Making $ in games

Unlike films and oedinayry games, synthetic worlds are ongoing services that need to be provided on a 24/7 basis, even after the production process is done (p126). Therefore, sophisticated testing and market reasearch have to be fully implemented to ensure a game. Castronova talks a lot about the business side of the game creating process in his article. On p.128, he talks about a typical video game production process: "An idea is conceived and sketched out in a demo, A team of designers goes off to determine what the player will do, while artists begin to render the environments and characters. Both groups send tasks to the programmers, who are supposed to make it happen. Eventually enough content is built that one declares that an alpha vertion of the software is avavile for testing. The alpha tests lead to design changes, which are tested again". After the long process of internal designing and testing, the free beta trial is usually out for game players to experience the game for free. Usually there will be free software that are out for game players to download, and "the idea is to get a community of insiders hooked to the game, so that when it goes gold and begins to charge fee, newcomers will already find an active and vibrant community within the world" (p128).

Although there is also another way of doing the fixing process, which is release the game first, then fix problems during the trial periods. However, author suggests that this is risky, which might fail to attract game players from getting into the game world in the first hand. In addition, many things will remain broken forever even after the fixing process. Therefore, the author suggests to the game companies in the end of the paragraph that "don't open the doors until the park id sone, works well, and offers everyone a good time; keep new content coming, and don't try to fool all of the people, all of the time" (p129).

Besides the producing process to the free trial period, Castronova also mentions about the pricing models in the game world. Game companies usually offer a two-part pricing system, which allows users to buy the client software and then pay a subscription fee on a monethly basis". In addition, they also charge the players for fee when the new version of games come out with abundant content. I sill remember when I used to play online game, I was kind of forced to buy the new version of the game when they are out. Those new versions usually contented many new things, such as brand new cities or monsters. And they usually give game players a brand new experience of the game, which can often be very fun and exciting to game players.

Question for you all: have you ever experienced any change in the game that you used to play or you are currently playing? does the new content make the game better or worse? tell us about your experiences.