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

Joe Ybarra: That’s really dependent upon the product because, as I was mentioning earlier, not all the products that we’re going to be delivering will even be MMOs. So how we perform that transfer or linkage will actually have to be done on a case by case basis. Some of the transporting elements may be things like bringing your avatar’s look and feel into the other spaces, or something like that. Other options may be transferring items into another space, particularly things like internal currency in game environments.

There are a lot of different techniques that can be applied. Again, we will implement what is appropriate depending upon what the target product is along with the source product. A lot of this has to be worked out over a period of time on our side, because there’s different types of problem solving that we have to do based on the types of products that we're making. If everything we were building was an MMO, I could give you a more straightforward answer to your question. But since it's not, it's much more difficult to answer your question.

Joe: Yes. Over the summer we're going to start releasing information on our archetypes, mobs, and several of our planets. We're going to have several big announcements this summer in the time frames of E3, Comic-Con, and Leipzig.

So yes, you're going to see a distinct ramp up of content.

But that's completely separate from FireSky, and even without it you'll be seeing this sort of information released.

Joe: It's actually part of what we alluded to earlier in our conversation. We're trying to develop a range of products and being the publisher/operator of these products across a very wide spectrum of subject matters, game genres, and target audiences. A lot of that is to reinforce the social networking aspect of it.

Conversely, as a social networking aspect of the group as it evolves, we want those customers using that part of our service to play all types of different games. Many of the customers who might use a MySpace or Facebook won't necessarily be hardcore gamers or even MMO players. We want to make sure there's something for everybody out there. Of course that's going to take some time, but we do feel that it is important.

On of the things that we've actively discussed among the team is how we're going to make customer support and care an integral feature of the service. Typically speaking, in the gaming world customer support and care are only recognized when they're bad. We want to flip that arrangement. When you're using our service, we want you to feel like we're really taking care of you, and that if you have problems, concerns, or even suggestions on how to improve our services, we can act on that information as quickly as possible.

One of the other component of our service that is really interesting, to me at least, is that we're trying to simultaneously launch Stargate Worlds in both North America and Europe. Longer term, we want to operate our service in the Asian market as well. What that immediately raises is the cultural differences in the types of products that we want to create that will appeal to these international markets as well as the domestic market.

Some products lend themselves to this. For example, in World of Warcraft everyone plays the same game. It may turn out that as our product line evolves, we may develop products that are specific to individual nations or we may have to modify products to make them more successful in different territories.

I think that's another aspect of our business model that I find to be quite a big challenge, because it's a pretty tough market to jump into even without worrying about making different variations to the same product.

Joe: In the long term, absolutely. If you really look at the bigger picture business model, one of the things we talk about a lot internally is how game development and deployment is more like television programming than any other analogy. We have to provide an ongoing stream of content that's reliable in terms of when we deliver it and is consistent from product to product. It also has to have a wide appeal.

If you look at it from that perspective, there's a fair amount of problem solving we have to do just with the content alone, let alone some of the other considerations that we've already talked about.

Joe: It's been probably close to a year and a half now from when we first started contemplating this possibility. There's been a lot of pre-production, where five to six months of our tasks was based around developing our production plan, schedule, budget, and the components necessary to do certain things with the product.

The last six months was dedicated to pulling in the staff that we needed along with building up areas like our distribution channel, network operations center, customer care group, and other things.

Joe: With respect to Stargate Worlds, our current plan is to deploy and try to hit the broadest retail distribution that we possibly can. With SGW being a AAA title, it has a fairly significant footprint. To deliver the world that we're building at a high level of quality, that's a fairly good-sized download for anyone.

However, we are looking at electronic distribution, along with other options in-place. The strategy for Stargate, however, is to have a very strong retail presence.

That said, some of our products in the future may not have any retail component at all, simply because we can digitally distribute them. But the AAA titles in particular will require us to have a box product simply because they're really big and we can put in additional value added features we can give to a customer who buys a box.

Joe: We can really do whatever we want. The way our billing system and customer support is designed, we can really take care of all the different types of games. Subscription, free to play, micro-transaction, redemption model; there's a whole slew of different ways to do that.

This is yet another reason why we thought publishing our own game would be the way to go because we want the flexibility to do whatever we want with our product.

Joe: Absolutely. We're pretty agnostic about where the products come from. We just care about the quality of the products. All of our products need to be consistent in their quality and play value.

Joe: Not particularly. Just keep posted on what we're doing here, especially as we gear up for the launch of Stargate Worlds!

If you haven't already, make sure you check out the first part of our FireSky interview!

Do you think the concept of switching characters between games is a good one? What sort of problems might they encounter? Let us know on the forum!