grant an independence all of its own. Is that something you recognise? Studios within EA are pitching upwards the product that they want to make. In many ways that’s no different from a start-up pitching to VCs. I actually think that EA recoginises that they need to innovate, there’s a lot of competition, and there’s a lot of new platforms and models for games. We’re fortunate that we have a strong management team who are all gamers at heart, and when they hear about something fun and interesting that will work in the market, they show meanful support for it. I’ve seen that happen both in the US and European studios. We obviously still have our big
blockbusters and our big sports titles every year, but at the same time, what we’re also looking for is the things we’ve done with Wrath of Heroes, Battlefield, and mobile. Those come from people at EA wanting to try something different. EA has the resources to help that happen. True indies can be ultimately beholden to
investors and publisher contracts. EA, with its size, can take bold steps and take big risks.
With Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes BioWare Mythic was able to experiement with a distinct free-to-play model
wonder free-to-play has become so big. It really has democratised the price of gaming. Consumers can now vote with their wallet. If they like it, they can spend on it. If they don’t like it, us developers didn’t do a good enough job making the game.
Mythic obviously applied a fairly distinct payment model to its MMOWarhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes. What have you learned from that? Firstly, we’re continuing to learn from it everyday, and that’s what studios should do. We’re still in open-beta with the game. EA has had a portfolio of free-to-play games for a couple of years now. Battlefield Heroes did it two or three years back. There’s also Need for Speed World Online. Through our Asian offices, with things like FIFA Online in Korea, we’ve had a massive success. The experience out there really began to
drive home to a lot of EA executives what a phenomenal opportunity it offers. As for what we did at Mythic was, we often got asked if we were planning to take Warhammer to free-to-play. There’s obviously been a number of MMOs to do that, and we decided to take a different route. We think there’s an audience that likes our subscription game, and they want to be able to play it the way it is. We didn’t want to damage that, but
there are aspects of the game that we thought would make a great free-to-play game. The thing with an MMO is it’s actually so many different kinds of games. People who play World of Warcraft – and there are millions of them – all play it in very different ways. Some will like crafting, while others will prefer forming guilds, some play solo. We have our instances and areas of our game that we know very well, and we can carve those out. If you want to be successful at free-to-play, your game has to be fast to download, quick to get into the game and really easy to learn. That considered, we decided to carve out scenarios and shrink the game down so we get it to a one-gig download. There are countries out there that still charge for the internet by the hour, and we want them to be able to get into the game quickly. In that scenario if they don’t like it, they
don’t have to pay. If they do like it it’s really interesting to see how much they are willing to spend. It’s a developer’s job to make a free- to-play game something a player wants to get into and finds compelling. That’s why free-to-play encourages quality.
At the Develop Conference you also spoke positively about being acquired by EA. There’s been a flurry of comment from various studios about how acquisition can
Free-to-play really has democratised
the price of gaming. Consumers can now vote with their
wallet. Eugene Evans, BioWare Mythic
Finally, you also talked about a vision of the future where what you called ‘porting of communities’ will be vital for hardware manufactures and developers. Well – look at a game like Ultima Online.
There are people who I have met that have been playing Ultima Online for 15 years consistently. These games draw the most amazing communities together to play, and the players commit to those communities almost more than the game. In a similar way there are people who are
committed to platforms’ communities in almost the same way. There will be people who won’t be
interested in a new platform if their friends don’t have it yet. Those people want to play with their friends, so it will be vital to migrate those communities carefully. That will be key to the success of these new platforms.
08| JUNE 2012
THIS MONTH: The Develop Awards, including the infamous opening video World of Tanks Dynamixyz’s move on games development