Rebel Faction - Arena.net's Jeff Strain

Looking somewhat dwarfed by the giant wall-hanging of a stag in the presidential suite of the Munich hotel where we meet him, Jeff Strain is quite possibly the friendliest rebel leader we've ever had the pleasure of speaking to. Both his history and his present outlook belie his rebel nature, however. Here is the former senior Blizzard man who jumped ship from the legendary developer, taking with him a raft of talented staff - including none less than Starcraft lead designer James Phinney - to form a rival massively multiplayer game developer which has gone on to challenge the entire business model of the MMO market, and, undoubtedly infuriatingly for some in the business, has enjoyed no small measure of success in the process.

We're here to see Guild Wars Factions, the second game from the Seattle-based studio Arena.net which Strain co-founded after leaving Blizzard. The original Guild Wars now has over a million players, mostly located in Europe and North America, and stands well apart from the rest of the MMOG market thanks partially to innovative gameplay systems which have practically removed all levelling from the game, focusing instead on team-based battles and tactical selection of skill-sets, but mostly due to the company's decision not to charge a subscription fee for the game.

The move is a curious one, made all the more peculiar since Arena.net is owned by Korean massively multiplayer gaming giant NCsoft, a firm which has built its fortunes off the back of monthly subscription revenue from huge games such as the Lineage series. However, Guild Wars Factions, which will be launched later this spring, reveals the method behind Arena.net's apparent madness - and the logic behind Jeff Strain's rebel thinking.

Rather than being an expansion pack for Guild Wars, Factions is an entirely standalone product, with players not expected to own the original game in order to play - although if you do own the original game, you can travel between the old and new territories, rather than being restricted to one or the other, and players who start off with Factions will be able to bring their characters back into the original Guild Wars (now being referred to as Guild Wars Prophecies) if they pick up a copy of the first game. Factions is the first of many new Guild Wars games, each of which will bolt into the existing game universe but will provide a brand new game experience and a host of new content, and which Arena.net plans to release on a six monthly basis for the foreseeable future.

It's an ambitious project which crosses and recrosses the line between massively multiplayer gaming and episodic content at several points, but which ultimately could prove hugely appealing to consumers - if the content is right. Early signs indicate that it's very right indeed; allegations that Factions is an expansion pack with delusions of grandeur are likely to be swept away by the sheer extent of the new content in the game, which not only features a host of astonishing new environments, massive numbers of new missions, creatures and skills, but also introduces brand new high-level gameplay elements in the form of a constantly moving battle line between the two titular factions, and new systems which force role-playing focused players and combat-focused players to cooperate in order to win certain objectives for their Guilds.

We sat down with Strain to find out how his business model allows Arena.net to support an enormously successful MMOG without a subscription fee, how the company hopes to release a new game on a punishing twice-yearly schedule - and where the ambitious firm which is rebelling against every convention of the massively multiplayer market plans to go next.

Jeff Strain: First of all, it costs us far less to operate Guild Wars than a traditional MMO. The technology team behind our server technology is the team that built the original Battle.net. At that time, there was no broadband, so the whole thing was built around 28.8 modem assumptions - so we learned a tremendous amount about latency masking and bandwidth optimisation. When we built the core network technology behind Arena.net, of which Guild Wars is one game that uses that technology, it was really designed with those principles in mind. Even though we knew that broadband was growing and that most people would have it, we wanted to make a game that was very bandwidth-light, because we knew from the beginning that we were not going to charge a subscription fee, and that - bandwidth - is one of your primary operating costs. Obviously you pay for the server infrastructure up front, but your ongoing cost is bandwidth, and we use substantially less bandwidth than almost any online game out there. So, right up front, we've cut our support cost that way.

The other big factor, though, and by far the larger factor, is that we just think that if you have a game that requires a subscription fee, you're going to have fewer customers. Obviously, there are examples out there of very big MMOs that have done well and have lots of customers - but they're building on established franchises and large existing customer bases. Guild Wars was a new product, and we wanted to come out of the gate really strongly and capture a very large number of players right off the bat. We just believed that we could be more effective at that without a subscription fee. With a subscription fee, you're going to cut twenty, thirty, forty, maybe even sixty per cent of your total potential customers right off the bat.

So our goal is to create this game, create this business model, have a large and thriving community - and then sell content directly to them. Really, if you think about it, if I make two games a year and I do a good job, make sure that they're really cool and really strong, and that you want to buy them; that's about the same as what I would get if I was paying a subscription fee for one game over that year. You're right, it's a little bit less - but fundamentally, it's in the same ballpark. So, that's our goal - make sure that we make enough content, that it's cool enough, fun enough, and released on a regular schedule, so that we're just as profitable and can support the game to the same degree that a traditional MMO can.

We certainly want to make that easy and viable for people to do. I think that there are two groups of players; there are those who see all the value of what they purchase in the bits that they get access to, but there are still a lot of people who really want to pay for physical goods, and who are uncomfortable paying for something and not having a physical representation of it in their hands. So we will always very strongly support our retail and distribution partners by having exceptionally high quality products on the shelf in terms of the packaging, the materials, collectors' editions, CDs, posters... Things you can actually get your hands on.

But for those players who are comfortable with direct downloading, then certainly, we'll support them directly. It's especially easy with Guild Wars, because of our streaming technology. It's true that we use that to update the world and run the live aspects of the game, but also, one of the things that's kinda cool is that most people don't realise that they have Factions right now on their hard drives. We did a Factions preview event last month, and we're doing another at the end of March, on March 24th. The way we do that is that we essentially stream down the entirety of the game to people; but we disable those parts of it that we don't want them to access right now on the server, so all the new missions are there on people's drives, but nobody can actually play them.

What that means is that when we release a new campaign, we'll start streaming it to you probably around three or four weeks before it's actually available for sale - and by the time you're ready to buy it and it's available directly online to purchase, all the graphics and resources and sound already reside on your hard drive. You purchasing it is just paying for it, and then there's no download - you just go! It's kind of interesting that way.

Yes, they're staggered. Last October we had staffed up to the point where we had parallel teams - overlapping, staggered development teams. So each of these new campaigns has an entire year of development, from a full development team, and they're released on staggered six month cycles.

For example, Factions has been in development since the say we shipped Guild Wars. Campaign III has been in development since about November of last year, and is already far far down the pipe. So that's how we did it. We haven't split all our teams - it's not like we've just taken the company and split it. There are some teams that are like service teams, such as the server technology team - obviously, they work on both products. But in terms of the world art, the character design, the mission and story, the core mechanics design... Each campaign has its own dedicated team for that.

It's actually working out really well. We were curious to see how that was going to go, because normally if a company has more than one project going, they're completely different projects and there's all kinds of politics over who gets to work on the A project and who works on the B project. We were curious to see how that would go from a company culture standpoint, but it works great - everyone still feels like it's Guild Wars and we're all one team, but everyone has their niche and their focus.

Yeah - the lead designer, James Phinney, who was also the lead designer of Starcraft. He arbitrates both and makes sure that no team is doing something that screws over the other one, or fundamentally violates the core mechanics of the game. He stays on top of that.

Our server infrastructure is actually kind of reflective of our core technology. We have data centres all over the world - we have data centres in Europe, data centres in the US, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. As you know, when you create your account in Guild Wars, it's a global account - you don't pick one of those data centres or servers, you're not even really aware of them.

What happens is that it knows where you are, and when you play, you'll probably be connected to one of the European servers - if you're playing with your buddies, or by yourself, in general it knows your home datacentre. But if you want to play with me, and I'm on one of the US datacentres, the datacentres will communicate with each other and try to figure out the best place to host our game. They may decide that the total experience across both of us is going to be better if it hosts the game in Europe, and so it'll hand off my character - it migrates my character record temporarily to the European datacentre, you and I play our game, and then when we're done, it migrates my character back.

The datacentres all work in a confederated manner. It's presented to you as one big massive server that's serving the entire world, because you never have to be aware of where they are, but there's a lot of datacentre communication going on on your behalf in the background to make sure that it's optimising the play experience for you.

As a specific example of that, we just had a world championship event in Taiwan, where we had six Guilds - two from Europe, two from the US, and two from Korea. When they played, they were all playing on servers in Taiwan, because it knew where they were playing and it migrated their server records to Taiwan for that match - so that the latency was optimal.

Right now, we're the Guild Wars company. We do have a lot of technology that could support any kind of game, certainly, but our commitment to the players right now is, "come join us in Guild Wars and we will support you constantly - there will always be new content." Right now, that is our primary focus.

Having said that, all of the server and network technology, all the engine technologies, animation technologies, the tool pipeline and the streaming technology that we developed for this game, would make games in other kinds of genres equally cool and fun. We're an ambitious company, and we have very definitive plans for the future, for future products - but right now our focus is Guild Wars, and will be for the foreseeable future.

As you know, we're a wholly-owned subsidiary of NCsoft, and NCsoft has product development teams all over the world - so we will license it internally for other NCsoft products, but we won't make it available for license to non-NCsoft companies or companies that aren't being published by NCsoft.

It is, yes.

We're watching this generation of consoles very closely. Obviously, there are a lot of console players who don't play PC games. For us, there are two issues. One is that from a technology standpoint, consoles are all about going to a store, buying a disc, putting it in and playing it - and that content is static. All of what I've talked about regarding the streaming technology, how we constantly update the game and things can change from winter to summer, and that we're using it as a publishing platform too; none of that is possible on a console. We're glad to see that a hard drive is an option for the Xbox 360, because that goes a long way towards helping us treat it that way - but it's still an option, and it wasn't built into all the systems. It's unknown whether the PS3 is even going to have that or not.

So we're looking for that, and we're looking at how broadly Internet will be adopted for the next round of consoles - how much people really get into that. Right now, for online games, it's all about PC. That's where the online gamers really are. If that changes, though, then we're ready. All of our technology is developed in an engine-agnostic format; we can very quickly plug in the client component for different platforms. Certainly, all the back-end technology, the server technology, doesn't care what the host platform is at all, so we could very easily do versions of our games that inter-operate across different platforms.

Then, finally, there's the business model issue. Xbox Live, for example, their whole goal is to encourage people to go and buy games on the shelf, then there's an online component for it. But for us, when you buy it on the shelf, that's just the beginning of our relationship with you - and we want a direct connection with our customer so that we're always giving you new content, always supporting you directly. Xbox Live just wasn't really built, from a business standpoint, to support that.

So, there need to be some changes in the business model, and we're keeping an eye on the technology - but we love console games, and I'd love to see Guild Wars on an Xbox or a PlayStation 3.

Yeah, I do think so. I think that Microsoft is a smart company, Sony is a smart company. They know that you can't hire an inexperienced team or somebody who's always just done straight console work and just have them make an MMO game. There is such a body of knowledge that is specific to that kind of gaming - it would just be a horrendous undertaking to try and do that from scratch. They know it's in their best interests to attract the top developers to develop for the console, and they know that that's going to take some business model changes - and I think that what we're going to see is that once the dust settles from the launch of this round of consoles, they're going to be very willing to engage in those discussions. So yes, I think that there will be changes.

It is - but by the same token, they gain a lot from it too. Their business model is built on taking a licensing fee for each copy sold - and the Guild Wars model is still very much based on selling new things, twice a year in fact. I think it's probably easier with us than it is with the subscription model, where what you buy at the store is really not even a factor, it's that ongoing monthly revenue stream that's really at issue.

But yes, not to shy away from your question, it is asking a lot - but right now, on PC, we've got a multi-million customer base, we have fantastic direct relationships with them, and we're not highly incentivised to go and give that up. So it's definitely going to have to be a meet in the middle kind of thing.

You know... I'm from Blizzard, and I worked there for many, many years. I actually started that project at Blizzard, I started the World of Warcraft project. I'm very fond of those guys, and I'm very proud of them for what they've pulled off. It's a beautiful game, and I very much respect it... And I'm not answering your question... [laughs]

It's been interesting for us to see. I do believe that the success of World of Warcraft is a case of "the tide rises and all boats float". I believe that it's been a positive for the entire online game industry. I don't ever necessarily want to have to do one of these and not hear it mentioned. I guess what I would say is that our goal is to make sure that they never get to do an interview and not have Guild Wars mentioned.