Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

A technical keynote at a game development conference in Austin this past week was given by SquareEnix and they talked about how they’re winning the war against Gil sellers in Final Fantasy XI; the challenges of making such an aggressively maintained and upgraded game; and mentioned that their cross-platform and cross-region strategy will continue with their next MMO on both 360 and PS3. Nintendo apparently doesn’t allow cross-platform online games.

The game is an insanely ambitious one, and with 500,000 subscribers it may not rival the most popular kid on the block, the design decision to have its entire group of servers serve all regions of the world and rely on time zones to stagger demand surges seems only slightly more sane than EVE Online’s one-cluster-to-rule-them-all paradigm. Its very fast update schedule that includes holiday events and a large number of expansions also don’t make the game any easier to run. Add in the sudden influx of currency farmers in 2005 and you end up with a big economic problem threatening the survival of the game.

Incidentally, the suddenly skyrocketing prices on ordinary items due to inflation is one of the reasons James left FFXI quite a while ago, and I stopped playing shortly thereafter.

SquareEnix convened a task force that continues to this day to analyze the data they were able to capture on currency farming activities and act on it with a number of enforcement measures and design changes to foil farming and minimize the impact on ordinary players. The article goes into some interesting detail as to just how much thought has to go into trying to end these activities.

The good news, though, is that it’s working. The economy is deflating and the number of farming accounts have fallen dramatically. Even if all those farmers have done is move on to other games (like WoW), it doesn’t matter too much to FFXI because their game is now safer for the players to enjoy.

Via Slashdot.