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How do you determine who should be hired, in that case? Because I haven't really heard of a lot of cases of hiring this massively, and company culture is really important, as far as any studio. If you're completely building it from scratch, how do you decide who to hire, and what the company culture is going to be?
JY: It begins with hiring the senior management team. When we initially started the company, of course the focus was on building the first studio, so the first wave of hires was the directors of the project. Our technical lead, our technical director, our head of the studio, et cetera. So, you just have to be patient, and you have to be willing to interview a lot of people.
And there are characteristics that I personally look for, in individuals that I want to bring onboard as managers, as leaders of our company. Like you said, part of our culture, if you will, is making sure you identify people that have the same belief system that you do; the same kind of ideas about things, and so on, and so forth.
But you also want to get a little bit of diversity into that as well. In our particular case, one of the things that I really looked for was experience. All of our folks, at least at director level, have at least ten years of experience in the industry. And because they come from many different companies -- we probably have somebody from just about every company that has ever built computer games -- that we get this diversity of viewpoint about how things get done, and, you know, certain values.
So, to go back to the culture question, a lot of what we have to do is just make sure that everybody's communicating with each other; they get on the same page about what we're trying to do. And it's working! I think that we have a really good culture. I like the culture of our company -- in the sense that we have enough diversity, as well as enough commonality, that it all works.
That's good. And there are multiple products coming out, right? On multiple platforms, eventually, with the Stargate license. Are you planning things other than Stargate, too?
JY: In terms of other product lines, you mean?
Yeah.
JY: Yes. In fact, Stargate, as an MMO, is the only large scale MMO that we are working on. We have another MMO that's under construction that's considerably less in scope, but nonetheless is still in that space.
But, another answer to your question is that all of our products will have online as their primary mechanism for delivery. And, in that regard, we don't focus entirely on MMOs. In fact, our second product is a completely different kind of a product. It's more of a peer-to-peer kind of an online activity. It's possible, like Stargate, that we can put it on console as well. But our primary focus is on the PC, and delivering online game experiences. All four of our studios build products in that space.
Have you thought much about the 'free to play' model, and what kind of business model are you going to go for?
JY: Yes, we have put a lot of thought into that. Yeah. And, it's my personal belief that it is ultimately where all the products go. Free-to-play, microtransaction business model, I think, is the winning solution, long-term.
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It is extremely rare for a new studio to have it's first game be great (especially great enough to take on WOW or EVE or...). The odds are low on this one.
Star Wars Galaxies anyone?
You see in order to get the Unreal "look" you have to maintain small "hallway" looking levels OR downgrade your graphical look OR go completly stylistic. At that point you really don't need to be using Unreal.
Unreal's material editor, it's material instructions and its "look" are tied together. You would need a high level filter to give the world a completly different feel and rewrite graphical instructions to get a new look aswell.
From my experience, level design wise, using the terrain editor it optimally maxes out at around 300m x 300m before you have to get streaming involved. Streaming and AI are whole other issue on the console I can only imagine what its going to be like online.
Another prime example and major hurdle these are going to be faced with is the issue of Itemization. Unreal uses "packages" and "archetypes" to manage its assets, however it does not support massive amounts of Items in any manageable method. Therefore the team is going to have to built a database that can manage, change, update and interface with Unreal's package system. The system will have to work backwards as well, updatea a package it updates the database.
Last but not least, making any object in Unreal and putting through their pipeline takes a long time...I don't see how they're going to build "Worlds" when just to get 8 hours of Console FPS gameplay can take 2 years. I can only imagine how long its going to take to make mmo "Worlds."
I for one, getting a stomache turning sensation everytime I hear that a new company is creating an MMO that is going to kill WOW, they really have to be kidding themselves. Blizzard is probably going to come out with StarCraft and its all over again.
Investors save your money and produce smaller scale games.
That's my 2 cents