Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you are working with third parties who are developing the games, and you are going to publish them as part of your core business, how do you determine which ones you want to bet on?

Scott Hartsman: It’s the kind of methodology you would actually expect out of a game developer because that’s really what we are here.  I was a game developer long before I was an executive. At our core, we are a company of gamers. We love games and we love playing them. So the first thing we do is we test them out internally. ArchaAge, for instance, was in playable form before we signed it. It was more of, “Let’s rally the troops, and see if we are genuinely excited about the kind of game this is going to be. Can we see the success path?” Then we look at the developers. Are they going to have the ability to create the AAA experience that we want to ship?

From there, is this going to be a game that we can see succeeding in our particular territories? Do we know who the users are that we can talk to either out of our existing user base or in the outside world? For example, ArcheAge may seem like a slam dunk because it is fantasy, and Rift was fantasy. At the same time, Rift and ArcheAge are diametric opposites inside of the fantasy world. Rift was very much a cooperative player versus environment kind of game. ArcheAge is the opposite of that. It’s a player versus player competitive game. Even though the genres are similar, the audiences are actually incredibly different between those two games. Can we go out and build up an audience of people who are actually interested in this new type of game versus the standard player versus environment. Once we decide that we can do that, it all comes down to can the game operate at a scale that we need it to operate at? Can it operate efficiently?

One of the costs of online games is the amount of server hardware and bandwidth that’s needed. We want to make sure that games can operate efficiently. Then there’s the how much it costs to localize. Unlike many publishers, we have to support multiple languages. When you start dealing with these MMOs, you’re talking about multiple millions of words and hundreds of thousands that change every month. Keeping all of those languages in synch is an on-going large expense. That’s another factor. I think the biggest one after that is will someone be able to commit to working with a business model that will be fair for our customers? We want to maximize our own revenue for sure, but we want to do it in a fair way and have customers anxious and excited to keep coming back game after game. If all that works out, we sign a game.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve heard a bunch of different points. I’ve heard about scalability and infrastructure. I’ve heard about the cost of localization, the user experience, and business model fairness for the customer. One thing I was expecting to hear, but I didn’t hear, is story. Is that a big determining factor?

Scott Hartsman: Not really. Let me put it this way, if story is a notable element of the game, then absolutely, that goes into checking on the game’s quality. But there are other games that are huge successes that essentially have no story. For instance, I’ll just pick two off the top of my head. League of Legends is a fantastic game, which doesn’t have a story. The world does have its own backstory but the gameplay itself is not about the story. The gameplay was released long before any elements of story were really released. Minecraft would be another one. Minecraft isn’t really a game that has any story to it whatsoever. It’s a game about building and the technology of modifying those worlds. There’s no story at all. For us, story becomes important only to the extent that story is an important feature of a given game. If so, we absolutely do evaluate it in terms of the quality of the game itself.

Sramana Mitra: For your organizing principle, story is not one of the elements? You would do skill-based games and all sorts of games as long as they’re good games.

Scott Hartsman: Absolutely. We’ve evaluated a number of skill-based games for which story is not that big a deal.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds
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