2012: We Only Do Everything

That's only if you go for visuals. With a console experience I know it's going to work on a console, with my laptop it's 50/50. I sit with my feet up using a console.

I agree, with your surround sound system and your big TV...

But PC is about sitting forward and it's a completely different experience, so I disagree. Visuals on PC are much better - at the moment.

But with things like OnLive you'll have that same experience as a console but on PC.

That's the point: when does that blur, when is a console not a console? Raspberry Pi, for example, could run OnLive, I'm sure. So you could play Battlefield on that. Is that a dedicated console? The fact that at the other end it's being hosted on a high-end PC, that's the thing to forget.

And so the next Sony or Microsoft console could be a window to a really powerful PC and the only thing they bring is a really nice controller or a really nice peripheral set and very well branded community.

I remember when the original PlayStation came out the thing that was so great about it was you didn't have to fiddle about, you put the CD in and off you went.

Back then that was really important compared to the PC experience.

That console mentality, it has to be totally consumer friendly. It's an appliance. If my mum can't use it it's not a console.

That's the same with tablets and phones as well. It has to work.

As a developer we can test the same set-up that a user is going to have with an iPad, with a 360, with a PlayStation 3 or whatever. We can't do that with a PC. Even in our office, with the PC standing next to it, it's got a different graphics card.

But for the same price as an iPad you can get a pretty nice PC that should play anything. The experience on a games console is not as good as it used to be on an N64 with a cartridge or on the PlayStation. Now you get a game that's maybe a week or two old and you put it in for the first time you have to wait for a system update.

You're right, that's bad, and that's essentially moving towards the PC world. The other thing that we're skipping over is that almost by the backdoor Sony and Microsoft have taken over the living room - just look at how easy it is to watch a move on your console.

In some ways I'm surprised it's taken this long. It's been their expressed strategy for years. When the Xbox 360 and PS3 first came out it was all about the battle for the living room, and it's five years later and we're just getting there.

In terms of how people consume content, look at the US with the ESPN deal and Netflix...

The thing is, I've just recently moved into the country and it's a bloody nightmare. It's like going back in time. I can't use iPlayer any more on my PS3.

Frontier is based just outside of Cambridge and BT were about as rubbish as it's possible to get. They couldn't get anything to us that was more than a 64k ISDN line so we went to a local start-up and we had a wireless link to the centre of Cambridge that was 64MB and it cost less than BT. It was an invisible service but the government made that really awkward for them because BT had a studio monopoly.

They have big problems in the US because it's such a physically big country that it will take a long time to reach middle America.

Are you talking specifically about streaming services or digital distribution as well?

Well the two are very closely related.

Do you think the growth of the App Store in certain countries has been because they have such good connections?

You can go to some countries that we would think of as more third-world and the connections are really good. Partly because they haven't bothered putting in a wired network. So they leapfrog from a fixed line network straight to a wireless network.

Do you think someone else can't come into that living room space now that Sony and Microsoft are already there?

It becomes harder by the day, but Apple has a chance there.

I find using apps on the TV really weird. That's one thing about the new [Xbox] dashboard, anything other than video on demand feels a little bit "we should have it, so we're going to put it onto the service". On a personal device like an iPad or iPhone you're using it exclusively and it makes sense. The interface is something that Apple could potentially revolutionise. Look at streaming from Apple TV to the iPad, it still doesn't feel right. I feel that maybe TV is going to go away as the main place that people will take their entertainment. Maybe it will stay the central focus for shared experiences but I feel like if there's nobody else I'm sharing it with, streaming TV or playing games on the iPad, it feels like this is my entertainment.

But I have a choice at home of the room with the small TV or the room with the big TV. I'm not going to watch the football on the small TV.

Oh sure, for something that's much more of an event, but for normal TV I'm happy watching it on an iPad.

Most people who watch TV have a remote control by their side and a big TV where they consume the content. An iPhone 4 does this. It's a little version of your remote, with a screen, where you're selecting programmes, pausing, rewinding, and then you watch it again on a great big screen, 1080p, surround sound speakers.

It makes sense that you have something that's multiple purpose and you hold it in your hands and you take it with you. And if you want to do anything that's more powerful you can do that via the cloud, and if you want to view it on a big screen you can. And when it comes to multiplayer everybody in the household can have their own screen, especially when the prices come down to something like the Kindle Fire level. And then you can make multiplayer games for multiple screens and the TV is just used to keep the score.

I really liked those Wii demos at E3, showing the two players, one on the Wii U and one using the Wii controls on a TV.

I've seen a game demoed on 12 iPads at the same time, one for each player.

There's no reason why not. If everybody's got a personal entertainment device it makes sense.

You can show secret stuff to a single screen and common content to the TV screen for everyone.