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

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor
Answers by Curt Schilling, Founder and Chairman of 38 Studios

What would you do if you could build your own MMOG? Who would you hire to run your development studio? Which genre would you set your world? Few gamers in the world ever have the privilege to answer these questions, and yet so many of us would die for the chance to make the game that we would want to play. That’s the sort of opportunity that Curt Schilling crafted for himself by creating 38 Studios and recruiting some of the most prolific talent in the industry.

However, 38 Studios also recently announced that they had acquired Mentor Media's product, the Azeroth Advisor, and its technology. For those of you unfamiliar with the Azeroth Advisor, it’s a service that players download onto their computer in order to allow the program to gather information about the gamer’s World of Warcraft characters. With that information the AA then creates a personalized newsletter for the player to read whenever he desires. To many, this sounds like a strange marriage between an MMOG company and a product that services a major competitor. In order to sort out all the details, Ten Ton Hammer’s Cody “Micajah” Bye got on the phone with Curt Schilling, and the two discussed all of the relevant facts about the Azeroth Advisor and its future with 38 Studios.

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Ten Ton Hammer: What initially drew you to the Azeroth Advisor?

Curt Schilling, Founder and Chairman of 38 Studios

Curt Schilling: *laughs* I was a dumb WoW player. I’m always out scouring the webs looking for stuff, because I’m always interested in finding new information or products. I don’t know what it was that I saw first, but I eventually happened to cross the Mentor Media – the Advisor site – and checked it out. I signed up for the free trial and when I got my first newsletter, I fell in love with the product.

My career is built around gathering information and this was the first thing I’d ever seen that saved me just immeasurable amounts of time. First of all, to go everywhere and try to find the information they were providing is next to impossible. However, the bigger piece for me was that the product itself was speaking to my character specifically. It discussed my race, my class, my tradeskill preferences; my playstyle, in a sense. I thought that was really cool.

So I had all these different characters and I was getting all these newsletters, and I really thought that the whole service was pretty engaging. The writing was good. The quality was good. I can’t stand products that have typos. I fell in love with the product right away.

Ten Ton Hammer: Did you keep most of the writers on staff when you purchased the Azeroth Advisor?

Schilling: Most of it is contract writing. There’s a stable of about 50-60 writers that are contracted in and out. There’s a database of 3,000 articles for the Azeroth Advisor. All the work for the product was done “up front.” There’s a staff of writers that deliver content for upgrades and patches, but that’s not a very big staff of people.

Azeroth Advisor translates WoW character information into a personalized newsletter.

Ten Ton Hammer: What are you hoping to gain from the purchase of the Azeroth Advisor? There are a number of people that have voiced some confusion stemming from the fact that you’ve got an MMOG in the works, yet you purchased a product that focuses on a “competitor.” Why go after this particular product?

Schilling: There’s a bunch of reasons. The first one, obviously, is that I’m a fan of the product. I love the Azeroth Advisor. But we do have an MMO in the works, and my draw to it was the fact that I wanted this sort of product available for the community that plays our games. That was a big initial piece of it for me.

I don’t look at it – in anyway – as providing a service to a competitor’s customer base. To be perfectly honest, you could probably take that angle. It might be true.

But I look at it the same way I look at Major League Baseball: There are 30 teams, and every team benefits when baseball – as a whole – gets more fans. I see it the same way with MMOs. We’re doing everything we can to improve the size and scope and retention of the MMO customer fan base. What I wanted to do with this first “product” from 38 Studios is send a message that “this company will always care about the customers and the community.” This is doing exactly that.

Initially, we thought of the Azeroth Advisor as a revenue generating product in that it would help us fund our game, etc. But it didn’t work out. It just wasn’t going to work out with Blizzard. So we determined that we could either take the large amount of money, time and effort spent on making this product and just scrap the Azeroth Advisor and make one for our game, or we could do that AND make a product and service for the WoW customer…but make it free.

The Azeroth Advisor will be free.

I’m a gamer first. My thoughts were to deliver the product for free because it’s a great product and we’re continuing to enhance it. We’re making it better and more relevant, and I think it’s going to enhance the WoW player’s experience.

Ten Ton Hammer: So you’re not monetizing the Azeroth Advisor in any way?

Schilling: Not for the WoW customers at least. That said, the Azeroth Advisor is a patent pending technology. Any business – from Harrah’s Casinos to the Westin Hotels to Blizzard – wants to offer a personalized customer service tool for anyone that uses their product. We’re in the process of working with some other companies to license the technology and license the product. There’s an immensely valuable business angle to the technology, absolutely, but it won’t be that way for WoW customer and the Azeroth Advisor customer.