Blizzcon 2009 Part 5: The Starcraft App Store

In part 4, I talked some about Starcraft 2, but mostly just in the context of the broader Battle.net strategy.  Now, you're going to hear some Starcraft-specific stuff.

I did get to play the game (specifically, a teeny part of the Terran campaign), and it's as good or better than you hope.  But there's only one aspect of the game sufficiently mind-blowing to be worth the time you're spending to read this article.  Let's see how long I can dance around it.



Starcraft was an excellent, to borrow a meme from ActionButton, top-down fighting-game.  Many people played and enjoyed it as such.  But it came with editing tools that let players make maps with "triggers," condition-reaction pairs that, when combined in sufficient numbers, enabled different forms of gameplay.

I remember two very simple examples included with the game.  There was "Zergling Roundup," where you directed a single flamethrower-unit to keep a hoppity alien inside a ring for as long as possible.  There was "Wokka Wokka," where one player directed a robot through a maze to find little yellow balls, and the others controlled aliens that hunted the robot through the maze (Hint: it was Pacman).  Imaginative and time-rich players found that they could make far more complex and impressive outings.

The most important ones to this conversation were those in which the player(s) had to build defenses with which to survive successive timed waves of computer-controlled enemies.   These maps eventually evolved into the modern game-form of Tower Defense: enemies approach along predetermined paths, use money to place and upgrade interlocking structures that kill them before they complete their pilgrimage, gaining more money to etc etc etc.

The genre proved popular.  Popular enough that there were designers who wanted more control and design variations than were possible in a Starcraft custom map, moved on to other platforms, most notably Flash, of which there are now approximately fourty hojillion examples mobbing every extant flash portal.  Popular enough, in fact, that they have become packaged commercial efforts, worth the money that people pay for them.  I highly recommend Immortal Defense, myself.

But that all took a while.  In the meantime, Blizzard had released Warcraft 3, another top-down fighting game, which ran with the custom map concept. much, much further.  People made far more sophisticated maps, culminating in Defense of the Ancients, in which ten players on two teams choose between dozens of unique hero classes and charge about a complex map full of computer-controlled allies and enemies, accumulating experience and gold, leveling up and warring with one another until one team's home base (you guessed it, the "ancient" of the title) is destroyed.

(You know it's serious when I have to italicize it.)

"DotA" maps rapidly became the most popular type of custom map played in Warcraft 3. Then it became the most popular map of any kind; that is, Defense of the Ancients became vastly more popular than Warcraft 3.

The DotA play genre is more complicated and long-form than tower defense, requiring more from both players and developers, so it's no surprise that it hasn't proliferated as much.  But some of the people responsible for DotA Allstars, now the DotA gold standard, are making their own game, which I expect to be absurdly profitable, thanks to a low cost of development, marketing and distribution.  And then there's Demigod, an honest-to-goodness AAA $50-60 title clearly pitched to the DotA community.

Okay, lesson in the history of obscure gaming subcultures is over.  Pop quiz.  Given that Blizzard has made games whose communities have given rise to entire (mostly) new genres of play, what are their goals with the custom map-making capabilities of Starcraft 2?

Well, of course, you'd think they'd want even better customization.  And certainly, you'd be right. Let's roll that beautiful bean footage:



Summary (in case you can't watch the video right now): you can use the "map" editor to make a third-person action game with RPG elements, or a top-down scrolling shooter, and that's just for starters!  You can import your own models, textures and sound effects. You can use the editor to create games that are not limited to the command interface or camera posititioning of the top-down fighting game. You could make Pong with the damn thing.

It's not just a game, it's a development platform.

And that's not so terribly crazy, because we've seen games that are development platforms before.  It's just that they've always been first-person shooters, since that genre has always led the way in fast, detailed rendering of 3D graphics, and it was eventually realized that there was no great loss in letting another company make a game using the engine you custom-made for your own, as long as they pay the licensing fees.  In fact, there is a family of companies who now make engines as their primary business, with the occasional game acting as an interactive showroom for the features of the newest product.  Hence the Unreal Tournament and Crysis series, and most especially, Half-life and Half-life 2.

The Half-lifes are also engines masquerading as (very good) games, but creator Valve Software has taken a slightly different approach to the business model .  Rather than supporting the high-paying development houses looking to drop art assets into a pre-made engine and push out a multi-million dollar AAA title, Valve releases free tools to everyone, and waits to see what happens.

I say that like we don't already know what happens.  id Software let people modify its flagship 3D product Quake, and computer-mediated gaming has never recovered from the shock.  It turns out that there are vastly more talented and creative folks with free time on their hands out there than our game software industries are able to efficiently use, so kids and folks working in their free time can make astounding things played the world over.  Just as also was happening in (some people made games like Warcraft 3 using Half-life, but no one could have done the opposite).  And that's certainly what happened with Valve's offerings: several mods became immensely popular, almost being seen as their own games.

So it wasn't entirely surprising that Valve encouraged the teams responsible for those mods to actually release them as stand-alone games.  Hence Day of Defeat Source, and the inestimable Counter-Strike Source.  Hence Team Fortress 2, made by the developers of a Quake mod so unnaturally popular, Valve hired them outright, which has proven to be extremely savvy.  TF2 is the WoW of its genre, the gold standard and the cultural touchstone.

So Valve encouraged the monetization of the excitement and creativity of its fans by giving away a development platform, which proved popular.  But by far their most popular innovation has been the creation of Steam, a publishing platform for low cost-of-entry digital distribution, which makes it even easier for just about anyone to sell the games they make.

In the panel on map editing which I attended at Blizzcon, all of these things (Steam, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress) were being shown on slides.  So was the iPhone app store.

Within Starcraft 2, you will find an interface letting you upload your custom "maps" (remember, they can essentially be games of their own) to a central repository, and also an interface for browsing that repository.  The maps can be dowloaded, reviewed, commented upon.

And they can be sold!  Money can change hands!  Most will be free, of course, because free works typically sit at a level of quality which requires less effort, but if you want, you can gather a team of friends, make a custom interface and custom models and custom sound effects...an entire game, all your own, and sell it via Starcraft 2.

The message is clear: they've learned their lesson.  Once (twice, actually) upon a time, while polishing a lamp, a genie came rushing out with a great *whoosh*, escaping to frolic in the ether.  The next great new gameplay genre, made by the next enterprising Blizzard fan, may not feel the need to escape the confines of its originating game.  Blizzard has asked themselves: "What does coding Flash and C++ have that making custom maps doesn't, and how much of that can we recreate?"  And so they have provided support for new art assets and control schemes, and then added the bonus of a fully realized digital distribution system, including the ability to make money.  Their goal is to make sure that it takes much longer before (or happens much less often that) a hypothetical developer decides they want to go it alone, to re-make their great idea in a fashion that doesn't contribute, even indirectly, to Blizzard.  Of all the millions of people who've played Tower Defense games, how many know where it came from?  What would have happened if even ten percent of those games were available only via Starcraft or Warcraft 3?  What would have happened if the immense success of DotA had been tracked, noticed sooner, and marketed/co-opted?

I don't judge them harshly for taking action for further market share and control of products inspired by their products: the ability of a company to give back-scratchers to its customers is also their ability to get their back scratched, if you follow me.  Give and get.  Ask and receive.  Make a big enough tent and watch people start a circus.  This is the way of modern game development.

-Nick