Community Call-Out: A Night With Louis Castle

An industry veteran, Louis Castle has been around the gaming scene for 25 years. As one of the founders of Westwood studios (the company responsible for Dune and Command and Conquer) and the former CEO of EA's Los Angeles branch (which developed the Medal of Honor series and Lord of The Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth), and winner of the "Life Achievement Award" by the CGDA he certainly knows his way around the industry.

Tuesday night I'll be sitting down with this industry giant (and of course by "sitting down" I mean we'll be across the country from one another on our respective telephones) in order to grill him on InstantAction, where he is currently chief executive officer.

Touted as a cloud-based means of digital distribution, InstantAction looks to bring browser-based gaming to blockbuster titles. With the ability to "demo" any game that is available (you get to play the first 20 minutes for free), rent those same games at increments and prices set by the developer, and outright purchase the game and play it from any computer with an Internet connection, it seems like a service that is setting its sights on services like Steam and OnLive.

If you haven't seen the service and what it's capable of, here it is in a nutshell: fully embedded games on any website. Whether it be a blog post, a review of the same game, or your facebook profile, a reader can have full access to both the demo and full retail version of the game you choose -- once they purchase it themselves, of course.

Sound crazy? How about you play The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, right now, on Bitmob?

The Secret of Monkey Island:SE powered by InstantAction

While I have a slew of questions for Mr. Castle, what would an interview for a community-based site be without, well, community input? (psst, this is where you come in!)

If you have any questions or concerns about the company or its service, let me know in the comments section. I'll pick a few of the better ones and insert them into the interview (which will be up on this site hopefully soon after).

You only have until Monday night to think of an amazing question, so what are you waiting for? Get to it!

(9)

Andrew Hiscock

May 07, 2010

Will previously free games continue to be free?

Evan Volmering

Where did the Mac support go, and why wasn't this information released before launch?

While Monkey Island was an overall successful launch, not a whole lot of people were 'wowed' by a game that came out in 1990 with a facelift. When will a game like Assassin's Creed be released on the IA platform, to really show people you guys mean business?

Mark T. Whitney

To answer the first part - The Mac support will still be there, but has been removed from the open beta. (from the help section of the website) It says that it's coming soon.

Dan "Shoe" Hsu

What are the limitations on what kind of games they can run? (Like, will we ever see a hardware-intensive game like Crysis available this way?)

What are the key differences between what they're offering what Gaiking and OnLive are doing?

Alex R. Cronk-Young

Do you think this technology will help make the PC gaming scene more accessible to the casual Facebook gamers of the world? What implications could that have for developers who have been either shying away from PC ports of their games, or putting crippling amounts of DRM on them?

Part of the reason game piracy is so rampant is because it is so easy. If Instant Action is a success and games become easily purchased and played right in people's browsers, could this take a serious chunk out of piracy?

How difficult do you think it's going to be to convince publishers to let you put their games on your service?

It's easy to imagine the positive things that could come from this technology, but are you worried it could have some negative effects? When game demos are littered in every blog post on everyone and their mother's blogs, people might get sick of it all. Do you think it'd ever get out of hand to the point that people begin blocking these embedded games like they were ads?

Sega Channel was truly ahead of it's time, and ultimately didn't have the tech to support it or the user base to remain viable. Are you worried that Instant Action could end up in a similar situation?

Your service, and others like OnLive, are seeking to change the way we obtain our games. Similarly, Sony Move and Microsoft's Natal are seeking to change the way we play them, and gamers are as skeptical as ever. Are you worried of a backlash to all this change, or is that something the industry desperately needs?

Hmmm, that's all I've got for now. I'll keep thinking.