Satori graphics code#
Satori graphics ps2#

However, I don’t think it’s happened just yet, and with my feet firmly planted on both sides of the fence, I think we’re a few years out at best. It’s entirely reasonable to say that these things will probably converge, especially as garden walls crumble with regard to social graphs. I still see a pretty big divide between developers/designers who are leveraging the available social graphs in ways that actually impact game design, and those developers/designers who are merely utilizing 1st tier friend relationships for shall we say “operational purposes” (read: invitation, matchmaking affinity, chat, and even marketing). But the time for arguing about whether or not to include social network access in your game is over: the answer is yes.

Satori graphics code#

These kind of abstractions are never optimal, there’s always some slop involved when you try to determine the minimal set among multiple platforms and yet still allow your game code access to platform-specific features. And then, as a developer, finding an easy way to give the player control over that access.Īt the moment, most developers I talk with seem to be abstracting away social graph API calls, in a similar way that one might abstract away rendering calls so that your game can run successfully using either DirectX or OpenGL. That’s practically true already! It’s only a question of which social graph they will connect with, and how you will manage that as a player. Why? Because ALL games will connect to a social graph. So are games on mobile and core (console) game platforms that use social graphs “social games”? No one uses that term at the moment – so why do people use the term for casual titles?Īs the game industry continues to evolve, “social game” will die out as well. Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network of course have had social graphs inside their walled gardens for quite some time. Apple ( Game Center), ngmoco ( Plus+) and Aurora Feint ( OpenFeint) are examples of just a few of the social graphs available to developers on iOS. But there are a lot of social graphs available now from other social network platforms such as Hi5 and RenRen. Right now in the popular consicousness “social game” really means “Facebook casual game with social graph features”. The same thing is happening now with the term “social game”. The term “online game” has been deprecated, by and large. Nowadays, we don’t talk about “online games” at all – that’s because ALL games have online features.

Satori graphics ps2#

When I ran developer relations at Sony I remember giving a lot of talks about the PS2 network adaptor, talking to our middleware partners about supporting online features, and working with developers to implement multiplayer online gameplay. Increasingly its usefulness as a descriptor is over.įive or ten years ago we all talked about “online games”. Paul Hyman’s article on Gamasutra this morning was timely, as I’ve been thinking a lot about the term “social game” lately and what it actually means.