Last Saturday afternoon, Curt Schilling sat calmly behind a desk fielding an array of questions from a packed auditorium. The questions didn't involve his newest ring, his new contract, or even baseball at all.
The focus of the panel discussion at Harvard Business School related to the future of online, virtual-world video games, such as Warcraft, and how Schilling's company, 38 Studios, intends to compete with the wildly popular franchise.
Schilling, along with a panel of the top minds in the business, discussed how this niche developed for hardcore gamers can expand to encompass a wider fan base.
Their ideas ranged from allowing for greater "organic" growth of the genre - which assumes that the companies behind these games are trying to make it easier for people with knowledge of computer programming to create their own additions to the game - to the economic implications or trying to compete with Warcraft, which basically has a stranglehold on the market.
For two hours, the star-studded panel, which included a number of chief creative officers, programmers, and a venture capitalist, discussed their differing views for the future of the games. They all agreed that something had to be done to attract a wider user base, and to create greater demand and revenue.
One idea presented was to give the software away for free and to charge the users for in-game power-ups, or to charge for land rights within the virtual world. Corey Bridges, of Multiverse Studios, brought this idea to a whole new level.
He said that his company is developing a platform allowing people to create their own virtual-world games for free and to charge them only once the creator started charging the game's players.
The panel unanimously agreed that the biggest problem to incorporating a greater fan base is the user interface. Once a simpler user interface is developed, these games would be more attractive to people who wouldn't consider themselves as "gamers."
2008 Woodie Awards
