Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

One of the other parts of MMO design, that I don"t think some people grasp is this. Think about every other genre out there, nothing is even in the same hemisphere when it comes to the use of content.

So in addition to volume that"s incomparable, you also have players, millions of them, playing through content, including mechanics, every day of the year. That amounts to millions of hours of time inside the game. Those simple cool thoughts and ideas always seem a lot cooler when you think of yourself playing them, then all of the sudden you think about 5-20 million people doing the same, every day, and you can see where things just don"t become as cool and ingenious as we like to think they are when we come up with them.

Goes back to what I suggested earlier. You are hitting the tough road right off. Build some experience and history first with console/pc games. They are a heck of a lot cheaper to make, you can start developing a following, and you can actually start making income off the sales. Jumping fresh into a MMO is begging for disaster unless you have some dynamite material.

Maxxius said:

Goes back to what I suggested earlier. You are hitting the tough road right off. Build some experience and history first with console/pc games. They are a heck of a lot cheaper to make, you can start developing a following, and you can actually start making income off the sales. Jumping fresh into a MMO is begging for disaster unless you have some dynamite material.

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While Curt is new to the whole game developer scene, his compatriots certainly aren"t. He"s got a team backing him with the experience and know-how so that the potential (I know, after Vanguard we alldespisethat word) for a great title is there. I don"t doubt that they have the talent and training to make 38 Studios" first endeavor a successful MMO. The big question now ishowsuccessful?

It"s no big secret Curt"s dream is to flip the industry on it"s head and bring 38 Studios to a whole new level of excellence. Whether or not their premiere title kicks unbridled ass could give us a good benchmark on the future of 38 Studios and the industry as a whole.

While many may point to VG and say, "Do something simpler at first" I don"t think you can point at VG and really say anything about the game itself based on the game.

I do believe that you can look at the game and say everything that needs to be said about the company behind the game.

VG always felt like a campfire tale, multi-beer, and hallucination of a game brought to life. You know those times when you sit with your friends and discuss how cool it would be to do this and that and everythign in between. It was like a love in, creative orgy that never developed into its own awareness.

If you go back and look at what was going on 3-4 years before the game released you can see a distinctly different path for both companies even at this early stage. Time will tell what the boys from boston can bring us....but at this stage I am pleased with not only the game foundation/ideas they are espousing but also their business sense.

It has the creative orgy involved in it....it is just staying in the business world rather than dropping into the hippy land of "lets all hug and allow osmosis to help us build a great game".

Cadrid said:

While Curt is new to the whole game developer scene, his compatriots certainly aren"t. He"s got a team backing him with the experience and know-how so that the potential (I know, after Vanguard we alldespisethat word) for a great title is there. I don"t doubt that they have the talent and training to make 38 Studios" first endeavor a successful MMO. The big question now ishowsuccessful?

It"s no big secret Curt"s dream is to flip the industry on it"s head and bring 38 Studios to a whole new level of excellence. Whether or not their premiere title kicks unbridled ass could give us a good benchmark on the future of 38 Studios and the industry as a whole.

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What I believe he was talking about is not about getting experience. Any software company, before going on to make their BIG UBER SHINY Application or game, should start out by making smaller applications not only to fund the big one but to also start developing tools/technologies to use in your future project.


Take Vanguard for example. They should have tried and built a small single player RPG, to test out their Graphics Engine, work out all the sub systems to said engine, aswell as refine all the Tools to interact with the engine, and get some income while they are at it.

Jedite said:

What I believe he was talking about is not about getting experience. Any software company, before going on to make their BIG UBER SHINY Application or game, should start out by making smaller applications not only to fund the big one but to also start developing tools/technologies to use in your future project.

Take Vanguard for example. They should have tried and built a small single player RPG, to test out their Graphics Engine, work out all the sub systems to said engine, aswell as refine all the Tools to interact with the engine, and get some income while they are at it.

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I feel, however, that 38 Studios" priorities aren"t the same as Sigil"s: Curt & co."s focus isn"t just "Let"s make great games," it"s a focus on becoming the pinnacle of entertainment companies, both internally and publicly. While Sigil may have been in it for the long haul, the folks at the top were mostly concerned about making their dream game. In contrast, Curt has stated numerous times his intention isn"t to makehisgame, but to evolve the industry.

For all we know, this MMO isn"t their "OMG awesomegasm" title, and is just a stepping stone in helping fund and prepare future developments. Yes, it"s a tall order for a "fledgling" company, but if they can"t dothishow could theypossiblykick things into overdrive to achieve their true, overarching goals?

Come on Cad, while I am not trying to put the jinx on Curt"s company, they really are heading down a tough road. Get your feet wet first. Build a following. There"s no rush. While they have people with experience, that doesn"t mean they have a product history to work off of. WOW clearly did. AOC and WAR do too. Lotro worked off one of the biggest names out there. I would say EQ was the clear exception and they just basically stepped in shit imo. Right game at the right time. It is very hard to duplicate that.

Maxxius said:

Come on Cad, while I am not trying to put the jinx on Curt"s company, they really are heading down a tough road. Get your feet wet first. Build a following. There"s no rush. While they have people with experience, that doesn"t mean they have a product history to work off of.

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Sure we do. Our President, CEO, was pretty much the guy behind the Medal of Honor franchise. Every person on our dev team has been in on the development of shipped titles, inside the MMO space and out, every single one.

Every person in this company BUT me has product history and successful history at that. Given that I am not driving them to make my game, it"s all good.

People point to other "start ups" that are getting funding and say "those guys made a game", which is not true.

Red5, everyone says that they got the funding because they are the guys that made WoW. I don"t doubt for a second that they are going to do some incredible stuff, but they didn"t make WoW. They were part of the team that did, but the core Red5 guys were PART of the team, not the team itself.

Using that logic our team has made as many, if not more titles, than any startup in existance.

No question it"s a tough road, but so what? Getting even the smallest titles to market is a tough road, and incredibly tough road in the game space these days.

No, our goal is and will remain to be the best in the world at what we do. We get that you have to crawl, walk, and then run, we are just doing it on a track that others can"t, won"t or choose not to get on.

We"ll make mistakes, we"ll screw up, but given the teams makeup and our goals we have to if we are serious about being what we are going to be.

We could put this thing out for half the money in half the time, to get to market and see where we stack. Doing that would make us like a bunch of other companies that no ones ever heard of, and some you have. That"s just not going to happen, ever.

If we launch something that sucks it will be because we were all wrong. But we won"t launch something you open, download, or install and wonder how on earth someone ok"d the launch of something that"s not only crappy, but bug ridden.

If you don"t set out to garner a global audience of customers who know for a fact that anything on the shelf bearing your logo is a polished piece of software that you KNOW will run reliably and be fun as hell, why play?

Curt, I am not referring to just experience on individual levels. I"m talking as a "product name." WOW had it"s following off of its name. Same as AOC, WAR, Lotro. I doubt if anyone would taken those games seriously without that (tho WOW is just such a well made game they probably would have succeeded anyway). Lotro, for example, is basically a mediocre game and would never have drawn the sales they did with out the "name." Trying to sell a game called "BrandX", which no one ever heard of is going to be very difficult. Coming out with "BrandX" after you had produced a series of "miniBrandXs", which proved successful, will help tons. And if "minBrandXs" are flopping odds are (tho not necessarily) so would the MMO too.

Certainly if you launch something that sucks, case closed that"s it, you try to salvage. And as you said in your last sentence above, if you have produced prior quality titles you give that ultimate MMO a much better chance for success. This isn"t to say you can"t make that uber MMO. I hope you do. But I am sure you are starting to see how hard it is, how expensive it is, and literally how fickle the market can be about these things. I just think you should start RPG first. My 2 cents to ignore.

While they may not have a brand name that will be recognizable they will most definitely have the artist and writer name. Slapping Salvatore, Schilling and McFarlane on the cover is enough to warrant some attention from a passerby in your local Best Buy even if they don"t know what an MMO is.

Well I said this before, Salvatore was a good catch mainly because you have a quality author who can write up a quality story and that story is what you should develop a following off of through a series of polished RPGs. Assuming success, you now have a solid foundation for a MMO imo.

What you are basically asking is for them to delay developing an MMO for nearly 10 years. If they spend the the next 2-3 years making an RPG, seeing how it does, making a sequel for 2-3 years and seeing how that does then spending 3-4 years on an MMO, it could be nearly 2020 before they release.

Well I assume they are in it for the long haul. As I said, why the rush? Plus you can work on both, and hopefully the RPGs are producing you additional income.

I don"t think name is as much of an issue as people like to think it is. Quality and fun is the name of the game.

VG was a no name IP but had a huge following. If the word of mouth had been good, if the game had been getting the "OMG this is fun!!" type of stuff then it would have come out of the gate extremely well. It had 200k people buy it, a lot more had it on preorder, and the vast majority of those knew it was very, very rough and might have some serious issues.

How many folks would have bought it if the word out of beta was how fun it was rather than how bad it sucked?? How many more would have bought it in the first month if everyone was saying how much fun it was??

No...you"re not going to get WOW numbers in the beginning with a new IP...but if its good, fun, and well put together then you can do very well simply because its word of mouth that drives these games. WOW wouldn"t be anywhere near where it is right now if it wasn"t fun and everyone that played it said it was ok but nothing all that great.

Yes, WOW had a pretty damn big following. But it was the open beta, which had damn near everyone raving about how much fun the game was, is what exploded opening day numbers. An IP with a good following CAN bring you opening day numbers. Word of mouth and a good game will bring you growth and excitement.

Think about it. A game that was trashed as badly as VG, was in extremely rough shape and in no way complete got 200k boxes sold that we know about in the first month. What would have happened to VG if it had the word of mouth WOW had??? What would have happened if it was fun, bug free and ran well on more machines??

I think you could have easily tripled those numbers and started growing.

Gaereth said:

I don"t think name is as much of an issue as people like to think it is. Quality and fun is the name of the game.

VG was a no name IP but had a huge following. If the word of mouth had been good, if the game had been getting the "OMG this is fun!!" type of stuff then it would have come out of the gate extremely well. It had 200k people buy it, a lot more had it on preorder, and the vast majority of those knew it was very, very rough and might have some serious issues.

How many folks would have bought it if the word out of beta was how fun it was rather than how bad it sucked?? How many more would have bought it in the first month if everyone was saying how much fun it was??

No...you"re not going to get WOW numbers in the beginning with a new IP...but if its good, fun, and well put together then you can do very well simply because its word of mouth that drives these games. WOW wouldn"t be anywhere near where it is right now if it wasn"t fun and everyone that played it said it was ok but nothing all that great.

Yes, WOW had a pretty damn big following. But it was the open beta, which had damn near everyone raving about how much fun the game was, is what exploded opening day numbers. An IP with a good following CAN bring you opening day numbers. Word of mouth and a good game will bring you growth and excitement.

Think about it. A game that was trashed as badly as VG, was in extremely rough shape and in no way complete got 200k boxes sold that we know about in the first month. What would have happened to VG if it had the word of mouth WOW had??? What would have happened if it was fun, bug free and ran well on more machines??

I think you could have easily tripled those numbers and started growing.

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No one, not even WoW has truly reached a "massive" audience. 9 million? That"s incredible, unreal, unprecedented, but in the global scheme of things how many players are playing fantasy MMO"s?

Someone can, someone will, launch to a world wide audience of that many, if not double. It"s going to happen one day and my gamble is that it will be us.

Okay, now you are scaring me.

Well WOW numbers really are misleading. Last I saw it was 2 million in US and about same in Europe. It" hard to factor Asia since they do the whole cafe routine and that can muddle true numbers. So is there plenty of room to grow? Yup. I guess the next question is do we really want it to grow heheh.

Gaereth said:

. . .

Think about it. A game that was trashed as badly as VG, was in extremely rough shape and in no way complete got 200k boxes sold that we know about in the first month. What would have happened to VG if it had the word of mouth WOW had??? What would have happened if it was fun, bug free and ran well on more machines??

I think you could have easily tripled those numbers and started growing.

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Yeah but you are talking about a nonexistent game then. It"s easy to say "what if game so and so was so great everyone praised it?" But that is make believe. When you compare ALL the MMOs to date only one had numbers that knocked your socks off, namely WOW, and that is because as I said they already had a strong following and they produced a solid game. And they were able to produce a solid game because they had a great story to work with and solid financial backing.

The solid game had way more to do with it than the IP.

If IP means everything...then SWG would have had the highest numbers for any of them out of the gate. Or LOTR even. But they haven"t and don"t because the game wasn"t/isn"t that great.

I bet if you polled the WOW player base you would find that less than 25% have played a Blizz game before. IP can make it easier but the game and gameplay is the only thing that truly makes a difference.

And Ngruk....I hope to see it.

Ngruk said:

No one, not even WoW has truly reached a "massive" audience. 9 million? That"s incredible, unreal, unprecedented, but in the global scheme of things how many players are playing fantasy MMO"s?

Someone can, someone will, launch to a world wide audience of that many, if not double. It"s going to happen one day and my gamble is that it will be us.

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Them is some big words right there.