WildTangent wants to bring the arcade to the desktop

WIRELESS CONTROLLER COULD BE IN THE MIX IN BOLD NEW PLAN
by Mke Antonucci
Mercury News

July 15, 2008 — Video-game consoles don't make sense, according to Alex St. John.

Flamboyant and impassioned, St. John is the chief executive of a company that hopes to blur the line between PC and console game-playing and revolutionize the economic model for selling games.

St. John runs WildTangent, a Redmond, Wash., developer and publisher of a wide range of downloadable games for PCs.

He's in the middle of launching a new method of playing games via desktop and laptop computers and has announced some of the key ingredients, including deals for console-brand games from high-profile publishers. Announced so far: THQ and Sierra Online.

Talk within the game industry is that WildTangent's major innovation is a new kind of wireless controller that would operate much like the motion-sensitive remote for Nintendo's popular Wii console. St. John apparently has shown it off to some outsiders, leading to information leaks despite confidentiality agreements.

Asked recently if WildTangent's plans include a new form of game controller, St. John said only, "We're not announcing one yet."

But St. John clearly wants to move past the time when companies must take expensive development risks with consoles while consumers must spend hundreds of dollars for both the console hardware and a collection of $50-$60 retail games that typically are played from start to finish.

The solution, as St. John sees it, is to make gaming through PCs more of a console-like experience and to enable people to spread their money or time over an assortment of games, as if they were at an arcade. WildTangent says a consumer's options will include playing any future WildTangent game in low-price sessions - say, $1 for hours of play at a time - or getting the same session for free when advertisements accompany the game's download.

St. John has dubbed everything he's doing - with hardware, software and session-by-session pricing - as the WildTangent Orb. No one facet of the Orb pops out as revolutionary, but everything together amounts to a unique approach.

Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities, a prominent games industry analyst following the Orb announcements, says St. John's approach is well formulated. "That'll work," said Pachter when asked about luring console gamers to Orb's services.

Heading into the game industry's major business summit - this week's console-focused Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles - WildTangent said it was on the verge of releasing the Orb application, which consumers will download from the company's Web site (www.wildtangent.com) and find featured later in the year on computers from Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba.

When all the features, services and control options of the Orb have been unveiled, the highlights are expected to include:

• Automatic detection of whether the consumer's computer has the necessary processing power to display, download and run specific games in a satisfactory way.

St. John, an ex-Microsoft employee who helped create the DirectX technology that's important to game programming, says the typical PC user is overmatched when trying to install a game. Console games have virtually no installation issues.

"I'm a computer expert," St. John said, "and it has been so much of a problem for me (with PC games) that it's the kind of thing that makes you go out and buy a console like the Wii."

• The ability to connect desktop and laptop computers to TV screens and play WildTangent games with console-like graphics and some existing game controllers, without any need for a keyboard or mouse.

• Not only can that enhance the visual experience, it's crucial to any multiplayer mode that families and friends want to enjoy without crowding around a tiny PC screen.

• A pricing system that allows consumers to sample and repeatedly play big chunks of games in short or long sessions, instead of buying a full game at a retail box price.

Wild Tangent uses a virtual micro-currency called Wild Coins that can be compared to tokens. Consumers can buy them in small or large amounts and spend them in whatever combinations they choose on game sessions (or for full games if they desire).

There's some family utility as well: Children don't have the credit cards for buying the Wild Coins but parents can do the purchasing and then give kids a dedicated amount to spend, just like tokens at an arcade.