How Strife plans to take Asia by storm: an interview with S2 Games CEO Marc DeForest

S2 Games CEO Marc DeForest is excited. His studio’s second MOBA, Strife, just went into open beta, and it’s coming into the market with some exciting innovations including episodic single-player content and a powerful official companion app. I got a chance to sit down with DeForest and S2 director of monetization Pu Liu prior to PAX last week to talk more about Strife‘s origins, and their plans for the game’s future in Asia.

S2 Games gets into Asia

S2 Games is an American company, and DeForest told me that when the company started making Heroes of Newerth back in 2006, Asia wasn’t really on his list of immediate priorities. “I had a sense [the market] was big in other regions,” he said. “It was no secret that Dota was heavily played in Russia, in China, and in Southeast Asia.” But he know that he and his company didn’t have the sophistication or know-how to dive into those markets alone.

S2 needed a partner, and in Southeast Asia it found one in Garena. Garena already had a massive userbase playing WC3 Dota, so they seemed like the obvious choice. Although it wasn’t a part of Garena’s business model at the time, DeForest approached the company and pitched a partnership. Garena said yes, and eventually Heroes of Newerth launched in Southeast Asia. From there, it caught fire quickly. “We made a great game, Garena did a fantastic job, and the game blew up,” DeForest said.

(And Heroes of Newerth is still popular there, by the way. DeForest told me he didn’t have exact numbers, but he did say that over 2 million HoN players are in SEA, making the region “a significant majority” of the game’s playerbase.)

Enter Strife, Asia-facing from day one

Needless to say, when it came time to start work on Strife three years ago, DeForest has a much clearer picture of just how important Asia could be for his game’s success. Rather than waiting for a Western launch to think about Asia, S2 knew that this time it wanted strong support for Asia at launch, meaning total localization in Asian languages (both Thai and Chinese are already available, Indonesian is coming soon), a global open beta launch, and strong local partners capable of running a big online game. “It’s quite an undertaking,” DeForest said of the trouble the company has gone to to localize the game properly.

The partners S2 Games chose for Strife are interesting: Asiasoft for Southeast Asia, and YY for China. The obvious question: since S2 Games had success partnering with Tencent and Garena for Heroes of Newerth, why did it choose different partners for Strife? “[Garena and Tencent] have done phenominal things for us,” DeForest told me. He has no complaints. But it made sense to go with new partners for Strife because they don’t want Strife to cannibalize Heroes of Newerth‘s market. “The products themselves are going to compete in the marketplace,” said DeForest, “and we want competing companies to compete with our own competing products.”

And of course, it’s worth mentioning that Garena and Tencent both also operate League of Legends, which is likely to be one of Strife’s main competitors. Tencent also owns a controlling share of League developer Riot Games, so choosing new partners for Strife has also helped S2 Games avoid having partners with potential conflicts of interest.

Free-to-play

S2 Games learned about the value of having good Asia partners with Heroes of Newerth, and director of monetization Pu Liu told me that the company also learned about monetization. HoN launched as a $30 title, but by the time Strife was being conceived, it was clear the market was headed in the other direction. The choice to make the game free-to-play was a “day one” decision, says DeForest: