Interview with Fuel Industries' Brian Robbins

May 3, 2007

Brian Robbins is one of the most influential developers in online gaming today. He is co-founder and chair emeritus of the International Game Developers Association's (IGDA) Casual Games Special Interest Group (SIG), and has also served as Chair for the IGDA's Online Games SIG. An accomplished developer, Brian has been the lead programmer on over 70 published titles, with contributions to more than 100 games.

At OGDC Brian will present his session Appealing to the MMOB, in which he discusses experience building games and large player experiences around branded properties. Brian talks with us today about how branded games are different from and have more potential than mere "advergaming", and why developing advergames don't limit creativity.

Edward Van Duering: Thank you for your time, and allowing us to interview you, Brian. Tell us a bit about Fuel Industries and your role in the interactive entertainment industry.

Brian Robbins: Fuel Industries is a Branded Entertainment company. That means that our job is to create outstanding branded entertainment content, primarily in the interactive space. We have focused a lot on web-based advergames that would typically appear on our client's websites, although several of our projects have also been offline or stand-alone projects. Over the years we've seen a definite shift towards increasingly connected projects, be they simple interaction through leaderboards, all the way up to the MMO scale.

In your view of the game industry, what is the overall condition of advertising in games? And adver-gaming?

Advertising in games, where ads are placed as billboards into unrelated game content, will continue to grow in market-size, but I see that as a very limited market. There are too many games where it's just too difficult to create a proper context for advertising without breaking the game itself. It's a very easy fit for something like Madden or a racing game, but it would be a lot more difficult to make realistic in World of Warcraft.

Advergaming, where the entire game experience is built around the brand, is something that is going to continue to grow until we reach a point where people stop calling it advergaming at all. I believe it will eventually just become an alternative funding model. Instead of having to convince a publisher to fund the development of a title, a developer will work with the brand to create a product that is a credible game experience, and stays true to the overall brand positioning. The brand will then provide the capital needed to develop the title.

Present condition of the advertising industry in games aside, you envision a future where a corporate-financed MMO game is a very real possibility. How would such a product fundamentally differ from current generation MMO games?

This is actually happening now with regularity. There are multiple examples of this already on a slightly smaller but still very real scale. Experiences like Coke Studios and Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom are great examples of MMO type worlds that were funded entirely by the brand. To a lesser extent I think you can make a case that even Toontown Online fits this model as it extends the Disney brand, and was fully-funded by Disney.

Ideally to the player, there is little to no difference in the final product. The goal of all games is still to entertain consumers, and that doesn't change when it's a branded title.

Perhaps one of the biggest differences that we could see is that it's very possible that branded-MMO's could be completely free to play. The current-gen MMO has the goal of generating revenue for the developer and publisher, but for some branded-MMO's the goal is simply to help spread recognition and experience with the brand. The funding could come out of the marketing budget, and there won't necessarily need to drive revenue directly from the game.

Do you expect there would be player backlash against a game that is built from the foundation up with corporate advertising and branding? Is it possible to build a branded game that encourages player loyalty?

It is absolutely possible to build player loyalty. In fact a branded game may have more opportunity to build loyalty than other types of MMO's. Not only do you have the ability to create the same experiences as any other MMO, but you can also push the game offline in a way that would be extremely difficult to do with other games. Again, taking Coke Studios as an example, you can sometimes redeem codes found on-pack for in-game items. This kind of cross-promotion benefits both the brand by helping to drive more sales, as well as the game, by pushing more people into the Coke branded environment.

The only time you are going to get player backlash is when a brand tries to hide its involvement in the development process. There have been a few examples of this over the years, and in every case where the brand has been found out, it's resulted in a very negative reaction from the targeted audience. When brands are upfront about what they are doing you simply don't see this type of reaction.

Do you feel corporate branded games would encourage or stifle creativity from their development teams?

This will really depend on the team. Working closely with a brand can be very difficult if you aren't prepared for it. The key is making sure that you understand the goals of what they are trying to get out of the project, and work to achieve those goals. A team that has their own vision for how everything should work, and isn't willing to listen to outside input will have a rough time working on this type of project.

In a branded MMO game, would access to revenue stop at in-game advertising, or do you imagine there would be other ways to monetize such games?

Again this will depend on what the goals are for the game. If the brand is just looking at this as a marketing tool, then the revenue from the game comes from the cost of development and continued maintenance with no revenue coming from the players. However that doesn't have to be the case. There is absolutely room for a branded MMO to charge players either for access, or for in-game content, or both. Any revenue model that applies to other MMO's can apply to a branded title; it just needs to be extremely well thought through before presenting it to the players.

Short of financing an MMO game from the ground up and apart from ad placements in-game advertisers currently offer, what other potential options are there for marketers to consider in the near future?

If you're willing to look outside the MMO space, the sky is really the limit. Consumers are interested in finding fun content. If that comes from a brand, that's fine as long as it's a genuinely entertaining thing, and they aren't being "tricked" into using it.

Even within the MMO-space there is a huge amount of room for titles that are smaller than World of Warcraft. A web-based MMO that's targeting just a couple thousand players doesn't need to have a massive development budget.

I think it would also be interesting to see groups of brands that share the same ideals, but create different products working together to create an experience. By sharing the costs between companies, no single brand would have to bear the full cost, and the final experience has the potential to be much greater than what any of them could do on their own.

At the Online Game Development Conference, what message do you expect to communicate with game developers, coders and programmers (who are at least stereotypically at odds with marketers to begin with) to take away from your session?

They key point is that just because a game is branded, doesn't mean that anyone had to sell out, or that it needs to compromise the game in any way. In a lot of ways creating branded content can be extremely rewarding and give you an opportunity to take something in a direction that makes sense, but might not have been originally thought of by the brand. Further, since there is the chance the final product won't be revenue driven, you don't always have to bring every feature back to how much money it will generate. This allows you to create features that may be a lot of fun, but aren't big enough, or perhaps target an audience segment that generally won't pay for content.

Thank you for taking the time today, and I look forward to speaking at OGDC.

Free Newsletter

Join the OGDC update list and receive our free weekly newsletter with all the latest conference and online games industry news.

Premier Sponsors