Interview: Alex St. John Talks Digital Distribution, Microtransacations, and the Future of Gaming, Part One

By Steven Crews | June 30, 2008 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

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Question: What do you get when you take a writer who likes to ask a whole lot of questions, and put him together with a man who relishes giving very detailed, weighty responses?

Answer: You get a 5,000 word interview, covering everything from in-game advertising, to digital distribution, to electrified liquid corn starch and the origins of Ultima Online. No pun intended.

That man is Alex St. John, co-founder and CEO of WildTangent, who is, without a doubt, one of the greatest salesmen I have ever met in my entire life.

If you’ve ever watched the movie Network, and remember the scene where Arthur Jensen explains the primal forces of nature to Howard Beale… he reminds me a great deal of that.

Our paths first crossed earlier this year at GDC. Back then, as I approached our scheduled meeting, I couldn’t help but feel a bit like I was being sent out on a fool’s errand.

I knew who he was, of course, and what WildTangent did. I would never go into anything without doing at least that much homework. I just couldn’t quite figure out how what they did fell under the purview of this site.

I walked into that room thinking that I was going to be polite, professional, and sit through their presentation in order to finish the job I’d been assigned… all the while doubting I’d be able to use anything I saw or heard to actually produce an article.

I walked out wondering if WildTangent was a publicly traded company so I that could get in early on investing, certain these people were going to soon be making a billion dollars a year.

In a little under thirty minutes he had managed to sell me on the notions that ads were good, microtransactions were the way of the future, up was down, black was white, and dogs and cats would soon be living together.

I’m a dyed in the wool traditionalist when it comes to subscription-based games, and if the man could convince me, he could convince anybody. Right then and there, I knew I had to interview him.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s get the ball rolling with introductions. The name of “Alex St. John” is not one that’s particularly well-known amongst John Q. Gaming Public. But, over the years your work has had an undeniable influence on the industry as a whole.

If you would, please give us a bit of background in your own words.

Alex St. John: Way back in 1994 Microsoft gave me the title of Game Evangelist. I think it was expected that I would get a few CD-ROM Myst-type games made for Windows 95.

Instead, myself and a couple friends from the same group created a Game SDK for Windows that we later named DirectX. We ran DirectX through 5 generations, created Direct3D and pretty much made Windows not suck so badly for media in general.

These days you can’t play music, watch video or play a game on Windows or the Xbox without using DirectX. I was the herald for the technology and drove a lot of the strategy, but the other two guys who actually made DirectX are named Eric Engstrom and Craig Eisler, and they certainly deserve as much credit if not perhaps as much infamy for creating the technology.