David Chang of GamesCampus Talks Sports MMOGs, Engaging Older Demographics

By Steven Crews | August 1, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews | Tags: David Chang, Free to Play, Freemium, Gamescampus, Major League Baseball, MLB, Shot Online

Steven Crews took the opportunity to talk to David Chang from GamesCampus about their sports MMOGs and about attracting an older demographic to their free-2-play titles.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for all of our readers who maybe unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us tell us a little about what it is you do at GamesCampus .

David Chang: My name is David Chang, I’m the EVP of Marketing and Business Development for GamesCampus.

I’m in charge of all of our advertising and marketing activity, as well as our business development activity. Which involves working with partners like Major League Baseball, all the way down to payments.

The MMO Gamer: You just finished giving me a very interesting demo. I have to admit to our readers, when I first went to your website I was thinking to myself: Pool? Baseball? Golf? What’s my editor on, giving me this assignment?

But, you proved me wrong. I didn’t think that it would be humanly possible to work baseball or golf into a persistent online world that meets the definition of an MMO, but you have managed to accomplish it.

David Chang: That’s awesome!

The MMO Gamer: Can you give a brief rundown on how the system is set up?

David Chang: Sure. One of the things about the baseball game in particular that’s so great is that there is a leveling component, not just to the team, but also to players.

So you’re exactly right in terms of the persistence. We want people to do not just play a baseball game, but we want people to grow their team and their players over time. So, there are things where if you win a game, that’s how you gain experience points.

If you win against a higher level opponent you get more experience points, if you kind of bottom feed and you take advantage of lower level players, you don’t get as much, and so on.

There are a lot of MMO-type concepts in the game. If you’re talking about individual players, if you hit a lot of homeruns, or if you steal a lot of bases, your power or your stealing stat will increase over each season.

So, a large part of the game is about growing not just your team, but your players on your team.

I think the example I used for our game was Juan Pierre. Juan Pierre is my lead-off hitter, and I’ve been able to do quite well with him. Over time, my batting power, my batting accuracy, and my run statistic with him has increased.

There are some people that like to collect players, like they want to have Vladimir Guerrero, and they want Bobby Abreu, and they want Mark Teixeira… you can do that, obviously. But, there are people like myself that like to grow players over time.

And, if you take your players and you grow them over time, they can compete head to head with the marquee players that are out there. So, you don’t need to necessarily need to choose one path over the other.

It’s also like an MMO, in that there are different ways to play a baseball game. One example I gave in our conversation was you can play long ball, right? You can play a power game, you can play a finesse game… kind of like [laughing] you can be a damage dealer, or you can be a stealth guy.

There a lot of different ways to think about how to play these games, that are very similar to MMO concepts. The only things we have are missions, that are very much like quests in MMOs, where you have to accomplish a certain set of objectives, like beating all the teams in the AL East, or pitching a shut-out.

The MMO Gamer: I was just going to bring those up in my second question. You have actually found a way to create missions that do not involve killing 10 rats. That deserves some kind of a medal.

David Chang: [laughing] They’re even a little bit more fun than killing 10 rats, right?

Even the basic missions, like beat your cross-town rival—so for the Dodgers it would be the Angels, or the Giants and the Athletics. What that involves is playing a really heated game against another person, online. And I think that’s a lot fun.

It’s not just simple hunter-gather missions, or grind. I think the one improvement above MMO games it that with our sports games, you can’t really grind out levels.

There isn’t this thing not where there’s this exploit, where you get a bunch of mobs to trail you, and then zone damage somebody… That stuff isn’t necessary, because all of our missions are gameplay missions, where you’re playing against other people.

I think that’s a good way to make it fun for everybody.

Continued on the next page.