The fact that live events are such a day-to-day part of the F2P operation, it seems like that would really influence the difficulty of Victor’s new job. However, before I voiced this opinion I asked Victor whether he thought the subscription community or F2P community was harder to manage.

“I knew what they did [at Outspark] but being here in the day-to-day operations is completely different,” Victor said. “At the same time, one of the first things I did was take some of my ideas about community management and implement them: cleaning up the forums, getting fiesta gold in contact with community leaders, and that sort of thing to really harness the enthusiasm in the community. It’s a learning process on both sides. I’m learning the business, but I feel like I’m also bringing a lot of the day-to-day community interaction over to our games.”

“I think that’s something that I’m trying to do is bring some of the pay to play philosophy over to the free to play,” Victor continued. “If you look at some of the free to play games, they’re just constantly filled with promotions and all of this pseudo-advertising calling for people to constantly be buying or doing things. The F2P model does call for more activity on a continuous basis, but we want to try and focus on a few key items or big activities. We don’t want people playing because we’re trying to sell them things; we want them to play because the game is awesome.”

That said, the F2P model is based on having items for players to purchase in their games, and so I wondered if all of Outspark’s games were completely microtransaction based (compared to ad-based of something similar).

“Yes [they are all microtransaction based], and as we go across the genres, what people pay for will be different; players can buy different things in Solstice compared to Blackshot for example,” he answered. “We’re really evaluating what there is to monetize in each game, whether we want to give players an option to rent a clan server for their FPS team or something like that. We’re really looking to expand our options and go beyond just digital options.”

Solstice is definitely a game for hardcore players.

As a final segment of our interview, I asked Victor what the future of Outspark was; whether they would always be publishing Korean developed games or if the team at the new publishing house had bigger plans in mind. Victor – as always – held a surprise in store for me. Here’s what he had to say:

“What we try to do with all of these titles is to be the exclusive North American publisher, and not only for Korean games either,” he stated. “That’s just really where we got our start because that market has so much to pull from. We are working with other developers and we have relationships with North American developers. We do eventually want to be a publisher for some of these other companies and even becoming the original publisher for some of these games.”

Is Outspark the next big premier MMOG publishing house? If Victor Wachter has anything to do with it, they will certainly stretch their legs and see if they can make it with the big boys.

I just want to extend a bit of thanks to Victor Wachter and Tracie Snitker at Reverb Communications for making this interview possible. And – as always – keep your browsers locked on Ten Ton Hammer for all of your latest Outspark and MMO gaming news!