I also do occasional press tours when marketing needs representatives from the development team and when none of the others are available.

Jonric: What were the most important lessons you learned during the development of AO? And what did you learn from other online worlds during this same period?

Tommy Strand: I think the most important lessons I have learned during the development involve how to deal with community and press. We had no extensive experience in this area before we started releasing information on Anarchy Credits and have paid the price in many areas and opened door in others. From playing other online games and talking to the developers of the other online games, I've learned and experienced how important it is to have a well established community within the games and this will very much influence the development of the next generation online titles I do.

Jonric: What are the major changes and advances you see happening within the persistent online world category over the next year or two?

Tommy Strand: I think that with some of the new titles hitting the market in 2002 and 2003 we will start seeing new types of customers entering the online scene. I know that mass market has become a bleached word used to hype publishers into dumping money into your product, but games like Star Wars Galaxies has the potential to bring in a lot of people that would not normally be drawn to online games and establish enough drive in the non-online gamer and non-gamer market to boost the overall market.

Jonric: Let's extend this time frame to the next five years or so. What evolutionary or revolutionary developments do you think we'll see? And what kinds of changes would you like to see?

Tommy Strand: I think as more and more games start hitting the market and the base becomes larger that the games will start to focus more on niches. Newly announced titles will not be promising "What everyone else has plus everything else", but focus on core elements that will be cheaper to develop and only covers a targeted section of the market. I also expect that we will see more marginally multiplayer online games as opposed to the massive. With this I mean that the massive is still in place to cater the larger community while the world is split into more partly isolated sections where players don't drown in the masses of people and more tight relationships can be formed. This is not because of technology because I predict that largely distributed architectures and super high end hardware will be everyday things for all these games, but the players need to feel special and it is hard to make people feel special when there are 10k other people around you.

Jonric: Do you think the size of the audience for online worlds will grow quickly enough to support all the games that are being developed? What are the main factors that will drive market expansion?

Tommy Strand: I do think the online audience will grow dramatically over the next few years, but I do not think it will be enough there for everyone. If the games in development now all hit the market at about the same time, I predict that 80% will fail off the bat. The others will compete with established companies that are already launching their second generation products. Some will obviously make it and make it good because there are a lot of very talented developers out there. The problem will come down to who has the most marketing buck. It does not always matter if you have the superior game engine or the superior game if nobody knows about it. We have seen it time and time in the game industry where great games do not get the air time they deserve.