The last year was one of turmoil for Frogster, the Berlin-based company widely known for the F2P (free to play) MMORPG Runes of Magic (RoM). Following the company’s purchase by GameForge, many of the members of the senior management team immediately abandoned ship. Now, at the beginning of 2011, Frogster faced a hacker attack that has supposedly compromised thousands of RoM game accounts, attack which was followed shortly after by blackmail attempts demanding better customer service and community management. Even though both these issues are not yet a thing of the past, Frogster is keen on moving forward. Dan Pearson, Staff Writer for GameIndustry.biz, talked with COO Dirk Weyel about all this and many other.

Q: First of all, let’s talk about the changes at management level since the GameForge takeover – Is the team settled now?

Dirk Weyel: We had a management change last year, in summer. It wasn’t actually connected to the GameForge acquisition, it just happened to come at the same time. Three of the managing directors of Frogster Online Gaming left the company, and some of the senior staff which belonged to them, a bunch of people.

So we had to restructure the management of Frogster Online Gaming and we now have a team in place which will continue to lead the operating arm. We’ve got one new person, which you’ve probably noticed, Seth Iorio – he used to work for GameForge before he came to Frogster. He’s been a member of the board since the new year and is also the managing director of Frogster Online Gaming.

We still have a holding structure – which means that there is Frogster Interactive Pictures, the holding mother company, the publicly listed company, the executive board, then the management of Frogster Online Gaming. But Frogster Online Gaming is doing the operational work for the whole company.

Q: So there was no pressure from GameForge to change any of the management team?

Dirk Weyel: Definitely not, no. One of the reasons that GameForge was interested in buying the majority of Frogster was not only to buy the assets, the titles and the product pipeline, it was also because they saw that there was a successful team, including the management – so they didn’t want to bring that down, or change that because they wanted a functioning Frogster unit after the transaction.

Q: The Frogster catalogue is aimed fairly squarely at a core market, so presumably that’s something that GameForge wanted to stick with, too. Is that the direction you’re sticking with, rather than changing tack to a more casual audience?

Dirk Weyel: That’s right. Our strategy was to work in the core-based, client-based MMO area. To do less titles but try to make premium, high-quality MMOs. So we’ve done that, we’ve licensed Mythos and TERA for this year. Also, we have one major MMO coming next year. So this continues, and is our, shall we say, strategic fit in terms of GameForge and Frogster. GameForge was originally based around browser-based games, they added client-based games to their portfolio but they came from another corner of the online segment.

Q: TERA is your only subscription model game. Is that because you see a distinction along the lines of quality there? Does it offer something that the free-to-play games don’t that makes you more comfortable charging a monthly fee for it?

Dirk Weyel: Yeah. We generally believe that free-to-play system will be the model for most of the MMOs in the future, but we also believe that the subscription model does still work. There will be subscription models in the future, and also hybrid models. We believe that TERA is the most premium title of all the games we have at the moment. In terms of production budget and quality in-game it’s certainly the premium product for this year.

That’s why we’re convinced that the subscription model can work for a title like TERA. I think free-to-play will be a model which will dominate the West, but I think there will also be a few subscription titles which can be successful.