Kev Adsett: A hot topic at the moment is that of online passes and single-use codes unlocking segments of the game for players who buy the game brand new. What are your views on this, and do you guys have any similar plans?
Justin Richmond: Yeah, we’re supporting the, what’s it called?
Arne Meyer: Online pass.
Justin Richmond: Online pass system for Uncharted 3, and so what it means is that if you buy the game new, you get a code that you can enter and play the multiplayer online, and so for us, I think we’re offering a huge package, we’re offering a ton of content.
It’s not just some throw away death-match mode, we spent a ton of time developing this stuff. I think we’re offering something that’s completely different from anything else that’s in the industry; our gameplay is really different and really deep and it takes a long time to master.
We give literally thousands of hours of content in our online stuff and on top of that we give you not just competitive, but an entire co-op experience as well. There’s basically a whole alternate history, alternate version story in our co-op, and in this game they’re actually all tied together. All the co-op missions, of which there are even more, are all actually one continuous story, if you play them in the right order.
It’s all that stuff, and so in general, we’re giving out a huge amount of content, and part of the reason for the online pass is that when that stuff goes online, it isn’t free. We have to pay for servers and all this different stuff to maintain it, and so at some point, you know, games have to make money. It is a business, and we just wanna be able to continue to provide that kind of content. If Sony ever comes to us and says “You’re not making enough money on this, you need to cut it” or whatever, that’s not something that we want. We want to be able to maintain the level of quality of the product that we’re giving out.
Arne Meyer: We don’t want to sink the company with bandwidth costs!
Justin Richmond: Yeah exactly, and the other thing is that even if you do buy it used, it’s worth the price of that online pass just to get all that content, because there’s so much stuff. It’s either that or we offer online completely in its entirety also, so we have a complete offline package as well, so if you want to play the co-op with a friend, you can do that offline.
