Torpia is a browser-based MMO strategy game that went live earlier this year in February and is available in Dutch, English, Spanish and Romanian languages. The goal of the game is to build up your small medieval village and interact with other users and their villages with the ultimate goal of conquering the world. If the concept bears a striking resemblance to Travian, another browser-based MMO that has been steadily gaining global popularity, it’s hardly surprising– Webgamic, the company behind Torpia, also manages Travian (which is license-based) in the Netherlands and Belgium in the Dutch language.
Gambit recently had the opportunity to talk with the owner, founder and CEO of Webgamic, Teus Louwerens, who discussed Torpia’s development and shared his thoughts on the difficulties of viral growth in Holland, the need for aesthetics in online payment systems and how user value in the Netherlands is overlooked.
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How many monthly active users does Torpia have right now?
At the moment, we have about 55,000 internationally: 45,000 in the Netherlands, and then 5,000 in Romania and Argentina because they just started.
How did you choose to launch in Romania?
We just happened to have a reliable partner there who was easy to launch the game with. Besides that, the eastern Europe countries are very interesting for us because there’s not such a big [offering of games in that country] yet, but there’s a big market.
How are you growing your user base for Torpia? Is there a typical growth model?
At first, you have to buy them, you have to get the game on the market. We also get a lot of what we call “mouth-to-mouth advertising”, where people just tell their friends, hey, this is a cool game to play. And we see that that kind of advertising is growing, but besides that, we are still using traditional advertising that we have to pay for in order to get our players.
Have you ever thought about offering something within the game that would encourage users to invite friends to join and play?
We have, but there are some problems to that, because in Holland, and also in several other countries, it’s forbidden because of spam regulations. It’s not allowed to tell users anything like, we’ll give you 10 credits when you invite a friend of yours.
It’s not allowed? How do they expect you to grow?
Well, they mostly look out for the customer, for the normal person that is totally fed up with all the spam they get, and that’s why this regulation comes about. But I guess they just think, you can get your users through regular advertising or through free will without having to push them.
What percent are you able to convert to paying users within the actual experience of the game?
Around 10%.
Is that pretty standard for these kinds of strategy games?
As far as I know, for a game where it’s optional, you’re not obliged as a player to buy credits, it’s a pretty common percentage.
In the process of building Torpia, did you focus first on getting the game right and then figure out how to monetize it, or did you have an idea of how you wanted to monetize the game from the very start?
We had the idea of how we generally wanted to monetize the game– with the option of credits, that’s something we wanted from the start because we feel that’s the best way to go, to offer a free game and leave the choice to pay to the people who actually play it; but we didn’t have any idea about how we actually wanted to do it, which premium features we wanted to implement. So we first focused on the game itself and we are now working on implementing the features that we need to monetize
When you talk about improving the game or changing features or adding new things, how do you take that into consideration? Do you look at user feedback, or do you take surveys, or do you look at certain metrics to determine where you take the game next?
All of the above, actually. We try to look a lot to our players; in the forums, we look at what players like. We also do surveys, mostly specific surveys– if we have a thing that we think needs improvement, we do a survey on that and with the results, we try to get the best feature out of it. And we think of things that could be better, and we ask the community how they’d feel about it, our new idea or feature.
We have several team members here who just work on communication and management of the communities, and besides that we work with a lot of volunteers who are just excited to play and manage the forums or the IRC channels. So we have a lot of people looking into the community.
What kind of people play these games? Do you still play Torpia?
Not for fun, because it’s the game I built myself and I know everything about it so that makes it not so much fun anymore. But we have a broad range of players. Ages 11 to 40, male and female– really broad– but the major part would be the younger players, maybe 14 to 24.
Does Torpia have anything to do with Travian at all, or is a completely different experience for your users?
Well, it has something to do with Travian in the sense that it is a strategy game as well, so you are building villages, you are attacking other players, but there are some major differences– you have to choose between Good and Evil sides, not three tribes like in Travian, and with that choice comes totally different gameplay. Good focuses on building, producing and trading, and Evil focuses on training of troops and attacking and conquering other players.
The idea is that the Good and Evil players work together to get to the higher goal, and that is winning the world. And that makes the game totally different than Travian, where all players have all the same features, and just the tribes are a bit different in their abilities and the configuration of the troops and buildings.
Does Travian mind that you’re starting your own game?
No, we have a really good relationship with Travian. We just talked about it with them and it’s not a problem.
How do people pay in countries like the Netherlands and Belgium for online games and in general– what are the biggest forms?
60% is iDeal. It’s just available in the Netherlands, and it’s direct bank-to-bank transfer. It’s really easy for customers to use, it’s a system where, when you choose to pay, you select your own bank and you pay through the normal bank interface. So it’s really easy and comfortable and safe.
Isn’t that like the major payment method for Germany?
In Germany, the major method of payment is direct debit. You give permission for the company to deduct the amount of money from your bank account, but the problem for companies is, users can also cancel it. Especially for banks, it’s really annoying because what often happens is there’s a lot of fraud with it. So people give permission to deduct the amount of money from their accounts to get the credits they’re paying for, but then just two days later after they’ve spent all their credits, they tell the bank that they never wanted to buy this, and they get their money back from the company– you have to pay it back, and you end up with nothing.
With iDeal on the other hand, users actually pay. They don’t give permission, but they do a direct bank transfer, so it’s different. There’s no possibility for any refunds. iDeal has no chargebacks.
On your payments page, you have something called e-Remittal. What is that?
e-Remittal is the system we built ourselves. It combines all the payment solutions we are using. We did it because at that time– because this is three or four years ago we built this– we didn’t feel there were any good payment solutions online that stood up to our standards: easy to pay, looks good for the player, and offers the payment methods we wanted. That’s why we built it ourselves, and from there we just expanded the system.
What was it about other payments that you didn’t like?
A lot of companies, I think, have a really bad payment interface, where even I, when I get to those payment interfaces– I don’t want to pay anymore because it just looks terrible. And also the way they present the possibilities, the payment solutions, to the customer, is just not user-friendly at all. They just put all the things on the [sidebar] and that’s it. So we were looking for a user-friendly, good-looking solution and that’s what we tried to build, and our users are really comfortable with the system.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Travian took over their own payments again because they took on a strategy which involved getting the payments back to the company itself, so they went back to another payments system, and we got a lot of feedback from the players saying, “Too bad we don’t have your payments system anymore because it was so clear for us.”
Oh, so you’d been using the system you built for Travian?
We built everything that came though the management of Travian, so everything from payments to community management to support to advertising, everything that had to do with the Netherlands and Belgium.
This is more of a side question, but for some reason– we (as Kickflip, Inc.) were actually building a lot of games in America, and it seemed like internationally, Germany and the Netherlands are the two major European game-makers. How did that end up happening?
I’d guess that one of the biggest advantages that countries like Germany and the Netherlands mostly have is the widespread broadband Internet in our countries. We have some of the biggest and best-spread broadband in the world and I’d guess that helps a lot with the development of these browser-based games which are played over the Internet.
One of the most surprising things for us in this business is the Nordic region– Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark– and the Netherlands, where people are spending a lot of money. Is it because you’re just indoors all day?
Because of the bad weather, you mean? [laughs] Especially small countries like the Netherlands and the [Nordic] countries, they’re really underestimated because everybody thinks it’s just like Holland, that it’s just 16 million people who live there. But again, I think the broad range of Internet here– basically, everyone has their own connection in Holland– and I guess the ease for the Dutch people to pay over Internet, and they’re very comfortable, so it just makes it a lot easier to pay, and it makes the decision to pay a lot easier.
Thanks for talking with us, Teus!
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