How Wargaming decides what platform World of Tanks should invade next

Above: Does that tank know that it’s on fire?

Image Credit: Wargaming

GamesBeat: You were able to also launch on the PS4 starting next week. It seems like a smart call not to go completely exclusive on any one platform in this case.

Lee: I’d say so. It goes back to your understanding of the free-to-play funnel. The other perspective is what I said earlier as far as our conviction that a good game is a good game, and the data we have on how users enjoy our titles. We’ve done a lot to move our titles to a lot of different platforms. You can expect us to be thinking aggressively about how to keep doing that. PS4 we’re very excited about.

GamesBeat: If you’re stepping back and looking at every platform decision, is it a question of whether the development costs and potentially making a special version of a game is worth the audience you’ll get on a platform?

Lee: Absolutely. Every step of the way, the decisions we’ve made about moving our titles from PC to console and PC to mobile—So far it’s too early to tell, but the numbers are tracking well on the PC version of Blitz. We have very few regrets.

If we could go back, one thing we probably would have done is, from the beginning, give a lot more thought early in the development process to thinking about multiplatform. Some of the smarter studios out there, looking at this new ecosystem of platforms we have today, are starting much earlier to think about a multiplatform direction in their development.

GamesBeat: When you’re looking forward at the world and future generations, are [you] going to start doing some of this work earlier, or planning it into whatever new game gets created?

Lee: The way I’d put it is, let’s say five or seven years ago we didn’t think about it even a little bit. Right now, from day one, from day zero, we think about the multiplatform aspect. How do we more efficiently develop our titles for multiple platforms?

The caveat is that it depends on the experience we’re developing and how that experience will be received and translated to certain platforms. That will shape the direction in early days, but for sure, multiplatform from day one is important to us.

GamesBeat: Are Blitz and the PC game on separate backends, or do they share the same one?

Lee: It depends on what you mean. From the development back-end standpoint, it’s the same one, but from an operational standpoint, they’re on separate back ends. Separate clusters, let’s put it that way.

GamesBeat: Is a backend just a backend? Does it play into any of your decisions as to which platforms you might go to?

Lee: The fact that we’re more of a server-driven experience company, as opposed to the experience being primarily driven from the client side—That gives us more freedom and flexibility to consider multiple platforms than if we were just developing more from the client side. Because the bulk of what we do – the game logic, the algorithms, the matchmaking, the authentication – is happening on the server side, it gives us a lot more choice to explore today’s different platforms or future platforms coming up.

GamesBeat: You mentioned relationships. I wonder if incentives from the platforms matter to you guys. Are they going to help you with marketing or becoming more discoverable on their platform?

Lee: User acquisition is a critical piece in operating any free-to-play game. Going back in history, that’s one of the reasons why we chose to go exclusive with Xbox 360, the user acquisition aspect. The other aspect of why we did that—Free-to-play on consoles was a new thing. It’s still a relatively new thing. There are only a handful of titles out there. Back when we decided to go with Microsoft to move our free-to-play MMO on a console, we realized that without strong support from the platform, it would be very difficult to do. That’s why we chose exclusivity.

Consoles are a lot more closed in terms of the way they operate. It’s a walled garden. Unlike PC, which is open and gives us a lot more flexibility and channels with which to do marketing, console is a lot more limited. We need and appreciate the strong support that each of these platforms provides for us. It’s a key driver of our success.

Above: It can be hard to hit something the length of 10 school buses.

Image Credit: Jason Wilson/GamesBeat

GamesBeat: What are you thinking about for Warships and Warplanes?

Lee: I can’t comment right now, but it’s relatively—If you look back on our history of moving our PC titles to console, and the fact that we’re very happy and satisfied with our experience, it would be a natural progression to think very positively about that idea.

GamesBeat: There’s still some delay in doing that. Do you always consider it job one to get a game established on the PC first?

Lee: Yes and no. We consider a multiplatform approach as we start concepting and designing a production process for new titles now. But there are choices we need to make as a business. Investments need to happen along the way. Right now, we do still take a measured approach as far as rolling out on different platforms. But we’re very aggressively and actively thinking about more simultaneous approaches to different platforms.

GamesBeat: Do you consider this process of going to new platforms to be labor-intensive?

Lee: It’s more brain-cell intensive? Whenever there’s a new platform coming along, the challenge is the uncertainty involved. Just trying to figure out the complexities and opportunities and risks associated with any new platform. Before you even start putting bodies on it, the process leading up to making a decision, making that calculated bet, is probably the biggest challenge of any new platform.

GamesBeat: Have you put out any new numbers for all of Wargaming or all of World of Tanks to date?

Lee: In the Wargaming universe, World of Tanks has 145 million accounts. We have 120 million registered users. Going back to Xbox 360, it was the highest-downloaded free-to-play game on Xbox 360. We have 1.2 million downloads on Xbox One. That’s about 10 percent of Xbox One’s total right now. I mentioned 100,000-plus downloads for the Windows 10 version of Blitz. Our PC users overall depends on which day you measure, but we’re hitting upwards of 1.1 million-plus across all of our products.

GamesBeat: Do you think other companies are capable of doing this, going cross-platform with free-to-play games?

Lee: It’s a combination of being smart about it and having the resources to pull it off. Those go hand in hand. If you’re smarter, you can manage with fewer resources than we’ve put into it. But it is a resource-intensive effort, even if you’re smart. You need the infrastructure to pull it off.

We’ve shown that a very interesting and profitable opportunity exists for PC free-to-play titles to move to consoles. There are more and more parties either working on it or are soon to launch or have already launched in that space. The traditional powerhouses in retail console games are eyeing the space. Destiny is a great example. It’s a premium product, but more and more the model they’re pursuing is suspiciously similar to how a free-to-play title works.

GamesBeat: If you think of new things like esports, does that seem to work evenly across all platforms? Or do particular platforms excel when it comes to the esports angle?

Lee: If I bring in the market development and community evolution over all regions of the world—If you look at the evolution and the speed at which mobile, for example, is growing, I think it’s equally compelling regardless of which platform you’re on. If you really look at who’s there, who are the competitive players, they’re all very similar regardless of which platform they’re on. Whether they’re on mobile or console or PC, there are similar characteristics to all these people. They’ll be competitive regardless of the platform they’re playing on.

Although esports as a segment was traditionally more associated with PC, I see no reason why it can’t take off on any other platform. That’s how Wargaming has been approaching it. Traditionally we’ve been PC-focused with our esports activities, but internally we’re thinking hard about how to extend the esports experience and the competitive ecosystem we’re building out across the Wargaming universe.

Above: Esports is a fast-growing space.

Image Credit: Major League Gaming

GamesBeat: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Lee: One thing I do want to highlight, just to give you a glimpse of how things are moving along within Wargaming—You’ve seen our evolution from premium products to free-to-play on PC, and evolving from there to expand onto consoles and mobile. We’ve put up the banner of free-to-win over the last year or two. The evolution we’re going through now is extending that our further.

We’ve had users complaining about why our games aren’t on this platform, why it wasn’t there a year ago, why we aren’t on smart TVs, and so on. The question is, how do we make people happy? What can we do further to make everyone happy? One of the driving forces behind our multiplatform strategy is, why do only certain groups of people on certain platforms enjoy our game? Why can’t we have more people on more platforms playing with us?

GamesBeat: One more question that comes to mind is the idea of live operations. When you’ve had a team working on one of these big new platforms, do they stay on that platform, or do you roll them over to the next job they have to do?

Lee: Different folks approach it differently. Valve approaches it in the way where they launch a game and let the community take care of it. We’re the other approach. We’re not agreeing or disagreeing with the way other companies do it. It’s just that from our philosophical perspective—Going back to making players happy, we really do put a lot of effort into community. We put a lot of effort into taking care of players after we launch.

I don’t know if you knew, but one of the words Victor really doesn’t like is “shipping” a game. It implies that you throw it over the fence and forget about it. We kind of religiously use the term “launching.” Launching is just the beginning. Our philosophy, from a dev perspective—Let’s say we have 50 guys who develop and launch a game. We would generally scale up after we launched, because we feel we need to—This is when the game begins. This is where we start to need to ramp up, provide content, provide improvement, fix issues, fix bugs. Our philosophy is ramping up post-launch.

GamesBeat: How many people do you have now altogether?

Lee: Let’s see. We have around 4,000 globally now.

GamesBeat: Your philosophy on doing ports from the ground up probably drives the number of employees.

Lee: Well, yes and no. That’s a separate topic over beer. But let’s just say that so far, we’ve done a pretty good job of taking care of our audience and our players and making them happier with what we have. We’ve invested very heavily.