Gamers live in an online world. So should their accomplishments

Here at GameSpy, we know that as games evolve from solitary play into a vibrant social ecology, gamers increasingly want to share their progress with their friends online. For some, it magnifies their sense of accomplishment to broadcast it out to the world. Others seek authoritative proof for mastering parts of a game, by backing up bold talk with an official reference point or even to compare the fruits of their gameplay labor with those of their friends and see who comes out on top. All of these goals are accomplished by breaking the in-game/out of game barrier, and GameSpy stepped up to the plate to help Disney share media created inside their game online. Gamers can then easily link to their creations in blogs, social networks and other communication channels with a simple web link, thus allowing your game to be promoted virally.

In Disney Interactive and Genki’s Spectrobes: Origins Action RPG for the Wii, players follow the adventures of Nanairo Planetary Patrol officers Rallen and Jeena and control ‘Spectrobes’, ancient beings of light aligned with the five elemental forces in their quest to prevent a great galactic threat. For the first time in the Spectrobes franchise, players now have the opportunity to capture their progress online, for others to see.

Easy for gamers and developers alike

Linked to a player’s GameSpy powered Wii friend code, Spectrobes: Origins already allowed the user to store a number of in-game screen shots online to GameSpy’s Sake cloud storage system, much in the same way that WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2009 stores video match highlights online on the PS3. The next obvious step was to make this content available to others, and to do it so in a way that took into account the young demographic of the game’s core audience.

In GameSpy and Disney’s collaboration on this feature, two points were of crucial importance for the publisher: the sharing needed to seamlessly integrate into the game without extra controls for its young player base, and the development team needed to be able to rapidly adopt the functionality without creating significant additional implementation overhead. We were able to deliver on both fronts, using our Social Networking Aggregator / Publisher (SNAP) service.

SNAP automatically uploads screenshots submitted to Sake to a special Spectrobes: Origins group on the picture sharing site Photobucket, without requiring any additional complicated UI or instructions to users. Since the actual business logic of submitting the images to Photobucket lives entirely on the Powered by GameSpy backend, the developers didn’t need to spend any additional time coding anything into the game. Our Professional Services team did all the work for them, allowing their engineers to complete the game.

SNAP speaks multiple formats, plays well with many destinations

Basic sharing of screenshots is only one aspect of our SNAP infrastructure. Created as a modular system, it can easily be extended to support any number of popular media sharing sites that offer a public API, such as Facebook, Flickr or Youtube. Publishers who want to go the extra mile and create a custom portal for their intellectual properties can share content on their own sites too. By drawing traffic back to their own web sites, they remain in full control of how their brand is represented and what additional content might be promoted to visitors.

The developer need only submit their media to the GameSpy cloud using our existing Sake API, SNAP does all the rest. It figures out how to authenticate a user, interact with the site’s specific API, converts the content into the appropriate format and attaches any additional meta data associated with it. Fault tolerant, SNAP will attempt to resubmit content again, should there be any problems the first time around. SNAP can even submit the same content to multiple destinations, and all the game needed to do was upload it once.

It’s so easy, what are you waiting for?

Gamers are clamoring to share their in-game creations with the world. Make your title stand out among others of its kind, by adding user generated content sharing using SNAP and Sake. Contact us today to find out more!