Supermassive's Geraint Bungay

One of the most interesting things is that normally Supermassive works on a boxed product, they push it out the door and move onto the next one. This is much like an MMO. It's an ongoing process - we have to work out the customer support, of course for the first time the billing, because we have microtransactions. We've been tweaking that as we go along listening to the users, we get the user support - which is not something the studio is used to getting, because it doesn't get that direct feedback from the end user. So there have been changes in terms of the features we're looking to put out there, we've got a whole raft of additional things that we hope to put in there as we go along, because you've got to keep it fresh. In terms of the studio itself, it's a definite departure from the standard way of creating boxed products. But it's definitely something that was thought about before going live, and was specifically why I was brought in, to manage the game ongoing and also the relationships we're looking to publish and partner with. Obviously right now we're looking to concentrate pretty much on the UK, but one of the most interesting things over the last couple of weeks has been running Google Adwords and that kind of thing. There's a huge amount of interest shown from places like South and North America in the game. Whereas it's region-specific in terms of it's the Premiership, the Championship and the two leagues, and the questions are in English, it's just amazing the level of interest from foreign countries. We've had an awful lot of registrations from outside the UK.

I think that's definitely what we've got. An interesting one was for just a four hour period we decided to see what would happen if we put the Google ads live in China. The response from the adverts and the click-throughs was quite phenomenal. Unfortunately it wasn't followed up with registrations, or not as many as we'd have liked, but what it did show is that if we can tightly target in certain regions in China, we could get a very large take-up very quickly.

Well, yeah, what it is we're now doing a lot of region-specific stuff in terms of marketing. There are no plans currently to do, for example, an Australian version with Australian leagues, or a Spanish version with Spanish leagues. But we are looking in terms of marketing now at what other territories might be interested. We always knew that there was a foreign fanbase for English football, but I was quite surprised by the take-up that we've been getting, and also the passion of the players when they get in there. It's a bit of wait and see with regard to the foreign market, right now it's about creating mass and users. But then we'll be interested to see what kind of take-up we get in terms of the microtransactions from different markets.

One of the new features that we're looking to launch in the next three weeks is very much the link using all the new Facebook applications. So when you've won a match or you've done an achievement like won five games on the trot, that's automatically if you choose to do it posted up to your Facebook site.

Yeah, but we're also very much leaving it up to the user to decide what they want to display. I think one of the most annoying things with some of these games is they're dumping information onto your Facebook wall and it's just never ending. It's very important to give the user control, so they think 'I'm happy to show this to everyone, or maybe I'm just happy to show this my mates in this particular group.'