An Exclusive Interview with Curt Schilling - What is the Azeroth Advisor?

[Cody Bye]

What would you do if you could build your own MMOG? Who would you hire to run your development studio? Which genre would you set your world? Few gamers in the world ever have the privilege to answer these questions, and yet so many of us would die for the chance to make the game that we would want to play. That’s the sort of opportunity that Curt Schilling crafted for himself by creating 38 Studios and recruiting some of the most prolific talent in the industry.

However, 38 Studios also recently announced that they had acquired Mentor Media's product, the Azeroth Advisor, and its technology. For those of you unfamiliar with the Azeroth Advisor, it’s a service that players download onto their computer in order to allow the program to gather information about the gamer’s World of Warcraft characters. With that information the AA then creates a personalized newsletter for the player to read whenever he desires. To many, this sounds like a strange marriage between an MMOG company and a product that services a major competitor. In order to sort out all the details, Ten Ton Hammer’s Cody “Micajah” Bye got on the phone with Curt Schilling, and the two discussed all of the relevant facts about the Azeroth Advisor and its future with 38 Studios.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you going to bring the Azeroth Advisor technology into other MMOGs as well?

Schilling: Absolutely. We’re in discussions with a bunch of different companies – and not just companies that are working on MMOs – from Xbox Live franchises to other franchises. There are a couple reasons for that, number one being that we can have this service available to a company with the personalized newsletter format in six months.

To read the rest of the Azeroth Advisor interview, click here!

[Sardu]

Great interview. The Advisor is something I'd heard of before, but never really knew many details on exactly what it was, so this was definitely very informative I think. I'm a fan of this type of thing where something from outside a given game can enhance the player's experience of it when not logged in.

Even though it's not the same thing at all, it still reminds me of Magelo - people in my EQ guild would obsess over their profiles and link them everywhere they could. Sort of like their MMO MySpace page before there was even a MySpace. Obviously it was a pretty popular service, as the entire concept was adopted and made a standard feature for the EQ2 Players site (and later on Vanguard and even WoW has something similar among others)

That said, I could see the Advisor growing it's user base by a substantial amount, especially if 38 does indeed work out deals to make the service available for multiple titles. I also like Curt's way of looking at the industry:

But I look at it the same way I look at Major League Baseball: There are 30 teams, and every team benefits when baseball – as a whole – gets more fans. I see it the same way with MMOs. We’re doing everything we can to improve the size and scope and retention of the MMO customer fan base.

Now they just need to work on making a service similar to the PS3's Home, only have it be a giant MMO lobby where you can log into it with your characters from whatever games you have an active subscription from. You'd have WoW Gnomes /dancing with GW Ritualists while people fly their Eve and Jumpgate ships overhead. How awesome would that be?

[Cody Bye]

Originally Posted by Sardu

Great interview. The Advisor is something I'd heard of before, but never really knew many details on exactly what it was, so this was definitely very informative I think. I'm a fan of this type of thing where something from outside a given game can enhance the player's experience of it when not logged in.

Even though it's not the same thing at all, it still reminds me of Magelo - people in my EQ guild would obsess over their profiles and link them everywhere they could. Sort of like their MMO MySpace page before there was even a MySpace. Obviously it was a pretty popular service, as the entire concept was adopted and made a standard feature for the EQ2 Players site (and later on Vanguard and even WoW has something similar among others)

That said, I could see the Advisor growing it's user base by a substantial amount, especially if 38 does indeed work out deals to make the service available for multiple titles. I also like Curt's way of looking at the industry:



Now they just need to work on making a service similar to the PS3's Home, only have it be a giant MMO lobby where you can log into it with your characters from whatever games you have an active subscription from. You'd have WoW Gnomes /dancing with GW Ritualists while people fly their Eve and Jumpgate ships overhead. How awesome would that be?

That would be totally awesome. Would it work? No idea.

[Lizante]

Nice job jumping on this one, Cody.

Sardu beat me to it, but I also zeroed in on this statement by Curt:

"But I look at it the same way I look at Major League Baseball: There are 30 teams, and every team benefits when baseball – as a whole – gets more fans. I see it the same way with MMOs. We’re doing everything we can to improve the size and scope and retention of the MMO customer fan base. What I wanted to do with this first “product” from 38 Studios is send a message that “this company will always care about the customers and the community.” This is doing exactly that."

I love this approach -- this philosophy about including other companies into the community and Curt's caring about all customers and the community as a whole. It's refreshing to see an industry CEO who's flagship first MMO product is 10-20 months from release verbalize these highly important realities.

Blizzard thinks they grasped this concept. SOE's starting to see it. FunCom's Craig Morrison epitomizes it. We can only hope that other companies will, as well.

[WZT]

As a writer for the AA, I can say I am pleased to finally see some press items about it. It's been launched for over a year (or was it two) now, yet the community has largely been unaware of its existence. Hopefully it will extend into other games, as I'm tired of just WoWing:P