“BlackLight: Tango Down” is a first-person shooter focused on multiplayer online skirmishes, in the vein of mega-hit “Modern Warfare.” The difference? “BlackLight” can only be downloaded and costs just $15, far less than a boxed game. Fast Company asked Marcus Beer, Director of Public Relations, and Shane Bettenhausen, Director of New Business, at Ignition Entertainment, about their strategy in releasing downloadable games, and whether digital titles are the industry’s destiny.

Kevin Ohannessian: What is BlackLight: Tango Down?

Marcus Beer: BlackLight is the first downloadable game that delivers enough content so you can keep playing for months and months on end. A lot of the downloadable games that come out are smaller, with regards to the amount of content. This is a futuristic online shooter with 12 maps, 4 modes, 4 player coop, and over 2 trillion weapon combinations.

Shane Bettenhausen: We first talked to developer Zombie Studios about BlackLight last September. At that point, what they had was this semi-featured multiplayer mode, which was going to be part of a larger product. Originally this game was going to be a giant boxed product, like a Halo or a Modern Warfare. We were really interested in focusing on the multiplayer. You look at the stats of a lot of games, like Modern Warfare 2, on day one tons of people, before they even try the single player, are going straight to multiplayer. There have been all of the advancements in the genre to keep it sticky, to keep people going back online, fighting to get new weapons and new ranks. There’s this whole movement toward multiplayer first. So we were like, “Let’s do that. Lets give people the mode they really want and not spend all our efforts trying to make a single player game they may not even play.” This allowed us to make a game with a much smaller budget and really focus on delivering a quality experience to the hardcore guys online.

Read the full article at Fast Company.