Blue Sky Thinking

It looks very natural, and just the way it should be...but it turns out it this actually just saved a week of somebody's time.

Yeah, absolutely. You can add, for example, a cover behaviour, or a vault behaviour, and just see how it works in the game.

It's not just a story of we save you money. It's also about giving people more time to experiment with ideas, and get a better end product.

At a high level people seem very happy to see this. Everyone says, "Yep, this is exactly what we need. When can we have it?" I think the rubber hits the road when you have to start integrating this into your engine and your whole process, and where we're at now with this is starting to work with clients, doing initial integrations, so we'll learn a lot from that.

People are extremely excited. It predates GDC, actually. When we work on things like this we work very closely with customers. We don't develop in a vacuum, and as I said earlier, we didn't just invent all of this. It's stuff that people have been doing – at great cost, unfortunately – internally, to some degree or another.

The big challenge for us is that people like the concept, they're open to it; it's just that, will they afford themselves the time to change.

The latter for sure. I think the former it's going to depend on...If you look at a lot of the larger companies, they're struggling right now to keep costs down and keep these big teams going. We have talked to some of them and it's a case of, 'If you have a solution for me and I don't have to do it, I'm happy to do that.' At a high level, conceptually, they know they make their money off being creative and creating new, interesting games, not necessarily rewriting technology all the time.

I don't know if you saw the Carmack quote that came out, where he talked about, for the first time, we're not going to be replacing all of the technology, we're going to focus more on the creative aspects and that side of things. I would say that's where film-making is more ahead right now, just because the technology hasn't been there in games, and every new hardware cycle means a change of everything for everyone. It's been expensive. It's been tough. But it's starting to balance itself out now, and people can afford to standardise a bit more on the pipeline.

Everything's maturing enough now that we should be able to do better at this, and I think Skyline shows that we can. If we can get some good projects and good customers on board to show more proof of that we'll have a good story.

If you look at it that way, it ends up... Take film, for example, once things standardise the big studios only get bigger. Who makes the big CG movies now? Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, Blue Sky maybe, and that's about it. You've got four or five that can really do it to the right quality level, and to really go high-end in games will still be a big undertaking, I think. Not anyone in their garage with a good tool will be able to pick up and do that. There's just a scale and magnitude that you can't match.

Regardless of the sophistication level or the amount of investment that a company has in their own tools, everyone has technology cycles. There's always a point when you need to look at some part of your pipeline that has aged, and that's the point where you have to ask yourself, are we gonna do another one of these, or are going to use this solution that's now on the market that's fine for everyone else.

I think it's going to happen; it's just a question of when. If you look at other industries, everything standardises. It's just a matter of time. Are we at the right time here? I hope so.