In the shuffle, some people saw their jobs affected or changed or even eliminated. How is Hi-Rez handling that as part of the restructuring? Are they helping the employees out? We’re doing what we can to help those affected by the changes we’ve made. Some jobs became redundant. It was less than 10% of the total population of the company. We’re doing what we can to make sure those employees land where they need to land.
Hi-Rez has been in the cross-play game for a long while now. What are some of the key things that you had to work out for yourself, which are now easier to do with RallyHere? That’s a great question. So when we set out to build RallyHere as a platform, we kind of went back to how we had structured technology in the past. When we started building games with Global Agenda, and Tribes and then Smite, it was very focused around PC, with consoles coming in after the fact. Even with Smite, when Smite launched on Xbox, and then PlayStation, there was a lag in time between when the patch went live on PC, and the patch went live on Xbox or PlayStation. Over time, we were able to align those timings and retrofit the older version of RallyHere to allow for cross- play, cross-progression and cross-commerce. As we set out to build Rogue Company in Unreal
Engine 4, we wanted to re-develop what we now call the Gen 2 version of RallyHere. We wanted the core pillars of the technology to be focused around cross- play, cross-progression and cross-commerce. So it was built from the ground up, with stateless micro-services that had features to allow for those functionalities immediately upon our launch of Rogue Company. So there wasn’t any kind of side-loading or trying to fix a
problem that didn’t exist in the past to allow these things to happen. It’s all just built into RallyHere. So for example, on each platform, whether it be
Sony, or Xbox or Steam, they have different rules and requirements around cross-commerce, cross-play and cross-progression. The RallyHere system actually takes all of those things into account, and algorithmically will allow or not allow different pieces of content or virtual currency to move within the ecosystem. A great example of that is that PlayStation likes to have their virtual currency stay on their platform, which is totally fine. But once you buy a hat or a cosmetic or an item within a game for those coins, once that hits your inventory, it can then also be on your Xbox or on your PC. We just want to make sure that all the rules are followed across all the different systems, and keep all of our great partners aligned on our goals.
You’ve launched more than a few successful live-service games. What would you say makes the way Hi-Rez has approached free-to-play work out so consistently? Hi-Rez has really taken the time to understand the ecosystem of free-to-play games. Not only is it about the game and the players, but it’s about building a community. We are purpose built and purpose driven to build and foster online communities around our games. That’s really more of the core mission of Hi-Rez, than it is to build really great games. Of course, we want to build great games for
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