Posted: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:58 PM - 8,681 Readers
By: Brian Gaar
Legendary video game designer Richard Garriott is officially back in the business that made him famous.
In an announcement today at the DICE (for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit of video game executives in Las Vegas, Garriott and his partners will announce a new foray into the industry. On one level, the new company, Portalarium, will act as a social networking game developer and publisher, offering games on social networks like Facebook.
The social games arena is crowded, and analysts say only the top developers make money. But Garriott and his team also are creating development tools that they say will lead to a higher quality of games on those platforms.
"If you look at the state-of-the-art in social media gaming right now, it lags behind a lot of the more experienced developers by a fairly significant margin," Garriott said. "That's what we saw really as the big opportunity."
The new company's main office is a cabin on 70 acres that Garriott owns along Lake Austin. The scene harkens back to the family garage in Houston where Garriott started Origin Systems in 1983.
It was through Origin that Garriott created the groundbreaking "Ultima" series and, after he moved to Austin, established the city as a gaming hub.
Garriott's most recent online game, "Tabula Rasa," never found an audience, and publisher NCsoft Corp. shut it down after less than two years. He parted ways with NCsoft in 2008, after taking time off for a high-profile trip to the International Space Station. He continues to dabble in space travel ventures.
Garriott was a pioneer of PC gaming in the early 1980s. Then he caught the online gaming wave when he launched "Ultima Online" in the 1990s.
Now he sees another opportunity in social media sites, like that run by Facebook Inc., which have hundreds of millions of users and potential game players.
Garriott's company will publish its first game, a poker application on Facebook, next month. Similar to other poker titles on the service, it will be free to play, with the option to buy more chips. Other games will follow — some designed by Portalarium employees, others by third-party developers. Portalarium's games will be playable on Facebook, MySpace, Apple Inc.'s iPhone or a computer.
Garriott's team is also creating a Web browser plug-in that will support a variety of gaming engines, not just the popular Flash format developed by Adobe Systems Inc.
Flash was never designed as a gaming platform, Garriott said. For example, many Flash-based games can't duplicate the sophisticated animations and 3-D modeling that are common on PC and console games.
Garriott and his team plan to make all their development tools public. That means that any developer can use them, whether or not they want to have a relationship with Garriott's company.
With more users installing Portalarium's plug-in, the easier it will be to play any of the company's games, Garriott said.
And as more developers use the same tools, Garriott and his partners hope to use that common language to create a social hub where gamers can congregate with their various friend lists.
Users will be able see which games their friends are playing and show off their own accomplishments.
"With this whole open movement, we're trying to say: 'Look, my friends are my friends; they have nothing to do with Facebook,'" Garriott said. "'Facebook doesn't own my friends list; I own my friends list.'"
Garriott knows he has competition in the social gaming universe.
There are already some well-known developers, like Zynga ("Farmville," "Mafia Wars") and Playfish ("Pet Society").
Still, social networking games continue to show the most aggressive growth in the industry. In August , "Farmville" had 11 million daily users. At most recent count, it had more than 31 million.
What's more, money spent on in-game items in the U.S. is expected to hit $1.6 billion this year, with $835 million of that from social games, according to research company Inside Network.
But industry analyst Jesse Divnich says the world of social media games has become saturated, comparing it with the crowded field of iPhone apps. Only a handful of developers, perhaps the top 1 percent, make money, he said. The rest struggle to break even, or lose money.
"It's a very tough, very competitive market to break into," said Divnich, who works for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research.
Garriott said the startup money for Portalarium is coming from him, some of the other partners and a couple of outside investors.
For now, the company is seven people working in a cabin (plus a handful of others).
The new company's CEO, Fred Schmidt , has worked with Garriott for years, dating back to the early days of Origin.
"This is what we live for," Schmidt said.
photography by Larry Kolvoord
