The natives are getting restless, clinging desperately to every scrap of rumor that even remotely suggests there might be a next generation of hardware around the corner. Among their hopes is that for this upcoming generation, Nintendo will improve their network offerings. The problems cited include insufficiencies of Friend Codes and, even when their rosters are suitably populated, the difficulty of setting up a game and lack of standards such as voice chat.
Microsoft's admirable Xbox Live is invariably brought up as an example of what Nintendo should have aspired to, and it definitely would make a good starting point for a next-generation online gaming network. But I think that now that we've crossed the 2010 line, it's simply not good enough to just ape Live—particularly as Nintendo has managed to draw in a whole new customer base that could benefit from online social gaming, but would likely balk at having to sign up for yet another service to do it... not to mention the missed opportunities from being signed into one company's service while your friends are on another.
The cool thing, though, is that the missing pieces needed for putting a next-generation network together that solves that problem already exist.
For all the crowing the platform holders have been doing about the userbases of their respective networks, there's a much bigger player these days in the gaming space, even though it's not terribly likely too many of our readers are a part of it—or at least would admit to being so. Interestingly, I suspect this player would be rather open to bringing Nintendo on-board; they've worked a little with them already. That player is Facebook.
The core of the idea is a really simple one: make a Facebook user's list available as a universal list of friends for game-playing of all stripes, including on consoles and handhelds. For some types of games, and particularly considering some folks' propensity for friending anyone they pass on the street, the ability to filter the list will be necessary—but simply having that starting point would make a world of difference for any gaming network.
Now, take the integration deeper. I'm sure you've all got friends that play Farmville or what not; you've seen the gifts and invitations. The next step is to enable games to use the news feed to note achievements in games; be they the trademarked Microsoft kind or the kind that got posted to our Wii Message Boards by games like Wii Sports. Finally, make users' in-game status available to their friends using the social network on a computer, and allow users to enable selective popup messages in their game to show messages of this kind in-game if they so choose. Voilà : you have a complete online network that isn't restricted to a single platform.
The applications to Nintendo's software in particular could prove really cool. Facebook games leverage a strong social component that anyone can get into, working and playing cooperatively. Such an advantage conferred on next-generation titles could really open up possibilities, particularly in the kinds of titles that Nintendo has demonstrated a solid and profitable mastery of in the current generation.
Of course, there's one impossible-to-understate danger for a platform holder like Nintendo in embracing a system like this, and that's in the mismatch of lifecycles that will undoubtedly result. For as long as Facebook itself has been around and likely will be, it runs on Internet time, and may be less of a phenomenon and more of a dead fish (or, indeed, just plain dead) by the time a gaming platform is just reaching its peak. It would truly be a shame if this meant that games were unable to use their social functionality, so I think the key here is to build into the SDK not a Facebook API but a generic social networking API, capable of mapping the common activities mentioned above to just about any social network. In a pinch, perhaps, even one a platform holder could build itself... something Nintendo, for one, might even choose to do right out of the gate.
It will be interesting to see if the platform holders do something along these lines for their next-generation systems, whether they be next year or even further out. There's definitely an element of control lost, and the platform holders—particularly Nintendo, who really likes holding both ends of the end-to-end experience—may not be willing to give that up. But I think that pursuing the building of yet another network in 2010 and beyond isn't really a winning idea. Tapping into the next-generation network that already exists, by contrast, is.
Microsoft's admirable Xbox Live is invariably brought up as an example of what Nintendo should have aspired to, and it definitely would make a good starting point for a next-generation online gaming network. But I think that now that we've crossed the 2010 line, it's simply not good enough to just ape Live—particularly as Nintendo has managed to draw in a whole new customer base that could benefit from online social gaming, but would likely balk at having to sign up for yet another service to do it... not to mention the missed opportunities from being signed into one company's service while your friends are on another.
The cool thing, though, is that the missing pieces needed for putting a next-generation network together that solves that problem already exist.
For all the crowing the platform holders have been doing about the userbases of their respective networks, there's a much bigger player these days in the gaming space, even though it's not terribly likely too many of our readers are a part of it—or at least would admit to being so. Interestingly, I suspect this player would be rather open to bringing Nintendo on-board; they've worked a little with them already. That player is Facebook.
The core of the idea is a really simple one: make a Facebook user's list available as a universal list of friends for game-playing of all stripes, including on consoles and handhelds. For some types of games, and particularly considering some folks' propensity for friending anyone they pass on the street, the ability to filter the list will be necessary—but simply having that starting point would make a world of difference for any gaming network.
Now, take the integration deeper. I'm sure you've all got friends that play Farmville or what not; you've seen the gifts and invitations. The next step is to enable games to use the news feed to note achievements in games; be they the trademarked Microsoft kind or the kind that got posted to our Wii Message Boards by games like Wii Sports. Finally, make users' in-game status available to their friends using the social network on a computer, and allow users to enable selective popup messages in their game to show messages of this kind in-game if they so choose. Voilà : you have a complete online network that isn't restricted to a single platform.
The applications to Nintendo's software in particular could prove really cool. Facebook games leverage a strong social component that anyone can get into, working and playing cooperatively. Such an advantage conferred on next-generation titles could really open up possibilities, particularly in the kinds of titles that Nintendo has demonstrated a solid and profitable mastery of in the current generation.
Of course, there's one impossible-to-understate danger for a platform holder like Nintendo in embracing a system like this, and that's in the mismatch of lifecycles that will undoubtedly result. For as long as Facebook itself has been around and likely will be, it runs on Internet time, and may be less of a phenomenon and more of a dead fish (or, indeed, just plain dead) by the time a gaming platform is just reaching its peak. It would truly be a shame if this meant that games were unable to use their social functionality, so I think the key here is to build into the SDK not a Facebook API but a generic social networking API, capable of mapping the common activities mentioned above to just about any social network. In a pinch, perhaps, even one a platform holder could build itself... something Nintendo, for one, might even choose to do right out of the gate.
It will be interesting to see if the platform holders do something along these lines for their next-generation systems, whether they be next year or even further out. There's definitely an element of control lost, and the platform holders—particularly Nintendo, who really likes holding both ends of the end-to-end experience—may not be willing to give that up. But I think that pursuing the building of yet another network in 2010 and beyond isn't really a winning idea. Tapping into the next-generation network that already exists, by contrast, is.