Pirates of the Burning Sea Q&A

GameSpot had the chance to sit down with Flying Lab’s Russell Williams and discuss the team’s decision to release Pirates of the Burning Sea for free (but not subscription-free) in Australia.

Q: Looking down the barrel of 10 million active subscribers on your biggest competitor’s books, how many subscribers do you foresee needing in order to establish and maintain a financially viable business in Australia?

A: This goes back into the history of our project. If you go to the various MMO game trade conventions where we talk about how to build these things, a few years ago WOW had just come out and everybody said, “OK, if you’re going to make a game, get your 65 million dollars together before you can even think about making an MMO because that’s what it takes to compete.” At the time it seemed crazy that very few people were going to be able to get 65 million dollars together to be able to do one of these projects, and I really think we’ve seen several games since WOW that have had pretty big budgets. We’re talking 30 to 45 million dollars, and they came out and they had a good two or three months and started to dwindle away because they’re trying to make the same damn game as WOW. If I’m making an elves and dwarves game, if I’m making a WOW clone, why would the player expect anything except WOW plus better? I’ve got to be offering something different to change the value equation. That’s why I think what people need to be doing in our industry is start creating different tastes, different boutique experiences to basically differentiate themselves from WOW. We don’t have the same kind of budget and the same kind of resources to have the kind of polish WOW had when it came out. But I guarantee you our ship combat is much, much better than WOW. It’s sort of like comparing the latest James Bond movie, which is this gigantic, huge, elaborate polished production, versus a low-budget independent film like Evil Dead. You pay the same amount of money, but Evil Dead is fantastic. It may not have the same kind of music and lighting and scoring, but it’s different, and people react to that.