Taking MMOG's to the Consoles

Thomas Bidaux was one of the original four team members that set up NCsoft in Europe in 2004. He is due to speak at the London Games Summit, taking place October 4th - 5th, with a session entitled 'Everything You Know About MMOGs is Wrong: Why the Online Business Model is the Way Forward in a Global, Digitised Economy.

Here, he discusses NCsoft's ideas to incorporate online play into next-generation and handheld consoles, the problems console titles have when it comes to building online communities, and why he considers titles that play across multiple formats to be the 'holy grail' for games publishers.

GamesIndustry.biz: You're due to talk at the London Games Summit in two weeks' time. Can you give us an outline of the issues that you want to address?

Thomas Bidaux: I want to communicate to developers or anyone in the creation of videogames they need to be aware of how important and predominant the online part of a game is, what it means to company and their business models, and in which directions this is going to evolve. The economy, and how to monetise the game is something to focus on too. And how Web 2.0 is going to influence the design of an online game, and the fact that there is room for something other than RPGs as massively multiplayer games.

What opportunities are available in the MMOG market at this point?

Well, it's not just massively multiplayer online games, but online as a whole. One of the new forms of access to the market is due to the new gaming platforms.

Everybody has the PC in mind when we talk about online gaming. But online console play is coming, although there's currently no MMO on any console. There's no big successful title and online console games are still minor compared to PC titles.

But the console market is huge compared to the PC market, so I want to discuss what is likely to happen to tip the balance to bringing more MMO titles to consoles, what kind of games you can expect on a console and why is it so difficult to do online console games.

What do you see as the key to creating an MMO that would be successful on consoles?

The biggest difficulty for me with an MMO on a console is that they are very, very focused on community. And a community is difficult to support on something that doesn't have a keyboard and doesn't have the tools for players to create friendship through the medium.

On Xbox Live your friends consist of people you already know in real-life and the main communication you have is voice chat. Developers need to find new tools for building community through consoles.

The PC has message boards and fan sites, and these act as the Petri dish that creates the community for the games. Users carry on their communications when they're offline - with emails, instant messages, notice boards - and that's what missing at the moment on consoles.

The important thing for an MMO on a console is how to support your community outside of the game and make sure the community is strong and develop tools that pull people together to make friends, and meet friends of friends, to see the community grow.

With the new platforms, the next-generation is already going someway to tackle this.

So you don't think that voice chat is sufficient to help build that community - it's direct communication between players but it doesn't lead to any growth outside of a small clique?

I think Xbox Live is awesome and voice chat is part of the future. But you don't say the same thing to a person when you talk to them as when you send an email. Each communication through online games has their strengths and weaknesses. Instant messaging and text messaging helps people create stronger links. Are you going to reveal your dirty secrets to someone while talking or is it easier to write them down?

I do think more MMOs should integrate voice chat, and there will be more tools for those that want to speak anonymously through voice chat, but at the end of the day, it is only one of the communication tools you need to build a community.

Voice chat is instant, but there's no persistency to it. With a message board you can have a discussion that builds replies every hour, so you don't have to wait for people to answer back.

But the next-generation is going some way to tackle these problems along with others such as hard drive space - all this is going in the right direction to build better online console games. An MMO on a console is going to be tricky. I wouldn't say it's going to be impossible.

Do you think publishers are looking at the console market and the MMO market and thinking that if they can marry the two it will be a holy grail of gaming?

For me, multiplatform is the holy grail. It's not about making a great game on PC and a great game on console, it's making a great game that you can play on PC or console, and then incorporate your mobile phone to expand the whole universe, because MMOs especially are extremely addictive. The longer the player can keep the world with him, the more he'll stay in the game universe. So the holy grail of gaming is a game that plays across as many platforms as possible.

Is that something that NCsoft is currently, actively looking into - to work across consoles, PCs, mobiles and every available format?

Yes. At the moment we are looking at three different platforms. We're looking at PC and we're looking at next-generation consoles. But we're also looking at simple online integration through other devices. Depending on the solution you use, something as basic as html is viable, because you can play on your Wii, you can play on your DS, your mobile phone, because they all have capacity to read and understand this simple language. And there are other platforms we are keeping an eye on, but with less of a priority.

So we're looking at mobile phones, but that's very much a Wild West market. You have tons of operating systems, you have different screen sizes. If you want to do one game for mobile phones you'll end up designing hundreds of different versions. Doing a game for mobiles is going to be tricky, but perhaps things such as an auction house or character creation through the mobile phone is a better solution.

The majority of online games fit into the role-playing genre. Is it time for new genres to develop online too?

Yes, we can get away from RPGs as MMOs. That's something we're already doing. We have a couple of titles that are being developed that aren't MMORPGs - they're very different. And we're probably going to push in that direction even further in the future. RPGs were the most logical step to begin with, but there are other genres that can expand with online play.

Whatever game you're working on right now, you better stop looking at what online can bring to your games, because in the future every single game is going to be online. It shouldn't be thought of as a feature - it's part of the whole experience.

So what's beyond multiplayer death matches and downloading new characters?

We can go beyond downloading new content and playing multiplayer. It can be just as simple as when you play a game, instead of saving your characters and progression at home or on the device you're playing with, you save it on a server. That gets rid of that notion that the way you play games is going to survive as long as the console survives. We can go beyond that, where you go to your fiends and instead of taking your console you take your login and access your account for instant access to all your achievements.

That's a small step in terms of play, but a huge step in terms of business. As soon as you start logging information from your users you have priceless marketing data. You can see popular characters, you can see what does work and work doesn't work. That's an extremely powerful tool for designing better games. And quite simply, playing online with another person is the best feature any game can have.