Just 17 - Part Two

Martyn Brown talks WiiWare, iPhone, release dates and the question of price points

Feature by Phil Elliott Contributor

Published on July 27, 2009

GamesIndustry.biz Although retailers are benefitting well enough from the second hand market.

Martyn Brown

Well, exactly. Everybody's still making money here and there, and it's not like the retail market's disappearing.

GamesIndustry.biz Will digital distribution drive prices down at all on what you'd consider triple A now? Publishers I've spoken to don't want to commit, even though physical distribution costs would go down...

Martyn Brown

Well, just look at the music industry. It's not so long ago that music CDs were about GBP 14-15 - they're about GBP 7-8 now in HMV.

GamesIndustry.biz Isn't there a risk that, if you take all three Alien Breed episodes there are a lot of hours of polished gameplay there - yet altogether, without knowing the final price points, arguably you'd be looking at something that's maybe half the cost of a full boxed triple A game. Consumers won't stand for that, will they, if the bar is raised high enough on the downloadable platforms?

Martyn Brown

Well then it just becomes a delivery mechanism. You'd have to ask consumers whether they'd be prepared to pay GBP 15 or 20 to get it in their living room, or pay GBP 30 and get it in the store in a box.

GamesIndustry.biz But will publishers really pass the cost saving on, or just add it to their profit margins?

Martyn Brown

You'd have to ask publishers that. Obviously a lot of publishers are still doing what I'd call mainstream marketing - I'm not sure where that's aimed at to be honest, but they're doing a lot of that, whereas we're doing different things, and not spending nearly as much on marketing, because we realise for digital it's a little bit different.

I don't know - we argued pretty strongly with Microsoft about the price point for Worms, for example. And we argue the price down, not up, because we saw the benefits in doing so - a larger volume means more people playing, populating the servers... so we could probably have made a lot more in the first week than we did, but in the long term, for the brand...

I think it is possible to make good profit without screwing the consumer.

Martyn Brown is the studio director at Team 17. Interview by Phil Elliott.

Read this next