Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Rift started with a certain storyline. You were basically allowing people to subscribe to the game and play however long and in whatever way they wanted. When you introduced free-to-play, obviously that storyline had to accommodate that model of commerce in the game. Can you talk about that in concrete terms?

Scott Hartsman: The overall goal was to provide a premium experience at a free-to-play price point. With that in mind, we intentionally adopted a strategy of making sure that the entire content, story, and physical locations of the game would remain free-to-play at all times. Then, on top of that, we would have a micro-transaction store that housed a bunch of purchases the players could make if they chose to support the game further. We typically break down those items into three categories: convenience, cosmetics, and the ability to catch up to your friends.

For convenience, if you were a customer who came to us after the free-to-play conversion, you will not have as many places on your character to store items as a former subscriber to the game would. For convenience, you might want to buy more storage space so that you could have more stuff. For cosmetics, every now and then, we also introduce new mounts to ride around the world.

Catching up to your friends is a really important part too. One attribute of MMOs is that if you’re playing for a long time, chances are you are at a high-level and can do certain things because of that high level of power. But for someone who’s new, you might have to play for weeks or months to catch up. That catch-up part of the store lets me go to the store and pick up items to help me catch up to you.

Sramana Mitra: What is the storyline of Rift?

Scott Hartsman: There is a planet called Telara. As is the case in many of these fantasy storylines, bad things happen to the world. In our case, it was an inter-dimensional conflict that played out between all the prime elemental planes of earth, air, fire, water, life, and death. That conflict played out in a very literal way on the planet of Telara where dynamic invasions would open up in the world and Rifts would open out into the world, spill enemies out, and create this dynamic content that would always give players something interesting and massive to do.

We call it massive dynamic battle. You can be adventuring in a world quietly when all of a sudden, monsters come pouring out and suddenly there’re 800 people all in the same area, taking part in the same dynamic event. Our gameplay goal for Rift was to really create this massive dynamic battle sense that has never really existed in MMOs. Nobody does massive dynamic better than we do.

Sramana Mitra: You said there are three things that have changed in your industry. Of course, interplay of all three creates a very dynamic environment from a business point of view. One is business model. Two is funding model, and three is development model. Could you elaborate on each of them and tell us what’s happening in the industry and where we are going?

Scott Hartsman: The biggest one is the intersection of all three. Starting with the way games get funded, 10 years ago, games were funded essentially by big publishers. You didn’t really see a whole lot that was getting funded out of venture or at an independent level, at least not of any quality or scale. Essentially, it was Microsoft, EA, or Sony who would choose to fund a game. They would either develop it in-house or they would shop it out to a developer. Then the publisher who would now own everything would put it on whatever platform they chose. It was very much a standard way of doing things.

The world has changed drastically. Star Citizen recently became the first crowd-funded title to raise $51 million from its future customers. We’ve all seen what’s going on with Kickstarter. Double Fine has made a name for itself on Kickstarter. One of our partners Frogdice has shipped two titles off of Kickstarter that are doing very well. They’re now on their third Kickstarter.

The funding model is great because it lets people take more risks. Customers get to vote with their dollars. There is no greater validation that you have a good idea than somebody saying, “I will actually put money down on that idea. I want to play that game.” That is the real magic of Kickstarter because if you have such a great idea, you’re going to get people excited about the potential of you pulling it off and them being able to pay for it as a developer. There’s no greater thing anywhere. To another extent, venture has acted as a bridge between the two models. Trion was venture-funded, so were some other companies during that time. The funding model has changed pretty drastically.

When you look at the development model, one of the things that made Kickstarting possible is because the development model has changed so much. 10 years ago, you had only a couple of companies providing development tools that were not really involved with gameplay but were usually more involved with rendering and graphics. You’ve probably heard of the Unreal Engine and CryENGINE. 10 years ago, those were just graphical renderers and weren’t going to help you make games. These days, there is a lot more competition in that space. Those tools have evolved significantly.

One of the biggest disruptors that came to the field was Unity, which created technology to create a game and then, with a push of a button, ship it on five or six different platforms all at once. That woke up Crytek and all of these other companies and they started realizing that they needed their tools do more at better price points. Just to give you an example, old engine licenses back in the day were seven-figure deals, which meant that they were pretty exclusive. If you’re a developer in your kitchen and you want to make a game, you weren’t going to get a copy of Unreal for a million bucks. But when Unity came out, you could get an entire professional license for $1500. Suddenly, you have this power that professionals have had the entire time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds
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