Think Services census reveals 13 percent increase in North American gaming jobs

Think Services Game Group’s Game Developer Research has recently published its Game Developer Census 2008 report with some interesting numbers.  Surveying all companies working in the video game development and publishing in North America, the survey uncovered a 12 percent year on year increase of US employees.  This years number clocks gaming industry jobs at a rockin’ 44,400 – up from 39,700 in 2007.  If the 12 percent in the US wasn’t enough to make you sit up and take notice, take a look to our neighbors to the north: Canadian video game jobs leaped a healthy 17 percent; up to 9500 from 8100.  Combined the North American gaming industry increased 13 percent, from 47,800 to 53,900.  Now that’s alotta jobs, and outstanding industry growth.

While a portion of this increase comes from increased staffing numbers related to next-gen games, the driving factor has been continued development and investment in MMOs and Virtual Worlds.  VC’s have obviously put their reservations on the shelf, as continued growth in the free-to-play game worlds has spurred increased investments.

Breaking it down in geographic terms, while Governor Schwarzenegger’s statewide economy might not be rocking the Kasbah, 21,200 game developers couldn’t be happier in the Golden State.  Washington State ranks a healthy #2 with over 4,700 employees, and the longhorns of Texas calling 3,330 video game industry professionals state residents.  In total, seven states (California, Washington, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Florida) have over 1,000 game professionals as inhabitants.  North Carolina and Maryland are just below the 1,000 threshold.

Interesting to note; the census did NOT include game tools companies (who’s your favorite microtransaction payment method firm?), game contracting/services companies, external PR, marketing, legal, and other business services and liaison or licensing divisions at larger media companies.  Game Developer Research estimates this number to be in the 18,000 range in North America.

“We’re delighted to present our second Census report, showing a notable increase in the amount of professionals employed in the game industry. With industry revenues at an all-time high, we believe that we’ll continue to see a vibrant market for those employed in the art and science of gaming,” said Simon Carless, publisher of Game Developer Magazine and director of Game Developer Research.

To view a sample data set, or purchase the entire 170 page Game Developer Census 2008 report, visit Think Services at gamedevresearch.com.

Vivaty to bring Virtual Worlds to your browser sans client

Picture this…a world where dashing off to your favorite virtual world is no more than a few clicks away, all the while having several other tabs open.  Tabs you say?  Isn’t that browser based?  What about that pesky IT department restriction of not being an admin, and not having sufficient rights to install said client?  If San Francisco based Vivaty has it’s way, clients are a thing of the past.  And to be honest, after the last 1.5 GB WoW patch update, I say….good riddance.

Former EA VP, CEO and co-founder of Vivaty Keith McCurdy and co. have been working on such a solution for over a year now.  They’ve steadily been gaining tracking since their summer ’08 release of Vivaty Scenes application.  Scenes is a personal profile page where the user can control who has access to this area, the objects within the area, flickr photos, youtube videos, etc.  OK, nothing new you say?  Agreed, it’s not a new concept…but since Wednesday, the application, titled Vivaty Everywhere, is available in a rich 3D environment right in your favorite browser, thereby making it a ‘take it with you where ever you go’ virtual world.  The feature allows users to embed a scene on any website and/or blog.

“Our vision is to make virtual experiences as accessible, engaging and easy to use as a Web page,” said Keith McCurdy, Vivaty CEO and co-founder. “Vivaty Everywhere gives brands, fan sites and bloggers a rich, engaging way to inject their sites with social experiences that reflect their media and style choices.”

In a recent Forbes.com interview, McCurdy states:

The idea is to create a solution for brands that want to advertise in the virtual world.

“The old model was to take a branded experience and bring it into an application virtual world [like Second Life],” he says. “Now, [we] can bring it to the customers on social networks or a branded site.”

It tackles the problem of “Second Life’s” “big empty” world by finding and engaging folks where they happen to be.

If Vivaty’s main goal is to attract brands to further Virtual advertising and engagement spaces, they’ve been given a big thumbs up with their recent deal with Universal Music Group.  Vivaty has landed a deal to create a Queen and Paul Rodgers themed scene to promote the new The Cosmos Rocks album.  The goal is to attract Queen and Paul Rodgers fans to these virtual spaces, scattered across the web, to listen to the new tracks, watch videos, and discuss the band.  They’ve also recently inked a deal and developed a scene for Barely Political, a leading political satire firm.

“We are pleased to invite Queen and Paul Rodgers fans to a 24/7 listening party in this visually rich, social experience around a highly anticipated album,” said Andie D’Avino, director of online marketing at Universal Music Group. “Making Queen’s Vivaty scene embeddable means it’s extremely accessible to fans, no matter where they are online.”

If some of this in-browser gaming sounds familiar, idSoftware’s recent placement of Quake Live, a free-to-play, browser based first person shooter, might ring some bells.  Unity and Flash are currently working on web publishing tools, Triton World Network is working on it’s own cloud computing gaming platform, and one of our favorite, Acclaim games has been working on server technology and server side game development tools for over a year now. Vivaty is perfectly positioned, and leading the charge of ‘lose that junk in your trunk’ via browser based technology.

“The big trend is that the world of monolithic downloadable application worlds is going to go by the wayside in favor of browser-based worlds,” Reuben Steiger, chief executive of virtual worlds marketing firm Millions of US.

“Worlds plugging in to the browser are becoming the de facto interaction for real-time communication on the Web.”

Vivaty currently has browser based 3D Virtual Worlds apps developed for both facebook and AIM users.  While attracting brands to advertise in these browser based virtual worlds appears to be the main monetization module, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Vivaty investigating further monetization via a microtransaction model within these virtual worlds.

MindArk brings Entropia Universe to NASA

MindArk has recently been selected by NASA as one of three finalists to present to Entropia Universe to NASA Learning Technologies and the Innovative Program office on November 7th at the Goddard Space Flight Center.  The goal of the project is to create an exciting and interactive MMO educational game to enhance the real world education of teens in high school and college in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields.  Saber Astronautics, Nocturnal Entertainment, and Big World and Virtual Heroes and Project Whitecard will also be presenting.

As we talked about in the e-for-all in Los Angeles wrap up, Entropia Universe is a proprietary tech platform for interoperable virtual worlds.  Each world within the Entropia Universe has it’s own unique planet and associated characteristics.  These varied free-to-play worlds each contain secure micro-transaction marketplaces, highly developed media (with a CryEngine 2 graphics overhaul currently in the works), transaction methods for both real and virtual items, and full MMO features including social interaction between players.  Players spend PEDs, the Entropia in-game currency, on customizing and equipping their avatars at an exchange rate of 10:1, PED:$ respectively.

Swedish Based developers MindArk have been working on the Entropia Universe for over 10 years at a cost of over $40M.  Hitting the streets in 2003, MindArk’s flagship planet, Calypso has been turning a profit since 2004, and served at a fine-tuning platform for further planet developments.  The Entropia Universe now boasts approximately 780,000 registered accounts from over 200 countries globally.  In 2007, the Universe was responsible for over $400M of secondary market (player-to-player) trading.

“We are thrilled and honored to present Entropia Universe to NASA and to have been selected from over 100 interested parties which were present at the NASA MMO Workshop in April. It is an acknowledgement of our concept and progress, and shows the versatility of the platform we have spent a decade developing,” says MindArk CEO Jan Welter Timkrans.

MindArk Director of Special Projects, Christian Bjoerkman, continues, “this opportunity to build the NASA MMO is very much in line with our strategy to enhance the learning aspects of the Entropia Universe Platform. It is a perfect way for us to work in collaboration with top academics and scholars to create a stimulating, challenging and educational experience.”

NASA Learning Technologies sent out feelers at a workshop back in April in order to evaluate which companies and projects would be best suited to their desire to create a STEM-based MMO title.  Their goal is to create a fun, interactive and educational game that will enhance NASA’s educational goals.

To learn more about the STEM-MMO project, visit NASA at: http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/
To learn more about MindArk visit them at: http://www.mindark.com/
To learn more about Entropia Universe visit them at: http://www.entropiauniverse.com/

MindArk Entropia Universe Trailer

Social Games developer Playfish lands $17 Million in Financing

If the recent Gordon Gecko inspired article regarding why harsh economic times are good for the gaming industry wasn’t enough for you, playfish has recently received a huge vote of confidence from Accel Partners and Index Ventures to the tune of $17 Million.  Their mission?  Simple.  Become the leading company in social games.

Playfish is an industry leader in social gaming, with over 10 million monthly users of their services.  These games allow people to play games with real-world friends across various social networking media platforms.  Playfish is directly responsible for some of the most popular facebook application games including Bowling Buddies, Pet Society, Who Has The Biggest Brain? and Word Challenge.  Not a fan of the facebook, and prefer staying with the good ol’ standby MySpace?  No problem, playfish has got you covered with a select number of apps now available on the MySpace platform as well.  Playfish plans on releasing a number of additional titles for MySpace in the near future.  And if being at the top of the facebook/MySpace social gaming ladder wasn’t enough for you, Playfish has recently made waves via their commitment to in-game advertising as well.  They’ve recently committed to participation in Google’s in-game advertising platform, AdSense for Games.

“This has proven to be an outstanding year for the Playfish team,” said Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Playfish. “Four of our five games are now on Facebook’s top-10 games list, which is unmatched by competitors. We’ve launched our in-game transactions platform and worked jointly with Google to help define in-game advertising. We’ve opened offices in San Francisco, Beijing and Norway and have now closed a round of funding with two great investors, Accel Partners and Index Ventures. We look forward to expanding our studios, growing our user base and continuing to develop new ways for people to play games together.”

“Social gaming is a significant evolution in gaming and is in some ways a return to the roots of games,” says Segerstrale. “Our games are designed around social emotions — people play our games with the same people that they would play cards, play board games or go bowling with in the real world. Sharing the game experience with friends makes it more compelling and fun and results in more play time, viral distribution and better monetization potential over time.”

Accel partners was founded in 1983 and is dedicated to partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class internet and technology businesses.  Some of their successes include BitTorrent, Brightcove, ComScore, Facebook, Gameforge, Macromedia, and Real Networks.

Index Ventures was founded and 1996, and is a leading European VC firm.  They’re dedicated to helping top entrepreneurial teams in the Information Technology and Life Science sectors build their companies into market defining global leaders.  With offices in London, Geneva, and Jersey, some of their successful ventures have included Skype, MySQL, and Last.fm.

“We are immensely impressed by the creativity of the Playfish team and also by the methodical and disciplined approach to development and commercialization they have adopted,” said Ben Holmes of Index Ventures. “They are clearly focused on building a great company as well as great games and we look forward to work with them on achieving this.”

Hellgate: London – alive for now, free-to-play Mythos – still up in the air

Good news for Hellgate: London fans – it looks like you’re back in the game, at least until January 2009.  Hellgate: London, and the associated Flagship fiasco behind the game are quickly shaping up to be one of the great ‘WTF’ stories of the gaming world for 2008.

Let’s take a step back, and I’ll give you the $0.50 tour.  Basically, the saga shakes out like so:  back in June, Flagship Studio’s audio and gameplay programmer Guy Somberg wrote a length nine-paragraph blog article reporting that Flagship employees were leaving “in droves” including accountants, programmers, HR peeps, and game artists.  He continued on and noted that only one full time employee was still working on Hellgate: London, and that the game was still trodding on, even though the gaming committee had trashed the title, sighting that it was full of various bugs causing system slowdowns and complete crashes.  Shifting into damage control, Flagship Studios CVP David Brevik followed up the article, claiming that Somberg was “having a bad day” and that everything in Flagship land was sunny and bright.  The blog has since disappeared.

“Both our studios are currently fully staffed, with our San Francisco studio working on ongoing content for Hellgate: London and our Seattle studio working on our free-to-play MMORPG, Mythos, which should go into open beta within the next couple months,” said Brevik in his official statement. “In total, we have over 100 employees working for both studios. As is typical in the industry, after a game is released some people naturally want to work on something else and they leave the company to do so. But in total we have had less than 10% turn-over and have rehired for all needed positions.”

Shall I continue?

Basically the story takes a turn for the (even) worse, with CEO Bill Roper finally admitting that there was some truth to Somberg’s outcry on June 14th.  Instead of folks leaving in droves, it looks like they were forced to take an early vacation: they were canned by Roper and Co.

“The past five years have been an incredible experience for us, but unfortunately, we couldn’t sustain the size of the company any longer,” he said.

Now we all know that where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, and sure enough, Flagship Studio’s smoky environment, sent some pretty clear signals to those that had a vested interest in both Hellgate: London, and Flagship’s free-to-play title: Mythos.  Korean based HanbitSoft, exclusive publisher of Hellgate: London and Mythos stepped into the foray and claimed that it intended to take over control of the titles.  Insert war of words here, including a juicy statement from HanbitSoft’s CEO Kim Ki-Young:

“Flagship not only lacked effort (in developing and maintaining Hellgate), but were only looking for personal gain. Firing all of the Flagship employees in order to protect the personal interests of its founding members only shows how selfish and irresponsible they are.”

Ouch.

As it turns out, HanbitSoft only has the rights to Mythos, and not Hellgate: London as well.

While this ensuing war of the words was taking place, Hellgate: London forums lit up like the 4th of July with everything ranging from wild speculation, to downright close to the truth.  Namco Bandai had been seen as a potential supporter of the Hellgate: London title, and this past Friday, they finally confirmed a number of rumors:

“[Namco] will continue to support customers of PC game Hellgate: London with online server support and play through January 31, 2009 despite the closure of Flagship Studios.”
“In a further gesture of support, Namco Bandai Games will provide this server support free of charge to all fans and players of the game up until the shut down date. NAMCO BANDAI Games appreciates the enthusiasm of all the Hellgate: London players and looks forward to providing them with future entertainment products.”

Phew.  What a tennis match of following he said/she said.

Which leaves us with one very crucial piece of the Flagship Studios puzzle: Mythos.  Mythos lead designer, Travis Baldree and Flagship Studios co-founder Max Schaefer didn’t take the collapse of Flagship sitting down, but rather, founded Runic Games.  The site was last updated on August 8th, 2008, and mentions Mythos, but gives no concrete details.  I’m going to take a guess, and say that the name may be well mired up in copyright issues and that we may never see this free-to-play see the light of day.  Again, only speculation.  On the other hand, if Baldree and Schaefer are as committed as they seem to be in Baldree’s WarCry interview, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a number of elements of Mythos incorporated in a new free-to-play premiered as Runic Games’ coming out party title.

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Atlantica Online offering to buy back characters; exploring new monetization models?

We’ve all heard a lot of news over the past few years about free-to-play titles, and the myriad of monetization models being attempted, tried and failed, or currently in the works.  So when arstechnica.com ran a story a few days back concerning Atlantica Online and Korean based developer NDOORS’ new buyback plan, naturally I took notice.  This is the first offer of it’s type that I’ve heard of, and my initial response is purely, ????

I’m not sure whether to call it a great marketing/customer satisfaction program, OR signs of s sinking ship, but NDOORS recently announced that they’re offering to buy back your character if you’ve played the game for a significant (read level 50) period of time and are still unsatisfied with the game.  Another way to look at this is, play this free-to-play game quite a bit, and cash in.  To be eligible for the $20 refund, players must have a level 50 Atlantica Online character and have an active paypal account.  With that said, the offer is only good until November 30, 2008, and only applies to players that started an account on or after October 12, 2008.  Technically, a months worth of work could net you $20.  Granted, not a fee that’s going to pay the rent, but an interesting new method of attracting new players to the game.

As a point of interest, the MMORPG world is largely holding it’s collective breath with the upcoming November 13th release of industry giant Blizzard’s release of the highly anticipated 3rd expansion set, Wrath of the Lich King, to their World of Warcraft franchise.  Coincidental timing?  Perhaps.  Is NDOORS really trying to give the 400 pound Gorilla in the room a run for it’s money?  Probably not, but an interesting proposition none the less.

As stated above, this is an industry first, regarding a buyback program, and it could pave some new avenues for free-to-play titles in the Western market.  Traditionally, free-to-play titles have been looked at as ‘sub-par’ games, and Atlantica Online is the first to step forward with a  ‘Give it a try, if you don’t like it, here’s $20 for playing’ model.  Obviously, NDOORS is banking on more players which will ultimiately (hopefully) lead to more in game microtransactions.  Enough that sales will off set the amount of players that are surely going to play, if only to get a $20 payout from NDOORS.

While arstechnica author Frank Caron, who’s written a number of great pieces for arstechnica, speculates that perhaps NDOORS has plans to resell these characters as a mark up to others (which I agree would be a VERY interesting monetization model), I’m not so sure that’s in the cards for Atlantica Online.  NDOORS are the developers, and obviously have the ability (and rights) to create any character at any level.  What might be interesting is to see a business model that experiemented with this concept.  Let’s say free-to-play game XYZ offers a payment module whereby I could plunk down $20, and start the game with a level 20 character.  $30 for a level 30, $40 for level 40, and so on.  There’s already a huge underground (and often prohibited by ToS agreements) market for character sales.  Instead of trying to police the property, it might be interesting to see a free-to-play face the problem head on, and simply offer the service themselves.  Would the community accept it?  Would there be a horrible backlash, and we watch the title crash and burn?  The question really is, is there a developer out there willing to take the risk and experiment with where the boundaries of community acceptance lie?  Perhaps NDOORS with Atlantica Online is just such publisher, testing the waters and taking community temperatures to gauge how far the concept can go.

Disney Online launches free-to-play Pixie Hollow

Making good on their promise to further develop the Tinkerbell/Fairies line, Disney Online, a part of the Disney Interactive Media Group, has recently announced that the plane to Pixie Hollow is now boarding.  Guests must be under this height to ride this ride.

Disney’s newest Virtual World allows players to create their own Fairy to take flight alongside Tinkerbell and other Fairy friends.  The goal is to help bring about the change of seasons through meeting friends, playing games, and collecting items in nature.

Features include:

• Play Talent Games — Help fellow Fairies bring about the change of seasons by playing talent mini games; help fish travel upstream with Silvermist and the other water Fairies, or light up fireflies with Iridessa and the light-talent fairies
• Collect Curious Things — Find and collect useful items like leaves, flowers, and rare mainland trinkets; use them as ingredients for crafting, to shop in the treetops and to earn badges
• Craft Incredible Creations — Create your own Fairy fashions and accessories by playing crafting games
• Earn Special Badges — Earn colorful badges that showcase your adventures and accomplishments in your personal Leaf Journal. Plus, when you earn a badge, everyone around you will see your accomplishments

“Pixie Hollow is an online destination where fans of all ages can become a Fairy and go to live in a magical world of Tinker Bell and her friends,” said Steve Parkis, senior vice president, Disney Online. “More than 7 and a half million Fairies have already been created and, until now, have been all dressed up with no place to go. Now, in Pixie Hollow, Fairies can join their friends, take flight and live their very own Fairy adventures.”

Pixie Hollow is a free-to-play title, but players may choose to upgrade their game experience buy purchasing a monthly $5.95 membership fee.  Benefits of membership include being one of the first to preview and play new games when they open in Pixie Hollow.  Members get a sneak peek at all games before non-member players.  Members will be able to craft individual and unique outfits for their character.  Paying members have access to the Fairy fashions and furnishings, allowing them to trade collected items for tops, bottoms, sashes, and shoes.

While Pixie Hollow is a standalone youth game, as with most things Disney, there are a number of real world tie-ins that not only encourage activity on the PixieHollow site, but also release exclusive in-game content.  Disney’s new Clickables™ Fairy collection will unlock special content in PixieHallow allowing players to make online Fairy friendships and add unique virtual clothing, accessories, and decor items to their collections.  Players may also earn in-game achievement points via a separate handheld LCD game that allows them to earn Tink points offline that can be used in-game for butterfly friends that fly with their Fairies in PixieHollow (in game pet).

The new free-to-play virtual world has opened a few days before Disney’s upcoming October 28th DVD and bluray release of Tinker Bell.

Asian Media Development Group enters free-to-play territory with Exteel

Philippine-based Asian Media Development Group (AsianMedia) has inked a deal with Korean developer NCSoft to bring Exteel to the massive Philippine, Singapore, and Malaysian gaming markets in a free-to-play format.  AsianMedia is the operator responsible for bringing Lineage II and GuildWars to the Philippine market.  This announcement signals AsianMedia’s first free-to-play title and is NCSoft’s first time allowing an in-house developed titles to be serviced by a partner abroad.

Founded in 1999, AsianMedia is a Philippine based company, but is rapidly expanding into the Singapore and Malaysian markets.  The Asian Media Development Group is the largest PC games distributor in the Philippines and host a diverse cyber café network, 90% of which is currently in the Philippines, along with over 200 retail outlets.

Exteel is not a new game, having been released on December 4, 2007, but is currently unavailable in the Philippines/Singapore/Malaysia market.  The game has been successfully serviced in South Korea, Taiwan, a number of European countries, and North America.  In these markets, Exteel operates on a free-to-play basis and is funded via in-game item mall microtransactions using NCcoins.  In North America, real world money can be used via NCSoft pre-paid gaming cards available at Best Buy and Target locations.  No word yet on how the microtransaction model will function in these markets.

Exteel is a third person shooter online game where players command mechanaughts, or human robots, and battle other mechanuaghts.  The game features fast action, easy arcade controls, and a massive selection of items available for players to customize their killing machine.  The two companies plan on expanding gamer’s experience.

AsianMedia has already made tentative plans to begin closed beta testing in the Philippine market as early as Q1 2009.  Philippine gamers will be given first hand experience with Exteels powerful Unreal Engine 2.0 graphics engine, interactivity and gameplay.

In an interview with Alex Villafania from inquirer.net, AsianMedia COO Ronald Allan Aquino said:

“…the decision to go free-to-play was due to the huge market for such games.”

While the games’ local portal is still under development, interested gamers can check in at the North American home of exteel at: exteel.com.

Stand and be counted Soldier: Nexon’s free-to-play Combat Arms tops 1 million users

Nexon: Not just for fantasy players anymore.  While this isn’t Nexon’s newest marketing tagline, it might as well be.  Free-to-play pioneer Nexon has recently announced that their newest offering, Combat Arms, has officially topped the 1 million user mark since opening the beta back in July.  The microtransaction model went live on October 1st with the opening of the ‘Black Market’ ; Nexon’s in-game item shop that allows players to spend real world money to further customize their characters.

Doing a bit of a well deserved celebratory dance, Nexon has chosen this milestone to bring out even more first person shooter goodness via a patch introducing a new area map and a revolutionary new form of shooter combat.  Not holding any punches, Nexon is really going all out with this one by introducing the ‘Waverider’ map, a European hilltop town (don’t ask my why they named the map waverider, I personally haven’t seen many surfing spots in European hilltop towns) that will now be the game’s largest playing field.  If new areas to explore and combat in weren’t enough, Nexon’s amping up the selection of available weapons, two supply cases, special event gear, and a mercenary character for the Halloween season.

Bobafett rises again!

OK, perhaps our favorite intergalactic bounty hunter ISN’T making an appearance in Combat Arms, but Nexon IS introducing a new game play mode, previously unseen an any first person shooter.  This new game mode, appropriately called “Bounty Hunter” features a hide and seek game play format, whereby one player is randomly tagged as the ‘bounty’ (booty?) and will then be hunted by other players.  The longer Bobafett the player can manage to evade the sharp eyes of other players, the more in game cash they earn.  In other words, find a dang tight hiding spot, park your butt there, and rack up the coinage, provided that Sargeant Snipe isn’t watching your back with a bullseye painted all over it.

“Nexon is dedicated to providing an interactive online gaming experience with our high quality games that are easy to pick up and entertaining at every level,” said Min Kim, vice president of marketing for Nexon. “Combat Arms’ successful commercial launch demonstrates the game’s huge mass appeal and validates market demand for great, free-to-play, online experiences.”

And while Combat Arms is one of the hottest new titles in the free-to-play marketplace, it’s not just the game’s fast paced action that keeps players coming back for more.  The game also features a plethora of socialization Web 2.0 community tools including buddy lists, clan systems, and a messenger system.

“We’ve received overwhelming feedback from Combat Arms players who loved the mix of the fast-action FPS game play and ability to communicate with other players in-game,” said Herb Yang, producer of Combat Arms. “People are really embracing the socialization features of Combat Arms, especially the built-in features enabling people to track their personal performance as well as to create and join clans, personalize their clans with items such as emblems, and participate in official clan matches on dedicated servers.”

While I’ll fully admit that my experience with Combat Arms hasn’t been exactly ideal (I play CA on a mac via bootcamp), and I’m sure there’s an added Windows native component that I’m missing, it still looks and feels more or less like Counterstrike, minus the price tag.  I found the action to be simple and intuitive to pick up, and battlegrounds are fairly well balanced, thereby making even the n00bs enjoy some devilishly good ‘ha!  Gotcha!’ action.  Since opening the doors just under 5 months ago, Nexon’s Combat Arms has gone from zero to hero.  Wasn’t there another highly hyped free-to-play first person shooter coming out sometime soon?  Oh yeah…ummm, Battlefield Heroes – what’s up?

True Games acquires free-to-play Warrior Epic

Hot on the heals of their most recent appointment of former NCSoft and EA exec Peter Jarvis, Orange County based True Games Interactive has just announced that they’ve acquired global publishing rights to Warrior Epic, a free-to-play MMORPG being developed by Possibility Space.  True Games and Possibility Space will work closely together with a projected launch of spring 2009.

“This partnership demonstrates True Games’ commitment to bringing quality triple-A gameplay, traditionally only seen in retail releases, to the free-to-play game space,” said Jeff Lujan, Founder and Chairman of True Games Interactive. “Not only is Warrior Epic a visually beautiful MMORPG, it also offers some incredibly innovative gameplay features that, combined with the free-to-play model, will ensure a big hit with gamers around the world”.

This free-to-play hot potato has been making waves even prior to the True Games announcement, and this is certainly not the last we’ll hear from Epic Warrior.  The fantasy RPG places players in command of a Warrior Hall where they manage their characters’ adventures.  Each character class has it’s own unique play style and is open for recruitment.  While True Games and Possibility Space have not yet released official details, these unique warrior classes and the hall itself can be upgraded visually and functionally, presumably via microtransactions.

“The free-to-play business model is ushering in a fresh and welcome change to how games are developed and the relationship between developer, publisher and player. We welcome this change, and were looking for a publisher who felt the same,” said Gage Galinger, CEO of Possibility Space. “True Games’ progressive attitude toward online gaming and dedication to working with the next generation of top developers on truly high-quality game content made them the right choice for us and for Warrior Epic.”

“As our lineup grows and the quality of our upcoming products becomes evident, we are raising the bar for the free-to-play space,” said Bob Drobish, CEO of True Games. “With each unique product we sign, we continue to attract key talent and partnerships and this is just the beginning of what we have in store for gamers.”

Considering True Games’ induction of Peter Cesario, and Peter Jarvis, along with this recent acquisition, if you haven’t already taken notice of True Games Interactive, now might be the time to start.  Personally, I see these guys loading up the big guns and expect to see some great things coming out of Orange County.

Check True Games Interactive out at: www.truegamesinteractive.com
Find out more about Warrior Epic at: www.warriorepic.com

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