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Trion announces Red Door publishing and development platform

by Jef Reahard on Oct 6th 2011 11:00AM

Business Models, MMO Industry, News Items, RIFT, Miscellaneous

Trion is the latest development firm to try its hand at a large-scale publishing platform, according to a new company press release issued this morning. The beast is called Red Door, and it "will consist of a consumer platform and a full-scale publishing and development platform based on the proprietary technology fueling Trion's games."

What games are those, you might ask?

Well there's RIFT, of course, and the company is also developing End of Nations and Defiance. Red Door aims to allow third-parties to build and run games of similar scope via "fast real-time updates and versatile monetization models." Trion CEO Lars Buttler says that the company's goal is to "revolutionize premium games and help the industry realize its potential in the connected era."

[Source: Trion press release]

More coverage: Trion website

Tags: defiance, development-platform, end-of-nations, Lars-Buttler, Miscellaneous, mmo-industry, monetization, pr-speak, press-release, publishing-platform, red-door, rift, trion, trion-world-network, trion-worlds

Reader Comments (23)

Trion wants it all, and tries to offer everything - But as they say, one man can not rule the universe and that's the case of Trion's suicide attempt.

@sjet Explain to me how developing and publishing your own game is a bad thing?

It's not like this is something new to the industry and I believe in most cases it has proven to be good for both the developers and their customers as they don't have to answer to a third party. While I am not a fan of RIFT I do wish them the best of luck and if they have the resources to pull this off (others have failed at it) then more power to them.

The less control publishers have over the game development process the better in my opinion.

@sjet

Um...this comment would make more sense if Trion was bigger than Blizz. It's not. And far from it.

@sjet

not sure if godwin's or poe's

@fallwind
Did you facepalm? Because I sure did.

@Ren54
d'aaaawwww....

While I do think the fanboism and/or fanaticism is cute, please don't delude yourself into thinking that Trion is a "for-gamers" company who is totally not a for-profit, corporate "tool" at all. All of them are in it for profit, and Trion only has a slightly better PR because they have the "small, underdog company" vibe going on.

That said, I read the article with complete puzzlement, since I don't really understand the difference between "publisher" and "developer" . I assumed one can do the job of the other. But meh, good for them, I guess?

@Unshra "The less control publishers have over the game development process the better in my opinion."

Amen! I'm looking at you EA

It sounds like to me they want to help companies get their games published quicker rather than having companies like EA or Activision can their stuff like they have in the past.

From the press release, it seems like, for developers, the Red Door will be allowing them to quickly publish games that use the technology behind Rift, End of Nations, etc, apparently running on Trion's own servers, and with accounts and billing managed by Trion and unified with Trion's own offerings.

It's an interesting idea. Akin to letting developers offer total conversions for Trion's online games.

Do we really need another closed circle distribution platform?
By closed circle I refer to the premise tht the devloper will only deviler thier own content via the service. The service will run seperately than the game (likely a background process like steam) will require the service to be running while playing etc etc etc.
The problem I have with this is exaclty what i said, do we really need another digital distribution platform? Frankly i'm tired of having to loadup some erroneous software to play a game, much less having to either run multiple platforms or constantly switch between them to play a different game. Enough is enough already.

@Skyydragonn

No word on if they plan on creating their own distribution service. Seems like they want to sell their server architecture to developers, then publish the game.

I'll be watching this. Trion is a great company, they seem to have really solid leadership and they are aggressively seeking to expand their reach. More power to them I say. I just hope they don't lose sight of what won them over so many fans in the first place: the service, reliability, and the development time they give to their games.

"the company's goal is to "revolutionize premium games and help the industry realize its potential in the connected era.""

that doesn't sounds good for rift's future

@(Unverified)

It does make it sound rather like RIFT was mostly a sort of practical tech demo, doesn't it? 'You too can make highly polished and profitable games using our platform!' The player boredom problem doesn't even matter then, because any prospective developer is naturally going to think they can do better.

Look up the Hero Engine. They plan to do pretty much the same thing from what I can tell. Only problem with the developers of the hero engine is that it killed the mmorpg that it was originally going to launch, Hero's Journey.

And Massively, srsly, can you fix this damn unverified thing? It is really damn annoying. My tag shows up fine on WoW insider, but not here.

@(Unverified)

But Trion uses the Gamebryo engine from Warhammer, right? Who'd want to platform off of THAT engine (other than Trion)?

@real65rcncom : Gamebryo is a game development toolkit, not an actual engine, and its used by darn near everybody.

So it will be something like Steam and Origin? Or am I missing something here?

@Ren54
So now you know why their currency is called "TRION CREDITS" in their upcoming EoN cash shop. Makes perfect sense to me.

They probably plan to link their cash shop through all their games as I've said before, including RIFT at some point.

When you tell people it's coming, they never believe it until it starts to look like the gaming equivalent of 1939 in Poland; too late for those who've paid six months in advance and kept saying "never", just in time for those who kept saying 'any day now' and subbed month to month...

I'd be surprised if by Fall next year, this wasn't implemented in all their games (cash shop and platforming)

"... apparently running on Trion's own servers, and with accounts and billing managed by Trion and unified with Trion's own offerings."

So who's doing all of these now? Servers, probably contracted to some data farm somewhere, but I am under the assumption that billing and whatnot are handled by Trion.

Are there companies that offer these type of services on a large scale?

sooo ...Steam for MMO's? didnt bioware/EA do this a month or so ago?

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Trion announces Red Door publishing and development platform

Reader Comments (23)

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 11:47AM sjet said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 12:00PM Unshra said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 12:03PM Utakata said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 12:16PM fallwind said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 2:29PM Seldra said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 5:59PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 7:04PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 12:50PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 1:38PM DarkWalker said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 1:44PM Skyydragonn said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 2:32PM LA1111 said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 2:50PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 6:08PM JuliusSeizure said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 3:37PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 4:42PM real65rcncom said

Posted: Oct 7th 2011 5:55AM psycros said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 3:47PM Braiks said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 4:36PM real65rcncom said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 6:01PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Oct 6th 2011 6:55PM Resurge said

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