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Leading the Way

Vanguard's CEO Arthur Houtman on changing the nature of core games

GamesIndustry.biz XBLA and PSN have seen a degree of success in terms of unit sales - at least those that seem to sit in the top two or three in the respective charts. There's been a little bit of concern voiced about sales numbers below those top positions, so how important is it for you to get to the top of the charts?
Arthur Houtman

Well, of course you always want to be at the top of any chart that you're part of, but unit sales is another thing where we need to evolve the business models. What Sony and Microsoft let us do with the platforms - I think there's something that also needs to evolve there.

Of course it's always risky to go to a freemium model, and we'll see if we ever get completely to freemium, but a lot cheaper games that have other features - and if you really like it, if you can spend more on it, then that's a better model.

So top of the charts? For the moment, with the business models of today, everybody knows exactly where that lies - you know how much you're selling your game for, and maybe a little bit of an idea as to how much it costs to get a game out there, to get people on board with the game, how much to spend on marketing and so on.

But as you're looking at different models now where there's room for everybody's spending appetite - if you look at, commercially, how you position things, and the P&Ls and business models and all that boring stuff...

Of course, with a game like GT5 you get people happy to buy the game for €60. Others might have bought it at €40, and others at €30 - but those people won't get the game, so you've lost them. The game still does quite well, good quantity and it's a top-seller - but if you look at that kind of model... and I think that's one of the reasons why the new business models are quite successful, because people can spend what they want, so you're much more in control as well of what you're going to give to people, what they like, what they'd want more of or not.

I was with Infogrames/Atari before, and it's almost difficult to imagine that for so many years we just put games in boxes, and just sent them out hoping they'd be successful, without much user feedback. Now there's a lot more going on with user-testing and the big publishers definitely have it more down to a science to see what users like - but still, it's a very small group.

If you look at - and again, we don't want to go completely in that direction, but it's an interesting thing to look at - Zynga pulls in 1TB of data, I'm told, per day to look at what people are doing, and what they play. Now, those games aren't really games - there's hardly any design that comes to it; it's all about mathematics. Everybody likes tractors, let's put up 45 different colours of tractors. It'll do well.

That's not where we want to go, but nobody's picking up those kinds of learnings and putting them into what core gamers would like. If folks playing the game were connected, and we're doing things for each other - I'm thinking that giving presents is something that core gamers appreciate - there are things you can look where you can get involved in each other's games, and because I'm playing, their game slightly changes.

It's interesting to know that if your friend is playing, I'm just going to pop over to my console to see if it changed anything in my garage, or whatever game it is you're playing. I think those are interesting things, because it makes for another experience - people have different experiences among themselves, and there's more to talk about, brag about, and stuff like that. It's not just a case of whether a player got the gold cup yet, or not.

I think it's opening up that register of how we can design products slightly differently and how can we promote different business models in this market. Obviously things need to change, because al those kids that are growing up today with all the free games on the internet are used to very different play patterns. When they come up to want to buy consoles and they're looking at playing more serious games, I think they'll have problems with our current business model.

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