The 56th hour

There are many things that would like to discuss and share with you. Right now I am involved with a project as discussed earlier, taking some of this theory and putting it into practice to give folks, like yourself, a practical example of what I have been pondering.

Fifty six hours ago I released the Mod to Mount&Blade. At this moment, over 2500 folks have downloaded and are playing it. There is a nice thread on the Mount&Blades forum where there is some great feedback, and more positive and supportive than I could have hoped for.

This is the heavy support phase after a release where all those little bugs that slipped through QA are addressed. I will be in this mode for around a week, then start to work on the next iteration of this project.

There is a fine line here that needs to be acknowledged. While there are some things that I want to deliver to the community that further my own goals, which are part entertainment and part real world demonstration of some of these concepts we discuss on this Blog. As a product marketing manager, it is essential that the community of players be engaged to help drive future features and that the process be as transparent as possible.

One thing I have learned that is a key point. Once you release a product, any product, to a group of people, you no longer control that product. To be successful, the community of consumers must provide the fuel that is transformed by the development team into results to get the product from point A, to point B.

In saying this, we have to acknowledge that this MOD for Mount&Blade is a product, not a service. The whole Mount&Blade business model is predicated on a product orientation, and a MOD, such as Prophesy of Pendor, and many others are just that.. modifications applicable to a product to increase the staying power and revenues of the product offering.

The problem with this approach is that it is not sustainable. You will note that many of the earlier pioneers of the community are no longer with us. They have moved on. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that real world life requires time and effort. This type of hobby is extremely time consuming and often to engage at this level is at the detriment of aspects of real life. They had to make a choice, as everyone who mods will eventually make a choice, to continue with their hobby or to pursue real world dollars that solve real world problems.

This is one of the primary reasons I am such an advocate of the game service platform approach as I shared with you folks several posts ago. If this activity paid a modder based upon the the time spent by players playing their creations then you would have much higher quality offerings that were really engaging, and focused on exactly what the players wanted. Further, it would allow modders to make a living or supplement their income which would solve real world problems and they would not need to move on. If you have not read that post.. take a look.

So, you may ask why am I modding? I have the desire to create, as many artists, writers and modders do. But more importantly, right now in these difficult enconomic times, I am between jobs and I have ample time to put into this endevor. The result I hope will be a win-win for all of us.

Peace out.. and I will post more soon.

Jim