Blue Mars focusing solely on third-party content
Whenever we see Blue Mars in the news, our computers usually start making this very worrying metal-on-metal grinding noise. Maybe it's because our computers have seen too many cheesy horror movies set on Mars, or maybe it's because Blue Mars is going to be using the CryEngine2 for its graphics rendering. We just hope that it doesn't kill the game early on, since we're pretty interested in seeing how it develops.
In a recent article over at GigaOM, we're told -- among various other news on the upcoming MMO -- that Blue Mars' content is planned to be outsourced to third-party developers. Any money earned through microtransactions will be shared by the Blue Mars team (who plans to actively protect creators from DMCA/content theft) and whomever created the content that was purchased.
Seems like a good plan, but of course there's always that concern that the large client download and high-requirements could put many of the targeted casual gamers off. Most of the people who are consistently playing casual games do so on either PCs that are several years old or current machines that have very low specs.
We'll be very interested to see how the third party content comes along, especially going into the planned 2008 Q4 open beta test.
[via Virtual World News]
