ICO Partners Part 2

Okay, I was going to say - I have huge respect for them, because they've made so many good decisions and they've taken them so far. Dust is the first thing that, on paper - and I've been proven wrong before - looks wrong. On paper it looks really wrong. It looks wrong to do that game on console exclusively.

The console deal does look really weird.

It looks wrong and makes me worry. They're going to go head to head with every single FPS game on Xbox, to fight against these people... That means they need to reach a new audience, start again with a very high barrier of entry, lots of competition. People are more versatile on PC, it's easier for them to go from one sort of game to another than on console.

For me it's against the very nature of the thing. Plus, on console, if you need to speak to people, if you need to arrange your mercenary group or whatever, you can't create that community fabric. That level that sits in the background. You can't build that on console. You don't have forums, you don't have fansites - not that are accessible from the main device. People have to go back and forth between PC and Xbox all the time. Why not do it on PC directly? I have a couple of ideas about why they made that decision, but for me it's counter-intuitive. It's a bit unnatural.

I'm excited about Dust - I think there's lots of good ideas. I believe it'll bring the added value to online worlds that I want to see in action - Dust is going to be the first to do that, so I'm really excited. But I'd be ten times as excited if it was a PC game.

If you look at the speculations from EVE players, following the recent patches that have added planetary interactions for players... They've added the ability to develop planets, build infrastructure and gather and so on. There are things that the EVE players don't really know what they're for. They're assuming that it's for Dust, so we'll see. It's one to watch, that's for sure.

Do you have another two hours? [laughs]

I definitely, when I think about the Sony crisis, think the hell their community people and their PR people must be going through at the moment. I'm really happy I'm not in their shoes, doing what they do because there's going to be lots to do! From my point of view, not being a PS3 player, in terms of the communication of brands - is the TV coverage. A couple of days before the royal wedding there was a report on Sky about the PSN hack. They invited a young games blogger on and he was talking about the PSN hack - many people who don't know Sony, certainly who don't play PS3, will hear about that. That might even damage the whole Sony brand, not just the PlayStation brand.

That's a shame because Sony is one of the companies who were really pushing for online content and free-to-play on console. They'd just launched Free Realms just before, I was very curious to see how it would do!

It's very easy to sit in the lobby of a nice hotel and say "if I was Sony I would do this". First thing I would say is, "we don't store your credit cards details anymore, we go through a specialist company who deal with all that." I would give away PSN Plus. I would take the time that it was down, multiply it by three, and that's what I would give away, because you need to be generous. It's not being overly generous, because it has a cost, but not that big a cost.

It has to be something that sounds big to people because the problem was big so the compensation has to be big. Then I would push the option, if people don't trust us, of pre-paid cards that you can buy in a shop. Do as many things as possible to buy the trust, because that's the biggest damage. I think they're going to also have a hard time with the developers. People launched games a week before the service went down - I would be desperate, crying! I'm not sad about Sony, it's a big company with big shoulders, it's painful but they can survive. Imagine the small developers, they have a good game and they lose out because of third, fourth parties. That's terrible.

It reminds me of 2002, when I was running Dark Age of Camelot in Europe, we had a hack. Quite a serious breach. We took the service down for a week. It was one of the longest weeks of my life. We didn't lose any critical information, because we weren't storing it, but it was our only source of revenue. We survived that and we came out stronger, but I can tell you, you hate the hacker. You really, really hate those guys.