Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are there developer tools out there that a Joe Developer can afford to develop on and are high quality tools?

Scott Hartsman: Yes, these are definitely commercial-grade high-quality tools for a far smaller price point.

Sramana Mitra: How many of these are there?

Scott Hartsman: Unity is the biggest of the big, but at the same time, this is across a bunch of platforms including mobile where there are other platforms like Cocos2D. Then, the technology around HTML 5 is being experimented in mobile especially. Unity is really the big standard bearer.

Sramana Mitra: All of those who are getting on Kickstarter and funding their projects, most of them are developing on Unity? Would that be a fair statement?

Scott Hartsman: Yes, a lot of them are. There’s also Havok and a couple others. It’s actually a little bit of a running joke that Indie used to mean quirky ideas that are too risky for publishers to touch. We’re seeing more out of Indie as I’m using Unity to make a first-person shooter. What’ll happen over time, obviously, is more people will just begin using these tools for making a variety of games.

Sramana Mitra: When it comes to platform choices, what restrictions or constraints does Unity force you into?

Scott Hartsman: That’s a really great question. One disadvantage of that type of system is Unity works the way Unity works. In these other more expensive systems, developers would get the full source code license which meant that they could modify the core engine to suit their game best. With a more commodity-priced system, you don’t get the full source code. Your game does need to work the way Unity works. You don’t have the same level of control if you don’t have all the source code yourself.

Sramana Mitra: But it does let you do both PC and mobile games?

Scott Hartsman: PC, mobile, PlayStation, Xbox, and Mac. You got it.

Sramana Mitra: What strategy does a player like you follow where you’re doing high-quality stuff? You want probably really heavy duty control over your developer platform. I imagine you’re operating with a custom development environment then.

Scott Hartsman: We actually get to work with all kinds of game engines including Unity. Let’s say you’re using Unity, Unreal, or CryENGINE. If you want to put this game online, you need a place to run your game servers. If it’s an online game, you need people who can do billing for you. If it’s a game where you want to actually do micro-transactions, you need a solid micro-transaction engine with a whole lot of features for item catalogue management and sales promotions and so on. If you’re an online game, chances are you’d also want customer service and account support.

What we’re seeing is there’re more people who are making online games using this greater variety of tools. They’re getting to the point where they could go ahead and launch it on their own. But if you’re a person starting out, there’re so many new games out there. Many of them head to Steam right away, which is the biggest digital distributor in the world.

What they’re finding is that there are hundreds of new games coming out every month. What they’re finding is a fair amount of crowding if they’re trying to do it on their own. If they’re doing an online game, they also realize that servers are expensive even in the era of cloud computing. Storage is cheap, but cycles are expensive. Bandwidth is unfortunately not as cheap as it should be. What we’re able to do is we have all these different layers of our infrastructure and we’re able to partner up with all kinds of these different distributors to help augment them in ways where they get to keep their independence and we get to leverage our infrastructure to help them succeed.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, you’re also marketing them to your existing customer base that is already on your system?

Scott Hartsman: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say you’re going to pick these 10 new games that you’re going to distribute on your platform and leverage this kind of marketing on. What is the organizing principle of what games you pick?

Scott Hartsman: We are trying to stay focused on games that are massive and online because that is where we are strongest at. That’s what our customers prefer, and that’s where we get to be unique.

Sramana Mitra: Does that also mean that fantasy is the genre?

Scott Hartsman: No, we only have two games that are fantasy. Defiance is science fiction and Trove is non-fantasy fiction. Genre is not really our thing. What it is for us is online games. The more players, the merrier.

Sramana Mitra: Are you launching these games or have they been somehow validated on other platforms?

Scott Hartsman: I think I should probably get into the split of what it is that we do. Our primary business is the online games business. ArcheAge, even though it’s a published title, is included in that group. That’s our core strength – online games publishing and partnering. In addition to that, we also do digital distribution, but that isn’t the main focus for us. The main focus for us is the online games. That does include some of our partner games also. ArcheAge is in beta right now and we are in various levels of conversations for what the next games will be.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds
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