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Hi guys,
here is a story about Trackmania, and I thought it would be nice to share it with you.
When I was in my Bachelor studies (I think it was in 2014), I attended a class that was called "sustainable innovation". We were introduced to different kind of concepts etc., and in one lecture we received the task to read through a paper, and present its content and main findings to each other. Among the list of suggested papers, there was the following paper titled "Managing Sustainable Innovation with a User Community Toolkit: The Case of the Video Game Trackmania".
Since I played TM from 2008 onwards, I was hyped. So what was the paper about? I quote from the Abstract: "The research is based on a longitudinal case study of the video game Trackmania, which has an integrated toolkit connected to a large and active user community. Results confirm the crucial role of the toolkit in the construction, control and maintenance of a sustainable innovative approach with a user community."
To put in other words, the authors of the paper investigated TM for five years (2004-2008) through the lenses of innovation research. They conducted several interviews with the CEO of Nadeo, with the most active community members, and also interacted with the TMX community and available information and documents. I don't want to bore you with any scientic details. Rather, I thought it is worth to share this info with you, since I think hardly anyone knows about that And maybe there are other members here, who are currently enrolled in a study programme, or even earn their money in the sceintific realm, and can use this piece of knowledge to their own benefit ;-)
Have a nice day,
Hr.Mann
P.S.: You find a version of the paper here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Guy-Parmentier/publication/256063076_Managing_Sustainable_Innovation_with_a_User_Community_Toolkit_The_Case_of_the_Video_Game_Trackmania/links/5f5f0e1f4585154dbbd01f16/Managing-Sustainable-Innovation-with-a-User-Community-Toolkit-The-Case-of-the-Video-Game-Trackmania.pdf
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Lmao that's pretty impressive!
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I just checked Google Scholar and apparently a few papers have been written on various aspects of Trackmania, mostly by the same professor. That's interesting 😀
I occasionally wonder what Trackmania's impact on the evolution of free-to-play games has been. TMN ESWC was one of the first successful free-to-play games, in a time when people still happily paid a subscription fee to play WoW. Eventually, the entire MOBA genre built its foundation on the free-to-play idea and completely ran away with it, thereby establishing free-to-play as the new normal. Meanwhile, people increasingly lost their interest in Trackmania, to a point where the franchise was lost in irrelevance.. until it reinvented itself, ironically as a subscription-based game. You could write a PhD thesis on thatLast edited by Quat
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