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KingsIsle Entertainment Marketing Exec Fred Howard Details Who Is Playing Wizard101

This article is more than 10 years old.

KingsIsle Entertainment has a huge global audience of over 25 million players who are devoted to the free-to-play MMO fantasy game Wizard101. While many people may look at the game as just for kids, the player breakdown is actually quite diverse. Fred Howard, vice president of marketing at KingsIsle Entertainment, breaks down exactly who’s playing Wizard101 in this exclusive interview.

How has your studio grown since launch?

We’ve almost doubled in size since launching Wizard101 with about 220 folks on staff currently.  What’s exciting is the growth of more than just the people.  Right now we have five different major initiatives at various stages within KingsIsle. Wizard101 is coming up on its 4th year as a live game and our second major MMO Pirate101 is launching later this year. We have three other major initiatives in the works that comprise a strong pipeline of unannounced projects.

What impact did the success that free-to-play games were having in Asia have on your decision to go that route when launching Wizard101?

Not much, really. At the time Wizard101 launched the FTP model was really looked down on in North America by both the publishers as well as the gamer community. Publishers didn’t want to give up the upfront box sales and gamers held the belief that FTP games were low quality and “cheap” products. We approached the launch of Wizard101 with a completely different viewpoint. We wanted to have the direct relationship with our customers that you can only get distributing your product directly. We also firmly believed that Wizard101 was (and still is) a great game and would sell itself once players tried it so we used the philosophy of getting as many people to try it as possible. The FTP model lends itself to this goal and was also the right fit for our target market. While we have a sizable base of “hard-core” gamers that enjoy Wizard101, the majority of our community is made up of 8-14 year olds and adult “casual” gamers. Our pricing model is much more approachable to this community than having to drop $60 on a box product you may have never tried. On a personal note, I really see the FTP model as a great benefit to the overall gaming community. I believe it actually increases the overall quality of games. If they aren’t top notch people will try them but they’ll fail to convert to financial success.

How have you seen the free-to-play market evolve since Wizard101?

It’s almost come 180 degrees since Wizard101 has launched. We’ve seen a number of MMOs that were launched with the traditional model make the transition to the FTP model including Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online and most recently rumors of Star Wars: The Old Republic. At E3 I was on a panel with Sony Online’s John Smedley talking about the industry’s move to FTP and recently EA’s Peter Moore stated his belief that Free-to-Play is an “inevitability” for all mainstream games. As mentioned earlier I believe this is a great movement for the general gaming market. Games are going to continue to have to increase in quality and entertainment value to compete in this new market.

Can you talk about how successful Wizard101 has been since launch?

We have been thrilled at the explosive growth of Wizard101. At an executive dinner before launch we debated how big we thought Wizard would become. I think we all underestimated its total potential. We’ve had over 25 million players register for Wizard101 based off of the US launch alone. In June we had over 16 million unique visitors to www.Wizard101.com.  According to Compete.com, that makes Wizard101.com the 78th most trafficked website in the US!  That’s out of ALL sites in the U.S. and is something I am particularly proud of as a company achievement.   As a private company we don’t discuss our financials, but I can tell you we are very profitable and that’s with just Wizard101 supporting all of the current projects.

What demographics are playing this game?

Our core audience is 8-12, but we have always approached our products as intended for family entertainment. Our designers have specifically focused on creating games that would be fun for all ages. It all started with Todd Coleman and Josef Hall (VP of Development and co-creator of Wizard101) who both came from a very hard core MMO past. As they matured in their careers they wanted to create entertainment that their children could play. However, we have also benefited from a little selfishness on their parts – they wanted to make games that they would find entertaining as well.  Earlier this year I was asked to speak on two panels at CES.  The first was focused on popular kid-centric properties and it was clear why a member of KingsIsle’s staff would be there. However, the other was a bit more unusual. I was asked to speak on a “Silver’s Panel” that targeted the baby boomer demographic. We actually have a huge audience of baby boomers playing Wizard101 for many reasons. Turn based combat eliminates the need for fast twitch computer skills. Our goal is to make games that are easy to get into and easy to understand, yet still deliver a rich storyline and deep strategic gameplay – this approach seems to resonate well with an older audience.

How have you seen parents play with their kids?

We have a large audience of parents that play Wizard101. We take significant steps to ensure we provide a safe environment for our younger players. However, we also encourage parents to participate with their children’s online activities. We want parents to get in and play Wizard101 so they know the property before they give their blessing to play. It’s amazing to see how many of those parents end up playing with their children in the game. Perhaps it’s even more surprising to see how many of the parents go on and play after the kids go to bed.

On average, what do your gamers pay for micro-transactions for this game?

Wizard101 is free to download and free to play. However, if you think of it as a book, the free to play portion is the first few chapters of the storyline. Players can play these areas as much as they want, create Wizards in all of the different schools and play thru the content. However, our premium content is gated. When creating the payment model for Wizard101, one of our primary goals was to give our customers choice in how they consume content. Players can access the premium content either thru a membership (kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet) or buy buying the zones one at a time for roughly $1-$4 per zone. We also took another unique look at the micro-transaction shop in the game. Players can choose to buy the items, but we also put them in the game as drops or make them craftable so that if players want to commit their time to farm for them instead of buying them…then they have that option as well. For the most part the only items that don’t follow this format are those that let players shortcut the game content.

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