Talking as part of an in-depth new interview at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment's Joe Ybarra has revealed that the Stargate Worlds developer has a total of four studios at work, with second, smaller-scale MMO currently in development.

In this excerpt, Ybarra discusses the free-to-play biz model and the online game-as-service philosophy championed by Nexon and others, suggesting that one or more of the developer's next efforts might reflect a few of these progressive philosophies.

There are multiple products coming out, right? On multiple platforms, eventually, with the Stargate license. Are you planning things other than Stargate, too?

Joe Ybarra: Yes. In fact, Stargate, as an MMO, is the only large scale MMO that we are working on. We have another MMO that's under construction that's considerably less in scope, but nonetheless is still in that space.

But, another answer to your question is that all of our products will have online as their primary mechanism for delivery. And, in that regard, we don't focus entirely on MMOs. In fact, our second product is a completely different kind of a product. It's more of a peer-to-peer kind of an online activity. It's possible, like Stargate, that we can put it on console as well. But our primary focus is on the PC, and delivering online game experiences. All four of our studios build products in that space.

Have you thought much about the 'free to play' model, and what kind of business model are you going to go for?

JY: Yes, we have put a lot of thought into that. Yeah. And, it's my personal belief that it is ultimately where all the products go. Free-to-play, microtransaction business model, I think, is the winning solution, long-term.

I was actually talking to Min Kim -- did you see the Visual Fight Club thing that happened?

JY: No, I did not.

It was just him versus Kelly Flock, and they were talking about subscription model versus free-to-play model, but when I was talking to Min earlier today, he said that a lot of people seem to have really the wrong idea about what the free-to-play model is. The game is really a service, not a product. It's like, you're facilitating contact, and the game has to be built from the ground up for item sales. You can't just make a game and then put item sales into it afterward and expect that it's going to be functional. So is that something that you've been building in from the beginning, or is it more recent?

JY: Well in the case of our second product, which is what we're discussing -- our free-to-play product -- yeah, it's been architected from the ground up to support that activity. And without getting into the content of what this game is -- if I able to explain it to you, it would be obvious that, yeah, this is a really good proposition, or content model, for this type of transaction-based environment. Because some games lend themselves better than others do, and what we think is that in our second product, we've got something that is absolutely perfect for this kind of business model.

And, like you said, all online products, regardless of what they are -- MMOs, or peer-to-peer, or whatever -- have a service component to it, and, as you articulated, it really is a service. We look at Stargate Worlds as the example of that; it's that we're not building a product, we're building a real service organization to our customers. Especially if you're in the subscription-based model, you've got to be more added value to your customer than just shipping up a box and connect up to your service. We've know that from the very beginning. And that's a lot of the effort that I'm personally working on now, at Cheyenne, is building that infrastructure.

[You may read the full feature at Gamasutra.]