Building an MMO - Brick By Brick

Just in general terms, it's fantastic. It's hands-down the best relationship I've ever had in any field, games or otherwise. They do so many things well - from process, to everything including business model and game experience, they put the premium experience at the forefront.

After some of our previous projects, we like to say that the best way to make games is to play them. I don't know who it was that coined the phrase, but it's true: "Great games are played, not made". LEGO really supported us with that - we wanted to do lots of rapid iteration and prototyping, and tonnes of consumer testing.

We've been literally testing before we had lines of code written, with the same group of 19 people that started with us, and their families - they still test with us today, and come into the office on a weekly basis to play a build of the game and give us feedback.

We definitely believe at NetDevil that smaller development teams over a longer time is better - rapid prototyping keeps the cost low, so just as a general strategy we keep the teams as tight as possible and only grow when we really, really have to.

The other thing is methodology - being transparent is a big deal. The relationship is good, and that's been extremely helpful, because I've certainly been in other developer-publisher relationships where we'd maybe hide things from the publisher, everybody diverges on what they expect to happen... and all that does is make it worse, and generally cost more in the end, because you have to fix things, or get them realigned.

So just keeping things really transparent is good - here's the state of the game, these are the things that worked, and the things that didn't, and just be upfront about it. In turn they've been really upfront with us about their organisational structure and what's going on with them - they actually present to us, and treat it very much as a peer relationship. Being on the publisher side, they're giving us status updates... and they don't have to do that.

I think that's a tremendous thing that helps everybody move along, because then we have a chance to give them experience and insight that our team has accumulated over the years in terms of running online games.

And then finally I'd say development process - everybody's moved to agile and scrum methods on the floor, and we've been doing that for a couple of years now. That's helped us not get in the rut of having a three-year design and development plan, and then every little detail is charted out... then two years in, we said we were going to do this and we still have to because it's in the contract...

No - let's not waste money on something that's no longer relevant for the user experience. Trade that out, because now we can see from the feedback there's a much more important feature or element to work on.

All of those things combined, we've a team of less than 100 including the LEGO team from Denmark. There's a supporting cast around that of maybe a couple of hundred that occasionally touch the project, but in MMO development terms it's probably a third of typical team.

Even on our Jumpgate: Evolution team I think it's still sub-20 - you get good people and good passion and you can have a really tight team. You don't need to generate tonnes of costs.

I think that's a very comfortable place for us, we've really operated that way since day one. We've always thought of MMOs as a service for our products - we care a lot less about the traditional one-shot boxed product revenue model, and much more about the service revenue, whether that's micro-transaction or subscription model.

I saw Gabe Newell at DICE this year talk about Steam, and boxed product as a service model, and I think people are starting to look at it like that - yes, that's a way that you can start to combat all of the issues, like combating piracy, getting the long tail, and all of that.

For us it's just intuitive - we've always made games that are built on that idea, so it's cool to see everybody else is recognising those models.