Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many games have been funded on the various crowdfunding platforms? Scott Hartsman: I wish I knew the answer but I’m afraid I don’t. Sramana Mitra: Is it hundreds or thousands of games? Scott Hartsman: The order of magnitude, at this point, I would say is around hundreds. I would say there are

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve said several times that one of the organizing principles of your portfolio is that you want the business model to be fair for the customer. Can you talk about this a bit? You are coming from where the customer will subscribe into your games and you started monetizing right away. Now the

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you are working with third parties who are developing the games, and you are going to publish them as part of your core business, how do you determine which ones you want to bet on? Scott Hartsman: It’s the kind of methodology you would actually expect out of a game developer because

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are there developer tools out there that a Joe Developer can afford to develop on and are high quality tools? Scott Hartsman: Yes, these are definitely commercial-grade high-quality tools for a far smaller price point. Sramana Mitra: How many of these are there?

Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Rift started with a certain storyline. You were basically allowing people to subscribe to the game and play however long and in whatever way they wanted. When you introduced free-to-play, obviously that storyline had to accommodate that model of commerce in the game. Can you talk about that in concrete terms? Scott Hartsman:

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you saw this Economic Developer Survey that came out about gaming. Mobile apps in general are large portions of games – somewhere around 50% both on Android and iOS, but the developers make $500 a month or less. Scott Hartsman: That’s exactly right. I saw a report last week

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 1)

The Online Gaming world has changed dramatically over the last five years. Business models have changed. Funding models have changed. Development models have changed. Read my interview with Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman to get a grip of where things are going. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with an introduction to Trion. Let’s introduce our audience

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Games: Console Games – Hardware + Software = Ka-Ching!

By Gabe Zichermann, Guest Author The first home game console was called the Magnavox Odyssey. Introduced in 1972, it had a number of design flaws that would eventually doom its future, including the need for plastic TV overlays, boring games, and some dubious marketing strategies. Ultimately however, it was the closed nature of the product

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