Trion's Lars Buttler

I think that the most dramatic is the notion of facing different and completely unexpected challenges every time you log on. That is not the case in any traditional videogame today. You log on and the world has changed. You log on and you get big events. Those events can be scheduled - it could be tomorrow night at 11 and you could bring all your friends. And it could be massively social. Those events could be completely unexpected. You can just run into them, and then you have to make tough decisions. Those decisions are what character class, what sub-class, how you want to address it, who do you want to play with, who do you want to recruit for this challenge? And so everything is about the unexpected, the tough choice, and the impact on the world and the community.

We're not talking about it at this point. We want to really focus on gameplay and get people really excited about it. So at E3 we're not really talking about the detailed business model of Heroes of Telara.

Our platform allows for a whole variety of business models, from subscriptions to micro-transactions, item sales and advertising. It's a full, built-out technology platform for server-based gaming, but it also includes backend and billing and customer service and everything. So we have a lot of flexibility. Different games have different business models depending on the quality bar, the live content and so on. So we have flexibility, there is also a lot of choice we will give people, but that's really all we can say at this moment.

No, we definitely will entertain all of those, and I would assume over time we have games that have lead business models in all those different categories. And there might still be combinations possible. And again, in our games you can have a tremendous freedom of self expression and choice. And we will also give at least some degree of choice in the business model.

If you just add the two latest rounds that we announced, that would be the amount. We've raised somewhat more than that, but that's what we've talked about.

No, because we never announced it, and there's all different combinations of funding. It's not all equity funding, and so on. I think the only important point, we didn't actually put this number out to say hey, look how great we are. We wanted, and we continue to want, to attract the best and the brightest. And we wanted to make it very clear that at Trion we have triple-A technology, triple-A talent, and we also have triple-A funding. And those are really the key ingredients you need if you want to do something great.

I would say that we talked about the technology and the funding, but we have never given a lot of detail about the games. Typically, people do it the other way around. They talk about their game from day one, then they really struggle to keep that excitement alive. Two or three weeks after we talked about this game for the first time, we're showing it as a first look at E3.

So, the rest of the announcements were always made to attract talent, to attract investors, and also to get Trion into people's minds. We are a new publisher, and we have to compete with the giants, the titans of the industry. And in a way, it's good if people at least know that we exist and know of us. So that is kind of the foundation on which you can then announce games, and that's what we're doing now.

We're not talking about launch dates at E3, but obviously we're showing the game now, and we will talk about this in due course. We have a publishing plan and will execute on it.

Yes, absolutely.

We're extremely excited about it. We are in the midst of development. Sci-Fi has signed up the writers and the production company, they're all working together very closely. The game is made by our triple-A studio in San Diego, very experienced people from Sony Online and Blizzard and so on, NCsoft. And they're making from my perspective a triple-A MMORPG.

And Sci-Fi is working on a television show that is based on the very same fictional universe - and the game and the show will launch together and evolve together. And because the game world is so dynamic and can change, the story arch of the TV show can become the history backdrop of the game world. You can watch the show, and then jump in and do all the exciting things you see on TV. You can interact with the TV characters, you can talk to them, they can become your mentors. They can be like celebrities in the real world.

So this is something that nobody has ever even attempted before, a full cross-platform experience of interactivity and linearity. And it's going very, very strong, and there will be lots of announcements to come about that game. E3 obviously for us is about Heroes of Telara, but we continue to be working with a lot of excitement on all the others.

There will be a lot of interaction and back and forth between the game and the show. Obviously as the show evolves, the game evolves, and that is immediate. As people explore the game world, they do things, and they express themselves obviously. The game world is much larger than what you can do on a TV show, and people are on 24/7. It's a live world. Since the entire world is server-based, we essentially know what people do. We know what they like, what they dislike, where they go to. Not only because they tell us, but because the entire world is a database.

That doesn't mean we play Big Brother and measure what [an individual] does. But as an aggregate, we know what people like and what they do. And we can constantly report this back to the makers of the show. We can say, hey, people staged a giant battle here, or they did this, or they did that. And then the makers of the television show can react to it. Obviously they need more lead time, they can't react as quickly as we do in the game world, on the fly. But between seasons, if there is a battle that people have staged that is popular, they can then decide to integrate it into the show.

So for them in a way this is a giant consumer study, and it gives them information that they would never have on television alone.