Warhammer Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

We started making adjustments to, particularly, the influence system pretty early on. The players can earn influence through RvR competition. Part of that was if I'm in middle of a public quest and I've been trying to move my influence along to earn some specific piece of armor or an item or reward of some kind and there's a battle going on in open-world RvR, I don't want to be de-incentivized from jumping into the fight. So giving you the ability to earn influence by fighting in open RvR in the area where you're gaining PvE influence meant that you were able to choose from whatever felt like it was the most significant thing to be doing at that time.

Those types of adjustments are things that we continue to make over time. We continue to look at level progression, renown progression, and try to make sure there aren't bizarre points where there's a spike in difficulty or where you slow down unnecessarily. We want players to always feel like they're always progressing in a meaningful way but that is always an ongoing challenge.

Ten Ton Hammer:
So switching gears a little bit, why did you decide to push Warhammer to the Mac? There's only a handful of MMO's that have really taken that step. That's not really a big player base, is it?

Josh:
Well what's interesting is the idea that it's not a huge player base is actually predicated upon bad math. People have a tendency to look at the infamous statistic, and depending on who you look at it, it will vary anywhere from ten to fifteen percent. What percentage of the market does Mac currently "own"? Wow, they only have ten percent, fifteen percent, sixteen percent, or some small number. Then Windows... sheesh. It's just dominant. There are more computers running Windows, but those numbers are on a pure OS basis and they count everything from ATM's that are running Windows slim client to servers that don't even have keyboards attached to them, to desktop PC's and so forth.

If you actually take PC's that are used for gaming, and Mac computers (and I would argue that the majority of Mac users are in the demographic of those that would play games if they were available) and put those head to head, it's much, much more competitive. I think that that's been something that the gaming industry has missed over the past, probably ten years. Since the return of Steve Jobs and the continued sort of ascendancy as kind of a preferred platform for young, up and coming folks in the world. We’ve had a tendency to look at consoles and PC's and ignore Macs. About 18 months ago EA made a pretty strong decision internally to try and support Mac platforms much more aggressively.

Ten Ton Hammer:
So looking to the future, should we expect anything in terms of a boxed expansion coming anytime soon?

Josh:
If you actually look back through the past 10 years of Mythic's history, with Dark Age of Camelot, we released stuff in retail expansions and we released some live expansions. Philosophically, we look at our products and go, if we're coming back to the well so to speak, and asking for another $50 every 18 months, that becomes a burden on the players that I think, and we've always felt, is somewhat inappropriate. Certainly, a retail expansion is something that is on the table. It's a thing that we could do if we feel that it's appropriate.

At this point in time we're very happy with the live event, live expansion system, giving us the ability to drive new content and significant new content to our players. We've added four new careers, we've added an entirely new geographical region to the game, we've added new scenarios, we've added new dungeons, we've added new systems - all without asking anything above and beyond the initial cost to purchase the game and a subscription. Personally, if I thought we could do that indefinitely, that's the way I would rather move forward anyway.

Curiously, you mentioned a boxed retail expansion and I think if you start to look ahead 5 years from now, the dominance of boxed products at all for this industry is going to have significantly tapered off. People are starting to wise up already that the games we are delivering are actually not products; they are services, and like cable television or internet access, or electricity, water, gas, whatever, that is actually much more attractive to the consumer to not be expected to pay a ton of money up front in order to access what you have to offer and to instead, annuitize that over time by subscriptions or micro transactions, or some other payment model that's a little easier on the consumer and doesn't require them to take a risk by spending $50 on a game they're not sure they're going to like long-term.

I would say that five years from now you won't see retail expansions at all. You'll service expansions and live expansions and you'll see the kinds of things that we're doing now and I'm happy to be at the forefront of that. But yeah. A retail expansion is always a possibility, but for now, we're very happy with the way that we've delivered content to people for the last year.

Ten Ton Hammer:
It was great talking to you again, Josh. Thank you again for taking the time to talk with us!