

This shouldn't stop you from building voice into your games. While initially found only in a select few games or something only the hardest of the hardcore did using external applications, voice is now seen as a standard feature. There's no perfect way to solve this problem there are a few approaches you can take.

First off, make it easy to mute the voice of both individual players as well as disable voice all together. Most of the games that have used our Voice SDK have taken this approach. See Lord of the Rings: Online or SWAT 4 for a good example of this.

Or take it one step further and make voice an invite-only feature. This approach was taken with great success by DICE in both Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142. Voice communication is only enabled for those within your squad. The player must consciously choose to join a squad and participate in voice chat.

Give your players the features they expect but do so by apply some thought and care to how they may be treated once it is discovered that a 13-year old girl is whooping up on them.

The team working on GameSpy Comrade are always trying to figure out ways to help you get more out of gaming. First, they took the best elements of our previous software and rolled it up into a nice, sleek little app that lets you chat (across platforms) with buddies and allows you to instantly join a game server that any of your friends join. If you haven't downloaded Comrade yet, you should give it a try.

Nowadays the Comrade engineers -- and when I say that I want you to imagine that they all wear lab coats and hard hats, because I've been pushing for that for years -- have developed a new tool for quickly getting into a game. Instead of forcing you to scan through a massive list of servers (or instead of picking one for you), the "SmartMatch" tool uses some basic criteria to give you a 'short list' of the four or five servers you'll probably care about the most. It gets you into a good game, quick.

All this was done with some clever UI on top of the Server Browsing SDK. You, Mr. Game Developer, have this technology in your hands right now. All you need to do is spend some time deciding what criteria you can use to pare that list down to a manageable size.