Sony has announced 100 million PS2’s have been sold, and at the same time, an Australian developer is running a survey gathering input for an Xbox 360 based MMORPG.

And a meeting with Oracle this morning to talk grid computing (among other things) and Demonware’s announcement of an award nomination leads me to post on the subject on massively multiplayer games, online games, consoles, and the ‘console war’.

I’ll start with something I’ve long believed: I really think that Microsoft made a huge mistake in pitching the original Xbox against the Playstation 2. The Xbox was certainly technically superior, but the PS2 had an installed base - so when the same game, with the same gameplay and effectively the same graphics came out for both consoles, people went out and bought the PS2 version. There was no reason to spend the extra on an Xbox.

I’m a case in point, although I do have both consoles. At one point I had more than 120 PS2 games - and 5 Xbox games. If a game came out on PS2 and Xbox, I bought the PS2 version. There was no benefit to me in buying the Xbox version. So I don’t really find it surprising that the PS2 is still selling well.

The subject of online gaming is close to my heart. I’ve been involved in one way or another with online games for a number of years (check out the book in the right-hand bar!), and I clearly remember thinking back in 2000 that there might be a bright future for online games when Quake 3 was released on the Dreamcast. As someone involved in a couple of companies providing game server hosting services (BarrysWorld, Games Domain Online), we were desperate to be able to host different games, allow more people to interact with our service, to bring online games to a much wider audience.

With the launch of the Xbox and Xbox Live I was once more hopeful that there would be advances, but the decision to make Xbox Live a walled garden soon put the kybosh on that idea. (Of course, my own desire to develop a cross-platform game had a lot to do with my disappointment.)

Does the surveying of players in relation to an Xbox 360 MMORPG mean there’s a change in the landscape with this new console? Will Microsoft allow Xbox 360 players to interact with PC-based players in a shared environment? Or will we go back to 2000, where players on one platform (Dreamcast) were specifically blocked from competing with players on another (PC), even though both used the same network (the Internet)?

Technorati Tags: Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Xbox, PS2, Online Gaming, Games, Online Games, Console Games, Microsoft

Random browsing occasionally throws up something interesting, and today I stumbled across a new Sun blogger in Identity Management.

So, you’ve just been handed an identity project.

Your emotions are off in two directions. First, elation. Identity is the hottest topic in IT and looks like it has some legs for the near future (job security, which in IT means at least a year before they come after your job;-) ). The second, is fear, as you really have no real idea what an identity project is and what it is measured by.

The first post, So what is an “Identity” Project makes for interesting reading too.

bytonic software have released a version of Quake 2 ported to Java which means you can play the entire game in a web browser. Effectively this means you can go to their web start page, select the version you want, and start playing Quake 2 straight away. Performance is said to be equivalent to that of the original version, and the recently released 0.9.4 version supports multiplayer and web-based installation of the Quake 2 files (if you don’t have it pre-installed)

There’s a debate raging on the use of RSS - either full-text or partial-text feeds. I’m going to talk about my games news website news0r.com, and compare it to this site, my personal weblog.

On news0r, there is a partial RSS feed of the last 20 or so stories posted. The decision to make this feed only a partial feed was a deliberate one, as the decision to use RSS is not one that relates to delivering content through this channel. The use of RSS on news0r is about making people aware that new content is available.

But the end point is not to deliver discrete blocks of content to our customers through this channel. After all, of the 30-odd categories we currently support on the site, the RSS feed only displays about 10. We don’t want people to read the news via RSS, we want them to come to the website and enjoy the other information we post as well (reviews, previews, screenshot galleries, feature articles, gamer columns and so on). By not relying on RSS as the delivery channel, we can also cross-link items, embed images, run features on the website. The information becomes permanent rather than transient.

The feeds we use to create the i-mode and web’n'walk sites are also only partial feeds, but this time for a different reason. These feeds drive sites that are aimed at mobile devices which may or may not have enough memory to display the full feed, so we deliberately use partial feeds so we can show more information to the viewer - more than just a bland headline (which need to be short for the aggregation services we also feed), and less than the full story - some of which are too large to be displayed on their own on some handsets.

This site however is a different animal. This site is a discussion site, it’s where I talk about what I’m doing and where I can put forward some of my thoughts and opinions. So it’s better that the RSS feed I provide be full text. And so it is (although admittedly at the beginning it wasn’t, as I hadn’t found the switch in the RSS output options that enabled full text…)

Technorati Tags: news0r, Games, Games News, RSS, RSS Feeds

I’ve been fiddling around with host headers recently to identify the type of device being used to access my sites, and in some cases redirect to a more suitable delivery format. (Try visiting www.news0r.com using a PSP -you will be automatically redirected to the PSP-friendly site).

It was while putting in some detection for the new web’n'walk site that I started looking more specifically into what information is available through mobile device user agent details. I-mode handsets are interesting in that not only do they report what device they are, they also report how much memory they have, allowing me to dynamically adjust how many news stories are delivered to the handset, as well as letting me chop up stories into multiple pages handled by my CMS for devices that only have limited memory.

Through judicious searching (I was looking for the headers for the MDA Pro and the Nokia N70) I came across WURFL, the Wireless Universal Resource File.

So… What is WURFL?
The WURFL is an XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of several wireless devices.

This is very similar to Nokia’s UAProf, but covers far more than just Nokia devices, making it far more useful.

Coming complete with implementation libraries in a variety of languages, WURFL marries generic information delivered via a device’s browser host header with collected, useful information about the device itself, including memory sizes, screen sizes, supported services and so on. So you can quickly and easily mofidy delivered content to suit the device you are dealing with.

Technorati Tags: PSP, Wireless, Mobile, news0r, i-mode, T-Mobile, Games, WURFL, UAProf, Nokia

When I first started looking into Identity Management in detail, I spent an enormous amount of time on the web reading through as much information as I could find. Most of those that I found interesting or added to what I knew about Identity Management concepts were printed out for reference. After doing the same for my RBAC pile I thought it was about time I did the same for my Identity Management papers.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, Enterprise Architecture, University of Salford

As part of the long term Identity Management project we’re working on at the University, a great deal of investigation and analysis was undertaken on the subject of Associate Members. Associate Members of the University are:

“[I]ndividuals engaged in business activities [or other activities] with the university who need to access university resources but do not satisfy either of the two main criteria of university membership: that of being either students or staff.”

We’ve now put up a web page containing a lot of the results of this analysis.

One interesting outcome from this project was the recognition that the University has far more people associate with it than were previously thought. Where most estimates had placed the number of Associates at around 2,500 people, the project identified more than 41,000… All of whom will be dealt with in one way or another through the Identity Management project.

Technorati Tags: Identity, Digital Identity, Identity Management

The T-Mobile implementation of our GTIP service launched last night on T-Mobile’s UK WAP portal. Unlike other implementations of GTIP, on T-Mobile’s portal you can enter your question via a WAP text entry field, although you will still get your response via SMS.

This is a small example of marrying browser-based text entry with SMS-based response and billing. Since we can identify the mobile phone by requiring all users to access the service through T-Mobile’s WAP gateway (through automatic detection of T-Mobile customers, or through ‘logging in’ to T-Mobile’s portal from another carrier), we can manage the WAP session and send information back to the handset without actually knowing the customer’s mobile number.

Technorati Tags: WAP, Mobile, T-Mobile, GTIP, SMS, Game Cheats, Games

It seems Microsoft are moving into the mobile gaming space, with a bold new plan to overhaul the business as we know it.

Microsoft’s has an ambitious agenda. The company plans to sweep up the best mobile games around. It also hopes to completely change gaming as we know it by connecting mobile, Xbox-based, and PC-based gameplay into one coherent experience.

If I may, this is an area we have been talking about (including in a speech to mobile game developers in Helsinki last year) and trying to push for several years now. In 2003 we even approached Microsoft about obtaining permission to develop an Xbox Live! version of an MMORPG for the PC that would allow players to compete in the same online environment on PC, Xbox (via Xbox Live) and mobile handset (any Java compatible phone). The idea was to allow anyone to play the game against anyone else - and since it was a massively multiplayer game, the interface device and required bandwidth didn’t matter - one guy even played via 9.6k GSM modem from a beach in Brazil once…

Unfortunately the plans never came to completion - Microsoft wouldn’t allow connectivity between the PC and the Xbox, and we couldn’t raise the fund to develop the java interface for the MMO, even though we had a carrier ready to promote the client to their customers.

I truly believe there needs to be a change in the way developers and publishers think about how games are structured in an online environment - stop thinking about a ‘mobile version’ of game XYZ, and start thinking about how the mobile can be used as an access device or a different way of controlling an existing game.

Even the current generation of MMO games could allow mobile access to limited areas of their game models. Why not allow players to move their characters between fixed, safe locations from their mobile phone? (For example, using the flightpaths in World of Warcraft). Or allow access to in-game purchasing services (Auction House anyone?) or even just simple things like banking or inventory adjustment.

Alternatively, provide a separate stream of gaming through the mobile handset, allowing people to participate in minigames through the handset that have an impact inside the game.

The particular game we were talking about in 2003 was a massively multiplayer real time strategy game, which meant your units remained in the game when you logged out. You could be (and I frequently was) wiped out while offline, so the option of receiving an alert and letting you get into the game’s high level control screen from anywhere was a very attractive idea.

We’ve even got yet another form of integration working - using you mobile as the channel for getting game support, cheats or hints. And not just through GTIP, we even have middleware that lets you place the question asking interface inside a game. The customer can then get their answer to their mobile, or even back inside the game itself (with billing done in various creative ways). And it’s still live customer support, not an automated service or a set of support forums that users need to search through manually.

There is so much that can be done, and we’ve been banging on about it for years now. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft bring to the table, and if they bring anything new at all. If anyone from Microsoft wants more information on what we’ve already been doing, drop us a line :)

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Mobile Games, Mobile, Games, Cross-platform, Xbox, MMO, Community Management, Customer Support, GTIP

Toby has invited me to an upcoming seminar to look at the key themes of Identity in 2006 he’s holding through the Enterprise Privacy Group. It sounds like it will be a lot of fun, so I’m going to make the effort to get down to London that day and attend. It’s invitation-only, so you’d best go annoy Toby if you want to come along.