Matt Firor Interview

Ten Ton Hammer managed to corner ZeniMax Media's Matt Firor during this week's GDC Austin for an interview about his role in the event, the current state of the MMORPG industry, and more.
Ten Ton Hammer: What are you trying to get out of this year's GDC Austin for your studio? The theme for the last couple of years has been MMOGs, but are there things that you're looking to learn from GDC this year?

Matt Firor: Yeah, GDC Austin definitely started out in the old days as an MMO show, but in the last couple of years it is definitely evolving just as the industry is evolving into a social networking online interconnected show, which MMOs are a big part, but there's a whole bunch of other facets to that now with the Facebook revolution, web-based and browser-based casual MMOs are a huge market now, so it's covering all of that. It's focusing more on the kind of interconnected gameplay.

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Ten Ton Hammer: GDC Austin has always been an online conference, but at the same time there is a blurring line between MMOIs and these massively single player games. Games that have online elements and communities kind of like the Oblivions and Dragon Age that's coming out. Do those sorts of games have a place at AGDC, or is that a line of distinction that isn't going to be crossed?

Matt Firor: That's a difficult question. Even the games you describe, although Oblivion of course is getting old now and didn't have some sort of online gameplay. I don't know about Dragon Age specifically because I don't know that much about it.