Fishpool

It's been about a year since I put my prognosis skills on the line and tried to predict where technology and consumer products are heading. Since today is National Fail Day in Finland, perhaps it's time to try again. Lets see how right or wrong I end up being.

Last year I noted a couple of things about mobile platforms and of the software environments best suited for creating apps on them. While this year has seen a lot of development on those fronts, little of it has been in surprising directions. HTML5 is coming, but not here yet. If WebGL and Intel's River Trail project were supported by the Big Three (IE, Firefox and WebKit, ie Safari/Chrome), that'd make an amazing game platform - but at least the latter is research-only at this point, and IE9 isn't going to support either. In the meantime, Adobe finished Flash 11, which now has hardware-accelerated 3D in addition to a pretty good software runtime, and, after only 10 days out, already has 42% reach for consumer browsers (at least judging by stats on habbo.com). Like I've said a long time, Flash gets a lot of undeserved crap due to the adware content created on it. We won't get rid of that by changing tech, and platforms should be judged by their capabilities in the hands of good developers, not by mediocrity. And, as far as mobile goes, the trend continues -- iPhone and Android battle it out, now also in courts as well as in consumer markets, while everything else falls under the wagon. If you're creating an app -- do it either with a cross-platform native toolchain, or with HTML5. If you're doing a game, do it with Unity or Flash, and build a native app out of it for mobile.

The interesting thing, to me, is playing out on the Internet. Google+ came out as a very nice product with well-balanced feature set, but (fairly predicably, though I was rooting for it) failed to catch the early adopter fancy for long enough to displace Facebook in any niche. Facebook, on the other hand, scared (or is going to scare) 40% of their audience by announcing Timeline (eek, privacy invasion!). Brilliant move -- you can't succeed today without taking such leaps that nearly half of your audience will be opposed to them, at least initially. Smaller changes simply aren't meaningful enough.

So, I'm betting on Facebook. I'd also guess that once they get Facebook Credits working outside of the Canvas, they're going to demand that any app using Facebook Connect log-ins will accept Credits for payment. I'd hazard a guess they're even going to demand FB Credits exclusivity. They'll fail the latter demand, but that won't stop them from trying it. Having your app's/game's social publishing automatically done by Facebook simply by feeding them events, and not having to think about which ones are useful to publish, is just such a big time saver for a developer, no one will want to miss out on it.

Not even Zynga. They're doing this destination-site, we're-not-gonna-play-inside-Facebook-anymore strategy, but continue to use Facebook Connect for log-ins. That's not because FB Connect is so much more convenient than own username and password (though it is), but because even they can't afford to let go of the "free" access to people's social network. That's the power of Timeline and the new, extended Graph API.

The chips are still in the air. When they fall, I think Facebook will be stronger than ever, but strong enough to displace the "rest of the Internet"? No. As a developer, I want to push Facebook the data for in-game activities, because that saves me time doing the same thing myself. As a publisher, I'm unsure I want Facebook to have all that info, exploiting them for their purposes, risking my own ability to run a business. As a consumer, it makes me uneasy that they have all that info about me, and while I can access and control quite a lot of it, I can't know what they're using it for. I don't think that unease will be enough to stop me or most other consumers from feeding them even more data of our lives, likes and activities. Still, they're only successful doing this as long as they don't try to become a gatekeeper to the net - nor do they need to do that, since they get the data they want without exerting control over my behavior. Trying to fight against that trend is going to be a losing strategy for most of us - possibly even for Google. Apple and Microsoft won't need to fight it, because they're happy enough, for now at least, to simply work with Facebook.

Last week I posted a brief review of 2009 here, but didn't go much into predictions for 2010. I won't try to predict anything detailed now either, but here's a few things I think will be interesting to monitor over the year. And no, tablet computing isn't on the list. For fairly obvious reasons, this is focused on areas impacting social games. As a further assist, I've underlined the parts most resembling conclusions or predictions.

Social networks and virtual worlds interoperability

As more and more business transforms to use Internet as a core function, the customers of these businesses are faced with a proliferation of proprietary identification mechanisms that has already gotten out of hand. It is not uncommon today to have to manage 20-30 different userid/password pairs that are in regular use, from banks to e-commerce to social networks. At the same time, identity theft is a growing problem, no doubt in large part because of the minimum-security methods of identification.

Social networks today are a significant contributor to this problem. Each collects and presents information about its users that contribute to the rise of identity theft while having their own authorization mechanisms in a silo of low-trustworthy identification methods. The users, on the other hand, perceive little incentive to manage their passwords in a secure fashion. Account hijacking and impersonation is a major problem area to each vendor. The low trust level of individual account data also leads to a low relative value of owning a large user database.

A technology solution, OpenID is emerging and taking hold in a form of an industry-accepted standard for exchanging identity data between an ID provider and a vendor in need of a verified id for their customer. A few of current backers of the standard in the picture on the right. However, changing the practices of the largest businesses has barely begun and no consumer shift can yet be seen – as is typical for such “undercurrent” trends.

OpenID will allow consumers to use fewer, higher-security ids over the universe of their preferred services, which in turn will allow these services a new level of transparent interoperability in combining data from each other in near-automatic, personalized mash-ups via the APIs each vendor can expose to trusted users with less fear of opening holes for account hijacking.

Browsers vs desktops: what's the target for entertainment software?

Here's a rough sketch of competing technology streams in terms of two primary factors – ease of access versus the rich experience of high-performance software. “Browser wars” are starting again, and with the improved engines behind Safari 4, Firefox 4, IE 8 and Google Chrome, a lot of the kind of functionalitywe're used to thinking belongs to native software or at best browser plugins like Flash, Java or Silverlight will be available straight in the browser. This for sure includes high-performance application code, rich 2D vector and pixel graphics, video streams and access to new information like location-sensing. The plugins will most likely be stronger at 3D graphics and synchronized audio and at advanced input mechanisms like using webcams for gesture-based control. Invariably, especially the new input capabilities will also bring with them new security and privacy concerns which will not be fully resolved within the next 2-3 years.

While 3D as a technology will be available to browser-based applications, this doesn't mean the web will turn to represent everything as a virtual copy of the physical world. Instead, it's best use will be as a tool for accelerating and enhancing other UI and presentation concepts – think iTunes CoverFlow. For social interaction experiences, a 3-degrees-freedom pure 3D representation will remain a confusing solution, and other presentations such as axonometric “camera in the corner” concepts will remain more accessible. Naturally, they can (but don't necessarily need to) be rendered using 3D tech.

Increased computing capabilities will change economies of scale

The history of the “computer revolution” has been about automation changing economies of scale to enable entirely new types of business. Lately we've seen this eg by Google AdWords enabling small businesses to advertise and/or publish ads without marketing departments or involvement of agencies.

The same trend is continuing in the form of computing capacity becoming a utility in Cloud Computing, extreme amounts of storage becoming available in costs which allow terabytes of storage to organizations of almost any size and budget, and most importantly, developing data mining, search and discovery algorithms that enable organizations to utilize data which used to be impossible to analyze as automated business practices. Unfortunately, the same capabilities are available for criminals as well.

Areas in which this is happening as we speak:

• further types and spread of self-service advertising, better targeting, availability of media
• automated heuristics-based detection of risky customers, automated moderation
• computer-vision based user interfaces which require nothing more than a webcam
• ever increasing size of botnets, and the use of them for game exploits, money laundering, identity theft and surveillance

The escalation of large-scale threats have raised the need for industry-wide groups for exchanging information and best practices between organizations regarding the security relevant information such as new threats, customer risk rating, identification of targeted and organized crime.

Software development, efficiencies, bottlenecks, resources

Commercial software development tools and methods experience a significant shift roughly once every decade. The last such shift was the mainstreaming of RAD/IDE-based, virtual-machine oriented tools and the rise of Web and open source in the 90s, and now those two rising themes are increasingly mainstream while “convergent”, cross-platform applications which depend on the availability of always-on Internet are emerging. As before, it's not driven by technological possibility, but by the richness and availability of high-quality development tools with which more than just the “rocket-scientist” superstars can create new applications.

The skills which are going to be in short supply are those for designing applications which can smoothly interface to the rest of the cloud of applications in this emerging category. Web-accessible APIs, the security design of those APIs, efficient utilization of services from non-associated, even competing companies, and friction-free interfaces for end users of these web-native applications is the challenge.

In this world, the traditional IT outsourcing houses won't be able to serve as a safety valve for resources as they're necessarily still focused on serving the last and current mainstream. In their place, we must consider the availability of open source solutions not just as a method for reducing licensing cost, but as the “extra developer” used to reduce time-to-market. And as with any such relationship, it must be nurtured. In the case of open source, that requires participation and contribution back to the further development of that enabling infrastructure as the cost of outsourcing the majority of the work to the community.

Mobile internet

With the launch of iPhone, the use of Web content and 3rd party applications on mobile devices has multiplied compared to previous smart phone generations. This is due to two factors: the familiarity and productivity of Apple's developer tools for the iPhone, and the straightforward App Store for the end-users. Moreover, the wide base of the applications is primarily because of the former, as proven by the wide availability of unauthorized applications already before the launch of iPhone 2.0 and the App Store. Nokia's failure to create such an applications market despite the functionality available on S60 phones for years before the iPhone launch proves this – it was not the features of the device, but the development tools and application distribution platform were the primary factor.

The launch of Google's Android will further accelerate this development. Current Android-based devices lack the polish of iPhone, and the stability gained from years of experience of Nokia devices, yet the availability of development tools will supercharge this market, and the next couple of years will see accelerated development and polish cycle from all parties. At the moment, it's impossible to call the winner on this race, though.

Among the things announced this week in GDC were two developments in entirely different directions on a particular axis of games technology: first, the OnLive network of thin clients showing network-streamed video games rendered on a server cluster somewhere, and second, the Mozilla/Khronos Group initiative to develop an OpenGL-accelerated, JavaScript-programmed 3D canvas in a web browser. Both have one thing in common: make it possible to run 3D apps (games) on standard devices without prior installations. How they go about that goal is radically different. One of them will fail.

OnLive is not the first company to attempt their idea. It's a basic extension to the same theme that has been around since at least the inception of the X Window System and Sun NeWS in early 80s - graphical thin clients showing applications running somewhere in the network. Further, the idea was explored for 3D games in the late 90s by G-Cluster, which apparently is still around in Japan in some form or another. In my opinion, it's a misguided approach. Certainly there's value to server-side processing, even of graphics, but the final rendering just makes so much more sense to be done on the client even when all of the application logic is remote.

What kind of client? Well, anything that can run a high-performance VM for Java or JavaScript (ie, a modern browser), and has 3D acceleration functionalities built into the graphics pipeline. This includes basically every network-connected device from the cost of $200 upwards: all smart phones, all netbooks, all laptops, all games consoles, and so on. Some of those devices are still intentionally crippled by their manufacturers in terms of operating system support for the required features, and clearly the 3D Canvas development hasn't been finished yet. The hardware capabilities, however, are already deployed to hundreds of millions of consumers.

Ignoring that deployed base and trying to scale a server-side rendering solution to the same figures is just mad. And that's not even considering the framerate and responsiveness constraints that are inescapable simply because of the round-trip network latency of such a system: on a high-bandwidth wired network 10s of milliseconds (not everyone can be situated within a few kilometers of the server cluster), and on radio networks, 100s of ms. Developing high-framerate games under those circumstances is hard enough when you only need to deal within transmitting positional data and adjusting for lag and jitter in both ends - making the games playable when every action made by the player needs to go to the server and back before it shows up is practically speaking impossible.

(Update an hour later) I suppose I should acknowledge that clearly the OnLive approach does have certain benefits to it: no piracy, little hacking of the typical kinds, little opportunity to cheat, and no need for investing in PunkBuster-type technology in the game clients, since none of that is running locally. However, all that just simply will not matter when weighed against the enormous brunt of having to run all that rendering in the wrong end of the MMO network and ignoring the opportunities to disperse so much of the investment and energy requirements to the gamers.

IMVU founder Eric Ries commented on Virtual Goods Summit and suggested that virtual worlds can be divvied up along three axes of UGC/first-party, subscription/pay-for-stuff, and economy/gameplay focus. This is certainly one good way of thinking about the focus decisions needed when designing and developing a product in this market, but personally, I think this model, along with others I've seen and played with myself, suffers from a few key weaknesses that arise from the need to simplify things. I'm not saying the model can't help put things in order, just that there's more to finding the right solutions than this. Lets go with the great blogger tradition of point-for-point response.

UGC vs first-party

It's amazing Sulka didn't comment on this: UGC is not just about letting users upload pictures or items to a world. More to the point, Habbo certainly is not first-party content focused. Yes, all our furni is designed and developed by our own teams, and we don't enable user uploads. But at the same time, over 90% of all of the activities in Habbo emerge from the community - users take what we've made, and do their own things with it. Most of what's going on, we had no idea would happen.

Eric says IMVU's efforts to enable UGC dwarf those to create their own first-party catalog. Well, so do ours, despite his classification of Habbo being first-party content focused. Every feature, every furni, every activity, every news item receives more thought on "how do we support users to go to their own directions here?" than "what do we want this to be about?". Plus the significant fraction of our work that has absolute no effort to produce content attached to it, and is fully focused on player activities.

Lets just use the old, tired LEGO analogy here. How much of LEGO is first-party content? Just enough to get the imagination of the players going so they can create something of their own. Anything more would be too much, and this applies to any VW that can call itself "social" - and none that isn't social isn't going to be interesting. Trying to make a useful UGC split for any purpose other than copyright infringement monitoring is a red herring, and even for that one purpose it's not very likely to be useful due to other moderation requirements.

Subscription or pay-for-stuff

This is one of the stronger arguments, if only just because those are the business models the industry has latched on to. They're certainly not the only possibilities though, nor are they alternatives to each other. Eric's points about the strenghts and weaknesses are good - but you can benefit from both at the same time, and support the weaknesses of one model with the strenghts of the other. This is certainly an area where we have a lot of experience, over 8 years of it, and I don't think we've gotten very far yet..

Economy or gameplay

Eric used the word "merchandising" instead of economy, and I think that's the crucial over-simplification that leads to thinking that pay-for-stuff games and worlds are just about cross-selling opportunities best left to a competent marketing department to handle. I'm wondering whether he's simplifying the choice to make it easier to explain, or purposefully misleading someone on what's crucial to think about, or whether our friends at IMVU simply haven't realized this yet: the first-hand sales are a small fraction of the total trade in an item-based game, and the gameplay balance is just as critical here as it is in a game built out of designer-created quests and gameplay mechanics. What's more, because its emergent behaviour, it's nearly impossible to predict, and very difficult to measure, model and understand. Yet that's exactly what's required in order to succeed.

I hope that explains why I choose to call it economy-driven rather than merchandising.