Rift News & Events & Guides

DR: We feel like we are very close to release-level quality. We are tuning. We are polishing. We are scaling.

VB: So after five years, you’re not making money on this game yet.

DR: Not yet, but really darn soon. What day of the month is it?

VB: How will the launch proceed?

DR: Here’s probably how it works. The best game companies launch their newest titles with a presale program. That is the point where the consumer can put money down for the game. Technically, when that happens, the game won’t be formally live. It will still be in testing. But we are going to treat it as if it were the real launch. We will have 24/7 support in all languages. We will treat these players as if they are paying customers. We’re very close to that right now. We’ll open it up to the public for a large beta test soon.

VB: At that point, you will have tens of thousands of people playing?

DR: Absolutely. I can’t disclose specific numbers of the beta, but we are in the midst of some very large beta test events now and we just keep scaling Cheap Rift Gold up. The first beta event was just the data center in Dallas, and so Europeans were in the beta, but they were playing on Dallas servers. We are opening a data center in Amsterdam for the European users. Operationally, that’s very important for us. We’ll bring up the different languages over time.

VB: The whole idea of a “Rift” is that you can open up a portal into the world and flood it with monsters. Then the players all go to that area and fight off the invasion. How many people can you concentrate in one place in the world?

DR: That’s a question with many potential answers. Because there’s the geographic point of it and then there is the hardware server part of it. The servers have multiple sections, or shards. Right now, we are figuring out how many people on a shard is too many. But what is unique about our game is that you can have a very large number of players all in one place and you can interact with all of them. You don’t have to worry that you can’t find your friends because they are in a different region or a different server. When a Rift opens, it is a dynamic event. The Rifts can happen in any geographic location and you can have lots of Rift Gold at once. We have shown in our beta testing that all of that is working properly. We will ramp this up to an industrial scale.