08-30-2011, 08:41 PM
I think what we see are economics and evolution. When PBM started, pretty much everyone thought they could make lot of money programming a game and running it. Ignoring the fact that designing for interesting and balanced gameplay itself is more complex than most people think, the economics of PBM were terrible. Combine bad games with limited economic benefit and we see some of the ebb and flow of games and players.
Evolution rears its ugly head in the form of the dreaded internet, raising number of choices for games and adding immediate gratification for the players, and a huge market for the moderators. Personally I got a small thrill out of anticipating when games would arrive. I could predict turnaround times for different games and moderators, and started to think I could tell how long it would take Flying Buffalo to run different Starweb games based on different cycles with their internal workloads. It was a game unto itself. Granted, there is something a little weird there, but todays game player would laugh if you told him it would take 2 weeks to tell if he survived a battle.
Now comes smartphones. All the would be PBM moderators are trying to come up with the next Angry Birds (note - never tried it, never will, or any smartphone game for that matter).
Evolution rears its ugly head in the form of the dreaded internet, raising number of choices for games and adding immediate gratification for the players, and a huge market for the moderators. Personally I got a small thrill out of anticipating when games would arrive. I could predict turnaround times for different games and moderators, and started to think I could tell how long it would take Flying Buffalo to run different Starweb games based on different cycles with their internal workloads. It was a game unto itself. Granted, there is something a little weird there, but todays game player would laugh if you told him it would take 2 weeks to tell if he survived a battle.
Now comes smartphones. All the would be PBM moderators are trying to come up with the next Angry Birds (note - never tried it, never will, or any smartphone game for that matter).