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Why do community features in games suck so much?

Date: 4th March 2008

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This one continues to baffle me. Why is it that none of the three consoles have user ratings on content? Why is it that things that take weeks in the Web 2.0 world take months or longer in the games industry? I suppose I can rattle off a few reasons that would come up in exec meetings:

  • It’s too hard to manage the content
  • By definition, it means some games are rated badly, and we want to position ourselves as having no bad games
  • It’s not in our schedule
  • We want to handle our own PR and portfolio
  • It’ll piss off publishers
  • We have no way of deleting offensive content (!!!?)

While some of these are real concerns, I don’t see this having stopped Amazon. Or Ebay. Or Facebook. I suppose XNA on the 360 addresses these issues, but I still think all content on the 360 should be rated, commented on, tagged, and searchable. And while I’m on my pipe dream I may as well wish for being able to write plug-ins for the dashboard, and that monetization for those plug-ins should be easy. Yes, these are hard legal issues, but I also think it would rock everyone’s world.

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Comments:

Comment by: mister slim

March 9th, 2008 at 3:27 am

Nintendo actually has a Wii channel where you can rate whatever games you’ve played. It just launched in Japan in November and there’s no release date for NA yet. It also includes some way to search the game database, though I have no idea how robust it is. It’s a start at least.

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