NCsoft's Jeremy Gaffney

I think there's two strong models when you're doing MMOs. Number one is aim big, go for a mega-launch and then try to drive your game thereafter. The other one is hit a niche market, but then each time you do an expansion you try and grow that user-base, through expansion after expansion after expansion. There are successes through both models - World of Warcraft obviously came out with all guns blazing, or Aion's a good example. They came out to a huge market, they expanded that success, and they've grown as they've done other packs. Lineage came out as being a very small game, in the order of 150,000 subs, but every single expansion drove that user base up to the mega-game that it is today. So I really think that both of those models still apply. It's harder to do a mega launch than it is a smaller game that you try to grow, but the rewards are bigger too.

I would really argue that when you have a mega-launch... There's been a pattern in the US and the Western markets for games to launch really big then tail off rapidly. There's two things to aim for - one of which is how many boxes are you going to move coming out the gate. Are you going to sell a million boxes? It's great to drive that number high, but more important for the lifetime of your game is are you slowly gaining users or are you slowly losing users, or plummeting users? That's about quality of game as much as anything else, tailored for a market. If your game is slowly going up, it kind of doesn't matter if you launch small because over time, if you map that over five or ten years, and you're slow-growing, you have a ton of users. Conversely if you sell two million boxes out the gate, if everything plummets after three weeks probably you've made some bad choices.

The market has seen both of those happen, so both are certainly possible, but if you had to pick one of those pick a slope that rises over time, because you're getting more users. One of the best things about our industry, makes it really the best to be in from a developer standpoint, is all the things that as a game developer you're supposed to be doing pay off in our industry. If you have a boxed game and you made a game that is not all that pretty but man it's really addictive, and you're going to play it forever and there's tons of replayability, if you sold a box for $50 and now the guy's going to play your game for the next three years - like a Sid Meier game, for example - in a way it's bad because there are people out who aren't buying other $50 boxes from your company. The MMO industry rewards that, because if you make a great game that's really sticky, really sticky, great game design, crapload of content, hundreds of hours of content, you make money month after month after month because people stay only in the good games. It doesn't matter how pretty your box was, how great your graphics were - all that ephemeral quality doesn't keep people in the game for the long haul. The money is really rewarding the people who make the best games in the long haul, and that's not always the case in boxed games.

Those microtransactions and downloadable content has helped make the boxed games make more sense as a business model, but it's also helped keep games alive as well in the MMO space. Especially because the wonderful thing about them from a player perspective is if you don't like you don't have to get 'em, if you like it you can double down as much as you like on them. It's great for the business and it's great for the people.

My take on it is that there are certain games for which it's very appropriate, and others for which it's really not. The kind of games which really benefit from it as those where there's a low barrier of entry, you can get in quickly, but on the other there's benefits to sustaining. We've seen some really big successes recently - League of Legends and similar games like that, where it's really easy entry but you can double down on the microtransactions. As we're doing it with more of our projects, I think what we're finding is it's a really great way to sustain a user base that's very passionate about a game. It gives a way to invest in it. In Korea you would see for a long a time that people on the Korean version of eBay would spend something like four times as much money as they would actually pay to NCsoft. What's interesting about that is it means in a way you're not serving your customers' needs, because they care enough that they want to spend this money. You're not giving them an outlet to do it. It's a very interesting situation.

We're a developer-friendly company all around, so our developers chase different business models that they find interesting. We don't have a boiler plate that we stick on all our games. Guild Wars 2 has been in development obviously for a bit; Guild Wars 1 really defined, I think, the 'free' MMO in terms of having a different business model than anything else. So we're agnostic - I don't think there's a company philosophy on that so much as developers know what's best for their games, so let the developer dictate that.

No, there's still a lot of money being made in subscriptions right now. Worldwide there's a lot of money being made in transactions, but there's probably a bit more money really being made in subscriptions worldwide.

No, not at all! Actually, when we were working on Asheron's Call in 1994, MMOs were all new - there was going to be this game that was all about these gods who were stalking the Earth, and there was a massive multiplayer element, and you were going to play this Thor-like guy with a big hammer and you'd smash people. And the name of that game was Quake. It changed a lot by the time it launched...

That's what we thought our competition was, that was all about dialling in on modems and the days of charging by the hour on Compuserve and all that stuff. Very different business. And we thought we were massively successful with 100,000 users, whereas now it's millions. I never expected it to go as broad market as it does; I always thought it would be very profitable, but a niche market among hardcore gamers, but it's really broadened out. Now you see South Park episodes based on MMOs, and I never expected to live in that world.

I think you saw the games really all built on each other, from that early model of Ultima Online. Everquest carved its own niche for itself, Warcraft built on that niche, and then the Korean market similarly - it started on 2D, tile-based games and then grew up into some of the most attractive 3D games overall. It's been very hard to predict what's going to be expanding in that market, in part because it takes so long to make each generation of games that there's a lot more time to evolve within each segment of that. When there's a gap of five years between each generation of games and they take so long, and so few of them succeed, it's really difficult to predict what it going to dominate the next segment of that market. It has not always been consistent, falling down one path - you've seen branches off it that are really quite unusual.