The new joy on the internet, the Romanians have discovered flash gaming on their websites. More and more sites from Romania are battling for a higher pagerank in google, trying different SEO tools, and backlink campaigns. The business of the online games industry is a complex one, requiring the input and integration of many variables — people, business conditions, product goals, and more — to create, implement, and distribute a successful online game. Senior IT architect Veronika Megler ignites the first of a five-part series that focuses on infrastructure providers for online games. The series illustrates the state of the industry today and demonstrates how to develop a high-level business description and how to identify the all-important business patterns. The author offers eight steps towards this goal.

Describing the online game industry in any level of detail JOKER123 would take quite a long time and I want to focus on the development issues rather than the history. To create a context for this discussion, I want to spend a moment talking about the industry.

The industry that creates, distributes, and runs games is complex. Increasingly, game art is developed by artist studios rather than by the code developers who performed every task back when I was writing games. Game developers can vary from small startups with a great idea, to major entertainment studios who wish to capitalize on existing media assets by developing a game with movie, character, or brand tie-in.

Games may be distributed by the company that developed the game, by the game publishers, or by game consolidators. The game-development industry is starting to look more and more like movie production with its major studios and small independents — who sometimes partner and sometimes compete.