fatfoogoo’s been making waves again with the official announcement of our joint venture with Sun Microsystem’s Project Darkstar. While this news alone is excitement enough, I’d like to take a step back and talk about who and what Project Darkstar is, and why fatfoogoo’s contributions are groundbreaking.
In a simple phrase, Project Darkstar is relatively simple: Harness the power of an open source community and avoid/tackle common problems facing all gaming developers and operators. The goal of the infrastructure is to simplify the development and operation of massively scalable online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications.
Some of the typical challenges that developers and operators face include zone overloading, data corruption, and server under-utilization. While tackling these challenges, another goal for the Project Darkstar gameserver is to support new dimensions in game play such as evolving virtual worlds and massive scale battlefields.
Ok, so you’ve probably got the basic idea here, Project Darkstar is an open source development tool for gaming, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. Check. So what’s the big deal about fatfoogoo being involved?
Glad you asked friend, glad you asked. Ok, let’s have a look at the Project Darkstar Online Game Value Chain:
Got all that? Right. Let’s break it down into a more understandable language. In the gaming/virtual world space, we’ve got three major players; the Developers, the Publishers, and the growing space of Operators. Each has their own unique and special function in bringing your favorite pixilated love to your LCD. Let’s think of Operators as facilitators to markets that either the publisher or developer could not, or had no interest in reaching at the time of launch of said game. Operators are often the ones that take on little to no risks that the publishers and developers have already taken, but seek to capitalize on the title via distribution and montetization methods. Up until now, Operators have been piecing together microtransaction monetization models via a hodge podge method. A bit of this, a bit of that…let’s hope it all works nicely together.
Enter stage left, fatfoogoo. By providing a standardized monetization software package, any developer, publisher, and/or operator can now all work from the same set of ‘rules’ to ensure 100% compatibility across the entire gaming/virtual world experience. The fatfoogoo software package allows operators to monetize their game, while giving them unparalleled flexibility in how they’d like to do it: including but not limited to, Subscriptions, gWallet, Primary Marketplay, or Player-to-Player trading.
The real benefit here is obviously to the gaming/virtual world community. With the addition of the fatfoogoo software to the overall Project Darkstar gameserver development process, designers, developers, and publishers have one less thing to worry about, and can focus on what they do best: make great games.
