Does LGP pay their wage full-time?
MS: We have a few people on a salary, but most are on a commission basis. LXF: How do you find people to work on a game? MS: With great difficulty. When the game comes out, and people start getting their commissions, they usually end up with a wage that’s roughly appropriate for the work they’ve done. But it’s hard because they don’t get money in advance. LXF: And if there’s a year’s delay, as there was with X3, they don’t get paid? MS: Exactly. It’s a bit of a problem. But we’ve got some good people on board now who are getting some royalties from previous games, so they’re able to work on new games without worrying too much. LXF: How far along are your own technologies? MS: The multiplayer, from our perspective, is fairly mature now. We’ve got it in a number of games and it seems to be working well. We’ve released PenguinPlay, which is our multiplayer matching service that we’re aiming to put in direct competition with GameSpy. It’s still suffering from having a low number of users a
