Monumental Changes
Monumental Games' founders talk £2m funding, console MMOs and the future of Facebook
Exactly, we'll just evolve it. You can theme all this kind of stuff as well, so you can have vampires versus humans, pixies versus dogs... uh, yeah that's a weird one. It's easy to just do one thing one day, something else the next, and see what happens. I think in 18 months time Facebook is going to have more veteran gamers. Although they probably don't realise it, they're becoming better at games - playing Farmville teaches you certain things about gaming. Over time they'll be thinking I don't want that any more because it's boring, what I want to be able to do is compete with other players and beat them in other ways.
We're doing play tests every single day internally and every day we're iterating the gameplay. Half the time you're iterating it just by telling people the rules of the game, just like you would in a playground - it's like making up games to play and using this environment to play them out. It makes everything so much more accessible because it's what people identify with from their youth.
It's part of the online studio. So they're working on the Facebook stuff we're calling browser-based MMOs, and then we're also working on console-based MMOs and obviously we're working on Football Superstars as well, so it's quite a reasonable size studio.
300 million users. That's it. It's the biggest platform there is out there. PS3 doesn't compete with that - the consoles are different platforms, there's money to be made on them but they don't compare with 300 million users.
I think it's difficult for big publishers to move dynamically into spaces that are quickly growing and changing. EA have huge infrastructure costs, so doing anything costs them £10m - as soon as they set up the team for a year it's £10m. You'd end up spending that on your first Facebook game, you'd never make any money back, at which point you'd stop making Facebook games. It's just a different business than they're used to.
The social gaming space went from zero to where it is now in the same time frame that EA would typically make a single game. I wouldn't blame EA for being slow to react but the way that they did react was exactly the right way - you can't go for organic growth in an area like that, you have to do it by acquisition and buy into the space.
It's the best way, to buy the companies that can do it - make sure they've proved they can do it and buy them. It's a very difficult thing for them to do, because of their infrastructure, because of the way that they think about games; how they make them, production, buyers and all that kind of stuff. You can't get into the space if you think like that.
Not really. We're positioning ourselves with a Facebook MMO, which no one is really doing right now although I'm sure people are thinking about it. You've got people like Jagex who are doing their own browser stuff and I'm sure they're thinking about it. It's a very interesting space, and one of the reasons we're doing it, along with console MMOs as well, is because not many other people are doing it. A lot of people getting into it don't necessarily know games very well, which doesn't mean they'll fail, but we're bringing our huge games experience into a social area, we can react and design games specifically for those markets, whereas I think some people don't have the experience to do that.