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

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.

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 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.

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.”

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!