No free Ryzom; what next?

No free Ryzom; what next?

Posted Jan 7, 2007 16:02 UTC (Sun) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048)
Parent article: No free Ryzom; what next?

Top-quality online games need top-quality artwork, sound effects, music, storylines, and more. If our community is going to create a great online virtual world, we must do a better job of soliciting and integrating contributions from artists, writers, and others who are not software developers.

It can be worth nothing that Second Life took an approach where this is just false. They only provide the server, where the engine runs, and the client, which is the tool to access and create the virtual world. All the contents (the world itself) are user created, and they essentially charge the users "renting" the virtual "barebones" real estate (think "acres of land").

The idea behind thes is that they rent the portion of the server that hosts the user's portion of the world, which is reasonable IMHO, and could be a sustainable model even if the game code were Free Software. After all, after we have a Free (as in speech) virtual world game, and it gets popular, somebody will have to pay for the huge server farm needed to host it: IIRC Second life is growing at a rate of 300 servers per month, it is only fair that the users pay for it!

Anyway, my point was just that in a true "user centered" virtual world experience, content creation needs not to be centralized, it is quite the opposite. The project should only care to provide friendly authoring tools, the users will do the rest.

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