(I'm NOT talking about him.)
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| Jay Cohen |
The other one is quite the opposite, he's the ethical and interesting Jay Cohen. He's a hard core gamer/creative type. When asked, "What's your favorite part of game development?"
Cohen enthusiastically replied. "Sitting around the table and seeing a spark of an idea ignite into creative wildfire that rallies the team to go the extra mile. Then, seeing that idea implemented into the game and having it actually work as imagined!"
Q: Are games important?
Jay Cohen: They are the most important entertainment medium of the near and long term future. Games combine the best of audio, visual, and interactive technology and drive progress and improvement within each discipline like no other medium.
Q: What's the biggest challenge you see facing the industry?
Jay Cohen: “Finding” our audience...there are so many platforms available in the home, at the office, on your mobile device, on the web, that it’s becoming a huge challenge to stay connected with your audience and find them where they are when they are.
I've been following Jay for a while. If you look at interviews as far back as ten years ago you'll be able to understand why Jay: is so successful and why he joined the Wargaming team. In my mind, Jay has had his hand on the pulse of some very commonsense issues in the making of games.
He has been innovative in his discussion of product placement in games and his innate flexibility allows (ed) him to forsee alternate revenue streams in the gaming industry as well as paying attention to the opportunities presented by product placement in games but also a synergistic kind of connection between other industries and the game industry. Cohen seems to have the kind of prescience that allowed him to see the connections between the products such as soda even clothing, the film industry. He is interdisciplinary in his thinking and that's probably why he worked with Bruckheimer of CSI then Ubisoft fame. Now Cohen is smart enough to see the link between tanks, PC's, consoles and gaming. In his latest job for Wargaming, he seems to have pulled it all together.
In this 2009 interview, Cohen discusses synergestic connections between games and other cross-media developments.
Jay Cohen: People are starting to realize the importance of developing synergies across medium within one IP. This approach is continuing to iterate on that. When you look at creating an original property, what’s the story? We aim to work with the best storytellers in the business. How do you tell the story? We’re looking at ways cross-medium to do that, and we have the outlets to reach our audiences at the point of inception. That’s what’s really unique about this. It’s not about, after the fact, thinking, “Oh, that would have been a great idea, let’s make a phone call and call Hollywood and get a film made of this game!” It’s totally not that. When you come to market, imagine utilizing all the interactive platforms available today, and delivering story before, during, and after the release of other portions.
In this interview from almost a decade ago, he discusses the problems of interdisciplinarity in the game biz. He believes open-minded problem-solving and interconnectivity is the answer.
Jay Cohen: It’s really interesting, the way it’s come about. When we entered the 3D era in the mid-1990s, we found we could create much more detailed environments that imitated real world settings. So we would call up brands, be they clothing, or fast food, asking for permission to use their logo. We’d say it would be really cool to use the Coca Cola sign as part of this game world, they’d say, ‘no way’ and then they’d put the phone down. That was just seven years ago.
We’d say it would be really cool to use the Coca Cola sign as part of this game world, they’d say, ‘no way’Then, five years ago, we’d call and suddenly they’d be ‘okay let’s do a cross promotion’. They said, ‘We’ll send you 40 cases of our soft drink and you go ahead and put that logo in there’. We thought it was a big win, but we also knew that one day they would realize that we were talking to the same guys who they were spending millions trying to reach.
Q: How is it working on a practical level?
Jay Cohen: It’s interesting to sell to those brand-holders because we have traditionally had a buying relationship with many of them. Let’s say it’s a car manufacturer. We may have previously decided that we really, really wanted a Ford Mustang in our game and were willing to pay. But now, they might want to feature the new Mustang in selected games. So we have different people from the two companies talking to one another and some of them are saying ‘pay me’, and some are saying ‘I’ll pay you’ for the exact same thing.
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| Louis Castle |
Jay Cohen: What's exciting... is perhaps what's happened in the past [with] games that aspire to become films, and films that aspire to become games, the experience of that game has just transferred over to the film, and vice versa. We want to look at things holistically.
To begin with, it is 100 percent our focus developing original IP, and then to developing the synergies with the film and television groups from the onset. We think this model is really unique, in that you're putting executives in charge of production... with the creative experience, the technical experience and the business aspects of production all together in the same room up front.
Both Castle and Cohen while realizing that they are prescient also seem to have a grip on understanding the synergy between the film industry and the game world.
Jay Cohen: It's enormously difficult, and complex and risky, but we believe in where we are today, and where the industry is going tomorrow. . . I think that's the real opportunity we have.
Jay Cohen: We’re prepared to look three-to-five years down the road and ask, how will the entertainment landscape look, and how can we be positioned now to deliver on that?
Where is he now? Well I guess you could say the he's a kind of soldier who goes where he is needed most. Probably one of the things he is starting to anticipate is the whirlwind of opportunities (which includes the hiring war that's going on right now) he clearly sees the connections and synergy to be made bewteen console and F2P. Wargaming released a beta version of its PC game World of Tanks for Xbox 360.
Here's what he says about how it's working.
Jay Cohen: We announced World of Tanks for the Xbox 360 last June @ E3 and saw a tremendous amount of support from both our community and the industry as a whole. In North America specifically, the console market is a huge opportunity for us to reach a new demographic of players. We are thrilled to be partnering with Microsoft to deliver a true World of Tanks console experience for players around the world. It is a huge milestone for Wargaming to extend beyond PC only gaming.
There are challenges too.
Jay Cohen: As an active and caring contributor committed to the promotion and advancement of the video games industry.
I think he'll be remembered as a kind of ethical problem solver.
Jay Cohen: We are a company delivering free-to-play online games with the purpose of giving our players experiences that are based on fair treatment, whether they spend money in-game or not. In the past, many free-to-play models allowed players to pay for advantages over other players, but Wargaming's monetization system is different; everything depends on your skill and experience.
We call the experience "free-to-win" and believe that such an approach to monetization is the most important aspect of keeping our players happy.
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