Looking Ahead to Develop

Q: Develop's changed a fair bit over the past three years - last year seemed to be well received?

Owain Bennallack: Yes - when we first started Develop the jury was a bit out on whether or not the UK could support another developer conference, because it had been tried before, but then it had gone away again. I think it's fair to say that the British are a bit more reserved, not just in terms of temperament but also professionally - they don't just bound up onto a stage and jump about.

But I knew a fair few people having worked on the magazine Develop, so I was able to reach out to people, and Susan Marshall, who's the conference director, knows billions of people from her time at GDC.

So we got people in, and I almost went down wondering if there would be anybody there - I knew we'd sold tickets, but... though the enthusiasm and the will to have a networking event was immediately apparent, and Brighton was a cool place to go to. It went pretty well.

The second year - difficult second album - but I think the second year built on the first year, but the thing we really got right in the third year was that we had a bit more in the mix, more bullet points would be a good phrase - there were more things for people that perhaps weren't rank and file developers

What we've tried to do with the conference is really make such that if somebody goes there, they can go back to work with the ability to do their job more effectively. That's not always compatible with creating the world's sexiest run of headlines, though, so that balance is difficult - finding something that can cater to both the event as an event, and the event almost as piece of a career development.

It's been going in the right direction, and this year we're doing some exciting new things, but it's against a backdrop of an economic downturn.

Q: It is tough balance - there are a certain number of people coming through the door, but you also want the event to sound appealing to people who stayed at home, so you still need those headlines to make a splash in the media...

Owain Bennallack: A particular difficulty comes when reaching out internationally. The UK's a fairly small place, people tend to know each other, and most developers know the conference and can make a decision on going there.

When we try to bring people over from the US, big names who will happily speak to 250 people in the US, we can tell them they can come to speak to hundreds at Develop, the cream of the crop of UK developers, and the event just doesn't have that level of international awareness yet.

It's getting there - we've had excellent speakers from Japan, we've had Ken Levine from Bioshock, people from Valve and Microsoft - great people speak. But does every US developer know that Develop in Brighton exists and consider it in the way a UK developer would? I don't think that's happened yet, we won't get 10,000 US developers flying in, but it would be helpful - the more they understand that it's an opportunity to speak to Europe, the more likely they are to come and take part.

We don't want to create something that's 'all sound and fury, signifying nothing,' but we do need to accept that there needs to be some spice in the mix.

Q: Do you think, with the economic downturn, that companies will sanction as much international event attendance as they might have last year?

Owain Bennallack: I don't think that we're seeing that yet, but it would be too early to say to be honest. Conferences are strange in the way that they develop a snowball effect. I think in general the whole idea that the games industry was going to escape from the economic downturn was wishful thinking, really, based on the economics of twenty years ago - when kids bought games machines and their parents bought their games.

You can't have something that's integrated into everyone's lifestyle, and at the same time expect that not to take a hit when people's lifestyles take a hit. It's the price that you pay for becoming a mainstream media pastime.

I think it's true - companies are feeling the pressure. There are financial reasons too. Publishers, for quite tedious financial reasons - that don't necessarily have anything to do with games not selling, it's more to do with credit markets, and so on. All you can do is put together the most compelling content you can and hope that it's sufficiently tantalising.

Q: Will that be a theme for the event this year, sessions on the economy?

Owain Bennallack: Well, there will definitely be a nod towards it. There was talk of almost a "How would the games industry cope with a 1930s depression" idea. I don't know if it's currently on or off the agenda, but when you start to think of it like that, with no new console generation in ten years, you can really start to run with that idea.

The difficulty is, is that compatible with our mission to try and give people practical advice that they can try and take away? Really it's better to explain how people can diversify in the new marketplace, looking at things like iPhone and Facebook as new platforms to fuse their IP on to, or tighter ways to use your existing workforce - outsourcing, and so on. These are more practical steps that people can take, things we've spoken about in the past, and things we'll speak about again this year.

It might be less about finding that extra chunk of profit, and more about stemming potential losses, but I think there's a limit on the amount of stuff you can do on the really big picture stuff - though I hope there will still be sessions on the agenda which will help people out with it.

Q: Education's another hot topic right now - will that be reflected at all?

Owain Bennallack: To me that's bubbled back to the fore again, but it's one of those perennial stories, like the Earth being hit by a meteorite or something. But I think people understand the situation of academia in the UK, and I think people have their positions on it. The various great and the good - it depends on whether or not those great and good decide to articulate their views that year or not.

I don't think it's really changed, and I don't think it can change - there are fundamental issues. You can't teach people to be sufficiently in the top 1 per cent of their year in maths sort of candidate to go and programme an engine for a game. Those people aren't going to be trained up in the provinces and go and work for Lionhead. It's not going to happen.

So I think there are specific structural issues that need to be addressed about the pipeline of talent into UK development, but I don't think this year will see any great steps when the complete opposite is happening - studios are losing staff and nobody's really recruiting.

Q: You added a new item to the mix this year - what's Evolve all about?

Owain Bennallack: It's something that really excites me, it's new, and on the first day of the conference, running into the second day, which is this unbelievable integration of games and games technology and the internet. The way this has changed in the last two years has really amazed me - two years ago, I'd been operating in the internet space for a bit and gotten quite excited about some things like Digg and YouTube which were just emerging.

So I went to the advisory board and said we should look into it, but they didn't see what it had to do with their business - because it didn't, nobody was really doing anything with it.

But just this year it's the complete opposite - they all, to a man virtually, were excited about the user-generated content, the integration with social networks, downloadable content whether via platform channels or democratised internet solutions, identities that exist beyond a single avatar... literally anything in the internet space that's linked to games - these are huge trends that are really changing games, and I don't think really that people, even though they're doing their own part of it, have really fully grasped how different games can knit into this wider 'game-o-sphere,' for want of a better expression.

People can't live in their own bubbles any more, they absolutely have to be specialists, more and more. People who don't try and get their heads around that now, who don't think about the impact that Google will have on games... you might not think it would have any impact, but that's to fundamentally misunderstand what happens when you 'internet-up-ise' an industry.

Look at how music has changed, firstly as the internet has sort of been bolted on, and then been turbo-charged through its veins. It's completely changed the industry. Things that seemed quite superficial become quite fundamental - if you imagine that everything in a game has an internet presence, all the elements, what you do, a sort of nodal presence that means you can take them and mash them up into other game spaces... it's incredibly exciting stuff.

That's what Evolve is for, it's a venue to bring some of this stuff out and talk about it.