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.

We now return you to regularly scheduled programming

Bonjour Blogosphere,

Apologies for going dark for a while, but I had a bunch of things line up on top of each other that kept me fairly busy.

As stated in the previous post, my son Matthew was born just over a week ago. He's a delightful little fellow who's actually pretty low maintenance; at least when compared to our experience with preemie twins. Alisa's doing most of the work (alas, I am without the means to feed him), but I've been shuttling the twins to school, swimming lessons, etc. Had a nice outing yesterday taking my daughter to Fry's for the first time. "Daddy, I LIKE that big tv!". *sniff* *that's my girl*

However, I've not been exactly idle from work at the same time. I had a bunch of Vista-enhanced casual games being released in time for the Vista launch; a bunch of work in getting some Vista-related developer documentation together, and was helping with a bunch of the aspects of getting our crew ready for the Casual Connect conference (F.K.A 'Casuality') in Amsterdam this coming week, even though I don't get to go this year >:-(

On top of that, I upgraded my home dev machine to Vista RTM, and have the SW set up to join the XNA Creators Club, should I ever get around to dusting off my coding chops.