Herein, the promised interview with EA Mythic’s Mark Jacobs.

I tried to approach this interview with a bit more of a ‘high level’ approach than most other folks probably did for interviews with Mr. Jacobs that week. I’d really enjoyed the MMO’s Past, Present, and Future talk the night before, and we spent some time touching on the subjects that event brought up. We do, of course, talk Warhammer as well, but there’s lots of ‘other’ stuff in there too. Specifically, Mr. Jacobs opines about being a small developer in the modern MMOG market, the RMT business and the SOE White Paper, and the role of viral marketing.

Read on for my transcript of our discussion, or feel free to download the whole thing and give a listen yourself.

I sat down with Mr. Jacobs at around 1:30pm on Thursday, the 8th of March 2007. We spoke on the auxiliary expo floor of GDC, in the North part of the complex.

MMOG Nation: I found the event with you folks last night very interesting; obviously I’d like to talk about Warhammer but I was wondering if we could start on that tack?

(quick exchange with a co-worker)

MN: So, my first question is … is the Massive genre saturated?

Mark Jacobs: Touche’ (laughing) [ed: This was a question Mr. Jacobs had stated the previous night that he 'hated being asked in interviews.']
MN: No, really, my first question is, do people really ask you that, that often?

Mark: I get asked that question at least once every couple months.

MN: Really? And why do you think that people don’t really understand where things are going with this? Because, I don’t really think that was something you guys got into much last night. These are springy chairs.

Mark: Yeah, I noticed that too, be careful. Why do I think people ask that question? One, because I think they really haven’t studied history. Two because it’s a really easy question to ask, and three because they want to ask a somewhat controversial question without coming out and asking a controversial question.

MN: Um, I totally agree. One of the things I found really interesting about the talk yesterday as far as the future sort of things was the comment … actually I’m not sure if it was your comment anymore … long night … your comment about “do one thing at least 100% better.”

Mark: Yup.

MN: What do you think … I guess I’m going to jump around, my apologies. What do you think Warhammer does 100% better than anything else?

Mark: Oh, our RvR. That’s something we did obviously quite successfully with Dark Age of Camelot. If you talk to our players, even players of other games, they think that Camelot’s implimentation of RvR and PvP was the best in any MMO. Certainly our longevity, our subscriber count, all of that attest to that. The market is kind of unforgiving. If you produce a very bad product, you don’t do well. Obviously, because we’ve lasted so long, because our game remains very popular, we produce a very good product. Hopefully, a great product. And since the core of this game is also RvR and Player vs. Player, I think it’s a safe thing to say that that is what people really liked. So we have that going for us right from the beginning.

The other thing we have is, really, a lot of experience, not only with Camelot, but all the other games we’ve done. I’ve been making games, online games now, for over twenty years. Mythic has been making games for over 11 years. There’s only a handful of people, let alone companies, that can say the same thing. So, we are now in a position, as being part of EA, that we don’t have the same constraints on us that we did as an independent developer. If I need to say “Boy, I could use another 25 artists on a project” or, “I need a few more months” or, “I want to spend an additional X on programming resources”, I can do that. As an independent, I couldn’t. And so … I think that, when you look at what we’re doing today with a game, what we can do over the next X months until release, I think it is very safe to say that we are going to focus on RvR and PvP in a way that we didn’t do with our game that we had in production prior to that, Imperator, and certainly as much if not more so than we did with Dark Age.

MN: So in general you would say that the EA situation has been overwhelmingly positive?

Mark: The situation with EA, as you can imagine, going from an independent, and certainly my company and I … I am certainly known as a very independent soul, going for the first time now, frankly in my life, of having a boss, and having multiple bosses, that’s certainly been challenging. But it’s not a bad challenge, it’s a good challenge. We had had investors before, so we were prepared for it.

On the other hand I have to balance that against the huge impact that EA can have on release of this game. EA has some of the best, if not the best, distribution worldwide. I think and certainly EA thinks that we are the best worldwide. So when Warhammer comes out we’ll be able to get it into more stores, worldwide, than we could have as an independent. Even as an independent with multiple deals. So if I want to go into Asia, more heavily, we’re already into Europe very heavily, and obviously the United States, I have a huge advantage with EA that I didn’t have as an independent.

I also have great access to technology and teams within EA. When you’re as big as EA is, and you’ve done as many games as EA has, and you’ve had as much success as EA has, there’s a lot of institutional knowledge. I get to draw on all that knowledge.

Playtesting. The game has been in playtesting, beta testing right now, for months. Internal only. But when I say internal, if it was Mythic, it would be just, you know, just our company and a few Q&A guys because that’s all we could afford. Now I have everybody within EA that I can call on and go “Hey, you want to be a tester, come on in”, “You want to play the game, come on in”. That gives me extra time to help balance the game, to get feedback on the game, from very trusted testers. Testers who I know aren’t going to post on a site, testers who have no axe to grind, just testers from EA.

MN: Just to kind of poke at you one more time, Daniel James, yesterday at the thing, was very much in favour of smaller companies doing, I guess, more innovative projects. Do you think that most folks who are doing smaller games would jump at the chance to do something like what you folks did? Do you still believe that it’s possible for smaller companies to make Massively Multiplayer Games?

Mark: First of all, as I said yesterday, Daniel James is a guy who I respect so highly. Here’s a guy who took a game, that really nobody believed in when he launched it, and it’s been a great success. So all credit to him. We need more people like that in the industry. I mean, we were like that, we were a small company our entire life. We had no venture funding. The founders had no money. Neither myself nor Rob Denton were independently wealthy. And so, when I see someone like Daniel have that kind of success I think it’s great for the industry

Do I think that most small developers would jump at the chance to do a large-scale game, yeah, probably. I think that the guys like Daniel are the exception rather than the rule. I think that he’s a very dedicated, very bright man, and he wants to do his thing. And that’s great. Again, we need more like that. I think most small developers have dreams of being large developers. We certainly did.

Now, what’s going to happen within the industry, I think that in the MMO space it’s going to get increasingly difficult to compete with the big boys. Frankly, I think that it’s almost impossible. Again, this sounds slightly egotistical, but the day of the “Mythics”, company that started in the basement. And that’s where we started, Rob in his basement, my in my basement, those days if you want to compete in certain genres …

MN: Like Fantasy.

Mark: Like Fantasy MMOs, those days are gone. It’s not going to happen. You need too many resources now. Back even when we released Camelot. … if we had released Camelot today, with the assets we had, with the game as it was, we would not be as successful. But even in that case we spent two and a half million on it. We were able to sell part of our company to get the funding to do the game. If we were doing this on our own, there’s no way. You need funding to do it. Now, that’s for the MMORPGs. There’s lots of other games [genres], as well as MMOs, that you can do it much, much cheaper and compete. But when you have Blizzard spending a lot of money on games, when you have Sony spending a lot of money on games, when you have Turbine spending a lot of money games … you know, the day of as they used to call us “The Two Brothers in the basement”, making an online RPG, it’s going to be very, very, very tough.

MN: Okay. You mentioned Camelot, and its situation today if you were to release it now. What do you think the situation is with Camelot now? When you folks release Warhammer a couple few months down the line, what do you think that Camelot is going to look like considering that both games have very similar feature sets?

Mark: Historically, and this is going back to the days of online games, not even Massives, one game has never killed another game. WoW did not kill any other game. It hurt other games, but it did not kill it. The only ones that generally kill the games are the developers, or the publishers. Either they didn’t do a good job in the beginning, in which case they don’t survive, or they abandon the game. Gamers are at times like sharks, when they smell blood that’s it. And if they smell the fact that the developer and the publisher no longer cares about the game, and there’s something else that they can play that’s like the game, a lot of them will move over.

In our case, we’re continuing to support Camelot. We will support Camelot until the players tell us it’s time to turn off the lights and burn down the castle for good. And I hope that day does not come for a long time. We’ve had a five year run, we’re already entered into our sixth year, we just did another expansion pack, we’re still working on the game … I hope it has a ten year run or more.

MN: Okay, something I found very interesting to kind of get back to Warhammer for second, something that I found very interesting with the approach you guys are taking is the enthusiastic support on your website with video blogs, regular type of blogs, that sort of thing … letting people like Paul Barnett speak in public … *cough* … what, I guess, what’s the tack there, what made you decide to let people into the development process a little bit?

Mark: One of the reasons that Camelot was successful back in 2001, was that we had to do a lot of thing virally. We didn’t have a lot of money. Our total marketing budget, and this wasn’t for a year, this was our entire marketing budget including E3, was $600,000. That was an unbelievable small amount of money for a game over a two year development cycle. Including, again, having a big booth at E3! So if you take away the big booth at E3, we spent very little money on marketing. So we had to work smarter.

Having Paul speak publicly, as you say, is a great thing. I’ve known Paul for a very, very, very long time. He’s a long-time friend from the MUD days. He’s a MUD creator, I’m a MUD creator. And we’d always hoped to work together. And when I got the opportunity to get Warhammer, I convinced him to come onboard to work with me. And his enthusiasm, his love for the IP, his love for the game, his love for the development process, I wanted to share with everybody. You know Mythic, I think, has shown over the years how much we about our players. We’ve resisted things like advertising in games, we don’t do item sales in games, we’ve even been in lawsuits with these people. You know while we’re not perfect, and no developer is, I think we’ve shown that we care more about the player than any other developer out there.

But sometimes we come off, and I come off I know … I have a weird bi-polarness about me. On one hand I’m the business guy, I’m the CEO of Mythic. I’m the guy who does or did all our negotiations, I have a law degree. On the other hand I’m also the lead designer, I’m a programmer. So I’ve got this kind of … I think bi-polarness is a good way to say it, that sometimes people think that I’m a suit or the company is a little bit too stuffy, and Paul’s a good way of showing how we’re not. And we have people like Sanya Thomas, who’s always been Sanya, and others. But I think having Paul was an important addition, to show that we’re anything but corporate, but we can have a guy like him happily represent the company, and happily do things internally for us as well, that are crucial to game development. He’s working with me as a design manager, we work very well together. I’m the big vision guy, I write the big documents, he takes them and puts his spin on them. We talk about things, we argue with things, and it’s great. It’s made for a better game.

MN: Okay. Just to touch on something you mentioned: Real Money Transfer. SOE’s White Paper recently ..

Mark: *cough* Ayeah.

MN: Yeah. SOE’s White Paper was very interesting, but for me personally I think there were some very troubling conclusions reached at the very end of the paper, and I’ve written about that. I just wanted to gauge … I know you’re very much against RMT, but specifically from the White Paper, what did you take away from that?

Mark: Well, I looked on the White Paper in the same way I’d look at a study by the Tobacco industry saying that cigarettes don’t cause cancer. When you have a company that is already participating in RMT that has, you know, you have EQBay, when you have a company that has announced that they are working on a game that is going to feature item sales and RMT, that having a White Paper supporting it shouldn’t shock anybody. So as far as I was concerned, there was nothing in there that I found interesting. There were some things I already knew, there were some things I don’t frankly agree with. My stand remains, frankly, unchanged, even with the EA acquisition. I think that RMT in a game that is not designed for it, is a very very bad thing. I think the companies who participate in it, as everyone knows how I felt, about the Black Snow guys and now the IGE guys, I think they are destructive forces. I think they care solely about making money. They have no interest in helping the gamer even though they say they do, and I don’t want them in any of my games.

On the other hand, if somebody was to design a game for RMT in the United States, which could really change the nature of RMT. See, my big problem with RMT is not the fact that players are buying gold. Right? It’s the behavior that players, and not even players, that companies have to engage in in order to get that gold. See, if Sony in a way was just selling gold on its own, I would be less opposed to that on one level. Because they’re just selling the gold, right?. I think there would be legal issues and other things would concern me, but their behavior wouldn’t be affecting the enjoyment of players. But as we all know from playing these games, if you’re looking to complete a quest, if you’re looking to grind to gain some experience, or even gold to level up your character, and you go into an area and you see the farmers there, and they don’t want you there, they will train monsters on you, they will be rude to you, they will try to keep killing things to try to drive you off … that is a game-changing experience for me. That has made certain games that I’ve played, me stop playing them for a little while, because I needed to go into these areas, and I got sick and tired of getting cursed at in Chinese. Or I’d go somewhere to try to kill a monster, and guys that were many, many levels above me would cast one spell, aggro the whole group and I’d have to wait and wait and wait.

My stand against it isn’t “oh my God, selling everything is bad”, my stand on it is anything that affects the behavior or the enjoyment of players in the game, especially when it’s caused by people looking to make a few bucks off my game, is bad.

The second reason is the EULAs. I’m a real big believer in EULAs. EULAs are what help keep these games online. The day that developers in the United States lose the ability to enforce our own EULAs, is the day that MMOs will start to dissappear. These companies are breaking our EULAs, they’re flouting them in our face, their behavior’s in our face, saying “we can do whatever we want”, and I’m sorry, that’s just wrong.

MN: Okay. Just to turn that around a second, in the last conference call that Paul and the other folks had, they mentioned that very specifically Warhammer is being designed to kind of thwart RMT folks, and I’m sure you don’t want to get into great detail, but can you give us any information about what specifically you’re doing?

Mark: No. But, I can say when I wrote the game design, the initial game design for the game … every game design that I do I have certain things that I call guiding principles, certain key things about the game we must follow. It’s not, what was it from that great South Park episode, the Sword of a Thousand Truths?

MN: Indeed.

Mark: You won’t have a Sword of a Thousand Truths, that’s not a guiding principle. A guiding principle is something like, in this case, design the systems to discourage farming, and limit impact that gold farming companies can have on the game.

MN: What’s your favorite faction? In Warhammer. Online.

Mark: Ohh … hmm … that’s a tough one … Dark Elves, I really like the Dark Elves.

MN: Really? Because we haven’t really seen those folks yet, we don’t know a whole lot about them.

Mark: I like the Dark Elves, I like the Vampire Counts that aren’t really going to be in this game right now, at least at launch. [ed: Woot, expansion material!] Umm … what else? Those are probably my two favorite.

MN: I won’t ask why. What is there, that has been released, with the four factions that have been talked before, which of those gets across what Warhammer is all about?

Mark: I’m sorry I don’t follow the question.

MN: I’m sorry. So we’ve got Dwarves …

Mark: Dwarves, Greenskins, Empire, Chaos.

MN: Right … there’s been many colourful adjectives used to describe them. Which of those four do you think people should really associate with Warhammer?

Mark: Oh, I think that right now Chaos has it down best of all of them. Empire is coming along nicely. Dwarves and Greenskins also came out really well. But if you were to look at the areas we’ve done so far and go “This area is the best”, the area we’ve done best with so far, is the pairing, the Chaos and Empire pairing. I mean, you come in, you’ve seen them, you come into the area, there are rocks with runes on them, we’ve got eyeballs that follow you, it’s really creepy: That’s Chaos.

MN: Excellent. Well, I think that’s pretty much everything I had. But I always like to end an interview with one last question: for the people who will listen to this, who will read this, what is there about Warhammer that you want them to know about?

Mark: Specifically … ooop … yeah, let’s spill the Diet Pepsi all over the keyboard, that’d go over well. “War is Everywhere”, that’s the key. You’re going to come into the game, it’s not going to be sweetness and light, and tea and crumpets and all that. It is going to be war, cannons are going to be firing, bodies are going to be flying all over the place, it is War, and you are in it right from the beginning.

MN: Well, thank you very much sir. I appreciate it a lot.

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And I do. Many thanks again to Mr. Jacobs for sitting with me on what, I’m sure, was a busy day.