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?
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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
style="font-style: italic;">EVE Online,
style="font-style: italic;">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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
