Veronique Lallier
NCsoft West's Europe MD on why the publisher is fitter than ever before
To be honest, not in the short term. We already have a lot going on in terms of development at NCsoft - we'll unveil more about that later this year, but you'll probably be aware of some of the announcements we've made in Korea on Blade & Soul, and of course Guild Wars 2. There are a few other unannounced projects too.
But as I said before, what we're really looking at are big MMO projects - and those are so big that we really only want to focus on a few projects to create high quality. The life cycle of an MMO is so long compared to a traditional solo console game.. it's a completely different way to approach things, and at the moment we're not looking at more projects in Europe.
Our European input is received in the US and Korea, and we have a lot of meetings to make sure that when we bring a game into a market, it's not only localised, but adapted to that market. It's what we did with Aion - the recent patch applied some new features for the European market, and we'll always make sure that the game is in sync with player expectation.
That's also part of the reason why we have such a large customer service and community team in Brighton - to be able to gather customer feedback at every stage of the development; but also when the game is live in order to make improvements.
It doesn't really matter that we don't have a development team based in Europe, because the goal of our games is to provide an amazing experience globally - we make sure that Europe is factored into that.
Yes - Lineage is an incredible product. It's still acquiring users and still exciting - it's showing great results and that's thanks to a development team that's listening to the market, to what's going on and what the player wants. The success of the game is continuing to improve, year after year - it's true that MMO games have a long tail, and Lineage is an example of that.
The market has changed, as has the player expectation - but the patches and game updates are huge, and in some ways we're recreating the world to make sure it's appealing to the market. It's something that NCsoft is very good at - we're one of the only publishers in the world to have that expertise, and the talent to help a game that's very old continue to see success.
It's amazing - it's great. More people are coming into the market, who won't necessarily play a big MMO yet, but they're starting with Facebook games - for us it's great, because they're helping to develop the market. More people are online and starting to play - and perhaps one day they'll buy Guild Wars 2?
But it's certainly very interesting, and we're looking closely at what they're doing - although it's not something we're developing in the West. In Korea they're doing some things, but those are specific to that market.
What we do understand, though, is that the game experience should extend beyond the PC - and the mobile platform is a good means to deliver more enjoyment for the user outside of the PC. So it's something we're looking at in terms of platform, I'd say. We launched some iPhone apps for Aion last year, and we're always investigating that kind of thing.