Arkane's Romuald Capron

It's a personal point of view, but I'd say that there are other ways to grow our market other than just forever increasing our development budgets. I think there are smart ways to increase the quality - and even the innovation - in your game that doesn't add tonnes of guys to your team.

At some point, I'd say that hiring a lot of extra people has a negative effect - because you need more management, you have less productivity, and I'd say you lose some innovation. We're more the kind of company that prefers to keep a core of senior, experienced and talented people and outsource a big part of the game - just keep the expertise, the know-how, internally, and stay flexible.

I think that's a good way to maintain reasonable budgets, and I think a lot of companies are coming round to this way of working right now. They're realising that having 200 people in a studio - okay, it can work for ten months of scheduled development, but is it the way to make a triple-A game?

Maybe they could re-organise and say, okay, let's keep to a three-year schedule again, but with less people - and more polishing at the end? At some point I'm not sure the markets can follow as fast as the development costs.

I think everybody has an interest in a longer life for the main consoles, because it's routine to see a cycle that's four, fix or six years. Arkane is a little bit less impacted by that because we've made the choice to use middleware for the game engine, the technology, and focus on the content so that we can be very active even if there's a new platform.

But I hope Microsoft and Sony will be reasonable with that, because the market doesn't need that kind of additional constraint. It's moving very fast, so we don't need another technical challenge like a new platform.

It's a way to extend the life of the console - I'm not sure if that will be for the games that we're doing, but yes.