Hawken publisher Meteor Entertainment definitely recognizes the appeal of smashing bipedal robots together, which is why CEO Mark Long told GeekWire he hopes the upcoming multiplayer mech-mania will supersede reigning crowd-pleaser League of Legends in both popularity and revenue, boldly predicting a profit pull of $100 million and a nearly 10 million-strong community by next year.
Meteor recently received $18 million of funding from a few venture capital firms looking for long-term hauls from Hawken's microtransaction system. The involved companies include Benchmark Capital and FirstMark Capital, two organizations that poured cash into developer Riot Games for the proliferation of League of Legends. Long wants that same dollar-bill-shaped lightning bolt to hit Hawken.
"You can play the entire game for free and unlock every single thing in the game,” Long said. “But, if you are like me, and you don't have a lot of time and want to play over the weekend and have a good time, you might spend some money on a robot so that you don't have to grind away for a month to unlock that.”
Long also highlighted Meteor's dynamic server scalability and virtual data housing to meet the precise demands of Hawken's player count, saying, "We can dynamically provision servers as we need them, and even as the sun goes around the Earth, we can shut down the servers we don't need. That gives us fantastic efficiency and really infinite scalability that really wasn't possible even a few years ago.”
Check out GeekWire's report for more of Long's comments on Hawken.
