Trion's Lars Buttler

No. It's a full show, live action actors and everything.

The show is a typical television show. It tells a story, the story evolves, the world evolves. And typically a game could not really be tied to a show, because once a game was developed, the TV show has already moved on. It's changing. Our games can be modified and changed constantly. They are live. So as the show evolves and big things happen in the show, they immediately influence the game world.

Obviously the other way around is more difficult because a TV show has more lead time. Traditionally the TV show was more dynamic than the game. We have flipped it so dramatically that now the game is more dynamic than the TV show. That's why I'm saying between seasons, and based on what people do in the game, the developers of the TV show can decide based on what people show them in the game of what they like and dislike.

Yeah. You don't want to replay or pre-play the TV show. In particular if you have five lead characters in the TV show, you have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people playing a massively-multiplayer game. So they are not actually playing those five characters, they are playing in the world. And those five characters are like celebrities, right? They're like Obama and other people in our world. They influence the world, they make an impact on the world. You can meet them, you can talk to them maybe, they can be your mentors. But you wouldn't necessarily be them, but there can be a tremendous level of interaction.

So you can actually watch elements of the TV show in the game almost as a newscast. You go to a spaceport and you see those characters like a newscast there, and you can interact with them. In the future, celebrities would be holographic, they could be on giant screens, you could be interacting with them. We can do all those things.

We believe that you can play the game even if you never watch television. You can watch the show even if you never play. But the goal is to broaden the audience and have viewers be enticed to enter this world and explore it much more, and get gamers enticed to watch the show.

So number one, we focused on broadening the audience, and give people an exciting form of cross-platform entertainment that they have never seen before. In this world where everybody has seen everything, that's a good thing, right? People talked about interactive television for so long and that is typically a linear experience with some interactivity wrapped around. Here, you can watch the show and then fire up your PC or console and jump into this world and play.

On the business side, of course the advertisers are tremendously excited about the opportunity to reach audiences in the linear format and the interactive format. But our number one motivation is not, with all due respect, to please the advertisers. It's really about giving the gamers a great new experience, and also the TV audience. And the demographic overlap between people who watch shows on the Sci-Fi Channel and gamers that play action-RPGs is actually pretty big.

For us, the platform now is the server architecture. What is traditionally called platform, the PC or the PS3 or 360 or so on, is really now an input, output and access device. We still use PCs, we still use PS3s, 360s and so on, particularly for rendering and input and output. We never thought it makes much sense to reinvent the console for the PC. People have PCs at home, they have consoles at home.

We wanted to really innovate in gameplay and how you make great games and experiences. So we are a PC publisher, PS3 publisher, 360 developer already. And the idea is really that once your games live on powerful servers, any device that's connected can be an access device into this live game world.

We are not a conduit for other people's games as a new distribution mechanism. We are also not building a new type of console. We are taking broadband so seriously that we think it is not just a new distribution mechanism, but it can change the way that games are made, played, paid for.

And so if you take traditional packaged good software games and you put them on the server, and you render from the server, that's a little bit like NBC or ABC on cable. You have a new channel, but you take old content. It's new distribution for old content. If you take the cable analogy, people then eventually figured out, wait a minute, you have to change the way that you make content, and that people pay for it. So you can broadcast 24 hours music, or sports, or news. You can charge for it. So everything from HBO to MTV, CNN, is original programming.

We want to make original programming for broadband, and we feel that having a powerful server architecture allows you to do it. We create games that are live, that are fully dynamic, that are massively social, that are loaded with gameplay innovation, because broadband really asks for that. Broadband as a medium allows you to do things with your friends, it allows you to measure things and build on that, to give them more of what they like and take away the things they don't like.

That's really what Trion is all about, making games that leverage the full power of server-based gaming and broadband. And also, by the way, because we really want to be mass market from day one, utilize the devices that people already have. They are PCs, they are Xboxes, they are PS3s. We don't want to compete with HP or Microsoft or Sony on the device front. We really want to invest all of our time and money into great new content.