Rebel Without A Pause

Right now we want to hit a number of platforms and we plan to make an investment in all areas of games, from traditional games which is where our background is, all the way through to Facebook, social and browser, which we've got very limited experience in and need to improve our knowledge. We need to have those investments because when you're trying to build a franchise if you have a run away hit on one format you really need to have it on multiple formats. To try and increase the chances of having hits you need to have investments in iOS and Android, tablet versions and consoles as well. You need one of them to get some traction for the others to benefit.

This year we've started off nice and easy because we've had the funding and have had all the usual start-up stresses to deal with. So we've got one title. Next year the plan has us looking at a Facebook, a tablet, two mobile and two console titles. What we might do is take a view on that and perhaps pull some of our investment from 2012 and maybe hit eight or ten titles in 2011. It comes down to how confident we are in managing those titles as a management team and how confident we are in finding the right games to fit those slots and whether we can find good producer talent to manage those games from start to finish. We're confident we can tick most of those boxes, there probably needs to be a few iOS/Android ideas to come along that feel right. The main plan has us doing eight titles a year at full tilt. But anything could happen, right? Vita could completely light up so we could switch our efforts there, or tablets could go completely bonkers.

We want to use as many indie outsourcing companies as we can, there's plenty of good testing houses out there, plenty of good marketing and PR companies, great localisation houses - there's no need to have those functions internally. We're much more like a movie production company. Our core group of people will be a management team bolstered by six or seven talented producers and associate producers. And then a small number of marketing and community management people.

It's not a dirty word. It is publishing, it is what it is. It took us a while to work it out ourselves. We started calling ourselves a trans-media company but we realised that's a wanky term. I guess we didn't want to piss Sony off when we left on great terms, we have so much respect for that company, they gave me my break in the industry. But we came to the conclusion that we're providing a publishing function, we're worrying about that side of the game, but we recognise that the game development is just as important. There is no pecking order, we don't place ourselves higher up in the food chain, we provide a function that's as vital as the game development function.

What we've learned from developers who have tried to do that function themselves is that it's hard. They do a lot more than you think. There's a load of hidden things - game ratings, PR, marketing.

Games have traditionally been marketed in a very crude way. It's not contemporary. If you look at the way mainstream brands are marketed they're done in a sophisticated way. Games either say 'actual game footage' or 'not actual game footage'. We're not going to do TV ads, but I've spent a lot of time putting together ads for Sony's digital store and there's so much more that can be done there. The ads that Nintendo do seem to be more grown up and contemporary. We’ve got a lot of ideas to be more creative because we can’t compete when it comes to channel advertising with big publishers but we can compete when it comes to being creative with ideas that are yet to be tried.

Yes. My time at Warthog was spent mostly on designing games. When we set the business plan up we didn't know what games were out there, so we had to rely on games that we’d invented ourselves. By consuming a lot of games and being commercially minded you spend a lot of time looking for where the gaps are and for what's relevant. It wasn't that hard to come up with interesting conceptual ideas which serve a gap in the market.

We'll come up with ideas and try to work with a game developer who shares the passion for it. Is that work for hire for us? Not really, because the developer is still applying the creativity there on the idea so we'd still pay the same revenue ideas.

Now we've got other investors who are looking to put money into the business. And they are quite a diverse group of investors, but they are all in related fields. All people who understand the business model - DVD publishing, magazine publishing, music licensing - they all understand the business model because they've used it in their field. It's an exciting time to get into the games industry for these people.

We qualify for an EIS tax break (Enterprise Investment Scheme) so any UK investors that want to get involved can offset the investment. £50,000 investment under EIS, if it all went pair-shaped, is £17,000.

Its is healthy, yeah. It just depends where you are in your lifecycle as a company. We're a start-up so traditionally venture capitalists don’t tend to invest, they look at one or two year's trading and then they get interested. So the bulk of VCs we spoke to weren't interested, but there are some that are different and are interested. Most of the interest has come from individuals.