Author searches for sports metaphor in Schilling interview, punts.

from the Sounds like a tuning fork, smells like leather dept.

BigWorld licensee 38 Studios and the esteemed Schilling and Close team up in this interview with Gamesindustry.biz - titled 'A perfect pitch' - on the difficulties of protracted, long term undertakings like MMOs.

Q: Many developers with the financial clout of a company such as EA struggle to launch MMOs, how can a smaller company hope to compete in the same field?

Curt Schilling: It depends on your perspective. For the next two years until we launch our game we're competing with ourselves. I mean, we have to deliver internally and meet internal expectations. If you're a company with any kind of long-term vision the barriers, the goals, the hurdles you have to overcome are far more significant internally than they'll ever be externally.

If you stay focused on what it is you're trying to deliver and you are true to that focus and you have incredibly talented people you're going to create something special. I think the key behind any good product in any market is the passion and the investment that the company puts into the product. At the end of the day our goal is to provide the best user experience from product purchase to account creation, to game experience we can possibly create and we have incredibly talented people who have done that already.

Brett Close: Another piece of that are partnerships. What we're focusing on is building the game, there are things that we don't want to get caught up in… there are a number of areas that frankly we don't have any business being involved in and we're not going to and we will find partners that will help us with that. We have a number of conversations in play with very interesting partners who can help us…