Leading the Way

I don't think re-education is the right word - I think the audience is evolving. Where the re-education needs to be is in our industry.

I think they have to - obviously they have to evolve with it. I feel it's a little bit stagnant where we are with the consoles, and even the console market. Looking back at the PSone and PS2, then where we are today with the market, a few years into this console cycle - and I haven't looked at graphs comparing previous generations - but I don't think we're doing as well as we should.

I know that the manufacturers are trying to figure out where to go from here, and so I can only imagine that they need to evolve a little bit into that space. They are trying to figure it out - but I think one of the big things is the education of the industry.

As far as developers just putting out a game and saying, "Oh well, our game is this good, I'll sell more for 800 points than I would for 1200 points..." - That's just making a pure business decision. What we're talking about is designing games so they might be able to go out for 100 points, then there's a lot of things you can buy for 50, 100 or 150 points, or whatever.

I think that kind of model is going to be more interesting. What I think is that we, as developers, have a role to work this further. I think that developers themselves - I hear a lot from colleagues that Microsoft doesn't want to move, or Sony doesn't want this or that. Actually, I think it's different - I think they can't move without having really clear ideas, and people coming to them with concepts.

I feel a little bit of responsibility lies with the development community, and not people just saying that's the way it is, and we're going to continue to put out games as we used to - without coming up with clever, new ideas that could be attractive, and some proof in them from what happens in the casual space. There's not a lot of that happening - we might be sticking out our necks a little bit, to say that we'd love to have Sony and Microsoft on board with these strategies...

I think they will get there, I think they'll get there easier if they have people like us presenting ideas of how to get there. It doesn't have to be a direct switch - you can take small, baby steps and try things out - and that's where we need to be. So the responsibility lies on both sides.

If I had really good ones, I wouldn't put them in the press... at least not yet. But viral is a big word in the social space, and I believe that's been one factor in the success of kick-starting the whole social story with companies like Zynga and Playfirst. When they started off, they got all that for free, but now Zynga's paying fortunes to have banners on Facebook.

Again, I think I'd want to come up with ideas that platform holders could buy into and find interesting. It's almost as if, for the moment, XBLA is going to go the other way - that it's a marketing platform for the full-spec boxed games, with people putting up a couple of levels of the multi-million dollar titles and making it an XBLA download.

That's a dangerous way to go - it's still great content to have, and I'm sure there's a public for it. But on the other hand I think we should really work at making that platform something in its own right. It's always been everybody's objective - but all the big statements that we heard many years ago, from the different platform holders, in terms of what they were going to be doing... When you look at what they have done in the last two or three years, it's very thin.

They haven't been enormously successful with some things they've tried; some other things are working well - but there's not a lot going on, nothing very bold in trying to push where they can go with the digital platforms.