GDC Interview: BigWorld Tech CEO John De Margheriti

By Steven Crews | March 15, 2008 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews

On Thursday afternoon during GDC I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with John De Margheriti, CEO of BigWorld Technologies, one of the leading MMO middleware providers.

While his company’s solutions have so far proven more popular in the East than the West (a fact exemplified by the four different Asiatic languages on the back of their business cards), each passing month seems to bring with it word of a new title under development for the US and European markets.

The upcoming Stargate Worlds, and the mystery projects from John Romero’s Slipgate Ironworks and Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios are all based around BigWorld’s products.

As one of the co-founders in 1985 of Micro Forté (parent company of BigWorld), De Margheriti has been working in the industry longer than a good-sized percentage of its playerbase has even been alive. As such, I was looking forward to a lively discussion, and he did not disappoint. Unfortunately, we had only ten minutes for our interview, so I was not able to get into all of the subjects I had planned. There’s always next time.

The MMO Gamer: To get us started, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, please introduce yourself, and tell us a bit about what it is you do at BigWorld Tech.

John De Margheriti: My name is John De Margheriti, and I’m the CEO of BigWorld Technologies.

What do I do? That’s a very good question. Basically, we’ve got three divisions that I focus on. The first division is the technology group that makes BigWorld Technology. The second division is the Micro Forté studios that make MMOs for our clients. And, now the third group is BigWorld Distribution, which will operate and run online games in Southeast Asia.

The MMO Gamer: Bring us up to speed. It’s been awhile since Austin GDC, which was our last interview with you. What are some of the new titles licensing BigWorld tech that you’re able to discuss?

John De Margheriti: There’s—I’m not sure the exact number—somewhere between twenty-three to twenty-six MMOs in development by professional groups. When I say “professional groups,” I mean individuals who have raised significant, large amounts of cash, and who are serious about developing a product.

People like Vivendi have been announced, 38 Studios is being announced today, and their games are being done with our technology.

The Kwari game, kwari.com, that was done by our studios for one of our customers in fourteen months. It’s a shooter where you buy bullets and you can sell bullets. It’s illegal in North America, because it’s deemed a gambling game, but in Europe it’s seen as a skill-based game. So, the Kwari guys are doing quite well.

There’s some other things… it’s widely rumored that John Romero is doing something. So, he’s working on an MMO—in fact, I saw it today, it was awesome. I can’t tell you what it is, but, it looks pretty good.

The MMO Gamer: BigWorld started back with Micro Forté in 2000, was it?

John De Margheriti: BigWorld started in ’99. It spun out of the Micro Forté group as a startup to focus on MMO development. Its history was really us seeing what Richard Garriot was doing with Ultima Online, and what Trip was doing with Meridian 59, and we believed that there was a market for MMOs.

When we finished the tech, nobody was interested, because there wasn’t a market for MMOs. But, eventually that market took off, with Korea, and so on.

So, we’ve been at it for eight years, we have the same development team working on the technology, and we have not lost our core guys. It’s been good.

The MMO Gamer: Micro Forté was originally developing its own in-house MMO with your technology, Citizen Zero, which was subsequently cancelled after a somewhat protracted development process.

Did that sour you on in-house development at all? Or, is Micro Forté planning to get back into their own original MMO titles in the future?

John De Margheriti: I’ll give you a bit of an exclusive, here.

We were doing Citizen Zero for Microsoft. Microsoft unfortunately cancelled all internal development on MMOs. We were one, there were many other MMOs that they cancelled. They largely decided not to focus on the original Xbox MMOs. We tried to pitch, sell, do a whole lot of things with other people, and had no luck.

What we didn’t tell, was that we had internally cancelled the project awhile back, and what we started doing was to develop our own MMO.

We’ve been developing our own MMO for about a year and a half, and it’s been going quite well. We have now sixty-five people on that project in the Micro Forté group.

We’re not showing it to anybody, because we will show only when it’s done. We’re taking the Blizzard model, and when it’s ready, when we think it’s good enough, we will show it to the world. If it ain’t good enough, we’ll can it, internally. But, we’re still funding it out of the glorious monies that we’ve been making over time here.