Ted Price on how Insomniac Games’ Fuse isn’t going to be a bomb (interview)

GamesBeat: What do you notice about people finishing the game in single-player versus finishing it co-op? Does the duration of the experience or anything else vary?

Price: We balance the game based on how many humans are playing. That’s key. One thing we have noticed is that it takes several playthroughs for anybody to unlock all of the skills and upgrades that you get for all four characters.

GamesBeat: Does that normally happen, that people will go through it more than once?

Price: When we do focus-testing and usability testing, people have a limited amount of time, so we haven’t gotten to the point where somebody has enough time to play through all of it. But internally, when we talk about our own testers, yeah. We see it all the time. There’s no way they can unlock everything with one playthrough.

GamesBeat: I asked you about big changes in the industry back in December. We’ve had more big changes already. What do you think of the state of things three months later?

Price: It kind of reflects the state of the world. In our world, things do change at an exponential pace. Our industry is not an exception. Technology drives a lot of that. The length of this console generation is also driving that. The pressure on the industry to continue to branch out, to reach new audiences, has been increasing, and we’re seeing the results.

GamesBeat: When running a business, how do you balance that you had to finish this game at the same time as some other things, like next-generation development, would naturally be spinning up?

Price: We have multiple teams. We don’t have just one team, so we do a lot of that internal balancing all the time.

GamesBeat: Did you pick up any big takeaways from DICE this year? Anything that struck you amid all the talks?

Price: From a data geek perspective, I loved the Qualcomm talk. Maybe because I’m not well-versed in phone technology, it was cool to hear what’s going on in the mobile chip world and see how fast that particular industry is moving. For Insomniac, at least, we have tended historically to focus on consoles and ignore everything else. Now, in this industry, you can’t ignore everything else. You have to be aware of what’s going on. The Qualcomm talk was a nice window into one aspect of the mobile industry that we all should be paying attention to.

GamesBeat: I’m writing about whether it will be easier for Battlefield 4 or Puzzle and Dragons to get to a billion dollars in revenue.

Price: Right. Unfortunately, I think people like to ask those questions with 20-20 hindsight. I’m sure that at the beginning of the development for either of those franchises, nobody had that expectation. Everybody wishes and hopes that you’re going to have a big hit, but the focus has to be on making a great game.

I always find it funny that, whether it’s Puzzle and Dragons or Clash of Clans or any other game that’s doing well on mobile, the assumption tends to be, “That must have been easy.” No, it wasn’t. I don’t think any successful game goes through an easy process. It’s usually a confluence of a great game, an audience that’s hungry for it, the right timing, and a lot of hard work.

GamesBeat: Some of the game engine-makers are doing some interesting things where they’re extending into mobile. They’re starting from triple-A, and now they’re extending down into the mobile platforms. I wonder how well that’s going to work. Are you optimistic that that could be a good way to go cross-platform?

Price: It depends. We’re already moving into mobile as well. We’ve said publicly that Outernauts, our free-to-play game on Kongregate and Facebook, is going to mobile as well. Our industry is very savvy as far as knowing that you can’t just take a console game and port it over to mobile because it’s a completely different control paradigm. A lot of redesign has to happen. But as content creators, we’re all interested in having our content appear on as many platforms as we can.

GamesBeat: Any last thoughts on how Fuse has turned out?

Price: We’re very proud of it. Every franchise we build is a learning experience for us, but we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into Fuse. The most gratifying aspect for me personally, over the last month, has been getting the game into more and more people’s hands and enjoying it with them. We’re having fun. That’s at the core of every great game.