A look into the differences between subscription-based and free-to-play communities.
The video games industry is a relatively small place. Those of us that work the conventions, either displaying our wares or reporting on those products, get to know each other pretty well as we talk about the future of gaming, our families, and our goals. During the summer months, we often see more of an industry friend than we do of our own families.

Victor moved to Outspark after working for over a year at Cryptic Studios.

For me, Victor Wachter is one of those individuals that I’ve spent numerous hours with, conversing about the communities in our online games and sharing the best regional beers we can find. So when it was announced that Victor had left Cryptic Studios to head up the community at Outspark, an MMOG publisher with a penchant for free to play games, I quickly got on the phone with my friend to get to find out as much as I could about Outspark and what Victor’s appointment meant for the future of the start-up MMOG publisher.

According to Victor, Outspark is a publisher of free to play massively multiplayer games, and the company was started in 2006 by CEO and founder Susan Choe. “We publish games developed in Korea for the North American market,” Victor said. “We have two games that are currently live, fiesta gold and Secret of Solstice, and two games in beta, Project Powder (a snow boarding game) and Blackshot (a first person shooter).”

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure why someone like Victor would make a move to a company like Outspark when he had what seemed like a pretty fantastic situation at Cryptic Studios. With two enormous MMOGs coming down the pipe at that developer – not to mention now being owned by Atari and having access to their IPs – Cryptic certainly seemed like an up and comer. I quizzed him about his move and why he decided to shift his focus.

“One of the reasons Outspark approached me was because of my experience in developing communities, and that’s one of the ways that I think we can really set Outspark apart from the rest of the free to play publishers,” Victor explained “We just need to make the best out-of-game, offline experience to make sure that our players know how to play the games, know where to meet each other, and make sure that even when players are out of the game that they feel like they’re having a good time.”