Prime Numbers

Q: Can you just begin by telling us how you got involved with Monumental, and your role there?

Mike Cox: I’ve known Rik Alexander [Monumental CEO] for ages and he’s always had interesting tech that he’s flirted with releasing outside of the company. So my role was to come in as someone who knows middleware and take the Monumental tech and see if there’s a market for it. And I was surprised when I got there at how much they’ve got. They genuinely to do have the world’s first commercially available, browser-based 3D MMO engine.

Q: That’s quite a mouthful. And a bit of a stretch to be honest…

Mike Cox: Obviously Unity has got a 3D browser-based engine, but it’s not dedicated to MMOs. Unity is great but if you want to use it for MMO stuff you’ve got to write all your own front and back end code. It’s not a trivial task, it’s possible, but it’s a big job. The advantage of Prime is that it’s all built in. You can effectively plug it straight into Facebook or whatever browser based application you want to use and the MMO functionality is already there.

Q: Is it pretty niche? That’s got to be a niche market at this point…

Mike Cox: It’s a niche market at the moment but its growing, definitely. As online games become more social and more and more people interact with each other, there’s this situation we’ve got at the moment where you think you’re interacting with your friends on Frontierville but actually you’re not. You can see the consequences of their actions, which is great, but you can’t interact in real-time with them apart from chat in a little box. What Prime offers is the ability to interact in an MMO with 3D models in real-time. The games that it can create look a lot more like traditional 3D games than you’d expect. In terms of numbers, we’re looking at LPSW - Light Persistent State Worlds - we’re not talking World of Warcraft. We’re thinking that in each section of our world you’ll get between 2000 - 3000 players. It’s still a hell of a lot, and it feels like an MMO. It’s not as vast but in reality the database can handle hundreds of thousands of people.

The key thing that appeals to me as an ex studio head is the small amount of resources you need to get something up and running. All the tools are there, all of the pipeline is there, effectively all you are doing is adding content, and that’s relatively easy to do. You just export your geometry and you’ve got world creation tools that come with the software and literally within a day you can have something up and running. And then it’s a matter of finessing it and adding more content. We’re aiming it at developers who like the idea of getting into the social online gaming space but haven’t really done it before because they’re from a more traditional PC or console background, and they don’t want to invest the time in creating their own tools. Especially if they haven’t been in this space before because they won’t know what tools they need, and they are also looking to rapidly prototype.

Q: Do you have the support network already in place? Because now you’re providing a service to other developers I’d imagine that’s a whole new business division for Monumental.

Mike Cox: One of the transitions that Monumental is going to have to make is the move from being a straight forward developer - we care about our staff and our games - to actually supporting lots of external companies, some of which may not even be in the same time zone as us. We already have an internal support system but that will have to be amended to be able to handle multiple calls and priorities. We have a whole ramp up plan to go from internal to external.

Q: How quickly do you see that happening?

Mike Cox: From now through to the next six months. What we’re saying to our very early adopters is that they are coming on this ride with us, here are the tools, they work and we’ll probably go the extra nine yards initially to get it all set up for you and get extra people on site. That’s why I’m being careful about who we initially let it go to. We’re looking at friendly developers who we know are interested in this and effectively heavily discounting it initially to get people on board.

There’s no point in trying to cover this up, it’s the first time we’ve moved in to middleware. But we’ve been clients of middleware before and we’ve had a lot of experience so we know what’s expected. It’s not that frightening and the tools are very stable, they’ve been developed over 3-4 years. The things we’re going to have to cater to are other people’s demands and there will be some surprises.

Q: You’ll be able to see how different people use your tech, which should be interesting…

Mike Cox: The biggest thing we have to sort out immediately, and we’re on top of it, is the documentation. There’s lot of it and it’s spread all over our servers and not in an indexable form, so we’ve just hired a technical author to get that as it should be.

Q: Have developers signed on the dotted line to buy Prime yet?

Mike Cox: No one has signed on the dotted line because the people who have been looking at it are friendly developers. I’m expecting to announce shortly our first five developers who are using it for real projects. What I’m looking for on that are a diverse number of projects. We’ve shown it around and the response has been excellent. What I really want to do is pick four or five developers who are going to use it fully and make really good games and different types of games so we can use them as examples of what Prime can achieve.

Q: The MMO market is notoriously cut-throat. You either sink or swim. How intimidating is that market, knowing you can lose or win a lot of money? Especially considering it can be such a time-sink for users, who don’t have time to play anything else…

Mike Cox: Well, you’re talking about MMOs. I’m talking about lighter, persistent worlds. Light versions of MMOs that we expect to see on Facebook. Yes, they still involve an investment in time but not to the level of World of Warcraft.

Q: But the success and failure rate is brutal online, regardless of a new business model. Look at a company like Realtime Worlds which got over $100 million in investment and collapsed within weeks of releasing its first game.

Mike Cox: It’s a challenge, it’s a tough market. But if people use Prime imaginatively and creatively they can make social games that don’t necessarily look or feel like MMOs. The idea is it’s a fairly generic platform for creating massively multiplayer online games. They don’t all have to be quest-driven RPGs. They can be social games, they can be puzzle games.

Q: What showcase games has Monumental got in the works?

Mike Cox: Little Horrors is in public beta at the moment. This was the first real project that was made using our tech and we’ve already found a producer for it. It’s going to be published by Jagex. Clearly it’s not up to PS3 or 360 quality, but that’s not the point, it’s designed to be played across Facebook and it’s a lot different to what you would normally see on Facebook. All of the tools that created the game all ship with Prime and this is effectively the demo game that we give away with the product.

Q: There’s a lot of acquisition activity in the online gaming space at the moment - do you expect it to calm down shortly?

Mike Cox: Ultimately, yes. I can understand why it’s going on. But you still need studios with the skill sets to produce those kind of games. Middleware isn’t a magic ticket, you still need the creative teams that can bring a vision to a compelling experience. There’s a limited number of those. As far a Monumental is concerned we’re well-funded, we’re a profitable company and we’re not actually currently seeking acquisition any time soon.

Q: I guess my question is are you adding middleware to bulk up in the face of increase competition and dollars, or adding middleware to become a more attractive acquisition?

Mike Cox: I think ultimately a little bit of both. Initially it’s because we’ve got this tool set, we recognise that no one else is offering it and it’s a relatively low investment to hire me and some support staff to get it out there. In doing that as a company we’ll learn more about ourselves and the product, which should accelerate the improvement of the product. Otherwise, we’ll get stuck into another game and we’ll only make the tools we need to make that game. That’s how internal development works. Doing Prime as middleware there will be requests coming in for other tools and optimisations that will benefit us as well as everyone else. For return on investment it makes sense to do it.

Q: There’s a shadow of Google hanging over the social and online games scene - what are you impressions of such a huge player like that ramping up to enter the market?

Mike Cox: I hope by investing significantly with the products they’re working on that the quality bar will move up. As a gamer myself, I was traditionally a PC gamer, then console and now I’m moving into the social space but I want the quality bar to be higher. I’m absorbed by some of the game mechanics of online games but disappointed by the visuals and end quality of what I’m playing. The sooner that improves the better.

It’s not just us, there is Unity and 3dvia and others out there pushing the quality bar up. A lot of online games, certainly in the social space, suffer from not having significant investment in them, and I hope with Google coming in we’ll all be able to push that investment up and so the quality improves. It can be a very good thing.

Q: The Chrome Webstore sounds very encouraging for developers if Google can keep to the 5 per cent cut it said it would take…

Mike Cox: So long as you can keep you original investment down, that’s the thing. And that’s why any middleware has got to be attractive, not just us, because the last thing you want to do is invest a reasonable-sized code team in reinventing the wheel when you don’t even know if it’s going to work or bring the money back in.

Q: So, the crude question - how much does Prime cost?

Mike Cox: It’s aggressively priced, certainly for early adopters and frankly until we’ve got our support system up and running everyone is going to be an early adopter. Prototype licenses are £20,000. The idea of a prototype licence is you get you game up and running, or any number of games, play about with it, show it to publishers, get your funding. A full licence is £30,000, so if you want to convert a prototype to a full licence you pay us the extra £30,000 and away you go.

The other thing we’re doing is site licences. These are for bigger companies like EA, who might want to release 10 games and not pay £50,000 per game. They can buy a site licence for £100,000 and that covers them for a year, so they make as many games as they like in that time. The £100,000 includes support as well, which we think is bargain. On top of the £20,000 and £30,000 we charge £15,000 a year for support.

If you’re only going to make one game and take more than a year doing it, you would probably pay £65,000. But if you’re going to make more than one game and commercialise them, then site licence is the way to go. We may put it up in the future, but that’s significantly cheaper than anything out there at the moment. To start with that’s a fair price, that’s value for money.