BBC’s dot.life on Flash
(Visited 5841 times) Game talk
Feb 262009
The BBC News dot.life blog has a piece about web gaming and how the industry is changing, with a pile of quotes from yours truly. It was a very fun conversation with Darren Waters.
The relaunch of a 10-year-old video game inside a web browser is not just a chance to wallow in some nostalgia, but also a strong pointer to the direction in which the video games industry is heading, and a potential herald of the future of rich internet media on many types of devices…
…The shift to the network – both in terms of delivery of content and at the end of point of the experience itself – is touching every aspect of the media industry and for video gamers it means a lot more fun in a browser near you soon.
10 Responses to “BBC’s dot.life on Flash”
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[…] with every intention of getting back into developing full Flash games, and the RSS feed I have at his site says he’s contributed to an article over at the BBC. About how Flash games are the BIG thing. […]
I have difficulty seeing how the increase of available downloadable single-player games has any connection with Flash browser games. Steam’s success contributes to “a lot more fun in a browser near you soon”? I don’t get the connection at all.
It’s quite simple really. The games industry has been entirely driven by box product, and the distribution channel has thoroughly and completely shaped what sorts of games have been made.
Now new distribution forms are rising. One of them is a transitional form, which is getting the box product over the wire. The other is the ultimate destination, which is just playing ON the wire.
Right now, you have high-end games which must be Steam-style distributed, and you have low-end games that can be streamed and played in the Net. But soon the high-end stuff will also be playable on the Net.
Whereupon the Steam-style stuff will adapt to be more like Flash, or it’ll go away in favor of the new distribution model.
I’d say Quake Live is towards the high end there, Raph. Quake Live plays like Quake 4 with Quake 3 Arena graphics. Quake Live is no Runescape.
Sure, but Quake Live is also an ActiveX plugin. I could take FarCry and put it in an ActiveX plugin. It’s deprecated tech, though. The real answer is from having a network p[latform, not just using ActiveX to put a desktop app in the browser.
Does it matter? Although a bit early to say for sure, Quake Live seems to indicate that people are willing to download a plugin to play something they want to play.
Ah, thanks for the explanation, Raph.
Now I’m wondering if I buy that such a transition will happen and, if so, whether I’ll like it. I never play browser games, yet I’ve been a supported of download games for years. Hmm.
Sure. Everyone who played Maple Story did the same, and there were a lot more of them than ppl who played Quake Live so far.
But once the barrier gets even lower, the game changes.
Or, to put it a different way, maybe these are the 8-Bit days of the net-based videogame? Going from arcade machines to home machinies was something of a parrallel jump, the home versions being noticably more primitive than what was in arcades, but then in under 20 years we have XBox 360s and PS3s, and arcades have all but vanished.
Right now, sure, Flash can’t do Farcry, and ActiveX is a bit like the Neo*Geo (if the analogy is extended). But, in two decades will game stores have gone the way of arcades? How quickly will the “10-year-old video game in a web browser” become better than the boxed new releases, the same way the home systems caught up to and overtook arcade hardware?
A group developing the Eden platform got in touch with me over the weekend via Facebook. They are writing a game development platform using Python for scripting and Blender for content generation. They use VRML97 for import/export of content although their blog mentions Seamless 3D which last time I checked, didn’t strictly conform to any profile of X3D.