Prime Numbers

Well, you’re talking about MMOs. I’m talking about lighter, persistent worlds. Light versions of MMOs that we expect to see on Facebook. Yes, they still involve an investment in time but not to the level of World of Warcraft.

It’s a challenge, it’s a tough market. But if people use Prime imaginatively and creatively they can make social games that don’t necessarily look or feel like MMOs. The idea is it’s a fairly generic platform for creating massively multiplayer online games. They don’t all have to be quest-driven RPGs. They can be social games, they can be puzzle games.

Little Horrors is in public beta at the moment. This was the first real project that was made using our tech and we’ve already found a producer for it. It’s going to be published by Jagex. Clearly it’s not up to PS3 or 360 quality, but that’s not the point, it’s designed to be played across Facebook and it’s a lot different to what you would normally see on Facebook. All of the tools that created the game all ship with Prime and this is effectively the demo game that we give away with the product.

Ultimately, yes. I can understand why it’s going on. But you still need studios with the skill sets to produce those kind of games. Middleware isn’t a magic ticket, you still need the creative teams that can bring a vision to a compelling experience. There’s a limited number of those. As far a Monumental is concerned we’re well-funded, we’re a profitable company and we’re not actually currently seeking acquisition any time soon.

I think ultimately a little bit of both. Initially it’s because we’ve got this tool set, we recognise that no one else is offering it and it’s a relatively low investment to hire me and some support staff to get it out there. In doing that as a company we’ll learn more about ourselves and the product, which should accelerate the improvement of the product. Otherwise, we’ll get stuck into another game and we’ll only make the tools we need to make that game. That’s how internal development works. Doing Prime as middleware there will be requests coming in for other tools and optimisations that will benefit us as well as everyone else. For return on investment it makes sense to do it.

I hope by investing significantly with the products they’re working on that the quality bar will move up. As a gamer myself, I was traditionally a PC gamer, then console and now I’m moving into the social space but I want the quality bar to be higher. I’m absorbed by some of the game mechanics of online games but disappointed by the visuals and end quality of what I’m playing. The sooner that improves the better.

It’s not just us, there is Unity and 3dvia and others out there pushing the quality bar up. A lot of online games, certainly in the social space, suffer from not having significant investment in them, and I hope with Google coming in we’ll all be able to push that investment up and so the quality improves. It can be a very good thing.

So long as you can keep you original investment down, that’s the thing. And that’s why any middleware has got to be attractive, not just us, because the last thing you want to do is invest a reasonable-sized code team in reinventing the wheel when you don’t even know if it’s going to work or bring the money back in.

It’s aggressively priced, certainly for early adopters and frankly until we’ve got our support system up and running everyone is going to be an early adopter. Prototype licenses are £20,000. The idea of a prototype licence is you get you game up and running, or any number of games, play about with it, show it to publishers, get your funding. A full licence is £30,000, so if you want to convert a prototype to a full licence you pay us the extra £30,000 and away you go.

The other thing we’re doing is site licences. These are for bigger companies like EA, who might want to release 10 games and not pay £50,000 per game. They can buy a site licence for £100,000 and that covers them for a year, so they make as many games as they like in that time. The £100,000 includes support as well, which we think is bargain. On top of the £20,000 and £30,000 we charge £15,000 a year for support.

If you’re only going to make one game and take more than a year doing it, you would probably pay £65,000. But if you’re going to make more than one game and commercialise them, then site licence is the way to go. We may put it up in the future, but that’s significantly cheaper than anything out there at the moment. To start with that’s a fair price, that’s value for money.