Gameforge Productions, the company behind the engrossing web-based Civilization clone Ikariam, has just opened an office in San Francisco to better enable the company to market its games in the U.S. market. In addition to marketing its own games, which also includes OGame, a space trading game, the German-based company is trying to position itself as a European localizer for American MMO developers. Gamasutra had the chance to speak with Lars Koschin, president of Gameforge, about the company’s plans.
One of the initial points Koschin wanted to get across was that Gameforge’s web-based games are a far cry from the standard casual games that many Americans associate with the platform:
Koschin spoke to a common preconception about web-based games, that they are often assumed to be simple puzzle games regardless of their genre - an image issue sure to be on the minds of InstantAction.com developer GarageGames as well. “Many people in the U.S., when I talk about browser games, say they’re mini-games - but this is a real world, where you can build your cities, build your armies, and if you log out and you log in the next day, your island is still there.”
Although Ikariam is modeled closely after games like Civilization, it focuses on the social interaction between the towns:
“In Ikariam, we have shared resources on the island, so you work together with your friends or with people who live with you on this island. You have to talk to them and say, ‘Hey, we have this lumber resource, and we can improve that if you spend some money on the god that protects our island.’ This is the main point in most of our games - the social interaction.”
Of course, you can’t be president of a web-based anything without aspiring to become some sort of social network, so it comes as no surprise that Koschin sees games like Ikariam as another milieu for MySpace social interaction:
“People going to MySpace or Facebook know this concept of playing games or exchanging information through a web portal. That is who we want to target. The other kind of gamer we want is people who play Civilization single-player, and they work in an office and now have a chance to use this simple system for that kind of gameplay.”
The concept of a casual MMO is really difficult to understand these days with most MMOs trying to compete directly with World of Warcraft, but Koschin feels that there is space for games with smaller time commitments:
The exec drew a distinction between these games and more traditional MMOs, however: “World of Warcraft, that consumes a lot of time - our barrier of entry is very low, so you can play right away without downloading a lot of stuff. You can decide how much time you want to invest in your game, and it’s still fun to play. You can play from 10 minutes a day to five hours a day, but it’s still fun to play.”
As someone who played far too much Ikariam before letting my little town go to seed, I think that it is certainly one of those games that encourages addictive play. My roommate, in fact, frequently tabs out of WoW to check up on his many towns in Ikariam. It’s likes some sort of cruel nexus of gaming heroin. But, hey, it means good things for Gameforge.
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