The video games industry is a relatively small place. Those of us that
work the conventions, either displaying our wares or reporting on those
products, get to know each other pretty well as we talk about the
future of gaming, our families, and our goals. During the summer
months, we often see more of an industry friend than we do of our own
families.
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Victor moved to Outspark after working for over a year at Cryptic Studios.
For me, Victor Wachter is one of those individuals that I’ve
spent numerous hours with, conversing about the communities in our
online games and sharing the best regional beers we can find. So when
it was announced that Victor had left Cryptic Studios to head up the
community at Outspark, an MMOG publisher with a penchant for free to
play games, I quickly got on the phone with my friend to get to find
out as much as I could about Outspark and what Victor’s
appointment meant for the future of the start-up MMOG publisher.
According to Victor, Outspark is a publisher of free to play massively
multiplayer games, and the company was started in 2006 by CEO and
founder Susan Choe. “We publish games developed in Korea for
the North American market,” Victor said. “We have
two games that are currently live, Fiesta
and Secret of Solstice,
and two games in beta, Project
Powder (a snow boarding game) and
style="font-style: italic;">Blackshot (a first
person shooter).”
To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure why someone like Victor
would make a move to a company like Outspark when he had what seemed
like a pretty fantastic situation at Cryptic Studios. With two enormous
MMOGs coming down the pipe at that developer – not to mention
now being owned by Atari and having access to their IPs –
Cryptic certainly seemed like an up and comer. I quizzed him about his
move and why he decided to shift his focus.
“One of the reasons Outspark approached me was because of my
experience in developing communities, and that’s one of the
ways that I think we can really set Outspark apart from the rest of the
free to play publishers,” Victor explained “We just
need to make the best out-of-game, offline experience to make sure that
our players know how to play the games, know where to meet each other,
and make sure that even when players are out of the game that they feel
like they’re having a good time.”
“We also want to enhance the quality of service within the
game, so that even though they’re playing a free to play game
that they’re also receiving the same sort of quality that
they might find out of a subscription game,” Victor
continued. “I’m working closely with the service
operations team to make sure that the community gets a fully fleshed
out set of patch notes and also working closely with the customer
service team to track user complaints, resolve them quickly, and
upgrade the time it takes us to respond to them.”
Although Victor’s announcement came very recently, he had
actually been working at Outspark for a number of weeks, taking in all
of their operations and getting a feel for what his new community would
be like. Since he had had a couple of weeks to acclimate himself, I
asked Victor what he thought of the differences between the pay-to-play
communities and the free-to-play ones.
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According to Victor, there aren't too many differences between the F2P and subscription communities.
“At the end of the day, we’re all gamers,
right?” Victor responded. “We obviously want our
players to have a good time, and that doesn’t necessarily
change with the business model. However, the activities that occur with
the various business models definitely differ. Free to play models tend
to be more interactive with their customers, and I’ve been
more involved with the community so far. We do do live events and we
interact with our users much more than the typical pay-to-play game
does.”
As a purveyor of both free-to-play and pay-to-play MMOGs,
I’ve always been intrigued with how often F2P games pushed
out live events to their users. It seems like every weekend features
some new XP bonus or fancy loot drop, and Victor and I discussed this
fact, since live events are really a large part of any community
management effort.
“The subscription business is just a much more passive
model,” he explained. “As long as their customers
are paying their $15 / month, it’s easy to forget about that.
Free to play games make money by keeping our users occupied and always
giving them something to do. It’s a much more active business
than a subscription game.”
The fact that live events are such a day-to-day part of the F2P
operation, it seems like that would really influence the difficulty of
Victor’s new job. However, before I voiced this opinion I
asked Victor whether he thought the subscription community or F2P
community was harder to manage.
“I knew what they did [at Outspark] but being here in the
day-to-day operations is completely different,” Victor said.
“At the same time, one of the first things I did was take
some of my ideas about community management and implement them:
cleaning up the forums, getting in contact with community leaders, and
that sort of thing to really harness the enthusiasm in the community.
It’s a learning process on both sides. I’m learning
the business, but I feel like I’m also bringing a lot of the
day-to-day community interaction over to our games.”
“I think that’s something that I’m trying
to do is bring some of the pay to play philosophy over to the free to
play,” Victor continued. “If you look at some of
the free to play games, they’re just constantly filled with
promotions and all of this pseudo-advertising calling for people to
constantly be buying or doing things. The F2P model does call for more
activity on a continuous basis, but we want to try and focus on a few
key items or big activities. We don’t want people playing
because we’re trying to sell them things; we want them to
play because the game is awesome.”
That said, the F2P model is based on having items for players to
purchase in their games, and so I wondered if all of
Outspark’s games were completely microtransaction based
(compared to ad-based of something similar).
“Yes [they are all microtransaction based], and as we go
across the genres, what people pay for will be different; players can
buy different things in Solstice compared to Blackshot for
example,” he answered. “We’re really
evaluating what there is to monetize in each game, whether we want to
give players an option to rent a clan server for their FPS team or
something like that. We’re really looking to expand our
options and go beyond just digital options.”
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Solstice is definitely a game for hardcore players.
As a final segment of our interview, I asked Victor what the future of
Outspark was; whether they would always be publishing Korean developed
games or if the team at the new publishing house had bigger plans in
mind. Victor – as always – held a surprise in store
for me. Here’s what he had to say:
“What we try to do with all of these titles is to be the
exclusive North American publisher, and not only for Korean games
either,” he stated. “That’s just really
where we got our start because that market has so much to pull from. We
are working with other developers and we have relationships with North
American developers. We do eventually want to be a publisher for some
of these other companies and even becoming the original publisher for
some of these games.”
Is Outspark the next big premier MMOG publishing house? If Victor
Wachter has anything to do with it, they will certainly stretch their
legs and see if they can make it with the big boys.
I just want to extend a bit of thanks to Victor Wachter and Tracie
Snitker at Reverb Communications for making this interview possible.
And – as always – keep your browsers locked on Ten
Ton Hammer for all of your latest Outspark and MMO gaming news!
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Fiesta Game Page.
