Developing and Running 50 MMOs at bigpoint.com

John from Bigpoint talks about their portfolio of 50 plus games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/bigpoints-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]li-YlTm-Ia4[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

John: Hi. My name is John Morgan. I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Bigpoint.

Interviewer: And what’s Bigpoint do?

John: Bigpoint has been building for eight years now really, really rich MMOs in Flash and Java and Action Script so we’ve been around for quite some time. We have 50 plus games in our portfolio.

Interviewer: And so, you’re pretty much running 50 plus MMOs, and you’ve grown substantially over those eight years.

John: And we run them in over 30 languages. So, we’re everywhere.

Interviewer: You have to internationalize all of them?

John: Yeah. They’re all fully globalized, localized. We make sure that we keep the flavor. We’ve been doing this all across the globe.

Interviewer: You know, after, say, one or two or three MMO successes, what inspired you to do 50 and how do you maintain that?

John: We want to tackle different universes. We have all kinds. We have racing games. We have space games. We have submarine games. We have fantasy games, and we also have different user bases. So, we have the really hard core gamer that wants to battle in space. Then, we have others that want go into a cute fantasy world. We have others that want to do sports games. So, we want to make sure that we really tackle all of those.

And then at the end of the day, we maintain really, really strong teams and make sure that they keep editing them. We keep pushing content to those games to keep them alive.

Interviewer: Yeah. In terms of keeping them alive, what do you exactly do because it feels like running an MMO is like a marathon.

John: Certainly. It’s very hard work, but the fun thing about that is that with an online game that you can play in any browser, you can push content at daily, weekly–you can interact with your community. You can really respond to what they’re looking for, and we have lots of events going on and extending quest lines. That keeps us busy and our users really excited about the games.

Interviewer: Since you guys started, there have been huge shifts in the industry. Did you catch those shifts early on, or did you have to kind of adjust and adapt based on those shifts? We talked about the Freemium model that’s come through, the browser-based MMO which seemed ridiculous at the time.

John: It has been a great ride, and it continues to be one. This year we’re going 3D within the browser in an MMO, and we’re going cross platform which is really exciting which hasn’t been done before. Over the last years, yes, people have grown. We’ve grown with the market. The users have grown with us. We just broke through our hundred millionth registered users on our sites, so that’s a great story.

It keeps us fresh and also allows us to constantly push the envelope. We don’t go with one technology. We look at what’s out there, what is possible. This year we do it on Java. We do it on Unity. So, we’re using whatever we can to bring the best experience to the browser.

Interviewer: When you talk about these new technologies, do you then apply these new technologies to your older MMOs or do you use them for your future MMOs moving forward? I mean, are the older MMOs usually on the older technology, or do you just focus on the customer and just be like, OK, well now use what’s appropriate for them. Now, iPhone is appropriate.

John: So, usually what we do is we keep supporting our classic games because on some of them we have 40 million registered users, a lot of them playing those games and have been playing them for years. We still support that and those are still going very, very strong, however, especially when new titles come online.

We just announced Battlestar Galactica online. We certainly want to push the envelope, and we want to then invest in different technologies. This one we’re doing with Unity, so we have a really, really rich experience with the Unity player. At times, we’re also looking at how can we bring that game that has been so strong to the next level. What we usually find is that our players, they like the Universe and want to play that and want to keep staying in that one.

Interviewer: Do you think Unity is something that is going to be permanent moving forward? I know there’s this battle now. There’s this perception that actually Unity might replace Flash. Since you’ve already developed MMOs in Flash and you’re looking at Unity, what do you think?

John: I don’t think it’s necessarily going to replace it. I think both technologies, both players and 2D versus 3D–you’ve seem this on social media these days. They’re going to have their target. There’s things they are going to do on those that make more sense to do them in that technology or the other. If I want to build a space shooter, well I can do that in 2D and 3D.

What vision do I have, and what do I want to realize here, especially if I look at Battlestar Galactica online? Of course, I want to make sure that it looks as closely to whatever experience in the TV show then and what I will experience going forward in the browser. And so, for that I think Unity is a great platform, especially when you go cross platform it’s even better to go something like Unity because it likes to port to these platforms easily.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about then TV versus game mixes. Do you feel that that’s the right combination? It can help with the marketing, but do you think that that is going to be necessary moving forward? Where do you see that going?

John: I think it’s a combination. It’s not a necessity. It’s something that can be great fun, and it can be very rich as a Universe. You can build games from the ground up that create that Universe like we have with Dark Orbit or with [?]. But then, of course, it’s fun for us to take a title, a license like Battlestar Galactica online or Battlestar Galactica and turn that into a massive multiplayer online game and build on top of that rich, rich story line and Universe. And, of course, users and fans for sure, they love that. And so, it’s fun for us to do that, but you can do both things. I think it’s really about how good is it going to be at the end and how are you going to keep evolving it.

Interviewer: Let’s shift then into maintaining the MMO. Since it’s all in the browser, do you just have players come in and play, maybe, three, four, five MMOs at a time, or is it usually one person is dedicated to one MMO. And then, you release another MMO for another segment.

John: Well, with our big, big titles they have been with the MMO and they live that MMO and have been for many, many years. We have players that then say, “OK, I want a different experience. I want to do the fantasy versions, the sci-fi.” So, they like that, but we have players really hooked to some shoot [?] guilds and so they really stick with them. They really, really stay with that game.

Interviewer: We talked about some of the trends like browser-based and Freemium business model, but some of the other surprises have been these social games and asynchronous game play. So, this concept of, hey we need to have these Real Time servers. We need to get everything going. Do you feel that’s going to be more relevant moving forward? Do you feel that asynchronous game play works for the masses?

John: Well, I think that in general with the social element coming into these games, we’ve opened up a whole new group of gamers that have never been there before. And so, with that come different styles of gaming. Not every game needs to be running in Real Time anymore. It doesn’t even make sense to do that. So, I think it’s really about understanding what game do we want to design and what makes most sense.

Again, I think it’s not about who pushes the envelope the most when it comes to from a graphics point of view or from how do I translate that into an experience. But it really comes to how good is the game from its story and its core. What do I understand what I want to achieve in that game, and then what’s my channel and that channel can be a web browser. That channel can be a SmartPhone, or it can be a social media platform.

Interviewer: The other thing about those games is you mentioned pushing out content weekly in those 30 international languages. Do you have to push that content all out at the same time, or do you test it in a few languages and then move it out to other ones? That seems very drastic to be in 30 languages.

John: We always like to connect with some events that take place in the real world. So, if you have certain holidays we do something for the holidays, and holidays differ in 30 plus different countries and languages that we’re doing that in. So, at times they’re happening at the same time. At other times we’re tying them to special events.

Interviewer: Do you have to customize the prices and the leveling structures and all that other stuff based on the nationality, or do you keep that the same?

John: No, that we keep the same because it’s really all about the game, deep game balancing and that in a MMO it stays the same, no matter from where I’m playing.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about the game balancing. How do you effectively balance these games? You have 50 games, over 50 games. So, do you just have a balancing team that applies their knowledge to everything?

John: We have lots, of course. We say there’s a rudiment or mechanics that apply to a MMO, and we have to understand them very well; however, of course, it differs from firing a cannon on a battleship in a fantasy environment or actually in the real world environment versus a laser or rockets in a spaceship. So, we have to understand what’s the effect. What do we want to achieve with doing something like that and then make sure that that works well?

The other thing that you said about also make sure that the Freemium model, that you can have that entire content through playing through it but also balancing against the skill that you acquire over time against people who say, I want to get ahead by spending money on it. And so, I think that’s a really, really interesting aspect of the balancing part.

Interviewer: In the preparation for this interview, we talked about some of these other kind of mainstream themes, like farming and restaurants or whatever else is going on. So, what are your thoughts on that? Is that where everything’s going to go because before it was with the understanding that we were going to provide this intensive fantasy world? But now, it seems that people just really want something that is kind of their daily life.

John: As I said earlier, I think it really depends on who are playing these games. I think with the social media platforms and what’s happening there, we have new gamers coming to that have never gamed before, that never played before. So, of course, it’s fun to build something for them they’ll really enjoy, and that at times is just a very different setup or setting than the hot cool gamers that we also serve and have been serving for so many years.

Interviewer: You know, another paradigm is user generated content in games. Is that something you guys are looking into? Where do you feel that’s going to go?

John: I think we’re just starting out on that one. And the industry, instead of starting out on that one, I think one of the first things that we’re seeing is that you certainly can post in a sense your high scores. You can invite your friends to play against each other. You can do all kinds of interactions that can generate a kind of content for the game itself. But I would say this is again something that the industry will explore going forward.

Interviewer: What are other trends that you feel are going to happen to the industry or in MMOs moving forward? Since you’re running all these MMOs, you’ve seen what’s going on and you’ve seen all these different trends that are out there.

John: I think one of the things that is really going to explode especially in the U. S. is going to be, really, the browser-based gaming. We’ve seen it in the social setup, and now we’re going to see this really, really heavy in MMO setup and in space shooters and fantasy games with the browser-based on the players and, of course, cross platforms so that I’m really not tied to my PC at home but I can take that with me, really. That is, I think, going to be something that we’re going to see much more of going forward.

Interviewer: Have you looked in Japan at these mobile MMOs? They’re actually overtaking the PC MMOs. So where do you feel that’s going, and is that going to disrupt everything, even browser-based?

John: I think again it’s really an addition. It’s making me independent. Like, the cell phone did; independent of my fixed line at home. That’s going to happen to the games as well. And some of them, maybe, we see this with the SmartPhones already. They are suited great for a SmartPhone. You couldn’t tilt on your PC, right? You don’t want to tilt your PC too much, but you do that on SmartPhones and you have a great game experience with that.

So, I think, again, it’s new dimensions that are starting to open it up and that are also allowing us to really be portable about these games. Some of them might even just simply work better at the end of the day on different devices. At the end of the day it’s really about what’s the best target device. What’s the best game play, and how do I realize that with the technology I have available or the device I have available?

Interviewer: And for game developers, can there be one universal game that everyone wants to play, or do you think you have to target these niches? I know these farming games have kind of come a little close, but you do you feel? It’s kind of like Google. It’s this one search engine, but the way the games work it’s like you have 50 different titles, 50 different demographics.

John: You know, it’s like people won’t wear one brand, one clothing brand. So, I think they’re going to be very, very different games that are out there and different levels of how deep I get into the game, how much time I spent with the game. I think one of the things that we are starting to see is that the entry barriers to games are becoming lower and lower so that people really want to immerse themselves very, very quickly into these games.

But then also, they want to have that open end and go really deep if they want to. It’s really my own personal choice of how much time I want to spend and how deep I want to interact.

Interviewer: Any other last suggestions then for people or small game developers who want to run their MMO or who are running a MMO?

John: Well, check out Bigpoint. We are a big publisher as well, so we have our Dev Lounge where you can really upload your games, and you have immediate access to over a hundred million users. We make it easy for you to host and to bill. I mean, we have over 150 different billing systems. So, I think looking into–basically, what I’m saying is looking at the web space and the browser-based online gaming space, that’s really the place to be, and I think a lot is going to happen this year.

Interviewer: Well, let’s talk about publishing a little more. I didn’t know about that. So, what exactly do you do with the publishing, and who are you targeting, like what games are you open to publishing?

John: Anyone, anyone. If you have a great idea, go to our Dev Lounge at Bigpoint, and we have lots of documentation, how to get started quickly and, again, you have access to our back end services. And you can really be successful with great ideas, and that’s what we’re looking for. I mean, it’s about great ideas in this industry, right? It’s not necessarily about how much–do I start from the get-go? How much farther do I push it? It’s about having fun with those games.

Interviewer: OK. Great. What’s the URL exactly for the site?

John: Good question.

Interviewer: Bigpoint.com?

John: Just go to Bigpoint.com.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.