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Broadening Horizons

Tulga’s herculean efforts to improve and expand the game on several fronts are purportedly starting to pay off, and Bowman (contrary to industry naysayers) reports modest but increasing gains in subscribership. He points to three metrics to show Horizons’s accelerating growth: attraction rate, conversion rate, and attrition rate. The first, attraction rate, is “pretty low. We’ve been hesitant to push the product before we felt it was really mature.”

Box promises now fulfilled

This makes sense on the face, but “before it was mature”? Horizons launched in 2003, yes, but David’s the first to admit that Horizons wasn’t ready. Bowman, who came on board in a troubleshooting role a meager 4 months before launch, thanks Atari for publishing the game, but says, “Atari put the wrong box on the shelf, and we put the wrong product in the box. Our client wasn’t ready. The server has been incredibly stable, the simulation layer’s been fantastic. But we wanted, needed, another year. We lost tens of thousands of people for a lifetime, and I apologize to them. No developer, no designer, no person whose desire it is to entertain, wants to know they’ve turned off tens of thousands of players for a lifetime. That’s a hard burden to bear.

“We want to try to convince people that, yes, we made a mistake, we’re sorry for the mistake, and we’ve worked for two and a half years to correct the mistake… We’re know where we’re going, we’ve seen the builds, and very soon we’re not going to apologize to anyone for the client ever again.” Tulga has been adding content steadily in those two and a half years with a much smaller team than when Horizons originally went live, and when you factor in a squirrely client to fix on top of this, this starts to sound like an infernal task for developers who said nasty things about Dante’s mother.

“You look at how many people try the game and convert to a paid subscription. Our conversion rate was abysmal, as low as 1%.” Bowman says the conversion rate is now over 50%, and attributes the success to steady improvements to the game, especially the revamped tutorial. “The attrition rate has decreased 1% every month over the past seven months, so we’re keeping more of our players.”

An Entertaining New World

Any MMO developer feels restricted by abstemious budgets, but none moreso than smaller developers, who have this nearly limitless MMO canvas and grandiose ideas, but an extremely tight pool of resources to draw from.

Communication with fanbase using IRC is key, Bowman says

The key to facing down the industry giants, according to Bowman, is to specialize; taking on the challenges the big developers don’t want to deal with. “We have to create our own IP so our audience knows that if you want a world experience, these are the guys to go to. When you’re competing with Sony, etc. they have access to resources we don’t have access to. We think we’re triple ‘A’, but without a triple ‘A’ budget. We can’t afford to have a 100 artists work for two years to create the art for our environments. We’ll make it interesting and intriguing and just keep evolving it and evolving it so that 20 or 30 years from now, the world of Horizons still exists in some form. We haven’t seen the end of any MMO that’s been supported. There’s MUDs that are still out there, that have an audience. Oh, it’s text-based, but it’s entertaining.” David contends that it’s hard for larger developers to tap creative assets, like Peter Beagle, because of the corporate development process, and that a world’s community is much more loyal than a game’s, even though it’s somewhat smaller.

“We’re slowly growing and we’re definitely leaning more towards world than game. ‘Casual world space’ is what we like to call it. We put a really good base down. Even if they don’t like the game, I have yet to find someone who hasn’t said ‘Well, this game has a lot of potential.’ And that’s by design, it’s going to become more and more world.”

Exploring New Horizons

So if you’re interested in a “worldy” MMORPG with an increasing amount of world-class content and backed by a committed team, you’re urged to check out Horizons 14 day free trial. Hefty download and Internet Explorer-based authentication system aside, the game’s definitely worth checking out with its playable dragon race, best in class crafting system, and smaller-sized MMO charm. Active military personnel can also snag a free second account with the Horizons Military Appreciation Program.

Thanks to David Bowman and the Tulga team for their time, and we look forward to discussing some of the great new content they have in the works at E3 this Thursday.