Magazines and MMOs

From a licensing perspective, we are looking at what genres, what scenarios, would each market need in our opinion, and then we check if we can get those from Asia or anywhere else as a finished, high-quality product. If we can't, we evaluate whether we can develop the game ourselves.

Not necessarily in the minority, but our first choice will be to find a game that is already finished and just has to be localised. In our opinion, if the price is reasonable, it's the better alternative.

It's our target group. We really focus on core gamers, and in the past it was necessary to have a client game for the amount of content and depth and so on and so on. But as [browser] technology gets better and better it isn't necessary for all of our games to have a client. The distribution with browser games is easier.

I think the technology question will become less and less important. In two or three years we will not ask that question, maybe with even cloud gaming coming into play. I mean, Unity essentially is a client that is run out of a plug-in and that is streaming content, or with games like Last Chaos and Fiesta Online we are using external technologies like SpawnApps to bring them into the browser. So I think it's all converging, and in two years we don't ask that question any more.

If you look at Otherland, which is a free-to-play title, I believe that Unreal Engine allows us to get a similar quality to a console game - on the current generation. Interestingly, every time we try to up the graphics quality, like with Black Prophecy, we also found out the two main factors against it: one is download size, or with a browser game the loading for streaming the assets; the other is that a lot of our players don't have state-of-the-art PCs, so even with Otherland we start to get users saying, 'look, this will never run on my PC'. So we're more focused on lowering the graphic requirement and allowing people to downscale than upping it more and more.

I'd say it's the same as the current ratings going on with European bonds, right? [laughs] What is really AAA, and when do you downgrade? I think it's fuzzy, and it's getting more and more fuzzy. We believe that graphics are important for user acquisition, but it's not important to keep users in an MMO. The free-to-play world is more about balancing, more about features, about gameplay depth.

Certainly, they will try it, and they will have to try it, because if you look at core gamers - as we already said - this is the right business model for that customer. I'm from the editorial and publishing space. I was responsible for Computer Bild Spiele magazine and also the website, and there were always discussions about whether we could give our content away for free. Those discussions are also taking place within these big gaming companies, but it's a major step to give up the $150 million you'd get for a retail game for a bet that you will get more from free-to-play. This is a long, long internal discussion, and that makes it difficult.

The other thing that makes it difficult for them is that it looks a little bit the same, having a retail game and having a free-to-play game, but in detail it's different. It's not so easy just because you have a good IP, and a good studio, and knowledge of classic game publishing. They will suffer from time to time just by making mistakes that a pure free-to-play company would never make, or made already years ago. It's not so easy, but they will come.

I'm responsible for production here, and I spend most of my time, because we work with developers who have done retail titles, educating them about free-to-play. You might think it's about 'should we put this item at price A or B?' No, it starts at the very beginning. This is so core and so important, and most of the game designers working in those studios don't have that mind-set.

They are focused on making a fun game - of course fun is important for free-to-play, but they are not focused on how to design the game so it gets challenging enough to get 5 per cent of users spending money, and how to design the game so that it is possible, in theory, to spend an unlimited amount of money. Most games are really designed so people can spend $100. I say, "No, no, no, people should be able to spend $10,000, $100,000 into this game." It's going to be a small amount, it's not necessary, but that's how it works.

This is the key thing with companies like EA and Ubisoft; they have production experience, but designing the games that way is very different. For them to do it organically would be quite difficult... I think those companies have to buy companies like us or our competitors to get that knowledge externally, because internally it just takes too long to build.