The greater fragment of a whole piece
Games are evolving everyday and studios try their best to improve the possibilities to make the best of their games. Sometimes, actually, the best may be not the game itself, but the essence it brings and what is left for creating an engagement with it, with a chance of creating something incredible out of a part of something. Let’s see how the game industry have been doing it, but first, for talking about this subject I might bring the term "mods", which the Merriam Webster dictionary explains as:
specifically : a modification made to a software application (such as a video game) by a user in order to change the way the application looks or functions (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mod)
Now, back to the subject.
DOTA 2, was, maybe, the beginning of the MOBA (Multiplayer online battle arena) industry. The game was actually based on the famous Blizzard’s game Warcraft, a strategy game for PC which the player have the control of several units (soldiers) to attack the enemy base, but besides the units they also had heroes, which was a stronger unity with unique skills. During the success of Warcraft, a fan created a mod for this game focusing only on the heroes and their skills, calling it DotA (Defense of the Ancient), making players focusing on evolving a single hero, joining forces with other players and their heroes, in a scheme of 5 vs 5, instead of a whole battalion.
Warcraft was already a big hit by its time and made fans around the globe, but DotA, even for a mod, brought attention to lots of people as well. It was a different kind of gameplay not seem on any other game until its date. That's where Valve, bringing one of the creators of DotA, saw an opportunity and created DOTA 2, with same structure as the mod DotA, but now, as a full game itself.
DOTA 2 is a success until the actual days, but is not the only one. Still on the mod subject, we have Counter Strike, or just CS. If you have never played CS before, you really don't like playing any games, now if you have never heard about CS, really where were you all this time? Jokes aside, Counter Strike might be the most famous game in the world with more than 2 decades of existence and its appearance came also as a mod, in this case for the game Half Life.
Half Life allowed players to customize their own maps the way they wanted. With that kind of control, two friends combined effort to create a mod for a map which called attention to Valve, hiring them to evolve the mod and then launching it officially as Counter Strike.
It made what Counter Strike is today, a big hit and one of the most known FPS (first player shooter) in the history of the games.
So, we talked about games, what about other products?
Let’s start with Slack. The multi billionaire company was originally a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game), just like World of Warcraft, created by Stewart Butterfield and his team. The game, called Glitch, started in 2011, was not a success, however the chat system was, actually it was incredible. Finally, by the end of 2012 the game died but the conversational system kept going, giving birth to Slack (which is an acronym for Searchable log of all communication and knowledge), which in less than 8 months made the 1bi figure.
This opportunity saw by Tiny Speck was fundamental for their growth. Even that Glitch was making some people excited to play the game, it was not enough, and with that in mind "killing" Glitch was the right choice for the company, so it would give birth to Slack, which today is one big platform of communication used by several companies in the world. It was so big, that even Salesforce, a CRM powerhouse, acquired the company in a mega deal of $27 billion.
Another big example is the Facebook. Before becoming what it is today, probably the most famous social network in the world, the platform started as Facemash, created by Mark Zuckerberg during his time in Harvard where students could judge attractiveness from other students by their pictures just like a competition, however all data was stolen from the university so the system was shut down hours after its launch.
Besides the polemic, Zuckerberg saw an opportunity analysing the behavior of those who entered the site to vote and created (in 2004) thefacebook.com (yes, with THE before the famous name):
"Harvard students who signed up for the service could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their lives, such as their class schedules and clubs they belonged to." (britannica.com)
The success was such that later it was expanded for students of Yale and Stanford as well. A few months later there were students from more than 34 schools signed up on the platform. A strong success that caught eyes of MasterCard that started paying for exposure of the company products on the platform.
Today Facebook is worth around $140 billion with more than 2.8 billion active users monthly (as for July/21) with plenty of companies exposing their brand on the social network to all those users.
Conclusion
Games and other digital products show that they can surpass their own ideas and ideals to create more and become better, sometimes more than their own pride. They are constantly paying attention to opportunities mainly regarded their user behaviors and taking advantage on that to improve their products sometimes creating new visions.
Are you paying attention on your users? Are you paying attention on their behavior and how that is changing? That is the most important if you want to keep with their needs. Keep full attention on how your users use your products and maybe you can find an opportunity that nor even you or your users would be waiting for.
Bibliography:
https://www.redbull.com/se-en/history-of-counterstrike
https://www.redbull.com/int-en/the-history-of-dota#:~:text=If%20you%20really%20want%20to,to%20Blizzard's%20newer%20Warcraft%203.
https://nira.com/slack-history/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Facebook
https://mobecls.com/mark-zuckerberg-become-billionaire/
https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/business/how-much-is-facebook-worth/
