The MMO Challenge

It's going alright - I think there are 22 or 23 game worlds live now, which shows the amount of subscribers with 1000 people in each game world. The SEGA ops team is being very proactive in launching new worlds when existing ones are full.

So it's kind of going to plan - obviously if it was going perfectly we'd have 1 billion subscribers playing, and eventually 6 billion, but realistically with the economy the way it is we're doing pretty well [smiles]

We're certainly doing well enough for SEGA to keep pushing us with more content, and certainly the flexibility of the business model is there. When we initially launched the subscriber periods were 3-, 6- and 12-month subscriptions having to pay upfront. We've looked at that, at the comments coming back from people who said they're interested but maybe haven't subscribed, and we've now added another business model which is more like a mobile phone contract - the longer you agree to subscribe for, the cheaper it is, and you pay per month.

So if you subscribe for 24 months you can get the game for GBP 4.99 per month, which is pretty damn good value for money.

Completely, plus we've also announced a recommend-a-friend scheme, whereby people who already subscribe to the game can get more time for free by recommending friends. If six of their friends subscribe for three months they effectively get the game for free - so looking at working with those kinds of flexible models, with us at Sports Interactive and the people at SEGA working as a team... that flexibility is very important when you're working on an MMO, particularly one that's starting off at a low level and reaching for the stars over the long term.

Certainly with the plans we've got around new content, with foreign language versions of the game coming in the future as well - there's a long way to go with this story.

Well, churn so far has been very low, but then when subscriptions started in January they were a minimum of three months - and when the retail version came out at the end of January it was four months. So we'll probably have much better stats on churn rate at the end of April and May.

Certainly at the moment it's not something we're concerned about - people seem to be enjoying the game. We know where we expect churn levels to be and they seem to be lower than that at the moment.

The problem that we'll have if there is churn is that because our game worlds are 1000 users, you might find a lot of teams leaving a particular game world slightly ghostly - but it would then be our job to ensure that the game world gets filled up, probably by pushing recommend-a-friend really hard to those users that are still in place.

But at the moment it's not a problem we've had to deal with. We've had lots of discussions about it internally, but we haven't had to do anything so far. Hopefully we won't have to, by keeping the content flowing inside the game, listening to people inside the game and making sure they're getting what they want.

Obviously you can't please all of the people all of the time - some people want different things to others - but we're doing our best to understand them.

Will it? Are we doing a new Football Manager game this year?

I don't know, you tell me... I don't think we've announced anything this year...?

We're always working on other projects at Sports Interactive. The FML team is completely separate to the other teams - the only work that is duplicated between the two teams is the match engine. Everything else... we have a different producer working on the title to the other games, and obviously while I'm involved with everything the studio does FML is a separate team that has a lot of input.

We still have three development teams here who all sit and work together, and all communicate very closely, plus we still have an R&D team who work on little bits and bobs - if those things look like something good, then we'll green light.

So not much has changed from that perspective - we do have more people here now than ever before, because as projects grow you need to grow as a studio. But we're still a pretty tight-knit studio.

We do have different periods when we're busy, though - the core FM team has busy periods when we're feature complete, or when we're about to code lock, whether that's the main game or with patches. The PlayStation Portable team has to submit stuff earlier for when there's a new PSP game coming out, and the FML team is on 3-4 month cycles for each game version, so it's pretty much constant.