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The man himself is talking in an interview over at IGN.PC - about his departure from Origin, about his own company and about Lineage: The Bloodpledge. This is part one of the interview, part two will be reported about here, too. Here's a bit about how he got involved in Lineage: The Bloodpledge:
IGNPC: How did you get connected to this project?
Richard Garriott: After I left Origin I agreed to a one-year non-compete agreement but then started this new company Destination Games (which is kind of a play on words -- when you leave your origin, you arrive at your destination). Getting the opportunity to start a company that you believe will grow to be a major player in the industry is a rare opportunity in any industry. My brother and I, who formed Origin twenty years ago, felt that was a very lucky once in a lifetime opportunity.
When I left Origin I did not honestly anticipate that I would have a second once in a lifetime opportunity. However, I believe this is one. My last project with Origin, other than Ultima IX, was Ultima Online, which in my mind opened up a doorway into this new thing called subscription-based online gaming. EA saw it differently. EA thought subscription based online gaming was somewhat of a fluke. They thought the next stage in evolution was, instead of going for hundreds of thousands of subscribers with subscription-based games, to go the AOL games channel, pogo.com style strategy where you get many millions of participants who are supported marginally by advertising but the big belief was that you could take these tens of millions of people and convert them to paying subscribers in some way.
The reason I left Origin was that they were pushing me and Origin and lots of developers across EA worldwide to develop these small JAVA application games for the EA.com service. For me, as an employee of EA, my salary couldn't be justified making these tens of thousands of dollars JAVA app games. It was not a strategy that was interesting to me professionally or made any fiscal sense as well and that led to my departure. |
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Richard Garriott Interview
