New European gaming portal, Key To Play believes that an active conversation with customers and meeting their needs, rather than turning a profit is the key to success.

Key to Play creative director Toni Garcia recently spoke with Rob Purchese of gamesindustry.biz regarding this simple, yet effective strategy.  Garcia believes that high quality portals are the future of online gaming, and that Key to Play can deliver high quality games to set themselves apart from other portals.

“We are gamers, all of us. The point is: we don’t want to make money. We want to make a big, quality portal. Money’s not our priority at the moment,” Garcia explained. “We want to make things that people, if they like our service, will pay for – because we need to live! At the end of the day this is a business, but it’s not our priority. That’s the difference.”

“Maybe other portals are gamers but they don’t care as much for their gamers because they only want them to pay. That’s why we decided to go ahead with Key To Play, because in the future people will only play portals offering good service,” he added.

First up on Key to Play’s offerings list will be Pristontale 2, the successor to the South Korean 2003 Best Game of the Year, Prisontale.  With 4 years of development work, support provided by Epic Games and powered by the Unreal Engine, Prisontale 2; not a shabby choice.  If high quality free-to-play’s are really going to set Key to Play apart from its competitors, Prisontale 2 is a rock solid choice.

Key to Play is planning on monetization through microtransactions via in game items and equipment.  Garcia sees free-to-play/microtransactions as a much more valid model than yesterday’s subscription basis as it gives players the freedom to test run a product and decide for themselves if they want to drops a few coins here and there to upgrade their equipment.  Hopefully, Key to Play will also follow the growing trend of providing only temporary benefits and/or cosmetic upgrades and not providing an unfair game balance.
While not letting the cat out of the bag, Key to Play promises another MMO from Japan as it’s second offering.  Garcia stresses that online worlds are/will not be the sole focus for Key to Play, as the next title COULD be a first person shooter, or maybe even a casual title.

“The main thing is to look for good games, it doesn’t matter where they come from,” he said. “If you do things well then at the end of the day the money will come.”

Here’s to hoping that Key to Play’s wide eyed enthusiasm (and hopefully well stocked bank account) will carry over to meet players high expectations.