Gazillion Entertainment Interview

GamesIndustry.biz has kicked up a three-page interview with veteran RPG designer David Brevik, president of Fortune Online and Marvel Universe developer Gazillion Entertainment, about the current state of the MMORPG industry, the transition a lot of titles have been making from a subscription to a free-to-play business model, the lessons he learned developing Diablo and Hellgate: London, what he thinks of the direction Blizzard is taking with Diablo III, and more. Because the site requires registration, I’ll quote a good portion of it:

Q: You were involved with Flagship, which was a very ambitious studio, and it’s fair to say that many of those ambitions went unrealised. What did you take away from that experience that informs your current project?

David Brevik: Well, a lot. There were a lot of lessons learned there. The big one was that we tried to develop all of the technology from scratch, and that was a much harder road to travel than I imagined. In the past, it wasn’t that much of a big deal to create your own engine. We had only done 2D games, so not only were we trying to make our first 3D game, but also develop all of the technology from scratch.

That was a really big hurdle for us to get over, and since then I haven’t been developing engines. It doesn’t make as much sense. I don’t want to be an engine company – I want to make games… Often you’ll have ideas that you might need to write custom technology for, but at the same time try to not bite off too much.

We just tried to do too much. We had massive ambitions, and we were used to working under the kind of deadlines we had at Blizzard, where we had the luxury of letting the product out kind of when we wanted, and not on a specific deadline. We were, y’know, running out of money [laughs]. Developing in that fashion, with that mindset, was a new reality for a lot of us, or was a reality that we hadn’t experienced in a long time.

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Q: Back to free-to-play, we talked to Sony Online Entertainment’s John Smedley recently, and he predicted that The Old Republic will be the last major MMO to launch with a subscription model.

David Brevik: I agree. I have a lot of friends in the industry and… I mean, the budget for The Old Republic is outrageous, but it’s the last, large scale subscription game I can think of.

Q: Could it easily change to free-to-play if the subscriptions don’t justify the budget?

David Brevik: No. Part of the problem with it is that you aren’t going to get the results. This is kind of going back to my talk: if your gameplay is integrated with the very concepts that you’re trying and integrated with the platform you’re going to get a better experience. Converting something to free-to-play works to some degree, but to have the most success you have to have that as an integral part of the game itself.

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Q: On the subject of payment methods, as someone who helped conceive the Diablo franchise I’d be interested to know your thoughts on Diablo III’s real-money auction house.

David Brevik: I see it more as a customer service thing.

Q: But it’s also just one more kind of persistent payment method. The industry is obviously moving away from one-size-fits-all pricing, but is this sort of thing going to be a feature of more games in the future?

David Brevik: It is. And the reason is that games aren’t as profitable as they used to be – on a percentage basis. It takes so much money to make a AAA game these days you have to ensure that it’s going to be a hit. That’s why we see so many sequels, but another way you can go is to charge your customer more than once. The fact is that if you’re going to have a game that’s persistent – that continues – people expect you to modify it, and how are you going to pay for those modifications?

In the past we used expansions, but expansions have become more spread out and you’ve got little pieces of content…on a monthly basis. Very soon it will be down to weekly updates. In China there are games that change every day, and we’re moving towards that sort of thing.