As I watched some of the online coverage of GDC, I was struck by how much the conference was dominated by iPhone games, Zynga Facebook games and online social games in general.  Every other tweet was something to do with how Zynga will have more employees than Facebook this year.  I knew there was an infatuation with everything iPhone and Facebook but I never realized it was this bad.  Eventually, I found my way to an interview of Koster by GameBreakr.com and I have to say that he’s underestimating the anger that core gamers have with the game industry these days.

Raph states that core gamers should be happy with the current progress that the industry is making.  Eventually, all this innovation will be good for the core gamer, goes the line of reasoning.  Web games are the future and eventually, the whole Facebook as a platform will catch up with today’s AAA game releases giving the core gamer something to cheer about.  With all due respect to Raph, why should the core gamer that helped pay for the “progress” aimed at the mass market have to wait for a next generation AAA title?  The core gamer has never had to wait on the sideline while the industry reinvented itself.  Why there are prominent people in the industry with such an outlook on the core gaming public is beyond me.  The core gamer is happy to spend a large amount of money on your game.  The core gamer remains loyal to your game and eventually your franchise.  The core gamer has been paying the way for today’s mass market progress with every purchase in the past.  This reminds me of the attitude that the cell phone companies have with their existing customers.  They’ll give them a discount on services only when they threaten to leave or when they are new to their service.  Incentives go to the customer that threatens to stop paying or has never given your company a dime of revenue while existing customers that helped pay for your marketing get nothing.  Revenue at all costs.  Screw the customer; Zynga’s even confessed to it.

That’s where Ages of Athiria comes in.  I’m not interested in chasing the mass market.  I care about providing a smaller set of customers a high quality experience for an appropriate fee.  Everyone else has run off to chase the casual gamer; the social gamer.  I’m interested in giving core gamers a significant advancement in traditional MMO technology that just so happens to also be connected to Twitter, Facebook, guild web sites, blogs and anything social that comes along in the future.  With Ages of Athiria, if I can ever get the damn thing funded, we’ll provide an open API that can be used to integrate the world of Athiria into any front end that the user finds suitable.  The simple view is that the game should be available everywhere, anytime and on any device.  The walled garden MMO is dead or if it is not, Ages of Athiria will kill it.  The next MMO revolution needs to take notice of Farmville and Mob Wars to realize why they are so successful.  There’s no denying that they are doing something right.  They then need to destroy the walled garden and show Zynga how a MMO is supposed to be built and why the Facebook/Flash platform is not the singularity future of gaming that the press wants to make it out to be.  Core gamer, please note that some of us in the industry have not abandoned you.  Some of us have not taken you for granted despite what the iPhone/Facebook obsessed media is telling you.