Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interview

Ten Ton Hammer has cranked out another Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning interview, this time with producer Josh Drescher fielding questions about the recent Wild Hunt event, the upcoming v1.32 patch, and more.

Ten Ton Hammer: So looking to the future, should we expect anything in terms of a boxed expansion coming anytime soon?

Josh: If you actually look back through the past 10 years of Mythic’s history, with Dark Age of Camelot, we released stuff in retail expansions and we released some live expansions. Philosophically, we look at our products and go, if we’re coming back to the well so to speak, and asking for another $50 every 18 months, that becomes a burden on the players that I think, and we’ve always felt, is somewhat inappropriate. Certainly, a retail expansion is something that is on the table. It’s a thing that we could do if we feel that it’s appropriate.

At this point in time we’re very happy with the live event, live expansion system, giving us the ability to drive new content and significant new content to our players. We’ve added four new careers, we’ve added an entirely new geographical region to the game, we’ve added new scenarios, we’ve added new dungeons, we’ve added new systems – all without asking anything above and beyond the initial cost to purchase the game and a subscription. Personally, if I thought we could do that indefinitely, that’s the way I would rather move forward anyway.

Curiously, you mentioned a boxed retail expansion and I think if you start to look ahead 5 years from now, the dominance of boxed products at all for this industry is going to have significantly tapered off. People are starting to wise up already that the games we are delivering are actually not products; they are services, and like cable television or internet access, or electricity, water, gas, whatever, that is actually much more attractive to the consumer to not be expected to pay a ton of money up front in order to access what you have to offer and to instead, annuitize that over time by subscriptions or micro transactions, or some other payment model that’s a little easier on the consumer and doesn’t require them to take a risk by spending $50 on a game they’re not sure they’re going to like long-term.

I would say that five years from now you won’t see retail expansions at all. You’ll service expansions and live expansions and you’ll see the kinds of things that we’re doing now and I’m happy to be at the forefront of that. But yeah. A retail expansion is always a possibility, but for now, we’re very happy with the way that we’ve delivered content to people for the last year.