Interview with Todd Northcutt, Director of GameSpy Technology
Todd Northcutt, Director of GameSpy Technology reveals what he feels is missing from multiplayer communities and their means of social connections, in a preview of his 2008 ION Game Connection lecture, Follow Me: 7 Cool Things You Can Do With Buddy Lists. The full monty is below.
 PAUL PHILLEO: Hi Todd, thank you for taking a little time from your busy schedule to share a few thoughts with ION Connection readers. Can you introduce us to your background and what brought you into the game industry? What is your role with GameSpy?
 TODD NORTHCUTT: Long, long ago, I was in the stodgy world of academia, working on my PhD in organometallic chemistry. Like so many other people now in the industry, I stumbled upon Quake and saw the amazing potential for the Internet to change what gaming was and could become.
I left that all behind in 1999 to join GameSpy in hopes of providing gamers a richer online gaming experience. My role gradually shifted away from providing stand-alone products to gamers (GameSpy 3D, Roger Wilco and GameSpy Arcade were my babies) to developing technology for game developers to be included directly within the games themselves. To date we’ve powered the online component of over 500 PC, Mac, Sony PS2, PSP and PS3, Xbox, Nintendo DS and Wii titles.
All that promise I saw so long ago is finally starting to be realized. We’re fortunate to have some big partners, like Nintendo, who are thinking about online from a brand new perspective, trying to make the whole concept more inviting to the average user. Just look at Mario Kart Wii and see how approachable things like leaderboards, ghost races and ELO ratings can be when you look at them with the right lens!
What is the purpose of GameSpy’s technology in the game development spectrum?
GameSpy Technology is designed to help developers achieve functionality for their games that fit into 4 broad categories: Connectivity, Competition, Community, and Commerce. Essentially, we provide a suite of services that help developers make their PC, console and handheld games online capable, and then maximize the features and functionality that are available to games once they come online.
Most games start with that first “C,” using our matchmaking services to enable basic online multiplayer functionality in their games. But we strongly believe – and this is based on experience with titles across the spectrum – that multiplayer is really just the most fundamental step. There’s a pyramid of value – both to the people making games, and the people playing them – that games can move up once they’re online.
“Connectivity,” for example, doesn’t even need to imply “multiplayer.” It can simply mean that the game makes a connection to the Internet somehow. Once you’ve have established that, there’s a wide range of cool services that a game can avail to gamers: multiplayer, of course, but also facilitating online access to user-created content (everything from screenshots and replay videos to “stage trading,” like what we’re seeing with Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which uses our technology); chat, buddy lists, instant messaging, all manner of competition (from simple leaderboards to ladders to tournaments and complex user-specific statistics).
The top of the pyramid is commerce – adding in the ability for developers and publishers to disseminate new content for their games via a channel within the game itself. Users win in that they get a perpetually renewable source of entertainment that lasts for months or years after a game’s release. And game creators win by opening up new revenue streams or creating entirely new business models that can dramatically grow the size of their audience or contribute to healthier bottom lines.
Is GameSpy Technology, which has a number of multiplayer components in its toolbox, complimentary to or competitive with other massively multiplayer middleware platforms, like those offered by BigWorld or Simutronics?
It’s complimentary. Middleware like BigWorld and Simutronics are really aimed at helping developers (particular those in the Massively Multiplayer space) actually build the game world itself – the fundamental content creation and rendering chores that can be a huge drain on development resources were a developer to try and build it all themselves, or piecemeal something together out of multiple tools.
GameSpy is about taking the next step: now you’ve got an online game – what, exactly, are you going to do with it? A developer might tap GameSpy to provide services for building in text / voice chat or buddy lists to help bolster its community. Or it might use our ATLAS Competition System to build out a robust user stats system or competition environment. It might employ Direct2Game to facilitate in-game commerce, enabling users to consume new content as the developers crank it out.
It’s important to mention here, too, that our services can be integrated directly into the game engine. We partnered with Epic to bundle all of our tools with the Unreal 3 Engine, making it much easier for that engine’s licensees to do all of the things that a game engine doesn’t do. So, in that sense, we can be radically complimentary to a tool like BigWorld. That works for everyone: the developer gets an easier time developing, and the engine company can focus on creating the best possible game engine.
Does GameSpy have developer mindshare presence in rapidly growing and heavily wired markets, like China and South Korea? What strategies do you think it takes for a middleware developer to penetrate those markets?
We do not yet have a strong presence in China or South Korea, specifically. That’s not to say that we’re not interested, or that it’s infeasible. Our partnership with Nintendo speaks to our ability to move into new markets and succeed -- even beyond the aggressive goals we’ve set for ourselves.
As a result of that, we’ve learned a couple of things that contribute to a company’s success when trying to move into a new market that markets and consumes game differently than our native market:
1) Do your homework – try to understand the commerce and cultural forces at play in the new market; understand what the consumers and production forces value most highly, and learn what they’re likely to reject out-of-hand – these values can be deeply entrenches, and inform how games move to market and how people play them;
2) Partner, partner, partner: find someone in the space who can serve, essentially, as your agent in that market. Work with an established brand or service provider if possible – their brand strength and reputation should make it easier for you to gain acceptance, and their competence should make it easier to get things done right the first time.
As a speaker last year at (formerly known as) OGDC, what did you take away from the conference that was beneficial to you through the remainder of 2007?
First and foremost, the connections with other people in the online-focused gaming space. It’s a great networking event, not just because it’s in the backyard of so many great studios and publishers, but because it focuses its attendees’ attention on “online” gaming.
Second, that focus extends to the content of the conference itself. That important to me – I work in the online space, and I want to hear about new ideas, challenges, successes and failures in that space. Frankly, that just helps me do my job better – whether I’m learning something new, or just hearing my current & potential customers highlight areas that are exciting them or giving them trouble. Strategically, that’s pretty crucial stuff for a service provider to hear.
Looking ahead to the near future, could you give us a little insight into your topic you plan to speak about at the 2008 ION Conference? Why do you feel buddy lists are an underutilized communications/multiplayer element in next-gen consoles?
Social gameplay is exploding, and that’s nothing but good for the games industry AND gamers.
Whether games are multiplayer or not, people are playing them socially – sharing the experience with their friends or clan mates or even random strangers – in larger numbers all the time. The buddy list is the fundamental building block of that relationship because it can facilitate so much cool functionality and interactivity with games. This enriches the game playing experience. Once you view buddy lists through that lens – as a means, and not an end – you start thinking of a long list of things that can be done with them (stuff that ranges across all 4 “Cs” that I mentioned earlier).
It’s also one of those things that developers put on their “if we have time” feature list – and so, one of the first things to get cut or mis-used. That’s a crime.
Do you feel consoles are lagging behind PCs in terms of how buddy lists can be implemented, or that buddy lists in general could be employed better regardless of platform?
Yes and yes.
The long answer is: the implementations on the console are no better or worse that what we’ve seen on the PC. On the console, you definitely run across situations where the platform owner has made buddy lists a central part of the overall online experience, and that’s great. But there’s a long way to go.
The same is true of the PC: while the buddy list is noticeably increasing in profile among gamers, games and third party gaming applications, we’re still only scratching the surface of what can be done here. Most of what you see branching off of the buddy list is just simple online / offline presence, instant messaging and buddy-following into games. That’s the ground floor. We’re very focused on developing what’s upstairs.
Beyond buddy lists alone, do you feel other communications elements -- – such as chat, lobbies, whispering, etc. -- could be implemented more creatively? If so, can you share an example with us?
Certainly – chat and lobbies have been around for years with very little variation or innovation. Chat is something of a nightmare these days, don’t you think? It’s very hard to enter a game lobby and extract useful, actionable information. There’s only so much utility in being called a “douche bag” 34 times by some kid in Uzbekistan, you know? There’s been a lot of discussion about this recently, on both the community management front and on the blue sky idea development side.
Again, I think this is a symptom of online community features being something of a “nice to have” feature for developers. They rightfully need to spend their time thinking about quality gameplay, and thus neglect the quality of experience that people have in ancillary features. Our argument is that these are not ancillary features. They’re core. They’re becoming more core every day as social gameplay becomes the norm.
So, we have a long way to go, not just in positioning the features better in the minds of developers, but in creating technology that makes the experience of dealing with them better (more pleasant, more utilitarian) for everyone. This is social engineering, of a sort – and because functions like chat are common currency across the gaming space, it makes sense for neutral third parties to focus on it.
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As the 2008 ION Game Conference approaches with under a month left before the conference gets underway on May 13th, we’re almost to the end of the list of the ten best reasons why you should attend this event. In fact, we’re down to reason number three.
