The Agency

We have strict criteria that we put in place. As we push towards alpha, our goals are to have performance at the level that is has to be at. We're not going to be like, it's five frames per second now, but it'll be fine when we optimise three months before ship.

The big difference between the PC and the PS3 is that there's actually a certification group that we have to get our product through. The other nice part about the PS3 is that it doesn't have five different video cards in it. It's the pros and cons of a console. The pros are: there's a certification process. The cons are: there's a certification process.

It's always saddening. I want more people to release MMOs, it's the only way that we'll get better. They're so tough to make and they're so expensive that our examples to learn from are few and far between. So yeah, Marvel going away is a drag, it's always a drag, it's another game that I don't get to play and I don't get to somehow look vaguely similar to Wolverine and say "bub" a lot. And I'm really upset about that. But to say it's unexpected... any MMO is always in danger, because of the risk it takes to create them.

We want more people to push onto the console. Both Hal and I have always believed that the console is the gaming platform of the future or the present, really. It was great back in the day when people were like, there's no way you can do a shooter on a console, and then GoldenEye came out and they were like, alright, you can do one, and then years passed and Halo comes out and after that, I honestly think the shooter platform is now the console.

That's a question people are still trying to figure out, that's why there's a debate right now about whether it's a genre or a feature.

Some people define an MMO from the business model perspective.

However you decide to monetise it down the road, at its core it's a group of unrelated people interacting with a game that has persistent results that all of them can experience over time. That's it. So if you have Halo 3 and you have leaderboards, you have a massively multiplayer experience for everyone that plays it. That's pretty much it, in my head.

There's what we think MMOs are, and then what people perceive them as: a persistent rental model that became a genre. So if you tell people the true definition - if I said Halo is an MMO, I'd get laughed out of the room. Or 360...

But you have an avatar, it gets Achievements, you can play others, you earn points, you grind to get those points, you pay a subscription fee...

And my wife plays one of the bigger MMOs out there right now, which is Facebook. She's Scrabulousing non-stop. It's full of mini-games, its got persistence and guilds associated with it... That's where the barriers are dropping, honestly. Defined like that, Rock Band is an MMO too. We're on the edge, hopefully, of losing that MMO term, because it's not associative to what these games are really about.