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

Questions by Cody "Micajah" Bye, Managing Editor
Answers by David Reid, President of Publishing for NC West

When the news broke a few weeks ago concerning the formation of NC West, there were a number of intrigued and concerned MMO gamers across the territories that the new entity would encompass (North America, South America, and Europe). What would happen to the old studios? Was NCsoft Austin closing down? Was ArenaNet becoming the sole developer for previous NCsoft titles? What was happening to games like Exteel and Dungeon Runners? Was Tabula Rasa still alive? The questions were scattered all across the Internet forums with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Thankfully, Ten Ton Hammer has heard your questions and concerns, and we've gone straight to the source, NC West's new president of publishing, David Reid. With your questions in mind, we quizzed David about the future of the various studios under NC West and exactly what gamers should expect from the new NC headquarters. His answers may surprise you, so make sure you check 'em out!  

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Ten Ton Hammer: What can you tell us about NC West that wasn’t already expressed in the press release? Why was the entity created? What does it provide to NCsoft?

NC West wants to continue the trends that Lineage II, Guild Wars, and City of Heroes set in their high quality production values.

David Reid: There were two reasons, really. One, we wanted to see NCsoft really get back to its roots and creating these large scale, AAA MMO properties. It’s a business that we’re one of the best in the world at, and it’s been very successful for us. If you look over the past couple months and some of the changes that we’ve made to the organization, it really is about ratifying that decision and that NCsoft is going all-in on building products more like Lineage II, City of Heroes and Guild Wars. That’s really what you can expect from us going forward.

The second part of what NC West is about is really consolidating all of our publishing operations across our Western territories, including North America, Europe, South America, and Australia / New Zealand at a global headquarters in Seattle. There were a number of reasons for that, but – by and large – it felt like the main thing to do for a very successful company that’s looking to become even more successful in the future. We looked around and saw that the great publishers in our business primarily have their principal operations located on the west coast of the United States.

We’ve kept our development studios intact, we’re moving our publishing headquarters up to the West Coast, and for us Seattle was the logical place for us to do that. One of the major reasons was because it has the shortest non-stop flight in North America to Seoul. Seattle really made sense to us, really because of that travel relationship with Seoul.

Ten Ton Hammer: So what’s going to happen with your other studios, namely NCsoft Austin? Will you have things like QA in Seattle, or is it just publishing?

David: It’s just publishing. The Tabula Rasa team is intact, QA, customer support, and our operations teams are still residing in Austin and we – in fact – estimate that the Austin studio will continue to grow. If you look out into the next year, you’ll see that Aion is launching and the future holds games like Guild Wars 2 and things we haven't even announced yet. We expect all of those functions to continue to grow in the Austin office.

What the Seattle office becomes is the global headquarters for NCwest and basically what you'll expect to see there is the publishing organization and team will be there. There will also be a smaller studio there that works on bringing our games in Asia to the West and does the production on that front. But basically NC West is a global office and a publishing headquarters for us.

Ten Ton Hammer: Now that everything is consolidated, will the distribution of information become more streamlined? In the past year, NCsoft Europe has been releasing more information on Aion than the North American branch has. Now that NC West is there, will we see information released at the same time? That sort of thing?

David: If you look at NC West across the territories, we effectively have four separate companies. We have the NC Austin office, the NC Interactive office, ArenaNet, and the Europe office. In the press release, we said that we were going to merge those four offices into one company. The symptom that you talk about is one of those things where communication just wasn't as streamlined as it needed to be. There are other aspects of this where we wanted to make sure that we're focusing our budgets on the right things and making sure we're not doing duplicate work across countries. Things like that.

It's really just something that's going to make this business work in a much more streamlined fashion, exactly as you suggested.

On that note regarding Aion, we're getting a lot of positive reception for Aion in all of our Western territories, but in particular we are looking at what the European branch has done as top-of-the-line marketing there.

They had a great presence at Leipzig and they've done well by that title. The North American team is going to look at that as something to emulate and that the best work going on around the globe is being shared by all the places.

Ten Ton Hammer: In the press release and earlier in this interview, you state that NC West will really be focusing on AAA MMOG titles now. If that's the case, where was the focus before? Why wasn't NCsoft really focused on those AAA games? What was going on there?

David: The market's been a really interesting thing to watch over the past 5-10 years. If you look back to how this business began - Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron's Call - it was very much rooted in the big client, big team, multi-year development and big budget. Over the past five years, you've seen some changes in the space with games like MapleStory, browser-based games, and free-to-play instead of subscription products.

Like many of the other companies in this business, NCsoft had dipped a toe in that and taken a look at what's going on in that market and that customer. In the end, we realized and looked out at what happened over the past five years and saw the success we had with Lineage and Lineage II still going strong. They're both $100 million a year franchises. Those new business models are interesting, but very few companies can do what NCsoft has been able to do and we realized there's no good reason for NCsoft to be distracted by that business. We're serving the gamers better and the shareholders better by focusing on these giant properties that become huge cultural events and intellectual properties rather than dabbling in some of these other business models. They're fine business models and other companies are making good product their, but I think the business that we're in is the right one for NCsoft to keeping going in.

Aion is one of the high quality, AAA MMOGs that NC West will be focusing on.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are we going to see more announcements of big AAA titles in the next few months?

David: We do have Aion coming out for a NC West release in 2009, and Aion - make no mistake - is cut from the same cloth as Lineage and Guild Wars. We have publicly announced Guild Wars 2 in the past, and you can probably expect that in 2009 we'll talk more about it. We're also going to be discussing taking some of these titles that have really been PC only sort of clients thus far and taking them out to other platforms.

Ten Ton Hammer: I saw a translated Korean press article on an upcoming "mature" NCsoft game called Blade and Soul. Can you talk at all about it?

David: I'll put it to you this way: While we haven't made any particular announcements from NC West on that franchise, I can tell you that I'm personally very excited about the property. I believe that it will be a successful global title and not just an Asian title.

And again, it's one of these high production value, big bets that we feel is right in the wheelhouse of what NCsoft has been successful with. You can expect to hear more from us on this and we do think it has a lot of potential in the NC West territories.

And you're right, it does look a bit more mature than some of the other T-rated games that are out there.

Ten Ton Hammer: The lack of clothing is a dead giveaway.

David: There's also a bit more blood. A bit more brutality. If done correctly, I think it's going to be a good part of that game. It's not a game that's being written for a younger audience. It's going to be developed and marketed appropriately for the audience it's geared for.

Ten Ton Hammer: You mentioned Tabula Rasa in the previous part of this interview. Is everything okay with that title and team? It seems like every other week has a rumor that Tabula Rasa is going down. (People crying DOOM!) Is everything still alright?

David: I think the company has been pretty candid in stating that we would have hoped for a better launch. There was definitely a lot of feedback from the community and things like that, and we are continuing to invest in that franchise. There have been twelve separate updates to that game and some of the most dramatic changes have happened in recent months in conjunction with Operation Immortality.

With the patches, some of the gameplay has been updated, there's a brand new boot camp for new users, and a lot of great things for people to look at and realize that the game has come a long way and it's an entirely different game in some respects if you took a look at it at launch.  

To parallel that, we're doing everything on the publishing side to help it out as well. A few nights ago Stephen Colbert did his spot on Operation Immortality and putting his DNA up on the Immortality Drive. We feel like we're in a very good spot with that game and Tabula Rasa is one of those AAA properties that only NCsoft and a few other companies have been able to do successfully. It fits right in to the portfolio planning for NC West.

Ten Ton Hammer: What's the biggest change that gamers are going to see with the move to NC West? For people in the industry that are watching this progress, it's obviously a big step for NCsoft. But what will gamers be seeing?

Dungeon Runners will continue to operate, albeit with a slimmed down staff.

David: Gamers who want these large scale, high quality MMOs should be absolutely thrilled that that is what we'll be focusing on. The company made some smart decisions to attempt some different business models, but, in the end, we are incredibly confident in our future in this space. It's growing very rapidly and we've seen what some of our competitors have done in recent months with their retail launches. We love our position in this space, and the first thing that gamers will hear is more information on those big franchises.

The second thing that I can say it that, at some level, I'd like to see us - at least from the publishing side - bet bigger when we get these great games. When you're dealt a great hand in poker, you've got to bet a lot of money because you can win a lot of money. That's a very similar idea to what you'll see from us here at NCsoft. You'll see us get behind these titles in marketing, PR and sales, a bit more than what you may have seen in the past because we can see the returns that a successful franchise can throw up.

Lineage has been running strong for ten years, and we believe that Guild Wars and City of Heroes will be there in a few years. We also think that the products that we're just now announcing will also have those sort of lifespans to them. But you're gotta play to win, and we will absolutely be doing that.

Ten Ton Hammer: What does the future hold for games like Exteel and Dungeon Runners? Where do those games stand in this entire scenario?

David: Candidly, for these titles that we've built in the West, they are a bit slimmed down on the development side. It's just the fact that we're doing less of that now. But those businesses are good. Korea and its Asian subsidiaries out there continue to do some development on this front. There are a pair of games in particular that we expect to bring to NC West territories coming from Asia. They're more like Exteel, and we'll be announcing those in short order.

When NCsoft invests in that, I think NC West should be the publisher for those titles. But NC West development is going to be squarely focused on ArenaNet, Carbine, NC NorCal, and the Austin studio. That is where we're putting our development dollars.

Ten Ton Hammer: As the final question, is there anything you'd like to tell gamers about NC West and the past couple weeks to help move forward? How would you encourage them to follow you down this path?

David: First, we want to make sure that everyone understands in no uncertain terms that the Austin office is still a very very healthy place. It is a critically important part of NC West. The transition of building a publishing headquarters in Seattle has absolutely nothing to do with the talent pool here in Austin. It has no impact on our development studios. It really is more about our transition into saying, "Look if we want to be a world class publisher, we need to emulate more of what those other companies are doing." Once again, all those folks have established their headquarters on the west coast of the United States.

That's the first thing. It's a vote of confidence of NCsoft emerging as a stronger publisher. And yes, the Austin office is strong and will continue to grow.

The second thing is that there are publishers in this business that have the size and have the desire to be in a bunch of different markets and cater to a bunch of different consumers. What you're hearing from NCsoft is that we're focused on the people who are looking to play these AAA MMOs. That's what people can expect to see from us going forward.

As you said, if you're coming along for the ride with us, what should you expect to see? You should expect to see more of these great large scale games. If that's what you're looking for, we're going to continue to be one of the best companies in the world in providing that to you.