Player Created Content: Industry Created Glut
Man, things sure seem to be shaping up for a mighty crowded playfield on the user-generated-content (or the better 'player created content' name) landscape.
The basic premise of '99% of everything is crap, but in a long-tail world, there's enough content for some cream to float to the top' seems sound. However, creating content takes time, and one has to wonder what the intersection of sets looks like between gamers and would-be-creators, and then how big that pool is, vis a vis it's dilution across so many venues for content creation & sharing.
An incomplete inventory off the top of my head:
Games centered around UGC
- Spore
- Little Big Planet*
- others
Games with UGC as non-core feature
- Many many first person shooters (e.g. Unreal)
- Race games allowing for custom cars/tracks (e.g. Forza)
- etc
Virtual worlds with UGC-element
- Second Life
- Google's Lively
- Habbo and a thousand would-be Habbo's
- Sony Home
Game creation middleware/systems
- MS's XNA
- Torque
Hosted game creation services
- Playcrafter
- Raph's Metaplace (my personal fave)
The good news is that there's plenty of variety, and they run the gammut from writing cod to drag-n-drop.
I do worry, however, that many will fall by the wayside for lack of sufficient user-base to generate the content.
And yes, I realize I *totally* sound like one of those "there'll never be more than a million MMO players!" cronies of 7-8 year ago. I was one of them! :-)
* BTW, this may point to it being a smart idea Sony's hinted at, allowing users to sell their content, to provide additional incentive beyond the rest of the fray. I beleive Raph's system is going to allow such things as well.
4 comments:
Yep! Metaplace will have a Marketplace that allows users to sell assets to each other (for a price or free) and buy new systems and art for their games from each other.
Thanks for the mention!
You left out Mockingbird, Whirled and GameBrix, probably others. There's a lot of them.
Thanks for the mention, Kim.
PlayCrafter is already sharing revenue with creators and we are planning on letting users sell content to each other in the future.
Out at the speedway. Same everyday-
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc8fXaTqmWE
Chuck Desylva ;)
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