For the last week or so, I’ve spent a lot of time playing Ticket to Ride, a simple, fun, multi-player game. It’s a computerized adaptation of a card game where you build train routes.

Bruce Geryk of CGM wrote it up in the most recent issue and, in some e-mail correspondence, he was asking me if I thought it was a ‘Casual Game’, and, why in general, there have been few successful multi-player casual games.

First, I don’t really consider Ticket To Ride to be a Casual Game, in the sense of the market that PopCap, Reflexive, Playfirst, and myself are developing for - older gamers, with a female majority, playing games mainly through portals like Yahoo and RealArcade. Those gamers are unlikely to find Ticket To Ride (it’s only offered through the developer’s web site), and if they did find it, would be put off by it’s complexity. The gameplay is actually rather simple, but the interface and tutorial, while tame by ‘hard-core’ standards, are still too rough around the edges for the casual market.

OK, so why haven’t mainstream casual developers/publishers pursued the multi-player market (much)?

I think it’s a chicken and egg problem.

Multiplayer development is more expensive and harder than single player development, especially when you’re making your first game and don’t have the right experience and tools. That’s daunting upon initial analysis.

Furthermore, a well-developed multi-player game incorporates design decisions aimed specifically at multi-player. It’s very hard to develop a challenging A.I. equivalent to a human player, and so, if you don’t have humans to play against, these games are typically boring.

Which brings us to the chicken and egg part - without an established gathering place heavily frequented by other players, the games aren’t fun. And if the games aren’t fun, then players won’t frequent the (nearly empty) gathering spots.

In theory, the portals are the most logical choices to develop multi-player games. After all, they already have many people visiting their sites. By pushing multi-player games in their banners, they could draw a crowd, at least to sample something new. But think about who some of the major portals are: AOL, MSN, Yahoo - these are internet companies, not game developers. The few games they have developed internally that I’m aware of (card-games, mostly), are hardly state-of-the-art. I doubt if they have the expertise, or the interest, in getting into development in a big way.

Pogo and RealArcade are both portals that have development capacity paired to them (E.A. for Pogo, Gamehouse for Real). I would expect those portals to be the strongest contenders to get into multi-player play. I’ve also heard that Oberon, who more or less run the MSN site, will be pursuing multi-player aggressively in the near future. So perhaps things may change in the next year.

As for developer/publishers both big (PopCap, Reflexive, PlayFirst), and small (well, me…), there’s not a lot of incentive to pursue multi-player at the moment. We don’t really have the resources or the interest to build out a solid, reliable multi-player server system, and the accompanying customer support organization to back it up. And if we develop for somebody else’s system, we’re targeting what’s currently a very small market, and the benefit of any growth in that market would more likely be captured by the hosting entity (they own the consumer relationship), rather than the developer making content for it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Game Biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.