Heads You Win

Exactly. In fact, I think what a lot of this is, and I've been expounding on this theory at great length - I probably shouldn't be quoting it to a member of the press, but whatever [laughs].

A lot of the HTML5 stuff comes out of a San Francisco, Web 2.0, internet company mindset, and that hasn't got a lot to do with games. I don't see a lot of people who I would recognise as authorities in the space of games talking about HTML5; I see a lot of people that know a lot about apps, exactly as you said.

So the reality is that there's a lot of talk about HTML5, and obviously different companies have pushed it because it suits their agendas. The reality is that most folks who are developing games are not HTML5 programmers. In fact, most game programmers don't want to use JavaScript.

When I saw the new Facebook app on iPad and saw the HTML games, they would have been state-of-the-art three or four years ago, but they aren't state-of-the-art now.

Right. I'm sorry, but if you look at any of the games that are charting right now or have been charting for the last twelve months, I just don't see those games being delivered in HTML5. I keep hearing that they're coming, but everything I see behind the scenes and actually talking to real game developers one-on-one, including people that have used some of these technologies, the jury is still out.

But I think Native Client is very interesting. Native Client is a very, very sophisticated piece of software engineering that effectively lets you run native-performance code in the browser securely with a very low overhead. We announced that we'd support Chrome and Native Client a couple of weeks ago. That is actually in the SDK release that's coming out this week. I've been playing games in it, and it looks great.

It is. The last numbers I saw were in the mid-twenties [per cent], and in the UK and a few other places it's even higher than that.

Me too. I was a Firefox guy for a long time and I find myself using Chrome more and more. There were some numbers presented at a conference recently - I think Google presented them at GDC - Chrome users, if they're game players, they tend to play more games, buy more games and spend more money on games. You're getting more of a cutting-edge user... The Chrome users are the more heavy computer users who are likely to engage with games. If you talk to someone with a game in the Chrome web-store, a lot of those folks are very happy with the way their games are performing.

You know, I think that kind of game is great. I love Infinity Blade and the console-type games. I think they appeal to a certain user. That's fine, but that's not the majority of games on the App Store. Again, go and look at the top 10, the top 20, the top 50, you'll find a few 3D games in there, you'll find a few premium titles, but the titles that are really killing them right now are 2D or 2.5D - they're not hardcore, 3D shooter titles.

If you're targeting core gamers that are looking for a console-like experience and have a budget of millions of dollars, that's a great market to go after. With Moai, we're really targeting the other 90 per cent of games on the App Store: you want to create a very polished game, you want the performance of a native app. Because it's open source-and it's all written in C++ and OpenGL, it performs just like a native app.

As a company, Zipline is quite new - we're only 12 months old. Moai only went into open beta in July, and we've already had 2000 developers sign up for it and check it out. The fact that it's open-source is great; that tends to attract the more professional developers. We're not really targeting the I-want-to-build-my-first-game guy. The typical folks that we speak to that really like Moai have already built a couple of games on iOS and Android and they realise how hard it is and they want to find a better way to do it.

Yeah. Closed-source products are attractive to a certain type of developer, but not everyone. In our experience, the more professional developers run screaming from closed-source. Jordan's team is a great example. What's beautiful is, they shipped Crimson: Steam Pirates, and they sent us an update to Moai with over 100 new features, improvements and bug fixes that they had developed for the game. So it gets better every game.

Obviously Jordan and his team are kick-ass game designers and creative people... but in terms of the raw technical performance of the game, for a game that was created in just 12 weeks, it absolutely helped put us on the map.

We've been out in beta for about three months or so, and we're shaping up for a 1.0 release in the next month. So in the next couple of months you'll see new features, you'll see more polish on the way we present Moai. It's still very early, so there's a lot of work to do, but the beauty of being an open-source project is that there's a lot of people who want to pitch in.

I've done a number of businesses around the open-source space, and it might take a little while to get going but, man, it's a pretty ruthless competitor. When the base cost of the competing product is zero, it's really hard to be competitive. I don't care how much 3D you've got; if it's open-source and people can use it, it's really, really hard to compete against that.