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ION 08: MMOs and the television content model (SGW)
Joseph Ybarra, SVP of strategic operations at Firesky, the publishing subsidiary of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, presented a session today at ION 08 about the Stargate Worlds production model that borrows heavily from Hollywood and TV models. The goal for SGW is to approach content updates for the game more like a production cycle for television, in which an episode takes a predictable amount of time to complete (14-16 weeks in the case of Stargate Atlantis). After some background on Firesky and CME, Ybarra showed the Stargate Worlds trailer and launched into a discussion of the strategy with SGW. The idea is to adopt a movie model for the development phase and a TV model for the post-launch "live" phase. They chose to use the BigWorld middleware platform and Unreal Engine technologies in an effort to use proven tools: "don't reinvent the wheel." This allows them to both minimize risk and focus on the content.
