"We were taking a look at the business model almost immediately after launch. We never actually charged anyone for the subscription. We do a lot of surveying of the player-base, and we were basically asking our users, 'Is it subscription worthy..? Are you spending enough time in the game to justify a subscription? Is there enough content to justify a subscription?'
Hi-Rez COO and executive producer, Todd Harris
The explosion of free-to-play gaming across social and mobile networks has made building a game around traditional MMOG models increasingly risky. The subscription business may be booming - market value rose from $1.4 to $1.6 billion last year - but the pie is divided in broad strokes with World Of Warcraft accounting for a whopping 54 per cent of western subscriptions alone. Factor in the spiralling choices available to gamers in a fragmenting and highly competitive sector, and the daunting task of convincing users to subscribe to a particular service is thrown into sharp relief.
"Feedback from our users, and us looking at the game, told us it wasn't yet at a point where it justified that subscription, so we never charged them," Harris continues. "We were continually looking at other models, and we actually surveyed the community in June and asked them what payment model best matched Global Agenda. Overwhelmingly, from our current players and even prospective buyers - who were on trial and that sort of thing - the buy-to-play (pay once, then pay for future content) came back as the preference."
Harris reveals that Global Agenda was built to cater to gamers who now have their own families, and increasingly busy lives; Hi-Rez settled on the shooter genre because it was better suited to short, 15 minute bursts of play than, say, an RPG. Straddling the class-based confrontations of Tribes or Team Fortress, while offering a persistent world populated by Agencies, shifting alegiances and territorial occupation closer to Eve's political machinations, the game's fast-paced shooter mechanics were met with some confusion by players more familiar with traditional MMOGs.
"Obviously World Of Warcraft has set the standard in terms of what the market place and end gamers think of as MMOs, it being an MMORPG and a very content rich experience - so that's definitely established in people's minds what defines that," says Harris. "We're trying to do some things that a bit more experimental, mix genres together - we're still very excited about that and think there can be a lot of different types of MMOGs that can be successful. But part of that is challenging user conventions."
The recent collapse of Realtime Worlds, following the release of its title, APB, is a sobering reminder of the MMOG space's volatile nature. Despite significant funding and resources, the developer misjudged its strategy and failed to attract enough subscribers to support the game. If even triple A studios can fall by the wayside, how can smaller outfits hope to compete?
"I think small [developers] can do it if they're conservative with their projections and their costs," says Harris. "So even a more niche title, if it grabs 10,000 or even 5,000 subscribers, can support a business if it's right sized. But what seems to be the trend is people chasing the success of WOW, spending inordinate amounts of money setting the expectation bar incredibly high, launching and then seeing their numbers decline post launch.
"We tried to do the opposite, independent of the business model we tried to start more conservatively, work with the community to make the game better over time and grow. It was our first title, so we're looking at all this investment as something that we can leverage towards future titles at some point, but part of it is establishing a reputation in the industry as someone who tries to not overhype their product, and tries to be really responsive to the community."