VentureBeat » Rift

Defiance developer cuts staff; MMO Rift unaffected

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:05:21 +0000

Trion Worlds recently launched online-shooter Defiance on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Now that the studio has that game out the door, it’s laying off some of its development staff.

Trion confirmed to GamesBeat that it is cutting jobs, as first reported by IGN.

“To best position Trion in a rapidly changing industry, we have reorganized our teams and are expanding our free-to-play offering,” a Trion spokesperson told GamesBeat. “With Defiance, we delivered a great game that more than one million gamers registered to play and continue to enjoy. As we progress from launch to ongoing development of [Defiance], we are adjusting our staffing levels to deliver new content and improved features.”

That new content won’t require the big team Trion had on hand to launch Defiance, which is a sci-fi shooter. Defiance is also a SyFy television program. The game and the show interconnect and affect one another.

Trion claims this move relates solely to the development cycle of Defiance and that these layoffs won’t have an impact on its other projects.

“Rift, and our other titles in development, were unaffected by these changes. We are very much looking forward to the free to play release of Rift and are excited by the other new titles currently in development.”

Rift is Trion’s subscription-based fantasy massively multiplayer online game. It is going free-to-play in June. Trion also has the real-time strategy MMO End of Nations in development, but it hasn’t revealed a release for that yet.

Filed under: Games

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GamesBeat weekly roundup: Google’s game service, EA axes online passes, and a look at The Last of Us

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:31:32 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Google held its annual I/O conference in San Francisco, revealing plans for cross-platform Google Play support, Electronic Arts decides to kill its online pass initiative that forced used game players to pay for multiplayer access, and GamesBeat gets an early look at Naughty Dogs’ upcoming project The Last of Us.

You’ll also find a review for Metro Last light and previews for Scribblenauts Unmasked and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

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Earnings and funding

New content

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Metro: Last Light refuses to let you go (review)

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Filed under: Games

Trion Worlds’ Rift MMO goes free-to-play in June

Jeffrey Grubb — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:30:06 +0000

Paying a monthly subscription fee for one title is the parachute pants of out-of-date game conventions. Even the biggest massively multiplayer online game on the market, World of Warcraft, is shedding subscribers. Developer Trion Worlds is finally responding to the shifting landscape by making one of its MMOs free-to-play.

The company revealed that Rift, its fantasy-themed MMO, will drop the premium pay-to-play model on June 12. Every dungeon, every zone, and every level will then open up to anyone who signs up for an account.

“We have been listening to feedback from our players and watching the continuously developing MMO community, and we are now ready to launch Rift as a premium free-to-play experience,” Rift creative director Bill Fisher said in a statement. “After taking our time and planning a careful transition, we are very excited to bring an enhanced game experience to everyone.”

To generate revenue, Trion Worlds will expand its in-game Rift store with a completely revamped roster of items. That includes new mounts, wardrobe items, and consumable boosts.

Players can still subscribe to a Patron program that offers benefits like a permanent experience boost.

“As a gamer’s game, a super-fun and fair experience is of the utmost importance to us,” said Fisher. “Players will have the opportunity to buy customizations and boosts to heighten their play experience; however the best gear in the game will always have to be earned through playing Rift.”

The June 12 switch to F2P will also accompany the game’s 2.3 update. This patch will introduce a new zone and world event.

Filed under: Games

Raptr’s rewards improve Rift’s daily users by 470%

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:22:51 +0000

Trion Worlds has pumped new life into its fantasy online role-playing game Rift: Planes of Telara by adding in-game rewards from gamer social network Raptr. The results of new rewards: 470 percent more daily active users and 58 percent longer play sessions.

After five years of development, Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion launched Rift in March 2011. By August 2011, Trion said more than 1 million people had played the game, and in January 2012, the company said it had generated $100 million in revenue. In November, Trion teamed up with Raptr to revitalize Rift’s community.

The campaign integrated Raptr Rewards — where members can get certain kinds of in-game rewards — to acquire and retain new gamers. The tiered virtual rewards produced results as the number of new online players “skyrocketed,” according to Raptr’s Tom Curtis. The goal was to get new people into the universe and give Rift players more reason to return.

The companies create four rewards, including a free copy of Rift with a one-month-free subscription. This reward was for Raptr gamers who had reached the “experienced” rank in other role-playing games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, World of Warcraft, and Torchlight II. If the players met this requirement, they could get quick and easy access to Rift. To get more rewards, Raptr gamers had to play Rift and reach different ranks within the MMO, including “newbie,” “elite,” and “experienced.” They could do so by logging more time in the game. In exchange, they got rewards such as “Smithy Goggles” and the “Exotic Spider Mount Spindrel.”

Rift daily active user numbers grew 470 percent among Raptr users. Existing users played 58 percent more per day, or 6.3 hours.

Filed under: Games

Trion to publish XL Games’ massive online game ArcheAge in Western markets (exclusive)

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:00:12 +0000

Trion Worlds has signed a deal with South Korea’s XL Games to bring the big-budget fantasy role-playing game ArcheAge to Western markets. It will publish the game on its Red Door online commerce platform in North America and Europe. The deal represents a major bet on the massively multiplayer online gaming business, which is competing fiercely for the attention of consumers alongside rivals such as social, mobile, and console games.

The title has spent six years in development, and its creator is Jake Song, who made the smash hit online game Lineage. It has been in closed beta tests for two years and has launched in beta testing in Korea. For Trion, the deal is a big coup, said Lars Buttler, the chief executive of Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion, in an interview with GamesBeat. He described ArcheAge as having an “incredible amount of polish.” Trion aims to launch the game later this year in North America, Europe, Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand.

Trion is the publisher of Rift, another fantasy MMO that also took about six years to make. Buttler said that the game generated more than $100 million in revenue for Trion in its first nine months, and the title will soon be coming out in China, one of the biggest MMO markets. Trion also developed an online games publishing platform dubbed Red Door, which it can use to publish games developed by other companies. One of the premier games coming up is Crytek’s Warface, a modern combat shooter that is expected to be published this year.

ArcheAge might seem similar to Rift, but Buttler says the two are different. ArcheAge is divided into two continents. The western one (Nuia) is designed to appeal to Western gamers, while the eastern one (Harihara) is targeted at Asian gamers, who prefer different art styles.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Trion Worlds, a company who is setting a new standard for gaming by embracing original, high-quality [games] on a dynamic connected platform,” said Song, the CEO and founder of XL Games. “We are impressed with Trion’s track record as they have consistently delivered against an unwavering vision; we are confident partnering with Trion will help bring ArcheAge the success it deserves.”

Buttler described Song as a “perfectionist in the best way.”

The addition of ArcheAge will give Trion a busy spring, with Rift China, ArcheAge, and Defiance (an open world sci-fi shooting MMO that is debuting in conjunction with the launch of a SyFy channel show on television starting in April) all moving into large-scale beta tests that precede official launches.

“We could have half a dozen launches this year,” said Buttler. “We are on an amazing inflection point now. We think [Red Door] will be the winning platform.”

Buttler also said that company will publish its online games on “any connected device.” His company is operating “games as a service,” where you launch a game and continually update it.

In ArcheAge, players choose a continent and then launch a virtual life in the online world. They can design their own characters and engage in all sorts of activities such as farming, flying, trading, building ships, creating underwater gardens, fighting naval battles, and more.

“It’s all you expect from a triple-A game,” he said. “In this category, you have to see World of Warcraft as competition.”

Tencent will introduce ArcheAge in China while GameOn will publish it in Japan. GigaMedia will publish it in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. That’s as close to a global launch as any MMO has ever had. Trion will translate the title and make changes to suit Western audiences.

Buttler described Red Door as a true web-based platform consisting of the back-end infrastructure and monetization tools for a huge online game. It has a development platform aimed at speeding up publication and a server architecture designed for dynamic events, where changes happen to the game world on the fly.

Meanwhile, Buttler said that the company has delayed the launch of its End of Nations real-time strategy MMO. The title was made by external developer Petroglyph Games in Las Vegas. But Petroglyph’s contract expired, and Trion decided to bring the game in-house to finish it, said Buttler. That resulted in layoffs at Petroglyph at the end of 2012, and Trion absorbed a number of its developers. That team is now making the game “more accessible,” said Buttler. That means the team is making it easier for players to get started more gently.

“It will take longer, but it was the right decision to bring it in-house and polish it more,” he said.

But the delay isn’t a problem since Trion will be more than busy publishing other titles in the first part of the year, said Buttler.

While Rift was tied to the PC, future titles will run across platforms. Defiance, for instance, will be published simultaneously on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the PC. Over time, Buttler said the company will embrace smartphone and tablet platforms in a bigger way. Right now, Rift has companion apps, but those don’t let you play the same game while on the run.

Trion has a big war chest to publish huge games. The company raised $85 million in early 2012. Trion has more than 500 employees.

“We created a wish list from day one with the start of Red Door,” said Buttler. “We got Warface from Europe, and from Asia, we got ArcheAge.”

Here’s a trailer video for ArcheAge.

Filed under: Business, Games

The best MMOs of 2012

Kat Bailey — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 22:58:46 +0000

Want proof that the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game industry is in a state of extreme flux? Look no further than ostensible World of WarCraft-challenger Star Wars: The Old Republic, which lasted all of seven months before going free-to-play. The times are certainly changing.

Profound disruption, however, can have its advantages. More than ever, underdog MMORPGs and other online games are finding niches in which they can survive and thrives for years. Even apparent busts can right the ship with some smart content and a good free-to-play model.

With that in mind, here are five great MMOs from 2012.

Planetside 2

Welcome to the future. That’s pretty much all we need to say about Sony Online Entertainment’s Planetside 2, which marries a free-to-play model with a full-scale shooter that’s nearly on par with big-budget games like Call of Duty. Sony Online obviously spent a lot of money on this game. That it’s free-to-play says a lot about where online gaming is headed.

More impressively, Planetside 2 really is free, which is more than can be said for many F2P titles. Free players and premium players are more or less on equal footing, with the main differences being in weapon efficiency. It’s a smart move on the part of Sony Online, since skewed balance tends to be felt rather keenly in games such as these.

Apart from being a free-to-play shooter, Planetside 2 is worth experiencing simply because it’s so huge. True, it’s bewildering at first. You’ll spend your first few minutes flailing around, desperately trying to figure out what all the icons mean and what you’re supposed to even being doing. But once you get your feet under you, the firefights that form and dissipate across the massive battlefield are consistently impressive.

At this early juncture, Planetside 2 is certainly still experiencing its share of growing pains, and it feels a touch floaty compared to other shooters. But nevertheless, Sony Online has found a standard-bearer for both its own offerings and free-to-play at large.

World of WarCraft: Mists of Pandaria

The decision to add in the Pandaren race is a transparent attempt to bring in new players and perhaps appeal to a younger demographic. But in practice, Mists of Pandaria has turned out to be very much for longtime fans of the series.

Mists of Pandaria’s feature list is familiar — a new continent, a new race, and a new class. But Pandaria seems less interested in introducing a world-destroying bad guy like Cataclysm’s Deathwing than reigniting the spark of what made the World of WarCraft so appealing in the first place. The continent of Pandaria is everything we’ve come to expect from the series over the years — lavishly detailed and full of nods to games of the past, all rendered with a winking sense of humor.

The actual content is likewise meant to recapture the attention of the old-guard. Aside from a host of challenging new dungeons, Mists of Pandaria brings with it a pet battling system much like that of Pokémon. For longtime players, it’s a great opportunity to dust off all those pets from BlizzCons gone by.

In general, you can say the same for the rest of the game. It’s not an expansion that’s apt to win many new fans, but World of WarCraft seems to be past that point. For those players who have been collecting pets and following the lore from the beginning, Mists of Pandaria is delightful.

The Secret World

At first blush, The Secret World seems like a pretty traditional MMORPG with a modern setting. In this case, it’s set in a world where every myth is essentially true — Lovecraftian demons, vampires, the Illuminati, and all the rest of it. But from there, it goes in some very interesting directions.

One way in which The Secret World shakes things up is in its open-ended battle system. In essence, The Secret World is something of a card game, with your deck of skills determining your role in a party. The goal is to allow players to avoid being pigeonholed into one role, and it’s rather successful in that regard.

The other way The Secret World stands apart is in its approach to its world. Some of have called it a “puzzle MMO,” and that description isn’t far off. Even before The Secret World came out, its marketing was placing riddles around the Internet. The resulting collaboration has been rather interesting to watch.

Unfortunately, like many Funcom titles such as The Age of Conan, The Secret World has been dogged by issues of content and various bugs. Having recently dropped its subscription requirement, however, the hope is that The Secret World will soon be able to reach its considerable potential.

Rift: Storm Legion

Along with World of WarCraft, Rift is one of the very few subscription-based MMORPGs still kicking around. Newcomers Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World shifted away to new models rather quickly, while Rift has managed to hold on. Storm Legion offers a hint as to why.

Simply put, Storm Legion is more proof that Rift is run by one of the best teams in the business. Extremely polished for an MMORPG release, it roughly doubles the size of the world while further building upon the dynamic content that helped define the game early on. Events take place on a grand scale, occasionally overwhelming entire zones. It’s a spectacle certainly worth seeing for yourself.

Also worth noting is the way in which Storm Legion addresses replayabiilty, which was an issue in the original game. Storm Legion’s expansion areas include a rather substantial route split, meaning a whole different set of content depending on which you choose. For those who aren’t extremely interested in traditional raids, the added replayability is a nice plus.

Like Mists of Pandaria, Storm Legion has flown under the radar a bit. The very fact that Rift has managed to last this long as a subscription-based MMO, however, suggests that Trion is doing something very right. The high quality content of Storm Legion is proof.

Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet intended Guild Wars to be the embodiment of disruption in the MMO space — an RPG that broke all the rules and redefined the genre. You can argue whether they have succeeded; but either way, Guild Wars 2 is still a terrific MMORPG.

Pretty much everything Guild Wars 2 has done has been to thumb its nose at the likes of World of WarCraft. Dedicated healers? Gone. Traditional loot distribution? That’s gone, too. Guild Wars 2 ends up sacrificing some depth for being as free and organic as possible; but in that, it ends up being far more welcoming to new players than many of its ilk.

Thanks in no small part to these changes, a vigorous marketing campaign, and strong word-of-mouth, Guild Wars 2 has arguably received more attention than even Mists of Pandeira. Though perhaps not the revolution that ArenaNet was hoping for — it’s still very much a classical MMORPG in form and substance if not in style — it is still strikingly beautiful and well executed. It is the perfect MMO for a genre in flux.

Filed under: Games

How major MMOs are celebrating Christmas in-game (gallery)

Sebastian Haley — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 19:00:43 +0000

Like Halloween, Christmas is a great time to hop in your favorite massively multiplayer online (MMO) game. Not just because your friends will actually have time to grind rare loot and experience with you but also because developers tend to go a little crazy (and generous) around the holidays. Unique items, characters, monsters, events, and locations — the more the merrier!

GamesBeat has rounded up what some of the biggest MMOs are doing for this year’s Christmas celebrations, but feel free to add in your own in the comments below.

Filed under: Games

The Oculus Rift might bring a virtual-reality renaissance to gaming

James Pikover — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:00:03 +0000

We all have a view for how games will look like and be like in five, 10, and 20 years from now. I expect some technologies, like 3D, to lead to holograms. Others will go in directions unknown. One upcoming technology aiming to change how we both play and see games and virtual reality as a whole is the Rift from Oculus. The Long Beach, Calif.-based company successfully completed its Kickstarter campaign with just under 10 times the amount it set out to make, a relatively meek $250,000 specifically for developer units and not consumer-grade peripherals. Yet with big names like John Carmack and Gabe Newell — founders of game-development houses id Software and Valve Corporation, respectively — openly claiming that the Rift is the best virtual-reality device in existence, it comes as no surprise that game developers and players everywhere have an interest in the peripheral’s future.

What is the Rift?

Photo by Kyle Orland, Ars Technica

The Rift is a pair of virtual reality glasses that completely covers the eyes and reproduces what people would normally see on a computer monitor or TV screen. With LCD displays, the Rift produces images at a resolution of 640×800 per eye (1280×800 altogether). The company has stated, however, that the consumer version, shipping in 2013, will have a higher-resolution display. Thanks to the two screens, the Rift fully supports and integrates 3D in what the company claims is the most realistic 3D gaming experience to date.

Many individuals agree with the assessment, but the device isn’t for everyone. Venturebeat writer Evan Killham played id Software’s Doom 3 BFG Edition, the first game to work with the Rift, and told me that while the technology worked, ”I realized that I was starting to feel disoriented and actually got a little clammy. Frankly speaking, playing the Oculus made me feel like shit.” His trouble with the device isn’t unusual for 3D technologies, though as an avid 3D gamer, he notes that the difference between the 3D of the Rift and devices like the Nintendo 3DS is extreme. He further added, “I told the developers afterwards about my queasiness, and they said that the Oculus would ‘take some getting used to.’ I’m not sure how long they expect people who have experiences similar to mine to stick it out since I’m pretty sure most people will stop as soon as they get uncomfortable. Even if they’re not worried about puking all over a prototype.”

My own experience with the Rift was very different. I had no difficulty with the use of 3D but also didn’t find the effect as incredible as the group using the Rift before me. I believe the technology certainly works, especially when compared to other 3D tech like Nvidia’s 3D Vision glasses, though with one major caveat: that developers program games for 3D properly. Even the Doom BFG demo ends with a paralyzing cinematic that I was told Carmack himself apologized for because he didn’t program past that section of the experience. I ripped the headset off quickly, fully aware of the bad 3D effects. That is to say, as good and realistic as the Rift is, it can be equally terrible in the wrong developer’s hands. What’s more impressive, however, is the head tracking.

Head Tracking plus 3D equals true game immersion

Head tracking is a technology that tracks movements and combines those physical motions with in-game action. Most previous attempts to combine gaming with motion tracking of any kind, even including popular devices like Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation Move for the Playstation 3, have a noticeable delay. What makes the Rift unique is the combination of 3D-video-and-motion tracking (specifically the head tracking component) that is one-to-one. So when wearers turn their heads, the game recognizes the movements, adjusting the display in real time with no noticeable delay. It enables players to actively look around the game environment, something previously found only in extremely expensive or military-grade devices. Even in Doom BFG, a recreated eight-year-old title, I had fun turning my head to look around. In a strange way, the Rift turned this inexpensive and old game into the most immersive gameplay experience out there.

With head tracking, players can do anything from simply looking around the game space to actually controlling character movement. It all depends on how developers use the technology. For Doom BFG, id Software has the Rift designed so individuals play with a gamepad but move their heads up and down to aim vertically. Side-to-side aiming can also be done with the head mount, but it isn’t the main function. The difference between Doom BFG with standard 3D and using the Rift aren’t comparable. I played both at the Penny Arcade Expo and, frankly, you might as well play two separate games. Turning, slightly looking around, and full motion control elevate games with the Rift into a class of their own.

Filed under: Games

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GamesBeat weekly roundup: Richard Garriott, PAX Prime 2012, and insane Japanese commercials

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 18:45:07 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Capcom reveals its approach to sequels, Steam removes a sexually explicit game from its Greenlight service, and Epic Games opens a new office in Seattle.

You’ll also find reviews for The Walking Dead Episode 3, Mark of the Ninja, and Legasista, as well as a comparison piece on affordable gaming glasses.

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Trion Worlds readies Storm Legion expansion for its Rift fantasy online universe

Mobile news

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Trion Worlds will soon have multiple gargantuan online game worlds (interview)

Dean Takahashi — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:00:17 +0000

Few game industry chief executives have been as successful at raising money as Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion Worlds, the publisher of massively multiplayer online games including Rift. The company recently raised $85 million in equity financing, and it has launched a third-party publishing platform for MMOs produced by other companies.

Trion successfully launched its Rift online fantasy game world last year, and it gained a substantial audience. But it didn’t take down World of Warcraft, the leading online role-playing game world with more than 10 million paying users. Still, Trion is moving on with the coming launches of End of Nations, Defiance (a joint project with cable TV channel SyFy), and an expected third-party publication deal with Crytek’s Warface. These games represent some of the biggest bets in gaming today. We caught up with Buttler at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show in Los Angeles, Calif. last week. Here’s the edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: So how’s the show going for you?

Lars Buttler: Very good. I think this is by far our biggest show and the biggest excitement. Two years ago, we had one game fully playable: Rift. Last year, we had two games fully playable on the show floor: Rift and End of Nations. This year, we have four, so every year we have doubled, you know? Knock on wood. And they’re all amazing. They’re all awesome games. They’re all original intellectual property. Different genres. Different development models. Different business models. Different partnership models.

GamesBeat: Do you count Crytek’s Warface [pictured right] as one of those? [Crytek and Trion showed the game together at the show but haven't announced a publishing deal yet].

Buttler: We want to focus on the game. We still haven’t said anything about the structure. But it’s a great partnership, and we’re going to talk about this more later.

Yesterday, we had the actors for Defiance here. We had Grant Bowler, who plays Nolan on Defiance. We had Kevin Murphy here, who’s the showrunner. He was also the showrunner for Desperate Housewives, an Emmy winner. He’s amazing. We had tons of TV crews here yesterday and today. The whole time. It’s super exciting.

The Rift expansion resonates insanely well with the fans. If there was one thing left in Rift that we wanted to address, it’s the size of the world. Because when we launched, we couldn’t catch up with eight years of World of Warcraft. But now we’ve more than tripled the size of the world with stunning content — really amazing.

And End of Nations is now extremely polished. You can play it and check it out. It’s amazing. We can show the metagame now as well — how everything you do changes the global battlefield. It’s basically nothing that anybody else has ever done before. End of Nations is revolutionary. It was even more revolutionary then, but again, original IP, the world’s first triple-A MMORTS [editor's note: massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game]. Defiance is an MMO shooter — triple-A quality for Xbox, PS3, PC — that alone has never been done before. And then transmedia tie-ins and so on. It resonates incredibly well.

GamesBeat: I played Defiance, and we all jointly attacked the giant shrub or whatever [laughter].

Buttler: Yeah. People are playing it outside on Xbox and PS3 and PC. It’s such an excitement at a show that’s generally more focused on sequel, sequel, sequel of packaged-goods games. To have four, original, premium online games that are different genres all really polished and great — I’m very happy. Exhausted but happy. And so is the entire team, I think. It reflects really well where we are.

GamesBeat: Logically, would you be happiest to make the most money with something like Rift that’s internally produced? As opposed to some of the third-party types of models?

Buttler: I’m incredibly happy with all the different structures. I think they’re all ground-breaking, and I think they can all be really profitable for everybody who’s involved. The SyFy relationship, where they’re a co-development partner and they produce the TV show, where they announce publicly that this will be the biggest thing they’ve ever done, including the marketing spending, in the 20-year history of SyFy — I think that helps everybody. If you want to create amazing new IP, being able to go all-in on the marketing side, on the production values for the game and the show, and then let everybody know about it and cross-promote and so on — I think that’s huge. And so all the different structures we have are really sorting out to be win-win situations.

In the traditional packaged-goods world, you have this master-slave relationship between the publisher and a developer. We don’t believe in this for services. They’re more like marriages. You want to be sure that the teams — on the publishing side, on the development side, everybody — everybody’s part of this, they’re in it for the long run, and they’re excited after six months, after 12 months, after two years, after four years. It is so important to think of a game as a service. If you think packaged goods, you might serve a big launch, and then after three months, everybody is gone. That’s a big problem.

GamesBeat: Were you disappointed that Rift didn’t actually take down World of Warcraft?

Buttler: We said throughout the history of the company, we want to make amazing properties that people really love. We want to revolutionize the genre and innovate in it. We want to build really good businesses that can pile on top of each other. And Rift was a breakthrough to world class. It really put us on the map. It allowed us financially to do so many other things that we’re now doing. So it did everything that we expected it to do. And quite frankly more. And we’re not done yet. I said that we would slowly and certainly just stay at it, stay at it. We’re still better at content updates than anybody else. Our expansion pack will be amazing. We’re not done yet.

GamesBeat: I always thought that Blizzard would, by virtue of mathematics, start to lose people, but they haven’t really lost at that kind of rate that some people thought.

Buttler: I mean, I think the time investment in the game and the friend connection in the game are very strong. I think that’s the key, and they know it, but you never know what happens, right?

We have a very, very loyal audience. It gives us a very good foundation to make the game better and bigger and more exciting all the time. It is profitable. We launched in Korea recently. We’re bringing it to China, to Taiwan. There is a lot of anticipation and excitement in China right now for Rift because it’s so polished, it’s so content-rich already, and with the expansion pack. What we’ll be launching is an even bigger game and more exciting game than we started with here. For me, Rift is 10 out of 10 in terms of what we expected and what it delivered. Maybe more.

GamesBeat: Are you hoping to bring every one of these games into China?

Buttler: I would assume so. It’s such a big market for online games. They’re very sophisticated, and they’re very demanding. Mostly what they’re playing today is a copy of a copy of a copy. And they churn through it really quickly. The Chinese operators and publishers are really looking for great innovation as well. It’s a cutthroat market there. Through partners, Asia is also hugely important for us. So I wouldn’t expect us to be operating our own games in those markets any time soon. But so far those partnerships are great

GamesBeat: How is Red Door proceeding? Are you expecting more of it?

Buttler: I said there will be lots of interesting announcements in the next three or six months. Like we always say, this is not an open platform yet for anyone. We want to do this very carefully and stay at the triple-A quality bar. And then, maybe over time, it’s becoming more open. We’re in discussion with the best of the best. And we will talk more about that.

GamesBeat: That SmartGlass demo that Microsoft did with Game of Thrones and being able to follow on the lap — it seemed to make the transmedia a little easier.

Buttler: I have to check it out. I have to admit I had no chance to even see it. What exactly is it?

GamesBeat: You would be watching a TV show on your screen, and then on your iPad, you could look at a map. The map would show you where the scene was taking place. As it progressed, they changed the location or something. It would jump automatically to the next location, and so you could still see information about the scene, and you could see this map that would be changing over time. That was kind of…I don’t know, it seemed like a neat way to do transmedia…. But it also looks like smartphones and tablets are something that could be interesting to get into.

Buttler: We have always said, we think that all the connected devices, they are direct windows into the world, or they can be windows into parts of the world. Maps and programming guides and auction houses, making you productive while you’re on the go and so on.

For us, you create these beautiful worlds. They’re completely alive. They have big communities. And then you have all these other options to interact with the world through a TV show or through companion apps, through mini-games, anything. That’s the ultimate vision of these living worlds — they’re beautiful, they’re stunning, they’re big communities, and any other way that makes sense, you can connect with it. We never think of making a stand-alone mobile game, for example. That makes no sense for us. Or making a stand-alone Facebook game. Everybody does that. But using all these devices, including even the TV, to be another window, another angle on this experience, that’s really exciting.

GamesBeat: It looks like some big bets are starting to pay off.

Buttler: We have creative products, but we have to stay paranoid [laughter].

But so far, so good. The reception we’re getting here is amazing. We’ve already been nominated for tons of awards. Actually, several outlets nominated all three games. So they’re now competing with each other, which is awesome. It’s a portfolio, right? We’re very excited.

I cannot tell you which one I like more. I love them all. They’re all amazing. We try to push the quality bar for all of them really high. The innovation, the originality, the factor of, wow, this is really something exciting and new. Not again the same thing. If I see a sequel number six, you know, which is not rare here, right…? And some people try to hide it. But it’s still really version eight or 10.

I always think this is worse than movies. Why not make something great and amazing? Of course, I think it has something to do with the problems that the packaged-goods model has in general. And the market is declining, and I think even used markets are declining for the first time. They all go to connected gaming.

GamesBeat: This longer console transition probably helps the PC side and your business?

Buttler: But you’re also seeing the recession.

I think there’s so many factors: the ubiquity of broadband, the explosion of connected devices that can all be gaming devices, PCs getting cheaper and cheaper — there’s so many factors. Most of the world being on PCs anyway as the lead device? And those are the parts of the world that become more important all the time. You have a consumer market in China now, you have a bigger gaming market in Russia. Germany has always been PC. But it’s now, of course, connected PC.

I think there’s so many factors, and I think virtually every one of them says, the future is connected gaming. Games as a service. Not packaged-goods software. And it’s not just packaged-goods software distributed online. It’s really new and exciting experiences, much more social, much more dynamic, live, evolving, big meta-games, and so on. And then even transmedia.

We’re excited that everybody else is now trying to have their own platform after being dependent on somebody else’s. Or evolving their quality bar upward. This is where we tried to be from day one. Super quality on our own platform so we can guarantee great quality and a great experience and scale our business and so on.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your tickets here.

Filed under: Games

Trion’s Defiance is one story told in an online game and SyFy TV show (hands-on preview)

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:00:18 +0000

Trion Worlds’ Defiance is one of the most ambitious transmedia projects, a story that stretches across multiple media, ever made. Debuting in April 2013, the online game world is being jointly developed in tandem with a science fiction TV show created by the SyFy entertainment network. We recently got a hands-on preview of the game where the creators described the depth of the story for the first time.

Trion is one of the most well-financed startups in gaming history, with one massively multiplayer online game world launched and several more in development. The company recently raised $85 million in equity financing and it has launched a third-party publishing platform for other MMOs.

The TV show and game are so intertwined that they share common characters who move from one media to the other. As an example, the main characters of the Defiance game cause some havoc in the futuristic city of San Francisco and they have to hightail it out of town. The TV series’ opening pilot shows the pair arriving in the remade city of St. Louis, where there is an uneasy truce between alien and human settlements.

“I cannot express how excited we are after about four years of talking about the concept and developing an amazing game to be able to show it today,” said Lars Buttler, chief executive of Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion Worlds, at an event in Santa Monica, Calif. “What excites me is that it is not another sequel of a packaged-goods game. It is a revolutionary project.”

He added, “It’s a triple-A MMO shooter for the console and PC and a premium online game, a live world, and an epic TV show. In a world where people get excited about cow clickers and the fifth game in a series, Trion and SyFy are doing something that has never been done before.”

Dave Howe, president of the SyFy entertainment network, said, “We have been a top cable network for 15 years, and this is the biggest and most exciting project I have ever been involved in.” Here’s a link to the making of Defiance trailer.

The story of the game is epic. Seven alien races arrive on Earth because their own planet has been destroyed. Those aliens don’t get along, but their peaceful move to Earth turns hostile after a terrorist act. The attack destroys the alien “Ark” ships, which carry “terraforming” technology that is loosed upon the world. The terraforming technology destroys much of the human civilization, and a war ensues.

After decades of war, an uneasy piece ensues because two commanders — one human, one alien — defy their orders in order to prevent huge civilian deaths. As the story begins, humans and aliens live side by side in small towns on a terraformed Earth. The citizens seek to find and trade items of value, such as alien artifacts from the mother ship, dubbed the Ark.

The game combines a third-person action shooter with the persistence and scale of a massively multiplayer online game. Like Trion’s other game, Rift, Defiance will enable dynamic events, where the fabric of the game’s landscape can change during special events, such as an alien invasion of the human territory.

While the TV show is set in St. Louis, where the only recognizable structure is the famous arch, the game is set in San Francisco. The events in one town can affect what happens in the other. The story of the show and the game will influence each other and evolve over time. The artifacts, vehicles, weapons, fauna, and animal species are the same across the two media.

“The game and the TV show constantly reinforce each other,” said Mark Stern, president of content for SyFy. “It is a high stakes story of courage and survival, a sweeping action-adventure with intimacy and a character drama with heart.”

The SyFy network has recruited some big stars to be in the show, including Grant Bowler (Ugly Betty, True Blood); Julie Benz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel); and Jaime Murray (Dexter, Spartacus).

Like in other MMOs, you can create your own custom character, dubbed an Ark Hunter because you hunt after artifacts from the Ark. You can interact with thousands of people at t he same time and level up as you fight enemies and earn rewards. You can get a bunch of weapons, armor, and special abilities over time. And you can go on missions, deal with emergencies such as surprise attacks, and explore the world.

As you arrive, your job is to establish law in a Wild West frontier town with different factions of humans and aliens. In the town, there is a new gold rush as prospectors seek the energy of the Ark. Both human architecture and alien designs exists side by side.

I was able to grab an all-terrain vehicle and drive around in the Marin Headlands, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The game was still in an early state as I could collide with another ATV without getting damaged. I stopped at one point and began shooting a bunch of monster crabs that came charging at me in waves. Then I saw a directional icon on the screen that signified a dynamic event. I drove the ATV over there and saw a bunch of humans attacking a gigantic alien monster. We had to shoot the thing’s underarms until its arms fell off and then vanquish it for good. It was a high-adrenaline game, but it wasn’t a particularly riveting or emotional battle.

“We wanted to wait until we had something meaty to play,” said Nick Beliaeff (pictured above), head of development at Trion. “We’ve focused on having something fun to play and a good show to watch without compromising the quality of the other.”

The world of San Francisco is huge in its own right, and the game will expand to include other regions of the San Francisco Bay Area over time. If all goes as planned, the story will never end. Stern said shooting has begun for the two-hour TV pilot and “it is really coming together.” The team has worked on shows or movies such as Battlestar Galactica, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Sin city.

Check out our video interview with Nick Beliaeff of Trion below and our screenshot gallery.

The third-person shooter Defiance will debut on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in April 2013.

Filed under: Business, Games, Media

World of Warcraft still on top with 10.2M subscribers in first quarter

Rob LeFebvre — Wed, 09 May 2012 21:00:54 +0000

In the massively multiplayer online game space, World of Warcraft has long been the juggernaut to beat. In a press release today, as well as in an call with investors, Activision Blizzard reaffirmed that WOW continues to hold the top spot as the number-one subscription-based MMO with 10.2 million subscribers as of the end of March.

The release of the beta for upcoming expansion Mists of Pandaria on March 21 is most likely a big part of this, as MMOs see an increase in activity around large add-on releases. With a beta test in play, the expansion is poised to help grow the subscriber base in the wake of competitors like number-two MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic as well as Rift and Tera. In response to a question about the subscriber base, the company also noted that a large content update at the end of the fourth quarter helped maintain what they call “player engagement.” In addition, Activision Blizzard reports a renewal of their license with NetEase to distribute World of Warcraft on mainland China for the next three years.

During the call today, Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, also tipped his hat to the publisher’s continued success in terms of Diablo III pre-orders, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm expansion, and an expected unnamed new MMO.

Filed under: Games

Activision Blizzard’s quarterly earnings report predicted to shine come Wednesday

Rob LeFebvre — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:00:17 +0000

Activision Blizzard will report its first-fiscal-quarter earnings on Wednesday, May 9, after the market close. This will come two days after its arch-rival Electronic Arts reports its earnings, and the two together will paint a better picture of the grudge match between EA’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and Activision Blizzard’s flagship online game World of Warcraft.

Activision Blizzard will, of course, want to show that its juggernaut money-maker, World of Warcraft, has kept its status as king of the hill in the massively multiplayer online (MMO) space, while also proving that the hit Call of Duty franchise has financial legs with Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops II, and the new Elite multiplayer service.

Wedbush Securities’ analyst Michael Pachter expects Activision to report results at or above its current estimates for revenue, at an estimated $570 million with an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.08. This is higher than the consensus of other analysts, who expect to see revenues of $552 million and an EPS of $0.04. Pachter also expects to see an overall decline in Activision Blizzard’s publishing revenue of approximately 30 percent, better than that of the larger market decline of approximately 40 percent as reported by market-research firm NPD Group.

Pachter notes that this shortfall should be made up for with new Call of Duty Elite subscriptions (an estimated $22 million), the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 downloadable-content pack, and $30 million in accessories for Skylanders (a game with separately purchased collectible toys), which is not accounted for by the NPD Group.

Activision Blizzard share valuations dropped a bit on Thursday, closing at $12.66 per share, while remaining valued at approximately $14.31 billion. While this shows the publisher to be much larger than rival EA (valued at $5.26 billion), there are still factors that can affect even a big company.

Pachter points to an increasing reliance on Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, noting that the Activision arm continues to commit more and more financial resources to the military first-person-shooter (FPS) franchise, while Blizzard focuses more on the upcoming Diablo III, Starcraft II expansions, and its successful MMO. In addition, says Pachter, while the futuristic Black Ops II game should help the Call of Duty franchise maintain its market share, it could well succumb to FPS fatigue as the market continues to become saturated with similar titles.

Activision could, of course, exceed even these measured positive expectations. Pachter says additional success could come from the multiple releases by Blizzard, if Call of Duty packaged goods do better than expected at retail, and if the upcoming Skylanders expansion, Giants, outperforms the original game. Finally, Pachter predicts that Activision Blizzard’s stock price will go as high as $19.00 per share, which is about 16 times the company’s expected 2012 earnings per share.

Traditionally, Activision Blizzard has maintained a strategy of culling its titles ruthlessly to focus its resources on what works. While it maintains a leadership position in online console games, it hasn’t experimented as much as EA in the realm of social, mobile, and free-to-play online games. EA hasn’t had huge successes in those areas, but at least it has spent a lot of time learning lessons. Those new markets represent the big expansion opportunities in the games business, while the core console market — where Activision Blizzard focuses most — has been shrinking. How Activision Blizzard and EA manage these industry-wide transitions will determine who comes out on top in the long run.

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has shown weakness in recent quarters, dropping to 10.2 million paying subscribers compared to past highs of around 12 million. The Old Republic may have taken some users away. But other online game worlds such as Trion’s Rift (which is soon bound for China) and En Masse Entertainment’s Tera are also likely to peck away at the big game.

Filed under: Business, Games

Trion Worlds teams up with Shanda to take Rift online game to China

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:30:26 +0000

Chasing World of Warcraft in its biggest market, Trion Worlds is announcing today that it will launch its Rift online fantasy role-playing game in China in a partnership with Shanda Games.

In an interview, Trion Worlds chief executive Lars Buttler said that the move is the next logical expansion for Rift, which garnered more than 1 million registered users in its first four months on the market after its debut in March 2011. After five years of development, the launch of Rift was one of the first real challenges to Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, which has ruled the massively multiplayer online game market since 2004.

WoW generates more than $1 billion a year for parent company Activision Blizzard, which reports its earnings today. But Buttler said that European and U.S. revenues for Rift have topped $100 million.

The China expansion is an attempt to put more pressure on Blizzard, but it is a pretty big undertaking. Buttler said that Shanda was his first choice for launching the game in China, where government rules require foreign online game publishers to partner with a domestic Chinese game company. He said that the exact launch details and pricing haven’t been set yet.

On Feb. 1, Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion also announced that it would offer “Rift Lite,” a version of the game that will allow anyone with a Trion account to experience the first 20 levels for free. The move is similar to one Blizzard Entertainment took in June 2011 with World of Warcraft, which has more than 10 million paying users. Rift currently costs about $30 at retail and $15/month for the subscription plan.

Buttler said that he predicts that 2012 will be a great year for game companies, with a lot of expansion and transformation as online gaming gathers even more momentum.

Buttler declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal, but he said that it is one of the “biggest licensing deals ever in China.” He said the partnership is a broad one that will allow Shanda to launch an exclusive version of Rift that is localized in Chinese. He said that Trion will learn a lot from the deal, and was proud to show that online gaming isn’t just about Asian games moving into the U.S. market. He believes the appeal of games such as Rift, which has a dynamic environment and ever-changing storyline, is universal.

“We are setting the standard,” Buttler said. “This is gaming at the deep end” in contrast to shallow online games on social networks. Alan Tan, chief executive of Shanda Games, promised a “blockbuster launch” for Rift in China.

Trion recently raised $85 million in a strategic round of growth equity financing. Later this year, Trion plans to launch a third-party publishing platform dubbed Red Door. Other Trion Worlds gaming coming soon include End of Nations and Defiance. The company has more than 500 employees.

Filed under: Business, Games

Trion Worlds announces Rift Lite, offers first 20 levels of online game for free

Stefanie Fogel — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:50:18 +0000

Video game publisher Trion Worlds is trying to draw new players into its fantasy-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game Rift by offering “Rift Lite,” a version of the game that will allow anyone with a Trion account to experience the first 20 levels for free. The move is similar to one Blizzard Entertainment took in June 2011 with its hugely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft.

Rift currently costs about $30 at retail and $15/month for the subscription plan. Removing the trial program’s time limit will no doubt benefit more casual players who want to experience some of the game’s content at their own pace before making a commitment. A whole wave of online games are moving toward the free-to-play model, but those at the premium high-end part of the business are still trying to make the subscription model work for long-term players.

“In the past ten months, Rift has evolved at a breakneck pace, through seven massive updates that set new expectations for live MMOs, in features, in content, and in service,” said Scott Hartsman, executive producer of Rift and Trion’s CCO. “We think a Lite edition with no time limit is the best way for players to see what an amazing experience Rift continues to be.”

In addition to Rift Lite, the 1.7 “Carnival of the Ascended” patch features PvP improvements, in-game weddings, a new master mode dungeon called Caduceus Rise, overhauls of the game’s expert dungeons, and better endgame equipment.

Filed under: Games

Trion Worlds raises $85M for its online gaming platform business

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:03:04 +0000

Trion Worlds has raised $85 million in strategic growth financing as it prepares to launch its online gaming platform for third-party massively multiplayer online games. That means that one of the biggest bets in gaming just got bigger.

The financing comes from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan as well as current Trion investor Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, a division of media firm Bertelsmann.

Trion plans to use the money to further grow its online games business, which includes titles like Rift, a fantasy role-playing game that takes on the dominant title World of Warcraft and features dynamic events, or rifts, which change the structure of the game world.

“We are thrilled about entering this exciting period of growth with our investors,” said Lars Buttler (pictured), founder and chief executive of Trion Worlds. He said the new backing was a “massive endorsement for Trion.”

More than 1 million players activated Rift accounts in less than four months. The game is an example of the high-quality MMO content that the company wants to continue to build. Upcoming titles include the real-time strategy game End of Nations, developed by Petroglyph Games. That title is expected to launch early this year. Another title is Defiance, an online action game developed alongside a SyFy Channel TV show.

Trion also recently disclosed a new platform, called Project Red Door, is a way for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company to make a lot more money than it otherwise would. The two-pronged initiative will have a consumer platform on the web and a publishing platform for game makers.

If it can start publishing third-party games in the first part of 2012, Trion could become a much bigger player in the lucrative online game market. The new strategy shows that Trion is making one of the biggest bets that a startup has ever made in the video game industry. Prior to the $85 million raise, Trion had already raised more than $100 million since its founding in 2006. It has more than 500 employees.

From a business view, the third-party platform makes sense because it allows Trion to amortize its technology investments over a much broader base of games. It also reduces Trion’s dependence on its own internally produced games.

Red Door will roll out in the spring of 2012. Buttler said in an earlier interview that Trion is talking with other game developers and publishers so that it can line up games that are “living worlds,” or MMOs that take heavy investment. It’s almost as if Trion is launching its own console, hoping to attract a lot of game companies to support it with their own games. Those who adopt Red Door could save years in development time, Buttler said.

For consumers, Trion will deliver a single, trusted destination site for connected games with rich social features. Players will be able to discover and download content and enjoy a suite of flexible account services, Buttler said.

Trion has game studios in Redwood City; San Diego; Austin, Texas; and London. On top of that, it has tapped Petroglyph Studios in Las Vegas to make End of Nations, which will be published as a free-to-play title, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods.

The company’s other investors include Time Warner, Comcast, Rustic Canyon Ventures, Trinity Ventures and DCM. PricewaterhouseCoopers stats that show online games are growing at 21.3 percent a year, compared to console games that are shrinking in the U.S. Buttler said Trion can take advantage of the latest trends in providing dynamic services — where a game can be updated on the fly in response to user feedback — as well as modern monetization, analytics, and business intelligence tools.

Buttler hopes to make Trion’s site into a hub that consumers can trust as a brand that represents quality. Buttler says he doesn’t think of the Red Door platform as a social network for MMO players. Rather, it’s a destination for “games as a service,” more like Microsoft’s Xbox Live online game platform for the Xbox 360 game console.

The risk for Trion is that it could be disrupted as well. While it focuses on the “deep end of gaming,” casual game makers such as Zynga are attracting huge audiences at the “shallow end.” Zynga can give away its games for free and charge for virtual items, undercutting the prices of subscription games such as Trion’s Rift. But Buttler said Trion remains flexible enough to test new business models as well to see what resonates with players. The beauty of subscription revenues, he said, is that the revenue doesn’t dry up after just a few months, in contrast to console games. And, compared to social games, the average revenue per users (ARPU) is far bigger.

Much of the success of Rift is due to the Trion platform, the underlying technology that uses a distributed computing architecture. The servers were designed to work in a dynamic fashion. If the game needs more functional tasks, particularly in a certain part of the world, Trion can simply add more servers to handle tasks such as physics or artificial intelligence of player data. That way, the game can support a huge influx of players into one part of the world, as can happen when Trion stages an invasion of the world. When the world changes, Trion simply changes its servers. There is no reason to patch a gamer’s own machine.

Anyone who adopts the Trion platform can use those same kinds of features and live services in their own games.

Filed under: Games

Trion prepares to host third-party games on its online gaming platform

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:00:54 +0000

Game maker Trion Worlds, which successfully launched its first major online role-playing fantasy game, Rift, back in March, is now unveiling a game platform to publish games created by other companies.

While Trion will continue making massively multiplayer online games such as its upcoming End of Nations and Defiance titles, the platform, called Project Red Door, is a way for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company to make a lot more money than it otherwise would, said Lars Buttler, chief executive of Trion, in an interview. The two-pronged initiative will have a consumer platform on the web and a publishing platform for game makers.

“We’re doing this because we see this massive shift in entertainment, which is transforming traditional content into connected services,” Buttler said. “The future of interactive entertainment is incredibly connected. Our job is to transform games into living worlds.”

Buttler said that the company raised more than $100 million and hired more than 500 employees since 2006 so that it could launch premium quality MMOs. But at the same time, it built a publishing platform that other companies can use. From a business view, the move makes sense because it allows Trion to amortize its technology investments over a much broader base of games. It also reduces Trion’s dependence on its own internally produced games.

“Our own games are just the tip of the iceberg,” Buttler said. “The true business significance of our company lies in the Trion platform.”

Red Door will roll out in the spring of 2012. Buttler said that Trion is talking with other game developers and publishers so that it can line up games that are “living worlds,” or MMOs that take heavy investment. It’s almost as if Trion is launching its own console, hoping to attract a lot of game companies to support it with their own games. Those who adopt Red Door could save years in development time, Buttler said.

The company’s investors include Time Warner, Comcast, Bertelsmann, Rustic Canyon Ventures, Trinity Ventures and DCM. Buttler cited recent PricewaterhouseCoopers stats that show online games are growing at 21.3 percent a year, compared to console games that are growing much more slowly. Buttler said Trion can take advantage of the latest trends in providing dynamic services — where a game can be updated on the fly in response to user feedback — as well as modern monetization, analytics, and business intelligence tools.

“This is a huge evolutionary step in the history of our company,” Buttler said. “Our platform is built and we are opening it up.”

Buttler said that Rift, Trion’s first game launched earlier this year, has been a great success. The game scored 84 out of 100 on Metacritic, a review aggregator. Trion continues to update the game on a regular basis. The game sold more than 1 million copies in under four months, and the average gamer plays for four hours a day. So far, players have spent 1 trillion minutes in the game and completed 1 billion quests. Players have tweeted more than 1.5 million times from within the game. Within six months, Trion has launched five major updates.

“We consider this to be the most successful MMO launch in the West,” Buttler said. “We have grown faster than World of Warcraft (the market leader) did in its early days. Rift has proven the technology and given us a revenue stream we can count on.”

Much of that success is due to the Trion platform, the underlying technology that uses a distributed computing architecture. The servers were designed to work in a dynamic fashion. If the game needs more functional tasks, particularly in a certain part of the world, Trion can simply add more servers to handle tasks such as physics or artificial intelligence of player data. That way, the game can support a huge influx of players into one part of the world, as can happen when Trion stages an invasion of the world. When the world changes, Trion simply changes its servers. There is no reason to patch a gamer’s own machine.

Anyone who adopts the Trion platform can use those same kinds of features and live services in their own games. Next year, Trion will launch End of Nations, a real-time strategy game, and Defiance, a first-person shooter game co-developed with the SyFy Channel. After that, Trion hasn’t said what else it will do.

Trion’s Red Door will be an end-to-end publishing platform that can be customized for each partner.

“The only thing you need is a talented game team,” Buttler said.

Filed under: Business, Games

Can Trion pull off a third-person shooter MMO?

Matthew Lynley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:04:11 +0000

Get ready for a new experiment in online gaming: A game universe that’s tied directly into a television show.

Trion Worlds on Wednesday showed off a preview of Defiance, a persistent open-world shooting game that takes place in the same universe as an upcoming science fiction television show, also called Defiance, that will air on the SyFy channel. The company announced the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Calif.

The tie-in means that any event that’s significant in the world, such as a cataclysmic event or a change in the balance of power, will take place in both the game and the series. But the worlds are loosely tied: The game takes place in San Francisco and the series takes place in St. Louis. As a result, the game and series directors can efficiently coordinate events between the two parts of the experience without having to worry about the logistical nightmare of having them tied together all the time. The game and series will be closely tied together, but separate enough to be avoid major consistency headaches.

That also means that the show’s directors can decide to send a character from the series over to San Francisco, and that character will appear in Defiance’s in-game world. Players can interact with that character before he or she heads back to St. Louis to rejoin the cast of the show.

Characters on the show will also talk about some of the most powerful and well-known players in the Defiance world too, said Robert Hill, senior producer at Trion Worlds.

“A character might be like, ‘I just had the most amazing experience in San Francisco,’ and you can be like ‘I was there!’,” Hill said.

Defiance is a third-person over-the-shoulder shooting game like Gears of War. It’s set in the not-too-distant future when Earth has been attacked and partially terraformed by aliens. The open world is part of the San Francisco Bay Area, so it will feature landmarks and other indicators that show the world is still Earth — though it’s lush with alien vegetation and life forms.

Like other MMO games, there’s a progression system that lets characters get experience points for completing objectives and killing enemies. They eventually level up and unlock new skills and abilities and get more health and armor when they earn enough experience points. Some of the skills in the game include creating holograms to distract enemies, lassoing enemies with an energy rope and pulling them nearby or cloaking in a stealth field and sneaking by enemies.

The combat looks very fast paced and it isn’t like some cover-based over-the-shoulder shooters that can sometimes leave players stranded behind walls while they wait for the right time to strike. Players can dash, shoot, jump and jump a second time while in the air in order to avoid attacks from enemies. It seems like the game revolves more around “twitch” gameplay, which relies on players’ skills and reflexes rather than progression in the game to make them more powerful.

The game looks great for an MMO — but that’s to be expected from Trion Worlds, which also runs Rift, another MMO. Rift also looks gorgeous and the worlds are very dynamic and feature a lot of moving objects and environmental effects. The Trion Worlds employees demoing the game blitzed through three or four quests throughout a ten minute demo, so it seems like the progression is very quick and players will be able to cover a lot of events in a short amount of time.

It looks like the game is not relying on “instances,” which other MMO games typically use on to segment the world and make it a little more bearable for the servers on the back-end. For instance, in World of Warcraft, the system transfers players over to separate servers when they are running through a dungeon with five or more people. This use of separate instances helps the back-end servers because they aren’t constantly bombarded with information from everyone all at once. It also means the players get access exclusively to bosses in an instance rather than having to camp out and wait for a boss to re-spawn.

In contrast, Defiance looks like it has players rushing around the world and jumping in and out of groups on the fly to complete quests. When players run by another group completing a quest, they can quickly drop into that group and help complete the quest and then continue on their way. They can also turn and take potshots at the other players if they’re feeling particularly malicious.

The same is true for the games’ large-scale events, called Arkfalls. Those feature large alien-like structures crashing into the group in the open world. All players in the area take place in the Arkfall and have to fend off aliens throughout the event. The Arkfall in the demonstration had players gunning down a giant terraforming pod to spawn a boss. The players then have to take down the boss to get access to the game’s most powerful rewards, and they are split evenly among all players that took place in the Arkfall. It looks like there is theoretically no limit to the number of players that can participate, compared to the limits in other games like World of Warcraft, which cap raids at 25 players.

All that being said, the combat demonstrated at E3 today seemed a little clunky. The movement of the target reticule wasn’t smooth and the hit detection on enemies looked a bit dodgy. When they shot at an alien’s head, the graphic would show up on the alien’s legs and torso even when it was the first shot fired at close range. A lot of that probably has to do with the early nature of the game. The shooting seems a little less refined when compared to other shooters like Gears of War and Uncharted. It also seemed like the skills they were using on-screen weren’t really helping much and the players were just blasting through the game with guns blazing and there wasn’t much strategy involved.

A few companies have taken a crack at creating an open-world MMO that features twitch-based gameplay and shooting. Sony was an early candidate with Planetside, a first-person shooter open world that launched in 2003, to moderately good reviews but was knocked off rails by a weak expansion pack that frustrated gamers. While the Trion team demoing the game was showing it on both an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 simultaneously, the games will all have discrete worlds. That means that PC gamers will only play with other PC gamers, Xbox 360 gamers will play with Xbox 360 gamers, and so on and so forth.

“Those decisions are only up to the platform holder,” Hill said. “Right now we can do cross-platform play but we don’t expect to have that at launch.”

The game will launch relatively close to the television show, but Hill wouldn’t give any additional details about when it will launch. It will go into a closed beta before it finally launches.

Filed under: Business, Games

Trion Worlds shows off giant battles in End of Nations

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 26 May 2011 15:00:50 +0000

Trion Worlds’ Rift massively multiplayer online game is barely out the door, having shipped in March. But the Redwood City, Calif.-based online game publisher is already showing off the polished game play of its second major online game, End of Nations.

For fans of this genre, Trion is promising massive battles where online players can team up by the dozens in intense combat sessions. If the game is a success, Trion could find itself in the rare position of being able to charge a monthly subscription for a perpetual game. This kind of game is extremely expensive to produce, and Trion has raised more than $100 million to build multiple MMOs at the same time. This one is being built for Trion by Las Vegas-based Petroglyph Studios. I recently got a chance to see it up close and play for an entire round of combat.

End of Nations is a real-time strategy game for the PC. It is set in a sci-fi universe that is a full-fledged persistent online world. You have a bird’s-eye view of the battle and can control your battalions individually or in groups. The battle unfolds in real time, where you make your move at the same time as your enemy and the action plays out in front of your eyes. As you can see from the images, the graphics are pretty and very detailed.

The big thing you can see from these battles is the large scale that has never been done before with online-based real-time strategy games. Trion has figured out how to create pretty 3D graphics and make them scale to dozens of units fighting on a detailed battlefield. That’s not easy to do, raising a question of whether you need a really hefty computer to play this game. (They haven’t set the required computer specifications yet.)

But computing power aside, the game manages to immerse you in a giant battle. In our demo, I teamed up with three other players to take on the computer-controlled player, which was protecting a base of gargantuan proportions. There was so much action and so many details to pay attention to that it was hard for me to follow it all at first. You can activate all of your units with a single click or move a single unit.

The dashboard tells you which units are down and need repair or have to be respawned. When the units respawn, you have to move them back to the front line where the action is, since the game is all about amassing as much firepower in a critical location as you can. You also have to coordinate with your team to get the right kind of units — artillery, tanks, aircraft — attacking in the right fashion. My team didn’t really cooperate, but we managed to get pretty far in taking down pieces of the enemy’s fortress in this “player vs environment” battle. Time ran out before we could make much of a real assault, though.

You can play the game solo, but Trion says that as many as 50 players will be able to play the game at once in epic conflicts. That will be a sight to see. It may seem chaotic, but that fits in with the story of the game. In the 21st century, the world economy has collapsed and a single superpower, the Order of Nations, has emerged to restore order by force. Revolutionaries can’t stomach the tyranny of the order and have launched rebellions against the totalitarian enemy on a global scale. Players can log into the game, fight battles, customize their armies, and rise through the ranks over time.

The game is expected to debut sometime this year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

Filed under: Business, Games

Will Trion's Rift be cataclysmic for World of WarCraft?

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:00:46 +0000

Rift is one of the biggest bets in video game history. Trion Worlds has been building the fantasy role-playing online game world for almost five years and has raised more than $100 million to build the game and the dynamic online platform that hosts it. The game will finally debut on March 1 in North America and March 4 in Europe. The beta has been out for a while and Trion Worlds announced Thursday that more than 1 million players have registered to play it. Yesterday, the players who pre-ordered the game started playing in advance of the launch date.

To put the registrations in perspective, that’s about how many users Trion would need to generate $180 million in subscription revenues a year, in addition to selling copies of the initial game. To topple the market leader, World of WarCraft, Trion would need to get more than 12 million paying subscribers a year. That’s a tall order, but Trion chief executive Lars Buttler has focused on making a game with the highest quality and a number of new innovations in a bid to outdo WoW. If anyone can topple WoW — and many have died trying — they get a license to print money.

The big feature of Rift is that it is dynamic. Users can log in one day and find that their beautiful city or bucolic town is under an attack via a “rift,” or a hole in the fabric of the world through which enemy forces can invade. As the rifts open up, the players have to band together and, like people helping each other in a fire brigade, put out the fires one by one. The world can thus change more often than its rival, World of WarCraft, and offer endless variations of content.

We caught up with Buttler at Trion’s headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

VB: You are getting close to being done.

LB: Yes. March 1st is the North American retail street date. March 4th in Europe. We also have a head start on February 24th for everybody who pre ordered the game and we have the beta going. So we are actually in the middle of launching. You can’t really say that March 1st is the launch anymore. You should think about how it starts and then keeps continuing as we add more content.

VB: So do you have anything to disclose — like how many people are in the beta?

LB: (We now know there are a million registrations). I mean I can tell you that for a Western online game beta, we have a historic first in many ways for a new game. We are still in beta but the audience is seeing much more responsiveness on our side than you have typically seen. We have issued a lot of patch notes, interacted with people on the forums, responded to the feedback. We want to demonstrate in beta what a live game should be like as you play it and as we run it.

A real massively multiplayer online game should have epic events that bring people together. It should have unexpected things happen, and it should also react and respond to what people like or dislike. This has always been part of what we discussed when we said what a premium video game franchise should look like in the connected world. We always had a big component of this being truly dynamic, a world that changes as you play it. We are proving in the beta that we can open up a “rift” in the world and completely change the environment.

VB: What are some examples of what is happening n the world?

LB: There is so much happening. We introduced the automatic broadcasting of achievements out of the game into the social world, on services such as Twitter. This was always something we said a top video game for the connected era should have. People spend hours and hours in the world and their achievements and their status in the world is really important to them. And we always felt that it’s not only important to people they meet in the game but to their larger social circles and their friends. So we have integrated an automated Twitter function. If you go to Twitter and you look at number sign Rift (#riftfeed), you see about ten tweets a second out of the game. You basically tweet your achievement and you can also tweet a screenshot and a picture with it automatically.

VB: Do you use another company’s technology for that or did you guys do that in-house?

LB: We did it all in-house. And we use Twitter’s platform. This is going extremely well. So you know we have huge numbers of people playing, and they talk to their friends obviously. Word of mouth is incredibly important to us. And now they also tweet to all their friends about it.

At the end of the day, we are a new company with a new idea and we decided to make the beta so big and so open because we have a terrific product and we want people to know, and we want people to talk about it, and we want people to tweet about it. So typically betas have been small and people had to pre-order the games to even get into the betas apart from the last push and open beta. Our beta events after the third or fourth waves of people have been so big, there has been virtually no barrier to get into it, and we don’t believe in keeping anything secret. If you have a great product, let people experience it.

VB: And the crowds have not hurt the game’s performance?

LB: The architecture is holding up with the live events. These are all invasions, live invasions going on in the world where someone opens a rift and all of these beings from another world invade. There are so many players in one place. This is massively social. It’s so epic.

VB: What sort of customers are in the beta? Are they WoW players?

LB: That is a very good question; I think we have everybody in the game. We have people who are WoW players, EverQuest players, Lord of the Rings Online players, and Ultima Online players.

There are also lots of new players who come to us from more of the free-to-play audience and are trying their first real high-quality game. It goes across the board.

VB: And are you resetting the game after the beta is over, which means all the players start over?

LB: Yes, so when Head Start begins on February 24th, everybody starts from scratch to be fair to the people who didn’t have the time or who didn’t participate in the beta. It will cause some hardships. I say this smiling because some people are already in love with their characters and with their achievements. I think everybody is cool with it, as it is also standard procedure in MMOs.

VB: And what else are you doing to make sure it takes off? How are you advertising?

LB: I am sure you saw the ad that went incredibly viral and was discussed all over the internet. It was a television ad, but it was essentially discussed everywhere. It shows the opening of the Rift and then some dramatic in-game footage, and then it ends. So this was obviously discussed everywhere and it said, “We are not in Azeroth anymore.” (That’s a reference to the world in World of WarCraft).

VB: It went viral because it mentioned Azeroth?

LB: Yes, exactly. I mean obviously because our world looks great and it says we are in a different world and we are maybe in a more dangerous place. People started to send it around to comment on it, tweet about it, Facebook about it, and so yes so we have TV ads running now on Sci-Fi Channel, on G4 on Adult Swim. It is all starting now. The Sci-Fi Channel ads started a while ago because they are a close partner of ours and the rest of the networks that are relevant to reach out. But TV is a small percentage of our advertising. The bulk is online advertising, which gives us the ability to very clearly measure our customer acquisition cost. Our net to acquire customers is the entire internet space. We are not bound to a particular social network or any particular site. We can advertise wherever our audience is, and we are actually doing it right now. We are casting a very wide net and we measure everything. I mean it is getting cheaper and cheaper to acquire people, which means they must like the game and we are finding the right sites to advertise on, which is fantastic.

Also, our Facebook site is growing exponentially so we are using social networking incredibly creatively and in a very powerful way. But we have more and more fan sites, very strong fan sites in North America, in France, in Germany, in the UK. Every week we have more, and I can tell you honestly that all of this exceeds our own expectations and goals that we set at the beginning. Every single item is exceeding our expectations.

VB: You are ready for lots of people to come on?

LB: We did a big beta event, let lots of people play, and that was a big stress test for all of us. We collected every bit of feedback that we could and then we went to work. What we could fix quickly, we fixed during the beta. And what took a little more thinking or a little more engineering we basically fixed in between betas. We are trying to preserve an absolute balance in the game. In large events, the balancing can’t be tested except with hundreds of thousands of people.

Our platform is built to allow us to react quickly, and the team is so focused on responsiveness and on delivering the best consumer experience, I think the betas allowed us not only to create a strong following for the game but also to create friends and followers of the company of Trion.

VB: What does it take to get users excited?

LB: We believe there is kind of recipe to create a hit franchise premium game. For 2011 and beyond, what you still need to have is a big game draw. Whether you are doing a role-playing game, strategy, action, shooter — you still have to have premium quality. It has to be complete in terms of game systems. It has to have highly polished game play, stunning visuals, and online play.

But then on top of it, we believe the games need to be fully dynamic. This means the game is constantly evolving, getting better. The game can be unpredictably exciting and extremely responsive to what users want. That has a lot to do with the technology choices we made and the dedication of our team. There are so many aspects to being a dynamic game. We believe a big online game has to be massively social. Your game architecture has to accommodate massive events. People get an incredible kick out of these epic events. You should have digital revenue sources and you should have a clear cross-platform strategy.

VB: Do you want to introduce digital revenues in this game, like selling virtual goods?

LB: It’s not really something that we want to aggressively pursue at the beginning just because you buy the game and you subscribe to it. But in agreement with our audience, as they want more things without disturbing the game balance, there will be additional opportunities to buy digital goods just like other games have done. But we clearly don’t want to destroy the high quality user base and audience and experience that we have for Rift right now.

VB: You have said there is a shallow way to connect people and a deep way?

LB: At the end of the day, there is absolutely no ignoring the fact that gaming is literally going through a revolution. You cannot call this anything else I think at this point. And it is happening in casual games first because it is always happening in casual games first; it is easier to pull off. There are shorter development cycles and you can experiment more. But this change is also happening at the deep end of gaming, the premium games, the video games, the core console games. You have all these stand-alone game publishers trying to adapt to online. Then you have new platforms like Facebook and mobile. We have come along to create content for the connected world, and that does not mean the PC only. The industry is now creating content for every connected device. Games will stay the same, but they will be distributed in completely different ways. They can be downloaded or streamed. It’s still the same game. If you are making a game in 2011, don’t even try to do it without the connected strategy. You need quality, great graphics, great game play, and you need to be connected.

VB: Where do you go next?

LB: The beauty is that Rift is a great showcase for our platform, but it is just the first product. We go much further in exploiting our platform with End of Nations, where we actually create a connected strategy game franchise. And we are working on a third major game in our partnership with Sci-Fi. We are seeing that the disruption of the game industry is coming to the deep end of gaming where we are focused. If you are building a AAA gaming franchise for the connected era, you want to use the Trion platform. We have filed for a dozen patents in this space, not just for video games but for creating dynamic synthetic worlds.

VB: Have you said how much you’ve spent? The company has raised more than $100 million.

LB: No. I have heard it said that it is a $50 million game. That is out there in the public. I did say that. Our other games leverage our platform. We have about 300 people and about 120 worked on the core Rift team. There is significant outsourcing across the globe too.

VB: And you have not gone on the record as saying you are doing a World of WarCraft killer?

LB: I have never said that. We will have nothing to do with that. We are intrinsically motivated to build the best product we could possibly build. As a matter of fact, I think that our mission as a company, our core purpose is to deliver the most exciting, most emotionally engaging entertainment experience in the world. I mean that doesn’t include killing anybody or fighting anybody else. If we meet our goal, that takes care of the economic equation. You don’t think about the economics first, but the quality first. If you start the other way around, you can fall flat.

Filed under: Business, Games

Will Trion World's Rift online game kill World of WarCraft? (interview)

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 13:00:29 +0000

No one at Trion Worlds has promised that the company’s first fantasy role-playing online game, Rift: Planes of Telara, will be a World of WarCraft killer. Indeed, many makers of massively multiplayer online games have tried to knock out Blizzard Entertainment’s online subscription game, but WoW has ruled for six years and it just got a major upgrade with World of WarCraft: Cataclysm, which sold 3.3 million units in a day. But that doesn’t intimidate the folks at Trion Worlds, which has raised more than $100 million and has more than 200 people working on a variety of MMOs. Of course, beating WoW is the ultimate prize, since WoW has more than 12 million paying subscribers and it generates more than $1 billion in revenue per year for Activision Blizzard.

Rift is in the midst of closed beta testing, and I’ve had a look at the beta version up close. The graphics are beautiful and the unscripted dynamic events, where the world can change in an instant, are working as advertised. We had a chance to catch up with David Reid, head of marketing at Trion Worlds in Redwood City, Calif. (and former marketing chief for Microsoft’s Xbox 360) about the upcoming game, and here’s what he had to say:

VB: You’ve been working for a long time on this game — more than five years. What are you doing with the beta testing now?

DR: The beta process is about testing scalability. How many players can we support? It’s about getting some feedback from a number of real users so that we can tune some of these last knobs. But in a lot of ways, beta will be almost like a launch for us. We know that a number of MMO companies have made the mistake of going out with the beta with a product that really should not have been characterized as a beta. They paid for it. We are not doing that kind of a beta. [Laughs]

VB: You’re getting close to release?

DR: We feel like we are very close to release-level quality. We are tuning. We are polishing. We are scaling.

VB: So after five years, you’re not making money on this game yet.

DR: Not yet, but really darn soon. What day of the month is it?

VB: How will the launch proceed?

DR: Here’s probably how it works. The best game companies launch their newest titles with a presale program. That is the point where the consumer can put money down for the game. Technically, when that happens, the game won’t be formally live. It will still be in testing. But we are going to treat it as if it were the real launch. We will have 24/7 support in all languages. We will treat these players as if they are paying customers. We’re very close to that right now. We’ll open it up to the public for a large beta test soon.

VB: At that point, you will have tens of thousands of people playing?

DR: Absolutely. I can’t disclose specific numbers of the beta, but we are in the midst of some very large beta test events now and we just keep scaling it up. The first beta event was just the data center in Dallas, and so Europeans were in the beta, but they were playing on Dallas servers. We are opening a data center in Amsterdam for the European users. Operationally, that’s very important for us. We’ll bring up the different languages over time.

VB: The whole idea of a “Rift” is that you can open up a portal into the world and flood it with monsters. Then the players all go to that area and fight off the invasion. How many people can you concentrate in one place in the world?

DR: That’s a question with many potential answers. Because there’s the geographic point of it and then there is the hardware server part of it. The servers have multiple sections, or shards. Right now, we are figuring out how many people on a shard is too many. But what is unique about our game is that you can have a very large number of players all in one place and you can interact with all of them. You don’t have to worry that you can’t find your friends because they are in a different region or a different server. When a Rift opens, it is a dynamic event. The Rifts can happen in any geographic location and you can have lots of them at once. We have shown in our beta testing that all of that is working properly. We will ramp this up to an industrial scale.

VB: Is the game designed to be split into shards at all?

DR: It is a game with shards. But we are being very careful about not locking people to particular servers and things like that. MMOs have always had that kind of problem. MMO’s, by their nature, are incredibly social experiments, right? And people in Europe want to play with people in North America, and people in North America want to play with people in Australia, and that’s just how these communities have been built online as opposed to a pick-up basketball game in your neighborhood.

So if you lock those servers and you’re not letting those people play with friends, then you are, by definition, fracturing those communities. We have to do this well because we are going into a territory where there are well-established brands that already have communities rallied around them. We want to win with the people who play these games regularly. If they have a guy in their group who is in New Zealand, you have to bring them all into the game together. This is something we’ve been really focused on.

VB: So you can manage this game by throwing in more servers when you have peak usage?

DR: In full transparency, I’m probably not the ideal guy to answer that level of question. But what I can tell you is that we do have with both the Dallas data center and the Amsterdam data center. We have servers operating in a beta process and we can fire more of them up as the population grows. We can add more firepower to the servers if there are more people or if we are going to amp up the events in the game, such as create sharper artificial intelligence, better physics, or more Rifts. One thing we are looking at is how many Rifts should be occurring in a given zone of the game so that a player can feel like they have a lot to choose from. What level of that is fun? One thing we want to communicate to the player is that they will start with all of the features that they expect to have in a AAA quality game. You have your zones, dungeons, quests, character classes, fashions, monsters — and on top of that is this dynamic layer where the Rifts open in the world and change the environment of the game dynamically. The dynamic layer is what causes the social play, because you have to rally with your friends to stop the Rifts. It impacts your decisions as a gamer and the decisions of the groups of gamers as well.

VB: What is your marketing message these days about your game being the “WOW killer”?

DR: Well, to be clear, no one in Trion has ever said that, and I don’t think anybody in Trion ever will. If you look at the lineage of great MMOs, starting with Ultima Online, you see generational improvements. Ultima Online was the first commercial success in the MMO business, but it was two-dimensional and weighted toward players fighting other players. That wasn’t much fun for the new players. EverQuest came along with 3D animation and players fighting against the environment. It was a real commercial success and it was prettier. Still, it had its bugs. World of WarCraft came along in 2004. It was an improvement on what came before and it was very polished. Within that game, you could have some great solo experiences. Other games have tried to emulate it.

We think of Rift as the next step in that evolution of product. We’ve taken a look at what World of WarCraft and others in that generation of MMOs have done and done really well. There were really innovative things that happened in Warhammer Online and in the Age of Conan. But those two products, in particular, didn’t, of course, capture everything that a World of Warcraft player was looking for. The players didn’t migrate from WoW.

In part, Rift is our love letter to the players who played the games that came before us. We love those games and we think this is the next generation, much like players move on to a new console with every generation.

VB: So WoW just went through that big change with Cataclysm. I guess you can do the same kind of upgrade just about every day?

DR: Yes. And that is a bit of what the engine of the Rift game and our End of Nations game is about. For all of the interconnected play that you have in an MMO, those worlds are still remarkably static. There isn’t much to do until a patch or a giant expansion comes out. And what the portal mechanic in Rift does is add a level of real life variability. It’s the first time really that in an MMO, you have the beginnings of emergent game play of things that will happen in this game that the developers aren’t able to predict and that the players are going to have a real hand in deciding. If a Rift opens on a town, you can help save it or you can wait for it to do its work.

VB: Is the audience for these games as large as ever, or are the free games sucking out a lot of the paying players?

DR: It has been fun to watch the industry evolve. We sit right here next door to one of the world’s largest publishers (Electronic Arts). Those kinds of publishers are putting a lot of focus on what I’ll call the shallow end of online gaming: the casual, the mobile, the social. Those are all really fine businesses, but at the end of the day, we still think that it is the gamer who spends the most money especially in tough economic times. These are people who will forego other things and will eat ramen noodles for weeks if that’s what it takes to pay for their Xbox Live subscription or their MMO subscription. That audience is very demanding. For them, you have to build a great, immersive product. In the past couple of years, the MMO businesses have not served this customer well. They have launched games that needed more time or innovation or just better quality.

We are capitalized well enough here that we’re not making that same mistake. As I said, for us, the beta test is really like a launch in a lot of ways. We’re not bringing a half-finished product to market.

VB: You made a reference to All Points Bulletin, which failed miserably after five years of development. You don’t interpret that failure as bad for the whole MMO market?

DR: No, we don’t. I think a lot of people could see those things coming and it wasn’t just APB. Final Fantasy XIV had a very rough start. There are other games over the past few years. It isn’t that the market isn’t there. It just comes down the fact that if you have quality product, gamers are willing to pay for it. But don’t try to convince them your product is high quality and charge them a high price if it’s not. That is the road to death.

VB: Are you tempted to play around with different business models because the industry has changed so much?

DR: Sure. There is a lot to think about there. It is, you know, from a business perspective, a very exciting time. Innovation is important, in both the game, the marketing and the business model. With Rift, we will use the standard approach. We will sell a premium product in digital form as a download or in a retail store. We will charge an appropriate price and have a monthly service fee that you pay after your first 30 days have passed.

VB: You have developed a flexible server infrastructure for your game. How will you make use of that?

DR: We can do updates. We will do some handcrafted design and launch it on a regular basis. But we can also change just a bit every single day, every couple of hours, whatever, as players react to and encounter dynamic content. Now, we have big plans on this front because this is part of what’s really new and special about what we’re doing. Those plans are nothing I can talk directly about yet, but I will tell you that it is something that makes you think hard about how the customer encounters your product and experiences it. There are critical moments in a consumer’s mindset of, ‘Am I having enough fun to continue paying for this game?’ and we think very hard about when to uncork more awesomeness in our dynamic layer of things to satisfy a very difficult customer who is used to some very high quality product.

VB: I saw a report that said someone had reached the highest level possibly in Cataclysm on the day it came out.

DR: That kind of gamer is going to be part of our audience. I am not surprised. Again, it only added five new levels. I’m impressed with that player, but I’m not shocked. People take a lot of pride in being the first to race through the content. As a publisher, that terrifies you. It means your work is never done. But it’s also something you admire in the audience.

VB: So, that’s the kind of thing you will be ready for?

DR: It is different for us. We have a very different kind of MMO with dynamic content. When you hit the highest level, you haven’t finished all the content. When you hit our level cap, you don’t have to leave the game. The challenge for the publisher is that once someone hits the highest level, they will still have awesome game play experiences.

VB: If you look back on the five-plus years, how would you say you made good use of that time? Sometimes when a game takes that long to finish, it’s a bad sign because of the cost overruns or because the design becomes outdated.

DR: That’s right. It’s a hard business, right? And you look back and there’s probably any number of small things you look at and say, “Yes, we could have squeezed that a little more efficiently. But a large amount of what you get with the time and the financing that the time gives you is the ability to bring in a great team of people. Then you give them the time to get the chemistry right and build what they want to build. The soul of this product is the ambition behind it and the polishing that has gone into making it right. You can’t do these games without huge investments, awesome talent, and a lot of time. For venture financing, $100 million sounds like a lot. But these are really ambitious projects, and you have to be in this league to be competitive. We have used that money to build not one game but to commission a number of games that are all very groundbreaking.

VB: Did you guys get some benefit from seeing Blizzard’s leaked release schedule?

DR: It got headlines everywhere and we looked at it like everyone else. But I don’t think we would change any of our plans based on internet rumor.

Check out a video recording of one of the unscripted Rift scenes in action below.

Filed under: Business, Games