Identity Fragmentation & The Future Of Gaming

Posted by mburstiner on February 21, 2012 09:50 pm 3

This post is in response to this fine gentleman, but I felt it belonged in Gaming, not Android. Also, i had started typing this out in a comment on that post, but it got super long so here I am. Go read that post before you read this. If you really don't want to, here's a TL;DR: If gaming on Android is to surge, Google should support game save syncing.

So, at the risk of sounding like a shill, my company is working on this problem. The thing is, what we see as the solution is a lot more complex that initially meets the eye. I'll start with addressing the things brought up in the other post and then I'll talk a bit about our approach and some of what we've found.

Gamecenter is fine if you're only on iOS. If you're only on iOS, chances are pretty good that your title supports cloud saves. That's fine & it's all well & good from that perspective. The problem is that the UI is absolutely disgusting & it's not terribly feature rich. Plus that pesky thing about only being on iOS.

OpenFeint has long been purchased by a Japanese social gaming company called Gree. Their focus is very much on social gaming. You know, the Farmville types. This is also the case with Plus+ creators ngmoco:). They were purchased by another Japanese company called DeNA. You can already tell that both of these companies have their priorities elsewhere. Either way, OpenFeint has a fatal flaw. It forces the developer to put OpenFeint UI in-game. Not only does this create aesthetic roadblocks, but it adds cycles to the developers' workflow. Every time OF makes an update to their UI, the game has to support it. What a nightmare. Not to mention that their online matchmaking & online multiplayer (turn based or otherwise) is so unreliable that most titles don't support it.

Now, if Google were to do this, the story *might* be a little different, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I love Google and the Android team has been very helpful & supportive in our work on the platform. The problem here is that even though Google can throw a ton of financial support behind it, they're already having problem with focus which is why they trimmed down many of their labs projects to put "more wood behind fewer arrows". Now, it's not just a problem of resources, but at the end of the day, gamers have a very specific set of needs. Until someone steps up to meet them, this problem is going to continue to occur.

Look at what's happening in the gaming industry right now, not just in mobile. Heard of UPlay, EA Origin, the new SSX's RiderNet, Call of Duty Elite, Mass Effect's Cerberus Network (now part of Origin) just to name a few? When did Publishers, let alone individual titles, decide that they need to build off a siloed off network just for their game?? At this rate, we'll have a different login for each and every game we play, then another for the publisher, then another for the manufacturer. Plus, with the gaming industry changing so much so fast, studios are always finding ways to shit on their most loyal fans by witholding content from a title for no other reason than to charge extra for it later.

I'm sure you can now tell that, as I said at the beginning of this post, this problem is much bigger than you would initially expect. Beyond what we both mentioned, there are more things to think about when talking about supporting features like this.

For an indie developer to support something like this is a massive undertaking. We know, we've been building it and we don't even make games. In this same vein, it creates terrible experience for the gamer. Played the ME3 demo yet? The first thing is does is shove a "Log in to EA Origin" in your face. It's even more egregious on mobile. You know the feeling: <open game> "Ugh.....you want me to log in to what now???" <cancel> At that point, even if the dev put the effort into supporting a middleware solution, so many gamers aren't even bothering because the experience is so poor.

Ok, ok, so what we gonna do about it? Well, we believe that the only way to make this work is to go straight into the title in a non-invasive way. We've built out tools that let developers support cross platform data portability (among many other things like analytics) without adding heaps of work to their already full plates.

We think gamers shouldn't have to log in more than once per device. We think you should be able to see all your friends across every platform. We think you should be able to get notifications when your friends start playing, not see it in your feed 6 hours later. We think you should be able to carry scores, achievements & progress to whatever device you damn well please. We think you should have access to your entire history of game saves for a particular title & see your entire statistical history as a gamer. We think that game designers should be able to design for experiences that transcend any one particular screen or form factor. We think that when you do interact with us that what you use should be beautiful and usable. And again, we think developers should be enabled to support these things without making their lives harder.

The problem with this all is that we need developer support in order to make these things possible for gamers. So, we'll see as we launch a beta in the next few months how much support we can get from gamers to help get the attention of developers. The key here is trust; something that has been absent from the gaming industry for too many years now.

Hopefully this didn't come off as a self serving post. I just wanted you all to know that there are gamers just like you out there actively working to make the experience for gamers as great & seamless as it can be as we shove the industry face-first into the future.

TL;DR The gaming industry is in a sad state. My company is working towards enabling developers to support cross platform identities for gamers.