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Realtime Worlds' David Jones

The head of the Crackdown and APB studio talks investors, retail, motion-control, recruitment, E3 and more!

GamesIndustry.biz Without talking specifically about your products, do you think there will be a time when the industry does end up in that place, where it's more profitable to distribute purely online?
David Jones

Absolutely - once we've got a better understanding... there's been a lot of talk recently about micro-transactions and average revenues per user, and everybody says the same thing - they're not quite sure what the correlation is, how you really work out the business model.

Once there's more data to work on and people are a bit more comfortable with the different ways of coming to market, it'll be a gradual thing. I don't think there'll be explosive change.

But we do have to think like a service-based company, it's absolutely right for our market and for it to be delivered. In some respects we should have been ahead of the music industry - it went digital pretty damn quickly. We should have been there, we're perfect for that, but they just got carried by the wave. I think we'll follow, but it's taking a risk - it depends how pioneering people want to be.

GamesIndustry.biz It's also down to technology, both on the server and consumer side. With respect to MMOs, they take a long time to develop, yet technology in the games industry changes quickly - have you changed your plans based on new advances when compared to your original plans?
David Jones

I would say definitely a lot of the social stuff. It's absorbing stuff like the last.fm deal we did, where people tend to socialise around music. And voice-over IP is becoming more usable, more cost-effective.

A lot of it is actually driven by cost - ultimately what we want to do is for our games to all be server-based, so that we can offer a great quality service. And what it really comes down to is cost - the really positive thing is that it offers tremendous gameplay potential, with connected experiences on high-end servers where you can do all the processing away from the client. To me it's about the technology to do that, it's pretty straightforward - a good connection to good servers and a good data centre - but really that's driven by cost, and that cost is coming down month by month

It's a different way of thinking - running as much of the game on the server as possible firstly frees up the processing power on the console and secondly means we can make really great connected gaming on a level that's not been done before.

GamesIndustry.biz Most people seem to be pretty pleased with E3 this year - were you happy?
David Jones

Well, I skipped the last two, so I only heard about how dire they were. But for me it was good to see the industry up there, there was major coverage afterwards, good to see some really good names up there on stage. So I think it was great.

GamesIndustry.biz One of the exciting announcements was around motion-control. Obviously you're not using Project Natal for APB, but as a game creator, what are your thoughts on that motion stuff?
David Jones

Well, it's obviously aimed at a broader market. Obviously hats off to Nintendo for having done all that, but it's interesting to see how Sony, and Microsoft especially, are trying to broaden their demographics.

It's kind of exciting. My own personal opinion is that Natal is cool, although having nothing physical is going to be kind of strange for core gamers. It's just going to absolutely need the right kind of killer software. There's this talk that core games can adopt this stuff, but I don't think so. Core games are really about having something physical in your hands.

I think that's why I like Sony's technology a little bit better in a way, having the wireless controller in your hand, with very high precision. I thought that was an interesting and good step for core gamers as well - but complete body-tracking? For me it'll have to be about that killer app that just could not have been done in any other way, apart from with that controller. That's going to be a challenge, and I'll be interested to see what that is.