Monumental Changes
Monumental Games' founders talk £2m funding, console MMOs and the future of Facebook
When you consider Monumental Games' founders set up the company following Climax with the plan to build a hunting MMO in just three months, it seems almost surprising the developer is doing as well as it is; five years on spread across three studios with teams working on Facebook games, PlayStation motion control games, Capcom's next Moto GP title, its Hunter's World IP and the beginnings of a possible console MMO, as well as continuing to run its first MMO Football Superstars.
But despite appearances and CEO Rik Alexander's apparently relaxed attitude to production schedules and gaining £2 million in funding last year, it's clear Monumental is doing a lot that's right. GamesIndustry.biz spoke to Alexander and COO Paul Mayze about the studio's success to date and where it's going from here.
We started Monumental just over 4 years ago, myself and Rocco, who is our chief tech guy, in our respective bedrooms. The idea was simple - we were going to make an MMO specialist developer. Just the two of us, no money... We had an idea for a hunting game, which, I managed to delude myself we could make in three months. I'm actually quite good at production normally, but for some reason I deluded myself to thinking that. Three people, three months, a full MMO, easy. Anyway that didn't happen. We got to the end of it and we had a game, but there was no way you could show it round publishers, so at that point we decided to go and see if there was some real work out there. We did a whole bunch of work, then set up our first office - £5000 a year rent, ideal - and grew to 24 people before it got too crowded and we had to move. I say crowded, it was actually rammed.
It was in the second year we decided to make a proper business out of Monumental. When we started it, World of Warcraft was this big beacon turning over a billion dollars. Everyone knows online's always been the future, the question was just when. We figured it was then, and we decided to make a play for it and see what happens.
We've now got 110 people spread over three studios - Nottingham, Manchester and Pune, India. And we have three conceptual studios too, so we do racing, online and conversion and technology. It makes it easier for people to understand exactly what it is we do. We were calling ourselves a specialist online game developer but we were doing Moto GP as well, so we decided to split the studios. Moto GP comes out in March this year and we've got a real USP which is that we're the first ever game on Xbox 360 and PS3 to do 20 player multiplayer online. We're currently averaging 85 on Metacritic - for our first racing game, which was built in 18 months from nothing. We're quite happy.
But online's the exciting place. We're moving into console MMOs, we're already in PC MMOs - we have a football game, a hunting game - and browser MMOs as well, so into Facebook. So we've ported our tech into all of those places, started about eight months ago and our first Facebook game should come out in June.
You look at World of Warcraft and people see it as a mass market MMO, but when it comes down to it it really isn't. It's still a hardcore MMO, it's just quite an accessible one. When it comes down to it, 13 million is absolutely bloody fantastic but it's still only a fraction of the number of players that are playing Farmville.
So we're thinking, if we're going to plug something into Facebook, we're talking proper mass market here. MMOs are for hardcore players - how's that going to feel to a Facebook user? Then we realised there's no reason why MMOs should be for the hardcore. There's no obligation to have quests and grinding and all the things we tend to associate with MMOs. Suddenly Andy Norman, one of our game directors, had an epiphany and suggested that we take it right back to basics. I think he suggested hide and seek initially...
We decided that in order to start tapping into a broader market, we needed a game that everybody knows. We didn't want to teach them anything, we wanted something that's dead easy. So hide and seek, tag, all these games you'd have played before at school. What we've done is created a big playground and put in various themes. So you've got tag, infectious tag, British bulldog, all that kinds of stuff, and the idea is to get on Facebook and push it out.
Our Facebook strategy is simple - over two years we're going to release 4-6 games and we're going to use KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] to track the first one, put themes out, keep evolving it and track the KPIs to see what everybody likes. So very Playfish, very Zynga - they made some money to start with, but they didn't make the big money until 18 months in when they just looked at all the KPIs, looked at what people wanted and then went for the big one and now have about 80 million users in Farmville.
So we're kind of coming in at the second phase. The first phase, the 2D stuff, is going very well, and we're coming in with 3D social games, proper ones where you can interact with your friends in a 3D environment and do all this stuff you already know.