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

David Reid: I’ll start with the obvious fan-boy, grognardy part of this equation. I’ve been a gamer for a very long time and grew up playing the Ultima franchise on my Apple II+. I’ve always been a fan of the Garriott brothers. A number of colleagues of mine in the industry have ended up at NCsoft over the years, and I’ve always had my eye on the company on that front.

When it became clear that this was a position that was opening up, I was naturally very interested on a number of fronts. The fact that I’m a gamer, and Richard Garriott – when he’s not off doing his astronaut training – works in an office above me is very, very cool.  

From the business perspective, there’s an excellent opportunity here. When you look at the quality of [NCsoft] games, the portfolio, the customer base, and combine that with a market that is really, really growing; there’s just a lot of stuff that got me interested in NCsoft.

That said, GameTap is a great business model. I really like it, I had a great time working with the people there. It was a lot of fun working on that product, and Turner is a fantastic company.

Honestly, the timing was very interesting for me. Those of us in this industry remember when Gary Gygax passed away, and it was one of those moments that really struck me. I’d always hoped that I would’ve had the chance to do something with Gary. But that didn’t end up happening for me. As I was having my discussions with NCsoft, I wondered if I would feel that way if I didn’t take a chance to work with the Garriott brothers.

It was something, on a very personal level, that appealed to me.

David: I think in some ways the marketing job at any company is fairly straightforward in terms of the media and the advertising that you need to do. PR, packaging, events, all of those things make a lot of sense.

But what’s interesting and fascinating about this company in particular, it’s the notion that it’s not just a launch and leave sort of business like a lot of the retail stuff I’ve worked in has been, like Xbox for example. It’s much more about this living portfolio of products that keep changing, growing, and improving all the time.

There is a different sort of marketing that you need to do with that, not to mention NCsoft is a much more online focused company than what you might see from a console publisher. From a marketing perspective, you need to go online, you need to go where the customer is going, and you need to realize where your customer is spending their time. There’s just a lot of strategic stuff that is different from things that I’ve done before.

David: Yup! I was actually part of that green light process, and it was really the first MMO I had worked on as a marketer. The thing about that product that was so interesting was the strength of the community. There was a community of people that just refused to let that game die. That kept it alive on their servers, and then you have the folks up in Spokane, Wash., that had such a passion for their product that you just couldn’t ignore it.

That product, for me, is really an example of the MMO community in general. Having an opportunity to work on the Myst franchise and serve that community was really exciting, very educational, and got me very keenly interested in the MMO space.

David: There are a couple things to talk about there, and we should really start with my experience at GameTap. The business model I worked with their was really quite similar to an MMO model in the notion that you’re a customer of one MMO and it’s a subscription based model. There’s a lot of front-end stuff, in terms of the marketing and the messaging, that’s very relevant.

But, there’s also a lot of back end plumbing that you have to do as well. Not only are you serving your product up at retail, but you’re also supplying it digitally as well. You’re digging very deep into data-mining and spreadsheets and registration paths and drop-offs and credit card failure rates, and all of these things are incredibly relevant to anybody that’s in a digital business. GameTap gave me an awesome two year crash course in those parts of the business. There are a number of things that are going to be directly relevant to my work at NCsoft in terms of how we engage our community and how we move them into our portfolio of products.

There may be one game that gets you interested in the products we offer – much like there might be one game that gets you to buy a console – but that customer should, can, and probably wants to be a customer of all the properties, or at least more than one. That’s something that’s very exciting – especially at NCsoft in particular. There aren’t a lot of companies that have the portfolio of MMOs that we at NCsoft have.

There are individually great products out there, but the strength of the portfolio here at NCsoft is an amazing asset that’s just waiting to be unleashed.

David: I’ve played a bunch of them on a very light level. I’m not the guy who’s running a guild, and I’m not a PvP expert.

The game that’s really captured me right now is Dungeon Runners. I love the sense of humor in the game, but I also love the fact that I can play the game with my kids sitting on my lap while their grandpa is logged in and playing with me.

What’s interesting about MMOs is this constant focus by the media on the core customers, but there’s an aspect of MMOs that’s like playing a pick-up game of basketball on the playground. You may never see those people again, but there’s a certain sense of camaraderie and etiquette to that that hardcore gamers just don’t get.

There’s a big opportunity there in the market, and I don’t feel like we spend enough time thinking about that consumer.

David: Yeah, although I do have a hard time with the word “casual” because I’ve seen people play these “casual” games – like Bejeweled – and at the end of the day they exhibit a lot of behaviors that look like a core gamer. They spend an enormous amount of time and associate themselves with the hobby of gaming and the games they play at a very core level of their own identity. At times they’ll spend a lot of money on these properties.

It was astonishing when I was working at Microsoft and we were launching the games like Bejeweled where we would have these 50 year old women throwing out $20 for a downloadable game. It’s an extremely vibrant business.

Are there people that are casual gamers? It depends on what you mean. Do you mean the casual genre, or a casual behavior? There’s certainly a question around the psychographic analysis of a person who isn’t as engaged in the hobby as the core gamer that we have, but there’s also the casual genre and business model that are also established.

Casual is a very broad word, especially in this business.