Trion's Lars Buttler

The short answer is 'all of the above'. But it's different territories, different times and different models. So in North America and Europe, if you have a very strict quality bar, subscription is the right model. That's what people expect. If you make it free-to-play with micro-transactions they immediately discount it as lesser quality. Subscriptions only work if you get real videogame quality - super polish, real persistence and a lot of engagement. If people are playing 3-4 hours a day it becomes really cheap.

But there are other territories, like Russia, where subscription would never work no matter how good it is. So for those we go with micro-transactions and over time, maybe a few years from now when the games get a bit old, you can switch. It's not set in stone. Pick a lead model for the market and then add on top of that.

Rift is of the highest production values right now, so it makes absolute sense to start it as a subscription game. Now if after the course of five years or so we launch better titles and these become older in the portfolio, then switching to micro-transactions makes absolute sense. The model is not the interesting thing, you optimise the model for the market and the time. It's really about matching correctly.

It's very cyclical. The top games have these long lifecycles. Everquest was out there for six or seven years undisputed, now Warcraft is out there for six or seven years undisputed. You should never try to be a subscription game unless you have better production values and product differentiation than the current incumbent. If you're going to make a clone of what's already out there, well, it doesn't work. And I'm not sure what people are thinking when they do that. If you look at End of Nations, which doesn't even have competition in the market because there is no massively multi-player online real-time strategy game, or the third title that we're doing with the SyFy action game, then it's a totally different playing field. Because you're not competing on a one-to-one basis with World of Warcraft.

We think that the minimum to have a really strong business is one tent pole title a year. Many people miss that, they launch a game and then for four or five years, nothing. We have a full pipeline and we're starting next year, and then every six to twelve months we're going to launch another big one.

Absolutely. We invested a lot of time, a lot of money, we hand-picked the best people, we built new technology, we raised a lot of money.

Well, we only publicly said that we raised over $100 million, so let's stay with that. But you can imagine that if you make these super-quality videogames that are live in a multi-player environment it costs a lot of money. We never want to sacrifice quality, so we pushed for more time, we pushed for more money. We had to in order to get it right.

Compared to console games, per minute or per hour we are cheaper. You play these games for so much longer, with so much more intensity than packaged good videogames. When you buy the game you have a full month of play, which is 100 hours or more. You can see that people clearly have a case for social, dynamic experiences in the casual game space, which is a totally different audience, there's almost no overlap in the audience.

Yes. If you look at the statistics for things like Zynga, it's 45 year-old women playing. That's the sweet spot. I was at Pogo with Electronic Arts and that was our audience. We were thinking about whether we should advertise on Facebook. Whatever we see in terms of demographics on Facebook it is not our demographics. It's not the male, young, typical videogame audience. If companies have figured out how to take 45 year-old casual games players from Yahoo to Facebook, what about the Command & Conquer player that wants to be social? That's what we're trying to do.

Yes, just because there are people in the West who still want a box. They go to a store, look at the shiny covers, and it's a signal of premium quality. We want to be open to any venue possible, we don't want to restrict ways in which a customer can buy a game. But retail isn't really core to our business. You can pirate this without being able to copy us. If you copy the client you cannot play the game, because it's entirely server-based in terms of computing. If someone takes a traditional PC game and copies it it's game over, the publisher makes no money. In our case, it's distribution. It's even more people that come to our servers and they have to register. We don't even need to bother with DRM or anything like that, there's no need for it.

Consoles are connected devices. If you have over 50 per cent of consoles connected, it starts getting really interesting. Since the console market in the West today is about five times bigger than the PC market, it's definitely something we don't want to neglect. If you have a server-based game it's so much easier to port, because you don't have to recreate the entire game, you just optimise the client. Just like the business model, you have to be smart what you pick as your lead format. For a role-playing game and RTS game then it's PC. For action games there's a huge console market, and if you tie the game to a TV show, people are already in front of it. So it would be a smart choice to put that on the console in addition to PC.

We could work with people in order to get the game on retail shelves but that's really the only thing. For everything else, we can do it. We think we know this better than traditional packaged goods publishers.