GamesBeat: What else?
Mansell: The second of those three prongs that we’re looking at is to make new living games. We’ve learned a lot in the last 17 years, not just about ourselves, but from everything else going on outside in the game industry. We play our own games as well as everyone else’s. We want to express what we think can be — one of the games we’re making is a next-generation online RPG. We’re about a year into a multi-year development cycle, with still a long way to go. We’re looking to innovate not just in the game but in the overall service. Those living game principles I talked about really imbue those at the heart of it.
I also think there’s a big opportunity for that kind of online RPG — I’m trying not to say “MMORPG” because in people’s heads, that creates an image that’s not what we want to build. I’m as much inspired by contemporary action-RPGs or adventures, by shared worlds like you see in games like Destiny. We’re not doing a shooter, but the idea that you don’t have to worry about what server you’re on or have to fight your way through cluttered UI. You get the benefits of an MMO game but without all of the complexity and hassle. We’re trying to embrace accessibility and these more contemporary concepts for big online games when creating this next-generation online RPG.
Separate from that, we have a small creative R&D group looking at what we call the “mid-size” online game market. I love triple-A, and I love indie, but especially on PC and console now, there’s an interesting middle space. RuneScape used to be in it. The big MMOs, arguably, used to be in it — like World of Tanks and League of Legends and Dota.
Examples of this would be Rocket League, Path of Exile, Warframe, [PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds], Fortnite. These games don’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. They’re not triple-A in the normal sense. But they’re incredibly community driven. They’re always updated. They have a lot of these principles I was talking about. They have amazing multiplayer experiences. There’s a phenomenally fertile ground for us to explore in that area. It’s not just our next-generation RPG. We’re doing that in other games we’re starting to explore as well.
GamesBeat: And the third?
Mansell: The third and final prong is game publishing. We’re fortunate that we’re a 350-person company for our current games. We have a full publishing suite. We’ve always specialized in community, grassroots marketing, advocates, influencers, creating content for the community. We have a broadcast studio in our U.K. office, the sort you’d imagine seeing in a TV studio. We do big esports tournaments that get to the top of the Twitch rankings. We do a lot of digital performance marketing for effective user acquisition on the PC. We have a global infrastructure for hosting. When PlayStation Network and Xbox were getting taken down by DDoS attacks a few years back, we got used as target practice before that. We’re this sort of under-the-radar, long-term game. So, we have a very resilient network. We know commerce very well, billing, anti-fraud, all that stuff.
Anyway, we have all of this stuff in house, and we realize that we can offer this as services to online developers who haven’t yet built or don’t want to build all of those things. People who want to specialize in making great games but how do they find an audience, run a robust online service, serve their communities and customers and listen to them as effectively as possible?
That’s something we’re starting to look into. We’re having introductory talks with potential partners. Probably later in the year, we’ll do a proper announcement and communications on our full offering. I can’t think of a go-to specialist publisher for live games. A few people are doing bits of it, but no one’s really got an amazing track record. The big triple-A guys do bits of it, but that’s not their focus. I don’t know of a specialist live games publisher, and that’s a big opportunity we see. Talking with developers, there’s significant demand for it.
That’s the opportunity space we’ll be exploring in the next couple of years, starting with just a few as we build up our services and build up our teams. We’ve been bringing in quite a lot of heavyweight talent from not just MMO companies but skills in mobile and publishing and community skills on all platforms, including console. The first half of last year was about finding our vision for the future. The second half was building a plan. Now, we’re executing that plan. We’re bringing the right people in. We’re making the business connections. We’re upgrading our technologies to be able to protect our current games, build new ones, and offer live publishing services to developers as well.
GamesBeat: Are you going to add more people? Does this strategy require more people?
Mansell: We’re building out our development teams, such as our next-generation RPG team. We’re not looking [to] create game teams up in the multiple hundreds. It’s important to me that our games are free to access, and our business model demands that they also have recurring revenue. I purposefully choose those phrases. I’m not necessarily saying “free-to-play” because that conjures a certain image. But certainly free to access and recurring revenue is important for very long-tail games and active, healthy communities.
GamesBeat: Do you think what Microsoft’s doing with PlayFab or Amazon and GameSparks, is that trying to get in some of the territories where you guys would be experts? Or are you doing something different?
Mansell: Those are partial back-end technologies. We’ve looked at those, and they’re pretty interesting. But they don’t help you find users. They don’t teach you how to build deep relationships with your player community. They’re a small component and a very important component. We’re looking to provide some technology services around hosting and commerce and analytics and customer relationship management. Some of that stuff is out there. A lot of that is becoming commoditized now.
I think what we offer that’s more rare is the practical experience of leveraging technology to create great experience for communities, for players. Fulfilling those five principles we talked about. I think that’s the experience that puts us in a unique place to help people.
GamesBeat: On the social front, do players not mind breaking the fourth wall, so to speak? They don’t seem to mind talking about the experience of playing a game, as opposed to immersing themselves in the story or the character of the game. They’ll go out of the game to talk about the game, then continue to play from wherever they are.
Mansell: I think you can see that the rise of Twitch, with a lot of people viewing as much as they’re playing — we’re very fortunate that our games have always had a lot of content creation. We rank very high on YouTube. We’re in the top-20 on Twitch at any given moment.
We have a lot of experience not just with ourselves broadcasting and talking to our players — we do live streams almost every day. We have dev Q&As and interactive community live streams in the game, broadcasting in many different ways. But there’s the rise of things like Reddit and Discord. Players like to extend their game experience. I think that’s what’s in our heads as well. I don’t see us just as product development and publishing. We’re creating a wider experience.
For us, the underpinning insight is that you can develop deeper emotional connections between players in the game and between players in the wider community. They all have a much deeper and richer experience. They enjoy that. They become more loyal. They’ll stay around and spread word of mouth to their friends. That’s really helped us.
Our RuneScape games have consistently grown over the last few years. We’ve had a resurgence for the last four years. That’s because we’ve genuinely embraced the community as the leaders of what we do. We listen. We serve them. We do our best to understand them, whether that’s through surveys and social media or through telemetry and analytics. We try to blend all these things together.
In late February, we did a big charity event inside our games. We had our highest concurrent user numbers in eight years. The RuneScape games we have are free to access, with an optional subscription. We have more subscriptions now than at any time in the last seven years. All this stuff I’m saying about living games, it’s genuinely tried and often proven. We’ve put this to work ourselves. It’s benefited our business. We’ve had our best ever financial year in the last three years running. It’s not because we’re chasing profit. It’s because we’re genuinely looking at the quality of service we provide and tuning it as best we can to our players.
We’re going to continue to do that on our current games. We’ll build our new games around those principles. We’re [starting] to look at how we can offer those skills and services to other people. Not just as ideas but as things we can show them. We have a track record with one of the world’s biggest MMORPGs still.