Questions
by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor
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Answers
by Curt Schilling, Founder and Chairman of 38 Studios



What would you do if you could build your own MMOG? Who would you hire
to run your development studio? Which genre would you set your world?
Few gamers in the world ever have the privilege to answer these
questions, and yet so many of us would die for the chance to make the
game that we would want to play. That’s the sort of
opportunity that Curt Schilling crafted for himself by creating href="http://www.38studios.com">38 Studios and
recruiting some of the most prolific talent in the industry.



However, 38 Studios also recently announced that they had acquired
Mentor Media's product, the href="http://www.azerothadvisor.com/" target="_blank">Azeroth
Advisor, and its technology. For those of you unfamiliar with the Azeroth
Advisor, it’s a service that players download onto their
computer in order to allow the program to gather information about the
gamer’s target="_blank">World
of Warcraft characters. With that information
the AA then creates a personalized newsletter for the player to read
whenever he desires. To many, this sounds like a strange marriage
between an MMOG company and a product that services a major competitor.
In order to sort out all the details, Ten Ton Hammer’s Cody
“Micajah” Bye got on the phone with Curt Schilling,
and the two discussed all of the relevant facts about the Azeroth
Advisor and its future with 38 Studios.

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Ten Ton Hammer: What
initially drew you to the Azeroth Advisor?


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Curt
Schilling, Founder and Chairman of 38 Studios

Curt Schilling:
*laughs* I was a dumb WoW player. I’m always out scouring the
webs looking for stuff, because I’m always interested in
finding new information or products. I don’t know what it was
that I saw first, but I eventually happened to cross the Mentor Media
– the Advisor site – and checked it out. I signed
up for the free trial and when I got my first newsletter, I fell in
love with the product.



My career is built around gathering information and this was the first
thing I’d ever seen that saved me just immeasurable amounts
of time. First of all, to go everywhere and try to find the information
they were providing is next to impossible. However, the bigger piece
for me was that the product itself was speaking to my character
specifically. It discussed my race, my class, my tradeskill
preferences; my playstyle, in a sense. I thought that was really cool.



So I had all these different characters and I was getting all these
newsletters, and I really thought that the whole service was pretty
engaging. The writing was good. The quality was good. I can’t
stand products that have typos. I fell in love with the product right
away.



Ten Ton Hammer: Did you
keep most of the writers on staff when you purchased the Azeroth Advisor?



Schilling:
Most of it is contract writing. There’s a stable of about
50-60 writers that are contracted in and out. There’s a
database of 3,000 articles for the Azeroth Advisor. All the work for
the product was done “up front.” There’s
a staff of writers that deliver content for upgrades and patches, but
that’s not a very big staff of people.

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Azeroth
Advisor translates WoW character information into a personalized
newsletter.

Ten Ton Hammer: What are
you hoping to gain from the purchase of the Azeroth Advisor? There are a
number of people that have voiced some confusion stemming from the fact
that you’ve got an MMOG in the works, yet you purchased a
product that focuses on a “competitor.” Why go
after this particular product?



Schilling:
There’s a bunch of reasons. The first one, obviously, is that
I’m a fan of the product. I love the Azeroth Advisor. But we
do have an MMO in the works, and my draw to it was the fact that I
wanted this sort of product available for the community that plays our
games. That was a big initial piece of it for me.



I don’t look at it – in anyway – as
providing a service to a competitor’s customer base. To be
perfectly honest, you could probably take that angle. It might be true.




But I look at it the same way I look at Major League Baseball: There
are 30 teams, and every team benefits when baseball – as a
whole – gets more fans. I see it the same way with MMOs.
We’re doing everything we can to improve the size and scope
and retention of the MMO customer fan base. What I wanted to do with
this first “product” from 38 Studios is send a
message that “this company will always care about the
customers and the community.” This is doing exactly that.



Initially, we thought of the Azeroth Advisor as a revenue generating
product in that it would help us fund our game, etc. But it
didn’t work out. It just wasn’t going to work out
with Blizzard. So we determined that we could either take the large
amount of money, time and effort spent on making this product and just
scrap the Azeroth Advisor and make one for our game, or we could do
that AND make a product and service for the WoW customer…but
make it free.

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The Azeroth
Advisor will be free.

I’m a gamer first. My thoughts were to deliver the product
for free because it’s a great product and we’re
continuing to enhance it. We’re making it better and more
relevant, and I think it’s going to enhance the WoW
player’s experience.



Ten Ton Hammer: So
you’re not monetizing the Azeroth Advisor in any way?



Schilling:
Not for the WoW customers at least. That said, the Azeroth Advisor is a
patent pending technology. Any business – from
Harrah’s Casinos to the Westin Hotels to Blizzard –
wants to offer a personalized customer service tool for anyone that
uses their product. We’re in the process of working with some
other companies to license the technology and license the product.
There’s an immensely valuable business angle to the
technology, absolutely, but it won’t be that way for WoW
customer and the Azeroth Advisor customer.