OpenRoad + Mod7
Two pioneering organizations, together at last.
OpenRoad is pleased to announce the acquisition of creative agency Mod7.
Read the letter from our PrincipalBoard games! Social networks! HTML5! Sounds great, right?
Posted on August 17, 2012 in Games by Mod7
According to this Mashable article... Catan is coming to Facebook?
Shut up and take our money!
And you say Catan is going to be Massively Multiplayer Online?
Shut up and take our firstborn!
Hold it. Let's think about this for a second...
- Nearly all the fun in our favourite board games comes from the hands-on, face-to-face, social component. Will the developers be able to recreate that feeling using social networks like Facebook and Google+? Given the success of other "social" board game ports like Scrabble, we'd have to say it's fairly probable.
- OK fine. But there is a technological twist here: the developer of Catan World, Goco, is developing all of their games exclusively in HTML5. What! Will that work? The answer is: we don't know. Mainly because the games we tried to test wouldn't work in our Chrome browsers... Ouch.
The concept is great in theory: develop your games in a native, ubiquitous framework and deploy easily across multiple platforms. We've heard that before, of course. But HTML5 still has a long way to go before we can expect the performance level of Flash - or Unity -developed games.
But back to the board games themselves. Could creating online versions cannibalize sales for this niche industry? Apparently not. One interesting note from the article is that the software versions of certain games actually boosted sales significantly for the hard copy versions of those games. Interesting.
Anyway, we've signed up for Catan World's beta. See you there.
Read more at the original article.