The Heretech

More info on Cisco's myPlanNet

Here's some more information about the topic of this week's Heretech podcast, myPlanNet, Cisco's simulation of running an ISP:

• The download page for myPlanNet.
• A slideshow giving more background on it.
• A Facebook fan page.

The difference between enthusing and embracing

Games without frontiers
I've said before that other parts of the technology industry could learn a lot from the computer game segment. Hollywood-sized budgets and revenue, real deadlines for getting product sold through retail channels, short shelf-lives for products, very high quality standards--these characteristics of the game biz tend to focus the mind on what's important.

But they don't immunize you from mistakes. Case in point: the game Demigod, which you may have seen in your local Target (that's the retail reach of the computer game industry, after all). Demigod's publisher, Stardock, designed the game around the assumption that a big chunk of the customers will want to play online. They also made some technical assumptions about how that should work, which proved to be wrong.  "One bad design decision and one architectural limitation" nuked the servers supporting online play. Ouch.

Shock the monkey
When all the electronic dust settled, Stardock had time to review some important statistics about Demigod's customers. In their annual report, Stardock's CEO admits their collective surprise that only 23% of their customers ever tried to log into the online servers. Of that fraction, a smaller fraction played at least one game online.

Unfortunately, that meant Stardock's investment in the development, testing, marketing, and support for the multi-player "experience"--to some extent, at the expense of the single-player way of playing the game--was reaching only a tiny minority of their customers.

How could a company make such a bone-headed mistake? By listening to industry gurus.

No self-control
In 2008 and 2009, computer game industry people were, by and large, fascinated by the brave new world of online gaming. After all, who wouldn't want even a tiny slice of Blizzard's mega-million dollar success with World of Warcraft?

The excitement over multi-player, online gaming grew to such a pitch that various industry professionals and luminaries started talking as if single-player games were already a thing of the past. (Here's a mild example, and here's a more feverish one.)

In hindsight, it's pretty obvious why single-player games haven't died. Not everyone wants to play online. Not every type of game is particularly well-suited for online play. (Here's a good example.) And certainly, few games are designed exclusively for online play, in the way that World of Warcraft is.

Some companies tried to explore the opportunity without the same "burn your boats behind you" approach that Stardock took with Demigod. The fourth version of the hallowed Civilization series put a great deal of emphasis on online play...But it was also a damn fine game in single-player mode, too.

Shaking the tree
As it turns out, the Internet connection from your console system or PC does have other important ramifications for the game industry, without having to believe in the Borg business model (always connected with other people, all the time). Many game companies are trying to make money through "downloadable content" (DLC), which open up new game options if you pay a couple of bucks. This season's mega-game release, Dragon Age, is a good example of how vendors are trying to make additional money, on top of the initial game sale, through these micro-transactions.

What's the broader moral of this story? Not surprisingly, as I write this post, I'm thinking about the buzz concerning social media. Certainly, there's some market for a particular kind of social media, such as micro-blogging, or a certain way of using them, such as customer service.

That being said, you have to be very wary of leaping from that use case to unspecified new ones. They may exist...Or we may have reached the current maximum volume of reasonable use cases for that medium.

That conclusion doesn't diminish the power of social media, or its future potential, one iota. Only the truly doltish among us would argue that social media have changed nothing. In fact, the use cases that we haven't considered—in the way that people hypnotized by World of Warcraft weren't thinking of new ways to make money, such as DLC—may even have bigger, more lasting, and more profound effects that the first one we imagine.

[P.S. Thanks to the Flash of Steel blog for the pointer to Stardock's annual customer report.]

[P.P.S. In case you're puzzled by my subheads, they're all the titles of Peter Gabriel songs. If there ever was a recording artist fascinated by new media, Gabriel's the one you'd have to cite.]

Hot off the presses: wargames, PM in the recession

Two of my research documents just went live on the Forrester web site:

• Wargaming for business leaders. Not the same as the kind of serious gaming that colleague TJ Keitt and I have discussed before, wargames are a more structured exercise that try to simulate possible business outcomes. The output is different than serious games, role-playing exercises, and other game-like tools. For example, in many cases, the goal is to help make smarter company-level decisions, not just product-level ones.

• Product management/marketing during the recession. A very short document that points to other research that we've done about the recesssion, and then puts it into context for PMs. What changes do PMs need to make in product strategy and positioning? Which markets are likely to bounce back first, and what do you need to know about them?