Raph's Website » YouTube for Games

YouTube for Games

November 6th, 2006 (Visited 6304 times) Tags:

The press release is here, but basically, pjio.com lets arbitrary people upload games — standalone Windows games, that is — and put them on this portal. A web-browser plugin then lets them be played in the browser. Users can play them for free, tag them, and earn “karma” which lets them unlock game features, etc. They can also just follow the links back to the indie developer and buy the game from them. Lastly, the players can actually find a game they like and embed it in their own website, just like you can with a YouTube clip.

Developers not only get all the profit, but they also get a share of the ad revenue for the site. It looks like there’s an API for doing things like leaderboards and the like, so devs can hook into the larger community features.

This is a step beyond the sort of “portal-as-publisher” model that we have seen digital distribution take on so far, and it is a really exciting one. It originated within the BlitzBasic community, with a company called Indiepath.

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한RSS wrote on November 7th, 2006 at 6:58 am:

[...] This is a step beyond the sort of “portal-as-publisher” model that we have seen digital distribution take on so far, and it is a really exciting one. It originated within the BlitzBasic community, with a company called Indiepath. 댓글달기 http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/06/youtube-for-games/#comments Trophy equipment Raph 2006-11-07 08:37 작성 | Game talk There’s a Terra Nova thread titled Source Identification and Soulbinding which basically says, …soulbinding is a “source identifier.” In WoW-like systems, you know if a person has been through a particular dungeon because the item they’re carrying could only have come from there. I have a Misplaced Server Arm, thus, you know I’ve been in Naxxramas. Fine. [...]

Game Tycoon»Blog Archive » Articles of Interest wrote on November 8th, 2006 at 10:42 pm:

[...] Via Raph Koster, a new portal called Pjio lets users upload games, which can be played and rated by other users via web browser. Players can actually embed games they like in their own website, ala YouTube. Developers currently get all the profit and share in the ad revenue. And apparently there’s an API for community features like leaderboards. [...]

Raph’s Website » Another YouTube for games wrote on November 9th, 2006 at 9:52 am:

[...] This one is Kongregate, which is founded by someone I worked with a very very long time ago for two weeks. We overlapped at the very beginnings of UO, back at Origin. I’ve been following it for a little while, but he came out of the woodwork today when he saw I had blogged pjio.com, to extend an invite to readers of this blog: [...]

3pointD.com wrote on December 4th, 2006 at 7:30 am:

New Gaming Social Network Now in Beta…

The Great Games Experiment is “a social networking community for gamers, developers and publishers to play, show off, promote and ultimately enjoy games.” Sounds good to me. Raph Koster blogged this recently, along with two other sites that…

EndgameRadio » Endgameradio Prime 128 : Gears of Nevernightserwinter War wrote on December 27th, 2006 at 9:29 pm:

[...] YouTube for GamesYouTube for Games [...]

IGDA Forums - Options for Digital Distribution wrote on May 13th, 2007 at 2:35 pm:

[...] what you are looking for, at all. I will however keep this post for anyone that it might interest. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/06/youtube-for-games/ quote:from Raph Koster’s website The press release is here, but basically, pjio.com lets [...]

Morgan Ramsay said on November 6th, 2006 at 4:47 pm:

Pjio? Not exactly a catchy name, but the idea’s cool.

Rufus said on November 6th, 2006 at 6:23 pm:

Unfortunately sounds like a virus writer’s heaven.

MaxS said on November 6th, 2006 at 6:31 pm:

argh, looked GREAT untill the screen with activeX plugin download, and so they snatch defeat from jaws of victory. sad. then again, if they have normal web2.0 mindset, I bet they will figure it out in month or two and go flash.

in other news http://goozex.com/ looks interesting as well.

Patrick said on November 6th, 2006 at 7:33 pm:

Rufus, thats an astute point that is the main barrier to Pjio’s success.

Another take is Kongregate, but the big thing is that there is no equivilant of the digital camera for game design… yet. I happen to know a lit’ol something about a venture trying to build just that, but as of yet you still have to know how to program, or otherwise work with a programmer, to implement a game design. The YouTube of games requires a tool in addition to a portal.

Morgan Ramsay said on November 6th, 2006 at 8:19 pm:

Patrick wrote: The YouTube of games requires a tool in addition to a portal.

Patrick, I believe that’s called GarageGames.

damijin said on November 6th, 2006 at 11:31 pm:

An interesting step in the right direction, but Patrick is right. This is more like a Livejournal to a future MySpace. It’s a step, but it’s not the culmination.

When this concept is married with the right tools, the right name, and the right appeal (can you say open, collaborative, projects with internet people? the game of making games!), then we’ll be on the way to gaming’s YouTube.

Colm Mac said on November 7th, 2006 at 6:10 am:

@Rufus
The nice thing they are doing is using their own “igLoader” to run the games through a browser sandbox enivroment. A quick google on it online only really gets me indiepath derived information (including igLoader Homepage ). The safety question has been raised before but other than saying “It runs in a sandbox” I can’t find any real information. I’d be interested in hearing about anyone’s experience with it. MiniClip use it so there must be some horror stories around, like another regularly used application.

Trucegore said on November 7th, 2006 at 6:20 am:

Very cool.

Allen Sligar said on November 7th, 2006 at 11:49 am:

Nice, I like it. I was going to link to goozex also (netflix of game trading?) but max beat me to it…

Raph said on November 7th, 2006 at 12:13 pm:

Max, if you connect with a Moz-flavor browser, you don’t get an ActiveX plugin but instead a slightly different beastie.

Can you get Flash to run an arbitrary app in a browser?

Patrick said on November 7th, 2006 at 2:42 pm:

In a way, what I do professionally is like YouTube distribution, except instead of posting whole films you post a trailer (play demo) and try to entice people to buy a unit. But we use Flash and talent is contracted remotely. You do lose some solidarity with no face to face communication, but the flexiblity makes up for it IMO.

Garage Games, Flash, Unity 3d, hell, there are a lot of platforms (oh yeah, that MS thing too, whatever) but the point is NON-technical people have to be able to use the tool in order for a YouTube like meta-culture to emerge.

MaxS said on November 7th, 2006 at 6:12 pm:

Raph, you are right on FF plugin, however my point is not about tech (ActiveX vs FF plugins), its about ubiquity. Reviewing youtube as canonic play:
1) any 14y girl with web cam and/or TV tuner can trivially author content in variety of non-standartized formats
2) hundreds of billions of browsers had [pre] installed flash, and youtube were smart to target lowest common denominator player early on
3) any video content was transcoded by youtube into flash thus becoming instantly available and instantly embeddable

in short, commoditized content creation, commoditized content delivery & critical mass from merging different contributing formats under same platform. pjio has objective challenge in #1 – games are damn harder to create then video clips. That by itself is hard challenge. They should try to avoid making it even harder by ignoring #2 & #3. right now to play ANY of their games player has to click “download plugin / activeX”, and we know how many people actually agree to that. same with embedding their games.

Solving that is not easy, but its cleary possible. If there is a will there is a way Say spawn isolated game instance VMs across farm, transcode output to flash stream, send user input back to server from flash client. Or go for flash-only games youtube for now – which is fine target by itself. Adoption & distrubution absolutely trumps richness these days imho.

MaxS said on November 7th, 2006 at 6:46 pm:

2) hundreds of billions of browsers

OMG millions of course.

StGabe said on November 7th, 2006 at 11:55 pm:

The YouTube of games requires a tool in addition to a portal.

1) any 14y girl with web cam and/or TV tuner can trivially author content in variety of non-standartized formats

I don’t think consumers want games made by 14 year old girls. I also don’t think that the vast majority of YouTube users actually create content. I know I’ve looked at hundreds of YouTube videos without ever having the slightest inclination to create my own.

The problem with, “we need tools”, is that decent game development really requires a lot that no tools can give. Even doing simple rectangular collision detection is beyond most of the audience. If you’re smart enough to make a decent game then you are also smart enough to learn enough Java, Flash or C to make that game.

Other than that, I agree with your other points, Max. For a game-based YouTube (which is a great idea and I can’t wait for one to really catch on) to work it has to be easy for you to take the game you like and embed it on your MySpace page, in an email, etc. Of course, it’s not trivial just to get YouTube videos posted on your MySpace and a lot of kids are still figuring that out too, so there is some room to work with.

StGabe said on November 8th, 2006 at 12:13 am:

Garage Games really hasn’t proven itself to be very productive, IMO. I think it’s a lot of posturing more than anything. I don’t think the kinds of tools offered by Garage Games are surmounting the barriers that really exist between people and making games. I think those barriers have more to do with raw intellectual ability and having enough time and discipline to see a project through. The idea of a tool that will let you magically make the game of your dreams is very appealing but I think that it just doesn’t work that way in practice.

A lot more games have been made with PTK, SDL and the PopCap games framework and the sorts of things that are really needed are libraries, server solutions, better portal technology (like the company mentioned here), generic art assets, etc.

Morgan Ramsay said on November 8th, 2006 at 12:48 am:

By the way, San Diego-based Eyespot provides a service similar to YouTube with the added twist of a mixer tool.

Jim Greer said on November 9th, 2006 at 8:10 am:

Hi all -

I founded a startup called Kongregate doing something related. We think Flash is already a great tool for making games, and we’re concentrating on building community features and a metagame to tie together what people upload.

We just launched a private alpha 3 weeks ago, and as of this morning we have 43 games - a lot of them are really great ones, too. We’ve just expanded our server capacity, and have room for a bunch of new players, so if you’re interested come to http://kongregate.com and request an invitation. We’ll get one to you within an hour or two.

We’ll also be supporting Shockwave games soon and Java a little later on. We give a share of the revenue we make to the game developer – up to 50% depending on whether they implement our APIs and whether the game is exclusive to us.

Game developers will also be able to use our 1-click payment system to charge for premium content in their games. For instance you could have a racing game where the first 3 tracks are free, and then additional tracks are $0.50 each or $5 for all of them. The price is up to the developer – here the revenue share will be much higher than 50% – it’s your game after all.

One cool thing we’re doing that isn’t implemented yet is a metagame. By playing the individual Flash games you can earn “Cards” – sort of like Achievements on Xbox Live. Those cards are playable in an online collectible card game, think Magic the Gathering.

A lot of this isn’t implemented yet, but you can check out the basics now. We’re really trying to get feedback from developers to make sure we’re implementing the right set of features and making a site that will be the best place to upload web games.

Steven "PlayNoEvil" Davis said on November 9th, 2006 at 10:49 am:

The only generic “player” out there that seems to work for games is from GameTap. This is a hard problem and would need monitoring regardless to prevent installation of malicious code.

A Flash Player can’t cut it since many games actually need to talk to the file system, etc. YouTube took advantage of Flash’s existing ability to work with video and that there are a limited number of standard video formats, they didn’t actually create a new player.

Obviously a service, like Kongregate, is different as it starts out as being Flash only.

Cael said on November 9th, 2006 at 3:17 pm:

Microft’s new XAML-based stuff offers some intriguing possibilities along these lines.

Tim Fisher said on November 10th, 2006 at 5:04 am:

Flash games can now be uploaded to pjio.com and Flash game developers get the same ad-share as the other game developers.

With regard to the security concerns, below is some of the text that is now shown to all visitors that do not have the required plugins. Our Sandbox is tight, if you know much about the Vista Protected mode then you’ll understand how ours works. In addition to this each game has a unique license that is held on our central servers - if a game manages to get through our controls then we can remotely terminate everysingle installed instance of that game and prevent any further downloads from ANY source.

Any game that is made available on this site for installation and play is secured by the Plug-in, much the same way as your computer is protected for use on the internet by a Firewall. The Plug-in restricts the capabilities of the game in such a way that it may not launch new programs, create new files or read files from you computer hard-disc drive. This preventative measure protects your machine from potentially harmfull programs, the process is known as Sandboxing.

For your peace of mind there is a four stage process every game must complete before it is made available for you to play on pjio:-

1. Game Files are Virus checked using Industry Standard Tools.

2. Game Files are checked for Spyware or Adware.

3. Game Files are checked for suspicious or inappropriate content.

4. Game Files are run within the Sanbox Environment to check for further suspicious activity

Further information regarding igLoader can be found here: http://www.igloader.com and, IANA details can be found here. The Plug-in Installation files are digitally signed by Indiepath Ltd and are Certificated.

So to summarise : Any Windows Game (provided the sandbox prevents some of it’s actions) and any flash game.

Maximilian said on November 23rd, 2006 at 12:40 pm:

Hey guys,
I have an iMac G5 running tiger 10.4.7 and I an having a wierd problem. Whenever I go to a site that has an embedded youtube, flash or some kind of video, there is no sound. If it a quicktime file there is no problem. There is not sound no matter what broswer I use, firefox, camino, safari, or shiira. And keep in mind that about a week ago I was not having this issue.

Help Would be awesome
Thanks!

YouTube for Games

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