The social nature of online games makes it essential to build a user community early on, said Scott McDaniel, vice president of marketing for Sony Online Entertainment, publisher of leading online game "EverQuest". "It's hard to get a community going if you don't make that a priority from the beginning," McDaniel said. "You want to make sure people have the information they need to get excited and evangelise the game...We do a lot of advertising and promotion, but we found that the No. 1 reason people sign up for 'EverQuest' is word of mouth -- a friend told them to try it." "Star Wars Galaxies," the upcoming online roleplaying game to be published by Sony Online Entertainment, has had a Web site full of active user forums for almost two years -- well before the earliest stages of beta testing. Developers use the site to update fans on the progress of the game, to conduct open chat sessions with readers and to solicit feedback through discussion groups and other forums. McDaniel said early feedback from fans has played a significant role in shaping the development of "Galaxies." "We started off asking really basic questions. The answers led us in directions we hadn't thought of," McDaniel said. Rade Stojsavljevic, senior development director for Westwood Studios, which creates games for leading publisher Electronic Arts, said the development team for "Earth & Beyond", the studio's new intergalactic roleplaying game, began soliciting feedback well before there was any test software to send around. "We spent a lot of time in there when the community was really small, soliciting feedback from players," he said. "We hired a full-time community manager early on -- her job was to filter feedback to the development team." Early feedback resulted in major structural changes in the game, Stojsavljevic said. The initial concept for the game didn't include "avatars," or display appearances, to represent individual characters -- players instead were supposed to focus on customising their spaceships. "Our idea was that you wouldn't spend any time thinking about who was in your spaceship," he said. "The thing we didn't realise in the beginning is that it's hard to get attached to a piece of metal. The user groups were very clear and unanimous and made a really good point about that. After that, we spent a lot of time developing an avatar system." Filtering the chat
Inviting the world into your software project includes some liabilities. It can be a lot of work to sieve through discussion group postings, e-mail messages and other submissions to cull worthy ideas. Westwood has five full-time community development specialists for "Earth & Beyond," who spend much of their time sifting through user input. "You can easily get a mess," Stojsavljevic said. "I think it's critical to have someone there to dig, find out which ideas the most people are talking about and funnel those to the right people on the development team. At the height of the development cycle on this game, we had 150 people working on it. It's just impossible to have everybody know what's going on overall." Developers also need to be able to pull the plug on unproductive or exhausted discussion threads. Otherwise, projects can bog down in a paralysis of ideas. "You have to be prepared to make some clear statement -- we're doing this, we're not doing that, or this issue has been settled, and here's the reason why," Lotus founder Kapor said. "If you don't take stands and communicate them, the discussion never ends. And you need to do that in a way that respects the community. If its feels authoritarian, that doesn't build a good dynamic." It also helps if the developer has a thick skin -- to withstand correspondents who express their ideas in harsh language -- and enough self-awareness to be able to admit they might be wrong. "Being a software developer, you need a combination of ego and humility," Bricklin said. "There are so many bugs and dead ends, you need the ego to keep going. But you need the humility to learn and make changes." With the right attitude and attention, however, public participation can make a software project a success before it leaves the developer's cubicle. "If you do this right, you've got early adopters, you've got evangelists, you've got a lot of early support," Kapor said. "The train has left the station and is gathering steam before you do a final release."
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