UGC comes to Rock Band

 Posted by (Visited 7085 times)  Game talk, Music  Tagged with: , , ,
Jul 172009
 

Rock Band® has announced that the game will support user-created tracks, creating a completely new indie distribution channel for musicians, one that potentially rivals iTunes in importance. They’re promising a cut of every sale, and help with promotion.

  • Mix your multi track recordings.
    • You will need to mix them to fit the standards for Rock Band.
  • Create MIDI gameplay info.
    • Reaper is a Digital Audio Workstation. We have been working with Reaper’s creators (Cockos, Inc.) to add a number of specific Rock Band Network additions that will make creating MIDI song information simpler and more intuitive. http://www.reaper.fm
  • Create a song package with Magma.
    • Magma is a PC tool that we are creating to allow authors to build Rock Band Network song packages.
  • Audition your song package within Rock Band 2.2
    • We will release a patch to Rock Band 2 that will enable “Audition Mode.” This will allow you to test out your song packages in game with features like speed up and slow down cheats and autoplay.
  • Upload to creators.rockband.com for Peer Review
    • Once your song is ready, upload it here. Other members of the community will try out your song, give you feedback, and submit reviews. Once your song has passed the review process, it is automatically approved for sale on Xbox Live.
  • Sell your song on Xbox Live
  • When the store opens, later this year, songs will be available for others to download via the RBN store ingame.

Probably the most interesting part is the mandatory peer review for publshing tracks up to the network. You’ll need to be a member of the XNA Creators’ Club to participate.

There’s a Wiki up with the full spec.

The borders of user created content

 Posted by (Visited 10704 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jan 072009
 

SusanC has a comment on a Terra Nova thread in which she observes,

So the main criterion for being considered is that there is some kind of creative expression involved. I’m OK with that, although it opens the door for arguments about exactly how much creative input is needed to qualify. Text chat, instant messages, and blog postings (like this one) clearly can be used for creative expression: so maybe these are within the paper’s scope, provided that they are sufficiently creative.

— comment on Terra Nova: New Paper on UGC.

It is an interesting problem, actually. There is hardly a site these days of any sort on the Net that does not support some form of user-generated content. But by unspoken convention, we seem to not consider chat and other basic synchronous social interaction to be the same sort of user created content that uploaded models and textures are.

I think the reason is interesting and subtle, and marks out a distinction between “extending the possibility space” and, well, “not.” So here go 1700 words… Continue reading »

UGC and IP in a cloning world

 Posted by (Visited 9562 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Nov 042008
 

Slashdot is discussing an article at Joystiq about UGC and IP rights which comes from a GamePolitics news item of a few days ago about the update to the PSN TOU around UGC — specifically because of LittleBigPlanet.

The bottom line, amidst all that linkage? Sony is taking a fairly traditional approach to IP rights, from a networked game sense:

Sony can use user content without restriction to advertise. They can also ‘commercially exploit’ your creations without permission, and if they do benefit ‘commercially’ (read: monetarily) from your creations, they owe you nothing. You’re also agreeing to abandon your moral rights to the work. Most importantly, you’re not allowed to commercially benefit from your creation without their permission.

— Mark Methentis, Joystiq

Now, LittleBigPlanet feels more like a toy in a lot of ways — you work with the pieces they give you. Then again, it took mere moments in UO for someone to grab a bunch of fish and spell out a dirty word on the bridge in the middle of Britain. (What’s more, seeing that occasioned a moment of glee from the team, though perhaps not from management).

Continue reading »

Interesting IMVU stats

 Posted by (Visited 13257 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Jun 242008
 

These all come from this interview. They sort of put paid to the notion that a mass market UGC business cannot thrive, I think!

  • They seeded the market with 2000 items
  • Have now registered 100,000 developers, with “tens of thousands” active
  • And 20,000,000 users registered (no word on active uniques)
  • There are 1,700,000 assets on their marketplace right now
  • 1,200,000 of them are full 3d
  • 3,000 new ones a day and 100,000 new ones a month
  • Resulting in revenues of $1,000,000 a month from digital currency sales for IMVU
  • And $1,000,000 a year in revenue for the top developer
  • 60% female, 40% male
  • 40% of users outside the U.S.

For comparison, Zwinky reported 9.5m registered and 4.6m active back in September.

Snap-together games

 Posted by (Visited 7217 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
May 022008
 

This is certainly turning into a booming segment. The latest is Microsoft’s Popfly for Silverlight, which has been out for a while but didn’t have any game stuff. But now there’s Popfly Game Creator.

Today we’re adding something special to Popfly: an early version of our Popfly Game Creator. That’s right: Popfly is about more than mashups and web pages. It’s about making it fun to build things and share them with your friends. And one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that games are the kinds of things that people would like to try to build.

What kinds of games can you create? Just about any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario™, Frogger™, Asteroids™, and a host of other old arcade games. To make it easy, Popfly is still focused on getting as much done as possible without having to write any code. The game creator has over 15 pre-built game templates for you to try, hundreds of images, animations, backgrounds, and sounds for you to use in the games you create, and, of course, a way for you to write code if you reach the limits of what the user interface can do for you. Since this is Popfly, you can still save, share, and embed your creations everywhere from your blog to your Facebook page to your Windows Vista Sidebar.

Just in the last few months we’ve seen this, and Gamebrix, and Sims Carnival…