Monumental Changes

Well, we're currently talking to a big North American publisher about a deal on a console MMO, which we'll hopefully announce in the next 3 months or something. We've already ported our tech onto it - it's an ongoing process, we're still developing tools and so on. I think the big players will start moving into console MMOs, now that the format holders are moving in themselves and releasing the ability to do console MMOs, like billing, who gets the share, do they have to use PlayStation Store, what's the royalty share, harddrive downloads and so on.

Now those hurdles have been gone through then everybody's going to be moving into it. I think it'll be 2-3 years before the main players, or rather the normal players get into it. But we want to just be part of the solution, so we'll be 2-3 years into knowing about console MMOs before anybody else thinks about it.

Well, we don't mind, we're flexible. We have digital download MMOs already - Football Superstars and Hunter's World - and we have a hybrid micro-transaction model. But we're also more than capable of doing full retail packages as well, once we figure out the details with Sony and Microsoft with subscriptions and so on. We're open to all kinds of models at this point, we're not going to define, we just want to be part of the solution.

Most publishers are very likely to feel more comfortable with going down a retail model initially I suppose. But 2-3 years on, a lot is going to have changed in that time I suspect, so it may well be that, come the time, digital distribution is leading on console.

We got investment in a year that hardly anyone got investment. Talking to some of our peers, most of them said the only people that got investment last year were ones with really good stories behind them, that had shown really good growth, turning over some decent money and looked to have great futures as well. We actually raised the money with no business plan on a three and a half hour meeting. We were literally about to go to the city on a three month tour, we'd prepared for it and then we had this meeting with Maven Capital Partners and two weeks later they gave us the terms sheet so we had to make the decision. And it was an easy decision really.

I would like to add that after the three and a half hour meeting there was a ton of work...

One of the reasons we chose Maven is they understand the space quite well and it's easy terms as well. We could have gone to the city, but the expectation of what [Maven] need to get out of it is lower I think than any other VC company.

We've never really had cash before. We've just grown out of doing deals and had just enough money to survive for a few months beyond where we were. Which is an interesting place to be... I'd never really thought about that as a negative until one of the investors said 'wasn't that a bit scary?' And I went, 'well that's just business surely,' and they said, 'no, most people raise money so they don't have to worry about it.'

But then we raised the money. And it sits in the bank, it helps us negotiate with publishers properly so we don't have to worry about starting work and having to get paid quickly doing a contract. We can spend money and make the right decisions. It doesn't mean we can rest on our laurels, but we can strengthen our foundations and accelerate growth.

NPD only tells part of the story - it's going to have to broaden some of its definitions to capture the wider market. I think that last year the games industry did have its own recession, it's just that while it was having its recession everyone was saying the games industry is recession-proof. So there was a difference with public perception and what was actually happening. We're noticing things really picking up so we feel really positive. But everyone's reporting on last year's figures and so we're getting a bit of a lag I think in the media.

Normally we get lots of enquires about what we're doing in January - people have got new budgets, they've just finished all their Christmas titles, they've had holidays, so they always pick up the phone in January. But it didn't happen this year, I don't know why. 1st of February the phone starts ringing. February is the new January... I can't believe I said that.

A lot of publishers battened down the hatches last year, and I think they're un-battening them now.

Our Manchester studio, which is our conversion and emerging technologies studio is working on a whole bunch of Natal and motion controller stuff right now. We have augmented reality tech. We're looking at all of that stuff - it's exciting times.