By Brian Hook
(April 2003)
For our inaugural IGDA Independent Game Development SIG interview, we're going
as far afield as possible -- an independent commercial text MUD developer,
Matt Mihaly!
Matt Mihaly is the founder of Achaea LLC, an independent game company specializing in text-based commercial multiplayer online persistent worlds. Founded in 1996, Achaea LLC started with one employee, Matt, and opened its first game, inconveniently called 'Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands' in 1997. Subsequently the company has opened two other games: Aetolia, the Midnight Age, in 2001, and Imperian in 2003.
What's possibly most interesting about Achaea LLC's games to other developers is the business model all its games use. While access is completely free (i.e. no subscription fee), players can purchase 'credits' which can then be used in-game to buy skill upgrades, magical artifacts, housing, pets, custom work, and so on. Further, since credits can be traded for in-game gold, there's a thriving economy that overlaps both the virtual world and real world economies.
Q: So first thing's first -- how did you get started in the game industry? Was becoming an independent game developer a conscious choice?
I'm not sure I'd call it a conscious choice, no. I'd been very into text muds as a player since 1991 or so and after having struck up a friendship with the owner of the commercial text MUD 'Avalon' I decided to start my own. I didn't think to myself, "I'm going to be an indie game developer now." particularly as I wasn't a game developer at all. I got my degree in political science in 1994 and became a stockbroker afterwards. I just thought I could do better than my friend was doing, so I started my own thing.
Q: How long did it take from "I have an idea to do this game" to "launch" to "wow, I can make my living doing this!"?
I always knew I could, in theory, make a living doing this. I had always intended to, in fact. It's just a darn good thing I didn't know how much work it was going to be, because I was way too lazy back then to have started had I known. Glad I did now, of course.
It took me about 2 years from concept to "launch." It should not have taken anything like that long, but I didn't work at it very industriously in those days. Nothing even approaching full-time, particularly at first. We were not ready to launch when we did either, but I couldn't stand working without players anymore. Heh, I remember that we didn't yet have any way to cure paralysis - a player got his character paralyzed and had to wait until an admin came on to cure him. Poor guy.
Still, even though I knew I could make a living doing it (I started it because I had a friend making a good living doing it) it wasn't until we had our first auction and netted $5000 or so in a couple hours of selling virtual items that I thought, "Holy sh*t!" That was quite an eye-opener.
Q: How did you support yourself while working on it until launch?
I gathered some people from a previous game I had played who were willing to invest enough to let me scrape by. I think I took about 40k in investment in total.
Q: What is the structure of your company, in terms of personnel, work place habits, work flow, etc.?
Right now we have 5 full-timers. There's a producer for each game, a CTO (Christopher Kohnert) who splits his time between working on Achaea-the-game and working on backend technology like our Rapture engine, and a biz-dev guy exploring partnerships and larger projects for us. Then there's a whole slew of volunteers that help out with everything from web work to player relations.
Everybody works from home offices. None of us are even located in the same cities, and we're in three different countries! As for tools and processes, we actually use our game worlds as our meeting and working places. We've got a small bit in each world set aside for us to work in. It's all fairly informal.
Having an office might be nice, but on the other hand offices can be just as potentially distracting in their own way as home offices can be. As we grow there's little doubt that we're going to need an office at some point, though the producers of the individual text worlds would still be able to work from home. The development of the worlds they are responsible for is completely up to them (to a point. No turning it into a child porn -oriented world.) and not even reviewed by anyone higher up than them, so they don't take up much mental bandwidth for me.
Q: In the past you've mentioned that you're not really a part of the mainstream game community. You don't keep up with the various news sites and don't really interact with other game developers all that much. Would you characterize as something you chose or just happenstance? Do you think this helps or hinders your ability?
Yeah, I don't really feel like I am part of the mainstream game community. I think we've forced at least parts of it to take us seriously as there's no arguing with success, but the fact that we don't do the traditional publisher/developer relationship does marginalize us in many people's eyes. Nothing unique there though. I'm sure just about every indie out there gets tired of being asked "Who's your publisher?"
Originally our attitude was happenstance. I just wanted to make muds and had no conception of being part of any larger industry. I think our attitude has been helpful to this point and will likely continue to be helpful. At the same time you never know when you're going to want to do something larger and past a certain point you either need a publisher or you need access to willing VCs/angels and a distribution channel.
Q: You seem to be doing well commercially, do you have aspirations of expansion or are you content doing what you're doing? Do you ever worry that you're stagnating or that you'll hit the wall when it comes to growth?
Oh, we're always looking to expand. We opened our third mud on April 5th and it's doing incredibly well. In fact, it's done more revenue in the first 10 days than we thought it'd do in the first month. I definitely don't worry we're stagnating at this point. My main worry is trying to balance the impetus towards more and more growth with the risk that expanding too quickly will cause the business growth to outpace our ability to effectively manage it.
Q: What was the impetus for expansion? Did you find that your existing players wanted a new experience that Achaea couldn't provide? What are the primary differentiators between Achaea, Aetolia and Imperian?
Well, the impetus for expansion as a company comes from a simple, basic desire to have more: more players, more revenue, more jobs for people.
We opened Aetolia because any two games that are different will appeal to a slightly different audience, thus expanding our total potential audience. Another big reason has to do with the fundamental design of Achaea. It wasn't ever designed to have as many players as it has and it wasn't designed to grow as quickly as we'd like. It's also not a matter of just tweaking a few knobs. Opening more games provides more "space" for the players. (Not in the physical space sense. It's not really a content issue.)
Q: How long does it take you then to launch a new expansion? Do you foresee more expansions in the future or will you be moving onto new and different styles of projects?
We advertised for someone to run Imperian in November, found the right guy (one of our existing high-level volunteers, in fact) in early December, and he started work January 1st. We opened it April 5th.
I'm not sure if we'll do more expansions in the future or not. We will certainly be doing more games in the future but the current proposal we're pondering would involve 9-12 months of development instead of 3. And we're also exploring the possibility of going for a much larger MMOG project... As a company though, we've not got much interest in single-player games. Virtual worlds are our thing and likely to remain so.
Q: How do you attract most of your new players? Marketing, word of mouth, advertising, etc.
Word of mouth is the #1 revenue generator for us. We do some simple advertising too on various major MUD sites. Word of mouth tends to work for us the best, I think, because text as a medium presents an immediately high barrier of entry to someone who hasn't played a text MUD before and to players who have played text MUDs before (usually based on stock codebases and thus very similar in gameplay) our presentation, conventions, and gameplay style is different enough to also present a high barrier to entry. So if you can get a knowledgeable friend to lead you through the early stages, it's much easier to get to a point where you're comfortable and having fun.
Q: What type of impact have the graphical MUDs such as Ultima Online and EverQuest had on you?
This isn't meant to sound glib, but what they mainly do is push us in whatever direction they AREN'T going. That's not a slam on their gameplay either. Obviously companies like EA and SOE are so much bigger than us as to make head-to-head competition with them suicide. So, what we do is ensure that we're providing gameplay they can't. We target a niche too small for them to bother filling.
Of course, at the same time they also provide a mark for serious, serious financial success and even replicating a middling percentage of their success would be great. We're always exploring the possibility of stepping up a level or two with a larger project.
Q: How would you classify your core gameplay compared to that of EQ and UO? When someone asks "Aren't you just a version of those without graphics?" what is your typical response?
Why yes, we are a version of those without graphics. Or more to the point, they are a version of text MUDs, but with graphics. That's what I'd tell someone who isn't particularly familiar with MUD-type games.
For someone who is, I'd tell them that the main difference is EverQuest is trying very hard to be a game with world-like elements whereas we're trying very hard to be a world with game-like elements. More specifically, EverQuest is mainly about the loot n' level mechanic. That's very popular with many people and they and other large games have it covered very well. The vast majority of popular free text MUDs are also based on the loot n' level mechanic. On the other hand, our games are fundamentally concerned with PvP and Group vs. Group behavior. Player-killing, politics, roleplaying, religious wars, etc. There is a level mechanic but the loot mechanic is pretty weak. All you can get from mobs is gold, sometimes. They're not item-collecting games.
Q: Do you find cannibalization between EQ/UO and your own game, or at least some players that play both?
There are definitely some that play both. There are some who find a graphical MUD and never come back. There are also some who start off in the mainstream graphical games, find ours, and cancel their SW:G pre-orders. Just got an email from a guy last week telling me that, in fact.
In any case, we don't look at ourselves as competing with the big boys. Shadowbane is the first graphical game that puts any fear into me. It's still not going to appeal to most of our players but a lot of their design is very similar to ours. (I'm not hinting that they borrowed ours. I think a lot of it is just a logical response to wanting to enable certain types of gameplay.) More to the point though it shows that a large publisher is willing to put out a game that is fairly fundamentally different from the EverQuest model.
Q: How much of your time is spent developing your games versus developing your business?
Increasingly, my time is spent more on business. In fact, these days, it's probably 60:40 in favor of business. I'm probably going to have to replace myself as the producer of Achaea-the-game, in fact, and devote myself to the business side of things for awhile. Our business has grown quite organically and as a result lacks as many formally documented processes as we might like and has a lot of cobbled-together systems. I'd like to rectify that and turn us into a sleek, sexy, text MUD producing machine.
Q: Because of your unique business model, do you find dealing with customer support to be a bigger problem than you'd like? For example, customers that spend a lot of money that expect preferential in-game treatment, or just simply little things like "buyer's remorse"?
Actually, not really, no. We're very strict about preferential in-game treatment and our policy is simple: You don't get it. I suppose that's not entirely true actually. If you're not a customer and you're a newbie and you break one of our major rules willingly, you'll probably just be deleted. If you're a customer, you're just going to be punished. For non-newbies, there's no difference in how we treat you.
We really don't have a choice in those policies. Players will accept that other players can acquire relatively small incremental advantages but nothing would be more galling than watching that guy be held to a different standard than you by the admins.
We do get some buyers remorse, but nothing that is seriously expressed to us, in any case.
Q: What expenses have you incurred that you did not foresee? What expenses do you generally incur?
Well, whereas I didn't really know anything about game development, we haven't really incurred any expenses that weren't easily forseeable. The vast, vast majority are in the compensation category. Compensation is probably 80-85% of our costs. Other costs are advertising, co-location, hardware, and bandwidth costs, and the occasional legal and accountancy fees.
Q: How long is your typical development cycle? What is the longest development cycle you would consider undertaking?
Being an online-only company, we don't really have development cycles with a definite end. We haven't yet closed a game/world, so the cycle is more of a never-ending marathon so far.
Q: What impact does being an indie have on your designs and how you operate?
We have to focus on niche interests that either aren't shared by a large enough population to be worth SOE's time or are not worth SOE's time to provide. We can be a lot more efficient than they can about creating our type of games. Any project they do has certain fairly invariable tangible and intangible overheads that make projects our size undesirable for them.
On a more concrete level, the fact that we don't have a proper QA staff means that we design for very frequent updates (every few days) as opposed to updates every few months. We update on a daily basis rather than every few months in order to allow the players to live-test the updates in smaller chunks.
Q: If you had to identify one turning point that, in hindsight, was crucial to your success, what would it be? Conversely, what decisions do you regret making or not making?
Probably the adoption/invention of our business model and hiring our volunteer-turned-CTO, Chris Kohnert. The former is one main reason we're successful. We earn a lot more per player than subscription services do. The latter was a turning point as much in the abstract as the practical for us, or really, me. Chris brought a much more structured approach to development to the table than I had previously worked with.
The decisions I regret not making are basically all of opportunity cost type. I regret not being more aggressive earlier on. I mean, we opened our first game in 1997, but didn't open our second for 4 years.
Q: Do you have any other comments you'd like to make about the state of gaming?
I think that now is the single best time in the history of the world to be making games due to the possibilities for true independence from large publishers who will want to bend you over and make you take it in the wallet. I also think that people who complain there are no interesitng games being made are the same sort of people who only go see movies with $50 million+ budgets and complain there are no good movies anymore.
Thanks to Matt for taking the time to talk about his game and experiences in a frank and open manner.
Brian Hook entered the game industry as the fifth employee at 3Dfx Interactive, an influential semiconductor company devoted to the advancement of 3D graphics for gaming. At 3Dfx he was the original architect of Glide, the popular rendering API used by hundreds of games throughout the world. After leaving 3Dfx, Brian joined id software where he worked on hit titles such as Quake 2 and Quake 3. In 1999 Brian went to Verant/Sony On-line Entertainment, where he assumed the title of Senior Technology Architect, working on technology and development for next-generation massively multiplayer role-playing games. Brian is now the president of independent development studio Pyrogon, which he founded in 2000.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the IGDA.