Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

by Cody "Micajah" Bye

Last week just before hopping onto our planes to Leipzig, the Ten Ton Hammer team posted our review for Sword of the New World: Granado Espada, giving it a well-above average rating (4 / 5) and concluding that with a few additions and a little work, the game could have really stood as one of the best imported MMOGs in  recent memory. However, that was before an announcement went out that stated that K2 Network was making Sword of the New World completely free to play, giving paying players additional money to be spent in the game's item market - with the added benefit of free-to-play value behind it, Sword may have scored even higher in our review. But even with a stellar release and extremely solid gameplay, the work at K2 Network is far from done. With any imported game, there's always a need to catch up to the original version of the game and K2 will be catching up to Korea's Granado Espada for a long, long time.

Peter Cesario, Sword's producer, gave us the details on the decision to go to a free-to-play format..

In order to get the latest news on Sword and how they're progressing on the advancement of the game, we scheduled an interview with the company during the Leipzig GC '07. Meeting in the low-volume Halle 1, Phil Comeau, Garrett Fuller and I sat down with the game's producer, Peter Cesario, and operations team lead, Phil Maurer. Our questions ranged on topics from the conversion to free-to-play gaming to the additional expansions to the game that will inevitably occur. Being fairly familiar with the K2 Network, both Peter and Phil comfortably answered our questions and made it a point to go into the specific details in certain instances.

With the announcement of going free-to-play only a few days old, my first question was oriented around why the developers had decided to go the free-to-play route after successfully launching the game in the pay-to-play market. "There are really two reasons behind our decision to go to free-to-play," Peter said. "First, we wanted to get back to K2's core philosophy: free-to-play games. With Sword of the New World we wanted to try something different by introducing some elements of payment but keep a good portion of the gameplay free to the users. What we found is that it tended to confuse people In order to eliminate that confusion and really get back to what K2 is all about, we decided it would be best to switch to the free-to-play model. It was an easy decision for us to revert back to the one simple process we already use and simply go that route." Indeed, even I was initially confused when looking at the game. I had assumed Granado Espada would function similarly to Guild Wars with a free-to-play game model after the initial purchase of the title. It wasn't until Peter actually straightened out my misconceptions that I understood how the business model worked.

"The second reason we decided to switch to the free to play model was the general feedback we were getting," Peter said. "There's always that core group of player who would pay $20 per month to play the game, but there were lots of people who were really enjoying the game but not enough to pay to play the game. When you get the majority of your feedback and its saying that people would play the game if it was free, that's what you want switch to. That's when we said, 'Why not open the game up to everyone? What's stopping us from doing that?' Players that are already playing with pay-to-play copies will be able to continue playing, and we compensated them really well. We gave them a lot of extras to make sure they're happy as well. Hopefully the game is now opened up a bit more to the general public and not just the few players that wanted to pay to play the game."

Phil Maurer, the operations team lead, set the stage for what sort of events players can look forward to in the future.

But with that in mind and a free-to-play game model now underway, how was K2 going to make any money off of Sword? K2's other games all featured fully-functional cash shops where players can purchase many of the items in the game. However, Sword originally didn't have a fully-fleshed out cash shop as they didn't want paying players to feel ripped off by any sort of item discrepancy. I was truly curious how K2 was going to handle that issue, and Peter thoroughly answered my question. "There's still going to be a fully stocked cash shop," he said. "By going to a free-to-play model it allows us to stay with all the rest of our games (and the rest of the versions of Granado Espada). There's going to be a lot more costumes and unique player characters available in the next few weeks."     

However, there are still numerous copies of the game on store shelves, located regional Best Buys, GameStops, and other video game retailers. Sword had a very hard push on the retail side of things, putting themselves in a position to succeed in the retail market and the games are on the shelves in a great many stores. What happens to those copies that remain on the shelves? Do they get pulled down and stuffed away in a closet somewhere? I never know how this method works, especially with games that started out as pay to play premium copies. I figured that Peter was a great resource to ask, and I aimed the question his way.

"The retail games will stay on store shelves, but instead of the thirty day free to play option that we gave players, you're going to be compensated with cash shop currency. The same goes for those players who had left over days on their subscription. All of that money will be compensated in cash shop funds," David said. "We compensate those players with unused months with 1000 cash shop gold, which is the equivalent of $10 and is actually more than the monthly fee was. The same goes for the retail version of the game. "