NetDevil talks up LEGO publishing experience

NetDevil's Ryan Seabury, the creative director on the LEGO Universe project, has told GamesIndustry.biz that the developer's relationship with the LEGO company is strong, and the transparency between them has been a key aspect in the quality of the project.

"The relationship is good, and that's been extremely helpful, because I've certainly been in other developer-publisher relationships where we'd maybe hide things from the publisher, everybody diverges on what they expect to happen," he explained in a recent interview. "And all that does is make it worse, and generally cost more in the end, because you have to fix things, or get them realigned.

"So just keeping things really transparent is good - here's the state of the game, these are the things that worked, and the things that didn't, and just be upfront about it. In turn they've been really upfront with us about their organisational structure and what's going on with them - they actually present to us, and treat it very much as a peer relationship. Being on the publisher side, they're giving us status updates... and they don't have to do that."

Seabury also revealed that the team behind the MMO is still under 100 full time staffers, while the company's other online title, Jumpgate: Evolution, is being created by just 20 people.

"We definitely believe at NetDevil that smaller development teams over a longer time is better - rapid prototyping keeps the cost low, so just as a general strategy we keep the teams as tight as possible and only grow when we really, really have to," he said, adding that he believes the service model for games is something the developer clocked a while back.

"I think that's a very comfortable place for us, we've really operated that way since day one," he explained. "We've always thought of MMOs as a service for our products - we care a lot less about the traditional one-shot boxed product revenue model, and much more about the service revenue, whether that's micro-transaction or subscription model.

"I saw Gabe Newell at DICE this year talk about Steam, and boxed product as a service model, and I think people are starting to look at it like that - yes, that's a way that you can start to combat all of the issues, like combating piracy, getting the long tail, and all of that.

"For us it's just intuitive - we've always made games that are built on that idea, so it's cool to see everybody else is recognising those models."

The full interview with Seabury, in which he also talks about the balance of user-generated content with accessibility, is available now.