"If you think about games, prior to computer games, almost every game in the world is multi-player. Everything from Monopoly to poker and all the games that have existed down through history are really social experiences between real humans. We are now finally seeing games that facilitate the same real, highly social person to person bonds and so we really believe that this is the beginning of really the grand era of computer games."
Garriott... a founder of Origin games and the Ultima Online series is known to gamers as Lord British. And he says the subscription based model of games like Lineage are the future. There have been as many as 180 thousand simultaneous players around the world. Garriott's goal is to expand the experience beyond the hard core gaming community...
"To get tens of millions of players, and to make online games truly pervasive throughout the world, we have to create online games where people can jump in, play for fifteen to thirty minutes, feel they've had a very valuable experience and then leave the game for a week or two or three and then still come back to it and feel the world has passed them by."
Richard Garriott, AKA Lord British. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.