Stargate Worlds was represented by FireSky’s Joseph Ybarra at the recent ION Conference held in Seattle, Washington, on May 13-15, 2008. Gamasutra‘s Wendy Despain and Mathew Kumar issued their report on Ybarra’s presentation in which he expressed the hope that future MMOGs developed by his company will follow a “television model”, which was established by Stargate Worlds, and present pilots for determining how accepted a new game will be. Just like with a television show, if the pilot shows promise, episodes will follow.
The development cycle of Stargate Worlds has been used as the foundation of the “television model”. The developers created the MMORGP using a development cycle similar to the way the actual Stargate SG-1 television show was produced, according to Ybarra.
“They would begin shooting in February and wrap in December,” Ybarra explained. “Each episode is about 40 minutes and only costs about $2 million to produce. Shoots last from three days to a week or two, and they’d front-load the time with the things they could count on like standing sets and established actors, so the vast majority of the time was spent in post production. To get this all done in one year they’d shoot episodes in parallel, too.
“Since they’d been doing this for ten years, they had this production organized down to a science — they could just repeat the process over and over again.”
With the use of established game-building technology (Unreal Engine 3 and BigWorld Technology), the developers of Stargate Worlds could function similar to the TV show’s production crew and focus their efforts on content. Creative director Chris Klug’s mantra is “show, don’t tell”, according to Ybarra, and so the team concentrated on telling “stories more like TV” where they present a more visual story than one based on text description.
“If you do this right, you extend the product life span through the regular content updates,” Ybarra expressed. “If you have a successful MMOG you’ll never stop making it — similar to Stargate making TV and DVD movies for more than 13 years.”
Ybarra is hopeful that the “pilot games” that they release will have the same kind of success, not only gaining an audience, but keeping that audience through the regular release of new content, just like with new episodes of a television series. Stargate Worlds is set to have a “predictable release cycle” of new content every six weeks. This schedule means that they will be working on updates in parallel, similar to how Stargate might film multiple episodes in parallel.
Ybarra hopes that the television and movie portion of the Stargate franchise will also benefit from Stargate Worlds just as the development of the game has benefited from the use of the “television model” established by those entities themselves. “MGM is seeing [Stargate Worlds] as an opportunity to get established in the Asian market more — where the show isn’t especially popular but MMOs are. The game may push more viewers to the show since they’re in sync with the canon. We’re working together with the show to sync the content up as much as we can.”
To read the complete article, visit Gamasutra: ION: Ybarra On Stargate Worlds’s Hollywood Model. To learn more about Stargate Worlds, visit their website.
Stargate Worlds is schedule to debut in the winter of 2008.