2010: Interviews of the Year Part 1

Mike Hayes, Sega

Sega is one of the big Japanese companies slowly changing its traditional business to take advantage of the shift to digital markets. At E3 this year I got a chance to sit down with western boss Mike Hayes. The first part of our chat was very much focused on the most recent announcements of Kinect, Move and 3DS, but the second part for me was more interesting.

It's always going to be harder for a company as big as Sega to adapt to new markets, especially when they are still undefined and evolving, but Hayes clearly understands the importance of new business, platforms and talent in a changed industry.

"If you look at the top 25 social games - not that they're easy to identify - none of them come from a traditional games company. They're made, they think and they operate in an entirely different way. Whilst we can take our traditional values across to certain devices like the iPhone or iPad, social gaming is completely different," he said.

Aware that growth isn't coming from the boxed console business, Hayes said Sega's money is currently being better spent on digital products for alternative platforms.

"Do you spend $50 million trying to compete with Call of Duty: Black Ops, which is a very challenging task, or do you take that $50 million and look at different ways of investing it? That's not to say we're not in the core market, because with things like Aliens Vs Predator and Vanquish you can see that we are, but in terms of where do you start diverting funds, it's definitely digital and devices that bring different gaming experiences and different consumers that are a very important part of what Sega's doing."

While the buzz around social games companies was appearing to peak, Hayes called out the prices being spent on acquisitions, pointing out that they have value, but are possibly over-priced in the current market. Sega, he said, would rather build its own social experiences than splash out cash on buying the next big thing.

"The value of what is current - you could argue is actually too high," offered Hayes. "If you look at a lot of famous companies, I won't mention any names, but look at their balance books and they are not making any money. They have value."

"With the Sega name and the money we have, we believe we can bring people in to build those things up. The good news is that particularly from a game design and production point of view the teams are relatively small. But as a company at Sega we can fund all the back end stuff fairly easily – the operations and customer service, the servers, the bandwidth. The clever bit, we think we can do that organically. It's not a gold rush."

Peter Molyneux, Lionhead/Microsoft

The media is never short of a Peter Molyneux interview, but I honestly think this is one of the best interviews with the Lionhead boss I've read all year. And I've read all of them.

He's known for speaking his mind and making any PR's in earshot wince (Fable has "got more bugs than any game that Microsoft Game Studios has ever had in its history"), but he's also straight up and insightful about the entire development process, and in this interview he held up his hands to say the current way of making games is fundamentally broken.

"Here's the issue which I hate - again, we're in the same position as many, many other developers, if you read the post mortems of Uncharted 2 or any game, they all say the same. We find our game so late on in the process, that it's very hard to pull it all together - and that has to change.

"We cannot do this - we can't keep turning up this late. A film analogy is me turning up with a camera on set and saying: "Okay, I'm not sure what the story is, but let's turn the camera on anyway."

"We've got to stop doing this, because 1) It's too expensive, and 2) Our consumers, the people that play our games, are too demanding of the quality we have to deliver. We just have to work on a different way - it's got to be the case."

He also chipped in on the idea that developing on newer platforms is cheaper and easier, predicting that once a company begns to spend millions on developing an iPhone game, everyone feels that they too have to match those budgets.

"It's only a matter of time before some b*****d out there makes an amazing quality app on the iPhone which blows everybody away, which costs a $5-10 million... and everybody will turn around and say: 'Great - now we have to spend $5 million on every app.'"

More of the best GamesIndustry.biz interviews of the year will be published tomorrow.