Questions
by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor
style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">
Answers by Joe Ybarra, Senior Vice President of Strategic Operations
for FireSky
When the announcement arrived concerning the unveiled publisher for
style="font-style: italic;">Stargate Worlds,
many individuals in the gaming industry were shocked. For a development
studio to essentially create their own publishing house was something
that had rarely – if ever – occurred in the MMOG
industry. To the untrained eye, the unveiling of FireSky as
SGW’s publisher raised as many questions as it answered.
Thankfully, Ten Ton Hammer’s Cody
“Micajah” Bye was on the case and sat down with
FireSky’s senior vice president of strategic operations, Joe
Ybarra, to answer many of the questions that were raised in
people’s minds.
In part one of their extensive interview, Cody and Joe discuss the
origins of FireSky and the purpose behind Cheyenne
Mountain Entertainment creating their own publishing company.
Enjoy!
border="1">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/30589">
src="/image/view/30589/preview" width="200">
Joe Ybarra
Ten Ton Hammer: What led
you to believe that creating your own publishing company was the right
thing to for you? Why not go with an established partner like SOE,
NCsoft, or EA?
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 style="font-style: italic;">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.
Ten Ton Hammer: What sort
of games are you looking to publish under FireSky? Is there a specific
criteria that you’re looking for?
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.
Ten Ton Hammer: Are you
looking to build a portal to direct people to all of the different
games in your catalogue? Or are they going to all be freestanding
services?
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.
border="1">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/30590">
src="/image/view/30590/preview" width="200">
FireSky Logo
Ten Ton Hammer:
How’d you come up with the name FireSky? Is it supposed to
mean anything?
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.
Ten Ton Hammer: Wow.
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.
Ten Ton Hammer: Is the
FireSky team separate from the CME team? Do you have your own offices,
or is it really one cohesive unit right now?
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.
Ten Ton Hammer: How will
the development of FireSky help the development of
style="font-style: italic;">Stargate Worlds?
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.
Ten Ton Hammer:
How’d the term “SNAP games” come about?
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.
Ten Ton Hammer: On a
personal level, do you think that MMOs and social network will continue
to draw closer together until they’re so intertwined that
there’s no differentiating them anymore? Or will there always
be at least some separation between the two?
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.
Make sure you check back
on Monday for the conclusion of Ten Ton Hammer's extensive interview
with FireSky's Joe Ybarra!
Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment made the right choice in creating
FireSky? Let us know on the forums!
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Stargate Worlds Game Page.
