Jesse Schell

Yes, absolutely. 90 per cent on games on there lose money, or something like that.

It's better than nothing, but the world is so big - there are so many things going on that for you to make something that's really going to stand out on a pure viral basis it needs to be incredibly unique and give a lot of fans an easy way to talk about it. Then, maybe it can happen, and we've seen a few of those lately.

But a part of the challenge is that, while it's easier on the web... I can send you an email or IM, you can click the link and you're playing the game. But if I find a cool iPhone game, how am I going to tell my friends? Some platforms are more- or less-suited to virality.

It is a lot of things, but I think the main driver really is that things are possible now that weren't possible before. Even just five or ten years ago, the idea of selling games for 99 cents was, like, "How are you going to do that?" There wasn't a platform for it - but now there is, you can also make games you couldn't make before.

So it's really just blown open the doors for the types of games people are making, or trying to make. There are different price points, games where you pay while you're playing - in the game, and that changes the way you play - games that involve your friends in different ways... all these doors have been opened at once, and more are continuing to be opened.

It's coming along great. It's an exciting property for us, because it's so fun - it's a movie all about guys running around shooting each other, while finding treasure and fighting monsters. It almost makes a better videogame than it does a movie [laughs]

Yeah - I love working with licenses really. I've had a lot of experience doing licensed content with Disney, and I really believe that licensed content is one of the things we're really going to see an explosion of with social gaming.

That's how it always goes with videogames. They always start out with no licensed IP, then some people start to float with it - and then usually licensed IP becomes about 50 per cent of any game platform, in terms of where the money comes from. I think there's a lot of room for that with social games.

It is nice - you have a ready-made world, and you can look at it and ask, "How can we really capture the essence of this world? How can we take this and make it even better?" That can be a lot of fun.

I don't know about that. It has to do with the licensor that you're working with and what they need to hold on to - so far our relationship working with Bigpoint and Universal has just been great.

Yeah, it's a good place to start.

The DSi can be a challenging platform, because it has its own little peculiarities. It's certainly not an open platform, but there's great support on the developer website for getting things done. Probably what's most exciting for us is that it's going to be a downloadable title.

It's a tough business doing retail handheld titles, because the price points are relatively low compared to say console titles - but at the same time the cartridge production costs are high, compared to a disc.

So you've got a situation where the margins are slim, and on top of that it's a crowded market - there are a lot of people making games for that platform. People have started to view the DS platform as a little risky for banging out retail titles, and on top of that there's the piracy - particularly in Europe, where it's growing more and more rampant.

The downloads do stop a lot of that, and for an independent developer it's really nice, because you don't have to do all the fussing about with the publisher.

I think it's partly because of how many DSi consoles have been sold so far - I don't think the market is huge yet. But I personally think that the 3DS is going to change everything... it's almost like the DSi is a kind of warm-up for the 3DS.