BY DESIGN

Chris Klaus' Kaneva Puts the Power to Create MMOs in Your Hands

Ever dreamed of designing your own MMO? Good news: You can officially stop scheming on how to steal all the gold in Fort Knox. With Kaneva (pronounced “Kuh-nee-vuh”), an all new game development platform created by Atlanta start-up Kaneva, Inc., anyone can construct and sell their own massively multiplayer title.

It’s a simple solution, really: the company provides the software toolkit that gets you instantly connected as well as up and running. All you’re responsible for is creating art assets and (if so desired) tweaking artificial intelligence routines, manufacturing quests and coming up with a general theme. Casual admirers can produce individual in-game items and sell goods over an asset marketplace or spend time fleshing out entire universes, then let 30 users play in them concurrently at no up-front cost. Commercial studios can instead buy a user license, allowing them to support thousands of gamers for a fixed monthly fee.

DIY: with Kaneva, anyone can design, construct and sell there own MMOG.

Whichever category you fall into, the possibilities are enormous. Freed from the constraint of having to build or pay for a game engine, anyone can now make their hopes of developing the next Guild Wars a reality. So whether you host everything personally or promote/sell your products through Kaneva.com, the only limit you'll face is your own imagination. Company co-founder and CEO Chris Klaus tells us how it feels to finally give ambitious amateurs the chance to finally show the pros what it's all about:

LQGaming Services:: The first thing everyone wants to know: What uniquely qualifies you to launch a platform like Kaneva that allows users to create their own MMOs?

Chris Klaus: I think it's a couple things. One, it's the crew we've got here. The team we've assembled at Kaneva has a very strong understanding of technology in terms of how to develop very scalable, robust, secure software. That's incredibly important within the area we're focused on, which is the massively multiplayer online space. And from that, we've been partnering with game studios that are providing feedback, giving us ideas on what features we need to add, etc. So we're providing an open platform for these guys to take their vision or dreams and apply it to an engine that would normally be out of the reach of a lot of these small studios. Our business model's very unique in the sense that without any up-front fee you can build a game and launch it from a commercial perspective and start generating money.

LQGaming Services:: Your background's in Internet security of all things. So why launch such a project? Is there a personal reason. do you have a love for gaming, or?

CK:I think when we looked out there at the digital entertainment arena, there was a lot of opportunity out there to help others. We basically just looked at the space and asked ourselves if we could build a platform to help others build their dreams. Kaneva started off with the vision of being a blank canvas. We thought it would be a lot of fun to help build a foundation… Not just work on one game, but help build hundreds or thousands of games.

LQGaming Services:: Who’s really going to benefit the most from this: Small studios working out of their basement or garage or the big boys?

CK: I think if you look at the Kaneva.com model, the biggest benefit to the industry is for the smaller guys. The 5 to 20 person studios, where they have a small team that has a vision for a game, can develop the content without having to spend millions on an engine… With the Internet, we’re starting to see a big shift in terms of how entertainment is being delivered. If you look at music, five years ago, no one believed people would pay for music over the Internet. Now we’ve got iTunes. If a platform’s simple and easy to use, people will use it.

"5 to 20 person studios can ... develop the content without having to spend millions on an engine."

We're starting to see the same things with videogames and MMOs. If you think about it, you'll say, "why wouldn't people start to buy this kind of content over the Internet?" That changes the distribution model entirely - in the past, you had to have access to retail to have a successful game. I think our platform enables you to push games over the Internet and from that, it's really the smaller studios that benefit the most. The barriers are pretty high against them. I think the larger studios will like the technology, but in many cases, they're able to host games themselves. It's the guys in their garage who'll benefit the most.

LQGaming Services:: Let’s say anyone gets the wild hair to become a developer. What sorts of MMO games can they start creating today?

CK: : There’s a whole area within MMOs that really opened up because the engine cost to make them is nominal now. (Meaning there’s no up-front fee.) In the past, if you had to build an MMO engine, it could cost you $5-10 million, and you’d have to try and recoup that. In most cases, you’d have to spend another $5-10 million on content, hoping you’d pay down your costs for the engine and the content itself.

We’ve said, “Look, now you can produce content for a 2000-person game or 5000-person game or a 10,000-person game and still be successful.” Because the studio can keep its costs low, they don’t have as much to worry about in terms of financials, and can take more creative risks. It basically takes less to be successful. And if we can empower hundreds of thousands of these studios to make games, our risks are shared among them.

Within that, it opens up a new market space in terms of casual MMOs. Whereas most MMOs are trying to encapsulate you for years on end, what we’re looking at is producing a lot more, smaller fun games that you can play for a couple of hours. The real value of an MMO is not how big the world is, but how social it is and if you can experience it with friends. If some of the gameplay is a small quest or a mission, it gives people the ability to rapidly produce content.

It also gives rise to an episodic model. So you can make a bunch of small games, get them out there, and keeping adding content. It creates a market that nobody’s targeted yet.

"You can make a bunch of small games, get them out there, and keeping adding content."

CK: You know, it’s interesting: We designed the engine to scale up to a lot of the latest graphic features like normal maps and so on. But the reality – and we’re getting a lot of feedback from the community as well – is that everyone has a different graphics card. And we’re working with a lot of studios to try and come up with a strategy so that if they want the most photorealistic images and graphics in their games they can do it. But it’s a trade-off – not as many people will have the cards needed to play, and performance is decreased if you shoot for the super high-end users. That will work. Or you can scale your game down and keep polygons and details to a minimum and let a lot more people play.

LQGaming Services:: How many people will Kaneva titles be able to support simultaneously?

CK: Hundreds of thousands if needed, just like any other major MMO. And anyone can set a subscription price for their game. A lot of studios have different models for how their titles are priced. Some want to make their MMOs completely free, and we’re OK with that. That kind of model would involve a lot of advergaming [in-game ads]. But subscription models of all sorts are possible as well. In-game item purchases are also a big thing, as you’ve seen in certain Asian MMOs. We’re in the process of enabling options for this as well. Games can be huge, small, value-priced, free, whatever…

Kaneva will be able to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent players, like any other MMO.

LQGaming Services:: What exactly can users create with your engine?

CK: Items as small as individual weapons, creatures or characters, or as big as entire worlds. You can create a tiny room and fill it with objects, or create worlds of about 15-20 square miles in space. And then you can connect other zones. So anyone could over time create a game that’s as large as any of the major MMOs. That’s not even the difficult part: It’s adding enough quests and missions to keep the game fun and engaging. More and more studios we talk to are looking at doing casual games. And by casual, I mean that you can jump in and play the title for 15 or 20 minutes and still have a meaningful and enjoyable time. That you can feel like you’ve accomplished something, not played for 3 months and only found yourself halfway through a quest…

LQGaming Services:: Must all games going to be purchased separately, or do you intend to produce content internally and sell access to a bunch of titles for one fixed fee?

CK: It's in discussion. Initially, a lot of studios want to set their own price. But long-term, we're looking to do things like the cable companies. There will be a basic package, pay-per-view and on-demand content. All those models can definitely come into play.

LQGaming Services:: What’s your ultimate goal with Kaneva?

Kaneva has partnered with over 50 studios which have a game that’s up & running.

LQGaming Services:: How is it possible that you can allow anyone who's so inclined to create something as huge as their own MMO on a lark?

CK: Our goal has basically been to provide a core engine that people can download off our website and video tutorials. We also have a Wiki that includes all information, that's updated daily as we fill in details the community asks for. It's an ongoing process. There's still a lot to be done. But we have over 50 studios right now who have a game that's up and running. None that are ready to launch, though. We've really only just started to provide this software to the marketplace. It's going to take studios and individuals some time to really understand the power of the engine and expand upon it, but the sky's the limit.

LQGaming Services:: Official launch is when?

CK: We haven't set an official date. That depends on the studios and what they've got available that people want to play.

LQGaming Services:: What do you have to reassure people that you're going to be around for a while? Obviously, it would suck to invest a year or two into a game, only to have it disappear if - heaven forbid - you go out of business.

CK: There are a couple things we're doing that are different than a typical publishing deal. Most publishing deals are exclusive - the publisher owns all rights to the intellectual property. In our case, we don't: Studios do. And the 3D models created for most games are very generic. Legally, there are no constraints that tie anyone to Kaneva as well. So if we were to shut down, which I'm sure we won't, they could always take their game somewhere else.

LQGaming Services:: Beyond self-constructed titles like Gorilla Paintball, now available at Kaneva.com, what other games will you be offering in the near future?

"We’re at the very beginning of where this technology can go."

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