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

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor

Answers by Monty Sharma, Founder & VP Product Management & Marketing, Vivox

Over the past few years, the integration of voice technology into the massively multiplayer online gaming market has been one of the leading trends of innovation. With developers coming to understand that community is an important factor in their game’s progress, more and more of them are looking for ways to integrate voice into their users gaming experience. This growing trend has meant that companies that focus on voice technology – like Vivox – are experience tremendous success. Recently, Ten Ton Hammer’s Cody “Micajah” Bye recently had the opportunity to talk with Vivox’s Monty Sharma to get an update on the company and the plans for Vivox in the coming months. Enjoy!

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Ten Ton Hammer: Vivox seems to have been extremely busy in the last few months with new announcements coming left and right. Can you give the Ten Ton Hammer readers a quick synopsis of the companies / games you’ve partnered with in bringing voice technology to their MMO players?

Here's Cody with Monty Sharma at AGDC '07.

Monty Sharma: We’ve had a great year and added a number of amazing partnerships.  Currently, we are live with voice in EVE Online, Second Life and K2’s War Rock and we’ve recently announced partnerships with Sony Online, Wizards of the Coast, NCsoft, and CyberSports.

Ten Ton Hammer: There are some incredibly big players on that list of companies. How did you manage to make so many critical partnerships in such a short period of time? Why are developers so attracted to your technology?

Monty: It is a combination of things that have attracted developers and helped us in engaging so many titles. For one, voice communication is no longer a technology that developers want to leave in the hands of players. They see the value it adds to their game and in building their community. For this reason, the technology that we’ve built, the features and reliability that are in our product, are important to major developers. In addition, our ability to operate a large scale network and deliver the kind of quality and support that these games demand is unique and proven. The devs get to know our team and know that we are not a typical technology vendor who gives you the software and leaves you to it.  We work hand-in-hand with every developer to ensure the integration is first-rate and that our companies are linked together to ensure the highest level of service for the players.

Finally this is our only focus.  Vivox does voice for games. We're not trying to build other branches of the business and we are not looking at anything other than making game play better.  We are proud that such amazing names in gaming have chosen to work with us.

Ten Ton Hammer: Now that you’ve established yourself as a major player in the voice integration marketplace, what’s next for Vivox? How do you get bigger and better?

Monty: We do not see ourselves as a major player, but retain the view that we are a small company who’s working hard to do everything as well as we possibly can. The focus for us remains top quality operations, adding key features that our customers desire and staying responsive to industry trends.  

Future wise, we are interested in doing more with that technology that directly impacts game play. We’re starting to see some early aspects of that and have a number of ideas that we think will really make communications more an integral part of game design.  

We are working on ideas that include letting gamers connect to the real world while in game and vice versa.  Ways that will let me get a message on my cell phone or be able to talk to my guild mates without having to be logged in to the game all the time.  For us, it is making the connections to the events in the game and to my community of fellow game players that is important.

The significant part of this is not just about our major features, but rather all of the little bits that make every feature work well and integrate simply. The beauty of it is in the details.

EVE Online has already integrated Vivox's voice technology.

Ten Ton Hammer: How does your success at Vivox influence the general MMOG player? What sort of things can integrated voice technology do to influence a gamer’s MMOG experience?

Monty: The biggest impact for the average gamer is simple access to communications.  In the past gamers formed islands of communication were someone who had money, time and the technical expertise would set up a server and then pass out server addresses and passwords. Now a higher level of communication is open to everyone.  The important thing is to make playing the game simple.  Players should not be building and managing tools around the game, they should be…playing.  As a result games become more accessible.  Players are able to create ad hoc groups like never before and communicate across all of these disparate groups.  With the effort that game developers put in UI design, we are just beginning to see the impacts of well-designed voice as part of games.  There are studies that have shown that gamers who use voice form closer and deeper relationships faster than if they use text alone.  

The simplicity of accessing voice inside of the game impacts the number of new players who are converted to regular players.  If I can learn how to play a game faster and easier by asking someone a question and getting an instant and simple answer rather than engaging in a long IM discussion, I’m more likely to continue to play the game.  And the more players in the game means bigger, better games with more content, for all of us. Everyone wins.

In the future, we expect to see communications as part of the conceptual game design.  This could be anything from eavesdropping to talking to NPCs in an interactive way or opening up negotiations with a rival faction.

The one thing that’s clear is gamers play for the community and social aspects and everything that a developer can do to enhance communications is good for the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Along with the various MMOG publishers, Vivox has also made some major deals with MMO development platforms like BigWorld, Icarus Studios, and Multiverse. How many games will have Vivox as their primary voice technology in the next few years? Will we see the number of Vivox users skyrocket?

Monty: One thing we’ve learned in the games business, you can’t count on a game until it’s launched. We do know that our partners have many games in development, and we certainly hope all of them will launch, but we don’t know how many or when.  The one neat thing of being in so many platforms is we are able to open up communication across games, allow you to see where your friend is and connect with them.  We hope that this becomes a way for gamers to stay in touch and to enjoy themselves, regardless of what title they’re playing.

Ten Ton Hammer: Over the past year, we’ve covered Vivox’s voice-masking technology pretty heavily. How is the development of that technology progressing? Will there actually be a point in the next few years where everyone has a default voice-mask associated with their character? Can the technology be upgraded to that point?

Monty: Voice masking technology has come a long way.  We’ve focused on making voice fonts that are natural and can be listened to for long periods of time.  Our dream has always been to have fonts for each race, and allow players to create subtle modifications within each race.  This will add an interesting flavor to all games and will mask the age and even gender of the players.  I can see many players tweaking their voice, if only to make it sound a little more interesting and more fun to play the game.

We’ve built the technology to allow upgrades and customizations in the future.  We see thousands of voice fonts being possible and designing your voice becoming part of designing your avatar.

Ten Ton Hammer: What has the major focus been for Vivox’s tech development over the past few months? What’s the next major frontier in voice technology?

Monty: We’ve been focused on enhancing communication between games and the real world.  This is something that we’ve demoed in the past, but building it to scale is a large and complex task.  We’re also adding new tools to allow players to record what is happening, as well as customize voice fonts.

D&D Insider will also come equiped with Vivox technology.

Ten Ton Hammer: Although Vivox has definitely made some incredible progress over the last year, many would argue that the name “Vivox” doesn’t resonate with gamers like some of the other “brands” in the MMOG industry. How can you help progress the Vivox technology as a brand, and how do you insure that Vivox is associated with gaming excellence?

Monty: Vivox has been focused on building the best network to connect gamers and provide them a first-rate experience.  We have not spent huge amounts of money promoting our brand, but rather spent it on building a quality service.  Our belief is, as more gamers play with our voice service the more our brand will be built. Flashy web banners will not build the community. Quality service and innovative features will.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there anything else you’d like to tell Ten Ton Hammer readers or fans of Vivox technology?

Monty: Our goal at Vivox is to deliver a service that just works.  But as we do that, I am reminded of my past in a phone company and realize some of the things that we do, with over a billion minutes of voice traffic a month, thousands of users in a single channel, hundreds of thousands across our servers at any given time this is really an impressive feat.  When I talk to old friends about this and say not only do we do that, but we do it around the world 24 hours a day and at a cost far below what anyone pays for phone service, they shake their heads in wonder.  And then when I tell them what a blast it is to work in the gaming industry, they give me a dirty look and move on.

We encourage gamers to visit www.vivox.com for more information.  Thank you for letting us talk about Vivox with Ten Ton Hammer readers.