Andrew Plotkin said the following on 01/14/2008 04:42 PM: > What we've found is that there's no need to drive people towards Jabber > accounts [...] > We realize that "Jabber on the back end" doesn't do much for XMPP > advocacy, but it's better than nothing, and our primary goal is to get > people playing games. Whatever that takes.
My primary goal isn't to get people playing games. I just don't care whether they play or not. It's not important. What's more important is that I am forced to use some proprietary IM protocol when I want to talk to my friends and colleagues who use ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, AIM or what's even worse: Skype for which I would need to use proprietary software. Making "Jabber on the front end" more attractive to people (by letting them play games) could help them migrating away to XMPP and making the (digital) world a better place ;) > The sticky point is getting people to download software. We find, in > this day and age, that people won't play a game unless it runs in > software they already have. That's a big obstacle for Jabber gaming: you > want that to be a *fast-growing* pool of games, but nobody is going to > download a new client update every week because another game came out. > > Our solution was to have a custom client which could download individual > game plugins itself. (In the form of Javascript code.) That worked > great, but then nobody downloaded the custom client in the first place. Many people already use some kind of instant messenger which may even support XMPP and plugins. If it has a decent plugin system, it is no problem for the users to add plugins or even plugin packs. The infrastructure is already there. Millions of new Ubuntu users find Pidgin pre-installed on their system. That's why we are building a plugin for pidgin based on our proposal for One-to-One gaming. In the age of package management systems (e.g. aptitude) installing programs or plugins shouldn't be a problem, as long as they are popular. If your goal is really just to get people playing games, why do you build your own gaming service with XMPP as a backend? Why not work here with us on a standard for XMPP gaming, so everybody could play with everybody else and would be able to play with the client of his choice. And why not give client developers the possibility to add game support to their clients, too? Let's just all play together! :) > --Z Torsten
