Interesting months ahead for the gaming industry. The big gaming news of Q1 2008 was EA announcing its plans to release its FPS game Battlefield Heroes for free. It offers the game as a free download, and supports it trough micro-payments (you can buy in-game bonuses for real money or pay monthly fees for premium services) and advertisements. A system closely related to the ‘in-world‘ economy models found in Social VW’s.
This however, is not the only way the game industry is innovating. Over at ‘InstantAction.com‘ the developers (GarageGames) are creating 3D browser based games in their own ‘plug in’. As the name suggest the goal of the developers is to create a new 3D gaming platform, socially connected trough the www. What I found the most promising part of this ‘plug-in’ is it uses the same engine (Torque) IBM uses for experimenting with their internal ‘Virtual World’ Metaverse.
A long since problem with the acceptance of Virtual Worlds are the tiresome client downloads (and updates), preventing easy access for explorers. Enabling browsers to directly become a ‘window’ into the virtual worlds will certainly be a step in the right direction for broad consumer acceptance and integration of immersive 3D social environments into the web. The data of Second Life for instance is already available on the world wide web, what has been lacking is the graphical engine to make it visual.
Apart from allowing companies to develop more direct links between their 3D ’sites’ and their 2D websites without the download and install processes of the Virtual World clients blocking the flow of the user, it also allows smooth cross-platform integration to gaming consoles (such as the Playstation, Xbox etc). As more teenagers are using consoles, the natural environment for 3D applications, it will be important to keep them connected to Virtual Worlds.
With all this technology rushing to the stage, I wonder how long it will take until we see the first graphically attractive Virtual Worlds who will meet the expectations of both users and developers run completely without clients. Interesting times indeed…
source: eightbar
Posted on: February 9, 2008 | Share on:
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