Artix At CES 2007
Meeting with videogame publisher and developer Artix – online RPG in Flash
Tags: CES 2007 Categories: Features, PC Features
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Jan 10th, 2007
Artix Entertainment LLC, based in land O Lakes, Florida, is a small office run by Adam Bohn, the founder. It operates primarily two games, Adventure Quest and Dragon Fable which are two Flash based RPGs. Adventure Quest started 4 years ago with Dragon Fable having launched approximately 5 months ago. Originally 2 people, there are now 32 employees on the payroll, which does include some contractors.
Over the last 4 years there have been over 25 million unique accounts created for Adventure Quest, with anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 players at a time currently. Adventure Fable has enjoyed similar success upon its launch, currently up to 25,000 or so can be found playing it simultaneously.
The business model was originally planned to not have any advertising, as well as having a free to play game. This of course doesn’t bring any income to the company, so a system of “Guardianship” was created where a one time fee gives the player access to more skills, areas, quests, etc. It is a limited revenue stream, but at $20 it does allow the company to steadily move forward. It should be noted however, that the games are still free to play, and full versions at that. As a response, Artix does realize that some sort of advertising revenue is going to be needed.
Both games, Adventure Quest and Dragon Fable are completely original content created within the company. The both take place on a world called Lore, and has a srong primary fantasy base. This is used, however as a starting point, as there are none of the trappings of a typical fantasy-based RPG, while there are still magic users and sword slingers, there is even one class that is more of a “steam-punk” type.
Dragon Fable takes place 5 years prior to the events that are taking place in Adventure Quest. This means that player actions in Dragon Fable can, and do, affect the game world for Adventure quest. There are continual storylines, some that are overarching for the whole came, some that last for days or week. Additionally there are special holiday themed events as well.
Flash was decided upon to use for the development because of its wide availability and ease of use. This also gives the games a distinct style. Both games are being billed as massively single player online role-playing games. This can be confusing, but the idea is that these are single player games, but the results could end up affecting everybody that plays the game.
Initially, most people playing Dragon Fable were from Adventure Quest, but now it has taken on a life of its own with 1.8 million accounts. Both games will continue to evolve, ad storylines for the next two years have been mapped out.
The next game Artix plans on releasing is a sci-fi mech game, which is already holding a spot on the internet. It is a placeholder, and the name will most likely change. There is still at least 2 years before that game is released, as it is still in the design stages. There is a place holder name and website (assaultmecha.com) but look for that to change.
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Tags: CES 2007
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Jan 10th, 2007 and is filed under Features, PC Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
