Flagship Studios Interview

For their latest “Soapbox” feature, RPG Vault is offering up a two-page interview with Flagship Studios’ Steve Goldstein about the issues involved with financially sustaining an online game.

Q: What do you say to people who feel that a free game gives the impression it’s not high quality? How do you get people to play, stay AND pay?

A: I think that people who assume free or micro-transaction based games are not high quality often do so because they are only looking at graphics. Even if a game doesn’t have tremendously compelling graphics, if it offers strong community components, it can become a huge hit. This is because people seeking out these games are looking for social interaction rather than triple-A level graphics. That said, there are plenty of micro-transaction based games that don’t have very compelling gameplay, either because they did not receive enough “culturalization” when they were imported to the US or Europe, or because, simply, they aren’t very good.

While I can’t speak about the “pay” part, I think that Flagship and Ping0 are going to be bringing something very new to the free game market with Mythos, because not only are we going to provide a lot of the social elements that are currently found in free games, but we are going to wrap those up in beautiful graphics and extremely compelling action RPG gameplay.