It's not everyday that we get to speak with one of the game industry's true visionaries. IndustryGamers had the pleasure of chatting with Will Wright back during GDC week, which of course is before it was revealed that he's signed on with The Science Channel. Wright could not talk about much detail concerning what's going on at his studio, Stupid Fun Club, but we were able to pick his giant brain about the impact of The Sims franchise, the iPhone and iPad, Wii and upcoming motion controls like Natal, and much more. Our entire Q&A is below. Enjoy!
IndustryGamers: What can you say about what’s going on now at Stupid Fun Club? What’s the latest progress update that you’re allowed to talk about?
Will Wright: Well, I mean, I can say we’re working on several projects. It’s just that none of them have been announced. We’re working with external partners on these projects, and so in terms of us giving visibility into them, that’s something that we’d have to decide with our partners on a project by project basis, but some of these projects are covering a lot of different areas in the toy and game industry, including games, but not just games.
IG: Yeah, I remember, back in October, there was an interview you did, where you said that there were 3 projects and how one of them was definitely in the realm of toys and how a couple others were video game related or game related. Has that changed at all or can you give any an update on that?
WW: No, I mean, we’re still working on those projects, but again I can’t really talk about it.
IG: Well, generally speaking, one thing I find interesting is that you talk a little bit about blurring the lines between games and toys and sort of using the web as kind of a connective tissue, I guess sort of similar to what Jordan Weisman has been doing with his projects. Could you give me your take on how it is that the toy industry and the game industry will come together for you?
WW: Well, I think that a lot of the video game industry came in and took a big chunk of what used to be known as the toy market and kids are getting very comfortable with play experiences and virtual online environments, or even offline. But for kids, when it comes to play, they don’t make a big distinction between playing with a physical toy and playing with a virtual environment; and so I think the fact that these things want to blend and mix…in the same way that people are investing more and more time in their Facebook stuff and friends and profiles, but it intersects the real world and so they see a very smooth blending between the virtual and the real and they’re in some sense self supportive; they’re not exclusive of each other. I think a lot of parents only see their kids playing with video games, like “Oh, why don’t you play with your toys instead of playing with video games?” For them, they’re very different experiences. They put a wall up between them.
But you look at younger people, at adults having kids, and I think they grew up in an environment where the virtual…it was in bits instead of atoms but it was still very meaningful, and they had friends online and online communities and they had real communities and real friends and real experiences. So I think we have a generation growing up that doesn’t make a huge distinction between those two and I think it’s pretty natural that the play experiences that they consider, whether they’re toys or games, consist of a blending of the two. And I see games going the other way in a sense; I see games involving more and more of the real world.
IG: I know you've said before that you feel video games as a medium have been focused on the 12-year-old boy, and that in order to mature, the industry needs to do more for all sorts of people of all ages and in all genres. What sort of progress do you think the industry has made in that regard, getting away from targeting the 12-year-old boy?
WW: Well, I think it’s been tremendously successful in that way because I think you see things like the Wii bringing in a much wider group of people, social experiences, bringing in more women, etc. I believe the demographics of people that are consuming these experiences, the rise of the social games element as a platform, that in some sense that’s what seems like the major destruction happening in this industry right now, is the fact that our demographics and platforms are broadening so dramatically and so fast. It’s something we’ve talked about for years, but now it’s happening in kind of this asymptotic slope.
IG: Speaking of social games, when you look at Facebook and companies like Zynga and Playfish, that sector’s absolutely exploded in the last year. Do you see this as something that maybe is going to be very long lasting in terms of its impact or is it almost fad-like to you? What in your mind will the impact of these social networks and social gaming ultimately be on the game industry?
WW: I think it’s going to be an established area of games; I don’t think it’s going to take over the world. People were saying that about online games before that and they were saying that about portable games before that. There’s always, when a new platform or a new niche emerges, there’s explosive growth in that niche; it’s like this void that’s being filled very rapidly, where there was a vacuum. So right now we’re at the steep of that curve. If you extrapolate that out, it looks like “Oh, that’s gonna be the whole market in 5 years,” but of course the curve never stays that steep. It’s kind of like the ecosystems are in this gigantic disruptive phase. Whole new niches are opening and other ones are shrinking and so we’re seeing some very steep deltas in different directions right now. I get the sense that in a year from now we’ll start seeing these things plateau towards what their natural equilibrium is.
IG: Are you personally a fan of social games? Do you spend some of your free time in FarmVille or Mafia Wars or any of those things?
WW: No, just enough to get a sense of them, but it’s not a big time thing for me.
IG: I’d like you to reflect a little bit on the legacy of The Sims. EA recently celebrated the 10th anniversary and 125 million sold, and obviously none of this would’ve existed without your creating it. What is your thinking about how far The Sims has come as a franchise and as a business and its impact on the games industry?
WW: That’s an example of one of those vacuums that opens up and all of a sudden something comes in and fills that vacuum. That was a vacuum that people didn’t really realize existed and The Sims has done a really good job of coming in and filling that vacuum. What’s still remarkable to me is that there hasn’t really been a viable competitor for it. Usually when a genre opens up you get several competitors coming in to fill that genre, but in some sense The Sims is a game of its own genre, which for various reasons nobody’s really copied. It’s almost like if you look at where The Sims was seven years ago, I think that’s where social gaming is now. It’s like this big vacuum that’s opening and it’s gonna fill with a certain type of play experience, a certain type of demographic. We’re gonna fill that, but then we’re just gonna have another genre. In a sense, we’re getting a more diverse set of play game opportunities out there to the consumer, which is part of games really starting to come into their own and have more diversity, that’s kind of representative of other entertainment media. If you look at movies or books, there’s a pretty wide selection of kinds of movies, TV shows, etc. I don’t think the video game industry had that degree of diversity, thematically or demographically, but we’re very rapidly approaching that.
IG: But what are you personally most proud of or happiest about in terms of the overall Sims franchise and how it has really changed the industry and brought in tons of new gamers? Is there a certain thing about the game or the process or an achievement? What are you most proud of?
WW: For me, it's always about the community built up around The Sims. So The Sims for the most part is an offline experience, but yet it encourages creativity, and that drives people to socialize, and they go and build these websites and they make stuff and they share them and they tell stories with it and all that and I’m still just really amazed at just how large that community is and how much interaction it actually fosters even though it’s not really an online game. It basically builds a lot of communities out there in different areas that are based upon sharing creativity rather than, like, shooting each other.
IG: There’s constantly talk about how video games are now on par with Hollywood as an industry, and you can point to things like Modern Warfare 2 and the massive launch that it had, setting off all sorts of entertainment records, and of course how The Sims franchise itself has done about $2.5 billion in revenue and that puts it in the class of some of the big blockbuster films. Do you feel that, legitimately, video games are now a real rival to (or on par with) Hollywood?
WW: I think in economic terms, roughly, yes. I’m not sure that that’s a very useful metric really. You can say “Is Hollywood on par with radio?” And back in the '30s that would’ve been economically a loss between the two, but when you look at where movies have come relative to radio since then, it obviously was really a bigger market and had lots more range of artistic expression than radio, so I think that it was, if anything, kind of a lower bar, if you were to make the comparison back then. And I tend to think games really have the potential to keep going and exceed…you know I think movies were really the primary medium of the last century, and interactive is probably gonna be the primary medium of this century, so the fact that we’re crossing movies right now, is interesting but I think it’s just kind of a marker toward what’s potentially going to be a much larger aspiration.
IG: What do you think, in your view, are the big hurdles right now for the industry to get to that next step? What are the major challenges that game makers are facing right now and have to overcome?
WW: Well, I think if you’d asked me five years ago I would’ve said, making a more diverse set of offerings for a larger group of people, but I think we’re very much in that phase right now, so I think we’re kind of on track with that. Also, I think we were a little too platform specific for a long period of time, but that’s changing as well. I think that we’re in this period of maximum disruption, but when we look at this 10 years from now, we’re gonna see that all these new niches opened up and that what we thought of the game industry is now a very small fraction of what we now consider the game industry. I think just right now we’re starting to see these niches open up and it's kind of hard to predict which are gonna be the major pulls in the future, the major directions as people consume these. I think we’re seeing games basically just diversify in every possible direction, very, very rapidly, like in the next few years.
IG: Yeah, I think one thing the industry really has to capitalize on is the whole shift to digital distribution; it's a challenge but it also presents a real opportunity. If you look at how the music industry handled that, they pretty much failed, as they were taken by surprise by all this and CD sales went way, way down as all the music was basically pirated online. So right now there’s a lot of talk about the transition to digital and you also have streaming services like OnLive and Gaikai from David Perry. How crucial will that transition be for the industry? What’s your take on the whole transition?
WW: Well, with the distribution issue… we kind of saw it coming. It was one of those things where we talked about it, talked about it, and now it’s finally happening. That happens frequently with these technologies – people talk about it for 7 years, and then it happens. But I think games are in some ways fundamentally different, in the fact that they’re malleable, that people can create their content, that they can build very strong interactive community experiences around them, and that means that having them over some kind of network, with ongoing digital assets and things being traded, really adds to the value of a game, much more than it does to, let's say, a movie or a book. So I think that’s gonna be the really critical factor, is the fact that games are a world that’s build for a network world, as opposed to something where we all sit in the same theatre and see the same movie. And they were built to be potentially more user centered, more collaborative…you’ve got user generated content, user communities, mods, all that stuff, and I think that is really gonna be the defining factor. This is something games have been doing for quite a while, but it’s really accelerating. But it’s something with games that's basically going to be their rocket assist relative to other media.
IG: The last time I spoke to you, you had mentioned how you were intrigued by the iPhone as a games platform and in the time since, of course, we’ve seen, I guess similar to the social games phenomenon, we’ve seen a real explosion of iPhone development. The App Store has just really grown in terms of the offerings that are available both free and paid, and games are the biggest category on the store right now. So I’m curious what your take is on that and also what impact you feel the iPad will have, if you think that’ll be just as huge as the iPhone?
WW: The iPhone and other platforms like that are very interesting because the scale of development is so much smaller than developing a title for PS3. So with roughly the same development effort you can knockout probably 20 or 30 iPhone apps for one PS3 game, and what that allows is to go for a lot more diversity; it’s kind of a shotgun approach…lots of little games, little apps, maybe things that don’t cost you very much as a player. I might spend 3 bucks for one of these and really enjoy it for 2 or 3 hours as opposed to spending 50 bucks and they basically have to give me 40 hours of enjoyment. I think that right now we’re kinda treating it as a small computer. I’m sitting there playing little versions of my games on a little screen, and we’re just at the point of people starting to look at this thing now as a real mobile platform and that being one of the benefits of the play experience. This is kind of moving toward the augmented reality stuff in a way. I think we’re going to have whole new experiences that are more immersing in the real world rather than in a virtual world, and that’s going to end up being the real niche that these platforms fill.
Now, the iPad is interesting because it’s not the kind of thing you’re going to carry in your pocket everywhere. On the other hand, I think that the web has become such a ubiquitous tool for so many different things, that I can imagine it - personally, I think I would use it in my own home just because I always want to grab something off the web and to have to walk into a different room to get to do that feels like an imposition. ...There’s basically a void between this little tiny screen on my iPhone and my big giant computer in the computer room that I think the iPad is kind of meant to fill for browsing, media, mostly in the home environment. It’s something that, depending on the connectivity and a couple other things, I might use instead of a laptop, especially since it’s kind of instant-on with battery life, etc. I think it’s definitely a niche that could be filled. I’d have to live with one for a while to see how well they fill it. But the fact that it basically is already leveraging a platform, the iPhone, for apps, right out of the box, you can play a lot of little tiny apps, which is a good start as opposed to there being no software for it.
IG: Last time I spoke to you, you had clarified how, even though you’re no longer with EA, you still have a consulting agreement with them to meet with them regularly to assist with any ideas for The Sims or Spore. Do you have any updates on your input into those franchises? Are you still regularly meeting with them and helping them shape the future of those franchises?
WW: Yeah, they’re just down the street, so I see these people all the time. I’m not sure of the things that they’re working on, what’s been announced or not, so I have to be careful what I talk about there.
IG: Well, I guess more generally speaking, what would you like to see happen with those franchises? What ideas or new things are percolating in your mind for The Sims or for Spore that you’d like to have implemented as part of the game design?
WW: Well, those are the kinds of things I talk to them about. [laughs] But I think that what they’ve done with The Sims 3, they’ve really done a good job of managing that franchise in terms of how they expand it, how they’ve catered to what the people have been wanting without ruining the core experience. I think each franchise has its own community, its own territory that they’ve staked out and they’re all exploratory in some sense. You’re always wanting to try things where you think the fans might want to go, but maybe you’re not quite sure and sometimes you might do that with a new version and sometimes you might do that with an expansion pack, or maybe a lighter, online experience that leverages off of that franchise. I think every franchise is very different in terms of where you go with it strategically, but again, I’m not quite sure what they would like me to say about that because I’m not quite sure what they’ve publicly announced or not.
IG: I wanted to get your take on the Wii and third parties struggling on the Wii. It sort of amazes me, because here we are, four full years into the Wii’s life cycle and it just seems like no matter what the publishers do – other than, maybe the more casual style mini games or the exercise games – it seems like they really have trouble finding the style of game that fits with the Wii audience. Maybe it is because it’s a very different audience, but I’m curious what your take is on developing for the Wii and why there’s been so much confusion from third parties?
WW: Well, I think the Wii is a very unique platform, and that’s it's whole value and that’s kind of why it was so successful. It was pretty clearly a different thing than the Xbox or the PlayStation. I think the things I’ve seen that were developed just for the Wii have been very fun experiences for the most part. It’s kind of a different level of experience. Again, they aren’t necessarily these 40-hour involved RPG games so much as they are fun toys just to take out and start playing in 5 minutes. And they’re really fun with a group of people sitting around. They’re not typically as fun as a single player sitting there immersively late at night with the lights off. It really is more into what I would call the play market, where most of the Wii games that I’ve really enjoyed feel more like toys than they feel like games.
In a broader sense, I think that whole model…we’ve gotten very predictable in terms of when’s the next console generation coming along, and it was usually about a four-year cycle, and there was a transition cycle, and it was a very predictable cadence... and that’s been shattered. I don’t think this will necessarily be the last generation of console we see, but I don’t think it’s going to be this clockwork-like predictable business that it had been. And so I think the fact that people are struggling on the Wii in a business sense, isn’t necessarily indicative of the Wii... The console businesses are going to be a very specifically defined niche. And certainly, the fact that Nintendo is basically about the only manufacturer that really invests as much in software as they do in hardware – probably more in software than they do in hardware, actually – it’s always been a very unique platform in that sense. Your biggest competitor if you’re going to go into that market is always going to be Nintendo.
IG: Yeah, that’s always been a problem with Nintendo platforms I think. I find it interesting though, how you talk about how most of the games that do well, of course, have this toy feel, and it’s more about playing with a toy. Isn’t that very self-limiting to the publishers out there who want to try and create these other, more core gaming experiences and they realize it might not be successful? It’s a very limited role for the Wii as a machine in most people’s households then...
WW: Well, I think it’s a direction that Nintendo chose to go down. I think if you have a hard core gamer who’s 22 years old and wants to play a first-person shooter, he’s going to go buy an Xbox to play Halo. Microsoft’s done a great job of covering that market, and so Nintendo said, “Ok, we’re not going to go head to head with that.” So, as they usually did, they went younger. And they took the industry in a really interesting direction where we have games on the Wii that people would not have dreamed of five years ago, and broadened the market in a lot of interesting ways. I think it’s good that they decided to go off and find a different sandbox to play in. I think it’s been very good for the industry.
Sony, on the other hand, is in the same mindset as Microsoft for the most part, except Sony was a little more in the mindset of “We’re going to build you an entertainment center for your living room and so we’re going to play Blu-ray discs and all this other stuff.” Microsoft has worked from their hardcore fans – what I consider the Halo players – and worked their way out from that, starting to build their online services, really leveraging their accessibility as a development platform relative to the PS3. And so the fact that Microsoft Xbox is basically a PC is a certain type of developer advantage and allows them to do things like Xbox Arcade and stuff like that. So I think these platforms are finding their specialty. It’s just that I think Nintendo kind of tripped over an unexpectedly larger void. If you look at a publisher, and they can do this hardcore thing on the PC or the PS3 or the Xbox, those are more in the same ballpark than the Wii, which is way over here in left field.
IG: What impact do you believe Project Natal or PlayStation Move will have when they launch this year? Do you think they’ll have a similar impact to the Wii itself or will it be more muted?
WW: I doubt they’ll have the same impact the Wii had. In some sense, they feel like evolutions, or evolutionary technologies. I think Natal feels like a better EyeToy, which is going to have some interesting applications. I don’t think it’s going to change the face of gaming or anything. I think that having motion control, like in a Wii controller, is something that both Microsoft and Sony are catching up to, but again it almost suggests certain toy-like applications. I’m not sure I’d want to use a Wii controller for a first-person shooter. Even as obvious as this might sound to you, you want to point something at the screen when you’re shooting, but just the precision of the technology is below the precision I would get with a mouse on a PC, for instance. That’s something that Nintendo has always been very, very good at... in some sense when they design something, they work from the controller outwards and they may show the kinesthetic second to second experience with the control scheme is first and foremost when they work on a new game. The feel of Mario jumping has to be just right, and then they base the rest of the game around that.
IG: The thing that interests me is that it’s almost as if Microsoft and Sony are trying to capture that audience that is familiar with the Wii and they’re hedging their bets that maybe some of these Wii owners will actually upgrade. As you said, it almost feels like an evolution of the Wii controls, so they’re hoping that some of these people will actually upgrade from a Wii to an Xbox 360 or to a PS3 to check that out. Do you see that actually happening? I think the more casual audience might not want to spend that money.
WW: I think at some point it becomes the feature that a lot of people enjoy and they value it, so now it becomes just something on the list they have to check off. Do you have online capabilities? Check. Do you motion control? Check. So I think that Nintendo has basically ratcheted up what’s expected in a modern gaming platform, and now Sony and Microsoft basically feel like they have to add that to their checklist.
IG: Thanks so much for your time Will.
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