Raph has been keeping an eye out on a lot of people promising to make a ‘YouTube for games’ or an ‘Open Game’ platform. Do any of these have a shot in hell? The industry vets seem to doubt it.

“There’s a reason some of us are employed and paid to make games, and there’s a reason why most people are not. It’s because they’re really bad at it,” added Starr Long, game director of NCsoft.

I found this rebuttal pretty convincing:

[Matt Bostwirk, head of MTV’s virtual worlds, says] “This looks to me like the television industry looking at YouTube and saying, ‘Who wants to watch this crap?’”.

Sturgeon’s Law says that 90% of everything is crap – and that number feels about right for professionally made art in any genre – sci-fi novels, games, movies, etc. When you open up your platform and let any schmo make content, that number skyrockets to, I dunno, 99.9%.

But the economics of YouTube are about brute force, and about serving the Long Tail. A lot of the ‘crap’ will serve a small audience, but that’s an audience that is underserved. But more to the point, sometimes the amateurs can surprise the old fogies like myself. You’d be surprised at how many constraints are inside the industry – imagine a world with no need to build team consensus, no need to chase publisher money and no concerns about whether you can get shelf space.

Or put another way, what do CTF, Team Fortress and Counterstrike all have in common? They all started as fan mods, back when the ‘real’ devs couldn’t seem to concieve of anything more complex than deathmatch.