So, the teams have just seen Everquest Next for the first time. How did that go down?
You know, I was really nervous about that. We showed it to them on Monday, and I couldn't sleep on Sunday night because I was scared. We've thrown out two previous designs of the game to go with something pretty crazy and. well, it's awesome. When the team saw it I could barely breath when they were watching it. But when I'd finished they were clapping and cheering - and these guys are gamers, so they're not afraid to call bullshit when they see us make a mistake. It's happened before. We've made mistakes, and the guys internally will call us on it every time. But they loved this, and we really felt vindicated that the way we're going with Everquest Next is the right way. I feel good about it. We're not trying to make WOW2 or Everquest 2.5 - we're making something that we think will define the next generation of MMOs.
The genre Everquest has occupied is pretty full now, so it must be very difficult to come up with something genuinely new.
Well, that's the trouble. Everybody has been making the same game since Everquest, really. If you look back, Ultima Online was out before us and really, all the current crop of MMOs are a lot like Everquest - they're in that style. They're great because the quality level has really improved, but nobody has really changed the game. Now, you saw it with League of Legends - Riot took DOTA and made it mainstream, so now everyone is playing that. You saw the same kind of thing in the Online RPG space. So, the previous designs we had for the next Everquest were cookie-cutter, they were 'me too'. We had some great, innovative things in there and they'd have been great games in themselves, but they wouldn't have been enough to keep an audience. We've had people playing Everquest for 13 years and we kept that in our mind as the main goal when making Everquest Next.
How are you feeling about your decision to pursue free-to-play as aggressively as you have done?
We definitely made the right call, and we like what we're doing. I think free-to-play is pure for one simple reason: people can vote right away. If they don't like your game they can just walk away because they didn't pay anything for it - it's the most democratic way to make games. And if they don't want to pay for it now, our hope is that they pay for it later, but they don't have to. So it makes me feel good that the games we make are being judged on their merit, not just how well we can market them or force them to play and pay like Zynga tried. It's pure and I love that.