WGE MAG: 25
RG: One of the fundamental things we are trying to change with our systems and these open processes and we are so much in favour of is to make sure if you are in one of our games and your friend is playing another, you would not only get a notification, which is a Facebook standard now, you will be able to click on that link in the notification and sit down right next to me, playing my game in real time.
BH: Like linking game worlds, a party in different rooms?
RG: Right. We have set it up where all of our games have gateways to the other game. You know if you are playing one of our games, you’ll see a table or doorway or whatever to the other game and can wander to another. And we are happy to interconnect with other games, not just our own internal games. But obviously, if your friends are playing competitor’s games, it is in our best interest to make sure we don’t leave our environment in order to play that game, because if we do now we have lost you. But we believe a rising tide raises all boats so that is why we believe that the more open standards increase the ties between you and your friends, respect your friend graph, support your friend graph
both the money trades as well as the assets you find in the game. I have a fascination with free-to-play games where the game is free but certain pieces of armour and some swords, for instance, cost a real dollar fair price. What’s nice about money, in this situation, is that people who create objects do so because they can make money in that game world. So in the virtual world, money separates the good content creators from the bad ones which adds to the experience and enhances the experience for everyone else.
BH: So you will be building your new games in a world of hundreds of competitors quite unlike the good old days of online games decades ago when there wasn’t as much competition.
RG: If you go back to the founding of Origin Systems in the early 1980s, we were in the Top 10. There were few competitors. As the industry matured, it became very obvious that to have access to Kmart game buyers they didn’t want 100 separate game companies to put their stuff on their shelves. At most they were going to talk to three to five companies so if you were not aligned with the biggest
“ I always go back to the real time strategy games from the early days. And I still think there is magic buried there that everyone has since missed despite all the games I have played on my iPhone for hours.”
and the more tools we give you, the user, to do this will make you want to play our games.
BH: So what’s the solution for asynchronous game play across platforms?
RG: We have talked about this a fair bit and it would be inaccurate to say we have a consistent plan as of yet. But the main thing is that you want to be able to hit the pause button like on online games across platforms and games so you start at the same level which is critical to a role playing game and proving a consistent experience across platforms. So it’s compelling to ponder solving this but I am not sure finding a solution is going to happen any time soon.
BH: Now it’s time to talk about my favorite topic, monetization. The Asian companies like Nexon have nailed micro-payments and US game companies are now finally ‘getting it’. What about Portalarium?
RG: We will be doing micro-payments with a system of our own but we are payment system agnostic. We actually think that the standards are by no means mature. I think that real money transactions are one of the more interesting potential features but they require a banking level of protection of
distributor like an EA, you were not going to be able to talk to buyers. And that is why we became part of EA.
Now fast forward to today. Things have changed significantly. If you look at the emergence of Zynga, the only reason they exist is because companies like NCSoft and EA and others didn’t pick up on this new social mobile new wave. But some of these companies are starting to “get it” and are catching up. Still, we believe that there remains is a brief window for new companies to scale quickly and carve out a significant market share in the new channels.
I have the greatest respect and admiration for certain other game developers and I am confident of my own abilities as a game creator. But I would be fearful of going too far afield into very wildly different other areas of creation than RPG. That has an audience. I always go back to the real time strategy games from the early days. And I still think there is magic buried there that everyone has since missed despite all the games I have played on my iPhone for hours. But none have recaptured for me the important subtlety of design in those early RPG strategy games from that first era. I think, in my own mind’s eye, I have a strong vision for how to re-craft that into the modern era of social mobile games. And that is what we are trying to do at Portalarium.
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