hris Chung, the new president of NCsoft North America, has jumped into his new role during a particularly interesting time. The company launched its latest MMORPG, Tabula Rasa, late last year and purchased City of Heroes from developer Cryptic Studios around the same time. We talked to Chung about his plans for 2008 and beyond, the effects World of Warcraft has had on the genre, and why more MMO developers aren’t exploring the console space.

Game Informer: Can you talk about NCsoft’s focus moving into 2008?

Chris Chung: Even though I’ve been in the company for the past five years in one shape or another, I seem to have a knack for not being able to hold onto a job for too long. [laughs] We talked about this with Robert [Garriot] and TJ [Kim] for quite some time about wanting Robert to move onto something that involves global development and basically was looking to me to step into his role. In terms of the strategy going forward, I really am a firm believer in providing a portfolio of games that have a distinctively NCsoft style to them to our gamers. We’re going to focus on that for all of our game projects, and also we want to make sure that this is the year that we wrap a lot of that with additional and beneficial services for our customers that will really make it easy to access games and connect with the people that they like to play with. I think those two priorities are going to be guiding us this year.

GI: Will these initiatives affect games that have already shipped?

Chung: I do hope that some of the services that we are developing will improve experiences for existing customers. So, yeah, even the ones that are released, I do hope there are some positive impact for them.

GI: There’s no questioning World of Warcraft’s success, but it’s made it tough for PC developers across the board who are working in the MMORPG space. Why do you think developers haven’t tried to explore the console space more—it definitely seems as though there’s definitely a gap in that style of gameplay.

Chung: I definitely agree with you that World of Warcraft is a great game. I guess one of the concerns when we look at consoles is that there are some different business dynamics. In terms of the gameplay, I think playing an MMO on a console is a very different experience. There is that question of, “How do you design a game that was meant to be enjoyed for a couple of hours a day on a console?” I think there are a lot of things that are coming into play that would probably have a positive impact for that to actually happen. One is the increase in HD adoption rate. Of course, if you look at the SD TV sets, it’s really hard to put a lot of UI elements in there. But as people adopt 720p or 1080p TVs, I think there are going to be some interesting opportunities for more complex games, including games like ours and maybe genres like RTSs. We’re already seeing some of that.

GI: Is that a market that NCsoft is looking to further exploit?

Chung: We had an announcement with Sony last year that we are doing a strategic partnership with them, so we are internally looking at potential products. We are basically focusing on some key franchises that we could potentially bring over to the PS3. We’ll probably have something to say toward the end of this year.

GI: It seems as though Tabula Rasa, with its blend of traditional MMORPG conventions and action elements would really lend itself to a console. Do you have anything to say about that?

Chung: I hope the Tabula Rasa team agrees with you, too. [laughs] I think it really does take a commitment from the development team, and we are talking to pretty much all of our teams in looking at consoles. And I do agree—the thing I really like about Tabula Rasa is the fact that it has a lot of visceral experiences. It’s pretty fun in that regard. I do think it would translate well into a console.