"Infernum is Latin and means hell. You know: Publishers are always the bad guys!"

We were granted the opportunity to meet with Andreas Weidenhaupt, CEO of Infernum Productions, a well-known publisher with amazing games under its belt, such as Dragon's Prophet or the latest Hazard Ops. We talked about the company's past, present and future, which was an enriching experience. Wether you are a fan or not, check it out!

QUESTION: Thank you for granting us the opportunity for this interview. It’s a pleasure. First of all, please tell us something about yourself.

Answer: I have been playing Online Games since 1997 and Ultima Online was my first true MMO experience. At this time, there were no online games publishers in Europe. I started my entrepreneurial career in the Online Games industry over 10 years ago with founding "Onlinewelten". After selling Onlinewelten, I founded Frogster Online Gaming as the Online Gaming entity of the stock market listed Frogster Group together with Christoph Gerlinger, another serial Games entrepreneur. After Gameforge acquired the Frogster Group in 2010, I decided to follow my destiny as a "risktaker" and founded Infernum Productions AG, together with Christoph’s brother Tobias Gerlinger.

CEO Andreas Weidenhaupt (left), CFO Tobias Gerlinger (right)

QUESTION: Imagine yourself talking to somebody who hasn't heard of your company yet. What is Infernum Productions?

Answer: A dedicated western world Online Games publisher with very experienced and passionate staff. Our core competences are PR/ Marketing, Game Improvement and Free-to-play Monetization.

QUESTION: Simply out of curiosity, why the name 'Infernum'?

Answer: You have to ask the bottle of Sambuca, which whispered it to me ;). It took me several days until I found a free single word with a solid meaning. Infernum is Latin and means hell. Our little devil in the logo takes it not so serious, so do we. You know: Publishers are always the bad guys!

QUESTION: Thanks to the European version of Dragon’s Prophet, Infernum has had a tremendous success as publisher in the MMO games industry. Why did you want to publish this game in Europe? How do you choose which game to publish?

Answer: First, we have a structured and elaborate sourcing process to avoid wrong decisions due to subject ratings. This process enables us to break down our pipeline of 500 possible next titles to a shortlist of 5 – 8 serious candidates. Then it's a matter of negotiations and timing. Regarding Dragon's Prophet: Besides being a great game, we have worked with the developer, Runewaker Entertainment from Taiwan, before and together we had a huge success with "Runes of Magic" in Europe and the US. So there is plenty of trust in each other's capabilities which helped a lot of course. We're very proud that Runewaker preferred us, despite having better offers from older and bigger publishers.

QUESTION: Could you please tell us something about the company's birth? How did everthing begin and how did you get to this point?

Answer: Well, when Gameforge took over Frogster, I could have leaned back and do my job as a well-paid managing director. But I soon realized that this is not my nature. Shortly after, I made the decision to quit and to switch to the entrepreneurial track again. I met Tobias Gerlinger at the GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) in San Francisco who told me that he had just sold his company to Gameforge as well and that he'd be in the mood to found a new games company. Two months later we founded Infernum.

QUESTION: What about Infernum's future plans? Do you want to keep publishing AAA MMO games? Is mobile entertainment in the future of the company?

Answer: Our DNA is AAA MMO publishing. However we see the changing user behavior and the trend of spending more and more time with mobile devices so we're looking into integrating mobile devices such a smartphones and tablets in our player experiences. With our recent title "Hazard Ops", we will try out some second screen experiences, so be curious!

QUESTION: Infernum is committed with the free-to-play model. What can you state in this regard? Is the P2P business model dying in your opinion?

Answer: We believe that both models have their right to exist. We just like to build great player experiences by constantly improving a game by incorporating the feedback and the desires of the players. And we like the approach of having to pay for content only if you really like it.

QUESTION: Two years ago, we discovered Theralon and were pretty excited. However, we haven’t heard about it for quite a while. Is Theralon your next big game? Could you give us some exclusive details?

Answer: Theralon is still there but due to personnel bottlenecks we decided to focus on our publishing business first.

QUESTION: Send a message to all the fans of Infernum Productions out there!

Answer: I like to say "thank you" to all of our fans out there. The communities of Brick-Force and Dragon’s Prophet are awesome, so will be the Hazard Ops community.

QUESTION: Thank you for your detailed answering. Do you like to mention anything else?

Answer: I feel blessed to be able to live out my passion and to earn my living by doing so. Thank you very much.

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2014 at 5:50 pm and is filed under MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.