Following the completion of World of Warcraft, several key team members left Blizzard to create a new MMO developer known as Red 5 Studios. Among Red 5's founders are World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, now CEO of Red 5, as well as WoW art director Bill Petras and Blizzard Korea co-founder Taewon Yun. One of the latest of the increasing number of Blizzard spin-off studios, Red 5 managed to create an impressive reputation for itself while still keeping the details of its first game close to its chest. Last year, the team launched a targeted hiring campaign by sending personalized invitations to dozens of hand-chosen game developers, creating one of the most well-covered recruitment drives the games industry has seen. One of the recipients of these invitations was Scott Youngblood, who sports a diverse list of development credits including the lead designer role on Dynamix's Starsiege: Tribes, content creation for Anim-X and EA's ambitious alternate reality game Majestic, and multiplayer design for recent entries in Sony Bend's Syphon Filter franchise. I took some time to chat with Kern and Youngblood about what Red 5 is doing and what the company hopes to achieve.

Shack: People seem to leave Blizzard to found new studios quite frequently. Can you offer any thoughts as to why this is, or what factors contribute?

Mark Kern: I think Blizzard actually has the lowest turn rate of team members for any studio. They retain people for a long time. A lot of us have our five year sword, then if you stay ten years you get a shield, so I think it's a little strange to say a lot of people leave Blizzard. But when they do, it's usually for a change. They want to work on something different. It's like a big university. You get there, you learn a lot about how to make great games, then you get some ideas of your own and you're really eager to try them. I'm pretty happy with the studios coming out of Blizzard; I think they've done really well.

Shack: So what was the change for you with your development at Red 5?

Mark Kern: Well, we're really moving out of the fantasy RPG space, as we've said before. We're not really discussing what we're doing, but we saw that World of Warcraft broadened the market for these kinds of games. There are a lot of gamers now who understand why it's cool to play a persistant universe, why it's cool to play online with other people, and I think they need new experiences if we're going to keep growing this market and create experiences that cater to them.

Shack: What are your thoughts on the perceived oversaturation of the MMO market? Some developers have noted that World of Warcraft has been a significant boon to their subscriber bases rather than a harmful competitor, provided their games are clearly distinct enough from WoW.

Mark Kern: Oh, I think everyone's going to see beneficial numbers as long as they're not trying to be World of Warcraft because, really, that game does it really well, and why would you play anything else? If you're going to compete with Blizzard, you're going to have to spend a whole bunch of money, and a whole bunch of development time. I think what's more interesting is that, as you said, it kind of floats all boats. Now, this other vista is opening up, and people really want this persistence in their games, and they're looking for how to get it. Games like EVE, for example, I think benefit from World of Warcraft definitely.

Shack: How did you guys end up with publisher Webzen, and what was behind that decision?

Mark Kern: Well, you know, I think Asia is just ahead of the game in terms of seeing this as a huge market. I think that, in Asia [outside Japan] it's pretty much the dominant form of gaming. Every game has online and persistence of some kind, and they don't really play boxed games. What we found was, everybody was kind of caught by surprise by World of Warcraft's success, and when we talked to US companies, they were just getting started with their initiatives. They would ask us to come on board and maybe help jump-start their program, but we didn't really want that. We did that before, building it from ground zero with Blizzard, but we wanted to focus on the content and the new ideas, and really leave sales and marketing and other operations to an experienced partner. What makes Webzen really interesting is that they are total gamers. The CEO is a gamer, he was the art director for MU Online, one of the most successful MMOs in Asia. They totally get the concept of these games, and they're willing to try new things.

Shack: Do you think North American and European gamers are going to become better acquainted with the Webzen name? We've seen a couple more Western-targeted games announced with them but most of those are still in development.

Mark Kern: Yes. I think that Webzen's strategy is a little different from, say, NCsoft. I think NCsoft is making a lot of bets, a lot of small bets to try to get a huge portfolio of online games out there. Webzen almost takes the Blizzard approach--taking it slow and steady, concentrating on a few good teams, backing them as much as we can, giving them the freedom to explore the genre and to do a polished game. That approach is something that interests us a lot more than the NCsoft approach.

Shack: When you talk about Webzen and its presence in the Asian market, do you yourselves have designs on the Asian market? We've seen a few Western games adapt themselves later to the Asian market, and some Asian games come over here later. Are you going to go for a more worldwide appeal from square one?

Mark Kern: I read some stuff about Red 5, and people say, "Oh, you're making an Asian game," and I think they miss the point. One of our strengths is that we have the ability and the understanding to make a game from the start to appeal worldwide. That's very important when you're talking about games on the scale and cost of a world-class MMO. I don't think that you can think about your own market first then try to adapt it. That doesn't lend itself to succeeding in those other markets. WoW was the first one that was built from the ground up to accomodate Asia as well as the West. That doesn't mean making an Asian game. It's sort of like how people here like to read manga. If Japan started exporting US-style comic books to here, I don't think they'd call that manga, and it wouldn't be very popular. Same thing with us trying to make an Asian MMO. What you want to do is make a Western MMO--because they like those games--that is, from an aesthetic and a mechanical standpoint, compatible with how they play those games and offers things that they like to do.

Shack: I don't know how much of this you consider outside of MMOs, but do you think that worldwide cross-compatibility will become more crucial to the games industry as a whole?

Mark Kern: Well, you know, you've got about half of WoW subscribers in China. I think that's very telling. Can you ignore that? Is that going to stay only in online games? I don't think so. If you're a publisher--well, I talk to publishers, Western publishers, and they say their goal is to be the number two or number three worldwide publisher in 2008. My next question is, "Then what's your online strategy for Asia?" and they say, "We don't really have one." They haven't found the right boxed games that will succeed there. That shows me that people have their blinders on, they aren't paying attention to this as a worldwide market. As games become interconnected, and as players become interconnected, it absolutely has to become part of your strategy.

Turn the page for Scott's recollections of receiving a Red 5 recruitment invitation.