Just 17 - Part Two
Martyn Brown talks WiiWare, iPhone, release dates and the question of price points
Yes - and what iPhone does as well is because we've got a few small new concepts, we could try a cut-down version of that, blast it onto iPhone, see what the comments and reception is like and maybe we can then develop that into a much bigger title somewhere else.
I think over the next few years there'll be more touch screen devices, an awful lot more hardware platforms, which will give us a good chance to experiment. It's almost like a new game style in many ways - the new interfaces have brought many ways of getting at games, and the way that people like to play games.
You only have to look at Flight Controller to see how popular that is - and it's a very simple game. Is it any less interesting than playing Call of Duty, for example? I don't know. It's all about entertainment - it's heading in different directions. We've got to watch all those trends and be part of it.
Well, the great thing about digital is that we don't really feel we need to have a long tail going into it. What we wanted to do with Alien Breed is just show a little bit of it five or six weeks before it hits, and hopefully the reaction from people would be "Oh my God, where did that come from?"
I think we'll probably start to do stuff late July, early August and start showing it.
We can't specify dates, but I would imagine the third part of the year. That's as clear as I can be without getting slapped.
If you look realistically, the second week of October is a minefield of releases. Whether or not people still consider digital to be competing with that, I'm not sure - because obviously price points are different - but I certainly wouldn't be comfortable being in that space, so I would think a little bit before then if we can.
Everything's kind of layered, really. Most of the effort goes into the first one, but a lot of the mechanics and core stuff is shared between the episodes. Most of the game was created in the early part of the year and the team then embellishes each episode. As one enters certification, the team works on embellishing the second lot.
We have no idea on how far apart the episodes will be yet - that's part of the beauty of being able to make the decisions along with Microsoft. We can react, and have all the episodes ready to be able to act. It's a case of learning about the market and episodic delivery, which everyone's still trying to crack - but we've put a lot of effort into thinking about it.
Absolutely - there's pretty much none of that involved in everything we do. Small amounts of piracy here and there, but generally-speaking everything's a lot more protected. At the end of the day the consumer's paying a lot less as well, and we're earning more royalties - and it's digital delivery, so everybody's kind of win-win, other than the distributor and retailer.