At the India Gaming Summit 2007 in Mumbai, GameGuru.in (GG) had an opportunity to speak with David Christensen (DC), the vice-president of business development and international operations at Sony Online Entertainment (SOE). He spoke on several things including Ramayana 3392 AD MMO and The Agency. Here’s how the whole interview went:
GG: What can gamers expect from Ramayana 3392 AD MMO? Will it be a typical MMO?
DC: I don’t know if it will be a typical MMO but I think you will pretty well follow a free-to-play model, what we call a dealt at role model. It is redeveloping a game right now and says it has free rounds and will follow the same models. It is basically a game that is free to play and you will be able to get a finite amount of content that you can play for free and then there will be areas in what we call as dealt at row model, there will be areas where you can see and potentially know about, but you can’t play in those areas unless you pay something. It might be a subscription or a one time sum. I am not sure about that how that model will be setup in India. In addition to that, we also want to attack the virtual item sales model as well in India. We feel that we have to be sensitive with pricing and hopefully our local partners would help us to set the pricing, as in how many rupees it will cost for a shining purple pair of pants or whatever it maybe but we really feel that’s the right model to go after this market.
GG: Is the game being targeted towards Indian game?
DC: It is being targeted to mainly India. The hope is that it will be an interesting enough story. It is a comic book, the Ramayana 3392 AD and there are a couple of folks in our office who are western-born people myself included who are huge fans of it, we yell at Virgin all the time, where is the newest edition, we are hooked! I need the new story and so we think it is a story that can definitely translate and people worldwide will appreciate. But actually the focus is for India and if we are successful with the story in India, that’s what we want.
GG: What about the PS3 and PS2?
DC: We are building! Right now we are developing two MMOs that are building right now simultaneously for the PC and for the PS3. But as this title is focused on the Indian market, we will have to see how the PS3 market grows in India as well as how many of the consoles are connected as well.
GG: Just like the PlayStation Network…
DC: Exactly. It is actually Sony Online that was instrumental in building the PlayStation Network. Fortunately, we are close enough to understand how network works and be able to create games for PC and PS3 but until we know what sort of penetration is in India and I don’t think we will be able to make determination of whether or not we put the game for the PS3 as well.
GG: Would you let our readers know something more about The Agency?
DC: Oh yeah, sure. Well, The Agency is a sort of a spy game. James Bond, I assume you would be a player for James Bond, or 24, readers would know about 24, it is a popular TV series. What we are trying to do is, Sony’s history has a lot of games that we jokingly refer to as men-in-tights, a lot of mythical characters like EverQuest, EverQuest II. So what we tried to do with The Agency is taking our skill set, since we are into PC and MMOs, and takes it into a genre outside of the traditional sort of MMORPG genre. And so this game is actually very interesting because you can buy items, first person shooter elements with MMO elements and the part that I think cool is the way you dress is very important to the gameplay.
You maybe in a camouflage and running away from the bad guys and you make a quick change into a tuxedo and suddenly they won’t know it is you anymore, because now you are in the tuxedo, this can’t be the guy who we were chasing before. He was in a camouflage. And how you dress, how you appear, how you play the game as well. For example, if you need a tuxedo, you get into a party, if you go during a camouflage, you won’t be allowed to get into the party. Part of the strategy of the game would be making sure that you have the right gear and the right outfits to access all the different parts of the game. It is pretty exciting because it is really not a traditional MMO and it sort of borrows from other genres, so we are pretty excited and we think it has a potential to be a very fun game.
GG: Will the game have localized content?
DC: Right now, we are building the game for western market. We are just starting now to look for partners worldwide and once we are done, we will start to localize the content for local partners.
GG: Thanks Mr. Christensen, that’s about it.
DC: Cool. Thank you very much.