Soon will be published on pages of Betatestingclub a series of interviews with leaders of various sectors in the world of Beta testing with the purpose of make known rules that govern it. We begin today with a mini-interview with Calì, CEO of Kalicanthus (Videogame publishing company).

Dear CEO Mr. Fabrizio Calì

  - Do You want to explain to our readers what was the idea of Kalicanthus?

Kalicanthus was founded in 2005 as Business Unit of an IT company, Intrasoft. Initially the project was to create and manage sections of some great online games portals, such as Tiscali, Fastweb and Sky to provide good content and manage the community. Kalicanthus in 2007 became an independent company and was created the www.kalicanthus.it portal with the launch of games like Berserk and Pentacore, both still available now.

- What kind of collaboration was established between Kalicanthus and authors of video games?

The type of collaboration depends obviously from games and agreements. In some cases Kalicanthus may simply act as a publisher, limiting just to publish what are the contents provided by the partners with whom you have an agreement; in other cases Kalicanthus creates a deeper collaboration with developers, which also includes involvement in level of concept development, content and ideas around the game in general - and of course all the activities that are involved in publishing, such as marketing, customer service, community management etc.

- Give us some news on the staff of Kalicanthus: How many people have been and are involved in the project? How are divided and what training they have and how did they land at the Kalicanthus?

The staff has grown with the growth of activities and projects. At the moment we count a dozen people who constitute the staff plus some outside collaborators. Everyone has an area of expertise, but often we confront all aspects of what we do and everyone is invited to express their opinions. In general we can identify the area of business development and marketing, which concerns the promotion of our activities and the develop of agreements with various partners, as well as acquisition of new products; product management concerns instead the development and management of individual games; community management and custode support to respond to requests and problems of players and manage the various communities and the systems engineering and development, which deals instead of the part regarding servers, processes, site, etc. . Everyone has specific skills relating to their areas of relevance, gained in previous jobs experiences, including online gaming (many of us have years of professional experience in behind). Furthermore, we are all players, a feature that allows us to be able to interact better with our community and understand their needs and ... key factor that has allowed each of us to land on Kalicanthus.

- How are done and how many different stages there are on a project of a new game?

Also in this case it depends on the specific games. In general we say that there is an initial study phase of the game in question, whether it is to develop it from scratch, whether it is to be to acquire it for publication: we evaluate various aspects ranging from gameplay, the type of players it addresses, marketing opportunities, the business model which can be based, the possibility of localization. Then, once defined these issues and the agreement with the developer, we proceed to the stage of actual production: it takes care of translating the game, if necessary, to define the characteristics that must be created or implemented for the various phases of testing , we start working on PR and marketing to ensure the creation of a base of players interested in trying the game in the early stages of alpha and beta testing: it usually starts with a short phase of alpha testing where few players test the fundamental characteristics and then proceed with a phase of closed beta for all players where they can already try many features, and finally a phase of open beta open to everyone that is primarily used to finish the game and find bugs to fix. Then you need to launch, with future expansion ... and the rest is history!

- What is the difference between the Italian Market and the European Market, the US Market and the International Market in general?

In numbers, basically. Develop and launch an online game, especially MMOs, only in Italy is extremely difficult because the number of potential players is much lower than other countries and an MMO works at its best only if there is a large number of users. It is not impossible as we have already launched several Kalicanthus games only for the Italian market, is simply much more complicated.

THE INTERVIEW TO THE CRAFT OF GODS AUTHOR HERE