Funcom's SweetRobot

It's a competitive space, it really is. We know this and we're fully aware of this. The high-end MMO space is also pretty competitive too! We're trying to do things we've never seen before.

We're releasing this as a limited beta this month. If it was a large-scale MMO we'd be having a closed beta at this point, but really there's not much point inviting eight-year-olds to a closed beta. It just doesn't work. What we're trying to do at the moment is really a large-scale focus-group and see what works and what doesn't work.

No, far from it. This is not a direct threat to the large-scale MMOs. It's all coming from the same pot of investment, but it's such a small part of it. On a positive note what I hope they'll take away from it are those bits we talked about before: future innovation, learnings from the small-scale that we can pass on to the large-scale. And potentially something for their kids to play so they can have more time to raid, ha ha.

This is one of them. There's a lot of potential technology out there that's quite interesting for the small-scale MMOs. A lot of what Funcom has been doing is exploring the different technical routes. This is a very emerging market, both in business model, target audience, distribution technique, so we've been doing a lot of research and development.

From a development team's perspective we can be a lot more agile, quicker to respond. And we have to rely on focus-testing. There's been lots of cases where we've seen something in focus-testing, the implementation of a feature, that we would have never thought about because it's so out of the box. An example of that is dragging a piece of armour from your inventory onto your character in the world to equip it. I've not really seen that before, but it was something kids did in a focus group, and it's probably how it should work!

It's PC, Mac and Linux. The current technology for PVM is not console... As far as the the casual space is concerned, the main portals we see for this are web portals. Until we see people using their consoles as a regular web-browsing platform, we don't see the upside of supporting those consoles.

Well we don't really launch casual games like that, with two years of hype and a massive marketing budget. We'll put it out on some portals and see how it builds and how it develops. The main reason for this is it's a business driver. Until we see a sensible conversion of free players to paying players, there's really no reason to have it hitting millions of people. What you won't see from PVM is us announcing that millions of people are playing this game. If millions are playing but no one is paying then it is not a success for Funcom. We'd much rather take a slow and steady approach and get the conversion-rate and response right.

There are all sorts of numbers floating around. If you have an older audience you can have a very low conversion rate, because a very small percentage pay a lot of money. If you're doing a monthly-subscription route you need a greater percentage paying. But then you need to consider how long they subscribe for.

Ha ha. It actually keeps me awake at night! [What, a bear? - Ed]