Funcom's SweetRobot

From a business perspective it makes a lot of sense to make lots of bets, have lots of irons in the fire, not put all your eggs in one basket. You can pick and choose the phrase you like. The other thing about this market is the potential upside is very high; the size of bet you need to make in order to have a large potential upside can be quite low in the younger-audience space. We don't have to make $20m, $30m bets.

We're not targeting the six year-old directly; really the money-holder in this situation is the parent. And in the same way a parent would subscribe to a monthly comic-book for their child, we can quite easily see parents subscribing to casual or younger-audience MMOs.

Also the business model isn't necessarily set - this is an experiment for Funcom. We will be looking into alternatives like micro-transactions or pre-paid cards. If you look in places like the US and at Walmart they have pre-paid cards on the checkout. Certainly within the US market getting parents to buy this or getting them to buy in-game benefits for their child is becoming easier. We feel that Europe will be going the same way as well.

It's something we've been very mindful of. There is an age, and we don't know precisely what it is, but where cartoony is not cool any more because everything has to be blood and gore. And then, oddly enough, you get over the age of twenty-one and [cartoony] is OK again. There is a danger-zone where cartoony is not acceptable but we're OK up to twelve. And this is technology that will allow us to make other MMOs that don't necessarily have to have a young style. That's important. We are actually developing a new engine for this game that we can use for other projects.

For a large project, a lot of work over the development period is spent making tools and technology. The production of this project specifically has been relatively small.

But on the flip side we're also not selling: we're not charging for it up-front. This is a free-to-play game. We're basically offering a large portion of the game - and again this depends on the business model and how we gate access to the non-free content - for free. Judging the cost of a free thing... Obviously then it's up to the child and parent whether they want to become a premium subscriber, which would give them access to more pets and restricted areas and other benefits in the game.

Yeah, exactly. We're looking at using these free-to-play games to prototype mechanics that we believe will work in large-scale MMOs but we're not completely confident about risking in one. So we'll experiment with different character advancement and reasons to return to the game. These sorts of things we can, in the future, be trying out relatively quickly and cheaply. And that innovation if successful can filter into large-scale MMOs. That means we can be more risky and more innovative in our large-scale MMOs because we'll have the certainty that what we're trying works.

I couldn't possibly say!