Matt Firor is the President of ZeniMax Online Studios LLC and an experienced developer with over twenty years in the industry. He also serves as an advisory board member for the GDC Austin where he helps organize the event. We recently caught up to Matt prior to this year’s convention to get his views on GDC Austin, MMOs, and social gaming.

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Ten Ton Hammer: Obviously you’re on the board of advisors. What do the advisory board members really do in influencing the programming of the show?

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Matt Firor: Generally the show is divided up into a few of different tracks like production, marketing, and business. Two advisory board members are appointed to each track, so generally along the lines of our particular experience usually. And we actually go through each of those submissions. Fortunately, the show people kind of see how its submission was submitted, whether it was submitted to the marketing track, the programming track, and so on.

Personally, I did the production track this year, so I went through each of the production track submissions and vetted them to make sure it was appropriate for the show and picked the best ones. Then I went through a lot of most of the other ones too just to see what the tanner of the show was and to see what kind of things were being submitted. And then we all got together in Austin and went over the entire program and talked about which would be the best ones to do. With all of us, the advisory board, but of course led by the show people.

Ten Ton Hammer: You’re in a kind of growth and development stage with your particular studio. Are you going to Austin to kind of look for potential employees as well as education for whichever of your development team has come to this?

Matt Firor: Yeah. It’s all of the above. Fortunately, GDC Austin is an online networking focus, which is very good for me because I actually learn things and so do my people who go to the show, but also, there’s the whole other side of the show which is the show floor. It’s a good place to do networking and recruiting. So it’s good for all those reasons.

Ten Ton Hammer: When you’re choosing a production panel, what are some of the specific things that you’re looking for? Are there things you’re interested in that you want to hear about or do you try to go for more of a general view? How do you choose the panels that are going in there?

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Matt Firor: Fortunately, there are 13 or 14 entries on the production track this year and they’re a mix of all of those. There are some things that I’m interested in, but I’m not going to pick the entire track based on stuff that interests me. The other advisors are also there to throw in things that they’ve run into that they are interested in. I have a couple of talks that go over a project that’s already been completed and see the lessons learned from that. The post-mortems are always pretty good.

Since mine is production, there’s also the side of project management. Agile has been a kind of a big buzz word today, so we have a couple of Agile management focus production talks, so it goes across the whole range from learning how the projects go together to what middleware to use or to use middleware at all and those kinds of decisions. 

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you tell us a little about the Agile talks and how they will influence the games that gamers are playing?

Matt Firor: It’s more of a traditional management technique called ‘Waterfall’. That’s where there is a design and the team takes the design, and the artists do art, the programmers do programming, and it all magically comes together. That’s very much tried and true and it has some advantages and some disadvantages.

Agile is much more where you get a team of artists, programmers, and designers and put them to work on one particular problem in the game and then you have another team working at the same time on another problem and another team on another problem. So it’s more of splitting up a bunch of little teams inside of your overall project. All of who are managed in a layer of management above them, but they are pretty much given autonomy to sit and solve their particular problems on a three to four week basis and every three to four weeks they present what they’ve been working on to the rest of the company.

Ten Ton Hammer: So rather than trying to paint a picture all at the same time you’re kind of trying to put a puzzle together.

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Matt Firor: Yeah, and it lets the people on the teams have more of a say in how the day to day management is done. So instead of tracking a team and saying you need to work 4.5 hours on this art asset, the Agile way would be you have three weeks to come up with a system for producing assets that will take 4.5 days to produce.

Ten Ton Hammer: What are you trying to get out of this year’s GDC Austin for your studio? The theme for the last couple of years has been MMOGs, but are there things that you’re looking to learn from GDC this year?

Matt Firor: Yeah, GDC Austin definitely started out in the old days as an MMO show, but in the last couple of years it is definitely evolving just as the industry is evolving into a social networking online interconnected show, which MMOs are a big part, but there’s a whole bunch of other facets to that now with the Facebook revolution, web-based and browser-based casual MMOs are a huge market now, so it’s covering all of that. It’s focusing more on the kind of interconnected gameplay. 

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think GDC Austin will ever turn into something like GDC where we see bigger announcements coming out of the show rather than it just being a small intimate sort of arena?

Matt Firor: I’m speaking here as an attendee and an advisory board member, not as a think service person, but I think there is only one GDC and there should remain only one GDC where the big announcements are because if you do that, certainly there can be big announcements at GDC Austin in the context of what we’re doing, so if someone is launching a major MMO, a big publisher made an acquisition of an MMO development studio, those are the appropriate kinds of announcements because they are related to the show, but for things like Bill Gates going and showing off XNA, that’s probably not going to happen.

Ten Ton Hammer: There has really been a push for quality MMO gaming out there in the gamer realm right now and people are really hungry for more quality MMOs to choose from. In your opinion, what’s really keeping more MMOs from taking off and exploding with popularity? WoW (World of Warcraft) has several million players in North America, but we all know there are more MMO players out there than that are just playing WoW. The burn rate for MMO players in WoW must be huge, so where do all those players go?

Matt Firor: I wish I knew and if you find out, tell me. Clearly there is a hunger for WoW because no game has launched since WoW that totally captures that market. It’s game-based not industry-based. When a game comes out that satisfies what WoW players want to experience they’ll go play that game. It’s pretty much as simple as that.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think WoW encompassed enough things that it was essentially an experience where a gamer could stay and experience everything they want in a single game?

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Matt Firor: It’s certainly not all things to all people, but it was certainly enough things to enough people that it survived by just what you say. It’s a broad based game that is attractive to a wide range of different types of gamers.

Ten Ton Hammer: I was reading some news recently and Fallen Earth, an independent sort of MMO, has had some impressive preorder sales. Do you think gamers are willing to take a chance on any western MMO as long as there is something new in it and it has a high enough quality of production value for them to really get into it?

Matt Firor: I think people are definitely willing to try out new games especially if the investment in seeing if the game is fun is not that big, which is why a lot of people try out the browser-based MMOs, the downloadable ones, and the free-to-play ones.  The Aion beta is certainly full of people. There’s a hunger out there for new experiences.

Ten Ton Hammer: GDC Austin has always been an online conference, but at the same time there is a blurring line between MMOIs and these massively single player games. Games that have online elements and communities kind of like the Oblivions and Dragon Age that’s coming out. Do those sorts of games have a place at AGDC, or is that a line of distinction that isn’t going to be crossed?

Matt Firor: That’s a difficult question. Even the games you describe, although Oblivion of course is getting old now and didn’t have some sort of online gameplay. I don’t know about Dragon Age specifically because I don’t know that much about it.

Ten Ton Hammer: What I am referring to with those games are the online modding communities.

Matt Firor: Yeah, they just fit the definition of having an online community, but there’s nothing directly built into the game that facilitates that, so in my estimation they would not be covered under this, but certainly I think any game that is developed in the future and Dragon Age might be like this, I don’t know, it might have a lot of those community tools built in where instead of going out to some random website to find your mods you’ll have an interface in-game where you can look at mods, download them, rate them, Digg them, and then automatically update your Facebook profile with the ones that you’ve installed. There’s no reason people can’t do that, and when games start to do that it crosses the line into interconnected gameplay.