Interview: Alex St. John Talks Digital Distribution, Microtransacations, and the Future of Gaming, Part Two
Picking right back up where we left off (which you can read here, if you missed it), today we bring you Part Two of our extensive interview with Alex St. John, co-founder and CEO of WildTangent.
In the first half we covered topics such as digital distribution and microtransactions… in this half the focus shifts much more heavily to MMO-related subjects, from predictions on what the next ten years will bring to the genre, all the way back to the origins of Ultima Online itself.
Read on for the transcript.
The MMO Gamer: I seem to recall from our meeting at GDC that you are a man of strong opinions… ones you are not particularly shy about offering up.
Alex St. John: Nothing ever gets fixed when people are shy about being brutally honest about the problems. When organizations like Microsoft get very big, doing things right often takes a big second place to getting along with your peers and avoiding conflict, usually at the cost of making a great product.
Nothing makes me sicker than sloppy, complacent product development by people who value their careers more than the quality of the products they make. I think it’s especially important to speak out for consumers who may not be technically sophisticated enough to identify the root of the computing problems they encounter and know who to hold accountable for addressing the problems.
The MMO Gamer: I also know from reading prior interviews you’ve given that one of your favorite pastimes seems to be seems to be prognosticating the future…
Alex St. John: Not only do I like to do it, but I get it right. The original DirectX strategy document I wrote back in 1994 was called “Taking Fun Seriously.”
I went back to that document for this interview to find my original prediction about how PC gaming would change if DirectX was created:
Connectivity will be one of the most powerful and compelling revolutions in gaming. Most games are isolationist. Certain types of fantasy and escapism are private things, but there are many forms of escapism that are social. Competition and explorations are more fun with real people. The number one selling console games are one on one combat between two or more real players. The number one selling PC game DOOM, is most fun when it is networked.
Connectivity combined with other technologies may fundamentally change the business model of the game industry from writing $50 throw away applications, to building vast extensible server based game universes for many players. Multiplayer games could be bigger business on the set-top than on demand video if enabled.
Social interaction also offers broader appeal in game play. Explorative, multiplayer universes are likely to me more appealing to women then traditional stand alone conflict driven titles.
So as you can see, I correctly anticipated the MMOG revolution on the PC and the most profitable game business model ever discovered for games as a consequence of making Windows a viable gaming OS. I hear WoW makes 1.2 billion a year in subscription revenues these days?
The MMO Gamer: Well, if I may play Devil’s advocate, your aim has been off once or twice before. What happened to the Chrome project at Microsoft, your follow-on to DirectX? The concept never seemed to catch on with the mainstream.
Alex St. John: I know my tenor may sound a little pompous, so to be fair I’ll admit that there are many things about which I have been wrong and I don’t brag to the press about them, but I did nail this one.
Chrome was never shipped by Microsoft. It was buried when the D.O.J. trial started because Microsoft didn’t want to launch a “Netscape” killing browser at a time when they were facing antitrust charges for abusing their monopoly power to kill Netscape.
But no matter, we did ship Macromedia Flash with IE 3.0 on the same bet and lo and behold, what has become the internet standard for rich media advertising and web design in the absence of Chrome?
Shockwave 3D had over 40 million users in its prime and my company’s product, the WildTangent Web Driver, which was a java enabled 3D graphics engine, had 120 million users worldwide with over 300 games developed for it.
So you could say that I bet my company on that one and made a lot of money off Microsoft’s choice to miss that opportunity.
