Shadowbane/Wizard101 Interview
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Wizard101 is obviously a very big departure from Shadowbane. How did you manage to shift gears like that, from hardcore ganking PvP to cutesy wizard school in the 9 to 13 demographic?
Todd Coleman: Well, a big chunk of it was that we just wanted to do something else.
We had been living and breathing Shadowbane for 80 hours a week for five years straight, and we were burned out. By the end of it, we wanted to go find something that was more casual, something we could have fun with and if we wanted to invent a Samurai cow and call him Sam-moorai, that was okay. Nobody was going to care.
And so from that standpoint it was actually quite freeing to go from something where we took the IP so seriously, and we took the gameplay and the balance of the game so unbelievably seriously, to something that was just kind of light and fun that we didn't have to try and kill ourselves with.
Also, Shadowbane was our first effort at doing a game at all, quite frankly, so we made a lot of mistakes, we tried to learn from those mistakes, so this was a chance for us to go back with a nice clean slate and start over technologically, design-wise, vision-wise and come out and say, (Here's our vision. Here's our goal. Here are the resources we need to attack that goal and we're going to do it right.)
And if you get in, the one thing that we universally get praised on now with this game, even people who are like, (Well it's not for me,) they give us lots of praise for the amount of polish that we put into it.
So we really set our vision, and set our goal, and we were ravenous about trying to stick to it and really achieve it, and I think that's the one thing I'm probably the most proud of is how well we lived up to that vision.
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Do you think the free-to-play model has been the key to your success? Or do you think that, if it had been a box on the shelf for 50 bucks and $15 a month, you'd still be past the million user mark?
Todd Coleman: No, we wouldn't have hit that without free-to-play.
Free-to-play is a very different model from retail boxes, WoW may be an exception to this, but you come out and day 1, you get all these sales. And that is effectively the highest number users you're going to have, because the next day, you start losing and you bleed and you bleed and you bleed and, eventually, you put an expansion pack out and then hope that pops up a whole new curve like the last one, only a little higher or at least equal to it.
So, you're fighting a war of attrition the entire time. FTP is not like that, at least it hasn't been for us. Every day we get more people coming in, and the game is sticking up or keeping a pretty good chunk of them.
So our loyal fan base of subscribers grows, our number of people spending micro payments and buying areas one by one by one, that's growing. And then the number of peak players grows and then the number of free trial players grows.
And then, we still have people that signed on back in September when we first launched that are just deciding now to become subscribers. I mean, it's crazy. It's a very, very different model.
Instead of that kind of peak and drop off, it's a growth curve that just goes up and up and up and up and up. So, it's very, very different from my experience.
And, of course, all those million, they're not all paying customers, but a significant portion of them are and, if we continue with this growth curve, we will end up - the number of core subscribers and customers on a monthly basis, will be significant enough that nobody would scoff at it.
I already, personally, think we're to the point where it's definitely respectable and, if it continues growing at this rate, it's going to be pretty phenomenal. It's a really cool thing to see.
