Flagship Studios CEO Bill Roper in San Francisco

In Part II of our four-part interview with Flagship Studios CEO Bill Roper, we got to talking about the company's somewhat criticized two-tiered model for its debut game, Hellgate: London. Roper informed us that the paid subscribers would no longer be referred to as Elites, and went on to explain that in his opinion, the free experience, which includes online play, was still a terrific value that should not be looked at as downgraded compared to the paid subscription service. Today, in Part III, Roper tells us why Flagship chose a hybrid business model for Hellgate: London; how the company is structured to deliver regular content updates; and why people should think of the game as an MMO.

In some ways, there isn't really a model like what you're doing on Hellgate: London. You have MMOs where people pay a subscription fee for the service. There are item-driven, micro-transaction driven MMOs, primarily in Asia. The closest thing that I think of to this--but it would even be different from what you guys have done--is Phantasy Star online, where you could play the single-player experience for no additional charge, but then to play with up to three other friends online, you paid a monthly fee. What's interesting is that audiences accepted that, whereas there's been some criticism of your approach with both free online and a paid subscription model. When you guys were formulating how you wanted to approach Hellgate's business model, what was the process you went through? What were the models that you looked at? How did you decide, "Here's what we think has worked; here's what we think doesn't; here's what we think is going to work for our audience?" What was the guiding philosophy?

Well, the guiding philosophy was what's gonna be the best for the game and for our players. We knew that players wanted the ability to go online and play for free. That was very, very evident. That was an expectation. And so even as a startup with our first game, we had to figure out a way to make that happen. We knew that that was gonna be a big selling point in terms of reaching out to all the Diablo players around the world. That was their, you know, expectations. They wanted to be able to have that same experience. But then we also knew that there was a big outcry and a need for continuing content and so, for us it really is "How do we accomplish these goals? How do we make sure there's free multiplayer? And then, how do we also support ongoing, continuing content and the things that are encompassed in that?" We talked about all kinds of things. We looked at all the models that are there: everything from real money transactions and item purchases to auction-based systems. All kinds of stuff. And really we tried to come up with what we thought would be the cleanest division, "Here's where you can get this experience and it's free. And then when you want to go to ongoing content, that's where we do a subscription."

We worked very hard to also try to come up with a price point--we decided on the $9.99 price [for monthly subscriptions]. It wasn't that we felt we were offering any less than games that cost $14.95 a month. It's just like with the game where we've done things like, for example, low-poly assets: low-poly versions of every graphic in the game so you can reach lower end video cards and older systems, 'cause we want to get it out to as many people as we can. Same thing with the pricing model. We want people to be excited about the potential of ongoing content from what's gonna be there; all the events we're gonna be having; these big content pushes every three months or so; and being on board with that and kind of sharing in that experience, and doing it in a way where we weren't busting the bank.

That was a lot of work not only from a development standpoint, but also with the online model: how we can do things so we can be more economical so we can actually offer it at that price? The board of directors here at Flagship sat down and everything that we decided was based on "How do we do what's best for the game, how do we do what's best for the players?" That really drove what the business model was gonna be. It's all about what could we do that enables us to be able to offer an amazing value, to kind of over-deliver, and to make sure that we can have people play for free for as long as they want. And then be able to support ongoing content that's very interactive, very driven by the community in a lot of ways so that it reflects what they want out of the game at a price point that was gonna be really friendly. The vast majority of our business decisions get driven by "What's good for the game? What's good for the players? What would we want? We're all gamers, so what it is that we want to do?"

That's how Battle.net got started in the first place back at Blizzard. We were at E3 and that was when TEN and Catapult and all these pay-for-play services were the rage. And we said, "God, wouldn't it be really cool if when you bought the game, you click a button, and you go online and play for free. That would be cool. That's what I would want to do." And so we just did it. We built that and that's what it was all about. With Hellgate: London, it's like, "Okay, what do we want to do? Hey, we want to make sure that people can have that same experience: that click of a button, go online, play for free. But then for people that want to have that long-term relationship with the game, we want to be able to have the same kind of long-term commitment and relationship, and build a game and continue to grow it and change it, and get in what they want, and get in more of our ideas, and do that in a way that doesn't kill anybody." It doesn't kill us, it doesn't kill them.

In terms of the continuing content model--I'm sure you guys must have considered--you say you're looking at a roughly sort of quarterly schedule for the major content updates. Did you consider sort of an a la carte model? What pushed you to a subscription model?

Because we'll be doing a lot more than just the push every three months. You know, we're already planning things; looking at monthly events, weekly things. If we come up with a really cool idea, we may not want to wait until that big content push to introduce things into the world. And then there is honestly a lot of expenses involved in running an online service and having a development team that's constantly being able to fix issues and balance tweaks and bugs, all those kind of things.

But I also don't want people to just think that because they're paying a subscription, they're only gonna get something once every three months. They're getting things all the time. There will constantly be things that we're streaming out to the player; events that are happening; special things that are tied to real-world timeline events; things that we build specifically just for inside the game that deal with our world history. We've even talked about things like every Tuesday is mod day and some Tuesdays we change--you know, you have a higher chance of mod dropping and different costuming to put on your weapon. Like we kind of change the rules on different days of the week. We'll have special events that happen once every two weeks, things we'll constantly be putting into the game and pulling out of the game, altering and changing. And all those things take coordination and programming, and art resources, and all that.

The goal is that there's always something going on and we're kind of always getting you new, fun things that happen in small amounts. But then once every three months there's a big content drop that happens as well, and that can be anything from new areas, new monsters, new weapons, new quests, new everything. New gameplay mechanics, new damage types, even up to and including  new character classes, which traditionally you only ever see in expansion sets. We want to have those kind of quarterly pushes being really big things that people are looking forward to, but at the same time they're constantly getting new stuff in the game.

So how are you organized internally to support the weekly, monthly and quarterly updates and events? How are you structured?

Well, pretty much when the game shifts, that's when the majority of the company is still working on it. Obviously because it's our big product that's launching, and it's our initial launch, that means the vast majority of the company is focused on that. We have people that are assigned as leads--design leads or program leads--and they kind of are that core of what makes up that ongoing content theme. We've already done a lot of designing/planning on what can happen in different months and different ideas, how those get created. And we do maintain a very organic development process where we'll structure things out in terms of a skeletal structure, where we have a high-level overview, a main line of what's gonna happen; but then we always leave room both in our dev schedules and in our design to be able to be iterative. So, if something goes in and it's not as good as we thought it was, we can change it. If it was really good, we can expand that idea. And we can get feedback from the community; we can actually see what's happening in the game and make additions or alterations that way. We're trying to stay as flexible as possible because that's really the most exciting thing about having an online game that has the ability to create continuing content is that you're not just building something for months and years, and then it comes out and you hope its what people want. You can be very iterative. You can make changes both small and large that take into account what's actually happening.

That may be the most exciting thing about doing any kind of MMO at all is the fact that your turnaround time is a lot shorter, right? You can say, "Oh, hey, this isn't working. People don't like that. Well, what if we change it this way? OK, boom, let's try that change, put that change in live. OK, yeah, that made it really good." Or, "Hey, it would be really interesting if we added this ability to this monster because it seems like that would make him a lot more fun for people to play at higher levels," and you can just make that change and put it in. You don't have to wait a year before an expansion set comes out to do that or something, right? So the team will be a mix across the board. It's still actually not design-heavy, but design-focused, in the fact that it's not just a list of things that we want to get done. It's us being able to play the game ourselves, interact with our community, and be iterative and responsive to what it is that the game wants and what the players want.

Do you have a name for this kind of thing? I mean, is it a minimally multiplayer online game?

No, it's an MMO. I mean, MMO means "massively multiplayer online." We're gonna be connecting hundreds of thousands to millions of players online. You know, Diablo 2 is an MMO, but in people's heads when they think MMO they think the EverQuest model so that gives them all these parameters of what an MMO is. And then---I don't know if this gets driven by marketing groups or by sales or fans, I don't know--people really seem to need, have that need to be able to strictly define things. Like I know that Raph Koster at one point referred to Guild Wars as a hub-and-instance MMO, trying to narrow down what kind of MMO it was. It's an MMO. You go online and you're playing with, you know, thousands of other people in your community. That's what Hellgate is. It's an MMO. But to me the more quote-unquote "confusing part" is that its both a single-player game and an MMO. I was thinking of it as trying to be kind of like the Swiss Army Knife of games or the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of games. You've got your single-player MMO or whatever, or it kind of has these different arms that it reaches out to, these different people that want to play it. But we talk about it as being a massively multiplayer online game in the fact that we're gonna be putting a massive amount of people together to play a game.

It is a different model in every way. Yes, it's a different business model. It's a different gameplay style. It's not gonna play like World of Warcraft. It's not gonna play like EverQuest because it's an action RPG, but it has story line, and role playing, and character development. Depending on what character class you play, you're even gonna get some different experiences there. If you're playing one of the hunter classes, especially the marksman, you're still going to be playing an action-RPG and still have all those role-playing things like leveling up and items, and skills, and you care about your character level versus monster level and all those things; but it has much more of an FPS feel to it. Like the mechanics flow more that way because the higher the level you get, depending on what skills you take, there's a lot more concern as to player skill whereas the Templar classes and the Cabalist classes don't really rely on player's skill; your twitch skill specifically. The marksman class very specifically, the higher level you get is more built to have more interest for FPS players because, depending again on the skills that you take, it becomes very dependent on player accuracy; and you get benefits for that.

Again, it's trying to take these elements from different types of games and--not mash them altogether but "Oh, this is really interesting about working in 3-D. This is really interesting about FPSs. This is really interesting about MMOs. You know, this is really interesting about very story-driven RPGs." Even things like the concept of content over time as opposed to content over area, which for the first time a lot of us ever really saw that used really well was in Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing has got a very small game space, but there's tons of new things that keep happening to you. That's because things are timed. Oh, I've been playing for this long. Oh, on this Tuesday this is gonna show up. Even though it's not like I had to go to a new land to find that. Things are coming to you.
And you even see that happen in games like Tiger Woods where they have a real-time event calendar. It's like "Cool, it's Easter. I can go win this shirt." That was a contest over time. Even things like that that come from different games and these blendings--I think that is where our minds have always been. If people feel that need to classify it, hopefully it'll be classified as a really fun game they like playing as opposed to just having to stick it in some box.