From GemStone to HeroEngine: Simutronics CEO David Whatley on Putting the MUD back into MMOs

By Steven Crews | May 1, 2009 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews | Tags: hero's journey, HeroEngine, simutronics

The MMO Gamer: What did you tell them? In other words, how much does HeroEngine cost to license? There are probably more than a few people reading this interview because they’re interested in starting up their own MMOs.

David Whatley: Where’s [Neil Harris, Executive Vice President]? We have an agreement that I never talk licensing and he never talks tech.

HeroEngine is designed for serious development studios. The big projects. It still requires that you have a serious, experienced MMO team to really knock it out of the park. Sometimes, people see us in there playing around with it, it looks really easy, they think “Oh, anyone can make an MMO,” they’ve got a team with a bunch of guys in a garage, and they’ve got money because of somebody’s trust fund, or whatever…

You’ve still got to know what you’re doing.

[Neil Harris walks in several minutes later, for continuity's sake I'll place his answer here:]

Neil Harris: HeroEngine has a lot of pricing models depending on what you need. If you were going to sell the game only in the Czech Republic, the price is much lower than a worldwide license. It could be either a royalty, or a flat fee, and that’s all variable, too.

Low to high six digits is about the range of most prices. So, not at the indie developer level. We hear from a lot of indie developers that are looking at HeroEngine, but it’s industrial-strength technology designed for a large team of guys.

The MMO Gamer: Ever thought of watering it down, releasing HeroEngine Lite and doubling your market share?

Neil Harris: HeroEngine Lite is definitely something that we’re looking at. Or HeroEngine Express, or whatever you want to call it. We’re just not there yet. Demand is so strong at the higher end of the market, it’s all we can do to keep up there.

The MMO Gamer: You said earlier in the demo that the average MMO takes 4 years and 30 to 50 million dollars to produce. What do you hope to bring that down to?

David Whatley: There’s two ways this can go. One is, you shorten the amount of time that you spend on a product, or you spend the same amount of money but you get a lot more done. So those are two approaches you can take with it.

Until a full AAA title, let’s say BioWare’s game; Star Wars: The Old Republic, pops out of the door, I don’t know that there is going to be any measureable empirical evidence on what this saves. But, anecdotally, it looks like we can cut about half of it out at this point.

And I think it can be a lot more, because like I was saying before I think there are diminishing returns that we’re cutting into. So it’s that last ten percent of the project that takes ninety percent of the time.

I think that’s where we’re going to get a great deal of the benefit really showing up. I know that right now you get a tremendous boost right at the beginning of the product, because we take care of all the niggling MMO stuff and we have this great developing environment that’s really fast.

Teams often take a prototype license of HeroEngine and will build a vertical slice of their game, industry talk for a piece that shows what the game is going to look like, and they take that to the decision maker, the board, an angel investor, a publisher, or whatever, and try to get a green light for their project. And they can do that within 60 days usually.

From having training and getting the engine in their hands, to something that you can play that looks like the game they want. So we know that at the beginning of a process it’s really fast, and until some games start popping out of the door that use the technology, we won’t know how much it’s really sped up the final part, but I anticipate it’s going to be considerable.

The MMO Gamer: We also talked a little bit about, hopefully, the savings of time and money causing a surge of innovation in the genre.

So, morbid curiosity, is Hero’s Journey going to be the poster child for a return to innovation?

David Whatley: Well, you know, Hero’s Journey has gone through an evolution.

Originally, I think our eyes were way bigger than our stomach. And so there’s a lot of innovation in the original design that won’t make the final cut of the product because of the people who are interested in funding it are risk-averse.

The point I was trying to make earlier, I think, was that when a company is spaced with a four year development cycle and forty, fifty million dollars that they have to sink into a title and they know there’s going to be cost overruns and it’s really going to cost seventy million before it’s done, there’s only so much risk you are going to take.

And there’s always this constant downward pressure on the creed of impulse the developers have to really go out and stretch the limits. We wanted to focus, on Hero’s Journeys, on characters, right? And how you can be very unique, both in terms of your physical appearance of course, throughout, but also in the way your characters story develops.

This idea of unique story, that every time you play the game it’s different, instead of just repeating the same story over and over again, is something we pushed really hard during our initial design and we still have the essence of it in our current design, but it had to be scaled back because frankly people thought it was too ambitious.

The creative side of me, not the business guy but the creative side of me finds that very distressing. I think we end up with 80% of me-too products out there. And right now in the MMO market, me-tooness is not being rewarded.

You really need to come out with some way, if you’re going to compete with World of Warcraft, you have to have something that’s really going to be market differentiating.

But, the people who hold the purse strings for this stuff would be woe to do that in some cases. Because World of Warcraft is successful. So, is World of Warcraft the formula for success? Do you have to be just like them, and is there room for more than one? Would anyone want more than one? I don’t know.

Continued on next page…