Looking Ahead to Develop

Well, there will definitely be a nod towards it. There was talk of almost a "How would the games industry cope with a 1930s depression" idea. I don't know if it's currently on or off the agenda, but when you start to think of it like that, with no new console generation in ten years, you can really start to run with that idea.

The difficulty is, is that compatible with our mission to try and give people practical advice that they can try and take away? Really it's better to explain how people can diversify in the new marketplace, looking at things like iPhone and Facebook as new platforms to fuse their IP on to, or tighter ways to use your existing workforce - outsourcing, and so on. These are more practical steps that people can take, things we've spoken about in the past, and things we'll speak about again this year.

It might be less about finding that extra chunk of profit, and more about stemming potential losses, but I think there's a limit on the amount of stuff you can do on the really big picture stuff - though I hope there will still be sessions on the agenda which will help people out with it.

To me that's bubbled back to the fore again, but it's one of those perennial stories, like the Earth being hit by a meteorite or something. But I think people understand the situation of academia in the UK, and I think people have their positions on it. The various great and the good - it depends on whether or not those great and good decide to articulate their views that year or not.

I don't think it's really changed, and I don't think it can change - there are fundamental issues. You can't teach people to be sufficiently in the top 1 per cent of their year in maths sort of candidate to go and programme an engine for a game. Those people aren't going to be trained up in the provinces and go and work for Lionhead. It's not going to happen.

So I think there are specific structural issues that need to be addressed about the pipeline of talent into UK development, but I don't think this year will see any great steps when the complete opposite is happening - studios are losing staff and nobody's really recruiting.

It's something that really excites me, it's new, and on the first day of the conference, running into the second day, which is this unbelievable integration of games and games technology and the internet. The way this has changed in the last two years has really amazed me - two years ago, I'd been operating in the internet space for a bit and gotten quite excited about some things like Digg and YouTube which were just emerging.

So I went to the advisory board and said we should look into it, but they didn't see what it had to do with their business - because it didn't, nobody was really doing anything with it.

But just this year it's the complete opposite - they all, to a man virtually, were excited about the user-generated content, the integration with social networks, downloadable content whether via platform channels or democratised internet solutions, identities that exist beyond a single avatar... literally anything in the internet space that's linked to games - these are huge trends that are really changing games, and I don't think really that people, even though they're doing their own part of it, have really fully grasped how different games can knit into this wider 'game-o-sphere,' for want of a better expression.

People can't live in their own bubbles any more, they absolutely have to be specialists, more and more. People who don't try and get their heads around that now, who don't think about the impact that Google will have on games... you might not think it would have any impact, but that's to fundamentally misunderstand what happens when you 'internet-up-ise' an industry.

Look at how music has changed, firstly as the internet has sort of been bolted on, and then been turbo-charged through its veins. It's completely changed the industry. Things that seemed quite superficial become quite fundamental - if you imagine that everything in a game has an internet presence, all the elements, what you do, a sort of nodal presence that means you can take them and mash them up into other game spaces... it's incredibly exciting stuff.

That's what Evolve is for, it's a venue to bring some of this stuff out and talk about it.