During the opening stream of Ankama Live on Twitch (available in French here), Tot has answered several questions that the community was asking him.
Is Dofus going to become Free to Play?
Tot: When I saw the frantic activity regarding this on Twitter, I couldn’t keep up at all! I merely suggested that this could be a possibility, and my words were warped. I wanted to explain to the community that we were pondering new ideas. Now, I’ve started a new blog for DOFUS Dungeons, so I’m picking up the pace on this.
We can’t make DOFUS into a Free to Play right now, there’s just too much at stake. We’re not the most efficient when it comes to monetization, if we take DOFUS Touch as an example. For a community of active players the same magnitude as DOFUS, DOFUS Touch has a much lower monthly revenue than his older brother. Our company is not part of the stock market, we’ve been alive and kicking for 17 years, which allows us the freedom of creating and not to be directed by money only.
What is DOFUS Dungeons exactly?
The idea is to create a new, simpler gameplay mode, in complete accordance with our community. We will make it free, amongst the other Dofus servers, and alter the gameplay and rules of the game as we much as we’d like, while at the same time dialoguing with the players about it.
Our objective is to move fast, and show you something playable this July.
The basic principle is to make the game simpler, by removing for example the jobs, the mounts’ rearing… and concentrate on small instance of zones containing many dungeons. Equipment drop will probably make a return as well. Our wish is to build this project in collaboration with our community.
At the same time, the DOFUS Dungeon’s server will be a “test” ground for future features of our historical games.
If you want more details, you can read my article on the blog I was talking about earlier (in French): here.
Wakfu Season 4
I’ve talked about this a bit before, but in animation, we don’t work alone: we’re depending on the TV channels. We can’t make Wakfu season 4 is France Television is not backing us up. They have a renewed interest in our show after season 3, since we wrecked their previous records on their web platform. Even if it takes a long time, between all the contracts and procedures, it’s going pretty well right now, France Television is very excited and Netflix has given us good feedback, with the show translated in 8 different languages. With our players helping us as well, we can probably get a season 4 rolling.
Dofus Cube
I’ve started the life of Dofus Cube on my personal blog because I wanted more simplicity and direct contact with you. The project now deserves its own space. I’ve really started to enjoy Game Design again, thanks to several projects, and helped by the fact that I’m working with some old friends I used to work with a few years ago. We’re having a solid testing of Dofus Cube’s 1v1 mode in two weeks from now. But we’re not abandoning the rest of development, as different parts are handled by different teams.
Princess Dragon
Regarding Princess Dragon, the release date is still up in the air. We wanted to make it a French-Japanese co-production, but the studio which should have partnered with us has retracted from the deal. JJ is currently working on the full story-board, and it looks absolutely gorgeous. We’re making progress, but we’ll probably have to wait until 2020 or 2021 to release it. This reminds me, I’ve received some criticism about how I write a lot of male characters, so I made an effort to write female characters this time.
WAKFU
We have big projects for this game, which has lived through several crisis. We took the decision to take a few months to stabilize the game and fix as many bugs as possible, putting on stand-by new content for a while and purifying the game in order to re-build on a cleaner ground.