Administrators · Legacy archive
Uncle Bear
-
Uncle Bear
#1http://unclebear.com/comments.php?id=P2470_0_1_0
When Good Ideas Go Bad
After spending six weeks developing a business plan, talking to business people and intended end users and industry creators and web developers, I'm killing the TwentySiders.com project at least temporarily and probably permanently. Everyone seems convinced that it's not commercially viable. I wasn't able to rouse anything greater than mild interest -- my enthusiasm was not contageous. The most frequently asked question was "why?".
I'm a supporter and user of Open Source software. I use OpenOffice and Firefox and Thunderbird. At some point later in the year, I plan to switch to Ubuntu. When developers are also end users, they tend to know what they want out of a product. For the most part, Open Source software is smaller, more stable, and even has better features than commercial counterparts. It's also free, and often provide an alternative to supporting corporations whose business practices I find ethically challenged.
It's been six years since the Open Gaming License (OGL for short) came into existence. Wizards of the Coast took the core rules to the world's most popular fantasy roleplaying game and made them free to use. Designers and writers could scribe their own material, tweak the rules, and create entire new games based on a system already familiar to most folks interested in roleplaying. Great things have come out of it -- Spycraft, Mutants & Masterminds, Blue Rose, Iron Heroes, and Conan, to name a few. All of them are commercial products. The only free materials to be released have been classes, spells, monster -- plug-ins to existing applications, to continue the software metaphor. No one has written a freely distributable "killer app" using the OGL.
This bears repeating: No one has written a freely distributable "killer app" using the OGL.
The TwentySiders.com concept was to create a website best described as a cross between a social networking site similar to MySpace and a developer's site like SourceForge, where people could create, collaborate on, and play OGL games. Prose material, known in the hobby as "fluff", and worldbuilding text would be released under Creative Commons licenses to allow users to remix and build upon other peoples' ideas. The popularity of social networking, married to the concepts of roleplaying, would offer something more closely akin to an actual tabletop roleplaying experience without the limitations of current MMPORPGs, allowing people to create their own worlds and storylines.
I thought it was a really cool idea with a lot of potential. Yet people still asked why I wanted to do something like that. Nobody thought it would catch on. People interested in OGL games flock to ENworld and people who want to design roleplaying games gather on The Forge and people who just want to socialize about games gather at RPGnet forums or just hang on a social networking site. No one felt that there was enough synergy to sustain the project. Given the time, money, and bandwidth that would be required, if I build it and no one's gonna come, I'm not gonna bother to build it.
On to my next white elephant...
Scratches chin....hmmmmmmm
Got my mine spinning around V3.0 with the Worlds...which got me thinking about 2.1 and the list I have for that....which made me think of some more possibilities with the current set up...which....which....
Studying is great, if only for the extreme need for the mind to slip into something else more interesting at a moment's notice.