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Eutechnyx' Todd Eckert

Racing studio's North American boss on new business models, the importance of brands and tax relief

GamesIndustry.bizWhat about the funding models for these games? Obviously the talking point of this conference - and others like it - has been about freemium, microtransactions and the like. Are you embracing that?
Todd Eckert

We're in the tail end of development of a car game, a free to play microtransaction-based game called Auto Club Revolution. It's interesting because if you look at it, why people want to have the Ferrari in the first place, it generally not because it's this fantastic piece of technology and they can go 200 miles per hour. Generally it's because it's reflective of a certain status, because they like being associated with the power and beauty of these machines...

GamesIndustry.bizWhich is why you see a lot of middle-aged guys wandering around in Ferrari baseball caps.
Todd Eckert

Yeah, exactly. But generally the guys in the caps are the ones who don't have the cars. That's the other thing, it helps get them laid. But this game recognises that all these licensed brands, people associate with them because it's emblematic of something within them. It's not necessarily the driving thing. 90% of the people you could put them in a Vauxhall or... a top of the line car (because if I say anything else I'll get in trouble) and they wouldn't tell the difference. So it's about community, it's about talking to each other, it's about envy, it's about exploration.

GamesIndustry.bizJesse Schell was saying in his talk yesterday that how many other brands outside of Harley Davidson do people get tattoos of? I guess you need to pursue that kind of aspirational thinking.
Todd Eckert

That's exactly right. Society's changed - it used to be you were in a pencil factory or you were in shipping or whatever and what you did was generally a pretty good indication of what you were. We don't really have that any more. If you're working in a Tesco, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's very hard to say "that's me, that's who I am." So instead you associate with a product, or you can associate with Aston Martin, or you associate with [the band] Interpol, or you associate with Apple. Twenty years ago, even if the technology had been the same, would people have lined up for a phone? No. They lined up for a concert ticket. That was it.

We're looking for those things by which to identify ourselves, and that's where brand identification and the reason communities that develop around brands exist. So let's say you are a giant Lotus fan. You could establish the London Lotus club if the UK Lotus Club is already taken care of. Or you could start the Worldwide Lotus Club. And you'll have situations where you actually have direct contact with some of the car manufacturers. So if you, for example, love Lotus and you are part of that club, then you will be given offers that people who aren't part of that club can't get. And so it is exclusivity, it is envy, it is all of those things that drive us in the real world. And that basically becomes the boilerplate for what's in the game.

GamesIndustry.bizSo you're moving away from the old model of "I want to achieve and progress" and instead onto "I want to own?"
Todd Eckert

I think it's both, it's whatever's meaningful to you. And that's one of the reasons that my speech yesterday, I decided to base it on the music industry because there are a lot of parallels. I mean, Britain started out as a singles culture, and then became an album culture, but people resented the fact that they had to buy the whole album for the two songs that were good. Because frequently, not always, there were very, very bad songs on an album and you didn't want them.

GamesIndustry.bizIt's track 3, and here's the dirgey ballad...
Todd Eckert

Yeah, exactly. Man, I hated it. And so sooner or later people said, Okay, why don't you let me buy what's meaningful to me - and there you go, that's iTunes. So even though iTunes is a lousy interface and it's impossible to find anything, if you know what you're looking for you still get to buy the two songs that you like and you get to get rid of everything else.

It's the same with the new game model. So you don't have to spend the £50 to buy the whole thing when all you care about is a segmented portion of the gameplay. So you buy the assets that are meaningful to you, and history shows that people who pay in game wind up paying much more than they would if they were just purchasing just a game in a box in-store. So for me it's a logical progression of the way the human mind works.

GamesIndustry.bizIs there not a risk for your model of people identifying with certain brands so aggressively that they just won't be interested in buying anything associated with any other brand? Won't that limit how much you can earn from them?
Todd Eckert

There's a risk but there's a little bit of Amazon thrown in there, where if you bought your Mercedes McLaren, you might also like Koenigsegg, which is a Swedish supercar manufacturer, they're based in the middle of nowhere, you get into the factory and it's absolutely gorgeous. And so you think "I don't know anything about Koenigsegg", it doesn't take any time and you think "wow! Holy s***! A million and a half Euros, they only make 24 of them a year, it looks really cool...." And you do that association. It's totally possible that there will be people who get in, they have their brand, they have whatever they want, they buy, they don't buy, but they have fun on the site and that's great. There are going to be others who are going to do that connect the dots experience, and have something more.

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A 10-year veteran of scribbling about video games, Alec primarily writes for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but given any opportunity he will escape his keyboard and mouse ghetto to write about any and all formats.