Interviewing The Brains Behind Gamers

Florian Santer is Paradox's man-with-a-plan behind GamersGate. We took some time to chat to him and get the story behind GamersGate.

Aaron McKenna: How did GamersGate first came into being?

Florian Santer: You may know that Paradox started a download service called "Paradox on Demand" in 2005. Our aim with that site was to enable people who could not find our games in stores or who wanted to acquire games which were not printed anymore to get them online. As the response to this service was very positive and people asked for a wider choice we decided to heed that call and gamersgate.com was born in April 2006. Today GamersGate.com is a company on its own and a platform that brings together developers and publishers worldwide to serve the strategy gaming community.

Aaron McKenna: What kind of an infrastructure does it take to run Gamers Gate?

Florian Santer: Gamersgate.com consists of several different components, some run by us and some by partners. To begin with we do obviously have the servers which we do not have in-house but which we "rent". It is an HP Gentoo server which is connected through a 100Mbit 100 SIR burst-able line, and should the need arise we have the possibility to increase that capacity. Then there is of course software side with databases, encryption etc. and the payment gateway. Besides running all of this we do of course also go out to our partners in the games industry to make their games easily available to our customers as well.

Aaron McKenna: About how much bandwidth do you use in an average day?

Florian Santer: To be honest with you, I do not know exact numbers. We have peaks where it is very handy that we can "burst" over the 100Mbit.

Aaron McKenna: Given the infrastructure it takes to run a digital distribution system, does it make economical sense for a company like Paradox to publish via digital distribution versus traditional boxed distribution?

Florian Santer: We see the digital distribution as a complement to boxed distribution. While many consider it a bonus right now, we believe that a certain group of our customers will require such a service, such as another part of our customers will want to buy games only in a box. That being said, it does also make economical sense for us to distribute our games that way.

Aaron McKenna: What kind of copy protection do you employ across GamersGate?

Florian Santer: We have partnerships with the major copy protection providers which we apply when needed or requested by the game developer. We also use a copy protection devised by our partners, which is called Truzt.

I think it is also worth noting that gamersgate.com is continuously reinventing itself as we find newer and better solutions to bringing games and gamers closer to each other. We have just last week started a campaign to collect feedback from our fans and will be evaluating their input later this month in order to plan future improvements to the complete infrastructure that is GamersGate.com. If we receive comments regarding copy protection we will of course have a look at possible improvements there as well.

Copy protection is always a question of balancing the need to protect the rights of our partners who trust us to handle their property responsibly with the overall goal to make the whole process from purchase to play as smooth and uncomplicated as possible for our customers.

An example for input from our fans is a new downloader which we are working on. The current one is not entirely intuitive for people who are not familiar with PCs and we will therefore simplify this stage of the process considerably by the end of the year.

Aaron McKenna: How fast is Gamers Gate growing?

Florian Santer: do not have a reliable growth number which I could give in percent simply because we have been up since such a short time. The amount of games distributed per month varies widely with new releases. Our most successful month was August so far where we had two new releases (Sword of the Stars and the add-on Victoria: Revolutions), which resulted in a real spike in interest. To give you an idea: Victoria Revolution (Price 9.99€) was released mid August and by the end of the month was downloaded 2000 times. Such performances make it difficult to have a month to month comparison, but I can tell you that we are so far very happy with the development the site is going through.

Aaron McKenna: Steam is the modern day model for digital distribution. Do you see Gamers Gate having any advantages, or disadvantages, over Valve's system?

Florian Santer: It has been a while since I used Steam myself and cannot really comment on their system. The demand for quick and reliable online services is rising, and different people will prefer different solutions. Our vision of gamersgate.com is a direct result of the input from our gaming community and we keep a close eye on their ideas for improvement as well as on the development of the technical side. That combination gives us as I believe an excellent solution to bring games and gamers together. Let me know if there is anything else you would like to know.

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