Dave Perry: The Kikizo Interview

Huge interview with the games veteran and Acclaim CCO on California, cloud gaming, beast riding in Top Secret, MMOs success, Phil Harrison and Atari, returning to Earthworm Jim, and why a single console future will never happen.

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Kikizo: What about Chronicles of Spellborn? You've said how you are "tracking" like 400 other MMOs out there, so how on earth do you stand out among 400 other MMOs?

Perry: Well, very easily when you've got the Unreal tech running underneath it. So that sorts the men out from the boys very quickly. You're top ten, the minute you've got the Unreal tech, so it's just this amazing, gorgeous world. And the second part is that there are many different levels of MMO now; right down to very basic grid-based kind of thing, all the way up as you add more and more depth. This game is a $20m, full-scale, amazing MMO. Our vision has always been: how can we get people to go free to play? And the thing that people have been making a mistake on, they don't think about the rest of the world; they start making their MMO, and it's a $20m MMO, and they want a retail box and a subscription. And they don't think about Asia, yet Asia is where the hot space is for these games. You want to be thinking: how am I designing this game for the world?

Will Acclaim show how MMOs should look with Spellborn?

Perry: And by making it free to play, you're going to get immediate deals in Asia - in fact, you'll get enough advance money to finish up your game. You can go around and license it in Taiwan, the Philippines, India - basically go around and do all your licensing deals, and use that money to help finish up your development. But ultimately, you're going to get massive exposure from all those companies. A single game will have like 700,000 players playing right this minute during the day, and so they just invite all those players to come and play your game. You miss all of that, if you don't set it up. Spellborn is one of the very few games where they get this. You know, like the Conan guys, it just is what it is; "we have to have subscriptions, we have to have retail"... god bless you guys, you know, but this is one of the few ones where we've got the combination of amazing engine, good team and also some vision, world wide.

Kikizo: How do you make it free, with in-game advertising?

Perry: No, no in-game ads.

Kikizo: But in-game ads is something you're working on though, right? Let's not get into that too much, in-game advertising is too large a topic to cover in the time we've got!

Perry: Yeah, that's a whole other thing. I basically pointed out that billboards in games are like the dark ages. So true, sophisticated in game ads these days is bringing in many new ideas. I think it's very important that they embrace things.

Kikizo: Denis Dyack asserts a view of a single-console future. Do you agree? Do you see that tying in with what you were saying about the $50 box that receives state-of-the-art visuals from the server?

Perry: There's no chance of one console. If you think about the example of iTunes - it came along, and then somehow all of the music companies found a way to play together. So somebody created something, and they found a way to get better distribution than they were getting digitally online. So someone came in and kind of created a portal for them, so they just went with that. Like, you don't go to Warner Bros to download your Warner Bros MP3s, and then like oh, they're from Universal, I need to go to Universal to download those MP3s. It doesn't work that way.

I don't think the game companies are going to be quite as flexible. I think they're going to fight to the mat, to keep their portals. Because it turns out, if you own the portal, you own everything. You own all the gamers. If you think about it, if Sony owns their own portal, they own access to every single Sony gamer, and they can compete against us because they are a first party, and they make software. So they'll control the portal, they'll control the featured slots. As you know, when there are 500 games, nobody cares about most of them - they look at the first 50. And so that's going to be really, really valuable real estate, and they'll control that, they'll control the in-game advertising and the revenue of that probably. Basically, they can lay down whatever rules they want, and game companies will have to think, I'm with that. So the offer of that kind of power, why anybody would say no - why they would say, "no, let's just group together, and let's try to work it out together!" There's just no way.

Kikizo: Well Dyack's prediction is based purely on this economic theory. But then economic theory also says to me, why would these guys let go of being platform holders...

Perry: Disruptive innovation is the thing that I am always thinking about. That's why I'm thinking about free to play. Could it disrupt our industry? This sort of innovation is like when you're Polaroid and you're making instant film, and along comes digital cameras and you're like, "no, we'll be fine - people will still want instant film". And digital cameras are hockey sticking into the industry. And you're like, "no, everything's going to be fine", until you go bankrupt. You know what I mean? That's disruptive innovation, and that's what you've got to watch out for in this business.

So if somebody came out with some device that just was $50 that solved the problem, and these guys were all blindsided by it, then great, maybe they should be, and they'll all want to be a part of it. But the chances are very small. It would take such big investment. It would take a visionary and major money to pull it off - to create the iTunes that they would all need to tuck into. But I have to admit, I haven't heard of even a slight rumour of that. So I would say they're all just going to go to the mat and try to make the best portal for them.

Kikizo: So we can look forward to console wars for many years to come! Thanks so much for your time, Dave.

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