I think March will be an exciting month. I will finally be able to start talking about two projects I have been working on for months.

The first is Stronghold Kingdoms, the castle-building MMO from Firefly Studios, the brains behind one of my favourite strategy game series, Stronghold.

Last week, they announced that the game would be free to play. (As regular readers of GAMESbrief know, I’m a huge believer in free.) The revenue model is based around strategy cards. Each card has an impact on different elements of the game, such as agriculture, warfare, trading, religion and so on.

As designer Simon Bradbury put it: “Strategy cards are integral to the game. The skilful use of a card can be the difference between winning and losing a confrontation”. (I don’t feel so bad regurgitating press releases when I was involved in drafting them.)

We’re also aware that there is a challenge for a free to play game – namely, how to make money. "Balancing making money with making a game freely available is challenging,” added Eric Ouellette. “We are convinced that most players will enjoy the many benefits that purchasing extra packs of strategy cards each month offers them.”

I’m really looking forward to the launch later this year. It will be a great example (I hope) of a developer taking its own intellectual property into the brave new world of self-publishing on the web.

(I can’t talk about the other project yet…)

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Disclosure: Huddle is a client of mine and I love what they do, so I wanted to share it with you. I think their service – making it easy to collaborate online – is incredibly valuable to games developers. But this is part recommendation/part advertisement. So if that puts you off, I’d skip this article.

The difficulties of sharing documents, ideas and discussions amongst colleagues and external partners is not new. Solutions range from email, conference calls to project management tools like Basecamp.

Huddle is my favourite solution (and not just mine, they have just been named Internet Product of the Year at the UK IT Industry Awards). It’s easy to use, free to trial and makes tracking documents, conversations and discussions a breeze. I’m a particular fan of the version management feature, which allow you to rollback to previous documents or see who messed it up.

So if you’re interested in free collaboration tools from Huddle (and I do recommend them) you can sign up here for the trial over at their website.

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I don’t normally cover product launches at Gamesbrief (this is a blog about the business of games after all), but this announcement of the launch of Stronghold Kingdoms from Firefly Studios is different for several reasons:

• Firefly is not only “taking Stronghold online and massively multiplayer, but we are funding this ourselves as an independent developer”, according to CEO Eric Ouellette
• It’s a case study in a developer taking its own intellectual property (the Stronghold series has sold over 5 million units) and developing a new and exciting business from it.
• The original Stronghold remains one of my favourite games
• Firefly is a Gamesbrief client and I have been working on Kingdoms for a year now: it’s great to be able to talk about it finally.

The game is not due until 2010, but it’s going to be exciting.

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1. I love it when I can start talking about games I’m working on – Stronghold Kingdoms

Slightly off-topic, but Huddle is one of my clients. They make collaboration software that is easily available on the web, allowing people to share documents, tasks, workflow and more across multiple sites. The basic service is free, with a variety of personal or company-wide upgrade options.

It’s part of the move towards cloud-computing, and is seeing real traction, particularly given its inbuilt security and the version management control it offers. Think of it as a collaboration software crossed with social networking conventions and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it does.

So the launch of Huddle on LinkedIn’s new platform is a huge coup for the company. One of only 8 apps, alongside behemoths like Amazon and Google, and the only European. This should give them access to LinkedIn‘s 30 million users, and also demonstrate one of the key strengths of Huddle: you can access your workspaces and documents from wherever: through the corporate Intranet, through my.huddle.net on the web or through partner sites such as LinkedIn.

If you haven’t seen it already, I would check it out (particularly for those of you managing projects across multiple time zones). And if you speak to the sales guys at any point, say that I sent you.

Note: Huddle is not designed to replace the sophisticated project management tools used in the games industry – it is for broader collaboration across all disciplines. For example, a key sector is digital media agencies, where assets need to be shared, approved and amended rapidly and globally.

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