OpenFeint Founder Tells All About His New iPad Exclusive Game, Fates Forever

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CoM: So what about multiplayer? Obviously you want to play with other people.

Jason Citron: Yeah, for sure. Like I said, we’re reinterpreting League of Legends, so there is only multiplayer, there’s no single player. The map is loosely based on the Twisted Treeline, if you’ve played that that map from League.

The gist of it is that it’s a three vs three game, two teams, real-time synchronous. It’s a two-lane map, and we’ve tweaked the health value and the damage and the balance of the game, a session time is about half as long as a PC game. So an average game takes about fifteen minutes to play through as opposed to thirty minutes.

CoM: So when are you guys looking at releasing? Are you guys just doing iOS or are you doing Android as well?

Jason Citron: Well, the game is built in Unity, so it supports everything. We’re just starting with iOS, though. We want the game experience to be really polished and feel good. The thing with Unity is, your code can port to all different platforms, but the (differing) GPU and CPU performances on different devices can cause the feel of the game to be quite different, so we’re just focusing on the four main iOS tablets–iPad 2, 3, 4, and mini–and just making it feel incredible on those devices. We’ll tackle the rest of the tablet market after that. Oh, and it runs at Retina resolution on the Retina iPads; we worked really hard to do that.

CoM: How long have you guys been putting this together?

Jason Citron: Since about November. Before that, we had experimented with a couple different concepts, and we settled on this one. So we’ve been working on it about six months? Seven months? It’ll be coming out this summer. We’re very much in the mode where it’s ready when it’s ready. But almost ready? It started talking about it now.

So one of the things I wanted to make sure we talked about was monetization. Because I think monetization for a game for core gamers is a sticking point, and I think it’s very different for monetization for casual games. The way that we approached the monetization is what I call ‘respectful free to play’ mechanics. And what I mean by that is two very specific things. Almost like core values, if you will.

One, the games should never force me to stop playing. If you sit down, and you want to play for six hours, that should be possible without spending that money. The second core value is that you should only be able to pay for options, not for power. So you should never feel like that because someone else spent money, that you can’t win.

CoM: Let me just jump in real quick and ask, why free to play in the first place? Why not just charge a premium price? Core gamers are willing to pay tons of money per game, historically.

Jason Citron: That’s a very good question. The short answer is that building a free to play game has less risk on the downside if you do it correctly. Like, the world is free to play. Have you ever bought a shirt without trying it on? Or at least touching it? Or when you buy an Apple product, and you go in the store, the whole store is free to play. You can stand around and use an iPad for as long as you want until you decide to buy one. It’s a very natural mode of interaction for human beings when they’re interested in purchasing products, to be able to touch see and feel their products before they buy it.

I think that’s why free to play just works so well just generally as a trend. That’s one thing. The second thing is that because this is a real-time multiplayer game where community is so important. A side effect of making it free to play, then, is that there will be a lot of people who play the game that will never spend money but play the game, and provide entertainment for people who do spend money, effectively.

CoM: So it builds your community.

Jason Citron: Yeah, exactly. It builds a community out of it. And if we made the game pay to play, we’d probably have ten times less the number of people playing. Maybe we’d make a little more money, maybe…I just don’t know. My hunch is we would make less money and people would have less fun because the community would be smaller.

What’s really nice about free to play is this idea that people are allowed to pay whatever they think something is worth. So the whale, as we call them, because I guess they’re big, are people who really find a lot of value in the game experience and spend a lot of money, but then there’s a curve.

So people can spend whatever they want. When you have a subscription business model, you have a bunch of people who are paying too little, and you have a bunch of people who pay too much. It’s the same as if everyone paid just the right amount, based on the value they percieve in the game.

I think that the (negative) perspective that people have on free to play comes from companies just abusing it. They don’t understand what it’s there for and why people engage in it. I really want to differentiate this game and my company by trying to be respectful..

CoM: You still have to offer something of value. Funny hats only go so far.

Jason Citron: Exactly. The reason why Apple makes so much money is, you walk into the store and you touch their phones and you’re like WOW THIS IS AWESOME. If their phones were shitty, people wouldn’t spend their money on them.

Our thanks to Jason Citron for taking the time to chat with us about his upcoming game, Fates Forever, due to release sometime this summer on iPad.

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