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

Question: Is there anything in the store that you put in and was surprised by how well that item was received by the community?

Answer: We’ve always hoped that the cosmetic stuff would take off, and that started off really slowly. That’s a big role-player and social thing, so we really wanted to push that part of the game because it keeps the game vibrant and alive. We just started off with some hair and some hair color, and then we started to introduce some hats and we saw that take off. Of course, that was something we were really hoping would take off and we didn’t have any real data to say if that was our game or not. Now we’ll be expanding on those types of things because we see that it is proving out. I think that the one item we didn’t know would be so popular would be the item that we call the Bell of Opening, which allows you to unlock a chest that has a lock on it so you can loot it so you get an extra pull at the treasure table. That’s one of our most surprising success items.

Question: How many of the player base, percentage wise, actually uses the store?

Answer: I’ll answer that in two parts. For people who may not know, one of the cool things about DDO is that you can earn points from playing the game. We actually give you points for playing and amassing favor, which is our patron system where you accomplish more and more quests for certain patrons, you get more favor from them. As you get more favor, you will earn Turbine Points to spend in the store. That’s been a very successful part of the model, and as a result of that, we see about 70% of our users in a given month use the store. That doesn’t mean that all those people are spending dollars. The number of our active users who are spending dollars on Turbine Points is around 20%, but I would note that this number is a very successful number compared to other games in this genre.

Going into this, we had some third party research numbers that were showing from 7 to 12 percent, so we’re building things based on that expectation. We found that our choice of what we put in the store led to us being more successful than that. You have to be pleased for doing better than the average.

Question: How do the numbers, player base and revenue, compare with the free-to-play with the store as compared to the old month-by-month model?

Answer: This is another case if I answer too directly, the corporate police will come in and snatch me out of here before the end of the interview. What I will say is that shortly after launch, we revealed that our revenue numbers had grown to be 5x from what we had seen before with the subscription model and that our active player numbers had grown to be 10x from what they had been before. Even the number of subscribers, which is now a fully optional program, had more than doubled. I guess without revealing any more numbers without being blessed by my corporate overlords, I will say that we continue to be very happy with how we are performing.

Question: That’s an amazing success story in of itself, talking about 5 times or 10 times the number practically overnight.

Answer: Yeah, it really happened fast. That was one of the cool things to see was how quickly folks jumped in and how many former players and former subscribers came right back and were totally excited about the model and the influx of people. We had so many people tell us, “Thank you! I wanted to keep playing this game, but I wasn’t sure if I could keep paying $15 a month.” That’s been very gratifying to us as well.

I think overnight is the right keyword there. I don’t think that we slept that much since it happened.

Question: What we have discovered is that offering a free-to-play game to someone, they are more likely to try it and by trying it, more likely to stick around if the game is quality. What we have here is a quality game that said, “We’re DDO. Give us a try.” It’s been a success. I’ve said countless times, there are two problems in the MMOG gaming world. Free-to-play has a stigma, where everybody thinks because it is free-to-play, then it’s crap. Also, people have these high expectations. “We have this monthly fee, so I’m going to try it out because you know it’s quality,” but as we all know, a lot of these games suck. What I love about this is that DDO said give us a try for free, and it’s an awesome game. You’re really flipping things around.

Answer: Thank you for saying all that. To add to that, something that adds to the secret sauce here is that we’re very generous with the implementation with the free-to-play model in terms of the number of hours of gameplay and content that we give away for free and in terms of how we reward players. The track record shows that it’s worthwhile to support the free players as well as the subscription and premium players. We’re very excited by the results and look forward to continuing on.

Question: What’s the difference between going subscription and going free-to-play?

Answer: Well, the subscription model we liken to the all you can eat plan at the buffet as opposed to ordering off the ala-carte menu. If you’re a player who’s going to play many hours per week and you’re a hardcore gamer who’s going to get into a game and get the max out of it for a few months or longer, then the subscription model is probably right for you. It gives you access to all of the game’s content, races and classes. With the free plan, however, you get to start the game and play it at your own pace. If you’re a gamer that has a family or you like to play with your game group who only gets together once a week or month, then you’ll want the free-to-play model. You come in, you play the game at your own pace, and you get to a point where you say, “I’m ready to buy this convenience item. I’m ready to buy this content. My group is ready to play this area.” So you spend $5 that night on the content pack.

What’s cool with the features and content when you buy them in our free-to-play model, you now essentially own those for the life of the service. So if you buy Tangleroot Gorge, then if you continue to play DDO and are a hardcore character, you can roll up ten more characters or play on multiple servers, and you’ll have access to that content pack on all of them. It’s really about what fits your play style. Again, we were very careful to keep the value in the subscription model because we didn’t want to alienate that existing fan base who was very happy with the game or force them to turn around and purchase the content they were enjoying already. That was one of the blessings of converting the live game was that it forced us to invent this hybrid model rather than just building a free model from the ground up where maybe we would be tempted not to have a subscription tier. Looking back in retrospect, it’s been a success story keeping the subscription model there.

Question: Update 5 recently launched. What kind of cool things is in it?

Answer: Aside from some great content, we have some really great mini-stories going on with a carnival and devil invasion type of theme, we introduced a guild leveling system which starts out as you’ll be getting little boosts and boons for your guild as you guys increase the rank of your guild. We have a guild xp called renown, which is how infamous you become in your world. As your renown grows, you’ll eventually be able to purchase which is our solution to guild housing, which is flying airships that you can set up your guild camp on. You can use it for travel, which makes it a little more unique than your typical housing, as well as setting it up with several amenities like rest areas. You can have your tavern there. You can have a practice dummy where you can test your DPS on, and it’s also a good time killer when you’re waiting for your guild to get together to run a raid. There’s all sorts of buff stations, and as you level up, you can upgrade your airship. This is another area where we offer a coin solution for in-game purchases, where you can get this sort of luxury line where the Toyota is the game version and the Lexus is the store version. You can purchase coins from the store to purchase a shinier, larger airship. You can upgrade the ship getting larger spaces. You can get crafting systems on board. It just keeps expanding, and we’re having a lot of fun building this thing out.

We’ve also put up some leader boards to get a little bit of shard competition going. You can go online and see your guild’s ranking versus others. You can also look across worlds to see who the top guild in the game is. That’s really been taking off. It’s gotten people playing very hard, and we encourage people to just play the regular game, and your renown and celebrity status will just come with it. For some of our hardcore players, that is the game and they work hard to get to the next level and stay on top of the leader boards.

To add to that, we also added a lot if little improvements to the existing classes. For example, the rogue class got a new trap making ability, which is their own dedicated crafting system. Now when they disable traps, which is a common part of DDO for those players who do not know that there is a real use of rogues and traps in our game that isn’t common to other MMOGs, they’ll scavenge some trap parts. They can take those to a crafting station and create their own traps. They have their own hand grenades and land mines that they can place in a quest or sell to their friends or in the auction house. Likewise, we made some improvements to the cleric, who have a prestige enhancement called the Radiant Servant. This is a really cool healing ability for the cleric that distinguishes them from the favored souls, who have been the new kid on the block healers. There’s also some improvements to a wizard line and some enhancements to a monk’s prestige enhancement as well.

Question: What’s in store for DDO in the future? Have you guys planned update 6 already? What can players look forward to?

Answer: Yes, absolutely on the update 6 question. In fact, update 6 is largely done and ready to be released to players. I guess I’ll give you guys first dibs and tell you that it will be coming in August. That update features a whole new adventure pack for level 9 players as well as epic mode, which is level 20 mode so that our capped characters can go in and play and get all their treasure upgraded to epic. The new adventure pack takes place in a new swamp wilderness area. It’s our first wilderness for quite a while and a needed one for level 9, where there currently isn’t one. It includes a Sahuagin city that is located underwater, and eventually the players will get to play the capstone adventure of that adventure pack fully underwater, which is really great. Our artists and content guys did a really great job with it.

Question: Is there anything else you want to say about DDO?

Answer: Half-Orc smash! We are going to be releasing a new race this fall, I believe, so it’s part of this year’s release plan. A new race of half-orcs. They are going to be the biggest, toothiest thing that we’ve ever had in-game. They’re a little larger than the warforged, and those are in development here. We’re getting stuff back from the art department: nice looking models and some really cool dance moves for those who want to do the emotes. They have some really cool abilities. They start with enhanced strength so they’ll be great barbarians in the game. That’s one that we’re definitely excited about. It’s been on every player’s question list for the last four years – when are we doing half-orcs? We’re finally delivering on that.

To add some more on what’s coming out later in the year in update 7 and 8, the other thing that I’m excited about is an overhaul to the user interface in the game. This is another thing that we’ve gotten a lot of player press on, and the players will be very excited to see a face lift UI as well as some much requested, and justifiably griped about, fixes to auctions. Players can be happy to know that we’ll be doing string searches in auctions, proper sorting of the search results, and other improvements to the UI that they’ll really enjoy. As a player, I’m so excited to be able to be able to properly search the auction and see the UI get a little bit of a refresh.

Question: You guys really seem to enjoy the interaction you have with the players. Is there anything that the players give you that is most helpful with the new content that comes out?

Answer: We always love to see the players who really clearly know the game, clearly know their character, they know how they expect things to work, and they come in and play the new content when it goes live, or even better, they venture into one our test servers, and give us dispassionate feedback. I know the forums can be a hard place to pick out the great suggestions from the rants and complaints that get into the mix. Though we do read it all. We appreciate the players who come in with a clear idea of what they don’t like, what they do like, what they want to see in the future, and their suggestions on how to change what’s there now.

We also love seeing the community get excited over some new feature, like the guild stuff. We see them talking about it and posting about it. It’s very satisfying after spending six months working on something and it finally sees the light of day and the players really enjoy it.

Listen to the interview with Fernando Paiz and Erik Boyer.