We chat with Marty Stratton, Executive Producer at id Software about his latest project, Quake Live.
UGO: First question, and it comes from a Mac user, when can I play Quake Live on a Mac?
Marty Stratton: Mac support is something we're working. We probably should have it up on a Mac within a month or so. I'm a Mac guy too, and I can't stand that I can't play it on a Mac. The Mac poses some different challenges, but we should get those worked outs soon.
Full interview after the jump...
UGO: Over at SK Gaming you mentioned in a video that you hoped 4 million users registered, and 2 million would play on a monthly basis. What's your personal metric for Quake Live's success. Is it ad revenue, a dedicated community or a certain number of players?
MS: There are several different ways to look at that. I think if we can continue to keep a team on it, dedicated to it, creating new content for it, running events, keeping a fresh site going, and we're making money on the ad revenue side, I think that's the first step from a business perspective. I think a measure of success is how far we can broaden our audience. It sounds like I threw out some numbers at one point, I'm not sure if that's the measure of success. Probably not. Those are probably pretty high. That's a lot of people.
Someone out there looking to play Peggle, I don't think we're necessarily going to get them. We might if they have some level of more serious gaming experience. If you're looking for a click the stones puzzle game, it isn't Quake Live. If you're looking for a premium title for free in a browser, one you can play casually and quickly once in awhile, and you have some experience with first-person shooters or action gaming, then yeah, we should be able to get those people. As far as a number, I don't know what I'd put that at. If we're attracting those people and having them stick with us then that will also be a measure of success.
UGO: The easy to play, in-browser format for Quake Live caters to a more casual player. Why did you choose Quake 3: Arena for id's first big attempt at cornering this market?
MS: Quake 3's a fairly easy game to understand the mechanics of. It's fast action combat. It's a quick fix. You can jump in and play Quake and pop back out. It's friendly for statistics and friends. There's always been a great community around the game that we felt we could tap into and really make being a part of that community much easier than we've ever done before.
With Quake Live there's a friends list and the awareness as far as when a friends comes online. We've added a whole system of alerts to pop up. When a friend joins a game you get an alert. When they win an award you get an alert. We have an achievement system.
It just felt like we could take a game that was pretty ahead of its time from a rendering perspective, from a graphics perspective, give it a bit of a face lift, go through and retool a lot of the arenas, introduce some training mechanics to the beginning of it, allow for practice play against bots and institute a skill matching system. We could combine these features to make it a bit more accessible, because when [Quake] does latch on to somebody, it's tough to put down.
UGO: Were the lightning gun and railgun nerfed to make Quake Live a more casual FPS?
MS: I wouldn't say it was to make it a more casual FPS. Those were changes to balance [the game]. To make it so the railgun wasn't such a dominant weapon.
UGO: Technically, there are no mod capabilities, but you will be approving certain maps that are user-created. What are your plans for this user-generated content?
MS: Our focus right now is getting the game launched and building a community around it. We've actually developed 4 or 5 new Quake Live arenas. Our plan is to, at some point in the near future, to give an SDK and some guidelines to map makers. Either people who've made pre-existing popular Quake 3 maps or people who want to make new stuff. Get some guidelines in their hands for incorporating the ads, and some quality guidelines, and basically run a map contest, so people are submitting content. We already look at what maps out there are popular. A lot of changes made to competitive maps have been made to the same maps inQuake Live.
Then we may try to build some credit for those guys making that content on the site. Whether that's through statistics on the community page that talks about which maps are the most played so those authors are given props.
UGO: On that note, user-generated content's huge right now, but when does UGC go beyond props. These people are making maps for you and then you profit off them with ads. Can they expect a cut?
MS: Potentially. One, we need to find out if we're going to even make money off it. The whole thing's an experiment for us. Month one we've got the cost to run all the game servers, we're running the entire back end. It's all advertising revenue based as far as what we make. There's no profit so far. It all depends on how many players we get, what advertising we get. I think what we need to know on our side, before we implement that stuff, is how is our business model working. Is it something that can support either a props award type thing or can it support possible financial payments to content providers? I'm not sure. I think the Internet's full of examples making sites off user-generated content. It's not crazy to think about, but it's also not crazy to think about some type of prizing. It'd be tough from an accounting perspective. I could see us doing some type of prize payment or cash payment to winners from some type of contest. They get a prize payment and we get to use their map.
