IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Lou Castle on InstantAction's Plan to Revolutionize Gaming

Posted August 18, 2010 by James Brightman

Earlier this week, the folks at InstantAction unveiled their first in-house project from the Vegas studio. Surprisingly, this game turned out to be a music/guitar game that leverages users' entire music libraries on the hard drive. At the time of the announcement we hopped on the phone with CEO Lou Castle to talk about the new Instant Jam game, the progress of the InstantAction business, and the state of the industry. Our full Q&A is below. 

IndustryGamers: Give me an overview or update on the InstantAction business now. I know when we met at GDC, you guys were preparing to unveil the whole new model and soon afterwards you launched with Monkey Island on the platform. Where does the business stand now, when can we expect to hear about more games, not just from yourself, but in terms of actual publishing deals?

Lou Castle: The winter launch of Monkey Island we obviously went public with the downloadable and the e-commerce system, so it was really great. We learned a whole lot about working with publishers, and we’re really thankful to Lucas for being the first in the door, as it were. We learned a lot more about how our service is working and where we needed to look to kind of double down on things. In fact, now since that point in time, we are very close with a number of publishers, but we’re sort of gated by how many of these individual products and individual publishers we can turn on at once. Obviously with our own game coming out, we kind of put things on hold while we put out Instant Jam. Originally, Instant Jam was supposed to be more like a traditional virally grown game, but we’ve had such interest from people that have great web traffic to have the game embedded that we want to be absolutely certain that things are going to turn out properly.

That actually is one of the things that is preventing us from announcing new publishers is that we want to be sure we can scale the downloads for their products as well. You’ve probably heard that before with online services, that scale is an important issue, and that’s something we don’t want to screw up. That’s kind of where we’re at right now; we’re at this point where we’re just doing scaling tests with the platforms and we’ll be putting out Instant Jam and shortly thereafter we’ll be doing titles from the Play Greenhouse deal that we announced at E3. As soon as we have millions and millions of people playing, and we can demonstrate the hard data, I imagine we can announce our publishing partners.

IG: Are you guys still working with Gaikai? Seems to me that the whole Gaikai integration isn’t going as planned with InstantAction.

LC: I would say it’s not going as planned because we don’t have the product that needs the Gaikai service on our service yet, but I would say it is going to plan in the sense that we do have our agreement with them and we fully intend to continue that agreement in place. They are just ready to launch their service as a paid service for third parties; I think you know their business model. We don’t really have the product that really needs Gaikai. Instant Jam is a 50 or 60-megabyte game, and it only has to download 5 megabytes before it starts. It still uses the InstantAction technology, but 5 megabytes is so short that trying to do something with Gaikai wouldn’t make a lot of sense on that; same thing with Monkey Island where we only need about 10 or 15 megabytes. So as soon as we have one of our bigger publishing partner's products that’s going to take a good 15 to 20 minutes to download on a typical connection, that would be our first Gaikai integration. If you recall, Gaikai is not really our standard mode of operation; it's more the thing we would like to use to get people into the game immediately if it is a really big download.

IG: So let’s actually talk about your new game, Instant Jam. My first question would be why the music genre? That is a genre that, at least from the retail side, has seen big declines. The Rock Band and Guitar Hero games over the last year or so have really declined in terms of consumer interest and sales have been waning. So what is it about Instant Jam that makes you believe that suddenly the music games genre will see a big revival?

LC: Well, a couple of things. We’ve been paying very close attention to the market. The reason we chose to do music game in the first place is because it has all the right components to show off many of the things that our service offers. Because of the idea that we had for Instant Jam, which took some time to make sure we could implement properly, was to use your music library that is on your PC, it makes perfect sense for us to build a game that uses peripherals; of course, the InstantAction platform allows PC games to run natively so you can use peripherals. It also accesses your hard drive, because you already have a music library there, and it also uses 3D in a way that is very attractive, but isn’t like Call of Duty where you have to have bleeding edge hardware. It has all of the components that we wanted to have for a title that would launch on our platform because it would exercise our platform. It has the ability to scale to millions and millions of users because it has a wide range of appeal.

I also believe that the reason the retail market has waned off a bit is that the games now focus on individual bands. It doesn’t matter how big the band is – I happen to love Green Day, but not everyone does. As Rock Band goes into focusing on bands like The Beatles or Green Day, there are some people that just aren’t interesting in that particular music. The downloadable content in their case, you can at least buy it on their platform, you get to buy a song to play, but I don’t really get to have it, I don’t get to own it; it just feels that the price point is really high, so you're starting to see a little bit of leeriness on the side of consumers... So our model's clearly different. It uses a player's exitsing library and it also offers the opportunity for somebody to go out and buy a song that they discover through the game. We’re also free, which is nice. In a place where people are selling you games for 70 or 80 bucks with 60 songs in it, we’re going to have thousands of songs for free. So we feel like that is a pretty compelling consumer benefit, and obviously you know, because it’s mass marketed, across multiple platforms, it uses our technology on many, many fronts. So that’s kind of the long answer here to your question.

It's also not a small piece of the business; it was estimated at $1.8 billion in 2008 and at $1.3 billion at 2009, so it's still a massive, massive piece of business. I don’t know about you, but whenever I go to parties, whenever I see these plastic guitars and I see people picking them up and playing them all the time, they are just done playing the same songs that they’ve played before, and it just takes a long time to get the next 60 coming out. I just think this is going to revitalize that whole genre, because it will be allowed to grow very, very rapidly. And frankly, there's a lot of music people haven’t been able to play before. We have a lot of country, we have ska bands, we have all kinds of stuff that’s covered, that’s supported that you’re just never going to get a chance to play; there are just some bands that will never ever do a music game, so this way kind of opens up and democratizes the whole thing.

IG: I asked you last time if you were still personally doing game development in addition to being CEO. Is this game something you are personally working on, or are you just overseeing this from afar?

LC: Yeah, this is definitely an in-house developed product and I’ve contributed to this as well, especially conceptually from the early days. I’ve been running around trying to run the business side of things as the CEO, so I’m certainly not up to my elbows in it like I’d like to be. Our team is always commenting on the fact that I will come around and I’ll be giving very detailed artistic feedback or very detailed game design feedback and work user flows, and I still contribute as much as possible in that way. It’s really Amir [Rahimi's] group that runs everything. He’s really good about calling in and saying “ok, we really like your experience in this place, can you share it?” And they give me a presentation and I walk through it and give them my feedback. Of course, I’m playing the game and giving my feedback from that. So I would say I’m involved, more so than other CEOs would be for sure, but not to the level where I’m actually programming.

IG: In the press announcement, you mention the note charts and having support for thousands upon thousands of songs out there, but how can that really well designed or accurate? Can your team create these note charts for literally thousands and thousands of songs? The Rock Band guys the Guitar Hero guys have dedicated teams to create these intricate note charts, whether it’s for the drums or the guitar or the bass or whatever... 

LC: That’s a very fair question... We are hiring a lot of people that worked on Guitar Hero and Rock Band stuff. The team that did the Van Halen Guitar Hero, we've hired them and they have done quite a few [charts for us]. Our tools are a lot easier to use, and allow you to create high quality note charts to support songs much, much more rapidly. From the beginning we’ve conceived of the tools as something we would need to be able to make something widespread, to cover the 10 million plus songs that are in the potential music library, if it’s out there. So for us, it was a design imperative to make tools to empower people to make tracks very, very quickly with very little training as a musician. You certainly have o have some game design savvy, so we have actually hired lots and lots of game designers to score musical tracks. If they have a music backgrounds, that’s much, much better because they kind of understand some nuance, but at the end of the day note charts are really a game design problem, not a music problem. You’re not trying to sort of faithfully reproduce the fingering of a song; what you’re trying to do is give someone that feeling that they are playing a guitar or a playing a song or playing along. Give them that feeling, but they are really playing a game. The note charts themselves, the rhythm tapping, how you make it more difficult, less difficult, how you move the frets around, is really an independent game design exercise. In fact, you can play with the music off to validate that comment. Good note charts are fun to play, even without music, and bad note charts are not fun to play, even with music. They just don’t feel right, is the best way I can say it. So to answer your question, the simple answer is that we’ve hired a lot of people to chart, and our tools are much more effective. Unlike Rock Band and the most recent band series from the Guitar Hero guys, we’re not trying to support four instruments. Right now, we’re just trying to cover one instrument, and that already cuts our problem to one quarter, and that actually allows us to create charts many, many times faster and we’re hiring a lot of people to create them. We’ve been at this game for a year; it’s not like we just now started it. 

IG: So from the licensing standpoint, do you guys have to worry about that? You’re not selling the songs, you’re selling charts that are going to adapt to whatever people have in their own music libraries, so you don't actually have to pay licensing fees?

LC: No, we don’t have to pay licensing fees for several reasons. What you've just said is right. The person who owns the song presumably has bought it legally, so they have the right to play the song in the background while they are playing the game. As I just stated, the game does charts. The note charts are created by game designers to be fun experiences that are intended to be played with a particular piece of music in the background, or it could be with alternate pieces of music within the game; you can choose a song that was not the one the chart was intended for. Sometimes it’s a great experience, sometimes it is not, but it is certainly something you can do. Each of the note charts currently offer four difficulty levels, but there will be multiple versions of charts as well. There’s multiple charts that map the song and multiple songs that map the charts. So it’s clear that the game design of playing the rhythm game is independent of the music that you are playing.

We are also very careful and very strong advocates of money going into the music industry. Instead of us charging $3 and paying a fee up front for a particular song, we are actually promoting the sales of songs. Of that $1.3 billion from the music games, I guarantee you most of that did not make it to the music industry; most of it went to the gaming industry. So, we literally push people to buy songs over at Amazon and iTunes; hopefully at some point we’ll have our own retail store soon, but for the time being it’s Amazon and iTunes. So, that 70 cents of every purchase or 70% of every purchase that goes to the music industry is already worked out with those retailers. So we’re doing it really differently than those other guys. Our model is more about free play, accessing your own music and motivating people to discover music and purchase music in a new way.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.