"SNAP" and virtual transference
Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment and their newly formed publishing company FireSky have some incredibly huge plans for the future of gaming. Stargate Worlds, the virtual MMO of the hit television show, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Joe Ybarra, FireSky's Senior VP of Strategic Operations, recently spilled the beans about some of those plans... and they are nothing short of revolutionary.
FireSky was created to publish SGW for a very simple reason. CME felt that they knew their product better then anyone else, and because they already had in-house talent with backgrounds in publishing, they figured why not do it all? With an already established focus on the service aspect of their product they truly believed they could create a customer support organization and technical infrastructure that was superior to anything out there. That in and of itself is a very bold move, one that not many companies would even consider let alone actually implement.
But FireSky has a far greater purpose then just game publishing.
Ybarra pointed out that companies that are producing games are starting to include social networking features while social networking sites are starting to offer games, thus the two are merging towards a new type of product. Realizing this FireSky came up with the term "SNAP games," which stands for "Social Networks at Play." The goal is to combine the very best features of gaming with the best features from social networking.
Enter Project: Ascension, a centralized "theme park environment" where gamers will have access to all of FireSky's games (eventually). But it's not just a singular rabbit hole into a wonderland of gaming goodness. Project: Ascension will eventually allow players to take things like guilds and extend and expand the idea of community into other venues and other games. Ybarra states, "...our goal is to try to find different ways for those users to transfer their equity that they've invested in one game into other games." Basically, they are going to give players the ability to transfer characters, goods and currency between games.
If that's not revolutionary, then we don't know what is. And if it all works according to plan then the little company that could will literally light the sky on fire.
