EQII's New Producer Brings 20 Years Experience

Dave:  It's just basically choosing how you spend your money, whether or not it's entertainment that's of value to you.  'Cause it's completely optional; none of this stuff is required, if you don't want to pay for it you don't have to.  If you want to buy a really cool costume because you think it's neat and it's worth the cash to you, then go ahead!  But it's not something you have to have.  And if you want to play the game, you want to get through the first 40 levels faster and you want to buy some experience potions to do that, go ahead!  It's already pretty easy to get through it but it's your game.  You just have to as an individual customer decide whether or not it's worth money to you or not, and if it's not, no big thing.  There's still a tremendously huge, very entertaining game out there already, this is just kind of on the side. 

Will there be more of that?  Probably.  But am I committed to that?  No, not necessarily, because we've got a lot of other fish to fry.  Of course we'd always like to see more and more users into the game, so maybe there's some analysis we need to do on the beginning of the game to decide if there's ways to get people entertained faster.  Or maybe the learning curve is too serious.  Once you get into this game, I think you'd agree, there's just a tremendous amount of stuff in it, things that don't exist in other MMOs.  So it's not a matter of making the game unique and different, it's just a matter of getting new people that have never played a game like this before into the game and getting them to stick. 

One of the side things that I found really interesting when I was working at Gaia was when we polled the users we we had like 10 million go through our open Beta in the first year.  When we polled our users we found that 90% of those people had never played an MMO before and most of them had never played a computer game before!  So there's this tremendous rush of new users who have never played these kind of games before, and they don't know what they're missing.  So if those kinds of people can get into these games the communities could become gigantic.  Which would be good for everybody. 

ZAM:  I could talk to you about this stuff for hours!

Dave:  Yeah, I study this stuff for a living, so it's fun to talk about, and I don't know exactly how that's going to translate into EverQuest II yet because like I think I mentioned already I'm facing a gigantic learning curve here.  So it's going to be a while before I start trying to make any waves.  Luckily the team is real good and we've got a good plan already.  But eventually, yeah, it would be really fun to shake things up so that more and more of the people out there can find out that this is a really great product.

ZAM:  I don't know how much of what's been going on recently you've had a chance to review.  You've been there three whole days? 

Dave: (laughs) Yeah, since last Thursday.