2010: Interviews of the Year Part 1

Jason Holtman and Doug Lombardi, Valve

This year GamesIndustry.biz gained a new deputy editor, Alec Meer, long-time games journalist and one quarter of PC blog Rock, Paper Shotgun. With plenty of experience and genuine love for PC games, he was the ideal team member to tackle Valve, the guys behind market-leading digital distribution service Steam.

This two part interview began with a look at the early success of Steam on Mac, with business development director Jason Holtman and marketing VP Doug Lombardi quick to point out that the service had quickly unified the PC and Mac experience.

"They're not thinking about their PC and Mac being separate anymore, they're really thinking about both of them being together and the platform just being there," said Holtman. "It's truly cross-platform. You can get beaten up by a Mac guy just as well as you can get beaten up by a PC guy."

Only one of the few developers to embrace the Mac audience, Holtman revealed to GamesIndustry.biz that is releasing some of the graphics code for developers to convert their games to the format, "so our Steamworks partners will have access to some of the hard work that we do to get our games up on Mac, and they'll be able to incorporate that into their games, and our hope is it gets them there faster.

"Because that's the real hard work in making Mac version is doing that graphics work, so we're going to help people along by giving them some of our code."

Attracting a whole lot of developers and publishers back to the Mac in 2010 has been beneficial for all - not just Valve - by simply opening up or bringing back a platform many had given up on, said Holtman.

"The other interesting thing we're seeing from publishers and developers alike is people aren't necessarily thinking of it as... it's kind of derogatory to think of it as a Mac port. They're not thinking about porting about their games to Mac: they're thinking 'wow, I need to write for a Mac. I'm not going to do a port six months later or maybe a year later, I should bring that in and do that now because there's a fair amount of people out there.'"

Sean Murray, Hello Games

It's been another successful year for independent developers, none more so than Hello Games with its PSN release Joe Danger. In another honest interview - conducted by the newest member of the GamesIndustry.biz team, Dan Pearson - developer Sean Murray opened up on the realities of self-publishing on consoles.

"PSN is the only place you can really self-publish a game," he said. "The only route on XBLA is through Microsoft as a first-party, or through another publisher. So you always have a publisher. On PSN we're the publisher, so we're totally in control of everything"

Echoing the thoughts of a lot of individuals this year, Murray said that he thought the end of the current console cycle was near, and that developments in indie circles and smaller innovation were much more exciting than the traditional console business, and this is where we're likely to see much more creative and innovative projects in the short term.

"I'm really excited that there are these new ways to create games, like digital download, XBLA, PSN. A lot of the stuff on Steam is way more interesting to me than a raft of new sequels at next year's E3 for example. I'm a lot more excited for that stuff, and I think a lot of people are.

"You see the way that Minecraft, for instance, is on fire at the moment, you know? People want innovation, it's just that at this stage, publishers don't want risk - and that's what they're saying. I think that's really short sighted, to me, but then I'm a small developer. I think it would be really risky not to innovate at the moment."