By Mary Jane Irwin June 02, 2008
What if games were « alive? » What if they never ended? What if, on a whim, a game maker decided that today an undead army would sweep through your virtual town intent on leveling it, unless you and a few thousand other virtual citizens showed up to defend it? Or, what if players thought a game segment too dull, so a developer dived into the game and changed it all?
Revolutionizing how games are made is the dream of Lars Buttler, chief executive of Trion World Network and Electronic Arts veteran. For the past two-and-a-half years, Buttler has pitched his vision of games as a service–piped from a server instead of hosted on physical media like discs. He’s found fans: Hewlett Packard, Rustic Canyon Partners, Time Warner, NBC Universal and General Electric, among others, are backing his venture. As of last July, Trion has raised $30 million in funding, but Buttler coyly says investment in the company is much more than that–plus it gets technical know-how and fun things like server plates from his partners. He’s also snagged talent from EA, NCsoft and Sony Online Entertainment.
Now he’s starting to unveil what all this hard work has wrought. Until now, Trion, which acts as a developer and publisher, has focused solely on building the technical architecture behind its digital distribution platform. On Monday, it announced its first title, an internally developed, fantasy-themed, massively multiplayer online game. Trion president Jon Van Canegham, best known for creating the role-playing franchise « Might & Magic, » heads up its development. Trion is also rolling out plans for a collaboration with the Sci Fi channel to co-develop both a television show and a videogame. The game will evolve with the show’s story, with happenings in the game world reflected in the TV series.
The hope is that these first titles, which are meant to ease players into the concept, will begin to move beyond the realm of mere games and evolve digital entertainment. Buttler says his company is trying to pull the best elements from games, television series and social media to keep players coming back.
Since they’ll be hosted on a server, these games can be delivered to any device that’s connected to the Internet–and could be hitting computers, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as early as this year.
To make the games work, Trion is moving the technical infrastructure that supports the game to the computing « cloud. » Buttler’s plans are far more ambitious than simply storing game data on remote servers. He intends to create dynamic games, ones that offer fresh and evolving experiences based on the interactions between players and the game. It’s a move away from a packaged good.
Although Trion is a digital delivery platform, Buttler emphasizes that it’s not an anti-retail strategy. He’s even suggested Trion will sell bundles of subscriptions or pre-paid cards that can be used to purchase items or more play time in stores. What he’s trying to eliminate is games with a clear beginning and end, and instead turn game playing into an ongoing saga–or a Web service that continually rolls out updates and improvements.
Buttler contends that such continual improvement would bring about better and more innovative games. Game design teams would continue to work on titles past launch instead of leaping from project to project, he suggests. Designers could take more risks because, like episodic games, they could build the framework and the first few bits of content to test whether it resonates with consumers before committing to further updates. And since games live on the server, creators would instantly see what players were doing in a game and then adapt it to fit consumer tastes.
Such continual gaming is the ultimate wish of game designers, says Trion’s Jon Van Caneghem–and would produce better games. Currently to make ship dates, developers too often ship games where « 30% to 80% of [the game] is wrong, » he says. By contrast, in Trion’s cloud games, developers could address every glitch when they find it, from making enemies less monotonous to fixing broken elements of the game.
Analysts say that moving games to the cloud is a likely scenario. The big unknown, however, is whether Trion is ahead of the market–and whether its approach is technically feasible. « [The market is] moving toward the server as a delivery system and a service, and it’s a necessary evolution for the market, » says IDC market analyst Billy Pidgeon.
Moving games to servers could also be an effective way to combat the rampant software piracy in Asia and other parts of the world, he says.
« Pirates are our friends, » asserts Buttler. The only thing they could copy is the game’s client, which Trion already plans to distribute for free. Piracy turns into free promotion.
« Gaming becoming an ongoing hub-like service that can evolve and change in a near real-time basis based on needs of consumers is a major disruptive trend, » says Gus Tai, a general partner at Trinity Ventures who led the firm’s investment in Trion. « All the major game publishers understand that trend. » They’re just waiting to snap up smaller firms that take the risk of developing such a system.
Buttler paints a powerful picture when espousing on the Trion platform, and he claims all it takes is the course of a lunch for him to convince developers that this is the future. But for all the lofty talk of revolution, Trion will still have to deliver on the basics: good games.