Creating a COD Killer

You're right, software as a service is a very different way of looking at the business and managing the business, but we think it's an opportunity and an advantage versus two years of development of fire-and-forget once it goes to market. We think software is a service, and how we're building a game at U4iA, how Riot builds games, Kabam ecetera, we think that's a huge market advantage and opportunity because it allows you to put out 80 per cent of the finished content to the market and consumers, and that's a great amount of content, especially in free-to-play, that level of content and quality and getting dynamic ongoing consumer feedback and the ability to adjust the gameplay experience on the fly, on an instant basis, and provide new content to consumers continuously, what an advantage that is over the traditional console model, to delight the consumers in unique ways.

You can be so hyper responsive to challenges, issues and opportunities from a consumer level as a marketer, my entire careers, Nestle, Dole, Activision, that's incredibly exciting for me to finally be able to have that sort of consumer access and to dynamically change the experience for them.

We're going to fish where the fish are, we're going to go after and target core and active gamers

That's a great advantage and so we look at it differently, it's not a challenge, it's a wonderful opportunity. Also we recognise that we are providing at U4iA a AAA, high budget, quality experience that is on scale and magnitude higher in scope that what you find on a traditional casual gamer. We're not making the low end propositions, we are making a very core AAA experience and so I do believe that our proposition can stack up and measure very well against console games.

Again, we're free-to-play, so you can expect some differences between the properties, but I think people are going to be very surprised by the level of quality that can be achieved with new technologies, the Unity engine ecetera, and how you make a development like this. You have to look at it a little bit differently, and I think most importantly you have to set up your company with the right level of talent and the mindset to continually providing new content and software as a service to consumers after the launch in perpetuity.

And you have to building from day one, and we've built this company, day one, we staffed it knowing we're constantly going to be delighting consumers throughout the experience and innovating to them. So it's a bit of your viewpoint, resetting the bar in terms of the budget which is much higher in scope and scale than traditional casual and social games and third, you have to have the right mindset and the structure of the team to be able to provide this content going forward.

I think we've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of people with backgrounds such as myself and my co-founder Chris Archer, we have deep, 13-plus years experience from myself, plus for Chris, we were pleasantly surprised that so many people with our similar backgrounds have been yearning to get in to this more social casual space.

They see the ability to iterate and delight consumers rather than fire-and-forget. I think, and I'm not a game developer, but what I see from teams in my past and currently is that the development team often has to sit for two-plus years to make something in a vacuum before they ever get any consumer insight or feedback or reward on what they've created and what they've made. Now I'm not a game developer, but I would find that very challenging, to sit in a dark room for two-plus years and not know what the perception was on what I'd made. I think as a human being you'd also get pretty burned out.

So the ability in under a year to create a game, launch it in the marketplace, and every few weeks, depending on your discipline, be updating your content, getting new consumer feedback or monestising that content, that's got to be extraordinarily rewarding. We're finding that people are very interested in working for us because they like that new disciple and opportunity, and I think two, that you're seeing that the console market is proving itself to be a very challenging and difficult place for new IP to get established and for monetisation. The very talented developers see the new world opportunities, and they believe and see that tablets, mobile phones, PCs, the connected opportunity that is provided by those platforms is far greater that what the consoles can perform and provide, and the top talent traditional game makers are really encouraged by what companies like U4iA can provide to them in terms of a creative outlet.

Well I do believe that the console market is not going away anytime soon, maybe even in my lifetime. I don't see the consoles going away, the consoles provide a wonderful gaming opportunity, a unique opportunity, I do see companies such as Microsoft really innovating over time, the approach and philosophy to connected gaming. Who among us thought that Live many years ago was going to lead to this and these metrics? Probably not many of us outside of Microsoft.

So I think that you can't discount the ability of bright companies and tech-lead companies to continually innovate the experience for consumers, and Microsoft has done that here with the Xbox 360 on multiple levels, and I think it would be too soon to count out any future console relevancy. So I think that still has a wonderful place but I do see, as you do, that consumers, just like in the music industry and just like in movies, consumers know when they want, how they want, and where they want to get it, and overtime they want to pay what they want to pay for it, and I think that that's a difficult challenge for traditional consoles to overcome. But I wouldn't write them off. Their ability to adapt has been pretty strong if you think about owning, as I have, an Atari 2600 back in the late seventies, gaming is still as strong as ever today, and will be. So I think they'll find some way to morph and transition and be very relevant in the future.

It's a bit too early for us to disclose and discuss our distribution and marketing plan for the product, but I think it's important that when we're ready consumers will understand that we are developing a free-to-play, AAA game in a web browser for active and core gamers. That's the central theme around what we are doing as a company and what our first product will be. When we're ready the right messaging and imagery will be available for consumers.

We're going to fish where the fish are, we're going to go after and target core and active gamers. I think secondarily for us as a target is more of that social and casual consumer, and over time we'll flex and grow our business into encapsulating that and capturing that consumer as well Because quite frankly that consumer base is what will tip us from 5 million users to 15 to 20 million users when we capture that casual, social type of consumer. But we'll do it in two different phases.

But primarily we are making a great AAA game for active and core gamers that happens to be available on the more social platforms, PC, Mac, tablets, iPhone, if you acquire a product through Valve today and Steam, you can think about that platform for us, if you were playing games through Facebook, you can think that that would be a platform for us, but primarily, if you want the best free-to-play AAA shooter experience, agnostic to distribution methodology, we will provide that experience.

I would say that for U4iA and for our first game we have very high aspirations for the product, and if you look back at the franchises that I have been apart of or co-founded, from Call Of Duty to Doom to Quake to Wolfenstein with the id properties that we helped to launch and build expectations are very high both internally and externally for our first person shooter.

We believe that given the magnitude of the genre being double the size of the traditional RPG market, that expectations should be very high for our product, and I don't think it's outside the realm to believe that you can build a user base that can rival what Riot has built, perhaps in a shorter time frame.

I think a year from now we'll have our first product in the marketplace, mid of 2012, and we'll be continuing to innovate that experience for our consumers, and I imagine that we will begin to start talking about high quality, AAA genres that we can provide to consumers in the marketplace as well.

To answer your original question I think that yeah, U4iA can match or exceed the user base that Riot is experiencing today. Much bigger genre, sticky proposition, e-sport competitive first person shooters are the hallmark of why so many gamers are playing on Xboxes and PlayStation 3s today, and we're going to provide a whole unique way to experience that in a AAA free-to-play package.