TALK TIME: EOIN BUTLERtalks to Dylan Collins, online entrepeneur
Tell us about your company, Jolt Online Gaming.
Jolt is an online games publisher founded last year. We make games that are free to play over the internet. Our games are popular with people who work in offices – so I suppose we’re at least partially responsible for reducing productivity worldwide and ushering in the most catastrophic economic collapse since the Great Depression. That’s partially us.
The music and newspaper industries are questioning the long-term viability of the free online model. You’re confident gaming is recession-proof?
Oh God, I wouldn’t want to tempt fate. But online gaming is a young industry and it’s growing at a phenomenal pace. And anything that’s based on a free-to-play model, I think, is positioned rather well at the moment. I also believe that people are going to be looking for much more free entertainment than they did previously. But you’ve still got to have a quality product. That’s the bottom line.
How do you turn a profit then?We allow our customers to purchase premium items – a new warrior to play with, say, or a virtual sword – that will give them some small advantage within the game. We can charge gamers for extras like this because the games sit on our servers – we control them completely. With music and film, people can download pirated material and access it for free. It's very difficult to stop them. But I'd say we're one of the few industries who can make "free" pay.
You recently signed a deal to develop a game with 'Playboy' magazine. Was branching out into pornography always a long-term goal?Not at all. One of the approaches we often take to building our games is to build them around a brand already popular with our core audience. So we talked to the Playboy folks in LA about the possibility of doing something together. They hadn't done anything like it before and they loved the idea. Hef gave it his blessing. The game itself, though, won't have any nudity or pornographic content.
Er, exactly how well do you know your target audience?It's called Playboy Manager. The player gets to play the part of an agent, managing the careers of Playboy models. So while it's a Playboy game, if there were actual nudity in it, that would create a lot of difficulties. As I said, a lot of our customers work in offices. They don't want nudity on their servers. We wouldn't be able to work with our partners. It's a tricky balance.
Without nudity, though, isn't 'Playboy' just a bunch of people standing around? That's not quite true. It's a bunch of attractive, scantily clad people standing around! It's a funny brand, though. I don't think you could ever deliberately set out to create what Playboy has become. Years ago it had this very risqué image, but nowadays you'll find the logo on kids' pencil cases and stuff.
Of course, Jolt wasn't your first foray into the gaming industry.That's right, Demonware was a company we set up in 2003, just as we were finishing college and the internet bubble was bursting. We created technology that connected games consoles across the internet, so that gamers around the world could blow each other up in new and original ways. We worked with people like Microsoft, Sony and Activision, on massive games like WWE, Call of Duty and Splinter Cell. It was always great for everyone's ego when you put the game into the console and our logo flashed up. That was pretty cool.
You sold that company in 2007 for a reported $15 million. What was the first thing you bought?There were all sorts of reports about the price, but it wasn't disclosed. But it was a good end to that particular story. As ridiculous as it sounds, I'm really not that interested in money. For me, it's more about the challenge of having an idea or spotting an opportunity and then putting something together to fill that gap.
Seriously though, what did you spend the money on?Nothing. A sports car? No, I didn't purchase a sports car or any other kind of vehicle. Or property or bling. I don't even like cruises.
God, I bet you still have your Communion money.You know, I never actually made my First Communion. It's something, though, that I often think the country should consider, in light of our present economic woes. The Government should announce to the world that Ireland is making its First Holy Communion next Sunday. All of the other countries are cordially invited, provided they bring lots of envelopes.
www.joltonline.com