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Joe Ybarra: There were a couple reasons why we thought that was a good strategy.

One of the things that we hadn’t announced publicly until recently was the fact that we actually have more than one studio here at Cheyenne Mountain. Because of that, we actually do have multiple projects under construction. That said, we thought that it would be really good to have a publishing vehicle for all of the products that we’re going to have in the future.

Another reason we thought it’d be important is because we recognize that an MMO is more of a service than it is a product. We have to provide ongoing support to our customers and provide a good environment for them to play in. Basically, we wanted to have a really direct relationship with our customers. If we had been published by another company, that company would really own our customer. We thought – in the long term – that if we self-published, we would own the customer and have the responsibility to them to provide quality service.

We also thought that we should publish Stargate Worlds because we could do a better job than everyone else. We firmly believe in the service aspect of our product offering, and we felt that we could build a customer support organization and a technical infrastructure that is equal to or better than anything else that is out there. We do have several people within the company that have been in publishing groups before, and through our previous experience most of us believed that we could learn from our past and do a better job than anyone else.

You put that whole package together, and you can see that it’s the best way to go.

Joe: One of the things that we’re really in the process of advocating and putting products against is the “Social Networks at Play” business model. The idea behind this is to combine the best features of gaming with that found in social networking.

If you look at the companies that are out there in both of these spaces, the game companies are migrating by adding more features that are oriented towards social networking while the social networks are trying to build gaming in various different forms inside of their products. We felt that by starting in the position of integrating those two concepts together from the very beginning, we would have a leg up on the other folks that are out there. We think that we should do this to really get an opportunity to reach out to the widest audience that we can.

So what our games will really have in common is the online component, and they’ll also share experiences on a community level. We felt that in order to deliver products against that business model, we need to have a wide range of products.

We’ll continue to be building the large scale, AAA games like Stargate Worlds, and we actually already have another large scale type project already under construction as we speak. But not all of our products will be MMOs per se. In fact, some of our projects are clready not in the MMO space.

Besides the type of game itself, the audiences that we want to reach are also going to be incredibly broad. Our products will not only be the traditional MMO type products, but we’ll also have causal games and other titles that are in genres besides just roleplaying and strategy.

By being the publisher as well as the developer, we’ll be able to get to a larger audience and broaden the appeal of all of our product line. Essentially, we’re building a lot of different types of games aside from just MMOs.

Joe: Yes. That’s what Project: Ascension is all about. It’s essentially a portal array or a destination theme park environment where all the games are aggregated together into a common portal. It’s in that space where the social networking features of our products will take place as well as other forms of entertainment and usability. A comparable product to things like MySpace will all be held in this destination portal, which is codenamed Project: Ascension.

Joe: Oh, FireSky. Coming up with the FireSky brand has been about a year long process. We started out with three folks sitting down in a room writing names up on a board. By the time the process was over, we had about 28,000 names.

Joe: The really interesting thing about that is that FireSky was probably one of the first ten names we wrote on the board. If you’ve seen the logo, it really evokes the form of the phoenix. As the phoenix reinvents itself from time to time, we too have done that as we’ve grown. That and we’re located right next to Phoenix, Ariz., so it seemed like a natural fit for us. In a nutshell, that’s where the name came from.

Joe: There are two different ways to answer that question. Geographically, we’ve run out of space in our original corporate facility, so we actually have another facility that’s four or five miles away from our main corporate offices. That new office holds two of our studios and our FireSky publishing team.

We actually have another studio that’s remote that’s specifically in the Boston area. In terms of the overall geography, we’re really spread out. But in terms of the rest of the studio and all of our people assets, we’re really in a fairly small area in Phoenix.

In terms of the coordination effort and the types of products and the integration of all the different product lines, Rod Nakamoto manages everything strategically and he and I work very closely together, and we establish best practices across all the different studios and make sure we get maximum leverage off the things we’ve already created.

So, to answer your question: Geographically we may be spread out, but in our strategies and practices we’re all together.

Joe: As the publisher of Stargate Worlds, we clearly have a vested interest in making sure that the product is very successful. We’ll work very closely with the studio to provide feedback and ad sense to the product where it’s appropriate. We’re actually in a unique position with FireSky because we essentially can do some different things with the way we deliver, communicate, and basically distribute our product.

In many respects, this goes back to the original question. Since we’re all one big company, it makes that synergy between publishing and development a much stronger situation than what we might have otherwise.

Joe: The name itself actually evolved from the work-in-progress for Project: Ascension. We actually started developing the tools and features for the project before we invented the term SNAP game. The idea was that we could see in the development of the destination portal, the need to want to put a lot of those social networking features into it. Some very wise and clever person came up with the idea, why not call them “Social Network at Play” games.

Joe: There’s several different components to that question. If you look at the way MMO architecture is anymore, some of the key features of any MMO is the ability to create guilds and internal communities within the game. If you think about the way social networking applies to gaming, at least for MMOs, basically we need to figure out how to take guilds and extend them outside of any particular one game and expand the idea of community and groups of people playing together.

Then we need to figure out how to motivate people in those same groups to play different types of content. After that, our goal is to try to find different ways for those users to transfer their equity that they’ve invested in one game into other games.

If you look at the long term future of what this all means, a lot of this is pulling out the idea that once the customer decides that they want to play a particular product, and then they decide that they want to move on to something else, we hope to get them to move on to something else that we supplied them with. What we hope to provide for them is an environment and a pathway in which that can happen with as much ease as possible.

When you look at the strategic level, I think what you’ll find there is essentially most of the gaming companies try to do something similar to this. If you look at Sony Online and the number of products they have, they haven’t really established the ability for players to transfer characters between the games. There’s nothing that is preventing them from developing that technology, they just need to make the decision to do it. Once companies like FireSky and other begin to showcase this idea, I think you’ll see more and more of that type of idea in the MMO marketplace.

Do you think the folks at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment made the right choice in creating FireSky? Let us know on the forums!