How to Get Rich Simulating the Deaths of Billions of People
source : 2012.12.04 WIRED (ボタンクリックで引用記事が開閉)
A small-time doctor in a Central American village notices a strange new disease. Symptoms range from vomiting and fever to a full coma. The locals take to calling the virus “Itchyhead,” since it sometimes causes insanity in its hosts.
Ten minutes later, the disease has mutated and gotten stronger, and 6.2 billion people have died. I pinch inward on my iPad screen and observe the devastation from a closer view. All of Europe is toast. Asia too. Canada and the U.S. fall to the rampant pestilence flowing out of Mexico.
In other words, things were going great.
Plague Inc., a game for iOS and Android, has spread just like a virus in 2012. Challenging players to wipe out the entire world with a carefully constructed disease, the 99-cent game has been chronically infecting the App Store’s charts since its release in May, selling over 2 million copies on iOS devices alone.
James Vaughan, a 25-year-old former business consultant from London, developed Plague Inc. with the help of just three freelancers and a MacBook he borrowed from his parents. The total budget for the first version of the game was just under $5,000.
“I thought if I made back the costs from doing it, that’d be amazing,” Vaughan said.
Three days after launch, it became the top paid gaming app in the U.K. Two days later, it was number one on the U.S. charts. Today, Vaughan is a millionaire.
In the early days of the App Store, tiny games made by individuals or small teams often dominated the charts. Doodle Jump and Soosiz exploded onto the scene and attracted hundreds of thousands of paying players, as well as many clones.
In recent years, that’s changed. Today, games published by Electronic Arts, Disney and Rovio monopolize the top of the charts for paid games, and even the most successful indie games struggle to claim more than a brief moment of glory at the top of the heap. The market for free games remains a wild territory, but the paid downloads side of the app industry has become dominated by Angry Birds Star Wars and its ilk.
Plague Inc. has bucked the system by staying near the top of the charts in numerous countries for the entirety of its existence, pulling in millions in revenue while competing with the big players.
Perhaps the greatest factor behind Plague Inc.’s success is its unusual premise, a humorous twist on mass extinction.
The game allows players to name their disease whatever they like, so if you want to call a disease that kills 6.2 billion people “Itchyhead,” as I did, you can.
Vaughan tracks the names that players use, and reports that many of his users are pretty morbid and rather uncreative: “Death” is the most-often-used disease name, followed closely by “AIDS.”
“There’s vast numbers of rude ones out there,” Vaughan said, laughing. He refuses to reveal some of the more grotesque disease names used by players, but admits to getting a kick out of the popularity of “your mom.”
Vaughan is open about the fact that his game takes heavy inspiration from Pandemic 2, a free-to-play browser game released in 2008.
“I thought, ‘I like Pandemic 2 but it could be so much better,’” Vaughan said.
Some have accused Vaughan of “cloning.”
“[Plague Inc.] is, unquestionably the better game,” critic Simon Parkin wrote in May, “but it is also unquestionably a game that wouldn’t exist were it not for Pandemic.”
Then again, Pandemic was not entirely original, either. In 1985 a PC game called Contamination, possibly the grandaddy of the “global disease simulation genre,” was released. It put players in control of world health organizations and had them fight ever-evolving diseases using a variety of tools ? a reversal of the role a player takes in Pandemic and Plague Inc.
Vaughan plans on expanding his company once he’s done tweaking and updating Plague Inc. He hinted at the possibility of movie tie-ins for future games in the franchise, but is currently focused on adding zombies to the game in the next major update.
Maybe I need to enlist the undead. In the end, “Itchyhead” failed to destroy civilization. Although my hand-crafted plague killed over 6 billion people, some crafty New Zealanders were able to keep their scalps unmolested.
Bummer.
source : 2012.12.06 産経ニュース (クリックで引用記事開閉)
ウイルスで世界を全滅させるゲームが、「App Store」の売上チャートで人気を博している。総予算5,000ドルに満たない「手作りゲーム」のヒットは久しぶりだ。
南アメリカの小さな村で、医師が不思議な新しい病気を発見する。症状は、嘔吐から高熱、昏睡まで幅広い。地元の人々はこの病気を「頭掻き」（Itchyhead）と呼んだ。患者の精神がおかしくなるからだ。
10分後、この病気は変異して強力になり、62億人が死んだ。ヨーロッパは全滅に近く、アジアもそうだ。カナダと米国も、メキシコから順調に伝染している。
iOSとAndroid向けのゲーム「Plague Inc.」は2012年、まさにウイルスのように広がった。入念に構成されたウイルスによって全世界を全滅させるというこの99セントのゲームは、5月のリリース以来、「App Store」の売上チャートに慢性的に感染しており、iOS機器だけで200万本以上を売り上げた。
Plague Inc.を開発したのは、ロンドン出身の元ビジネス・コンサルタントであるジェームズ・ヴォーガン（25歳）。手伝ってもらったのは3人のフリーランスのみで、使ったマシンは両親から借りたMacBookだけだった。このゲームの最初のヴァージョンの総予算は5,000ドルに満たなかった。
「最初かかったコストが取り返せればいいなと思っていた」とヴォーガン氏は言う。しかし、このゲームは発表から3日で英国の有料ゲームアプリの1位になった。2日後には米国の1位になり、ヴォーガン氏は金持ちになった。
App Storeの初期には、個人や小規模なチームが大きな売上を得ることもあったが、最近はElectronic Arts社やDisney社、Rovio社といったゲーム会社が有料アプリのランキングを独占している。個人の作品がランキング上位に来たのは久しぶりだ。
このゲームでは、ユーザーは「自分のウイルス」に名前を付けることができる。筆者のウイルスは「Itchyhead」だが、統計によれば最もよく使われている名前は「Death（死）」で、その次が「AIDS」だそうだ。
ヴォーガン氏は、自分の作品が2008年にリリースされた無料のブラウザーゲーム「Pandemic 2」から、多大なインスピレーションを受けていることをオープンにしている。
しかし、Pandemic自体も完全なオリジナルというわけではない。1985年にリリースされた「Contamination」というPCゲームがおそらく「世界的疾病シミュレーション物」の草分けだ。
ヴォーガン氏は将来、映画とのタイインも希望しているが、まずは次のアップグレードでゲームにゾンビーを付け足すつもりだ。たしかに、わたしのウイルス「Itchyhead」は60億人を死亡させたものの、ニュージーランドにはちょっとだけ生き残りもいる。
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