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

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The MMO Gamer: Holodecks aside, so far, the average player expectation has been for MMOs to evolutionarily improve over time; with each new title having more content, more classes, more polish, and, most importantly; more loot.

Wouldn’t the notion of smaller, more numerous, and perhaps, given limited budgets, less-polished games run contrary to what the consumer wants?

Alex St. John: That’s a correct observation of the long term trend in gaming and will certainly hold true for MMOs over time. The point I’m making is that there is a shorter term trend that is more dominant at the moment.

Imagine that you’re slowly pouring sand from a bucket into a pile on the ground. Most of the time the sand mounts up and the pile rises, but periodically the pile will abruptly slump and spread out before growing again. That’s what’s happening in MMOs. There is more market opportunity to be had growing broader and lighter than growing deeper and more vertically.

Once that market opportunity for a broader range of MMO offerings has been satisfied then competition will again be dominated by which games that have the best features and production values.

In other words if I wanted to make a game that would grow up to be bigger than WoW I’d invest in an entirely new kind of light community based game today, and deepen it over time once it had existence and proven traction rather than spending tens of millions of dollars and years of effort trying to make a game that is 20% better than WoW with none its established community.

I think Blizzard can improve WoW’s features and graphics faster than the other guys can duplicate their community and subscriber base. In my opinion the position of “King of the MMORPG Hill” is a title which has always been surrendered by the previous king, never stolen successfully by a usurper.

The MMO Gamer: Speaking of previous kings of the MMORPG hill… although it sounded like a decidedly off-the-record story the first time I heard it from you, would you be interested in retelling your version of how Ultima Online came about? I thought it was very… enlightening.

Alex St. John: That’s a long story.

The short of it was that when I was first given the job of “Game Evangelist” at Microsoft I had very little to offer PC game developers as an incentive to make Windows games. My pitch was basically, “Hey, Windows is bloated, wastes RAM and CPU cycles, obstructs your access to video and audio resources and does nothing to make your games work better BUT it supports networking!”

I was already thinking about solving the graphics and audio problems at that time but it was very early. I made the pitch to Richard Garriott at Origin that Ultima would make a fantastic Windows game, that we were solving the graphics and audio problems and that multiplayer would be the killer feature for Ultima 9.

Richard thought that was the craziest thing he’d ever heard, and basically dismissed the idea of a multiplayer Ultima being any fun, but he agreed to send three of his best engineers to Microsoft for 3 months to try porting Origin games to DirectX 1.0.

His guys came to Redmond and in the course of porting the Ultima 8 engine to Windows, they created a 256 player demo they called “Multima” which they brought home to Origin to demonstrate how cool a multiplayer Ultima could be.

A few years later Garriott was all about MMOs.

To be absolutely fair to Richard he clearly had the vision to recognize a great idea and run with it when he finally saw it, but history should remember the names Zack Simpson, Frank Savage and Tony … damn I can’t remember his last name… anyway, those three Origin engineers who created the original Multima demo.

Also, a lot of people don’t remember that Diablo was the very first original DirectX game ever created, which of course contributed greatly to Blizzard’s phenomenal success because in addition to be a fantastic game, it was one of the very first Windows games at a time when there were very few.

The MMO Gamer: Finally, going back over everything we’ve discussed, let’s say it’s the future, and we’ve arrived at the Alex St. John utopia. Games are now delivered digitally, microcurrency is sold off the rack next to the chewing gum at everyone’s neighborhood Wal Mart, and, of course, Orb comes preinstalled on every new machine shipped by all the major manufacturers.

What’s next? Where do we go from there?

Alex St. John: Isn’t that enough?

At its very core the joy of gaming is they joy of having intimate real-time control over your environment by successfully anticipating a present event to influence it. The closer the link between the information your senses convey to you about their perception of reality and your ability to influence your perception of reality, the better you’re going to like the game.

Simply stated that means that technology that does a better job of saturating your senses with virtual reality and technology that does a better job of giving you intimate control over that reality will be the future of gaming. That probably means that full 360 degree visuals, smell, and more haptic control engaging more of the body are in our future. Sound is already almost as good as it can get.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you very much for joining us, Alex. We appreciate it, and look forward to speaking with you more in the future.

You may find further information about WildTangent at their official website: http://www.wildtangent.com