One Love

No - to set the record straight once and for all - Zoe Mode has created the game completely, with a dedicated team. All the proceeds that we get from Microsoft are going to charity for our exclusive period - they're not getting anything of that at all.

With that game there's a slightly different departure point, because as you may or may not have seen, free apps with additional downloadable content is becoming more of a dominant model on the iPhone. We're suddenly faced with a situation where the developer is creating the game pro bono, in their spare time, and then the game gets released - but there needs to be support for that game on a monthly basis.

If we were to have an exclusivity period of 4-6 months, we'd be doubling the amount of work for the developer - so we haven't quite figured out how we're going to make it work, but we may decide to actually use some of the revenues to cover some support costs, and regard that almost in the same way as the fee you pay to platform holders. We have to cover that out of revenue, but obviously the rest goes to One Big Game.

Exactly.

We need to sustain the momentum now, but that's a bit self-sustaining in some ways. The games come out, people take notice - Chime has sold well, and what's happening is that people who were sitting on the fence a little bit now come on board, because they see it's becoming a reality.

While we were doing our evangelisation process in the past few years, there were lots of people that were interested but some - quite naturally - adopted a wait-and-see approach. We've grateful to Zoe Mode for being the first group in that regard... and for delivering a game of such quality. If it had just been average, then people might only have been aiming to make 60 per cent games for One Big Game.

So we momentum, which we need to feed - to co-ordinate the process and make sure that good games come out, and keep coming out. It's a tremendous sigh of relief, as well as joy and happiness.

From an entrepreneurial angle I get as much of a kick from scoring a deal with Sony for a first-person shooter as I do for signing Masaya Matsuura for One Big Game. There are more great game designers lined up, so we're really looking forward to it.

Not officially - we did have discussions about it, but only with people who weren't able to make a decision on it. It's a practical situation.

Microsoft has been really helpful - they promoted Chime at launch, pro bono, and promoted it again recently. It's just that they're a big corporation, with rules and regulations - if you're doing a charity project, and your charity partners are on Microsoft corporate charity partners list, you certainly get a lot more done than if they aren't.

We can't ask Microsoft to change its corporate rules - it's as simple as that - so we just have to live with the fact that 30 per cent isn't waived, and we don't hold it against them. We never officially asked them, but just had discussions to find out if it was practical or not.