Star Trek Online Preview

Q: In February Atari put out a press release announcing one million Star Trek Online accounts had been registered. How did that make you and the team feel?

CZ: The reception to the game, the number of people who have tried the game, the number of people who've stuck, we're really happy after the first seven, eight weeks to see who's still here, who's still playing the game on a regular basis, and to look at those metrics, the team is really excited. We have that quorum, that nugget of people that is going to keep this game around for a very long time, and allow us to continue to change and develop and draw new players into the game. I'm really happy with the reception on the ground, the number of people who daily play the game, how populous it is on the weekend, how excited the community is on the forums. The reception to the game has been really good.

Q: Can you discuss concurrent users (CCU)? Has it met your expectations?

CZ: Without actually going into concrete numbers, the one interesting thing about the populous that we're seeing right now is that it is a higher CCU percentage wise to the subscribers to most games that we know of. Usually you're between the 10 and 15 to 20 per cent range of people online at the same time. But we're finding our CCU percentages are much higher. The people playing Star Trek Online, a lot of them are coming to the game and then hanging out in the game for a long period of time and using it as a social place as well. We're really happy with the CCUs.

Q: Can you tell us how many people are paying to play STO? People like to compare that number with the equivalent from other MMOs. How do you view that?

CZ: We don't tend to talk about numbers. It's something in the industry that, personally I'm not quite sure why it's a gigantic secret, why people hold that a little close. They're for the most part worried that those numbers might be analysed in a way that isn't favourable. Myself, I think it's just interesting data. But at Cryptic we don't reveal our numbers. That being said, the most difficult thing is looking at those numbers, and then people use those numbers to gauge success of a game, right? And there are all sorts of different ways that a game is actually successful. What are the goals of the game? Games with different budgets, games with different goals, games with different expectations as to what their community will be and what they want it to be - it's a lot more complex of a question to gauge the success of a game than just looking at the subscriber numbers, I think.

Q: Leading on from that, is Star Trek Online successful as of now?

CZ: We have a really good community. We've hit the numbers we expected to in terms of subscribers, in terms of going forward, in terms of giving us a group of people that has enough mass behind it to keep this game going for a very long time and keep a really nice live team with it.

Q: What kind of feedback are you getting from Season One Common Ground update?

CZ: For the most part, aside from a couple of little post-launch glitches that we fixed and crushed as soon as we could, it's been received very well. People like the new Fleet Actions we put in. People like the Fed v Fev PvP. Most of all, the reaction we're getting back is not, oh my god, look how gigantic this is, or, this is perfect, this is what the game needs, but, oh man, I can't believe the devs are still doing this much. I can't believe that this soon after there's this much stuff to do. It has let the community know that, no we're here, we're still working, we're still adding things, we're still doing things to the game, and don't expect this game to go silent for any period of time. There are going to be constant updates and things addressing the game and evolving the game as time goes on. So for the most part people are excited that this soon after launch we've put something out of this size.