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: The overall goal was to provide a premium experience at a free-to-play price point. With that in mind, we intentionally adopted a strategy of making sure that the entire content, story, and physical locations of the game would remain free-to-play at all times. Then, on top of that, we would have a micro-transaction store that housed a bunch of purchases the players could make if they chose to support the game further. We typically break down those items into three categories: convenience, cosmetics, and the ability to catch up to your friends. >>>

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 where somebody drew out what the long tail looks like on PC versus the tail on mobile. On mobile, only a fraction of the top 1% is making any money at scale.

Sramana Mitra: The long tail of PC is healthier, is that what you’re saying?

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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 to yourself as well as to Trion.

Scott Hartsman: I’m the CEO at Trion Worlds. We bring high-quality core gaming out to the Internet, primarily on PCs. We are a very core, gamer-friendly, free-to-play company. We are in online games. We are primarily in PC games, but we also support consoles. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Maybe pick three client use cases who have these large amounts of data. Let’s double-click down on understanding specifically what that data contains and what kinds of intelligence are you able to derive out of it. What processes and methodologies have you innovated to bring that together?

Dmitri Williams: Let’s start with an academic one and maybe jump into some commercial ones. The first project that we did was on predictive analytics and we were doing this for the intelligence community. They were interested in looking at someone’s online behavior and understanding something about them offline. Those are all declassified stuff that you can read about online. We would take a look at someone playing a video game like EverQuest 2, which is the game that we were looking at most of the time. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: They are more powerful, which makes it a PR nightmare. So, you don’t have a solution to this. You observe a problem; I observe a problem. There is no solution. We’ll just have to deal with this muck. It is an open problem, don’t you think?

Doyon Kim: It is, yes. It is becoming a more serious problem. I read a book about five years ago – and I don’t remember the title of the book, and at the time I didn’t like it – that was criticizing the Web 2.0 movement. What they were saying, basically, is this Web 2.0 thing gives too much power to amateurs, and anybody can be an expert. Anybody can be influential with this new Internet. Because I was in the Web 2.0 industry, I didn’t like the tone at the time, but now I kind of agree. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That was my impression also, that cross-promoting using each other’s ad inventory that is not being sold, because nobody wants to advertise. There is a huge amount of unmonetized ad inventory.

Doyon Kim: And also, it’s a very targeted audience.

SM: It’s a very targeted audience, yes. So, barter is one of the trends in the industry. I see that, too. Is there any other major trend you’re seeing in gaming? One of the observations you were making – and I’m in sync with that – is that Zynga came into Facebook before all of these privacy settings came together. So, the virality was still there. And then anybody who came in before there were privacy settings with which the virality could be turned off used Facebook virality to scale up. But it’s no longer viable. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It’s an execution game.

Doyon Kim: Right. And we don’t expect people to play our games for three years or four years. Yes, they can copy it, but we have a head start.

SM: So, your strategy is to continuously come up with cross-platform games, keep using the user base, and market new games to them.

DK: Yes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the top five things you need to do when you design a game to be a cross-platform social and mobile game?

Doyon Kim: One thing is you have to understand the technology. One way to do it is have one game for this platform and completely rewrite everything, maybe use the graphic assets for another platform, but that’s a doubling of resources. There are a couple of technology platforms that enable this multi-platform development. One of them is HTML 5, but you have to understand what it can do. HTML 5 is not really designed for gaming. >>>