NBA 2K15 MyGM To Distance Itself From VC, Be More Dynamic

The Return of the Comeback Kid: The Visual Concepts Interview
by Matthew Kato
POSTED: 4/23/2007 4:43 PM

When Electronic Arts snatched up the NFL license and basically everything surrounding NFL football you could hear the collective 2K football fans crying in pain. The rivary between EA Sports and 2K Sports was dead. That is, until now. Exclusive to Game Informer Unlimited is the full transcription of our interview with Visual Concepts President Greg Thomas. We get the details on the complete history of All Pro Football and 2K’s goals with this game.

Game Informer: Obviously you lose the license and I was talking to Jeff [Jeff Thomas’s brother and VC’s Vice President of Sports Development] and the guys were immediately into thinking of all the different possibilities. I guess just talk about your thoughts at that time.

Greg Thomas: That was a rough time! We had to kind of reset. We had to really think about everything and what we were going to do. Everybody here thought about it. We talked. We had so many meetings. It all came back to one thing, which was, it’s all about the game of football. It’s all about the game that we made in 2K5. It’s about getting that back. We had so many e-mails from people who bought the game. We still have forums today. People play that game all the time. They’re always updating their rosters and just try to make it the most current game they can. They say it’s still the best football game. Those are the people we’re trying to please with this game. That’s what it’s all about. It’s putting aside the licenses and it’s making a real football game. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to do anything crazy, weird, some kind of little hook here or there. It is absolutely our football engine. The best we can make it. Again, it’s all about football.

GI: Would you guys go after the license in 2010 when their deal expires and you guys can get back in again. Would you guys do that?

Thomas: Absolutely. We would do it if it made sense to do it. This is not us putting our nose up to the NFL or something. This is about making a football game because we believe in the sport of football whether we have NFL with us or not. Would we prefer to have the NFL? Yeah, it’s a huge license, of course we would. But, everything is at a cost. If it’s so expensive to make a game that we can’t financially afford to make the game based on a license, then no, we’d rather not have it. And that’s kind of what we’re doing here. We’ll see how people like it. Again we think that, when we’re done, this thing is going to be the best playing football game. That’s what we’re shooting for.

GI: You have fans still playing 2K5 and you have a new direction you haven’t unveiled yet. Is there any danger that there might be an insurmountable mountain of hype that you guys might not be able to overcome because of the romanticism of the franchise?

Thomas: I was pleasantly surprised after we announced All Pro Football how many people were really excited about it. I was thinking, “It’s been a while now, maybe it’s really calmed down.” I was really surprised by how many people were excited about it. Since then how many people asked questions about it and wanted to know more about it and can’t wait for it and know it’s going to be the best football game out there when it ships. People really behind us. So I think there’s a lot more of that then I thought there would be.

But it’s still been a while since that really has happened. Still, a lot of things have changed. We have new platforms out there now. A lot of things have changed. It’s been bigger than I thought it would be.

GI: Because, it’ll be a situation where, for a lack of a better phrase, they’ve come back down to Earth because in a sense that they’ll actually have a product that they’ll have to criticize or look at or there will be things that they’ll test you on. Like instead of them romanticizing the good ole’ days they’ll actually have one of your products that they’ll have to run through the paces or find things that they don’t like.

Thomas: I think that we really look forward to that. As long as they’re understanding that it starts with not having an NFL license, because that’s what we’re building. We’re building a football game and as long as they start with the idea and they treat it fairly across the board, that that’s what this is. Then that’s exactly what we expect from everybody. We’re building a football game and we expect to be judged on quality of the A.I. and the animation and the visuals and the sound and all the things that we’ve been known for, that’s what we’re expecting. And we’re not sure how everyone is going to take it. I look at this as this is definitely a more hardcore game. When I think about who’s going to buy this game I think that “is this going to be people looking for their Madden fix? Are people looking for their NFL fix? Their football fix?” This to me is people looking for their football fix, obviously. They may also purchase Madden, they may also play some other football game. But, it’s about playing the best one, playing the one that hopefully they like so much as 2K5. This is not just 2K5 redux either -- this is a brand new game. It really is us trying to make the best football game we can make. There are always going to be things you can do more, and better or you can innovate and this and that. We’re not going in the direction of trying to do something totally crazy. We’re trying to make the best football game we can based on the game that we made before.

GI: Because I can imagine for casual fans, that will be the hardest thing to do. They see the thing on the shelf, “What’s All Pro Football?” I don’t know who the Tigers are or whatever the teams are going to be. Is that something you guys are going to attack just on the marketing end? How are you guys going to overcome that? How are you going to overcome feeling the need for a license?

Thomas: We cannot over come that. That is not something we can overcome. There are things that we are going to do - and we have not talked about that yet - that we think are very “football centric things.” But, generally speaking, this is not an NFL game. That’s where it starts. Right there. It’s going to be obvious to people and it’s the first jumping off point when playing our football game. It’s not an NFL game, it’s a football game. This is a very football centric game. But you’re not going to get an NFL license with this game. You can think about what that means negatively but instead of what we’ve done is we’ve thought about what that means positively. And not just in the way of, “Oh, now you can swear. Oh now you can do this.” We’ve thought about it and what it means in a positive sense for a football fan.

GI: Is this kind of retooling as a whole for the game also a way you can possibly introduced a non-yearly cycle to sports games?

Thomas: I don’t want to say we haven’t thought about that because we’ve thought about a lot of things. I don’t think that we’re trying to go into an annual or bi-annual kind of cycle. We’ve got a lot of different ideas, and this is one where we want to see how it goes. There’s a lot of ways to do it and this is one of the ways. We think this is the right way to go but we just won’t know until we see how the sales are.

But again, we think it all starts with the engine. Even if there was another hook or something else that we were going to do the next time it would still all be based around this football engine, that we here, just love. We here can not play enough of it. We here believe in it so much. I’ve gotten all of these e-mails and I’ve read all of the forum posts and all of these things that you cannot get in a football game today. That’s what everything is based on for us.

GI: Do you guys have any interest in developing for the Wii?

Thomas: We are in development for the Wii. But, not this game, per say, but we are developing other games for the Wii, and we really like the Wii. You’re asking if this game makes sense on the Wii?

GI: What about the NBA or MLB? These games are very complex games that have a lot of different facets to them. Would it be a situation where you just unveil a different line with a different focus for the Wii?

Thomas: I think it’s easy to fall into the, “Oooh, Wii is a kids machine or Wii is the motion game machine or something, and let’s keep it simple.” We just wouldn’t want to do it that way. We build simulation sports games. Would there be some new wrinkles? Of course there would. We wouldn’t just want to bolt on new control, but we would definitely want to take those people on the Wii and have them enjoy the same experience we’re giving to people not on the Wii. Just make sure that as we go, it really uses their machine in the best way we can. Whether if we’re using Miis or whatever it is just making sure that it holds true to our experience and it gives them what they’re looking for. And those to me can align. But they’re not always the simple, “hey, just make it simpler, take out the franchise mode, or this and that.” It’s not like that. I think we need to give a little bit more respect to that market.

GI: What about the PSP? You had a PSP game last year. How do you see the handheld market? PSP and DS are two pretty different things.

Thomas: We’ve got baseball on the PSP. You know, it’s a matter of resources for us. It’s a matter of where can we really afford to make these games? The DS is something we haven’t gotten so involved with and I wish we would have earlier. We could be looking at doing more stuff on that. But again, the development is so different between all of these machines that it takes a lot of focus. Individual focus per platform, now to do something right, not just putting something out. That’s tough. That takes a lot of effort and a lot of resources. And we’ve only got so many resources, and you’ve got to be really smart on where you put them.

GI: Do you expect the people who buy APF to mainly be the hardcore fans, or do you see this as even sort of drafting off of Madden in a sense that, people might buy Madden because they want NFL but that same consumer you hope is going to buy your game for a different experience?

Thomas: Well, the number one [person who’s going to buy the game] is fans of our franchise, our game, and our game engine. #2 are people who want a good football game. So whether they buy another football game or not, they also want ours. And #3, is really people who just want to play a f-----g game. Our focus is just the first two. It’s a sim game. It is aimed at the hardcore football user. And it is something that we expect if you’re going to buy another football game you’re going to read the reviews of our football game, you’re going to see our game, and you’re going to say, you know what? I need to check that out. And that’s really what we are looking for.

GI: You’ve changed your pricing up with NFL 2K5 and you had the World Series version around the MLB playoffs with different pricing. Do you foresee being able to do some of that? Is there a restriction from the first party console makers at all? What kind of freedom do you have to change the price of your games?

Thomas: The whole idea with all of our licensing agreements is to be a partner with them. We work together with each of them to try and figure out what makes most sense. So I don’t want to say we’re limited or we don’t want to try this or try that. We’ve tried a lot of things in our time, and we’ll continue to try more things in our time. But we would only do it with our partners with them being with us. Because it never makes sense when you’re working with someone to do something that is half-believed in or whatever. You want to make sure you have the support of everyone behind you and that’s what we’ll do.

GI: When Madden came out for the next-gen, as well as even last year, they got dinged because they dropped a bunch of features. When I was talking to Jeff he said we’re not approaching this as this is 2K5 and then we’re just going to step into the new football game as if nothing ever happened because maybe some feature sets don’t make it. Madden got dinged for not having a certain amount of features. Do you expect the same thing to happen to your football game, even though the focus maybe different from 2K5? Do you think the criticism is going to come out and say, “We’re getting less”?

Thomas: The reason why they would get dinged is because they had something that made sense and then they took it out. We have a different product. If we have something that was in 2K5 that doesn’t make sense for All Pro, I don’t think we’re going to get dinged for it because it doesn’t make sense anyway. You know what I mean? If we have something that does make sense for it and isn’t in there, then I think we should get dinged for it. Our intent is to deliver something that makes sense for the consumer in every way.

This is different and unique and cool and it’s not that they’re missing something because there’s nothing to miss because it shouldn’t have been there anyway. Whereas when you’ve got something like NBA we get really concerned about taking something away from someone and we don’t want to do it. We never want to take something away from someone. We always want to add to it. Again it comes down to focus, it comes down to resources, and what can you do best. It really is about your resources and putting your focus on what you believe in most. Sometimes those are really tough decisions to make, but we’ve done our best.

GI: From a different angle, you have the exclusive MLB third party license. Can you talk about your experience with that as far as how it’s maybe helped you with the baseball franchise or has that whole thing stayed the same? It’s kind of a similar situation where it’s an exclusive license, but it’s different because it’s a third party license.

Thomas: I think that in general, we’ve made this clear, we don’t believe that exclusive licenses are the way to go anyway. Given that, and given the situation that we’re in, the MLB, and MLBPA have been great partners for us. We’ve been working with them closely and as exclusively as we are gives us a lot of benefits. With MLB2K7 we’ve tried to build the game that is indicative of the kind of relationship we have. From a baseball standpoint we’ve come a long way from 2K6 to 2K7. Our plans for 2K8 are incredible and so much more. There’s just no letting up. There’s so many things that are going to happen as we go forward in time with the game including new ideas entirely around baseball and that kind of stuff. Yes, we are really taking that relationship and making it all we can, but again we think that it’s a better place to be with non-exclusivity.

GI: Do you see the NBA going either way or staying on their own?

Thomas: I think publicly they’ve made it clear that they expect to go non-exclusive. They’ve made that decision and they’re proud of their decision. I think if you look at NBA sales this past year between all of the products, they’ve increased around, and happily we’ve increased our share among those. We really feel great about our basketball game and the NBA feels really great about our basketball game, as well.

GI: In the area of downloads in sports games, we’re used to the roster updates, and obviously there’s tournaments with online, but with other genres it’s easier to do expansion packs. Do you see anything with the future of sports games in how things could be approached differently than they are now?

Thomas: There are so many things you can do differently and so many reasons to do things differently. We haven’t announced anything and I really don’t want to talk to much about the details but that space is wide open. There’s reasons to change the way the things are done right now. The successes we’ve had with services such as Xbox Live are just kind of testament to what services consumers are looking for.

We’ve done what everyone else has done with demos, and trailers, but we’ve done something with NBA and NCAA College Hoops with the Reel Maker that was really successful. That is basically adding a whole new feature to the game. A feature that isn’t available in the packaged game came after the game was done and attaches to that game. And that’s done well and I think that can be expanded upon as we go.

There’s other angles to take it to. The games should work together better. These games are so separate. Not just packaging wise, but the way you play them, and see them and everything. They should work better together. I think we were pretty excited about what Sony showed at GDC with Home. That stuff is definitely exciting.

GI: Do you have any ideas on how you would integrate your game into Home?

Thomas: Lots. We don’t know much about what Sony’s going to allow or what it can do. But just looking at the videos that they’ve put out and talking to them a little bit about it, it definitely appeals to us. We’ll be able to mix in pretty well with what they’re doing and we’ve got some pretty unique ideas on putting our product in Home and not just in a, “Go to the NBA room.” Putting it in Home in a more substantial way. It’s early, but it’s also exciting, because it’s something that’s new and different and I think that consumers are really going to like it.

GI: Is your work on Fantastic Four the first step in starting to do more non-sports stuff?

Thomas: As long as we’ve been around we’ve always wanted to do, and have done, non-sports games. Whether it’s Clay Fighter or whatever. But with next-gen it’s been really difficult to line up something that we felt really good about from a license standpoint, or from a concept stand point. Knowing we had a team that could do it that we weren’t going to fall into a situation where, “Oh you’re kicking guys off sports to do this one.” We wanted to make sure we had everything in place before we did it.

Fantastic Four for us is our way of putting something out there that’s not a sports game but uses a lot of our technology that we’re really proud of. Making Hollywood licensed games is a tough business. It really is tough. But Fantastic Four is technically, visually a really really great game. Gameplay wise it’s going to be simpler, because it’s got to appeal to a wide audience. But it’s going to be fun. That’s been our goal. But beyond that we really intend to continue down that road. Continue to grow. Also since we really put out a non-sports game, the market has kind of grown and changed with a lot of these kinds of things. We need to make sure we’re really clearly giving consumers what they expect in that market as well as sports.

GI: Do you think those will be more licensed based or new IPs that you drum up in house.

Thomas: New IP is really tough. It’s so difficult to say what makes more sense. You know, from a lot of standpoints, if you can get a license with the right timing to make a good enough game, that makes a lot of sense for us. But if you can develop new IP where you know you have people who are going to want to play it, and you know you have a great budget behind it, that makes a lot of sense.

Our intent is really to take baby steps, because that’s what we have always done as a company. We’ve tried something and grow a little bit from there. Take a chance here. Little by little, not try a bunch of stuff over night, which is what a lot of other companies do where over night you’re hiring 100 people or something. We’re really trying to take steps. I don’t think we’re going to knock it out of the park with the first one, it’s got to be something we feel really good about. It’s got to be solid growth for us. We never want to be pigeon-holed into one thing. There’s a lot of talented people here who don’t just want to make sports games, or don’t want to make sports games all the time, or what have you. They want to switch around and get different feels. It’s really about working with those people and coming up with things that work on both sides. And that’s what we’ve done with Fantastic Four. A lot of our focus ends up being on sports. We love sports. We believe in it. We think we offer something that’s different and fun and higher quality than other people are offering, we want to ultimately do that with everything we do. But it’s been a while since we’ve done something other than sports.

GI: Did Activision just drop the license? Was it just open for the taking?

Thomas: I don’t know what happened with the license standpoint. We had been looking for licenses for a long time and we had been talking with Marvel on a number of different things and it just came together and we’re really happy. Some of the things that we have kind of seen in the movie and such is exciting. We’re excited about it. We really are.