According to Meier, ”I think (my name) probably does not carry the same cachet in the mobile market that it might in PC. What we’re seeing is that a lot of those core players are getting iPads or they have their phones and are looking for things to do that have the strategy element and the gameplay of some of the games they are used to on PC or console. That’s really kind of the market we’re going after, the player who is looking for strategy but they can’t take their PC with them everywhere.”
Meier thinks that free-to-play gets a bad rap as well, because PC gamers for a long time associated “free” with “demo”. ”There is a lot of suspicion attached to the free-to-play label. The way that we look at it is on PC for a long time we had the demo and purchase model where you can download a demo for free and play it for a certain amount of time or to a certain point and get a feel for whether you like the game or not. Then if you like it you’ll go ahead and purchase the full game,” he noted.
He then admitted, ”Building monetization into your game design is not a totally comfortable thing; we really don’t want to get into a situation where the two are in conflict, where to make my game more fun I would do this and to make my game earn more money I have to do this. I’m looking for places where those two are in agreement.”
Meier is not abandoning PC gamers, he insists. Instead, he’s trying to attract the core audience to mobile platforms while Firaxis continues to serve the PC gamer.
”It really depends on the idea that I’m excited about and where I can bring it to life most effectively. I could see myself doing a PC game next or a mobile game or console game; it’s really not platform driven. It’s more idea driven and where that’s going to work best. As a company, Firaxis is committed to PC - that’s been our bread-and-butter and where a lot of our audience is - but we’re interested in console and we’re interested in iOS. As our players evolve and move and embrace new technologies, we’re going to meet them there. So to me, it’s not platform driven, but it’s about how a game comes to life most effectively,” he stated.
Don’t count on Kickstarter being in Meier’s future, however, because it lacks flexibility. ”You’ve got to convince people to support it and create trailers or whatever it takes to get the support. I think you kind of lock yourself into a lot of ideas early,” he described, ”I really enjoy the luxury of changing my design and evolving over time. I’d be a little concerned with Kickstarter if I committed to X, Y and Z and I found out down the road that Z didn’t work very well, I kind of promised to do this. I think it’s great for people who want that indie environment, but there are advantages and disadvantages to each situation.”
