Interviews// Interview With NCSoft Europe Marketing Manager, Veronique Lallier

SPOnG: Moving on to talk about your competition in the MMO space – World of Warcraft mainly – do you view Blizzard as a competitor?

Veronique Lallier: WoW has done a fantastic job at making people aware of what online gaming is all about, so it opens doors to the titles that we do. We are the only worldwide publisher to concentrate purely on the online gaming space. And we offer a whole range of different experiences within this – medieval fantasy, super hero gaming, soon to be offering a sci fi experience…


SPOnG: What’s that?

Veronique Lallier: Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa! You know Richard of course. He’s generally considered to be the father of MMO gaming, having created Ultima Online. This new game should hit the shelves sometime later this year and should really appeal to sci-fi fans. Richard is basically the man who ‘wrote the rulebook’ on how these games are supposed to play. He is of the opinion that nothing has really changed that much over the last ten years, since the first Ultima Online.

Tabula Rasa is going to really challenge how MMO games are played – in terms of the combat, and the feeling that you are the champion of a story, at the centre of a dynamic world … and not just an avatar amongst hundreds of other avatars.


SPOnG: How are you going to feel that you are centre of the story?

Veronique Lallier: Well, you’ll have to wait and play it to see and understand that!


SPOnG: In terms of the other big MMO titles that are out there at the moment, what are the major titles you consider as competition?

Veronique Lallier: Well most of our competitors have big licenses, in terms of games like Warhammer or Age of Conan for example, whereas we are quite different. You can easily see from looking at our range of titles that we produce original IP (intellectual property) based around new settings and particular themes – whether that be fantasy, sci-fi, super heroes or whatever.

Another thing is that we offer various different subscription or payment models to the consumer. With Guild Wars, for example, it’s a unique online RPG game as it doesn’t have monthly fees. You buy the boxed game – for £19.99 for Guild Wars Prophesies – and that is all you pay.


SPOnG: So how can you make money on that?

Veronique Lallier: Our technology that we use in the game is amazing and actually, it doesn’t cost as much as you think. We have a business model that makes it work.


SPOnG: What’s the plan for the future of Guild Wars?

Veronique Lallier: Well, we’re going to release the first expansion pack later in the year, Guild Wars: Eye of the North, which is compatible with any previous standalone version of Guild Wars. And also ArenaNet is working on Guild Wars 2, which should go into beta around about the end of 2008 or early 2009.


SPOnG: Are there any plans for future intellectual properties based on the contemporary world, as opposed to fantasy worlds?

Veronique Lallier: You mean like Second Life?


SPOnG: No, not really, something that is set in the contemporary world and is story and character driven?

Veronique Lallier: Well there is certainly a lot of talk in the market about this type of thing. The online gaming arena is growing each year. People realise that online play is the way forward.


SPOnG: So do you think single player gaming will be phased out in time? To make a random future prediction, will everybody be playing online games in ten years time?

Veronique Lallier: Oh no! I won’t say that! I mean, I quite like to sometimes play offline. It’s sometimes nice to be alone, you know. To me, most of the time, it’s more appealing to play online as I find it a more sociable experience. But I think generally human beings, people, sometimes just like to be alone. So solo or offline gaming will of course be around for ever.


SPOnG: One of the last things I wanted to talk about was how you go about marketing MMOs. It’s very different to how it’s done with single-player games.

Veronique Lallier: Yes, there’s a lot of word of mouth, of course. It’s a community based game experience. Perhaps the biggest difference, in terms of marketing support, is that we have to continue to promote our games every time there is a new update or an addition to the experience. So it is a much longer timescale than a traditional single-player game, where all the marketing is focussed around the launch of the game. And, perhaps, again at a later date, when it becomes a budget game.

So Guild Wars today, for example, even though it was released over two years ago – it’s a brand new game today, because there are so many updates happening every week. So we continuously have to communicate to our community about this and continuously have to promote the game. It’s actually really hard for our distribution network to sometimes understand that.


SPOnG: So it’s that traditional distribution and retailer mindset that you have difficulty with?

Veronique Lallier: Yes, though people are gradually understanding how the model works. Particularly with the ongoing success of games such as Guild Wars. They understand that these games will stay on shelf for far longer than has traditionally been the case. And of course, we have our marketing team, our PR team, our community team who are on the forums constantly talking to the players, our customer services team who are in there to help players 24-7. It’s a huge undertaking!


SPOnG: You seem to appeal well to the casual market (with City of Heroes) and the hardcore (with Lineage). How do you try to appeal to and target those total newbies who might have never even played an MMO?

Veronique Lallier: Well we run specific mainstream media campaigns, for example, on the Sci Fi Channel, in the case of City of Heroes. It’s also a matter of doing ‘normal’ mainstream PR outside of the specialist PC gaming press – so we ensure that we get plenty of coverage in the national press and in lifestyle magazines.


SPOnG: Cool, thanks for your time Veronique.

Veronique Lallier: No problems, thanks.