Geek Content Innovation

I'm not a fan of the Star Wars Galaxies online game -- but a posting on Digg has me thinking about customers, communities and the 'market as a conversation' hypothesis.

This body of knowledge is familiar to anyone who has ventured near the much-hyped realm of business strategy, which currently teaches that companies should listen to their customers, especially the passionate ones, and in some cases can even use inventive and obsessive users as a kind of unfunded research and development to prototype new products and market opportunities. Wired magazine, for example, ran an article about how Lego geeks - grown men who, yes, play with blocks - served in a pivotal capacity during the redevelopment of the 'Mindstorms' line. And other examples abound. Cincinnati's big consumer products company (cough, cough) has made almost a scientific discipline out of studying consumer behavior for clues to product improvement.

So here's how this one goes: A group of 'Star Wars Galaxies' geeks were royally miffed about a series of official upgrades to the game that were made by Sony Entertainment, upgrades which, to use gamers terminology, really sucked. So they set about the task of reverse-engineering a previous version of the game. You still need a licensed copy of the game to play, but the server code (the part of the game that 'lives' online and manages the interaction of the players) is now open-sourced, freely available, and devoid of the sucky gameplay elements that had previously made the SWG geeks so pissy.

Sony might still sue the dickens out of this group - even though a case can be made that they haven't broken the EULA. Sony already supposedly tried to hire some of the developers working on the server emulation. But if they're smart they'll watch and learn. They might give the upstarts some help in reverse engineering the code -- perhaps in exchange for some kind of splashy announcement that anyone who uses the bootleg version of the game does so at their own risk, and Sony cannot be held liable, etc.

It's always amazed me the extent to which certain genre fans, especially Star Wars, feel like they own the intellectual property. If they can't pay for the fantasy experience they're perfectly willing to haul off and invent their own. How far can this type of product innovation go? In the future media companies might be able to do very little work, and simply produce artwork and the basic premise of a story and let the fanbase do the rest. Maybe the fans need to be won over with with one mindblowing movie or game, one original incarnation of the media - but after that any sequels or derivative work are only going to pale in comparison.

The upgrades, so to speak, are bound to be driven by an eye to increased revenue, instead of improved experience. Companies should learn how to make money from providing the core assets, but otherwise let the geeks take over.