The Lord of the Rings Online Interview
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Do you see anything coming in the way of competition? Is there any title that is on the horizon that seems interesting?
JS: There's a lot of things coming out that are interesting. I think that the challenge is that, as I said, these things are just so hard to do. They all have a lot of fire to climb through to get there, and it's hard to tell who will get there, but I'm really excited to see what happens with Warhammer and [realm vs. realm] and taking that to the next level. Conan's trying some new things. There's a lot of people trying new and different stuff. Even Guild Wars was playing around with different business models. All of that is interesting and is good for us. Being the one movie that you watch is not necessarily the best thing, because then they won't build movie theatres, and they won't have Blockbuster or whatever.
AM: There's no winners in this. In some way, I have to say that we're all winners, as long as the industry keeps growing. What I think is the interesting story is to look beyond who's doing the cool thing with new gameplay or new game features. Like he said, RvR and Conan have some interesting things, but I think the industry has a lot of cool things coming that may not have anything to do with gameplay. It may have to do with how products are distributed. It may have to do with business models. There's so many ways to innovate and try new things. Do people really compare Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars? One's a paid subscription, and one isn't. It's hard to... I think what's going to be most exciting is not the innovative game features that are coming, but the innovation that's going to come to huge distributed network-architectured persistent online worlds.
JS: At a much higher level, the industry's maturing. We're not just, "We make these kinds of games and here's the business model and here's the way it works. It sells at retail, and it's always the same." Hopefully, we're in the position, as an industry, to not make the mistakes the record industry has been making, for example. It's fastidiously hanging on to a model that has never changed. You pay $15 for an album -- and sure it's on CD now rather than a record -- but the model's the same. Steve Jobs -- say whatever you want -- he's the guy who took a stand and said, "No, we're going to break the mold. We're going to do it differently." Yeah, it's risky and people will steal our stuff and all that kinds of stuff...
AM: It changed user behavior. Item-based commerce is huge in Asia, and thanks to Steve Jobs, it's huge here in the United States now.
JS: And it isn't just about, "We're smart and the record company's dumb," because that's not my case at all. My case is that we're new enough as an industry and that games have constantly had to change consistently that we're used to having the change, whereas we don't have tens of billions of dollars and 60 years of history. It's hard, right? Once you're that far down the road, you're trying to sell records, and you've been selling them for $15 forever, and you make lots and lots of money. If you decide to not do that anymore, you could just about implode. We're not quite there yet, and in some respects, that's an advantage.
AM: In the scale of things, 10 or 15 years when you look back, we haven't even skimmed the surface of where this is going. We're going to be the biggest-growing segment of the entertainment industry. The best example I can give you where we're on the tip of a change here is my five-year-old twin daughters, who don't know what it's like to play a game offline. From when they were two and they sat on my lap, we went to sesamestreet.org and they played Flash-based games showing how to group blue dogs in one pile and red dogs in another to teach them basic skills - to Webkinz now, when they're five, and they've got these little dolls that have their own virtual lives and they put them on stage and they have a bedroom.
Right there, this whole audience -- my children, that generation -- is only going to know about online gaming. So what's it going to be like in ten years when they're fifteen, or twenty years when they're coming out of college? That to me is what's exciting, not what's in front of us where a lot of games are trying to come out and it's very hard. We're seeing a lot of people struggle, and we went a long route to get this game out and worked really hard. There's infinite possibilities. Where is it a game and where is it a virtual world? Things along those lines, and how they change. And who cares? I think it's very exciting.
People look at WoW and they've done amazing things for the industry because they've sort of kickstarted online gaming in a way. We were around with Asheron's Call eight years ago, but they kickstarted an industry that goes so far beyond that hardcore 18-24 year-old gamer. It's not really bizarre that our average is over 35, because the average age of a gamer is like 33 now, right? We're all growing up -- the early adopters. It amazes me to see what world is going to come for my kids, when it comes to how they're entertained, versus how we were entertained at that age.
JS: PlayStation 9 implant?
AM: Yeah, it's going to be goggles and virtual reality. It's amazing. The question was whether we are concerned about our competition. No. We're really not. Anytime someone does well, it's not taking our business, it's just expanding our universe.
JS: Some of the confidence comes from the fact that it's just hard to do right. If it was a simpler, shrinkwrapped game... anybody can't make a good game, but anybody can make a bad game. And not anybody can make this kind of game, good or bad. It's just so hard to get it out the door.
