Thoughts on Shawn Fanning's new social networking service, Rupture
Shawn Fanning’s new social networking service, Rupture, was announced with great fanfare yesterday. Since he’s kept it remarkably stealthy, it’s impossible to discern what he’s really building. However, there was some concern in the blogosphere yesterday that Rupture may violate World of Warcraft’s terms of service agreement. Given that Shawn has demonstrated an acute ability to learn from his Napster experience by delivering the successful Snocap service, I would be really surprised if Rupture did not play well within the ecosystem that has already created around WoW.
Yes, there’s already a thriving ecosystem of developers building atop the WoW platform. Think of as a Salesforce.com-style AppExchange for the World of Warcraft environment. There are already hundreds of individuals and small dev groups out there building very cool UI, management, and communications modification for your World of Warcraft experience. WoW has done a good job of creating the hooks to allow people to extend the WoW gaming experience. Many games have done this in the past and I’d be surprised if all future online multiplayer games didn’t support something similar. APIs, like open source, facilitate economies of scale around the development process and create network effects for the core product.
I spoke with Matt Marshall over at Venturebeat earlier today about why I think there’s a need for Shawn’s new service – Matt’s article is here. I haven’t seen Rupture so I’m only speaking from the perspective of being an average player who sees an opportunity in the market. Matt’s article links to a number of different services that I pointed him to, that provide some subset of the functionality that Rupture seems to be aiming towards. But there’s still market opportunity for someone to provide a cohesive and comprehensive toolset that sits atop the core WoW experience – wrapped up in a UI targeted towards the average user. Right now, I suspect that most WoW mods are downloaded primarily by the hardcore raiders and PvPers.
Also, most services right now are geared towards making your core gaming experience more efficient or helping you locate game-related information – there’s definitely opportunity in providing tools that help people discover, communicate, and build relationships with other folks. After all, your average MMO player spends 20+ hours a week in game. That’s a lot of people with some strong similar interests.
Susan,
I’m going to have to mildly disagree here. Not that my opinion matters much, but heres why:
1. Gamers, hardcore raiders, and large meta guilds (100+), that cross multiple games, already have tools to facilitate SN. This add’s no value proposition to thier game play.
VOIP, guild hosting, mods, etc.
2. Mapping game data directly to a third party site from WOW is against the TOS, all modder’s know this, otherwise CTmod would have been directly mapping to guild websites to dynamically update profiles based on loot and raids and karma (if using DKP) and therefore given the reach of CTmod in the WOW community the value of that service (easily monetized btw) would be HUGE. I’ve checked into this in depth because its a feature I wanted to include at launch. Result: not gonna happen
3. Blizzard just co-oped this idea by including the LFG interface in the most recent patch.
4. Building a game-centric service is shortsighted, its a short term solution to a long term problem, based on the premise that one game (even if it is the largest game) will provide recurring revenue over the long term. The space grows organically over time, true its been stagnant for 2 years (which facilitated WOW’s growth curve) but 07 will see 3 major new titles for release: Vanguard, PoTBS, Warcraft
5. Xfire already exists. and has 3+ million registered users
Anyhow, its likely he may innovate something thats been missed, but the ROI might not be there.
I think Allen’s comparison to Xfire is an apt way to think about Rapture.
My skepticism around Rapture would be that many of the tools already exist, and unlike Xfire which focused on a very specific killer app, Fanning seems to be trying to be a gamers’ portal. Being everything to everyone, especially in a world of players as diverse as WoW, could be an issue.
But, that is not to say there is not a power in aggregating pre-existing tools around a specific audience. MySpace was essentially all pre-existing tools, bolted together, with the starter “flame” of music — which is very powerful because many people communicate their identity by the music they listen to.
I hope this isn’t just about building a community of tools around one hit game. WoW, and other MMOs, have a real power of identity that doesn’t typically happen just because you sold millions of copies of Madden.
Edit:
Vanguard, PoTBS, Warcraft
Should read:
Vanguard, PoTBS, Warhammer
@Nabeel
if you click on my name, and register you might be pleasantly suprised on the 5th of next month
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Thank You
Interesting…
Nice
wood this no look