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Trion's Lars Buttler

The CEO of Trion Worlds on why it's time for an evolution in the MMO market

GamesIndustry.biz You've been working on these games for four and a half years, so there's a lot to recoup there. What business models are you attaching to these titles?
Lars Buttler

The short answer is 'all of the above'. But it's different territories, different times and different models. So in North America and Europe, if you have a very strict quality bar, subscription is the right model. That's what people expect. If you make it free-to-play with micro-transactions they immediately discount it as lesser quality. Subscriptions only work if you get real videogame quality - super polish, real persistence and a lot of engagement. If people are playing 3-4 hours a day it becomes really cheap.

But there are other territories, like Russia, where subscription would never work no matter how good it is. So for those we go with micro-transactions and over time, maybe a few years from now when the games get a bit old, you can switch. It's not set in stone. Pick a lead model for the market and then add on top of that.

GamesIndustry.biz Lord of the Rings Online was subscription and recently went free-to-play. Do you see Trion being in that position, able to completely overhaul the business model if players demand it?
Lars Buttler

Rift is of the highest production values right now, so it makes absolute sense to start it as a subscription game. Now if after the course of five years or so we launch better titles and these become older in the portfolio, then switching to micro-transactions makes absolute sense. The model is not the interesting thing, you optimise the model for the market and the time. It's really about matching correctly.

GamesIndustry.biz What's your take on the current state of the MMO market, because it seems brutal if you fail to pick up a audience quickly, it's obviously costly to enter...
Lars Buttler

It's very cyclical. The top games have these long lifecycles. Everquest was out there for six or seven years undisputed, now Warcraft is out there for six or seven years undisputed. You should never try to be a subscription game unless you have better production values and product differentiation than the current incumbent. If you're going to make a clone of what's already out there, well, it doesn't work. And I'm not sure what people are thinking when they do that. If you look at End of Nations, which doesn't even have competition in the market because there is no massively multi-player online real-time strategy game, or the third title that we're doing with the SyFy action game, then it's a totally different playing field. Because you're not competing on a one-to-one basis with World of Warcraft.

GamesIndustry.biz What turnaround are you going to have for getting games to market? It's taken over four years and you don't yet have a live product.
Lars Buttler

We think that the minimum to have a really strong business is one tent pole title a year. Many people miss that, they launch a game and then for four or five years, nothing. We have a full pipeline and we're starting next year, and then every six to twelve months we're going to launch another big one.

GamesIndustry.biz And the company will presumably scale with that, as it supports multiple live products?
Lars Buttler

Absolutely. We invested a lot of time, a lot of money, we hand-picked the best people, we built new technology, we raised a lot of money.

GamesIndustry.biz How much have you spent so far?
Lars Buttler

Well, we only publicly said that we raised over $100 million, so let's stay with that. But you can imagine that if you make these super-quality videogames that are live in a multi-player environment it costs a lot of money. We never want to sacrifice quality, so we pushed for more time, we pushed for more money. We had to in order to get it right.

GamesIndustry.biz Compared to other online games and entertainment you're in that high-end category, and one of the most expensive games experiences for a user to commit to - is that a concern with so many cheaper alternatives online?
Lars Buttler

Compared to console games, per minute or per hour we are cheaper. You play these games for so much longer, with so much more intensity than packaged good videogames. When you buy the game you have a full month of play, which is 100 hours or more. You can see that people clearly have a case for social, dynamic experiences in the casual game space, which is a totally different audience, there's almost no overlap in the audience.

GamesIndustry.biz Do you believe that? There's no overlap in players dabbling with other, less hardcore game experiences?
Lars Buttler

Yes. If you look at the statistics for things like Zynga, it's 45 year-old women playing. That's the sweet spot. I was at Pogo with Electronic Arts and that was our audience. We were thinking about whether we should advertise on Facebook. Whatever we see in terms of demographics on Facebook it is not our demographics. It's not the male, young, typical videogame audience. If companies have figured out how to take 45 year-old casual games players from Yahoo to Facebook, what about the Command & Conquer player that wants to be social? That's what we're trying to do.

GamesIndustry.biz Are you bothering with retail at all for these releases, or just going straight to market as a download service?
Lars Buttler

Yes, just because there are people in the West who still want a box. They go to a store, look at the shiny covers, and it's a signal of premium quality. We want to be open to any venue possible, we don't want to restrict ways in which a customer can buy a game. But retail isn't really core to our business. You can pirate this without being able to copy us. If you copy the client you cannot play the game, because it's entirely server-based in terms of computing. If someone takes a traditional PC game and copies it it's game over, the publisher makes no money. In our case, it's distribution. It's even more people that come to our servers and they have to register. We don't even need to bother with DRM or anything like that, there's no need for it.

GamesIndustry.biz Have you got any interest in the console space at all, and if so, what opportunities are there for Trion?
Lars Buttler

Consoles are connected devices. If you have over 50 per cent of consoles connected, it starts getting really interesting. Since the console market in the West today is about five times bigger than the PC market, it's definitely something we don't want to neglect. If you have a server-based game it's so much easier to port, because you don't have to recreate the entire game, you just optimise the client. Just like the business model, you have to be smart what you pick as your lead format. For a role-playing game and RTS game then it's PC. For action games there's a huge console market, and if you tie the game to a TV show, people are already in front of it. So it would be a smart choice to put that on the console in addition to PC.

GamesIndustry.biz Would you need to team up with a distribution partner or publisher to take the SyFy game to consoles?
Lars Buttler

We could work with people in order to get the game on retail shelves but that's really the only thing. For everything else, we can do it. We think we know this better than traditional packaged goods publishers.

Lars Buttler is CEO of Trion Worlds. Interview by Matt Martin.

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Matt Martin

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Matt Martin joined GamesIndustry in 2006 and was made editor of the site in 2008. With over ten years experience in journalism, he has written for multiple trade, consumer, contract and business-to-business publications in the games, retail and technology sectors.

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