Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

When the news of Tabula Rasa’s imminent demise hit the internet, the social gamers of our MMO industry lit up like they had just sat on a massive mound of fire ants. People were scrambling to figure out why NCsoft suddenly opted to pull the plug after they had been declaring to numerous press establishments – including Ten Ton Hammer – that the game was safe and secure and would be enjoyed for months, if not years, to come. However, that proved not to be the case.

Only a few other development companies have had to face the closure of their games and even fewer have had the game operate for such a short amount of time. Out of that selection, Ten Ton Hammer got in touch with NetDevil’s Scott Brown, a man that has been fairly outspoken about his experiences with Auto Assault's closure in 2007, and asked him a number of questions regarding Tabula Rasa’s impending shut down. In part one of this two part interview, we ask Scott about the future of the developers at Destination Games, his thoughts on MMOG closures in general, and how NetDevil bounced back from the end of Auto Assault.

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NetDevil's Auto Assault faced closure in mid-2007.

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s the attitude in a studio like when you know that your game is going to be cancelled and things are wrapping up? What kind of processes will the Tabula Rasa team go through mentally to close down the game?

Scott Brown: So basically what happens is the game doesn’t meet expectations and people start trying to figure out how the game is going to make a profit. In the case of Auto Assault, NCsoft opted to just close the game versus running it with a smaller team. I don’t have any insight into the situation, but it looks like they did the same sort of thing with Tabula Rasa.

On the other hand, with the original Jumpgate we just scaled our team back until it was profitable. I really don’t understand why you’d ever shut off a game, in my opinion.

Ten Ton Hammer: Why would a company turn off a game rather than just scaling back the team?

Scott: I don’t know the answer to that. I can tell you that it was certainly a disagreement between us and them.

I would never turn off a game. I would do what I would need to do to make the game support itself, but why turn it off? Especially when there are people that love your game?

There’s a site – and I don’t know how many people have seen it – it’s called biomek.org, and it’s an old Auto Assault site/forum. There are a bunch of people that go on there and post about how they liked Auto Assault and enjoyed playing it. There aren’t a ton of people, but the point is that there is a community out there that enjoyed playing the game. I still get emails from people asking me to turn the game back on. And I wish I could, but it’s not my IP.

I think communities form, but they don’t necessarily have to be the size of the World of Warcraft to be a success. Really, I would never turn this stuff off.

Ten Ton Hammer: What happened internally when the decision to shut off Auto Assault was made? What does that do to the development team? Where do the guys go from there? Do people start looking for jobs? Is it a relief knowing that there won’t be any more churning to try to keep the game alive?

Scott: Here’s what we did. NCsoft certainly knows how to make a game, and they committed to a long amount of support for the group to stay on the game for a while after launch. So some of the first stuff that we did was we went up to the Auto Assault team and said, “Look, the game’s obviously not performing well enough to cover its costs. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

That was the first thing we did, and we tried to be really honest with everyone. We were straight with them. We thought we were going to get more work, but we weren’t sure. We supported people, and the situation was just too unstable for some of our crew. We helped them find new places in the industry, and they were free to use us as references. At that point in time, the president of Gas Powered Games was actually talking to us and reached out and hired a few people that were nervous about being in that situation.

While some people have that sort of entrepreneurial spirit and the “Let’s just keep going!” attitude; some people have families and kids in college and just decided to move on. As a whole, we just wanted to support everyone in the best ways that we could. We didn’t want to shock everyone and just say that we’re out of money and can’t pay them.

Ten Ton Hammer: Didn’t want to take ‘em out to the parking lot?

Scott: I’ve never understood that approach at all.

So that’s the way we did it. We just let everyone know what was going on. So then we scrambled and tried to find work. We decided that we needed to diversify as a company. Games are so hit and miss and we can’t have our company survive or fail off of the success of one game.

That’s when we signed LEGO, and a group of people transitioned from Auto Assault over there. After that we signed Warmonger more as a tech demo because we had done all this work on Auto Assault on physics and had worked with Aegia on creating an Aegia-supported mode on Auto Assault. Everyone was getting a kick out of it, and we wondered what we could do if we took that destruction to an even higher level. A group of the Auto Assault guys that worked on the physics and destruction in the game split off and worked on the Warmonger deal.

With the rest of the team, we took a step back and looked at Jumpgate. We still had fans in that game and people that love the game. What if we took what we had learned from Auto Assault and see how great we could make it.

At the same time, we wanted to try to get into the web games business too, because there are a bunch of games – like Club Penguin and Webkinz – that are just rocking and kicking our ass.

NetDevil didn't take the closure of their studio lying down; they actively fought to find jobs for their employees

Ten Ton Hammer: They’re making SO much money!

Scott: And with such a small team! Shouldn’t we be looking at that too? So we diverted a different group onto that project, which still hasn’t been announced yet. We really took some of the web-based code from another development team that’s been working with web tools and combined that with some of our tech that we developed for our MMOs and combined them. That group is about to go public with some of their stuff, and it’s really freaking cool.

So now we’ve got those three big groups: LEGO, Jumpgate, and the web game. It’s all pretty neat.

The other thing that’s been cool for us is that when you do an internal post-mortem on a game, you really beat yourself up over it. Why did the game fail? What did we do wrong? What lessons did we learn? A lot of people have heard the talk from us, but that’s when we made our decisions about the first fifteen minutes of the game, vertical slice, etc.

That’s when we determined that we needed to commit to this, because if we’re not going to do it great, it’s not worth doing. It worked out well for us.

We talked with a variety of companies – I’m a big ArenaNet fan, and I think those guys are some of the best and smartest people I’ll meet in my life – and we discussed a bunch of ideas with them and the direction they took with Guild Wars.

Ten Ton Hammer: It seems like you bounced back pretty well from the closure of Auto Assault. How did you – and perhaps eventually the team at NCsoft – bounce back from the closure of a game?

Scott: It’s hard. When you pour your life into something for four years, it’s hard when it fails. We sat down – Peter, Ryan and I – and asked if we wanted to do this anymore. We really asked ourselves if we wanted to make games or not. Are we going to go fight for this, or not?

Before, when someone said something to us or thought we were doing something the wrong way, we were too scared to say no. We didn’t want to get put out of business. It’s not that I think we’re right all the time, but sometimes – as a developer – there are times when you just need to put your foot down.

We were scared. We were more concerned about staying in business, and I think what that experience taught us was that we’d rather lose our jobs or rather go out of business than make a bad decision. Even after we did that, we were still scared about the first time we had to say no to someone.

And in reality, it’s been a very positive experience. It hasn’t been an adversarial thing. If LEGO or Codemasters wanted us to do something a particular way, and we said, “We need to do it this way, and here’s why.” It’s usually worked out okay.

It turns out that everyone wants the same thing, right?

Ten Ton Hammer: They want a success.

Scott: Yup!

It made a big difference, and it changed our philosophy to one of rather than working in fear to one of believing that we know what we’re talking about.

Rob Pardo’s talk at AGC a couple years ago was a huge inspiration to me. I was sitting there listening to his talk and thinking, “Wow. We knew all this stuff. We just didn’t do it.” You always rationalize it. I hear so many people that say, “But they’re Blizzard!”

And I just want to tell them that if they want to do something great, you have to do it that way. At least that’s what I believe.

Ten Ton Hammer: There are definitely ways to make games and ways not to make games. Blizzard just did it right the first time, and I don’t know if they got lucky or if they got good.

Scott: To be honest, I think the thing that no one talks about is that they learned. They made a bunch of games before they ever had the huge mega hit. They learned that process and it became the studio culture. Now that culture has become very addictive and it works and no one argues with them.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s interesting that they did so well on their first shot with an MMO though.

Scott: Certainly, but it’s not like they didn’t make tons of mistakes and spends lots and lots of money working through those mistakes. They just had someone that believed in them enough to let them work through those mistakes.

But they also earned that right. They had made several very successful games before that so they really earned a little bit of time.

Ten Ton Hammer: How much pressure is there on a developer? When you get that first set of numbers back and it’s not looking too great; how much pressure does that put on a development team to get your product in the black?

Scott: It’s all on the publisher. As much as developers like to cry about publishers, it’s the publishers that are taking the risk. It’s publishers that are spending the money. At that point that’s where the rubber hits the road, and they have to figure out the way to make the money.

Everyone that we’ve ever worked with have been good people. It’s never been the evil publisher, and it’s never actually been that way. They have a responsibility to the people that gave them the money, and some of them stick their head out to you to make this game and know they’ve got to make it profitable.

Most of the time, you'll know if a game will succeed before it is even launched.

Basically, the pressure is almost all in beta. I mean, there’s some pressure at launch, but most gamers know if a game is going to be successful way before the actual launch. Right? You just know.

If there’s a beta that you go and play then you never play the game again, you know it’s probably not going to do so well. But if you play a beta and wish that the game was already launched because you don’t want to lose your character, you know that the game is going to be a hit.

It comes down to really simple stuff.

Ten Ton Hammer: Where in the development process can you look at the game and know that it’s going to be profitable or not? Alpha? Beta?

Scott: It’s the moment when you go home at night and play your game instead of something else.

Ten Ton Hammer: What if there’s a game out there that’s just amazing? I know a lot of the NetDevil crew are fans of WoW…

Scott: That’s the problem; there isn’t really a single point where you know the game is ready. It’s a very soft thing. In reality, everyone talks about these numbers called “conversions” right? There’s some percentage of people where your game is a success or a failure.

You’re never going to convert everyone. There’s never a game out there that everyone likes. It’s basically how good you can get that percentage to be.

For something like Jumpgate Evolution, it doesn’t have to have the same sort of numbers that LEGO has to have in order to be a success. But maybe you have to have a higher percentage because the amount of people that try the game is smaller, or something like that. I don’t pretend to be marketing and know how to explain this sort of thing or not, but to me it’s simple.

Do you like to play it or not?

When you’re at work, are you thinking about it? Do you dream about getting back into the game and finish building the project you were working on. Or you can’t wait to try that mission again. Or you need to get back into the PvP so you can kill those guys.

That’s how you know.

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