Marc D'Souza, Creative Director for NCsoft Europe Q&A

Many of the MMO companies are focused on chasing Blizzard's tail. Do you think that is a viable strategy?

In MMOs, as in any other genre, there are companies that will tend to lead from the front and there are companies that tend to chase. In the case of GTA, for example, there were a whole load of companies that tried to jump on the so-called bandwagon with varying degrees of success and I'm not sure that it was ultimately profitable for them to do so. In the same way, by simply redressing the World of Warcraft game mechanics in a different style, I'm not sure if you're actually adding value that gives consumers choice. I'm very much from the school of thought that says you build the experience from the ground up. Building from the ground up gives players an experience that is distinct from a pre-existing experience.

How does NCsoft build from the ground up?

I can't speak for NCsoft as a whole, only about our development strategy in Europe. What we're looking to do is to create novel game experiences, not to make copycat games in any way. While we totally appreciate games like World of Warcraft, that is not our starting point for developing new products. What we do is to identify a number of game concepts at a very high level that could be interesting, and we put them through an incubation process which we use to prove the game mechanics before even considering pre-production. We do that through a series of iterative processes.