I was in the middle of my 3 hour car drive from NYC to Boston today, when I had the "OMG DRUPAL + MMORPG GUILD MGMT = HAPPINESS" epiphany...something I reckon most of the people in this group have already experienced. All of these different ideas flooded my mind...managing guild members, raid scheduling, forums, notifications, character item integration via XML feeds for ALL mmorpgs....not just WoW. Maybe I could combine my old passion of gaming and new passion of drupal into a an actual job!
Then, I was saddened to learn that there already seems to be quite a few companies that already do this:
One in particular, guildlaunch.com looks like it might actually be a drupal site.
So, is the market saturated with this kind of service already? Is there something unique a new company could bring to the table?
I mean...I fantasized about quitting my job tomorrow just so I could do this. Does anyone else share this passion? Would anyone else be interested in doing something like this?
Comments
Yup, yup
Hey, Phpgirl
I actually already have been bussy thinking this out for quite some while (6 months). Already worked a bit with Mixel Kiemen on a new form of group setup in order to support what you would call All mmorpg's. I am unsure if we can achieve this with OG, especially with the ideas that I have been thinking about (i.e some mmorpg's have allliances between guilds).
I did quite some market research already trying to find out what other companies are doing, wich all seem to focused allot on more and more functionality instead of ease of use. I doubt the market is saturated at all, however it is very hard to offer these services in detail to all MMORPG's so allot of guild related services tend to focus on one or a few games.(+ not supporting any asian games!)
If you wish to get in detail over mail, please get in contact with me on bojhan...at...xs4all.nl, I would love to do more with this, but the lack of good programmers that have time seem to have propsponed most of these ideas for me.
Best Regards,
Bojhan Somers
I'll likely compete with a
I'll likely compete with a free and GPLd codebase and hosted alternative. Why? Because I really believe that such an endeavor should be open, accessible, and receiving contributions from the whole community which, in turn, should be able to benefit from it. Rather than slapping one monolithic system into the landscape I envision a JSON or XML based protocol for smaller hosting sites (1-20 guilds) communicating with each other and/or a master system for data exchange. The upcoming "Thrallslist" (working name, I like Craig and I think he respects me but I won't try to pee him off) is just about that, a central hub for games (initially we have Warhammer and Warcraft, because that's the only thing we're playing at the moment, but module design is massively simple).
As for the module code for Drow (Drupal WoW), the issue is rather mundane. Two weeks ago my guild of two years went up in flames as the result of some ill-advised recruiting and failure to deal with drama in a timely manner (iow, kick the offenders swiftly instead of trying to communicate). The remainder of the guild isn't strong enough to do the testing and provide the data I wanted, so I went writing backend code and looked for a new guild for a few of us. The former is coming along nicely, but I am too choosy, I guess, for the latter.
This weekend I put the finishing touches on the module core and the Armory import (doesn't matter if you have two or twohundred imports) and will release what I have to CVS.
Well, it would be free to use
with advertising revenue and optional pay membership. And modules useful to the community would be contributed. For example (and I don't know if this exists or not) if Blizzard made character information accessible via a web-service, a Drupal web-service client module could be available for all to use.
That doesn't mean EVERYTHING needs to be given away though. I mean, I'm talking about making this a full-time job, for which some compensation would be desirable! It just seems like the market for MMORPGs is so vast, that's there's plenty of opportunity to make money from it.
And this is where we might
And this is where we might differ. For paid solutions (well, paid via advertisements) Rupture does a great job in the aggregation department. I envision a free and open codebase with enough contributors to disentangle this from one or two developers or providers, specifically to avoid the quagmire that is, right now, Views/CCK and other things that just haven't made it into 6.0 yet and slow down Drupal adoption. Some day down the road, something like FriendFeed for Games would be peachy, but again Rupture might just take that cake (and I'd be more than happy with them doing it).
Imagine this - a group of 10-ish core developers and a benefactor to provide the box/bandwidth as a start (I am talking to a few such benefactors about that). The ability to download the full codebase as an install profile for 6.0 and to setup ones own guild website. Or to partake on the contributed box. A XML (right now I am playing with JSON for this, but XML strikes me as a bit more cross-system) feed that can be fed into the main system for things such as rankings, combat log storage and analysis, trade, looking for members/looking for guild, etc.
Most of my work, atm, is on the system in the back. I guess by next week I'll have a prototype to look at at which people can sign up and post. I'll also have Drow communicating with that backend, if not next week then soon.
That's not to discourage you from going on this endeavor. My code is dual-licensed under a GPL and MPL so you can even use it, as long as you publish your modifications (the difference between GPL and MPL here is simple - the MPL considers installing it on a web-server to be "distribution", while the GPL is vague. I believe it IS distribution (think "WebOS") and therefore installing it on a web server requires the user to actually make the code they installed (as long as it's mine or based on mine) available to the Drupal community). If you do, I'll look forward to it and will definitely make sure that the community code works well with whatever you envision, but there might be, aside from GuildLaunch/GuildPortal/DKPsystems/etc. also a GPL/Open competitor, that's all I wanted to make sure you knew.
jluster
Yup, totally agree. You cant have it setup like the other systems, where everything is simply a hosted solution. In order to suceed you need to have some form of master system for data exhange and some easy way for users to set it up them selfs (ie install profiles). Hosted solutions are only viable if they have a certain key advantage, to self-hosted and if you want to go commerical you have to find these.
From a pure business perspective, there is always a need for payed service solutions but free these days is part of the business solution. Giving everything away will ofcourse not be the case, but you have to let people to interact with your system, to be able to enrichen the system as a whole.
Jluster it might be handy to talk over some form of IM or IRC anytime soon, so we dont all have the same ideas and not work thougheter :)
My IM is dotsocial for YIM,
My IM is dotsocial for YIM, I should be online most of the time I am on my computer or have 3G on my cell. I'm posting a LFG (snicker) in a few seconds.
I added you
Hey, Jluster
I added you to YIM, I see you want to push a diffrent license model then Drupal. I am fairly familair with Drupals reasons behind GPL and why not any of the other models including the current new GPL 3 mockups have been choosen. Dries notes : No one is forced to distribute or share code. And MPL would force us to distribute any modifications we make to your modules if I am correct. So that would mean a no go to unique functionality. I am all about releasing code, however I dont think you should force it upon people. The standalone should indeed be platform free, but that doesnt mean the platforms that you build have to be released completly.
More about licensing : http://drupal.org/node/30708 .
Be aware, that anything released on Drupal.org has to be GPL'd and not dual licenced.
Anyway, we will get into detail over IM.