Pearl Abyss America CEO Talks About MMO Trends, Business Models, And The Success Of Black Desert Online
Only a few games have managed to retain a solid foothold in the cutthroat world of MMORPGs. Pearl Abyss’ Black Desert Online is one of those games. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Pearl Abyss America CEO Jeonghee Jin talks about the game’s success, the fierce competition, and the current trends in the MMO genre.
“People's standards and expectations are getting higher and higher because they have experienced a lot of different MMOs by now, and they... want to know what these MMOs can offer in terms of technology, graphics, and the game experience,” she says.
She also says that MMO developers are moving towards different directions. Some opt for big games with all the trappings we’ve come to expect from modern MMORPGs, while others prefer to go for a classic, barebones experience.
“The competition is only getting more fierce, but at the same time when you think of WoW Classic or Old School Runescape doing so well, people have some nostalgia for their initial MMO experience from the '90s or '00s... People's tastes are not just converging to better quality, more convenience features, more degrees of freedom... I think there are also core MMORPG experiences that people kind of miss, so I think there are diverging trends and different things that people are looking for at the same time.”
Jin continues to talk about what it takes to ensure BDO’s survival when other high-profile games have decided to call it quits just a few years after launch. “We put technology as our top priority,” says Jin. “We built our own proprietary game engine just for Black Desert... [. . .] Using our own engine and live service experience, we put a continuous effort to improve the game starting from the launch date... To be honest, we were not really successful with our first launch in Korea, but the team didn't give up. We launched and updated with more content and more patches just hoping to make it better and better.”
Jin also talks about subscription business models versus buy-to-play and free-to-play. “The subscription model will survive, but probably in a little different way, because there is more and more competition between free-to-play games and not free-to-play, whether they are subscription-based or a one time purchase model,” she explains. “So it's going to be hard for them to survive for a long time, but I don't think it's going to be free-to-play versus subscription... I don't think it's one over the other is going to survive and the other is going to die. You just have to have players evaluate whenever they have to pay.”
