Highlighting innovative companies in the entertainment industries, AlwaysOn recently released their OnHollywood 100 and recycled that old saying – content is king.
But the failure of many of these services to drive consistent audiences and attract premium advertisers has made it clear that Silicon Valley won’t usurp Hollywood, content is still king.
That’s not what many in Silicon Valley wanted to hear. Content is king is another way of saying hits-driven business. Are virtual worlds destined to become a hits-driven business?
Successful virtual worlds
Sally Schmidt laid out what it takes to make virtual worlds successful – the 5 Cs.
She then broke down the five key strategic points into the 5 Cs: Creativity (dressing up avatars, decorating homes, designing clothes), Collection (free goods, paid goods, points), Caring (feeding a virtual pet, charity), Community (chat, events, message boards), and last but not least Competition (levels, comparing points wit other players). Her conclusion was that each of the big sites encompass all five key points, but only strongly emphasize a few. For instance, on Stardoll the draw is obviously in the creativity of designing your own clothes and styling your avatar. On Neopets, your role as pet owner promotes caring.
Seeing the success of kids worlds I would also add strong context. We see the importance of context when comparing virtual worlds that had little, like Google Lively, to those that had a lot, Club Penguin. Google Lively was trying to be general purpose, appeal to everyone, and in the end appealed to nearly no one.
Let’s take the first C – Creativity (dressing up avatars, decorating homes, designing clothes). Yahoo! has had avatars. You could customize their hair, dress them up, change their mood, even add a monkey however few know about them and even less use it. Yahoo! is the poster child for general purpose and lack of context, adding avatars did little. Maybe it’s different when it’s 3D, but I would argue that Google Lively discredits that theory.
In the end, without context these virtual worlds become little more than 3D chat and when was the last time you used chat? To move beyond 3D chat virtual worlds need context, something kids worlds have known for a while now.
So why the sour faces?
If it’s about content, it’s a hit-driven business. But for many a hits-driven business is not a business they want to be in. As a business model it’s:
- About narrowing your audience - Everyone can use a search engine but how many find horror movies too scary to watch? It’s also a fickle business.
- A fickle business – The line William Goldman captured this perfectly in the line, “Nobody knows anything“. That isn’t to say that Hollywood execs are stupid, just that prior to a movie’s release they have no real idea how well a film will do.
- The domain of artists – What drew most developers to the virtual worlds industry was the technology, not content.
WoW and the MMO space captures these points perfectly. It isn’t a question of technology as much as content and game design. WoW is incredibly successful while other MMOs of equal or greater technology flounder.
Of course Blizzard, creators of WoW, is based just outside of LA. Silicon Valley has traditionally shied away from hits-driven businesses. We in Silicon Valley live by the model “build a better mouse trap and they will come”. We simply don’t feel safe competing on content, it isn’t our industry. Which is exactly what Paul Heckel brought up in his book The Elements of Friendly Software Design.
Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control to artists – or more precisely, to the communications craftsmen. The same thing is happening now with personal computers.
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A Senior Product Manager at 