Tony Hilliam, CEO of Auran Games

Interview from Yug - Friday, 02 May 2008 @ 12:37pm

Tony: Well, the timing couldn’t be better Yug, because this week we’re about to make some pretty big announcements. We released some of the information to the community online last week and had some really good responses to that, but this week we’re announcing the future of Fury, which is a new competitive gaming platform called Fury League.

What we’re really doing is taking the core of Fury and stripping out the more MMO elements and focusing on the competitive skill based gaming elements, which is what our core community have been saying all along.

So, back to ‘where’s Auran at’, we’ve been busy for 6 months trying to figure out what to do, then getting ready for this day.




Tony: Right now, it’s very disappointing the numbers. When we look at the decisions we’ve made in the past, we now realize the impact of those. Because there isn’t a level playing field, even though we introduced more friendly game types, once the players get out of those game types they’re still disadvantaged.


Tony: Well, because the new players don’t have all the good gear and abilities, when they start playing against veterans who do they get owned.


Tony: The matchmaking system only works when you have sufficient players. Basically, in order to get a game within a few minutes, which is the threshold of pain, we’ve loosened the matchmaking so that it says ‘well, we can’t find anybody close, so here’s the closest’. So we have a situation where we have veteran players and new players, and no-one in between. Very few people cross the threshold to reach the veteran stage. It’s only the real gluttons for punishment that make it. And of course, once they’re there, because they’re such competitive creatures, they just love smashing the new guys.


Tony: And so the cycle continues. So what we’ve done is we’ve moved away from the old business model, which ultimately we tried to make a system where people would spend money on gold and spend that gold on purchasing equipment, but not enough money was being spent. So we had to change the model, because we certainly couldn’t survive otherwise. So in looking at what the competitive players want – good competition and good prizes – so what Fury League is doing is delivering skill based competition and a variety or prizes based around Fury Gold.


Tony: The two things we control are the servers and the designated ladders. What we will be doing is working with the community to figure out how many ladders, what types, how much to split them up, etc. Ideally we want to have Leagues where you have promotion relegation, where the top 100 are in the elite league while the next 1000 are in the premier league, so people of all skills can potentially win a ladder. Of course, that can only be achieved if we get sufficient player numbers, so we’ll start with one league and move on from there.


Tony: Well there are two things competitive gamers want, one is to win prizes and the other is to satisfy their ego. So that’s what Fury is all about – giving people the opportunity to show off by buying new gear in game, by also by entering elite ladders. So you spend gold to get into bigger prize money. Even the free to play players can earn small gold prizes, but the exciting part is where you pay extra gold to get into a high stakes tournament.


Tony: That’s right, except this is PURE skill, poker is a bit of gambling! It’s a high stake skill based competition, therefore it’s not gambling, therefore it’s legal in the US and so on, and by being able to withdraw your gold and convert it into cash, it really is a case where good players will be able to earn good pocket money.




Tony: Certainly. Basically, we had to release in October last year for financial reasons, and it was a real catch 22. We knew we needed more time to polish and fix those issues, but conversely we didn’t have the cash to do it. Coming so far and then releasing it 2 or 3 months before it was really ready was a major bummer.

So we’ve had 6 months to fix a lot of those things, obviously there are some issues that are harder to track down – I won’t say it runs on every computer. For instance, one bug we fixed about a week after release was a sound bug which was introduced late into the beta, and on a lot of machines is halved the frame rate. So it was one little bug that was doing this decompression thing on the fly, and for certain machine configurations it was a system hog and basically stopped the game. And you know, little things like that make a big difference when you solve them. So, performance is greatly improved, and of course we have more room to improve on loading times and so on, but I think the biggest thing is that by changing the nature of the playing field – making sure all players start with all abilities and equipment available to them at the start of the game means it comes down to skill and experience.


Tony: I was going to say, just because it’s a level playing field ... if I gave you a golf club you’re not going to be as good as tiger woods on day 1. He’s had a bit more practice than you have.


Tony: So you’re going to need to learn how to swing your club, figure out how to shape the ball and so on. Same with Fury, you have to learn what the abilities do, how to counter different abilities. Also, a lot of the game types are teamwork orientated, and that’s where getting on VoiP and talking it up with your team is a big factor as well.


Tony: In regards to the current community, I think a lot of people really wanted Fury to succeed, and for various reasons a lot of them are not here right now. Some technical issues, some competitive issues, some design and balance issues. And we really think we’ve nailed all the problems, and this is why we’ve been keeping quiet, so that when we do make some noise people will listen.


Tony: It really is a new game, new business model, and if we can get even 10% of all the players that have left back, that’s going to be some good numbers, and that critical mass will make sure we have nice even matches. This makes it much more fun for everyone!




Tony: Well, we’ve designed it around a 500 millisecond lag tolerance, so basically there’s a 1 second global cool down on all the abilities. So you can’t execute more than 1 ability every second. So on that basis, even if you’re bashing the buttons constantly, it’s not going to make much difference.

Actually, one of the cool new feature we have done – people used to call Fury a button masher – we’ve now setup the quick bar so you can hold the key to execute the ability automatically, so when you’re building charges you just hold down the 1 key and it will execute every second. So you build up 5 or 10 charges and you can use your consumption abilities.


Tony: The other thing about button mashing is that people would go ‘all you do is bash the buttons and then you die’. Well that’s right; you’ve learnt how to loose; now you need to learn which buttons to press in which order and you might survive. We have new templates for the starting characters with this next patch, which means you have a much more competitive build. We haven’t given you noob abilities, we’ve given you powerful abilities, and while you still need to learn how to use them there will also be playing guides helping you figure that out.


Tony: Well we used to have 3 game types, now we have 6 ... well, 5 ½ with bloodbath training grounds. We’d certainly love to love more game types, new maps, new abilities, new armour, and all the rest ... but step 1 is to rebuild the community. Which is why this month we’re doing the Fury League qualifying season, so every game people play in the month of May will give them one free game into Fury League proper when it starts in June/July.


Tony: You can download it for free, and you can still buy it retail for US$20.


Tony: Under the new Fury League system, if you buy the retail copy now you’ll get $10 of game gold and a month free subscription. The subscription gives you unlimited games for free, and the game gold means you can buy cool armor or enter into the elite ladders.


Tony: There’s going to be a compensation package for all the existing players. It won’t be a correlation from old gold to new, since previously old gold was used for buying equipment, repairs and abilities, and now they’re all free. So it’s not a 1:1 correlation. But we definitely want to compensate them, keep them on board so they’re still enjoying the game.


Tony: We have Trainz Classics 3 going gold in a week, and that will be about the 17th different version of Trainz that we’ve released.




Tony: I’m pretty sure it’s the 17th. With Classics, we’re concentrating on a single route, and providing a whole lot of scenarios for that particular route. Our core audience is over 250,000 registered members on the website, not all active of course. The age demographic for Trainz is amazing though – I’ve met peoples fathers who I’ve mentioned that I make video games and they say ‘The only game I ever play is Trainz’, and I say ‘We made that!’. So it’s really expanded, there’s a lot of hobbyists that have got into that. It’s a steady old war horse, and we’ve sold over a million units of all the various editions all around the world in a dozen languages.


Tony: Exactly, and we realize that not everyone is into competitive gaming, although Fury is niche as well – although a much bigger niche.


Tony: Yup, Battlestar Galacta on Xbox Live was released late last year, a pretty busy time of the year. It was number one on Xbox Live for the first couple of weeks, but again, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and Sierra realized that their biggest mistake was not calling it something like ‘Battlestar Fighter Squadron’, as people were expecting something like ‘Battlestar Galacta MMO.


Tony: Well it did pretty well.


Tony: Yes there was, although I have no idea how well that went.


Tony: We have one guy here working on his own little project which is a cool little game called Battlefield Commander, a helicopter/tank game, and we’re looking to get that placed pretty soon on Xbox Live and probably PC as well.

There’s always stuff in the pipeline, but nothing else definitive. The other big thing is we are still negotiating with various Chinese and Koreans for Fury, and looking at different business models for Asia as well.


Tony: Yeah, taking what we’ve got and using that as the basis for their own product.


Tony: We’re alive!


Tony: Well, we’re a small team, but we’re big enough to make sure we can deliver on Fury League. We had 60 guys working for 3 years developing the core game, and once you’ve got the core it’s so much easier to make changes. We’re big enough. We’ll get bigger again.


Tony: We’re just in the process of hiring more QA staff, so if anyone is interested in a job ...




Tony: Well the thing to realize is that no game company is ever rock solid. I mean, EA closed their studio on the Gold Coast 6 years ago, so it doesn’t matter how big the company is, your studio still has to perform and survive. I think it’s just something with the industry, and pretty much all our guys got placed in other jobs in Brisbane very quickly, and the good news is the government scheme has all worked out so most of them are getting all their cheques this week.


Tony: Getting an MMO or even an online game to market requires so much. We had a team of over 60 people, invested millions of dollars, took many years, there’s marketing aspects ... and without going into detail, a lot of planets have to align in order for the project to succeed. We had pretty much an uphill battle all the way because every one of the things that we required was in short supply. Money was in short supply, experienced staff was in short supply, marketing dollars were in short supply, time was in short supply. And ultimately we trimmed where we could trim, and released when we had to release, and in today’s market we didn’t deliver a product that was of sufficient quality to attract a sufficient number of players. And that’s history.

What do you do differently? We didn’t have a track record to get additional funds, and you can’t change that fact. I would have had more funds, more experienced people, more time, more polish, more beta testing ... you know? And even then, look at Hellgate London for example – they had most of those things, and they struggled! And they’ve been there and done that before!

WoW is a phenomenon, and I would say 80% of our players have played WoW, and I would suggest that 60% of them went back to playing WoW after trying Fury. So there is this consuming hobby of WoW that sucks hundreds of hours of time out of your life, and we’re competing for a slice of that time.

You see it on the forums ‘I’ve tried it, now I’m back to WoW’. People try it then they go back to where they’ve invested the majority of their time. And that’s one of the reasons we’ve gone down this Fury League road. I mean, WoW has their competitive stuff as well, but we’re focused entirely on this – this is our niche, so let’s dominate it.



Fury can currently be downloaded for free here. Qualifying matches for Fury League are free for the month of May, with Fury League being available in July. More info at www.furyleague.com