Game Meets Web
Wow, the gaming world is revving up to Web speed. Checkout this exchange from an allstar panel of gaming luminaries @ GDC 2008.
Raph Koster: “Iteration speed on the web is insane. The base assumptions on pace are astounding. The web can test and iterate in matters of hours; Flickr is patching every 30 minutes. Web analytics is something we can’t do and on top of this games are very hard to make. Unlike the web guys, we can’t afford to make six different versions of a game to see which one works best.”
Peter Molyneux: “Shouldn’t we be making our own social networks [as games and as platforms]? I see what those guys are doing and I think the mistake they are making is the one that we took 20 years to fix; they are mistaking complexity for depth”
Raph Koster: “The fact is that those guys are learning our tricks much quicker than we are learning theirs. They are gamers. They understand the things that we are good at, like interfaces and they learn fast.”
Phil Harrison: “We already make social networks. MMOs are social networks but with a narrative.”
Neil Young: “At EA we’ve been playing around with creating applications and releasing them and watching them go viral. It’s incredibly fast. If you are making games right now and you don’t understand this stuff, you won’t be around for long.”
Flickr has in the past claimed to be patching every 30 minutes--anecdotally at least. I'd bet that as they've matured (and gotten tighter with Yahoo), that's changed.
Pushing changes every 30 minutes isn't something to strive for: it's thrashing, not iterating. Rapidly launching and improving new ideas is great, but as services like Flickr mature, stability and predictability become much more important.
Also: pushing new changes rapidly is not the same as "going viral" quickly. Rapid adoption of something isn't the same as rapid development of a thing.
Posted by: Thomas | February 22, 2008 at 10:12 AM