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MCV INTERVIEW CHRISTOPH HARTMANN, PRESIDENT, 2K
Talking Take Two 2K’s global president Christoph Hartmann is looking forward to a stellar 2009. Here, he speaks to Tim Ingham about the state of the industry… How do you think the industry will be affected long-term by the socalled ‘credit crunch’? Traditionally, when the economy does badly, the entertainment market grows. I don’t see why it should be any different this time. The recession is coming, but it’s not only about the sad situation of people worrying if they can pay their mortgage – it’s people wondering if they can still afford to spend £500 to go crazy in Ibiza twice a year. People spend less than a tenth of that on a video game that will last for hours in their own home. Cost-wise for a decent amount of hours of entertainment, it’s cheap. Brutally cheap. The recession shouldn’t have too much of an impact.
something new. And we got Nintendo’s support, which was also a factor. The promise of the title is also straightforward: ‘Carnival’ tells you exactly what’s in the box. Sure, it doesn’t have a movie licence or Mario; but everyone can imagine what it does in a nanosecond just by looking at it. Would you have had that success if it came out six months later? Had we released it last week, it would have been much tougher. There’s far too much stuff in the Wii market and it’s hard to shine. While the Wii’s the strongest growing console, it’s a risk not to have well known brands in your games. If you’re a girl that goes to a nightclub at 11pm, it’s easy to shine. If you go at 2am when all the models are there, it’s much harder. You’ll have to get up on the loudspeaker and dance a little to create some attention.
As a third-party publisher, what do you make of the Nintendo software market? The reality is, the Nintendo market always gets super overcrowded. The only Wii publishers make ten titles five titles that do well on their machines are the top and think that if two are hits, five titles – and there’s a it’s okay. But their crappy good chance three of games flood the market. them are first party. Christoph Hartmann, 2K Where people go wrong in the casual market is that, while the development costs are exploding on the Do you see iPod Touch as a rival to casual side, they’re treating the Wii like DS and PSP – as Apple has claimed the old PC market – making very cheap, it can be? accessible games. They think if they We’re very much a multiplatform make ten titles and two are hits, they developer – so we’ll give any system a will finance the other eight. But they try. With the iPod, we look at the forget the other eight crappy titles will commercial opportunity, but realistically. flood the market and will lead to We’ll give it away to other people to do problems in terms of production and for us, or we’ll do it in China to give it a manufacturing – and upset retailers. The try. We could allow one of our premium consumer will be pissed off because studios to give it a go, and I’m sure they’ll be confused. How many Cooking product development would be very Mamas or pony games does the excited. But it would be a bit of a waste consumer really need? of time. Sid Meier’s very excited by it, for instance, but it’s not a clever use of Carnival has been a great success his time. I don’t think it will become on Wii. What’s its secret? serious competition to DS. It’s still Getting it early to the market. It was cheaper to get a handheld than an iPod also decently innovative and did Touch. And at some point you cannot
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have a machine that does everything. You can watch movies on it, but they’re a little bit too small. You can browse the internet or write emails, but it’s fiddly and by no means perfect. If Apple really want to go up against Nintendo and Sony, they need their own gaming device. Are they capable of it? Sure. They’re adventurous, they have balls and a great marketing power. But I don’t think the iPod can do it. Do you have any plans to take the 2K Sports brand into genres more loved by Europeans? We need a real European title to grow in that region – we focus a lot on US sports at the moment. We’re always willing to try things. We do the best tennis game on the market, which does okay in the UK. We tried to do boxing, but it didn’t do that well. But at least we gave it a try. On snowboarding, we did Amped, which did well and had good scores. But after the last one, we got scared about whether the market numbers were as high as we needed. We felt we’d leave it for later. Now others are making snowboarding games, we might go back and do it again.
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What about a football game? That’s the one sport you need to really break the European market. There are two great games out there – both are really respected and crown jewels for the companies involved. How many people tried to have another football game? Everyone – and I think everyone got burnt. Even having another football manager game here would be very hard. The last thing I’d do is burn a gazillion dollars on what’s already out. But if anyone in our group comes up with a good, innovative idea for the football market, we’d definitely be willing to do it. Five years ago, if someone came to us with the idea of a street football game