License holders such as the labels and associations like RIAA or GEMA think of games mostly as boxed units. This works fine for games like Singstar. You go to the store, spend cash on the game, and a (pretty big) portion of it goes back to the license holders and artists. That’s cool though, as it makes sense: After all, the game’s business value is dependent upon the music, so it is only fair a big portion is shared.

Welcome to 2011, where the largest percentage of gamers plays on Facebook, tablets and mobile phones. As much as you don’t “buy” Facebook or Google, you don’t “buy” a Facebook game. Games are becoming interesting consumer platforms more than ever. Some of them are always on, always engaging and a new layer of social interaction. The prior business model of adding music simply does not work any longer for these types of games.

Another proposal from the licensing industry has been pay as your customers listen, a.k.a the “radio model”. Yeah, pretty much what you think: Game developers are expected to pay as much for the usage of popular songs as if it would play on the radio. It’s viagra to forget that – again – the business model for radio entirely depends on the music – better music is directly proportional to more listeners! No, games are not radio channels.

Here’s a twist. Embedding popular music into games is a great privilege for the license holders and artists, not vice versa. It’s an unprecedented way to market music in highly interactive and engaging ways. They should be *dying* to get their newest music added to the most popular games on Facebook, and beg browser game developers to develop new interesting ways to integrate the music into their game worlds in smart ways. Hell, if I was running a label, I would not only give them my music for free, I would *pay* them.

Perfectionism vs. trying to be awesome

Note that all ideas I have, and everything I’ve presented so far is not related to being perfect or delivering the perfect web product. Perfectionism is extremely dangerous, and chances are you never get the job done. In fact, many of my labs demos are far from perfect, even stable, but they push the limits. They deliver awesomeness. They provide great experiences.

Looking at games

Why games? It’s actually really simple. While web developers have been whining for years and have been stuck in their despair, game developers never stopped to amaze with the little tools and possibilities they’re given. 3D on a Super Nintendo? Easy. Full blown 3D RPG on PlayStation 12 years ago? You bet. Yes, game developers deliver.

Cheating and optimizing

Why are game developers so different, and what are they doing? Well, for once, they’re simply cheating. Remember Final Fantasy VII, the greatest selling role playing game of all time that lead Sony’s success of the PlayStation? Since the limited 3D capacities where not enough to deliver a great experience at times, they simply uses prerendered scenes and mixed them with live renderings. Yes, 1997. The even bigger point though is the optimization efforts that are made. Web developers only optimize when they see performance issues. For game devs, they know from the beginning on that the console they’re developing for cannot handle the raw 3D data, so they need to find optimization patterns right away!

They for instance need to control the number of polygons on the screen, memory consumption and frame rates. Many 3D techniques developed in the last 10 years are in fact optimization techniques, that either deliver a richer experience with the current hardware, or consume much more energy to be able to use much more of the same.

Delivering

Most importantly, game developers aren’t afraid of going different routes if something doesn’t work out. They try hard to deliver the experience they’ve planned, not the actual expact specification. Whenever I work on new projects, I ask myself “how would a game developer do it in a game?”. This usually gives me brilliant new ideas, and I highly suggest you try it out!

Now if only I could convert some game developers to start over in the web world…