Defiance: Angry Joe Interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uule_TmhU7M#ws)
The ever evolving gaming industry. Online gaming keeps going to new levels.
I don't know how to approach this. The ultimate goal is money. You get it from selling games, mostly on consoles and also from a few copies on the PC, but also by advertisements. As far as I can tell, they didn't exactly get what they expected from placing product informations or wall advertising panels in games (and boy did they try). Now, with a TV show.. there's the "natural" place for ads. If you analyse "TV" it is either pay TV or commercial-based TV stations. All private TV stations make their money with advertisements. They place series and films and news around their core, commercials.
This attempt here looks as if both TV stations (or producers of a show) and a game companies go into a joint venture. If they get gamers to watch commercials and TV audiences to play games.. they both win.
The fact that it's playable with thousands of players is quite revolutionary isn't it :o Don't know about the tv show. I can imagine watching the show if I enjoyed the game online, but I'm not a series watcher anyway, so I might skip it.
I can see the hook for involved gamers of being able to expect and seek out new game content as it's revealed through the ongoing series and again if the gamers themselves develop quirks, tendencies, habits or even unique ways of confronting enemies or difficulties in the game that are not anticipated by the developers that behavior can in turn be introduced into ongoing episodes of the series by the writers.
Interesting concept.
I'll see how the show looks, but since I can't play online games, have to skip that part. If the show is dumb or too hooked into the game, where you have to be "in the know" as far as the game is concerned in order to understand the show, then why bother.