Don Daglow

Five answers come to mind at once! The first thing I would think of is that, having gone to CES and E3 since the Eighties, every time I would walk through the halls at those shows, all the way back to when we were battling Atari and ColecoVision, I remember thinking: "how can all these titles possibly succeed - there isn't the audience; there isn't enough money; there isn't enough shelf space for all these titles? How does this business work?!" Now when I saw it thirty years ago you can understand my jaw going dropping, but at E3 you get the same impression now.

The only way to get through this mess, with all that stuff that's out there, is to build something that's fun to play

I actually think of the Facebook market as being like that experience at E3 – and at CES before E3 – in that in each of those situations I came back and thought that the only way to get through this mess, with all that stuff that's out there, is to build something that's fun to play. Focus on the fun and focus on the gameplay. It sounds naive, but for thirty years I've been operating on the basis that if you get the gameplay right, even in a crowded market, you'll be okay.

I can think of a lot of times when we've gone up against bigger competitors and held our own or took the next bestselling spot in our genre simply by that process of saying: "well I guess we've just got to go on faith because the business keeps rolling along and we think we know what we're doing and we believe in what we're doing and we love the project, so let's just focus on gameplay and see if that'll work out." It doesn't work out every time, but it works out a whole lot of the time.

Yeah, in that way it really is in that, if you've got a publisher who knows what they're doing and can get their act together in a lot of these ways, there's a whole batch of things you don't worry about – which frees you to worry about fun and gameplay. Every business structure has its pluses and its minuses, but having a major publisher to work with, the way we do, there are a lot of variables you don't have to be preoccupied with.

I think a lot of licenses are not suitable, especially at the current time in this space, because they kind of drag you off in different directions. Once in a while a property will come along with a story it's telling, and a connection the property has with the audience, so much aligned with what you want to do with the game. At that point the license is not an albatross weighing you down – the license is a way for people to feel familiar with your property, so they feel they know what's going on in the story right from the start.

I don't feel that way about the Facebook space because I'm having a great time working on it and I think it's a really interesting challenge. If you think about painting, there are abstract painters where, if they see somebody doing a landscape, they just go "ah, that's not for me" and they just shake their head and walk off, because they're an abstract painter – that's what they do. I have a friend who is a painter and he does abstracts in oils where he does really interesting exercises in colour – and he also does seascapes.

I know people who would say "so you love the abstracts and you make the seascapes to make money" because that's what people buy in a gallery. But his answer is "no I simply love the sea; I love being in the ocean. Oh and, by the way, I also love these abstract paintings." So I don't see it as a matter of respect or disrespect or whatever else – I think it's just a matter of taste. Some people are abstract painters, some are landscape painters and some, like my friend, do both.