Magazines and MMOs

Well, apart from classic gaming companies coming into the market, even with just our existing players there is a necessity for us to get more professional in terms of user acquisition and retention. The times in the past where we could say, "here's a product, the people will find it, and it will be successful," they are gone.

We already have to be more detailed and very, very nitty-gritty about where to get the right customers, and what we'll have to pay per customer, and so on. And that's getting more and more expensive without the classic game companies. That's why we say that customer service is getting more important. It doesn't matter if the big guys are ready to step into the market or not. We have to work on this anyway.

There's this idea that the internet is limitless, and there's an endless amount of users. A lot of our developers are saying, "Hey, why don't we just do this game ourselves. It's so easy to run servers, and to use Google." But in fact it's not. We're getting to a point where we see that the market for core free-to-play MMOs is indeed limited; the people who want to play this kind of content are already playing something, the barriers to entry are getting higher and higher, and even on Google the amount of advertising space is limited. And so on, and so on.

So we're going from the cowboy days, where everyone could just put a game out, back to the point where, as Rainer said, being professional is very, very important. Also, the hit-and-miss is also there, so for an independent developer to do one or two titles it would be very hard to have a success. If they are VC funded and the VCs have made ten investments like that, fine. Would I bet my personal money on that? No.

I think the strength of the German industry at this point is borne out of desperation. I'm sorry, no offence, but I think in the UK the current situation was borne out of hubris. A lot of console games, big productions, were done in the UK, and when we got started with free-to-play I talked to a lot of developers there - starting from Rebellion over to...well, a lot of companies that are out of business these days. And all of them said, 'we're not looking at free-to-play. It's not our quality standard. It's not where the money is. We don't believe in it.'

In Germany it was the other way around. The German developers didn't know about free-to-play, but they were not getting console deals because there is no big German console publisher. American companies don't really like to work with us, we don't have the experience, we're not getting dev kits, and so on. So the German industry missed the console bandwagon, and as single-platform PC projects were not in demand any more the developers were desperate. They were open to everything else, including free-to-play, and I think that's the important thing.

It's the same with companies like Gameforge and Travian. Now they are all publishers, but they all started off with one product that nobody else wanted to do, and that product became successful.

It will take some time.

The only advantage is that I do believe that free-to-play will make its way to consoles, just as its making its way to iPhone and iPad. That's where the experience of these console teams will come back into play... so that's where the UK industry can have a second coming.

The problem with consoles, in my opinion, is, first, communication: do people really chat in console MMOs? How do you form a community? The second thing is the processes: if a company like Sony or Microsoft asks you to approve every single freaking patch separately in the US and Europe with a lead time of 72 hours, it's not possible for an MMO. You have to update weekly, you have to react fast, and sometimes they even force you so they run your servers. No.

There's a lot of restrictions still, but I do believe that mid and long-term those platforms offer a lot of opportunities.

The next generation for sure. The question is how much they open up the current generation. There have been trials, and Sony is definitely more open, but there are also still a lot of hurdles.