Publication: IBM Systems Journal
Publication Date: 01-MAR-06
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Sharp, C.E. ; Rowe, M.
Article Excerpt
Online games are the future of the interactive entertainment industry. The idea of integrating business services into online games holds a number of exciting possibilities for new business models, new markets, and new growth. We describe an architecture, Business Integration for Games, and an implementation prototype, for integrating online games with business services. We also describe a demonstration system that embeds our prototype into the popular first-person-shooter game Quake II[TM].
INTRODUCTION
Online games, which give the player the ability to compete against other players over a network, emerged seriously in the mid-90s. This rapidly evolved from a novelty feature to an expected function by players, and game designers adopted this approach to build multiplayer (MP) and massively multiplayer (MMP) genres of games.
A key difference between these genres is scale, and with it, the associated infrastructure to support it. The MP games confine the number of concurrent players in a single game to somewhere between 16 and 32. Usually, the game can be played either stand-alone or in multiplayer-network mode, and one of the players' machines acts as the server. The game session is relatively short-lived (minutes to hours). If the server crashes, the game is, at worst, over or, at best, severely disrupted. The MMP games, though, are a very different affair. The most popular MMP games today have subscription bases in the millions, with hundreds of thousands of players online at any one time, spread over hundreds of servers. The shared game session lasts indefinitely. This requires a much more stable environment; thus, these games have to run on dedicated servers equipped with a persistent database. Network bandwidth to support the game-related traffic is also required, and all this obviously has an associated cost.
These two different genres and their associated infrastructure requirements and costs spawned two different approaches to sustained revenue generation. The first one, mostly associated with the MP games, is based on the provision of a portal to act as a hosting and matchmaking Web site for players of these games. The portal site offers either a free membership to players and generates revenue through online advertising or a premium membership, free from advertising. The members gain access to services for locating other players and games, league tables and high scores, patches and add-ons, and use of the portal's dedicated server machines for playing games. An example of such a portal is GameSpy.com, (1) which maintains a subscription-based membership and provides an aggregation point for a variety of games that run on a variety of platforms. Some game publishers run their own portal sites with free membership, dedicated to hosting their own games and ensuring a quality experience for the community of players. The downside from the player's perspective is that these sites are limited to the products of the publisher. An example of a publisher portal site is Battle.net, (2) dedicated to games from Blizzard Entertainment.
The second business model, associated with the MMP games, is based on subscriptions that include a persistent presence in the game environment. For typically ten to fifteen U.S. dollars per month, a player has access to a game character that may be developed over time to accrue additional features for a more enjoyable game experience. The reasons players continue to subscribe include a strong community spirit, exciting game experiences, and an ever-increasing investment of time and money in the game character--if you stop paying for your subscription then your character (and all the experience and wealth gained) is lost. It is not uncommon for the subscription to be continually renewed while the account is dormant.
These games belong to the role-playing game category, and are often referred to as MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games). Game characters are often involved in adventure and exploration jointly with other players, and aim to achieve some objective and gain rewards. The more rewards gained, the more powerful the character. Virtually all of these games have some kind of embedded trading mechanism that allows players to exchange wealth among them in the game world. For instance, in one of the most popular MMP games, EverQuest ** (3) from Sony Online Entertainment Inc., players assume the roles of pseudo-medieval fantasy heroes, gaining magic and gold in a land of dragons and wizards. Players are able to buy and sell their virtual property in exchange for virtual wealth, but this virtual economy is confined to the game world and is not a means by which the game service provider makes any of its revenue. Trading virtual wealth in the game world, however, has spawned a third business model that is now emerging.
From the earliest use of MMPs (Ultima Online ** (4), EverQuest, Asheron's Call ** (5)), the players in the community have recognized a gap in the market. Whereas some players are unable to devote the time, or lack the skill, to develop powerful characters and gain access to the more enjoyable game experiences, they are willing to pay real money (above and beyond the subscription fee) in order to acquire this virtual property. Thus, a real economy has emerged in which artifacts of the game world, such as magical items, weapons, or even whole characters, are bought and sold for real-world money. The means by which these transactions occur are often through an external medium, such as an online auction site like eBay. (6) The game service providers have historically frowned upon this practice, claiming that it is they who own the intellectual property rights to the items being traded, not the players, and that the trade is therefore illegal. But despite various attempts to prevent it, the practice is now an acknowledged side effect of the MMP game genre, and some newer MMP releases have attempted to build this into their design from the outset by providing auction functions and the ability to exchange real-world currency for virtual in-game currency. The open market, however, is a strong force, and this has not really deterred players from continuing to use external auctions and payment services.
Another reason why the game service providers dislike this real money trade is that, if left uncontrolled, it can detract from the game-playing experience, undermine overall player satisfaction, and put the service provider's continued revenue stream at risk. If it ends up that the richest players are automatically the most successful, this imbalance can be very frustrating to the other players.
An obvious problem arises from this kind of external transaction--the financial exchange is completely decoupled from the asset exchange because the two transactions occur in totally unrelated environments, and it relies on the humans in the loop to monitor and maintain the integrity of the two. This has inevitably led to cheating by unscrupulous players (and even non-players) through bogus transactions. Clearly, this is not a new problem, but one that is present in auction and e-commerce sites on the Web, where the purchase and delivery of goods are separated over time. However, the coupling of the financial transaction and exchange of assets in this case is eminently possible and would make for a much safer and reliable experience.
Meanwhile, MP games are developing further revenue channels through the development of "episodic content" that can be purchased online and used to enhance the original game experience. Since the beginning of the MP genre, a feature of these games has been extensibility. Players have been able to create their own content to augment or tailor the game. And by the same mechanisms, the game developers create official content that is released for sale. Systems, such as Steam ** (7) from Valve Corporation, provide a download client system to integrate the purchase and digital delivery of the content for incorporation into the game. However, these transactions occur outside of the game itself and not between players, preventing the players from selling their own content.
Despite the two genres of MMP and MP games exhibiting different revenue models and infrastructure requirements, they both share a common feature. Players continue to play the game and pay for subscriptions or add-on purchases if the experience continues to be enjoyable and is perceived to be worth investment in the long run. If players cannot trust the other players in the community, if real-money trade results in a playability imbalance, if the content does not get updated regularly, or if the players cannot contribute to the content of the game as a whole, they will lose interest and go elsewhere.
This problem is very similar to that faced by Web-based businesses, striving to make their Web sites "sticky" through new and interesting content and through community participation, and it should not be surprising that the technical challenges facing Web portals are relevant to the evolution of online games. However, the browser is a very different operating environment and interactive experience from that of a game. Early attempts to integrate e-commerce into games used very simplistic means, usually involving the launching of a Web browser. But this approach has serious deficiencies, because launching a Web browser involves a clear disruption of the game experience and a disconnect between the e-commerce transaction and the in-game mechanics.
In this paper we describe an architecture, Business Integration for Games (BIG), for integrating business services within online games. The work was performed within an incubator project, called Aspen, that was set up to investigate this architecture and implement a prototype. The implementation involves three main components: a thin client connector included in the game platform, a process broker based on WebSphere * to act as both agent (for the client connector) and intermediary (agent for multiple clients), and a collection of business services. The prototype is available on the alphaWorks * Web site under the name Business Integration for Games. (8)
To demonstrate the viability of integrating business services with online games, we applied the BIG technology to several games, the most notable being Quake II **. This game, from id Software, (9) is a benchmark for MP games and is highly representative of the genre. Moreover, its source code is available under the GPL (GNU General Public License) open-source license, making it suitable for our integration experiments. Since this work was completed, several MMP games have become available as open-source code, making it possible to explore the application of BIG to the MMP genre.
The rest of the paper is divided into the following sections. First, in the "Business Integration for Games" section, we review the current trends for systems integration in the enterprise, we introduce the programming environment for game development, and we describe the BIG architecture. The next three sections cover the three main components of the BIG architecture: client connector, process broker, and business services. Then, in the section "Implementing the BIG architecture," we describe our prototype and...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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