Serf Wars Interview Part 1: Aiming For Nintendo's Mid-Core Audience

Here at Gaming Blend there was an opportunity to talk with a few of the bright minds from Meteor Games regarding their latest title, Serf Wars. The VP of business development, Josiah Gordon, and director of PR and communications, Katie Gerber, gave a bit of their time to discuss the project and the company’s lofty ambitions moving forward.

Serf Wars is the latest Facebook game to launch that doesn't actually seem like it should be on Facebook (and that's a compliment). The game is basically like Age of Empires contained within a browser, fused with almost two handfuls of different mini-games, crafting, combat and diplomacy. Yeah, this is no Farmville. The guys and gals at Meteor Games actually have bigger plans for the title as they want to capture the mid-core audience that seems to be quickly slipping away from Nintendo.

You can check out the first part of the interview below.

Gaming Blend: The first thing anyone would notice when booting up Serf Wars is that the game actually has to load. This is a clear indicator that this isn’t just another Mafia Wars, Cityville or Farmville clone, which is a good thing. How did the design idea come about for Serf Wars and was it always the intention of the design team to make sure that the game stood out from most other Facebook games, with being as close to a real game as you can get within the structure of Facebook?

Josiah Gordon: Hm, how did the design come about? I don’t know the answer to that. I may have to follow-up on that with an e-mail. I guess, as an overall sort of design, it’s the brainchild of our chief creative officer, Adam Powell, and his wife Donna Powell. As you may know, they were the original creators of NeoPets. They sold the company to Viacom in 2005 for $160 million dollars -- and they have tons of game ideas.

Serf Wars has really been sort of a pet project of theirs, so to speak. They’re very involved in the design of it; hand crafted the whole world and [Adam] has many more years of content in his head than what appears in the game. I believe your second question was how the game relates to other Facebook games, right?

GB: Yeah.

Josiah Gordon: We purposefully tried to make the game more strategy-oriented. So we’re trying to pick up more of a mid-core audience than we did in the past. Our previous games were casual-social games. Our biggest game was Island Paradise, a farming game set on a tropical island with decorations and simple tasks…like a casual social game would have.

Serf Wars goes a step further: it has crafting with things like the Forge, and the apothecary, so you can gather items throughout the game including within the arcade-style mini-games, and then put those together to craft elements that help you in battle and in other ways in the game. So Serf Wars contains strategy, resource allocation, different stores of value that we track, for lack of a better word -- and it basically tries to go after a mid-core audience.

And what we’ve seen with the traffic is that its 70-73% male depending on the day. And to give you an idea, Island Paradise is 68% female. So it’s been a big shift for us -- it’s much more male. We anticipated that but it’s more towards the Kabam games and sort of the Xbox kind of core gamer appeal right now. And that was definitely the intention. We’re willing to make games that have a longer shelf life and we like games to be persistent to the tune of two to three years instead of being measured in the span of several months on Facebook. And we like more immersive worlds like virtual worlds where users can really get involved with the game and have something to look forward to. That’s sort of our overall approach and Serf Wars definitely embodies that, it’s sort of our core game going forward and we’re putting a lot of resources into that team and building up Serf Wars’ capabilities and its audience.

GB: Following up on the last question, I’m curious was everything designed from the ground up or did the team acquire some middleware to help out with the design?

Josiah: It’s 100% proprietary. We built our own game platform, even below the game engine we built our own platform for that game called Core4 (that’s just our internal name for it) and we focused the company on building up the blocks to be very scalable and very successful in the future. We have a shared core platform that runs on Facebook now, and we can handle many, many millions of users. And as we build on new services in terms of marketing support, business intelligence, databases and stuff like that, as well as new game features, we can easily add those into new properties without rewriting any code.

So we built this sort of library-core platform…and then the game engine itself is proprietary to Meteor Games, it’s an isometric world that includes, right now, player versus environment combat. We are planning to do cooperative combat where you can slay huge dragons and other monsters with your friends and then further down the road player-versus-player combat.

GB: Are you planning on using this kind of platform as leverage for newer games, based on this kind of gameplay?

Josiah: Well, the core platform supports multiple kinds of games, and the simple answer is: yes. We’re planning the business around leveraging the platform that we’ve built as a very modular extensible so we can add new features all the time. New games won’t necessarily be in the genre of Serf Wars.

Overall, our design strategy going forward is larger more immersive virtual worlds, but they won’t all be combat related, you know? So yeah, we’re looking at higher engagement levels than with past games like Island Paradise and Ranch Town Town and we created our first combat based game [Serf Wars] is combat based, but as far as our future portfolio, we won’t be 100% combat based.



GB: It’s interesting because considering that Meteor Games’ titles like Island Paradise and Serf Wars are definitely a grade up from the Zynga type of Facebook games -- and actually require a measure of thought and a bit more than random clicking around -- do you find that this has limited the appeal of your games to the general casual audience of Facebook or increased their appeal to those looking for something slightly more hardcore than the standard Facebook game?

Josiah: That’s a great question and that’s something that we’re always looking at -- sort of where the sweet spot of the market is for our titles. Serf Wars is positioned between mid-core and casual, and that’s by design. So, a very rough way to look at it is that the art-style is to appeal to women and the gameplay mechanics tend to appeal to men. Just the name alone, Serf Wars, tends to bring in a lot more males than females, and we can see that in test and ad spends across the board. Women are less likely to click on a game titled Serf Wars than men are. So the game is really designed for a mass audience but we’re trying to get high engagement from players all over the board. So clearly, we have the battle element in the game and that one is a pretty obvious one, but we’re also trying to build up sort of a sense of accomplishment through decoration, resource management, crafting…”

You know one of our most popular features in Island Paradise is cooking. So in that game it sort of started as a simple farm-type game that was on an island with cool art, but it fairly quickly evolved into a game where people are planting different crops so they can create different recipes and craft different things on our loom in the island workshop, and we think that that appeals to a sort of completionist mindset. And Serf Wars has some of these elements as well. In terms of psychographic targeting, we’re trying to target completionist, the decorators, we’re going after sort of the core gamer that might want a more casual feel. Clearly, Facebook games today don’t have the same experience that the Xbox 360 has. We’re not trying to recreate a game for that, we’re trying make a game that fits well and is very fun and playable on the Facebook canvas. So we’re trying to leverage the platform as much as we can.

GB: I thought it was interesting in the Forbes article that it was mentioned that Meteor Games and Serf Wars are aiming for the middle-of-the-road gamer just like Nintendo. But as we’ve seen over the years, it doesn’t seem like the casual-core gamer sticks around for very long and Nintendo is seeing a massive drop-off in consumer appeal with the Wii and the Wii’s third-party software as this generation of gaming is coming to an end. Exactly, how do you rectify the drop-off in casual and hard core gamers, and what sort of design decisions were made for Serf Wars to sort of hook the gamer so that they stick around?

Josiah: Okay, that’s a great question. So, I think there’s sort of two parts to that: One is that every entertainment property has a life-span. You know, so if you look at a blockbuster movie it may last two weeks, four weeks, six weeks in a movie theater. All games are like that. You know, the original Super Mario Brothers maybe had a three year or a two year lifespan, and some games have lower lifespans. Some big Facebook titles have six month lifespans. We’re really trying to build two to three year engagements in persistency in our games. So that’s the first thing.

And how do we get there? That’s a great question. You know, today I could tell you the features of the game and why we hope that [players] would be engaged, but it would be a guess at this point – the game is just too new to tell. However, we are fairly confident that the of story-driven design will retain players. You know that’s something we’re going to have in all our games going forward. In a lot of casual games there’s no real reason to keep going forward, like players progress based on XP or level, but there’s nothing that’s really drawing them in, in terms of having an emotional connection to progressing in the game.

So we’re trying to engage people on an emotional level and part of that is story driven design. And in Serf Wars you go through the missions and we’re actually telling a story, sort of like a role-playing game on PC or console. So we’re trying to go at it with more of a strategy approach so people feel like they’re a part of the story and they’re actually having an impact on the game world.

Be sure to stay tuned in for the second-half of the interview right here at Gaming Blend.