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An eye on TrionJuly 9th, 2007 |
Worlds In Motion has an interview with Trion’s Lars Buttler about their recently acquired $30m in funding. Based on the interview here, I’d say they are trying to make the existing big publisher model apply to the Web world — a “virtual console” perhaps?
“…the platform also allows you to tap into the same experience from any connected device. We’re taking the game experience out of the client and putting it into a sophisticated infrastructure.”
Elsewhere in the interview, this point is hammered home:
“Every channel is accessible across a number of devices,” Buttler says. “And that’s web, PC client– that’s even mobile phones. But the point is, it will not be the same experience. It will tap into the same gameworld, but it will be tailored to the capabilities of the device. On a mobile phone you wouldn’t want to play a large scale game, but you want to be in touch with your game—alerts, info, et cetera.”
Despite talk of client-agnosticism, however, this very much seems like a big business play: the investors are Time Warner, GE/NBC, Bertelsmann… so I don’t expect it to work the way the Web does, but rather the way the publishers work. The emphasis seems to be on AAA games. Indeed, Buttler calls Trion a publisher as well as a developer.
This seems like quite a contrast to the other way of thinking that is around a lot these days, which seems to be much more about democratization.
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[...] little of what Trion are actually doing. I am not sure I’d be so scathing as Raph Koster is here, because they do talk about opening the platform up to many third parties to develop content (so it [...]