ICO Partners Part 2

I'd say I'm on the fence on The Old Republic. I wish them to succeed because I think that a big blockbuster success online would be good for everybody. I question some of their decisions, which I think are frankly stupid. The full voice-over, I don't think, brings that much added value compared to the cost. Not just cost in terms of money, but cost in terms of flexibility. They're making a big sacrifice in terms of how reactive they can be in terms of their content.

Yeah, every time they do an update they have to hire the voice actors again. It takes a lot more time and you have to be very reactive on that kind of game.

One thing that for me is kind of sacrilege, which may be very good because it's bringing something new to online games, is the story. I'm kind of an old-school dinosaur with MMOs because I like it when there's no story. For me that means I can be the story. My imagination can build the story and I can build the personality for my character - there's no one dictating how he's reacting to the other characters. I can fill in the blanks. There's lots of blanks, maybe too many! But the BioWare angle is that they're very much about filling in everything for you. To me, that's sacrilege - but at the same time it'll bring something fresh to online which nobody has done. I love it and hate it.

I can work out what I do like, though - what Riccitello said the other day about wanting to go full steam on games as a service. The notion of games as a service is something I've been living and breathing for eleven years now. It's something I believe. It'd be a really good idea for our industry to go that way. So the execution is very important, and I don't know how they'll do that at EA, but the fact that they have this strategy makes me very happy.

Star Wars? BioWare? I don't think they'll lose money, even if it's just so-so. I hope they'll do very well because that will be really good for a lot of people, especially in the US and the Austin area, which has a big pool of talent and needs a big success story to keep going on. Injecting talent into the industry is always good - it makes a change from the stories of studios shutting down which we've been talking about.

MMO's need good tools. You can save a lot of money with good tools. I think in terms of price - I don't see why anyone would spend that much money. I don't see things plateauing in terms of quality or content, there's lots of ways to improve on toolsets, how content is created and how it's put into games.

I know there are big projects, there's the Zenimax project that nobody knows about that's going to be big - a lot of people can probably guess what it's going to be! For me, that's going to be, not the last big MMO, but one of the last, along with one of the NCsoft games. NCsoft hasn't played all of its cards yet, it still has really impressive stuff to show - stuff that's been in development for a long time - I know because I was still there when it was in development!

MMO's need good tools. You can save a lot of money with good tools.

Thomas Bidaux

But they'll never die out, they'll never disappear, but I think they'll fade compared to the releases we have on the free-to-play side. I also believe that, if you look at Tera, in Europe, it has potential but I think it's going to fail, because of its business model. It's really good, but it's probably not quite good enough to be subscription, but too good to be free-to-play, in some ways. I think it's the kind of game where people say, yes, it's AAA, and free-to-play isn't a bad word to attach to AAA - we need to make that shift. I think that's going to become more common - we will see things that aren't huge, but are high quality, they'll come out free-to-play.

Some games, like Allods Online, there should be around $15 million in their production budget now, they're improving, adding loads of content and that kind of thing. I think that's the beginning of the AAA free-to-play era, which does make sense. After that, where do you put a game like LOTRO? It has very high production values, was subscription, is now freemium. Where do you put it? Is it subscription, free-to-play? It's kind of in the middle, raising the bar. You see products arriving from Korea right now, that will be in the West in two or three years - they're really, really good.

Funcom doesn't put all its eggs in one basket, that's the interesting thing about that company. They were the the first to take their pay-to-play game into a free-to-play business model. They were the first to try to integrate in-game advertising. They didn't get a lot of big success, but they have tried a lot of things, and it's worked out for them.

Now they don't put all their eggs in one basket. Okay they've got The Secret World, we'll see how that works out for them, but they also have their kids game, Pets Versus Monsters, a strategy space game, they have five or so games, not as expensive as The Secret World. So I would definitely not write them off, for now. They've definitely proved that they're a company who evolve, more so than other companies. I know it's tough to evolve.

Funcom is a very dynamic, flexible company. They do okay, they're still around and they still have money, so they must be doing something right. I'm curious about The Secret World. I definitely think that it's the sort of game that shouldn't be a boxed product. I don't think they've announced anything about that yet.

Well, they announced that they were partnering with EA Partners for distribution, if you need distribution, there's going to be a box, that's for sure.

I'm more curious about World of Darkness, from CCP. Mostly because we don't know anything about it, but also because it's CCP and they've done a lot of things right.